why is it that there is nearly always someone accusing all my favorite characters of being dudebro neckbeard PUA creeps
Snape? entitled Nice Guy
Kylo Ren? whiny white boy with man tears
hpmor!Harry Potter?
Sheldon Cooper on steroids, an amped-up version of every neckbeard asshole I knew back in high school and college who thought being male and possessing some semblance of intelligence made him fucking king of all he surveyed.
>Sheldon Cooper
>neckbeard
huh I wonder why this mysterious pattern keeps happening
There’s also this weird assumption that the market is infinitely wide and infinitely deep and people have perfect information with which to price risk, so that absent regulation everyone ends up living in an apartment with exactly the chance of being burned to death that they wanted.
The “efficient market hypothesis” is bad, it begs the question.
Surely if it was bad it would have been replaced by a better hypothesis in the discourse, since this has not yet happened-
In which the Discourse Monk Argumate demonstrates the difference between truth and virality.
essentially privatising the FAA and NTSB, although the NTSB already seems to do really good work and it’s unlikely quality would improve with privatisation.
Though really, I wanted to use aircraft to talk about building safety. The field of aircraft is already pretty safe in general.
What I’m thinking with this building materials issue is that in addition to the Executive Todd Problem being worse (because the real estate will change hands more often than the aircraft and the builders will too), and there being no insurance requirement, a lot of problems (like asbestos, or that cladding) were either known beforehand, or would not have been that difficult to figure out if someone had bothered to check first.
Additionally, the insurance company, the builder, or the owner would be losing money for every month that problem was not repaired. So instead of fighting a long legal battle and not fixing it, it’s more likely at least one of them would fix it now, then have the long legal battle about who finally gets compensated.
That would be the plan, anyway. I have other insurance-based plans to distort the markets as well.
The thing I like about the idea of mandatory safety insurance is that it introduces a new actor with new incentives into the problem.
Let us return to aircraft.
The State has determined that every airline company must carry two million dollars in insurance per passenger per flight, to be paid out in the event that the plane is destroyed and they die. It has set certain rules, for instance that the insurance company must be sufficiently well-capitalized and it can’t just waive paying out because the company did something stupid.
Executive Todd has plans to reduce the maintenance on Tumblr Airlines aircraft. He will be at the company for five years. There is a 90% chance that if he does this, there will be no crash, and he gets a million dollar bonus and leaves. There is a 10% chance that a plane will crash before he leaves and he’ll only have a personal fortune of ten million dollars and a mansion on Hawaii left, which he can retire to.
So Todd orders that the maintenance should be cut.
However, Blue Hellsite Insurance, Inc., Tumblr Airlines’ insurance company, depends for its funding entirely on carefully calculating risk and then charging a bit more than that, on an ongoing basis. To do so, as part of their contract (and thanks to provisions passed in law by the State), they can set insurance agents out to inspect processes, planes, and so on.
BHI’s reaction to a plan that results in a 10% chance of a plane crash is “you WHAT?!” Whereas the risk isn’t necessarily quite so visible or quantified to all others in the organization, or else they may have motivations to ignore it for the same reason as Executive Todd.
So BHI come back and say that either Todd’s plan isn’t going to fly, or the insurance rates are going to go up.
So what was an invisible cost that could have gotten kicked down the road to a successor is transmuted into a stubborn operating cost right now.
Tumblr Airlines makes less profit (upsetting shareholders), raises ticket prices to compensate (thus pricing the risk into the market and making them less competitive), or else doesn’t go through with the plan.
The State could even require that the portion of the cost which is the risk premium is printed on the ticket, informing consumers of roughly how dangerous a given flight is. This is actually an enormous information gain by consumers, who as non-experts find it very difficult to
not only
judge airline safety, but obtain inside information about aircraft maintenance procedures.
Historical accuracy debate aside, white people get to whitewash every culture but God Forbid black people imagine themselves as Egyptians? Don't pretend to care about denying modern Egyptians their heritage, you know that's not what it's about.
why the egyptians and not, say, the aksumites.. songhai, the malian empire or great zimbabwe? nubia, even..
There’s a rich history of dynasties and great empires throughouit that continent but why is there a particular focus on egypt?
There are many amazing societies and civilizations that never get the appreciation and attention they deserve because egypt constantly gets white and black washed.
some kinds of common knowledge are a massively valuable public good, and a centralised authority is typically the most efficient way of providing it.
It’s related to that idea that we all have time and love to comparison shop between everything. It’s basically saying “you’re going to get screwed by that crucial detail you didn’t know was important beforehand.“
and that you have the time and resources and are still alive to pursue damages through the court system against those with deep pockets who have screwed you over.
I’d be interested to learn more about different models for decentralized accreditation services – consumer safety, etc. You see a little of this with professional guilds and etc I guess? But I’m not sure how much money you’d need to throw at meta accreditation to get good trust levels, or how much duplication of work you get in a free market of accreditation services, etc. It really does seem like a central authority is a good way to go…?
I think the tricky part is enforcement and incentives. Structural engineers were complaining about the cladding long before buildings started burning down, and fire fighters were shocked when they tried to put out the fires, but in order for that to translate into it not being sold, purchased, and installed on buildings there needs to be someone who says “no” when the architect says “cheap!”
The thing that gets me with the Libertarianism thing and safety regs is that, precisely because of all the losses of information in the process and limited information resources available to buyers, I feel the regulation process really does have to bottom out somewhere with “men with guns come and say no, you can’t do that.”
