Oceans Yet to Burn
Month
my god, that’s what you’re supposed to do with apples
To prevent it from melting in the dish, ice cream should be served on chilled dinnerware, and the dining room’s ambient temperature lowered to between -12 and -14 C.
Totally false.
Ice cream is better right when it’s on the verge of melting. That makes it creamier and also makes it more flavorful since cold numbs the tastebuds.
I’d read that -12 and -14 C is the ideal serving temperature, but that may be on the assumption that the reader isn’t chilling their dining room, and so assumes ambient heating.
If that’s the case, then we’d need to find out what the ideal eating temperature is, and then serve the ice cream at that temperature in a room of that temperature.
The problem, I think, is that you actually want to catch it while melting. It is optimal when it’s not at thermal equilibrium, so it’s partially but not completely melted.
Like, there’s a reason most people prefer ice cream to ice cream soup, but you also don’t want it completely frozen. You want it in that mixed state where it’s kinda melty but not totally melted.
Note that “completely frozen” for ice cream is more like -20 C. Ice cream gets softer and softer at it warms before truly melting, so the situation you’re imagining may still be below 0 C.
I’ve recently had ice cream sandwiches that came out of the freezer unacceptably soft but which, based on subsequent measurement of the freezer’s temp, would have been -5 C.
(As an aside: this is also an unacceptably high freezer temperature for food safety concerns. A freezer should be around -18 C.)
the dishes themselves are refrigerated, and spray the ice cream with cooled (but not liquid) nitrogen for optimal temperature control
Violence is a tool, it has a class nature. Our violence is good, because it is liberatory. Without violence, we cannot be liberated.
good to know.
Communists - or White Nationalists?
We report, you decide.
They weren’t showing up for me, so I didn’t notice them. Configbox ticked. Or rather unticked.
The issue with racism is that it violates the principle of justice as individual. Someone is being made to suffer for something someone else entirely did, united only by surface characteristics. (E.g., being black is not an ideology and does not cause behavior in the absence of a cultural context which makes it ideological/cultural/political.)
So breaking the principle of individual justice to combat racism probably isn’t such a great idea.
However, while race does not intrinsically alter behavior, culture, ideology, and religion do. Some of this is mostly just aesthetics, like architecture or food. But some of it has much deeper consequences, like multigenerational cousin marriage, or “honor” killings.
However, unlike race (currently), culture is fortunately somewhat mutable. There are limits, however, particularly with regard to ideology.
I guess what I’m saying here is that America should limit the number of North Korean refugees it takes after the War, until it can be determined how safe former adherents of Juche coming over in one mass are, but should be willing to take many thousands of refugees from South Korea after Seoul is destroyed. In-kind aid should be delivered instead, and infrastructure reconstruction should proceed with more funding than originally scheduled.
>Arab anon is a racist piece of shit that lives on double standards and thinks the world is desperate to spend time in their sandy hell-hole.
Huh, what a surprise…
safety vs. comfort
safe spaces vs. comfortable spaces
making someone feel unsafe vs. making someone feel uncomfortable
unsafety vs. discomfort
Easily resolved, friend Argumate. Anyone making my group feel uncomfortable is also making them unsafe.
so Hillary vs. Trump, is that it then?
‘fraid so
Somehow it still is
They want to enforce moral liability for Trump voters, but that only makes sense within the context of the possible alternatives. As such, “Hillary would likely have got the US into a war with Syria right now instead of just doing one missile strike, and the Media would all be cheering her on, further expanding the migrant crisis in Europe” is a valid response. (And I didn’t even vote for Trump, actually.)
Isn’t the alt-right bodycount still at zero? Or did I miss something?
mitigatedchaos said: maybe but if we care about offsetting risks and pricing them in, then by putting insurance we set a more market-based assessment of that
in theory yes, although in practice it just lifts the regulation up one level to apply to the insurance company instead.
Not so!
It lifts some of the regulation up one level to apply to the insurance company!
The difference between being regulated by the state and being regulated by an insurance company is the profit motive: I am going to apply for the insurance that is the cheapest for me, in combined fee-to-insurer and time-spent-on-paperwork.
