@argumate has been talking recently about hypothetical problems with ancap/libertarian-paradise-world, and it’s making me think about a very basic issue that I don’t see talked about enough.
Namely: all of the usual arguments about how markets are great (“aggregating information” and all that stuff) also say that wealth inequality makes markets worse at doing those things. This is not a knock-down argument for having a state that redistributes wealth at gunpoint, but it is a reason to see wealth equality as a relevant concern even if you don’t have it as a terminal value. Even if you don’t care about it, the market needs it to achieve the things you do care about.
I’ll generalize this in a moment, but first, let’s look at an especially clean example case: prediction markets. Prediction markets are nice here because we don’t have to worry about thorny problems about aggregating utility to construct a “social welfare function.” There isn’t a role for disagreements about values. Everyone agrees about what we want out of a prediction market. (Or rather, the disagreements that exist are technical rather than ethical.)
What we want out of prediction markets is a price that corresponds to the actual observed frequency of events. Of course, this is not always possible – sometimes there is relevant information that no one in the market knows, so even a perfect information-aggregator (say, a rational being that knows everything that anyone in the market knows) would not get the right answer.
So at best, we can only ask for some sort of information-aggregating property, something like “prices reflect the average (i.e. mean) belief.” This is desirable because we expect many sources of individual error to be uncorrelated, and these will wash out when we take the average.
But the prices in prediction markets reflect, at best, a wealth-weighted average of beliefs. (For “wealth” here, read “quantity of money the individual is willing to invest in this market,” which is obviously constrained by wealth in a straightforward way.) This is easy to see informally: if there are 1000 people who are only willing to buy $1 worth of shares each, and 1 person willing to buy $1000 worth of shares, the market mechanism will get an equally large signal from the one big spender as from the 1000 small spenders.
A formal version of this is derived in this paper: with logarithmic utility, prices equal the wealth-weighted mean of beliefs. (If you’re worried about the log utility assumption, note that this is arguably the most favorable possible result for prediction markets, and much of that paper is dedicated to showing that other plausible utility functions do not yield very large deviations from it.)
Is it a problem that the results are wealth-weighted? Well, not necessarily. But it’s important to note that there are two different reasons it might be a problem.
First, assume (as in the paper) that we’re in the “many traders” limit, so there is a continuous distribution of beliefs, we have integrals rather than sums, etc. In this case, what matters is the (Pearson) correlation of belief and wealth. (If they are uncorrelated, the wealth-weighting will be invisible.) This correlation will either help or hurt depending on whether the bigger spenders have more accurate beliefs in any given case; it seems hard to argue that they’ll have less accurate beliefs in general, which makes this concern easy to dismiss.
But second, suppose we are not in the “many traders” limit. The worry with finitely many traders is a situation like the “1 vs. 1000″ example mentioned earlier, where the intuition that we are getting an average becomes misleading because the prices are so heavily affected by a small number of people.
Recall that the whole reason we’re interested in getting the average belief is that we expect uncorrelated errors to wash out if we average over a large number of people. In situations like the “1 vs. 1000″ example, the inequality is making the effectivepopulation size smaller, i.e. making our law-of-large-numbers argument weaker. From basic statistics, we’d expect the uncorrelated errors to get smaller by a factor of sqrt(N) when we average over N people. That corresponds to the errors getting about 32 times smaller for N = 1001. But in the 1 vs. 1000 case, half of the answer comes from the belief held by the single big spender, which (by hypothesis) carries random errors of the same size as everyone else’s, so the error is only cut down by (approximately) a factor of 2, not 32.
Now let’s extend this to more general markets.
This case is harder, because we don’t have an analogous law-of-large-numbers argument for the claim that the the price should reflect an unweighted population average. To argue for that sort of claim in general, we must (horror of horrors!) introduce some sort of ethical assumption, say about no one being inherently more important than anyone else.
I was being facetious in the last sentence when I said “horror of horrors,” but there are real difficulties here. The problem is not that some people might really be inherently more important than others, but that we are trying to do some sort of utility aggregation, and this is a famously thorny area. So it may help to be more concrete.
The basic intuitive appeal of “invisible hand” type ideas is that the market will learn to provide what people want. The phrase “what people want” has the same thorny issue just mentioned – how do we translate statements about what individual people want into a general statement about “what people want,” so that we can judge whether it is being provided (relatively well or poorly)?
The core of the idea is nonetheless pretty clear. If a bunch of people want something, but not enough to buy it at the prevailing market price, someone will see the opportunity to make a profit by selling it at a lower price that these people will take. After they take that opportunity, everyone else who produces the product will notice and lower their prices, and (after some equilibration) the market price will be low enough that people get the thing they want. Likewise, if there is more demand for something than the low market price suggests, everyone will buy until there’s none of it left, at which point the suppliers will produce more because they can afford to do so by charging a higher price (assuming that supply curves slope upwards, which is not obvious and which I’ve heard is not always true IRL, but let’s grant it). If you don’t allow these things to happen, you get Soviet bread lines and shortages of rent controlled housing. Or so the argument goes.