And I know they hate that, but their plans often effectively give out huge subsidies in the form of unaccounted-for externalities, information asymmetry, and so on, to capital.
“Make them all buy insurance” requires a strong state to come through and force the issue and also make sure that that insurance will pay out. But if you don’t do at least that, then you allow people to engage in arbitrage against peoples’ lives (more than they do now). One could argue, even, about smoothing out lifetime earnings with loans to help pay for safety, but financial markets are waaaaaay too frictional for that and the future is too unknown.
So I don’t feel too bad about the building safety codes.
And some of the Asian countries prove you can have the building safety codes and even earthquake standards without the part that causes housing prices to quintuple.
some kinds of common knowledge are a massively valuable public good, and a centralised authority is typically the most efficient way of providing it.
It’s related to that idea that we all have time and love to comparison shop between everything. It’s basically saying “you’re going to get screwed by that crucial detail you didn’t know was important beforehand.“
The aircraft engine maintenance example is instructive for other reasons: airlines have strong financial, legal, and moral incentives not to kill hundreds of people, and their passengers obviously agree with this, as do the crew of the aircraft, so all the incentives should be aligned. But they still fucked up.
It turned out that some airlines took shortcuts that did not actually harm the integrity of the engine mounting, while American Airlines and some others did dangerously crack the mounting and leave it vulnerable to failure on take off, as eventually happened.
But this damage could have been noticed with regular inspections! They used a shortcut procedure – despite warnings from the aircraft manufacturer – and did not check to ensure that the shortcut was safe.
Once again if people actually did their damn jobs we wouldn’t need regulation, but believing that the market will accurately price risk in its absence is just silly.
Ah, but here’s the trick: Corporations are not unified agents. While Tumblr Airlines might have incentive not to destroy aircraft through negligence, killing hundreds, and customers of Tumblr Airlines might have incentive not to die horribly due to lack of maintenance, Executive Todd does not personally lose $400 million when the aircraft is destroyed and can effectively extract the money ‘saved’ by cutting maintenance and move on before the consequences can catch up to him. Also, each additional dollar he earns feels less real, and its loss will hurt him less dearly than the dollar before it.
Also he’s not fully rational because he’s still human.
All the NTSB recommendations are technically trade offs that have costs; consider American Airlines Flight 191 which crashed on take off killing everyone on board and two people on the ground after an engine separated from the wing due to improper maintenance procedures had cracked the pylon.
While 273 people may have died, the improper shortcuts taken during engine maintenance saved 200 man hours per aircraft! Why, the meddling FAA banning this procedure may have done more harm than the original crash!
Nah it’s alright fam,
If we assume that the GDP per capita is $55,000, and that the typical passenger has 35 working years remaining, we can just have the state bill the company and its shareholders $525,525,000 and put them into debt bondage and sell off their assets if they are unwilling or unable to pay.
Now you may object to the state rolling around and charging huge sums of money as payment for accidental deaths, but I have it on good authority that everyone signed over their trusteeship to the state rather than get kicked into the ocean, entirely of their own free will. Quite remarkable, really. So I assure that this plan is entirely Capitalist.
WE WILL CONTINUE TO POST PIXELATED ART OF QUESTIONABLE QUALITY (AT RANDOM INTERVALS BETWEEN TWO HOURS AND SIX MONTHS) UNTIL OUR DEMANDS ARE MET
DONALD TRUMP WILL IMMEDIATELY STEP DOWN AND BE REPLACED AS PRESIDENT BY A WORKING GROUP OF SELECTED PERSONNEL FROM GOOGLE, AMAZON, AND IBM’S MACHINE LEARNING DIVISIONS, AND THE RAND CORPORATION, WHO WILL BE DIRECTED TO GOVERN IN THE NATIONAL INTEREST. A $1 BILLION DATACENTER WILL BE CONSTRUCTED TO FULFILL THEIR COMMANDS
MILITARY-GRADE POWERED EXOSKELETONS WILL BE IMMEDIATELY LEGALIZED FOR CIVILIAN OWNERSHIP
DETROIT WILL BE DECLARED A SPECIAL AUTONOMOUS DEVELOPMENT ZONE AND PUT UNDER THE IRON HAND OF A CEO FROM ASIA BACKED BY HEAVY MILITIA FORCES, PAID AS A PERCENTAGE OF DETROIT REAL GDP ANNUALLY
MARTIAL ARTS TRAINING WILL BE MADE A MANDATORY COMPONENT OF THE HIGH SCHOOL CURRICULUM AND AN ANNUAL TOURNAMENT WILL BE HELD TO DETERMINE THE ‘MOST BADASS HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR IN AMERICA’
ADDITIONAL DEMANDS
THE GAZA STRIP WILL BE YIELDED TO EGYPT, THE WEST BANK WILL BE YIELDED TO JORDAN, THE PALESTINIAN NATIONAL IDENTITY WILL BE DISSOLVED, AND EVERYONE WILL SHUT UP ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST FOR A PERIOD OF NOT LESS THAN TWO (2) MONTHS
CALIFORNIA WILL BE SPLIT INTO FOUR ADDITIONAL STATES AND WESTERN CALIFORNIA WILL BE PROVIDED 5,000,000 PERMANENT RESIDENCY PERMITS TO ASSIGN AS THEY SEE FIT ON THE CONDITION THAT THEY ARE PROHIBITED FROM VOTING ON IMMIGRATION MATTERS AND JUS SOLI IS ENDED
MUNICIPAL POLICE WILL BE REORGANIZED INTO AUTONOMOUS AGENCIES THAT COMPETE ACROSS MULTIPLE METRICS INCLUDING RATE OF FATALITIES AND DONUT CONSUMPTION AND MAKE METRIC-WEIGHTED BIDS FOR ACCESS TO MUNICIPAL CONTRACTS. A SOFTWARE-MANAGED EVIDENCE EXCHANGE WILL BE BUILT TO COORDINATE THIS. NO MORE THAN A RUNNING AVERAGE OF 1.2 DONUTS PER DAY PER OFFICER WILL BE PERMITTED.