This encourages the insurance companies to find the most efficient level of regulation, because if it is inefficiently high, they will lose customers, and if it is inefficiently low, they will lose money when their customers customers get sick.
I mean the state typically regulates the insurance industry very closely, to the extent of issuing specific terminology they have to use in contracts
“The state ruins everything, news at 11.”
Obviously nothing* can be done about the state inserting itself to actively ruin value when it doesn’t get punished for ruining value. Read the text more like if you, yourself, were a government official concerned with making the world a better place. You can regulate directly, or you can find some different method - enforce strict liability on restaurants (but then you’d have the inefficiency of lawsuits) or require a bond posted for accident payments (but then…) or you can just require people to have insurance and get out of the way.
*If you disagree, see me behind the tescos at 11, bring a canister of gasoline.
ah instead of the state micromanaging the insurance companies it should just mandate that they need to take out policies from a meta-insurance company!
Also don’t forget that insurance companies will try to sneakily cut out items from the insurance coverage that we wanted to cover the risk in the first place. We want to exclude lesser insurance policies, which is why insurance was mandated to begin with. In this case my motive was not the pure efficiency of the market, but to accurately price risk and put it on the bill, among other things.
I envision a society with lots of mandatory insurance as part of its stealth social safety net and part of pricing in the real cost of recklessness into something people can immediately see.
mitigatedchaos said: maybe but if we care about offsetting risks and pricing them in, then by putting insurance we set a more market-based assessment of that
in theory yes, although in practice it just lifts the regulation up one level to apply to the insurance company instead.
@collapsedsquid: then you have to regulate the insurance as well
Well, you regulate the insurers, the insurers regulate the vendors. What’s perhaps lacking is a high-cost no rules insurance option.
The thing being that if the risk of actual poisonings is low, then once spread out over the population it, hypothetically, shouldn’t cost that much. And if it’s high and the state is responsible for healthcare, selling w/o insurance is potentially a form of free riding.
A lot of these things, we wouldn’t care if people did risky things if we didn’t have to pay for it or strain our empathy because we insisted we not pay for it but they don’t have $$$ for it either.
2357911131719 said: The more obvious reason is that microcredit is seen as a charity while payday loans are seen as a business; there’s a lot more willingness to assume good faith in the former than the latter
right, but microcredit interest rates are really high! the perception may differ, but are they actually different in practice?
I thought the idea was that microcredit was used as an investment to start a business, while payday loans are consumption smoothing to help you get by.
hence the original point that in the developed world it’s almost guaranteed that any business you try to start with a payday loan will be illegal due to contravening one regulation or another, and that’ll get you a stranglin’
in impoverished areas you can just buy a goat and sell the milk or try to exploit arbitrage opportunities by buying stuff here and selling it there, and while you may face a number of challenges including unofficial corruption the state is generally weak enough that it won’t immediately shut you down.
I think it’s more that anything that’s not illegal is already being done much better than can be done with such a small amount of capital.
That’s one of the other major reasons. A lot of things can be productive, but not productive *enough*.
how many businesses are just grandma cooking a big pot of stuff and giving you a bowl of it for money… try that in Australia and you are looking at approximately a thousand pages of paperwork and certification before you even start.
what if we make them buy insurance instead
The Mitigated Chaos Plan for School
…that’s true.
I don’t know what a good solution would look like, but it doesn’t have to involve any more high-IQ individuals than we have now, just a better distribution of resources schools already have.
I want to test solutions to the current system, and to find many different possible set-ups that are different from the one we have now. (They might not scale well, of course.)
Even improvement in a limited geographical area or to some minor aspects, for relatively affluent middle-class individuals, would be really valuable to me.
Roight, let me suggest my plan, which would only help matters that you want tangentially most likely.
Are you familiar with Spaced Repetition? It’s used in programs like Anki. The basic summary is this: your brain flags things as important by whether or not you use them, and forgets them gradually over time. Spaced repetition brings the item up again at a certain point in the forgetting, so that your brain goes “oh hey this came up again, it must be important, I better remember it!”
Gamification is also a thing, and I have a theory that a big part of why people don’t like school stuff is that it doesn’t feel applicable, or that it will ever be applicable. But while I do not enjoy math for its own sake, I feel almost no resistance to doing math when I have to in order to accomplish some other task.