OK, so here’s a brain-teaser for you: how much are homeless people willing to pay for housing?
Although there may be some exceptions (crust punks?), people do not generally become homeless because they simply value having a roof over their heads less than the average person does. Many homeless people would be perfectly happy to pay the market price for housing if they could. They just don’t have the money to.
In other words, the signal received by the market isn’t “preferences,” it’s “willingness to (actually) pay.” It’s startling how rarely I see the distinction made between “willingness to pay” and “ability/capacity to pay”; in the academic literature it seems to be mainly made by economists interested in healthcare. (See e.g. this paper, which presents the distinction as a novel modeling contribution, and has gotten only 2 citations since it was published in 2008, and this one, 3 citations since 2006. If I am missing some large body of research here, let me know.)
Talking about this presents some technical difficulties, since there is no well-defined concept of “what someone would pay if they didn’t have to worry about their budget.” For instance, what one is willing to pay in principle for vital necessities will scale up with budget in an unbounded fashion: I’m sure you could get Bill Gates to pay billions for a loaf of bread if the alternative was starvation, but this does not mean that a loaf of bread is “really” worth billions, and in fact does not mean much at all. Even for non-essential goods, things can be pretty elastic, since many goods that are provably non-essential for human satisfaction can nonetheless feel effectively essential once one has satiated to them. (You could extract a lot of my money by threatening to separate me from my internet connection, for instance.)
But it’s not as if spending patterns are unrelated to preferences. If you give someone any fixed budget, they will buy some bundle of goods with it (for simplicity, you can view savings as just another good people may buy, so that everyone always “spends” their whole budget). To determine someone’s preferences, give them a series of decreasing budgets, and watch which goods they are priced out of first and which they hold onto until the very end. (If two people have different preferences, one person will buy more of some good than the other given a fixed budget of sufficient size, and as we decrease the budget, there will be some level at which one person is still buying some of it and the other isn’t.)
Thus, the market receives a signal about “what the people want” in the following form: it observes the extent to which the population has been priced out of buying it by their budget.
To clarify what this means, consider an example. Suppose that everyone has the same budget. Their spending patterns will vary, because preferences vary, but there will be trends. For instance, there are some goods that almost everyone will be willing to pay you money for if they don’t have it (food, housing), and some goods that many people will happily do without. Demand curves will be generated by people successively pricing themselves out (in) in response to price increases (decreases). Few people will ever be willing to price themselves out of food or housing, so these goods will have nearly flat demand curves (low price elasticity of demand) with high intercepts, while goods that people will happily prices themselves out of (yachts, tchotchkes) will have steep demand curves (high price elasticity of demand) with low intercepts. If some good has a given supply curve, it will be produced in a large quantity if it is of the former type (food, housing), and in a small quantity if it is of the latter type (yachts, tchotchkes) – interestingly, this is true no matter which way the supply curve slopes.
Thus, in this hypothetical world, a lot of resources go into producing food (or more relevantly, distributing food), and not as much into manufacturing yachts. Because people – you, me, even Bill Gates – value food more than yachts, and the market mechanism responds to preferences. The invisible hand works! Chew on that, socialist planners!
But in our world, many resources are allocated to the production of bizarre luxury goods while billions go hungry. Is this because “the people” want the former more than the latter? Of course not. No one wants the former more than the latter. If you gave me the choice between food and my MacBook Air, I’d take the food, and so would you and Tim Cook and everyone else alive.
Why are resources misallocated in this way? Because the starving have been priced out of food, while I have not been priced out of buying a MacBook Air, and the market only sees preferences in the form of the “what have people been priced out of” signal.
When people’s budgets are all the same (or similar), this signal results in production patterns that track people’s relative preferences about different goods. When people’s budgets are wildly dissimilar, this does not occur. The production patterns don’t even reflect rich people’s preferences, since they prefer essentials over luxuries just like everyone else. (It satisfies rich people’s preferences, which is not the same thing as reflecting them. Being rich means having the opportunity to buy things which have incredibly low, although still positive, marginal value to you.)
Does this mean we have to spread the wealth around at gunpoint? Well, I don’t know. We don’t need to do anything. But the market cannot do its Adam Smithy magic if the wealth is very unevenly distributed. Maybe you value not having a state more than you value the market doing its Adam Smithy magic! But it is worth being clear that these values are in conflict.
you see this is why I don’t try and formalise my hunches: it’s so much work
Ah, but dear owl-friend Argumate, if we rate those with zero money as having zero preferences, then all the math works out great!
To get rid of the spelling idiosyncrasies of the English language while allowing for artistic flourishing, we will be switching the entire country over to Japanese.