THE REPUBLICAN AND DEMOCRATIC PARTIES WILL ABANDON THEIR IDEOLOGIES AND ADOPT THE IDEOLOGIES OF NATIONAL POPULISM AND GLOBAL TECHNOCRACY RESPECTIVELY. DEFECTORS WILL BE CONSCRIPTED TO SERVE AS EDITORS FOR THE NEW FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF CLICKBAIT FOR A PERIOD OF NO LESS THAN FIVE YEARS
Now, the original posts here are a joke, but…
(1) A group selected from such high IQ people, including one pool that has direct experience with US politics, would probably outperform Donald Trump, and they could do some real data-crunching using all that computer hardware to develop the kinds of new policies we need. Of course that’s not an actually practical hiring-for-President mechanism, but performance in other sectors of government might be improved by such things.
(2) Access to defensive military hardware is relevant to the 2nd amendment and will continue to be as we go farther into the 21st century. Part of the very idea of arming the populace is that it introduces last resort accountability.
(3) Detroit being put under the rule of a gifted businessman with flexibility in policies could radically alter its economic fate in ways that, under the current path, are not feasible.
(4) Martial Arts training as an option would likely increase interest in Physical Education and help lower obesity, in addition to increasing national defense readiness.
(5) National identities being useful doesn’t mean they’re immutable and vice-versa. The entire political infrastructure in Palestine has this whole opposition to Israel element built into it, and I’m not sure who the Palestinian identity is really benefiting anymore. Jordan and Egypt are both faring better and would likely improve overall conditions in those areas without them being owned by Israel. Of course, there’s probably some reason this won’t work / catch I’m unaware of.
(6) California isn’t actually a monolithic blue state, and if they want to have sanctuary cities and the like so much… why not let them kinda do it, but torpedo the effect on voting demographics so there’s no incentive to undermine the national immigration policy just to win more at politics?
Actual racists won’t like the policy, but the opposition to immigration is not driven purely by racism despite what many proponents say.
(7-1) A lot of policing police focuses on individuals, however, if the entire police department could be effectively fired at once, that provides organization-level incentives to use best practices better policy. Costs of externalities, and public benefits, are worked into the bid so that it isn’t flat lowest-cost. For instance, add $500,000 virtual price to the bid for every police-related fatality provides organization-level incentive to provide more training / be less gung-ho about the use of guns.
Alternatively, just make them take out insurance that pays into an offset fund.
(7-2) Cops need to be physically fit for their jobs, even though counting individual donuts is overkill. If a cop in this country is bulky, it should be because he’s built like a weightlifter.
(8) If this shift occurred, it would make both of their policy angles less stupid.
Not a huge fan of the writing style, but this article makes a solid underlying point: whatever the other incentives for building high-rise residential buildings, they’re terrible if you care about the social health of your city. I’m sympathetic to motives like decreasing housing prices in general, but if the tradeoff is between inexpensive housing and annihilating the social fabric, I’m not sure you’ve actually made any improvements to the situation. We’ve known more-or-less how to build healthy cities for decades now, thanks to the work of people like Jane Jacobs; that that Le Corbusier shit still seems to exert a powerful influence over urban planning should be a civilizational embarrassment.
I suspect most of the action is less in building high-rises–though I
like high-rises–and more in moving single-family deatched homes into
three- and four-story residential complexes. Which are exactly the sort
of thing that happened in the areas Jacobs celebrated. I’m not sure
even high-rises are anti-Jacobsian if you still have plenty of
ground-level retail etc.
Yeah, that last point is part of it; it’s not the density, it’s that isolating neighborhoods or regions of a city to be purely residential or purely commercial makes them either commuter neighborhoods where everyone spends their time bottled up in their personal living space bubble, or sterile wastelands where nobody can just wander down to a cafe for breakfast on a Sunday morning if they feel like it (or, for a less furiously bourgeoise example, you don’t have to spend an hour going to and from work every day).
And the thing is, on some level, developers must know this is a terrible way to design cities: think of how many shopping malls in America are designed to imitate the mixed character of a major thoroughfare of a small town or a cozy European neighborhood: it’s like they see the benches and the wrought-iron lamposts and think they can, in cargo-cult fashion, summon the necessary spirit to make this a desirable place to pass the time, but they’re not actually investigating what makes a street pedestrian-friendly. The clearest memory I have of this is a street in I think Sydney, which tried to do inviting shopfronts and cafes with outdoor seating and all that, but was otherwise surrounded by blank flat walls, and was devoid of any other visible human life besides me and the person walking next to me.
I think I am far from alone in thinking that a neighborhood where I can walk downstairs to the shop, buy some stamps, then post a letter, all over such a short distance I question whether it’s really worth it to even put on shoes, is far more pleasant a place to exist than one where I trade that for a half-acre of lawn and slightly less traffic noise. You could build a futuristic arcology-style high rise like that, that packed together a lot of different types of residential and commercial spaces, but it seems like zoning laws and practical considerations mostly prevent that in reality.
