Oceans Yet to Burn
Month
China couldn’t be bothered to reign in North Korea, so now Japan’s going to have a nuclear triad and remilitarize, quite possibly.
And no doubt the Chinagov’s gonna pitch a fit over this, which is on some level their fault.
One must also commit to the idea that autism is equally prevalent in both men and women and simply underdiagnosed for women, and that the reason young girls are typically better at masking the syndromes is purely due to socialisation and cultural factors.
silver-and-ivory said: I mean I think this might be true
anaisnein said: using today’s relatively broad definition of autism, this seems completely intuitively obvious to me, tbh
timtotal said: yeah, this seems entirely reasonable?
One could perhaps test this by looking at children diagnosed at very early ages due to being nonverbal, which seems less likely to be confounded by socialisation issues.
Then there are gender differences in schizophrenia, which presents at different ages and at different rates.
The hypothesis being put forwards is that you can tell nothing about the preferences, psychology, or personality of a group based on their genetic or physical attributes alone without knowing their culture and socialisation.
(The weaker version of this hypothesis is that you can, but the information is so weak as to be useless).
It would be convenient, but seems scarcely credible.
Presumably age at least has a measurable statistical impact, even if gender does not.
Well, we know that testosterone is not a placebo. The idea that it could have no impact on the relative rates of various mental illnesses seems, to me, absurd.
“THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS” being airbrushed onto the side of a soviet tank in russian
THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS AND ANYONE ELSE STANDING WITHIN A FEW HUNDRED METRES, IT’S NOT VERY DISCRIMINATING being painted onto bombers
“THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS” being engraved onto the side of the abstract concept of mortality
jurassic park but nothing bad happens. a bunch of people go to a dinosaur park, disgusted with the mundanities and cruelties of their lives, and quietly hope to be destroyed in a glorious eruption of reptile chaos. despite a number of close calls, emergencies that might begin, nothing bad happens. they leave, disappointed, but unable to vocalize why to their family.
“like” can also be an expression of support for the person making the post, not the ideas in it
usually in this context a “like” means “hang in there” or something to the effect, or “I like you”, or even “I acknowledge that at least someone heard you”
[ Enjoying Whiteout? Future posts will be on the @whiteoutstory blog, with chapter 8 released next Thursday. Follow whiteoutstory for continued updates! ]
[ Missed a post? The previous posts can be found here. ]
Beneath the Department of Immigration & Customs building was a vast database, known as the Ancestral Name Directory. Its name was a deliberate misnomer. The Directory didn’t store the names of ancestors, or rather, this wasn’t its primary goal. It stored the original identities of the living members of the city. Local slang called it the “Ghost Bucket.”
The Directory was air-gapped, cut off from the Internet. It had to be accessed in person, physically. Any wide-scale breach of the Directory could result in potential political disaster, and disrupt the careful peace the iron hand of the Pacific Metropolitan Collective had constructed.
wirehead-wannabe said: “like legalizing polygamy (for normies).” Oh man, imagine the dystopian future where you need to get certified as autistic in order to get poly married
The “Mitigated Chaos” blog, also known as the “Future of Social Conservatism Culture Shocks Liberals” blog,
Indeed, but if the reasons given are based on its likely future consequences, then they can be evaluated against the actual experience of places which are already there.
Tumblr once told me that disliking graffiti tagging is racist.
That sounds extremely racist, as graffiti tagging is not a biologically-ingrained behavior.
Also, seriously, fuck graffiti tagging. Yes, it’s vandalism, but also it’s ugly. If you’re going to paint something illegally, at least paint a picture or something and don’t just write the equivalent of “lol i was here brah”.
It’s basically paint-based littering.
COED MMA WHEN?
North American Mixed Martial Arts Neo-Georgian Light Cyborg Division Semi-Qualifier here. Mostly no co-ed fights until the availability of enhancement evens out the PWR post-war, but the VR stuff before that is plat. Ofc the physical fights are dominated by combat software, but they look spectacular.