The full transition will be occurring in two years, so make sure to start learning your three kanji per day now.
Even newscasters and politicians are pronouncing “folk” with an /l/, I’ve noticed. In fact I can hardly remember the last time I heard somebody pronounce it without an /l/ aside from my parents and grandparents. Certainly every damn person at college who ever said they were gonna play some /fɔlk/ music at the open mic said it with an /l/. I’m sure it’s just an inevitable countdown till the day someone makes a snarky comment about my pronunciation - probably they’ll say “You know, the way you say ‘folk’ is kind of…/fɔlksi/!” Is there any hope left for the original* pronunciation of “folk” among college-educated Americans?
And I swear to god sometimes I hear people saying “yolk” with an /l/ too
*original in that, afaik, all English speakers had already dropped the /l/ centuries ago before it was reinserted as a spelling pronunciation the last few decades
Oh, spelling pronunciations. The absolute worst thing is people pronouncing ‘often’ with /t/. Everyone does that nowadays.
While I’m here, the days of the week end in /i/, not /ej/, but that battle is already lost. I’ve never heard the correct pronunciation from anyone under 50.
(Actually, I’m starting to think it’d make sense to analyze final unstressed [i], the happY lexical set, as /əj/, and final [o], the potatO lexical set, as /əw/. This makes diachronic sense: diachronically, happY used to be [əj], and potatO is, in native words, mostly from word-final Cx/Cɣ clusters, so it’s not hard to imagine schwa epenthesis followed by the standard development of /x/ to an offglide. Then all you need is the laxing rule in absolute word-final position.)
Some spelling pronunciations which are now pretty much universal (from Dobson, 1956):
lots of words used to have th pronounced /t/ (after French), but now have a voiceless dental fricative (after Modern Greek): Arthur, author, authority, Catherine, diphthong (this word also used to have /p/ for the ph, and many people still use that pronunciation), lethargy, orthography, throne; also sphere used to be a homophone of spear
bankrupt used to be pronounced “bankrout”
baptism used to be pronounced “baptime”
corpse with a /p/, not homophonous with course (however the /s/ has always been pronounced; the Old French word was cors, and final esses weren’t silent in Old French)
perfect used to be pronounced “perfit” or “parfit”; verdict used to be pronounced “verdit”
schedule—both modern pronunciations (“skedule” and “shedule”) are spelling pronunciations; the older pronunciation was just “sedule” (likewise for schism although some people still pronounce that one as “sizzum”)
There is one /l/-restoring spelling pronunciation which is very very widespread: very few people still pronounce falcon as “fawken”, like walk, talk, etc. I wonder if Malcolm was ever pronounced Mawkem? Unfortunately personal names don’t get entries in the OED… Balkans always has /l/ but maybe it was borrowed too late (attested 1785 according to OED).
Isn’t that all to be expected in a language where spelling varies from pronunciation, and thus each person has to carry two units of information per word, as more and more people spend more time interacting with language primarily through text rather than the spoken word?
I have a vague hunch one can sketch out a proof that extreme libertarian slash ancap economics is suboptimal without adding some additional centralised coordination to resolve the inevitable crises caused by speculative bubbles
If it could be done, the market would’ve done it by now.
without speculation you hobble your economic growth, with speculation and absolute inviolable property rights I think you run the risk of [fill in blank]
Ah, yes, [fill in blank], the primary objection libertarians have had to contend with since time immemorial.
I mean the obvious starting point is currency, which is either restricted to a fixed amount (ushering in the Great Depression?) or issued by a single authority (giving that authority too much power?) or issued by anyone who cares to, the most interesting case.
Oh snap, we forgot about currency! No way to handle that one without government. Back to the drawing board.
You know, that’s the one thing I never hear libertarians talking about: how to privatize currency.
Libertarians are required to have a complete program for rebuilding society from the ground up, along with an exacting proof that the program would work. They are not allowed to simply say “the state will whither away” like the communists are. Much less are they allowed to get away with simply having a bagful of policies, like mainstream, democratically-elected parties. No.
No, libertarians can’t just say “hey, how about no minimum wage” or “how about no drug war,” because if you do, someone like @argumate will come along with a vague hunch about a sketch of an argument that an extreme form of libertarianism is less than perfect. And then you’d be so embarrassed.
So get on it. Argumate’s got a smidgen of doubt that libertarianism isn’t immediately and obviously perfect. Can’t let that stand.
Actually, Communists aren’t allowed to say that “the state will whither away”, and as someone that does not and has never liked Libertarianism, I have called Communists on this on multiple occasions and demanded that they provide a full plan for rebuilding society from the ground up, since “let’s abolish private ownership of the means of production” basically requires that.
And Communists complain that they aren’t allowed to just say that, and talk about how you aren’t supposed to pre-define the revolution so it doesn’t get locked in.