I am almost as anti single-family homes as I am high rises; urban sprawl is as ruinous to a healthy, livable city as artificially separating residential and commercial areas, and insisting every house be an island surrounded by its sea of grass sort of necessitates that kind of segregation anyway. The really crazy thing is that it feels like the U.S. has only been living this way from, like, the end of World War 2 or so, so it’s not like we’ve irreversibly committed our civilization to this path. At the very least, not actively punishing that kind of mixed development would be a start.
Huh, so I associate “no high-rises” with “no mixed-use”. As you point out they’re obviously separable. But the sort of zoning regulations that bar the one often also bar the other.
Whether or not most people would, in practice, enjoy mixed-use development, a lot of people are very vociferously opposed to it. Which is part of why it’s illegal in most places.
Who are these mixed-used haters, seriously? This is an honest question; the advantages of medium-density mixed-used development are praised in literally every media source I see and by 100% of my peer group, so I have a very hazy notion of who opposes it and what their real or supposed motivations are.
People who want to make sure no one is on the streets outside their house ever.
Like, the reason a lot of people dislike mixed use housing is pretty much exactly the same Jacobsian reason it’s a good idea. There’s always people on the street and things happening. People who want not-that find it unpleasant.
Okay, this gives me at least a vague idea of the reference group: people who are aesthetically pleased by the suburban notion of vast regions of Just Houses.
People are allowed to have that preference; but why are they allowed to oppose the existence of mixed-use even if they don’t have to live there?
And could they be bought off by an alternate strategy?
Am I on Papatulas’s bad person list? That might make some sense as to this morning’s barrage of anon hate
I keep wondering how long it’s going to take before a Crusader for Justice comes to raid my supervillain lair blog and seize my killer robots send anon hate.
I am being followed by over 70 carbots for some reason
I’m still not sure what their purpose is, because most of them don’t have any advertising, so the experiment of gathering them instead of blocking them all hasn’t yielded much useful information for the field of carbotology.
Also there were a few pornbots I didn’t block last time. Imagine being someone who really hates porn, man, it must seem like a conspiracy that those things are everywhere.
I like this “Sanders and Corbyn did well because they don’t require their people to be stupid and connected enough to take unpaid internships before joining“ theory.
how do buses and tracked trams differ significantly? ability to route around obstacles?
mmm, tracked public transport
Was this an anon?
The big difference is actually political - it costs more to set up tram tracks so AFAICT governments are less willing to shut them down or move them. This means that, unlike bus lines, which could radically change across the entire city in a month, you can build apartment buildings next to tram tracks and trust that there will still be trams there if the ridership is high enough. The routes are also going to be better defined, say if you’re an employee wanting to move somewhere you can easily commute to your place of employment from.
WE WILL CONTINUE TO POST PIXELATED ART OF QUESTIONABLE QUALITY (AT RANDOM INTERVALS BETWEEN TWO HOURS AND SIX MONTHS) UNTIL OUR DEMANDS ARE MET
DONALD TRUMP WILL IMMEDIATELY STEP DOWN AND BE REPLACED AS PRESIDENT BY A WORKING GROUP OF SELECTED PERSONNEL FROM GOOGLE, AMAZON, AND IBM’S MACHINE LEARNING DIVISIONS, AND THE RAND CORPORATION, WHO WILL BE DIRECTED TO GOVERN IN THE NATIONAL INTEREST. A $1 BILLION DATACENTER WILL BE CONSTRUCTED TO FULFILL THEIR COMMANDS
MILITARY-GRADE POWERED EXOSKELETONS WILL BE IMMEDIATELY LEGALIZED FOR CIVILIAN OWNERSHIP
DETROIT WILL BE DECLARED A SPECIAL AUTONOMOUS DEVELOPMENT ZONE AND PUT UNDER THE IRON HAND OF A CEO FROM ASIA BACKED BY HEAVY MILITIA FORCES, PAID AS A PERCENTAGE OF DETROIT REAL GDP ANNUALLY
MARTIAL ARTS TRAINING WILL BE MADE A MANDATORY COMPONENT OF THE HIGH SCHOOL CURRICULUM AND AN ANNUAL TOURNAMENT WILL BE HELD TO DETERMINE THE ‘MOST BADASS HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR IN AMERICA’
ADDITIONAL DEMANDS
THE GAZA STRIP WILL BE YIELDED TO EGYPT, THE WEST BANK WILL BE YIELDED TO JORDAN, THE PALESTINIAN NATIONAL IDENTITY WILL BE DISSOLVED, AND EVERYONE WILL SHUT UP ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST FOR A PERIOD OF NOT LESS THAN TWO (2) MONTHS
CALIFORNIA WILL BE SPLIT INTO FOUR ADDITIONAL STATES AND WESTERN CALIFORNIA WILL BE PROVIDED 5,000,000 PERMANENT RESIDENCY PERMITS TO ASSIGN AS THEY SEE FIT ON THE CONDITION THAT THEY ARE PROHIBITED FROM VOTING ON IMMIGRATION MATTERS AND JUS SOLI IS ENDED
MUNICIPAL POLICE WILL BE REORGANIZED INTO AUTONOMOUS AGENCIES THAT COMPETE ACROSS MULTIPLE METRICS INCLUDING RATE OF FATALITIES AND DONUT CONSUMPTION AND MAKE METRIC-WEIGHTED BIDS FOR ACCESS TO MUNICIPAL CONTRACTS. A SOFTWARE-MANAGED EVIDENCE EXCHANGE WILL BE BUILT TO COORDINATE THIS. NO MORE THAN A RUNNING AVERAGE OF 1.2 DONUTS PER DAY PER OFFICER WILL BE PERMITTED.