Galactic blob of brain tissue vs. Cube of computronium.
Don’t be like that man, you know the hardware is neuromorphic, and even if the kinetic subcomponents are more carefully engineered, the abstract reasoning has to be grown, and the whole thing has to adapt to the user’s body and integrated with the subconscious. A finely-honed Combat Reaction System is a work of art and I will not have you in this blog if you disagree.
We can’t be friends anymore.
Warriors are not born. Warriors are forged.
I, too, was made in a factory. I feel ya, man.
mit I think there’s a difference between “forged” and “mass-produced”
Oh, right, that’s that old-timey thing with blacksmiths, right?
OP is artisanal? Very cool. It’s almost like having a biological father!
One more Whiteout post is queued for tomorrow, then I need to decide what I want to do with future releases on it. (I’m already up to chapter 13 already written, starting in on 14.)
May end up registering a sideblog for it and scheduling it once a week.
Warriors are not born. Warriors are forged.
I, too, was made in a factory. I feel ya, man.
“So what’s the condition on our suspect, then?” I asked, as we walked through the hall towards the back of the judicial holding area of the hospital.
“Not good. She appears to be suffering some kind of immune system rejection related to a viral infection.”
“Whatever,” I said. “Just give me a feed.”
The hazard-suited man looked back at me, then continued walking forward. I was granted temporary access to a handful of camera’s on the hospital’s network, and their feeds appeared before me as AR windows.
< Our perp is bleeding out of her eyes, > I said.
< Well that’s not good, > said Charlie.
< Do you think this could be a case of biologically-induced ideological terrorism? > Asked Huan.
< Nah, every one of those so far has been a hoax, > I said.
< What about that one in Shandong? > Charlie asked.
< That one was a hoax, too. But it might be possible to introduce mental illness and then prey on that. > Said Huan. < Induce paranoia and a disconnection from reality in order to speed radicalization. We can use gene editing to gradually remove mental illnesses, so why not use it to cause them? >
< That’s never been proven, > I said.
Huan was solemn. He might be right.
We arrived at a room full of diagnostic booths, at the end of the hall. There were four men, all in those same white hazard suits. I was waved into the diagnostic booth first.
Each booth was a miracle of modern medical technology, with all the finest sensors money could buy integrated into one compact package, fed through a network of diagnostic AIs. I tossed off my clothes in the enclosed changing area right in front of the booth, then walked in and assumed the T-pose.
A radiant line of red light ran down my body, then side-to-side, like in those movies when I was a kid. “Please hold still. Scanning,” said a robotic voice.
After a minute, the scanning was complete, and I put my thumb on the pad at the front of the booth for the blood test. The robotic voice did its little thank you routine, and I put on my clothes and sunglasses and returned to the holding room.
“So what can you tell me about this virus?” I asked.
“It’s a strange one,” said one of the men in hazard suits. I noted down his AR ID, in case I needed to contact him later. Dr. Zhang Cheng. “It’s targetting specific genes to overwrite, but nothing that’s essential for survival. Unfortunately, the immune system appears to get caught up in the process and begins to attack the uninfected cells - at least, that’s what we think so far.”
I let that sit for a moment. Maybe a mutation of one of the older generations of genetic modification delivery viruses, that got loose somehow? But every one of us in Outer Hong Kong, the citizens at least, should be resistant against that. It was way too much of a coincidence to be happening now.
Then a dark memory came over me.
“Dr. Zhang,” I asked, “what kind of non-essential genes is this virus changing?”
“A number of them are for appearance,” said Zhang. “We haven’t run a simulation yet on what someone would look like after the viral modifications, but it couldn’t be too different seeing as our patient has a fully-grown adult body.”
“I have some stuff to take care of,” I said. “When will I be cleared to go?”
“Oh, you’re already clear, Officer Fang. The scan found no signs of viral contamination.”
I adjusted my jacket.
< Charlie, Huan, > I said. < I need to go check out some things on my own. I’ll meet up with you later. >
That’s preposterous. If I were a fujoshi, would I be building an army of robots to take over the world? Certainly not!