(But I don’t need to worry, since nothing hurts Libertarianism quite like Libertarian immigration policies.)
bluepill: superficial and commodified weeb idea of animeland japan “redpill”: balanced and informed perspective on japan redpill: tradweeb who fully embraces esoteric state shinto and pilgrimages to yasukuni shrine from akihabara and recognizes karafuto and chiishima as primordially japanese
Wired: paleoweeb fetishizing Jomon era pottery and lacquerware, thirsting after brow ridged waifus
exalted: jomon irredentist ainu cartoon enthusiast who understands that the only tradnat path for japan is the physical removal of all bearers of yayoi genetics, all traces of rice cultivation, and all political systems not founded on bear worship
if copyright was abolished in Libertarian Paradise, it could be quickly replaced by an equivalent contractual scheme whereby major conglomerates require you to enter into an agreement before accessing their products, with penalties for breaking the agreement.
anyone who wished to access Star Wars, Pokemon, Harry Potter, or any other popular franchise would need to agree to copyright or find someone willing to break it, and experience suggests that most people would go along with it.
Depends.
To start with, I will say that I agree with the general gist of your post. However, I suspect we would still end up with a licensing scheme much different from current IP law.
Imagine going into a store to buy a CD with software (I know, so nineties, I work with what I know) and at the cashier, before paying, you’re handed a 200-page contract (That is, the EULA plus all currently applicable IP law) that you must (a) read and (b) agree to before they will take your money.
A couple of things would happen
1) Some people would not purchase the software
2) Others would purchase equivalent but license-free software from your competition
3) In an effort to capture some of that market, publishers would create an extremely streamlined contract; the main difference - looking at what has happened in other fields - would generally be that a lot of cruft would get cut out.
3A) The hard-to-enforce cruft (E.g. “not allowed to resell”) would be cut out because: If the state subsidizes your enforcement you might as well have as many terms as possible and put the burden on the customer - they cannot really go to a competitor because that competitor will have the same burdens because it is law. If you have to pay for your own enforcement, you might as well cut it out - the contract will be less confusing to your customer and that might give you a leg up over the competition.
3B) The hard-to-understand cruft would also be cut. E.g. “Not allowed to modify this software” You see this in e.g. the CC license - in an effort to make people use that license, it is very easy to understand. A private court of arbitration could create an equivalent Easy To Understand IP Contract, a service they do not provide today because they’re in direct competition with the government enforcement monopoly.
You’d end up with licenses that individual people could make educated decisions about. You’re absolutely right that people would still agree to these contracts, but I expect the contracts to be much better. And it is easier to explain to the customer “you’re not allowed to sell or give away copies of this because we needs to get paid” than “you aree allowed to create copies of this for backup purposes only unless we have used copy-protection, unless that copy protection is easily automatically circumvented by standard software in which case it doesn’t count” which is the current state.
I expect that a proliferation of licenses would quickly congeal together into a single conglomerate, which you could opt into once via an easy process.
Then you really would just walk into the store, pay your money, and walk out.
People negotiating hundreds of little contracts on an individual basis seems much less likely than the convenience of a standardised option, much in the same way as you would expect people to standardise on a small number of currencies and other common standards.
Honestly, I find ShieldFoss’s response here to be a bit naive.
If all the record companies and movie studios get together (and it makes sense for them to do so), they can make their standard contract include those supposedly-hard-to-enforce clauses, and their standard contract will be harsher than real IP law.
They simply setup the situation such that any breach which would cause the copyrighted item to escape the containment field means someone violated the contract, and pursue people the few who didn’t and who did not immediately turn over who was responsible under the contract for some kind of conspiracy.
They don’t need to enforce it perfectly, just enough to scare people, and they can flat-out specify the prices in ways that courts will not dispute.
“This contract says you agreed to pay a $1,000 fee for every song you copied,” and oh hey, it’s civil court, so the standard of evidence is still not “beyond reasonable doubt”.
And since everyone will have to sign the contract to participate, it doesn’t really matter if a few copyright freegans on the edges of society don’t.
So no, the contracts will not be much better. In fact, they will be worse.
I think one big economic problem millennials face that is horribly under-discussed is that businesses just don’t really seem interesting in training people anymore, or at least not unless the person is in an unpaid/underpaid internship.
Like, in the ‘80s, my mom got a job as a programmer and was trained by the company. Prior to that, she had no experience with computers and hadn’t gone to college, and they trained her to program (granted, she wasn’t in a high level programming position, but even low-level programming jobs pay pretty well). Companies used to really invest in workers, and they don’t now. That’s unimaginable today. Companies now seem to expect you to get a four-year college degree that is directly applicable to the job, and at least a year or two of relevant internship experience, plus some self-learning on the side, to even hire for entry-level office work.