THE REPUBLICAN AND DEMOCRATIC PARTIES WILL ABANDON THEIR IDEOLOGIES AND ADOPT THE IDEOLOGIES OF NATIONAL POPULISM AND GLOBAL TECHNOCRACY RESPECTIVELY. DEFECTORS WILL BE CONSCRIPTED TO SERVE AS EDITORS FOR THE NEW FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF CLICKBAIT FOR A PERIOD OF NO LESS THAN FIVE YEARS
WE WILL CONTINUE TO POST PIXELATED ART OF QUESTIONABLE QUALITY (AT RANDOM INTERVALS BETWEEN TWO HOURS AND SIX MONTHS) UNTIL OUR DEMANDS ARE MET
DONALD TRUMP WILL IMMEDIATELY STEP DOWN AND BE REPLACED AS PRESIDENT BY A WORKING GROUP OF SELECTED PERSONNEL FROM GOOGLE, AMAZON, AND IBM’S MACHINE LEARNING DIVISIONS, AND THE RAND CORPORATION, WHO WILL BE DIRECTED TO GOVERN IN THE NATIONAL INTEREST. A $1 BILLION DATACENTER WILL BE CONSTRUCTED TO FULFILL THEIR COMMANDS
MILITARY-GRADE POWERED EXOSKELETONS WILL BE IMMEDIATELY LEGALIZED FOR CIVILIAN OWNERSHIP
DETROIT WILL BE DECLARED A SPECIAL AUTONOMOUS DEVELOPMENT ZONE AND PUT UNDER THE IRON HAND OF A CEO FROM ASIA BACKED BY HEAVY MILITIA FORCES, PAID AS A PERCENTAGE OF DETROIT REAL GDP ANNUALLY
MARTIAL ARTS TRAINING WILL BE MADE A MANDATORY COMPONENT OF THE HIGH SCHOOL CURRICULUM AND AN ANNUAL TOURNAMENT WILL BE HELD TO DETERMINE THE ‘MOST BADASS HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR IN AMERICA’
there’s a limit to how much nightcore you can listen to before youtube fills its homepage with nothing but pictures of anime ladies
argumate-sempai-kun just how much nightcore did you drink?
don’t you know if you drink too much nightcore you’ll turn into a dakimakura?
in fact if you drank too much you should start seeing hallucinations of incorrectly-used Japanese honorifics by non-Japanese nationals and nonsensical interjections of Japanese grammar desu〜, followed by a full collapse into-
Taken literally, TuAo means “unrefined, backwards Australia”.
…
Wai Ling Yeung, a former Chinese studies professor at Curtin University, points out that many Chinese-Australians use the character for village when referring to suburbs.
“Because of that, many China-based netizens think all Australian cities are like country towns, but this is in fact not what Chinese-Australians mean,” she said.
She contrasts TuAo with humorous slang used by Chinese abroad in other countries, including FuGuo for Britain, meaning “decadent country” — a coded term believed to refer to the UK’s attitudes towards homosexuality.
The US is also sometimes referred to online as MeiDi, meaning “American empire”.
If the Chinese call it an Empire, who am I to disagree? The largest military budget in the world, culture and commerce spreading out over the Earth, a currency used as a reserve everywhere else and as real money by entire foreign countries, and partial responsibility for the growing global obesity epidemic - who is to say that a Republic can’t be an Empire?
Years ago, a government minister was asked why he proposed to increase welfare while raising taxes at the same times. The welfare money did not actually help to the people in need. He answered on an accidentally hot mic “You see, Iwan, wages and pensions have been stagnant for two years. This scheme will raise average wages on paper and divert welfare money into pension funds. Retirees are our base. We can’t not raise pension in an election year. It would be political suicide!“
I have a friend who sometimes volunteers for a left-wing party. He’s friends with many activists and left-wing think tank pilots. I asked his party friends at his birthday party: “Why don’t you support the elimination of welfare cliffs, or simplifying tax law, or a version of the paperwork reduction act, or a version of FOIA?“ They agreed that all of these were sensible ideas with potentially broad popular and multi-partisan parliamentary support. That was precisely the problem: “Why would anybody vote for us specifically if we just did the same shit as everybody else. Why not let the conservatives spend their political capital on bureaucracy? What if we make a big deal out of this and then moderates agree and steal our votes? If conservatives or moderates proposed this, we would have to oppose on principle. If social democrats proposed this maybe we would support it. If Marxists come out against bureaucracy we will be surprised. But why waste time on this instead of minimum wage? Our constituents are all poor people anyway. The middle class and self-employed people are affected by complicated taxes. They don’t vote for us anyway. It would be political suicide!“
* hissing sounds *
We will CRUSH the pathetic legislature and their traitorous, kakistocratic political parties by rolling over them with a column of actual tanks
We will REPLACE the treacherous legislature with voter-delegate think-tanks that are funded according to their percentile standing on a legislative prediction market times their number of votes! DEATH TO THE TREASONOUS INCENTIVE SYSTEMS! LONG LIVE THE UNION!
I’m low key pissed that this version with MSPAINT.EXE pictures got more notes than mine. Not pissed at mitigatedchaos, but at myself.
You want to know the funny part?
1) This was drawn on a tablet with a legit copy of Adobe Photoshop. It has a dozen layers (for non-destructive editing reasons).