No, I’d likely be carefully building a highly-detailed 1:10 scale model diorama of [INSERT POPULAR ANIME MALE] and his gay male romantic companion, Doctor Cumber Wholock, each hair lovingly rendered in perfect detail as they act out their romantic adventures in a series of scenes worthy of a Disney movie.
Which I’m definitely not doing. Je ne suis pas une fujoshi!
In fact, I did.
at least in America, a good start would be to stop poisoning the water supply
Maybe the reason so many Leftists think white nationalists cannot be deconverted is because they cannot deconvert them.
If you believe in collective ethnic ownership of the land, you believe in one of the core components of ethnonationalism. And if you believe that ties into race, you believe in a core component of racial ethnonationalism.
Asking a white nationalist to come down from the tree of white ethnonationalism is not going to work while you, yourself, are up a tree of ethnonationalism. It’s hypocritical, and hypocrisy is not very convincing.
The real alternatives are more in the realm of individualism - placing individuals over ethnic groups (and ethnic group membership) - and civic nationalism - placing the nation and national culture above ethnic groups. But both of those are very unWoke.
I’m getting increasingly suspicious and uncomfortable about the Leftist branch of ethnonationalism, after initially letting it fly under the radar due to the company it kept.
This is in contrast with my position on White Nationalists, which has always been suspicious, uncomfortable, and at least low key hostile: they want to harm and kill people I like, or kick out people I like having around and think improve the community, and then there’s the whole sexism/White women are morally obligated to pop out babies thing which is only debatably better from my perspective than just straight up wanting to kill me.
The thing is, we could go with a throwback, “every ethnic/linguistic group ought to have a state, and every state ought to be homogeneous” with lots of bickering about who’s homeland every inch of the planet is, and that has plenty of issues, but it has at least a veneer of fairness and a hypothetical possiblity of everyone surviving. In practice, it’s not any of those things, but on paper it’s not immediately obvious that it’s a recipe for genocide, or at least it’s possible to pretend that it’s not.
Current Leftist “woke” ethnonationalism though, is implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, genocidal/proto pro rape as a tool of genocide. There is not a veneer of mutual survivability, and this is presented as a plus.
Oh yeah, white nationalism is definitely not trustworthy, and it would seek to kick all sorts of great people out of the country, and has a record of killing people.
And at the same time, I think it’s reacting to that undercurrent within the implicit ethnonationalism among the Woke crowd.
There’s definitely also a contradiction in there - if whites all have to leave America because it is the rightful land of the natives which they stole, then they go back to Europe - but this will massively tilt Europe back to being white, when they instead want it to become ‘diverse’ and ‘brown’. (They use the word ‘brown’. I find it kind of weird tbh.) I definitely pick up on a signal of just… “white people should just not-exist for their crimes”.
And, well, hoo boy, nothing is going to create white nationalists quite like that.
This is the second time I’ve gotten a message notification with no message in my askbox.
Does this mean I received a message from someone I’ve blocked? I’ve blocked a number of bots, maybe I swept up an actual person in that by accident.
Charles Mingus
(via babylon-crashing)
I feel like this is a callout post just waiting to find me.
I still want to write a story about a God of Commerce coming into existence and revolutionising the economy of gods, prayers, and worshippers.
Balderdash! The prayer market regulates itself!
With a limited pantheon it can become an oligopoly or cartel!
Okay, but who is the deity of the State?
Now we’re bordering on NationStates.net territory, my dear Anon.
I, for one, back the Techno-Principality of Greater Rock Springs.
Their combination of Neoreactionary, Demi-Confucian, Muskian, and PAP principles, fused with a synthetic Sino-Japano-Anime-American metaculture and corporate backing practically assures their success against the bio-primitivists and the Communist Block.
What I really want to know is who @xhxhxhx is betting on.
Who are you betting on? Answer in the comments below.
Other issues with attempting to replace Nationalism include many Liberals are currently ideologically prohibited from noticing what is required to induce Liberalism and are instead obligated to pretend that it just happens on its own.