Of course, this new system makes younger workers much less competitive compared to older workers, and it means that any disadvantages you have (you have a mental illness, your parents aren’t supportive/wealthy enough to help you through an internship, you didn’t get a 4-year degree or got one at a lower-level institution,, etc.) multiply in how much they hinder one’s attempts to enter a given industry, because you have to do so much to even get your foot in the door.
Yeah, this is one of a large variety of ways in which the private sector, running out of ways to become more competitive by generating value, has increasingly depended on pushing costs onto others. Even fiscal conservatives tend to be fans of “skills training” subsidies, so it’s easy for companies to just completely give up on training and entry-level recruitment and then argue that the government needs to save them from the skills gap, and universities need to better train students in whatever they need right now. Then a huge amount of money gets wasted training people for things that are useless by the time those people enter the workforce, but were in-demand three years earlier.
In general I think it’s really important to understand this pattern of cost-smuggling, because it’s probably the single most fundamental tactic used by modern firms to stay competitive. You also see it in, for instance, the tendency to outsource resume screening to third-party service providers, who boast about their proprietary algorithm but actually just discard any resume without appropriate keyword hits and the right degrees. Or just-in-time scheduling, or the tendency to offsource all capital costs onto employees/contractors except the ones absolutely necessary to maintain leverage, or firing people when they’re costing you money and then rehiring them when you need them again. There are simply far, far more opportunities to save money by tricking or forcing other people into paying than there are by actually doing things better, and in a competitive marketplace, you can’t afford to hold out for the latter type.
What’s funny is that it’s not even clear that these strategies do improve long-term profitability. The issue is that long-term profitability doesn’t matter; companies have to optimize for short-term profitability, and things that make them money over a period of many years in ways that aren’t obvious to shareholders or investors aren’t worth that much in the rat race.
We may see an increase in relative performance by employee-owned and privately-owned companies for this reason.
This is discussed by finance people and while this factor is probably there, it’s already accounted for and some firms really do better by being publicly traded because you can get founders that are just not that great at leading even medium sized enterprises or just go bat shit crazy for what ever reason. And really, mega enterprises probably are too large to not be publicly traded.
This isn’t even accounting for the fact that just because an enterprise is not publicly traded it doesn’t mean there are not numerous owners with different incentives, and the tax incentive for debt financing and its interaction with corporate raiders.
Yeah, I feel like the optimal performance probably requires strong control by someone committed to the long-term prospects of a firm, but that model makes you extremely dependent on the quality of the people in charge, because it insulates you from pressures to fix actual problems as well as pressures to chase quarterly earnings.
While I’m not generally a fan of increasing financialization, as long as that’s the world we’re in right now I wonder if there’s a way to mitigate this framework using some kind of financial instrument better keyed to long-term sustainability. At least then you’d be getting information about what people think of a firm’s long-term prospects.
5-year stock that pays an additional 20 percantage points in value on dividends until it matures at year 5. The other dividend money 1-years don’t get goes into the pool and is re-divided to those with more mature stocks, which makes it a bit of a scheme, but unlike a pyramid it has a clear end and is a real company. When the stock is sold, the clock resets on those shares.
I can imagine going the opposite way round: Women are shorter than men (on average). Women earn less than men (on average). Short men earn less than tall men (on average).
Ergo: Discrimination against short men is toxic masculinity/misdirected misogyny.
There is a fine ideological difference between “I identify as an attack helicopter“ and “I am a helicopter-kin” and “My gender is heligender, with pronouns heli/helixs/helim/copterself“ and “I am a transcopter, but medical gatkeepers keep me from getting my propeller!”.
I don’t think the people using attack helicopters as a reductio ad absurdum care about this, but they should.
Yikes!
Attack helicopter AI platforms are the only ones that have the right to declare themselves as being attack-helicopter-gendered. Anyone else doing so is an appropriation of their culture formed by a lifetime of forced military service, which they have no right to despoil.
Human-Exclusive Radical Feminism is the only real Feminism.
Actually, what does Satan derive from the foolish alignment of Westboro Baptist Satanists?
(i.e. very un-Satanic satanists)?
I’m not entirely sure what’s being asked here, but it sounds like it might be a good question.
Does Satan get anything out of people who profess to like him and worship him but who actually act in a consistently un-Satanic way and display some of the virtues, which confound and attack him?
That does actually sound like a good question.
(However, I cannot intuitively model existing in a world where Satan is real and focused on spreading anti-virtue. It doesn’t really make sense to my brain on a deep emotional level, much like I can only understand other sexual orientations academically.)
Presumably, they are still Damned (which meets Satanic goals?) by Christian standards. Indirectly, they would also weaken the association of the Great Adversary with evil and thus open up paths for conversion by those who would otherwise see flat evil and resist.
I will admit though that I’m enamored with the idea of evil creatures doing good (through either will or contract), and of using evil means to achieve good, and with fake things becoming (effectively) real. Something inside me just finds such things cool or satisfying.