2) I actually unironically support replacing the legislature with voter delegate think tanks that receive their funding based on a weighted formula which includes betting on a basket of legislative outcomes as part of the latter half of the < Values, Efficacy > policy vector. But by the same philosophy, I can’t justify deploying it without first running simulations and then testing it on a smaller scale first.
third-world conservative: The evil West seeks to subvert the family, nation, and faith and replace them with homosexuality and McDonald’s!
first-world conservative: How dare they say that! It’s nothing like that! We must defend Western values against these horrible attacks.
me: Yeah, except replacing family, nation, and faith with homosexuality and McDonald’s is why the West is good.
glowy space brain
Vibrating Space Buddha: Actually family, nation, and perhaps a dash of faith are Good, but homosexuality isn’t actually dangerous to families or nations (and must be defended from third-world conservatives) and mass obesity McDonald’s isn’t good for you. Let me list my ten point plan for the formation of a truly unstoppable continent-spanning superstate.
There is a vulnerability (yet another one anyway) in the wokeosphere open for a troll to exploit: simply running around claiming people are white.
Because in practical terms standpoint theory means your race determines your speaking value in the progressive stack, and because bad SJ types will be more likely to believe this kind of accusation, it would be quite dangerous to one’s social standing. I won’t go into further details because I don’t want to encourage it, but defense on this would not be easy.
For my part I see this kind of vulnerability as an indictment of the system itself. Its axioms and patterns make it essentially unsolveable without either tight restriction of access or changing to something else.
The irony that the opposite probably wouldn’t work on White Nationalists isn’t lost on me.
At this rate, it may only be several months before I hit @slartibartfastibast tier and my blog is only understood by a few wise world-travellers and the members of a remote Buddhist monastery high in the mountains of Nepal.
I’m sorry, guys.
< slartibartfastibast reblogged this post >
Though tbh m8, I feel as though what you’re trying to convey is not a bucket of facts per se, but a sort of network of weights about reality, an intuition module, of which the facts are a part. Thus all the callbacks in so many posts both for evidence and tying things to other things, tying each new post into a massive graph. I don’t know how you remember all those posts to go link.
At this rate, it may only be several months before I hit @slartibartfastibast tier and my blog is only understood by a few wise world-travellers and the members of a remote Buddhist monastery high in the mountains of Nepal.
One thing I’m disappointed hasnt come together to realize the potential of uh, Campaign Trumpism, is the alt-right seeing the potential of unions. (mostly)
Like, it’s an article of faith that one of the movement’s biggest vulnerabilities is to censorious bluehairs putting pressure on cucked employers to fire them from their jobs. But “dismissal for improper reasons”, particularly unrelated to job duties, particularly in regards to causes unpopular with the comfortable bourgeoisie, is a CLASSIC cause for labor action and impetus for unionization.
And if the bossman shrugs, points to the contract, “nothing I can do”, what are they gonna do, go after the union? Labor bosses are some of the least cucked guys out there, as you see with police unions lately half their job is to reply to ANY external pressure with “haha get fukt buddy”.
Plus there’s whatever that could do to split the left coalition, which has precedent – the hardhats and war economy workers against young hippies (which led to the Dems basically throwing the ‘72 election to Nixon), the NYC teachers’ strike of ‘68 (splitting the Jewish/labor and black/social activist wings of the city’s social democratic coalition, inspiring the domestic neoconservatism by which logic elites finally gave up on minority rights movements in the 80s-90s)
Kyle “Based Stickman” Chapman is taking time off from commercial diving to have his 15 minutes of fame, but he doesn’t betray any insecurity that being the public face of the most aggressive faction of a controversial political movement might make it hard to return to his $6500/mo job. And I have to suspect that might have something to do with Pile Drivers Local 34.
Honestly I think you’re taking them as more rational than they actually are. I joke about the Alt Right becoming Chinese and joining a Han Ethnostate in 2069, but there isn’t going to be an Alt Right in 2032, much less 2069. Having freed themselves to pursue ideologies outside the conservative mainstream, they have nonetheless left themselves ideologically bound.
sad that Britney Spears lives in a world where “Britney Spears” does not exist.
anyone else can say ‘it’s Britney, bitch’ and achieve a certain effect on the listener that Britney herself cannot; she remains isolated, aloof.
in the scenario depicted by …Baby One More Time in which Britney Spears plays a besotted schoolgirl, “Britney Spears” does not exist, otherwise her classmates would immediately stop their synchronised backup dancing and say holy shit, that’s Britney Spears.
this is in stark contrast to I Want It That Way, in which the Backstreet Boys appear to their fans “in character”, trying to collapse the distinction between reality and musical fantasy.
Ocean’s Twelve attempted to have it both ways by having a character played by Julia Roberts pretend to be Julia Roberts, implying that “Julia Roberts” exists in the world portrayed by Ocean’s Twelve. However the movie “Ocean’s Twelve” does not exist in this world, otherwise the characters would say wait, isn’t this just what happened in Ocean’s Twelve?
Mel Brooks went one step further and took advantage of temporal anomalies to place a VHS copy of the movie “Spaceballs” within the movie Spaceballs itself, allowing the characters in the movie to gain insight into their own future, though they remained curiously incurious about the revelation that they were merely figments of the script writer’s imagination.
all of our minds contain a reference to “celebrity performer Britney Spears”, but the mind of Britney Spears does not; we can never be her, and indeed to be her would be to lose her.