This is why we aren’t seeing a focus on the cousin marriage stuff for instance, when it’s an obvious vector for preservation of illiberal and oppressive cultures in otherwise liberal or social progressive environments.
Input carefulness and gentleness, get back laughter, beer, and miscellaneous History Facts!
In all seriousness, though, I don’t want to stereotype bros and am not sure what level of irony you’re operating on. Thank you for the ask, however.
@thathopeyetlives. Also, they seem to think that Han Chinese are not white.
I wonder in how much this will come into contention in about 10-20 years. There’s definitely a gap in appearance vs the various kinds of whites, but Han Chinese in America are a prime target for resource extraction, the People’s Republic of China is actively trying to weaken the cultures in outlying territories, and already East Asians are being disadvantaged by academic affirmative action policies.
“Charlie, you really need to get over that thing with your ex,” I said. “I’m worried it’s going to get in the way of our investigation.” We were waiting in the lobby. A murder investigation on a double platinum had high priority, and now that we’d found a connection between two of them, headquarters had handed off all our other priorities. So I wanted the prognosis on our suspect before leaving, and maybe, if we were lucky, we could continue the interrogation.
Charlie opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it again and sighed. “It’s just… it’s been tough, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
“Well how could you know, Vick? You live for the job. I’ve never seen you dating anyone, not even a man. You never take time off, and you never talk about your love life.”
“Trust me,” I told Charlie. “I know. But the past is the past, and the future is the future. Chairman Liu said it, I believe it, and it’s why I’m here.”
I got up, walked over to the vending machine, and ordered three soft drinks. The money was automatically deducted from my account. Admittedly, I had a lot of overtime pay, but I didn’t always have a choice. I tossed the first to Charlie.
Charlie caught his easily. “Chairman Liu Cola. Very funny.”
“Best soda made in Outer Hong Kong,” I said.
“Only soda made in Outer Hong Kong,” Charlie replied.
“That’s not true. There are some unlicensed soda vendors down by the dock markets. I mean, if you don’t mind getting sick, of course. Just a little sick.”
I passed Huan his green can of soda. Then I leaned against the wall, cracked mine open, and had a drink.
Huan looked contemplative as he drank his soda.
“Who is Jack?” He asked. “And who is Camille?”
“You think this goes deeper?” I asked.
Huan took another drink.
“I’m thinking it’s a problem if our only suspect and lead on the case dies without any follow-up.”
“True, but there are probably a million Jacks on Earth,” I said, “so it doesn’t help us narrow it down that much - assuming she was even telling the truth. Say, do you guys think maybe she was concussed?”
But inside, I was worried that I might know just who “Jack” was.
“Maybe,” said Huan, “but don’t they check for that?”
A door opened at the far end of the room, and a man in a white hazard suit stepped through. We all looked over at him.
“Officers Charlie Lin, Victor Fang, and Zhang Huan?” The man asked.
“That’s us,” I said.
“I need you to come with me, please. We need to check whether you’ve been exposed.”
Maybe the reason so many Leftists think white nationalists cannot be deconverted is because they cannot deconvert them.
If you believe in collective ethnic ownership of the land, you believe in one of the core components of ethnonationalism. And if you believe that ties into race, you believe in a core component of racial ethnonationalism.
Asking a white nationalist to come down from the tree of white ethnonationalism is not going to work while you, yourself, are up a tree of ethnonationalism. It’s hypocritical, and hypocrisy is not very convincing.
The real alternatives are more in the realm of individualism - placing individuals over ethnic groups (and ethnic group membership) - and civic nationalism - placing the nation and national culture above ethnic groups. But both of those are very unWoke.
right after the con chair took the mic, she introduced one member of the convention committee, who proceeded to name 8 or 9 American Indian tribes that had lived in Southeast Michigan in the past and said that “we are their guests here”.