I’d like @argumate to read this post, too, and probably a few of the others as well.
So here’s my proposal:
1. This will be primarily implemented as a computer program. It will be implemented on a custom computer system that is not easily compromised.
2. All textbooks will be presented in both a fuller, contextualized format, and as semi-atomic facts of information, ready for use for spaced repetition memorization.
3. Exercises will be split between grinding and synthesis. Synthesis exercises will sometimes be in the form of game-like programs that have a complex problem which the students must integrate their knowledge of the subject to perform. (That is, students must be able to take the knowledge and use it and apply it, not just repeat it.) Other times, for other subjects like English, they will be items like essays that are manually graded by teachers. Students earn resource points to attempt synthesis exercises through grinding exercises, which are the rote learning component intended to reinforce the knowledge and speed up processing (e.g. of doing math). If you fail the synthesis exercise, you may have to do more grinding to attempt it again.
4. The computer program will conduct a review of all the subjects the student needs to know, based on spaced repetition algorithms and data about the student and their previous performance. This prevents the constant information loss that is pervasive in the American school system.
5. All of this is individualized. Students go at their own pace, and graduate when it has all been completed, or are pushed out of the school system at 21.
6. Homework is mostly rare or non-existent. Instead, students will stay another hour or two at school. Homework is for doing exercises, which we are having them do at school.
7. The school day will be broken up by various social activities to let students’ brains relax in between blocks of studying, which will still be somewhat unified by subject of study to make #8 easier.
8. In addition to grading work, teachers will also act as tutors to individual students. Students will be grouped in classes with students who are in a similar position of progress within the system. Teachers will go around the room answering various questions and helping students with items they are having trouble with. There may be some small lecturing sections, maybe.
The following is less necessary, but additional depending on your balance of Nationalism/Capitalism/Technocracy/etc.
9. Students will be awarded points based on a mix of (about 1/3 each) progress, attendance, and and percentile academic standing within their school. These points can be spent on a very larger variety (over 100) of uniform parts, snacks, media, and other items at participating retailers. This has the virtue of aligning the school’s social hierarchy more closely with the desired outcome of learning & academic performance, as well as giving students practical experience with small amounts of “money”.
10. Research shows that teaching math below a certain age doesn’t actually accelerate learning progress on it much at all, so for very young students, the system will focus on “moral/social” education and socialization and potentially language skills.
Also maybe @xhxhxhx aaaand uh @nuclearspaceheater and maaaaaybe @bambamramfan? And possibly @slartibartfastibast in case there is some hole in Rationalism here I’m bumping into without noticing.
I know there has to be some huge glaring error I’m missing here other than “state-sponsored software project completed successfully”.
IoW, part of the plot here is to avoid the Welfare Trap, where you make more money staying on welfare than getting off of it, up to a certain amount. Making and (profitably) selling cheeseburgers or something generates more value than sitting around, meaning the base wage before subsidy is higher, so the total pay is higher.
We can start by lowering the minimum wage some and adding the subsidy some and then seeing what the level of wasteful behavior is and just how much load we’re putting on the economy. We can then increase or decrease appropriately.
One thing I keep wondering about is the question of “What’s going to happen in the next economic downturn?“ We’re almost 10 years from the last one, and there are all sorts of possible ways the next one could happen. Given that we haven’t really recovered from the last one, what’s going to happen after that? I think it’s in the crisis that the policy for the next economic era is going to made, so what’s it going to be?
mitigatedchaos: Good question. That’s why I keep chanting “wage subsidies” at all of you.
Yes, the unemployed will be very grateful for wage subsidies.
Combined with a much lower minimum wage, it moves a lot of people from “unemployable” to “employable and making enough money to live off of”.
Others should be covered by some sort of disability scheme (which won’t eliminate eligibility for the wage subsidies). Children, of course, are to be supported by their parents and the various other child protection systems we need.
At a low enough minimum wage, but with subsidies so the pay is actually reasonable, the economy will find work for these people to do that isn’t digging holes and filling them back up again.
If we get a wage subsidy, I’m totally doing Matt Bruenig’s idea where I create the Institute for Full Communism and get employees to kick back their salary.