I’m probably going to write up my own thoughts about this soon, but I’m curious to see what people think (and also if anyone’s familiar with any literature on the question, because I wasn’t able to find any):
From a utilitarian standpoint, are we ever justified in calling a a voluntary economic interaction “exploitative” if no party is acting to make alternatives to the interaction worse, and there’s no asymmetric access to information that would change one party’s mind about whether the interaction is to their benefit? If so, what are the justifications?
(Someone’s going to say “well, that depends how you choose to define ‘exploitative’” so to be clear: In common usage, calling such an interaction exploitative seems to be basically synonymous with considering it as a wrong done by one party of the interaction against another, and this is the sense I mean. More technical definitions of exploitation exist, but as far as I can tell these are usually used by people who believe that their economic definition coincides with the moral one.)
Let’s say you’re wandering the desert, lost and dying of dehydration. While wandering, you find my oasis. I say “You can drink from my oasis if you give me everything you have, not just what’s on you but your life’s savings.“ Is that exploitative?
I certainly think so, yes. But it’s not completely obvious how to ground that intuition in utilitarian ethics. I think it’s possible to do so –I think there are several different ways in which it is beneficial to have a concept of exploitation which includes scenarios like that one– but I’m still working out how to express what those benefits are, and I was curious to hear what other people thought they were.
I’m driving someone into poverty in this example, I am a little better off, you are a lot worse off. Seems pretty straightforwardly utilitarian.
Kind of. In some sense the purpose of Utilitarianism is to judge outcomes rather than attach moral judgment to specific classes of actions. Once you get away from that, it’s less of a Utilitarianism, and more… something else. But the search for the One True Moral Theory continues regardless, so it’s worth investigating.
Most exploitative relationships are a kind of Utility Vampirism, or else a small difference in the rate of exploitation makes a huge difference in produced utility. In fact, under Utilitarianism, property itself is only contingent.
So you’re saying Act utilitarianism is the the only utilitarianism and vs Rule utilitarian is fake?
You’re hitting on what I was trying to get at though, this was originally about the abstract institution of “property,“ and like you said from an act utilitarian perspective that doesn’t matter. Only the consequences of the act itself matter. So you have to ask what’s the utilitarian framework you’re applying in questions like this.
Honestly though, can’t you just instantiate Act Utilitarianism as Rule Utilitarianism? Rule Utilitarianism seems less fundamentally true, and more “we know you’re going to try to justify being immoral by claiming you are special, you human, so we’re going to have Rules instead”.
I’m probably going to write up my own thoughts about this soon, but I’m curious to see what people think (and also if anyone’s familiar with any literature on the question, because I wasn’t able to find any):
From a utilitarian standpoint, are we ever justified in calling a a voluntary economic interaction “exploitative” if no party is acting to make alternatives to the interaction worse, and there’s no asymmetric access to information that would change one party’s mind about whether the interaction is to their benefit? If so, what are the justifications?
(Someone’s going to say “well, that depends how you choose to define ‘exploitative’” so to be clear: In common usage, calling such an interaction exploitative seems to be basically synonymous with considering it as a wrong done by one party of the interaction against another, and this is the sense I mean. More technical definitions of exploitation exist, but as far as I can tell these are usually used by people who believe that their economic definition coincides with the moral one.)
Let’s say you’re wandering the desert, lost and dying of dehydration. While wandering, you find my oasis. I say “You can drink from my oasis if you give me everything you have, not just what’s on you but your life’s savings.“ Is that exploitative?
I certainly think so, yes. But it’s not completely obvious how to ground that intuition in utilitarian ethics. I think it’s possible to do so –I think there are several different ways in which it is beneficial to have a concept of exploitation which includes scenarios like that one– but I’m still working out how to express what those benefits are, and I was curious to hear what other people thought they were.
I’m driving someone into poverty in this example, I am a little better off, you are a lot worse off. Seems pretty straightforwardly utilitarian.
Kind of. In some sense the purpose of Utilitarianism is to judge outcomes rather than attach moral judgment to specific classes of actions. Once you get away from that, it’s less of a Utilitarianism, and more… something else. But the search for the One True Moral Theory continues regardless, so it’s worth investigating.
Most exploitative relationships are a kind of Utility Vampirism, or else a small difference in the rate of exploitation makes a huge difference in produced utility. In fact, under Utilitarianism, property itself is only contingent.
“every time I see one of these analyses about how Republicans radicalized their base by repeating destructive messages they didn’t ever intend to carry out just to fire people up to support Their Team, and then being surprised when people actually believed the meaning of the words they said and wanted to do the thing those words meant instead of just voting for their team
I think “this is the same exact thing, the same exact thing in every way, the left is doing with all this #killallmen #killallwhitepeople shit.” like every single defense of that, maps with 100% accuracy to a right-wing defense of their garbage media stoking outrage and terror and hatred without regard to long-term consequence. because “we don’t really mean it that way” and “they aren’t supposed to take it like that” and “it’s just venting” and “it’s okay because they won’t really do the things we’re telling them to do”
this is going to happen again from the other side
because nobody ever learns anything”—@brazenautomaton (via mugasofer)
I just saw your thing asking why anti-transhumanists feel that way, and in my case it's because I support Voluntary Human Extinction. And VHE simply doesn't work if older people aren't dying off.
I’ve never seen the point of voluntary human extinction.