Ｉｍｐｌｉｃｉｔ Ｅｔｈｎｏｎａｔｉｏｎａｌｉｓｍ
~You can’t stop the ethnonationalism because you are ethnonationalists~
I’d be pissed off too, Tron Guy, having to sit there and listen to that without objecting that no, it’s still ethnonationalism when Leftists do it, and no, Leftist rationalizations are just rationalizations.
If I go to one of these things, maybe I’ll wear a Lee Kwan Yew T-shirt.
right after the con chair took the mic, she introduced one member of the convention committee, who proceeded to name 8 or 9 American Indian tribes that had lived in Southeast Michigan in the past and said that “we are their guests here”.
Ｉｍｐｌｉｃｉｔ Ｅｔｈｎｏｎａｔｉｏｎａｌｉｓｍ
~You can’t stop the ethnonationalism because you are ethnonationalists~
right after the con chair took the mic, she introduced one member of the convention committee, who proceeded to name 8 or 9 American Indian tribes that had lived in Southeast Michigan in the past and said that “we are their guests here”.
Ｉｍｐｌｉｃｉｔ Ｅｔｈｎｏｎａｔｉｏｎａｌｉｓｍ
(I refuse to use the grammatical atrocity “woke”)
Ah, but that’s what’s so brilliant about it. It’s perfect for mockery.
Of course, this kind of thinking is why I have a low Woke Score, but…
The reason? Women are now far more likely to be well-educated and earn more, but not the blokes with whom they mate. Yes, women are marrying down more than ever before. For men, it’s hypergamy, the concept of marrying above your station. Women are pitching their sights a lot lower, hypogamy. Both of these risk the long-term stability of relationships and the answer is monogamy. Joke. It’s actually homogamy. More about that later.
damn those hypergamous men!
seriously though these numbers require very careful handling
regression to the mean
(actually this is the exact example used by Thinking, Fast and Slow)
Is regression to the mean sufficient as an explanation? If we assume that marriage partners aren’t selected for income at all, we’d expect women to marry up more than they married down due to the pay gap, so it seems to me that there remains something to be explained when we find that the exact opposite is occurring.
Have you accounted for the higher rates of both incarceration and homosexuality in men? Oh, and dying off faster too. Basically, there are fewer “eligible” men than women.
Hmn… no doubt this situation will be described as sexist later on. (”A net transfer of wealth to men! How dare they! Where have all the good men gone!”) Though while in my extended family an executive married a blue collar man, said blue collar man was still a very manly type (and fairly sharp, had his own business at one point). Big, tall, works with his hands, likes hunting and fishing, and other things I can’t quite describe.
(Unlike a few other members of the extended family, I approved of this relationship. He’s a pretty good guy. Trustworthy.)
I’ve talked about women wanting status in men, and I think the trick is actually in that gender segregation of professions everyone hates so much. If the career track has no women in it, or few women in it, then it still works for proving masculinity even if it’s low-earning. (It’s a status track that he’s further along that she isn’t, as compared to her being better than him at literally everything.)
Though now I’m wondering about the death rates of lesbians and bisexual women relative to men.
I have come to realize that a big problem with Tumblr Discourse is that Tumblr was never meant to be used as a platform for political discussions of this caliber.
That is what Forums are for, they have moderators.
Of course, this only works if the moderators are unbiased, but let’s ignore that for now.
True, but forums aren’t blogs, so actually the preferred Discourse can’t happen there, either.
Have you ever met someone on the internet that you liked so much that you sometimes sit there and think “Oh man there are people who are lucky enough to see this person IN THE FLESH ON A REGULAR BASIS and I wonder if they realize how LUCKY they are”
Ah, but the people that know me IRL don’t know I’m the person that I am online, where I can safely have fewer social boundaries and present myself however I want, and filter my thoughts through text.
The trick’s on you, dear readers! The grey-skinned cyborg you imagine dutifully making these posts while in Union Army cosplay does not exist!
They’re both characterized by a situation of sudden (and unpredicted) scarcity because of a breakdown in the usual supply chain that provides a good, and the price of that newly scarce good increasing dramatically.