There are ways out of that, but part of why I’m in favor of wage subsidies as a plan is that it can be rolled out and tested gradually to measure the load on the economy of plans like yours. All your kickbackers would be making more money if they did something actually economically productive. The question is how much pressure is necessary. We can test this empirically, and I believe that we should.
One thing I keep wondering about is the question of “What’s going to happen in the next economic downturn?“ We’re almost 10 years from the last one, and there are all sorts of possible ways the next one could happen. Given that we haven’t really recovered from the last one, what’s going to happen after that? I think it’s in the crisis that the policy for the next economic era is going to made, so what’s it going to be?
mitigatedchaos: Good question. That’s why I keep chanting “wage subsidies” at all of you.
Yes, the unemployed will be very grateful for wage subsidies.
Combined with a much lower minimum wage, it moves a lot of people from “unemployable” to “employable and making enough money to live off of”.
Others should be covered by some sort of disability scheme (which won’t eliminate eligibility for the wage subsidies). Children, of course, are to be supported by their parents and the various other child protection systems we need.
At a low enough minimum wage, but with subsidies so the pay is actually reasonable, the economy will find work for these people to do that isn’t digging holes and filling them back up again.
…that’s true.
I don’t know what a good solution would look like, but it doesn’t have to involve any more high-IQ individuals than we have now, just a better distribution of resources schools already have.
I want to test solutions to the current system, and to find many different possible set-ups that are different from the one we have now. (They might not scale well, of course.)
Even improvement in a limited geographical area or to some minor aspects, for relatively affluent middle-class individuals, would be really valuable to me.
Roight, let me suggest my plan, which would only help matters that you want tangentially most likely.
Are you familiar with Spaced Repetition? It’s used in programs like Anki. The basic summary is this: your brain flags things as important by whether or not you use them, and forgets them gradually over time. Spaced repetition brings the item up again at a certain point in the forgetting, so that your brain goes “oh hey this came up again, it must be important, I better remember it!”
Gamification is also a thing, and I have a theory that a big part of why people don’t like school stuff is that it doesn’t feel applicable, or that it will ever be applicable. But while I do not enjoy math for its own sake, I feel almost no resistance to doing math when I have to in order to accomplish some other task.
I’d like @argumate to read this post, too, and probably a few of the others as well.
So here’s my proposal:
1. This will be primarily implemented as a computer program. It will be implemented on a custom computer system that is not easily compromised.
2. All textbooks will be presented in both a fuller, contextualized format, and as semi-atomic facts of information, ready for use for spaced repetition memorization.
3. Exercises will be split between grinding and synthesis. Synthesis exercises will sometimes be in the form of game-like programs that have a complex problem which the students must integrate their knowledge of the subject to perform. (That is, students must be able to take the knowledge and use it and apply it, not just repeat it.) Other times, for other subjects like English, they will be items like essays that are manually graded by teachers. Students earn resource points to attempt synthesis exercises through grinding exercises, which are the rote learning component intended to reinforce the knowledge and speed up processing (e.g. of doing math). If you fail the synthesis exercise, you may have to do more grinding to attempt it again.
4. The computer program will conduct a review of all the subjects the student needs to know, based on spaced repetition algorithms and data about the student and their previous performance. This prevents the constant information loss that is pervasive in the American school system.
5. All of this is individualized. Students go at their own pace, and graduate when it has all been completed, or are pushed out of the school system at 21.
6. Homework is mostly rare or non-existent. Instead, students will stay another hour or two at school. Homework is for doing exercises, which we are having them do at school.
7. The school day will be broken up by various social activities to let students’ brains relax in between blocks of studying, which will still be somewhat unified by subject of study to make #8 easier.
8. In addition to grading work, teachers will also act as tutors to individual students. Students will be grouped in classes with students who are in a similar position of progress within the system. Teachers will go around the room answering various questions and helping students with items they are having trouble with. There may be some small lecturing sections, maybe.
The following is less necessary, but additional depending on your balance of Nationalism/Capitalism/Technocracy/etc.