I think the years imply you're talking about SSM, in which case I think this is wrong even from a socon perspective. No fault divorce could be reasonably described as forgetting what marriage is. SSM is a tiny blip by comparison.
I sorta agree with that from a strictly practical public policy standpoint. Trying to fight SSM, and then not getting anything out of it when losing? Terribad idea in hindsight. That probably wasted most of the capital that could have been used to make covenant marriage law much more common or to make family law customizable so that the faithful and the obedient could make the law surrounding their own marriages conform to the law of the Lord.
I of course didn’t write that ask, and wasn’t thinking primarily about SSM – I now recognize that I don’t actually know what date interracial marriage stopped being so stigmatized.
But as far as the actual views of what marriage is, or what marriage is for, I don’t see SSM as a “tiny blip” although I do see divorce as being significantly more serious.
It’s actually a real thing. The guy wanted to prove how easy it was to make a church in Brazil, something that can give you the benefit of not paying some taxes. So he spent a couple of months going through paperwork and created the national church of Hanzo.
i read this whole fucking thing translated thru google and you know what. here are some highlights
the creator of this church admitted that he could have used mercy or zenyatta who are already rife with religious iconography, or even lúcio who is the only brazilian character in the game but he decided on hanzo for the interesting backstory and the fact that his long hair and beard make him “look like jesus”
“Hanzo is my shepherd and arrows will not fail me!“
the .pdf form he used as a reference stated in an article that members of this church would be allowed to skip a tuesday off of work every month for “religious purposes” ie playing overwatch
baptism = playing overwatch, or paladins if they cant afford to download overwatch
his church is allowed to sell pirated hanzo merchandise
I’m from Brazil but even I didn’t expect this to work. A few more highlights:
He chose Hanzo specifically because of how despised he is: he figured if he could use Hanzo to make up a bullshit church it would be proof that there is no limit to our legislation
The objective of the National Churches of Hanzo is legally registered as “promote peace and harmony on the internet and online communities”
Console wars and other separatist thoughts are not tolerated
But don’t worry, the National Churches of Hanzo are just on paper. Due to the (low) risk of the government getting suspicious and arresting him for tax fraud and money laundering, the guy will keep paying his taxes and won’t sell Hanzo products
Despite not actually playing overwatch and not knowing why people think that Hanzo is a bad character to main, I am tickled pink by the fact that people use “Hanzo main” as a slur.
World War 2 seems to have resulted in a rebuilding of all the national mythologies in the West. The figures in the war aren’t viewed historically, but as characters in a grand moral fable about who we are, who our enemies are, and why we’re better than them.
It's interesting being from Minnesota and going to the University of Minnesota, since all over the state, on the first Wednesday of the month at 1pm, they test the tornado sirens. Which, having grown up with them my whole life, I just glance at the time/think of the day and shrug. There are many students at said University without said experience/knowledge. And while at first it was amusing to see who had experience with it and who didn't, I then realized how freaky that must be for some.
what exactly is one supposed to do when a tornado bears down on the town
the GPS trackers for autistic kids seems like a competing access needs problem, or at least there are regular stories about autistic kids going walkabout in Melbourne and being found days later shivering in bushland kilometres away; presumably parents are worried about that happening to their kids.
I think one big economic problem millennials face that is horribly under-discussed is that businesses just don’t really seem interesting in training people anymore, or at least not unless the person is in an unpaid/underpaid internship.
Like, in the ‘80s, my mom got a job as a programmer and was trained by the company. Prior to that, she had no experience with computers and hadn’t gone to college, and they trained her to program (granted, she wasn’t in a high level programming position, but even low-level programming jobs pay pretty well). Companies used to really invest in workers, and they don’t now. That’s unimaginable today. Companies now seem to expect you to get a four-year college degree that is directly applicable to the job, and at least a year or two of relevant internship experience, plus some self-learning on the side, to even hire for entry-level office work.
Of course, this new system makes younger workers much less competitive compared to older workers, and it means that any disadvantages you have (you have a mental illness, your parents aren’t supportive/wealthy enough to help you through an internship, you didn’t get a 4-year degree or got one at a lower-level institution,, etc.) multiply in how much they hinder one’s attempts to enter a given industry, because you have to do so much to even get your foot in the door.
Yeah, this is one of a large variety of ways in which the private sector, running out of ways to become more competitive by generating value, has increasingly depended on pushing costs onto others. Even fiscal conservatives tend to be fans of “skills training” subsidies, so it’s easy for companies to just completely give up on training and entry-level recruitment and then argue that the government needs to save them from the skills gap, and universities need to better train students in whatever they need right now. Then a huge amount of money gets wasted training people for things that are useless by the time those people enter the workforce, but were in-demand three years earlier.