One is where someone who already has a stock of the newly scarce good increases the price and reaps a windfall profit from the event. The other is where someone acts to increase the supply of the newly scarce good, and charges a price commensurate with the extraordinary measures required to do so (ordinary measures, by definition, no longer being adequate to provide a supply).
There are good reasons why we might want to treat these two cases differently, and yet I see very few people, on either side of the debate, willing to make the distinction.
In particular, if you put in tons of time and effort driving supplies to a disaster area from somewhere unaffected by the storm, you should be allowed to sell things for whatever price they sell at. Because getting more supplies to a disaster is good and if you’re not allowed to sell above a stupid definition of ‘at cost’ that doesn’t take into account ‘putting a thousand miles on my car’ or ‘losing my entire weekend’ or ‘the risk that I was wrong and this wouldn’t be needed’ then there will just be fewer supplies for disaster survivors.
And yes, the laws get used that way: After Katrina a guy heard that people needed generators, so he bought 19 of them in Kentucky, rented a U-Haul, and drove them to New Orleans. The police arrested him and confiscated the generators (which they did not distribute to disaster survivors). He intended to sell them at double the cost, and people were eager to buy them at that price. He served four months in our brutal inhumane prison system for ‘price gouging.’
And yes, the laws get used that way: After Katrina a guy heard that people needed generators, so he bought 19 of them in Kentucky, rented a U-Haul, and drove them to New Orleans. The police arrested him and confiscated the generators (which they did not distribute to disaster survivors).
Yeah, this is what I’m worried about. The law will end up being written in a stupid way that makes the situation worse than not having a law.
Thx, but isn’t that a fanfic site?
So technically, couldn’t only fanfics of Whiteout, rather than Whiteout itself, get posted there?
The broken-looking figure of Rain Bailey had propped herself up in a chair, out of the bed. Her black hair was a mess, and mostly covered her eyes. She looked at the floor, tiredly. Then, she looked up.
“So, the cops of this Hell world are here to interrogate me, huh. Little demons of order trying to keep the peace in a den of debauchery and sin. Or is it devils? I never could keep the two straight. Fuck you.”
I paused for a moment. “Why did you kill Daniel Blake?” I asked.
“These bodies we have,” she said, “they’re abominations. My body is an abomination. It shouldn’t exist. It makes me sick. So fucking sick, doing these twisted things. The pleasure of sin is an illusion. It hollows out your soul. When he decided not to pay me, I finally realized it was just too much. Seemed like as good a place to start as any. To start ridding this world of filth.”
Charlie gritted his teeth, then couldn’t hold his tongue back. “If you hate this shit so much, why did you buy an F3 body? Hell, if you hate it so much, why not just get a regular job?”
“I bought into the bullshit of this city. The philosphy of it. ‘We’re not degenerates’, they said, 'we have rules.’ But this city is rotten to the core with filth. The rules just make it better at hiding it. It’s sick with perversion. Look at you, pretending to be 'NeoHan’. NeoHan isn’t even a real thing. It’s a warped, funhouse mirror copy of the Chinese, who aren’t even that great anyway. A fake ethnicity. Were you Chinese? Were you ever even Chinese?”
Charlie gritted his teeth again. I looked at her.
“Did you kill Robert Cang?” I asked.
< She’s clearly delusional, > Huan’s voice said through the cybercomms in my head. < I don’t know if any of this will even be admissible as evidence. >
< Fucking pleasureboats. > Said Charlie. < Never trust an F3. >
“Yeah, I guess.” She said.
“Why?”
“I dunno. Looked at me funny.”
She was lying and she knew it, but why? A drop of blood ran down from her nostril, and she licked it. Then she coughed.
“Waaaaiit a minute,” she said with a half-smile. “Those reports on the forums weren’t bullshit after all.” She looked at me. “'Victor Fang’, huh? Jack, why are you pretending to be Chinese? Haha. Hahahaha. Hahahaha! The irony of it! The irony of it all! Camille sends her regards!”