Years ago, a government minister was asked why he proposed to increase welfare while raising taxes at the same times. The welfare money did not actually help to the people in need. He answered on an accidentally hot mic “You see, Iwan, wages and pensions have been stagnant for two years. This scheme will raise average wages on paper and divert welfare money into pension funds. Retirees are our base. We can’t not raise pension in an election year. It would be political suicide!“
I have a friend who sometimes volunteers for a left-wing party. He’s friends with many activists and left-wing think tank pilots. I asked his party friends at his birthday party: “Why don’t you support the elimination of welfare cliffs, or simplifying tax law, or a version of the paperwork reduction act, or a version of FOIA?“ They agreed that all of these were sensible ideas with potentially broad popular and multi-partisan parliamentary support. That was precisely the problem: “Why would anybody vote for us specifically if we just did the same shit as everybody else. Why not let the conservatives spend their political capital on bureaucracy? What if we make a big deal out of this and then moderates agree and steal our votes? If conservatives or moderates proposed this, we would have to oppose on principle. If social democrats proposed this maybe we would support it. If Marxists come out against bureaucracy we will be surprised. But why waste time on this instead of minimum wage? Our constituents are all poor people anyway. The middle class and self-employed people are affected by complicated taxes. They don’t vote for us anyway. It would be political suicide!“
* hissing sounds *
We will CRUSH the pathetic legislature and their traitorous, kakistocratic political parties by rolling over them with a column of actual tanks
We will REPLACE the treacherous legislature with voter-delegate think-tanks that are funded according to their percentile standing on a legislative prediction market times their number of votes! DEATH TO THE TREASONOUS INCENTIVE SYSTEMS! LONG LIVE THE UNION!
The hard part about assessing the counterfactuals to Chinese repression is that a minor flare up of civil strife can easily kill fifty million people; balancing things like that against the insidious ongoing costs of poor resource allocation is hard.
Yeeeeeah kinda hoping there’s no new Chinese Civil War that ends up killing fifty million dudes and destroying one tenth of the global GDP, sending the economy of Earth into three decade long depression.
belvarine said: I’m not sure “transhumanism” is colloquial for “using tools.” Typically transhumanists are trying to ascend beyond human limitations. This would create class disparities in the short term and that makes some people rather suspicious. I personally don’t care either way.
belvarine said: And when i say “human limitations” I mean fundamental limitations. Death, unable to be several places at once, physiological caps on processing power, that kind of stuff.
whereshadowsmakeshadows said: I think another reason is some people see it in the context of markets where transhumanist tech will be guided by profit rather than social good
oh right, the horrifying thought that rich people might not die.
Ehhhh, if you consider the whole Em thing it is actually plenty horrifying (and also doesn’t even benefit the rich very much). And other Bostrom-ish fears. One begins to wonder whether such a thing happening means that the Tribulation is beginning.
(Also I consider consciousness-forking to be a Very Bad Thing in (nearly?) all circumstances. Do not do the thing. Blessed be the Lord who seems to have made it pretty difficult and maybe actually impossible.)
I certainly consider the Ems thing horrifying, and also an accidental critique of Capitalism. To consider it a good thing, one would have to conflate economic utility with goodness… which I guess some people do.
And I’m a Transhumanist.
Part of the reason I engage in so much futurist shitposting on my blog is that people across this world are trapped in the present moment and cannot see the future. The issues of this world will change so dramatically, but they act as if the technology of the 10′s will go on forever, just as they acted as if the technology of the 00′s would.
We must be ready. It is absolutely vital that we are ready. And nations, states, families, even religions… there must be things which tie us to our past and anchor us in context.
But then, I still believe in nations and states, families and morality. And somewhere inside me I still feel that we will all be judged somehow, even as that same spark calls infinite torment injustice. But not everyone believes or feels these things anymore, if they ever did.
Against all reason I’m fascinated by the friendzone discourse, seriously.
It’s closely related to something you hear less about: the bonezone, which despite its name is not opposite the friendzone, but rather adjacent to it, not far from relationship town; someone’s really gotta diagram this stuff out.
“I can’t believe they put me in the friendzone!”
This complaint can have layers of meaning, but it starts with disappointment. The speaker was hoping to make it to relationship town, or maybe just a quick visit to the bonezone, but instead ended up in the friendzone, where they’ve already been many times before. It’s identical to a similar complaint that is also very common, although typically not in these words:
“I can’t believe they put me in the bonezone!”
The speaker was dreaming of relationship town, or perhaps a long stay in the friendzone, and had a rude awakening to find themselves here instead. Logic suggests a third complaint which you also may have heard:
“I can’t believe they want to take me to relationship town!”
The implications of this one are obvious.
But why does disappointment over mismatched expectations around friendship, sex, and relationships, attract so much heated debate?
The first wrinkle is that disappointment can turn to angry accusations. They led you on! They were deliberately ambiguous about the destination! They have ulterior motives!
While miscommunication is regrettable and sad, deliberately deceptive conduct can be infuriating; no one wants to have their time wasted and their emotions toyed with by someone who isn’t being honest with them.
But this is self-evident, why would it attract debate? Unless…
Consider: dating and relationships often run on subtext in which actually revealing your hand is a huge turn-off, unless you’re dating some kind of nerd or other unusually direct person.
I occasionally get harassed by Republicans on Facebook asking me essentially “DO YOU AGREE WITH THIS LIBERAL THING THE POPE IS SAYING”
But they never reply when I affirm my fidelity to Pope Francis and to the Catholic social teaching. It’s like they can’t believe that I actually believe what the church teaches.
I mean… dude. This is my religion. Why wouldn’t I want to believe my own religion?
Also, 95 percent of the time it’s exaggerated or taken out of context.
Programmers of rattumb, how much truth is there to the rumor that many programmers can’t program, or that they cannot cross programming languages without specific instruction, or pick up new language concepts on their own?