In general I think it’s really important to understand this pattern of cost-smuggling, because it’s probably the single most fundamental tactic used by modern firms to stay competitive. You also see it in, for instance, the tendency to outsource resume screening to third-party service providers, who boast about their proprietary algorithm but actually just discard any resume without appropriate keyword hits and the right degrees. Or just-in-time scheduling, or the tendency to offsource all capital costs onto employees/contractors except the ones absolutely necessary to maintain leverage, or firing people when they’re costing you money and then rehiring them when you need them again. There are simply far, far more opportunities to save money by tricking or forcing other people into paying than there are by actually doing things better, and in a competitive marketplace, you can’t afford to hold out for the latter type.
What’s funny is that it’s not even clear that these strategies do improve long-term profitability. The issue is that long-term profitability doesn’t matter; companies have to optimize for short-term profitability, and things that make them money over a period of many years in ways that aren’t obvious to shareholders or investors aren’t worth that much in the rat race.
We may see an increase in relative performance by employee-owned and privately-owned companies for this reason.
Depressing thought: I was born in the brief sixteen-year period between a majority of Americans accepting interracial marriage and forgetting what marriage is.
The difference between the polytheism of fantasy fiction and historical Greece-roman polytheism is that fantasy polytheism tends to be far more consistent, like there are actually rules on how things work instead of the constant shifting and inconsistency which Greek myth tends to have.
(I might be wrong, since I not an expert or anything.)
could it be that the gods can actually exist in fantasy fiction
Local Owl Struck by Lightning
Death an accident, according to Greek man at scene
I can understand being terrified to look up non-msm sources on Venezuela. but you can't just believe CNN Breitbart or vice or other mainstream outlets
“Venezuela no longer has the money to fund its lavish social programs because their oil isn’t worth what it used to be and they have nothing anywhere else” isn’t a terribly controversial take though.
>cricket-sized chickens -- why not chicken-sized crickets?
Also a good option, but this may require a specialized atmospheric chamber. Once that’s taken care of, mega-crickets can be rebranded as a luxury food for rich people - the Lobster of the Land.
How about gentrification? I've seen the pro-property destruction people discussing that, and it's not illegal so appealing to the legal system wouldn't work. And often worker abuse laws are not enforced well, and bringing the lawsuits harms the workers.
1) I do not think ‘your livelihood is destroyed and you are possibly injured or killed in a mass riot’ is an appropriate penalty for ‘some asshole decided you were participating in gentrification’
2) Random mass violence sure is a way to keep property values down, I guess, but if your goal is ‘low property values, period’ rather than ‘livable communities with affordable housing’ then we just profoundly disagree on priorities.
3) …and rioting and destroying businesses never harms the workers, I’m sure. Look, raise money so exploited workers can quit. Ask them what they want and do that - I guarantee you it’s not going to be ‘smash the business and attract tons of police attention’. Don’t decide for yourself who is guilty, decide for yourself that legal mechanisms won’t work, decide for yourself that peaceful mechanisms won’t work, destroy tons of stuff, and then call that ‘fighting for marginalized people’.
4) If your radical leftist politics amount to ‘Kristallnacht, but trust us, they deserve it’ then I’m sorry but fuck you.
How about gentrification? I've seen the pro-property destruction people discussing that, and it's not illegal so appealing to the legal system wouldn't work. And often worker abuse laws are not enforced well, and bringing the lawsuits harms the workers.
1) I do not think ‘your livelihood is destroyed and you are possibly injured or killed in a mass riot’ is an appropriate penalty for ‘some asshole decided you were participating in gentrification’
2) Random mass violence sure is a way to keep property values down, I guess, but if your goal is ‘low property values, period’ rather than ‘livable communities with affordable housing’ then we just profoundly disagree on priorities.
3) …and rioting and destroying businesses never harms the workers, I’m sure. Look, raise money so exploited workers can quit. Ask them what they want and do that - I guarantee you it’s not going to be ‘smash the business and attract tons of police attention’. Don’t decide for yourself who is guilty, decide for yourself that legal mechanisms won’t work, decide for yourself that peaceful mechanisms won’t work, destroy tons of stuff, and then call that ‘fighting for marginalized people’.
4) If your radical leftist politics amount to ‘Kristallnacht, but trust us, they deserve it’ then I’m sorry but fuck you.
ive never actually seen one with my name on it but i think im probably on one of those “BAD PEOPLE:BLOCK IMMEDIETELY” lists somewhere and thats why people ive never interacted with have me blocked
ngl like 80% of people you hang out with either are already literal nazis or defend nazism at every single opportunity
> tags
Here’s a post from recent memory, but I’m not sure how much of it is memeing.
Okay, the ESF part of your blog description bugs me not just because of the ideological signifier, but also because I'm both a Gundam fan and a pedant. The Federation in UC was just the "Earth Federation." The ESF is from Gundam Wing, however, and it was formed after the brutal war between thbe Earth-based Romefeller Foundation and the Barton Foundation-backed colony forces. This probably changes the context of its usage in your blog desc.