The laughter quickly turned into a vicious coughing fit, and the cloud of AR health indicators around her began to turn red. The door soon opened and the nurse rushed in. I and the others moved out of the way.
“What happened?” Demanded the nurse as he rushed to her side.
“I don’t know,” I said. “She was laughing and then she went into a coughing fit.”
“Help me get her into the bed!” Said the nurse. She resisted, but we soon lifted her and pushed her back onto the bed.
The nurse gestured for me to get out of the way, and the bed took off out of the room and down the hallway at a fast walking pace, the nurse following along.
“'the fuck? I’ve never seen a Buster grenade do that.” Said Charlie.
“…Jack?” Said Huan.
“There is no ‘Lesbianism Bomb’, Tom. She left you because you stood her up too many times.”
common misconception is that i want to be a girl but thats wrong
i want to be a shapeshifter capable of shedding one form and moving onto another at will, a perfect entity with total mastery over my physical and spiritual form
(… and also a girl)
Putting in disaster gouging laws is not really the virtuous thing, because
- Any cop you have out enforcing the anti-gouging law could instead be either pulling dudes out of flooded houses, trucking in water, handing out waters, or guarding supply points
- It isn’t going to actually increase the amount of drinkable water entering the zone
- Not every random trucking water in but charging for it is going to charge $42 a bottle. If someone charges some lesser amount, it may also still cover their fuel costs and time off work to get out there
This policy is more of a looking good than doing good thing. It lets the politicians get away without actually doing anything, spending any money, or successfully bringing more water into the zone. (It also costs resources to keep all these laws on the books.)
Having supply depots already nearby as part of a multi-layered civil defense system capable of responding to a broad range of emergencies is the actual virtuous policy, the tough one that we can’t actually have because reasons.
I know @collapsedsquid suggested that having supply depots would be defeated because tax breaks for the wealthy, but that isn’t the only factor.
Any money spent on civil defense depots with stockpiled water filters would also have to contend with complaints that it was depriving resources from any other groups - for instance, from education, healthcare, etc. It might even get accused of being racist for being connected to some distant probability-calculated need rather than the immediate needs of the local community. (Tho that last one can be reduced somewhat by giving the ¾ shelflife MREs over to homeless shelters.)
there are already cops who are protecting from vague looters rather than pulling dudes out of flooded houses, does that mean we need to abolish private property?
It isn’t going to actually increase the amount of drinkable water entering the zone
it will prevent the thing where people with spare cash go to a supermarket, buy out the entire stock of water, and then resell it at much higher prices after the disaster.
Well, looting non-essential items will harm people afterwards, and there are reports of some people shooting. Though if I could allow people to loot water bottles from abandoned houses without all sorts of secondary consequences, I would.
What I’m thinking is that we won’t get a law that’s written intelligently, but one that also prohibits guys from buying out all the waters in a store in a neighboring county, putting it all in a pick-up truck, and driving it in to the disaster area to sell. And we should want someone to do that, even if it gets sold for $10 a bottle, since it increases the available water.
Venezuela, which is pretty messed up right now, keeps trying to legislate prices on things like bread, and it isn’t helping there.
Putting in disaster gouging laws is not really the virtuous thing, because
This policy is more of a looking good than doing good thing. It lets the politicians get away without actually doing anything, spending any money, or successfully bringing more water into the zone. (It also costs resources to keep all these laws on the books.)
Having supply depots already nearby as part of a multi-layered civil defense system capable of responding to a broad range of emergencies is the actual virtuous policy, the tough one that we can’t actually have because reasons.
I know @collapsedsquid suggested that having supply depots would be defeated because tax breaks for the wealthy, but that isn’t the only factor.
Any money spent on civil defense depots with stockpiled water filters would also have to contend with complaints that it was depriving resources from any other groups - for instance, from education, healthcare, etc. It might even get accused of being racist for being connected to some distant probability-calculated need rather than the immediate needs of the local community. (Tho that last one can be reduced somewhat by giving the ¾ shelflife MREs over to homeless shelters.)
I once got into a long after-class argument with my econ professor about anti-gouging laws during disasters, and he genuinely told me that a superior option would be to drop massive amounts of cash over affected areas via helicopter (a literal helicopter drop) so that everyone could collect it and have the ability to purchase goods at their market value. I tried to point out that the lack of competition caused by a severe supply shock eliminates any upper constraint on prices, so a helicopter drop could just lead to local hyperinflation that would rapidly wipe out the money’s value, but he cut me off before I could get to it.
Pretty sure he had a PhD.
Okay, but that spike is only temporary, depending on just how difficult it is to get out there and just how regularly the government does this. If there is suddenly $200,000 laying around for buying water, then someone will get a boat or a truck and bring water.
No, what you really have to worry about is that some guy with a gun will just take it all to himself.
some guy with a gun will just take it all to himself.
No but see that’s not real anarcho-capitalism, just like every time corporations do something bad that’s not real capitalism. As ancaps have never ever told us within drug law and gun law discourse, people always obey vague ephemeral principles like the NAP, except during all of human history. And this is definitely different to every time a tankie claims that nothing was real communism.
I mean technically, once the state either debases the currency by printing it or seizes the currency so that they can helidrop it into disaster zones, I think you’ve already left anarcho-capitalism.
I once got into a long after-class argument with my econ professor about anti-gouging laws during disasters, and he genuinely told me that a superior option would be to drop massive amounts of cash over affected areas via helicopter (a literal helicopter drop) so that everyone could collect it and have the ability to purchase goods at their market value. I tried to point out that the lack of competition caused by a severe supply shock eliminates any upper constraint on prices, so a helicopter drop could just lead to local hyperinflation that would rapidly wipe out the money’s value, but he cut me off before I could get to it.
Pretty sure he had a PhD.
Okay, but that spike is only temporary, depending on just how difficult it is to get out there and just how regularly the government does this. If there is suddenly $200,000 laying around for buying water, then someone will get a boat or a truck and bring water.
No, what you really have to worry about is that some guy with a gun will just take it all to himself.
“Temporary” still matters, a lot, when we’re talking about access to water in a disaster zone.
They might hold out for it, though, and if it became a common practice then dudes would line up with trucks full of waters along the storm boundary, excitedly waiting to go, driving down the price due to the expectation that the seller would make less money later for anyone that could afford to wait a little longer.
It just ignores that one dude with a gun can get all the money for himself, which is a frequent thing we see with economic thought ignoring the realities of force even while implicit force is, though useful, the basis by which property can even exist.
the sj hiding in my brain: uh why are you reading a book where the two main characters are boys, written by a man, i really think that you’re reinforcing harmful and incredibly oppressive structures-
me: could you just, fuck off, and let me read my adventure novel about archery and fantasy rangers in peace, without commentary, for ONCE
you: haunted by the ghosts of your past who sing in chorus in your mind ever onward, seeking to bind you in chains of your own making
me: busy writing something arguably even more problematic than archers, fantasy rangers, or even gay archery-focused fantasy rangers
I once got into a long after-class argument with my econ professor about anti-gouging laws during disasters, and he genuinely told me that a superior option would be to drop massive amounts of cash over affected areas via helicopter (a literal helicopter drop) so that everyone could collect it and have the ability to purchase goods at their market value. I tried to point out that the lack of competition caused by a severe supply shock eliminates any upper constraint on prices, so a helicopter drop could just lead to local hyperinflation that would rapidly wipe out the money’s value, but he cut me off before I could get to it.
Pretty sure he had a PhD.
Okay, but that spike is only temporary, depending on just how difficult it is to get out there and just how regularly the government does this. If there is suddenly $200,000 laying around for buying water, then someone will get a boat or a truck and bring water.
No, what you really have to worry about is that some guy with a gun will just take it all to himself.
Thx, but isn’t that a fanfic site?
So technically, couldn’t only fanfics of Whiteout, rather than Whiteout itself, get posted there?