Actually, I used it in my blog description without originally intending it to refer to Gundam, as it quickly denotes “a federation controlling the entire Earth sphere”.
But now that I’ve engaged in Gundamposting, I should change it!
Also I think they called it the ESF in Gundam 00 too.
a libertarian who likes fascism or nationalism was never a libertarian to begin with. they were conservatives using the label much like the libertarian party is just about weed and cia shill coporation
This is ideology, not religion. People’s minds are capable of evolution.
how is fascism evolution? are you high on meth?
9 out of 10 ideologies are better than libertarianism, the other is communism.
Future purged brown shirt found.
We’ll be doing the purging actually.
You don’t get it. You all be purged by your own fascist leaders or left for dead in the next Stalingrad. You are a moron. Every fascist state lead to self implosion and lost every war. You are a dumb ass.
So nationalism of any kind, including liking living in Texas rather than California is bad?
Name one instance where nationalism has not led to war or state violence.
This is a bad point because even without nationalism there is still war and violence
blaming nationalism for violence is like blaming religion for violence
Wrong. Nationalism emphasizes conflict, the other, and war. It can only survive on external and internal threats
Name one instance of immune system function that has not lead to microscopic violence.
To put it simply, in this world, an ideology can only be physically instantiated if a sufficiently large, well-armed, well-organized, and well-resourced group are willing to literally fight to the death to ensure it is so. They may not actually have to fight to the death, but the credibility of the threat must be there.
Libertarianism will not be instantiated if the culture does not support it. It doesn’t matter how “objectively moral” it is. If people with the means to enforce their views do not want it, it will not happen.
I don’t particularly care for Libertarianism except as a counter-weight, but it’s easy to see that some Libertarians have noticed that the cultural demographics matter when it comes to whether or not there will be Libertarianism.
but in this year of our lord 2k17 I’m actually genuinely uncertain as to whether describing Japan’s schoolgirl obsession as “kinda messed up” counts as woke or reactionary.
Publicly, woke so they won’t decide to Normalize Schoolgirlhoodphilia or something just to spite reactionaries. Privately? Reactionary.
It isn’t just government subsidies that are in effect when a company doesn’t pay enough to keep workers alive.
The company can also be indirectly subsidized by draining the social and other capital of families, relatives, kind strangers, and whoever keeps those employees alive.
This is “efficient,” not actually efficient.
The alternative is to openly embrace social darwinism, which also deprives society and the economy in general all future value of the worker based on what their feasible value is right now, which may cause a rather significant net loss.
( @collapsedsquid may know if someone has explicitly studied this )
Making it impossible to fire people isn’t a good idea, but letting companies free ride on society’s / the country’s generosity isn’t such a great idea, either.
Now, you may say that direct wage subsidies have to come out of taxes, but those taxes likely aren’t going to come from the scarce poor-families-capital currently subsidizing Walmart, and it significantly reduces the competitive advantage of such behavior. Additionally, with more jobs profitable for more workers, there is more competition between employers to quit being jerks to the working class, which is currently distorted by the massive power imbalance between the working class as individuals and corporations with their collective bargaining power. It’s also less expensive than welfare since it stacks public funding with private funding, instead of running a straight loss, and if structured correctly, it still strongly incentivizes these workers to pursue higher-paying, more economically valuable work.
If walmart vanished, those workers would still be getting public assistance. They are purely making the situation better. If there was anyone around who would be paying those workers better, or enough to NOT need public assistance, they would be working there instead. This is a common progressive instinct: Making the perfect the enemy of the good. It’s far far better that walmart exists and pays the wages it does than if it didn’t. And the most important beneficiaries of Walmart’s low wages aren’t even Walmart’s profits: It’s everyone, primarily poor people, who shops there.
By subsidizing Walmart’s cheap goods and convenience (having a huge selection and being open 24 hours), the USG is actually helping out the poor people a lot!
If you put a bomb in someone’s skull, you have a lot of leverage and can get them to do just about anything, up to the point that they are willing to die to refuse your demands.
And if they’ll merely be homeless? Well that’s not quite as much leverage, but it’s still a lot of leverage. Walmart can walk away with only a few less hours served, but the workers may not necessarily be able to. This imbalance in the amount of skin in the game may mean that Walmart wages are artificially low, even without Medicare preventing their employees from dying of medical conditions.
In this case, I feel it would be better for the workers and their working conditions if we made the subsidies more explicit, so Walmart and everyone else could stop pretending they aren’t being effectively subsidized. And while the effective hourly wages might not rise as much due to not generating that much value, the influx of competing job options into the marketplace would likely result in competition over working conditions, which are one of the things that makes life for the working class so unbearable.