9. Students will be awarded points based on a mix of (about 1/3 each) progress, attendance, and and percentile academic standing within their school. These points can be spent on a very larger variety (over 100) of uniform parts, snacks, media, and other items at participating retailers. This has the virtue of aligning the school’s social hierarchy more closely with the desired outcome of learning & academic performance, as well as giving students practical experience with small amounts of “money”.
10. Research shows that teaching math below a certain age doesn’t actually accelerate learning progress on it much at all, so for very young students, the system will focus on “moral/social” education and socialization and potentially language skills.
blue-komrade said: But where is the line between ethnocentric nation states and empire anyway. The major european nations all descend from multi lingual, multi ethnic empires… Or is that your point?
yes, the construction of a homogeneous French identity, German identity, Italian identity, etc.
pushing common languages and suppressing dialects, as happened more recently in China and Indonesia.
and forcible movement of people to line up with national borders, as took place at various intervals throughout the 20th century.
Sometimes this is used to argue that nations aren’t really real in any valuable sense, but once you go up enough contrarianism levels from the normies you wrap around and say “actually, constructing nations is Good.”
regardless of whether it’s good or bad, it’s certainly powerful, and the original debate was whether anyone has a more powerful meme for cohesion, and so far the answer is no:
- international community of workers (Great War says no)
- religion (Henry VIII says no)
- united in joyful acclamation of the marriage of our beloved king (hell no)
- neoliberal technocracy (nationalism kicks its teeth in)
I think that last one is arguable. The fighting is going on right now, and Neolib Tech and its global finance isn’t licked yet for sure.
(Admittedly, I’m disappointed that the other Techs are so Neolib, but National Technocracy is always going to lack some appeal in the West.)
Edit: Well, for the meme staying dominant and having power. Cohesion, admittedly, not so much.
teens in unison: today we will live monogamously
all bad things are related and all good things are related.
this is why ending capitalism (a bad thing!) will also end racism, homophobia, the nuclear family, child abuse, exploitation, climate change, and death itself.
(if it turns out that some people have different opinions on which things are good and which things are bad then you just repeat it louder).
but more specifically some people are pining for an aesthetic of communal living and believe that everyone else is too or are willing to force it upon them if not.
Conservatives have so much fucking nerve talking about how “ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS ARE OUT OF CONTROL” when absolutely no-one feels inconvenienced by them or has ever even encountered them in their personal lives unless they’re the CEO’s of a megaconglomerate bitter that they couldn’t rip up a national park and buy like their fifth house boat
Yeah, it’s literally the Kochs saying “It’s so UNFAIR that when the oil pipelines we own but don’t maintain bust and flood a town with toxic sludge, that WE have to pay to fix it.” and “An employee we forced to clean chemical storage tanks without the proper gear for 15 years developed cancer, and they’re allowed to sue us over it? TYRANNY!!”
How is it never occurred to me to put it like this before?
this honestly comes off as pretty silly and out-of-touch, because there are of course plenty of people who get laid off in industries that are subject to environmental regulations, and while it’s certainly possible to make an empirical case that, say, coal regulations have little to do with the decline of coal jobs, it’s at least plausible that there is some effect.
of course the solution to this is that you need a full employment economy so that losing any particular job doesn’t mean losing a job, period, but until you do so (and obviously there are general capitalist interests against having a genuinely full employment economy outside of wartime) there will be entirely understandable resistance among certain fractions of labor against things (environmental regulations, immigration, labor-saving machinery) that are extremely good in themselves
I would argue against immigration being a general good in itself, but…
Wage subsidies with low minimum wage would get us pretty close to full employment without harming workers (in terms of net income) or crashing the economy (it has support from economists).
Admittedly I’m kind of a broken record, here, but it seems like something that could actually happen without a revolution and without potentially ruining everything.
blue-komrade said: But where is the line between ethnocentric nation states and empire anyway. The major european nations all descend from multi lingual, multi ethnic empires… Or is that your point?
yes, the construction of a homogeneous French identity, German identity, Italian identity, etc.
pushing common languages and suppressing dialects, as happened more recently in China and Indonesia.
and forcible movement of people to line up with national borders, as took place at various intervals throughout the 20th century.
Sometimes this is used to argue that nations aren’t really real in any valuable sense, but once you go up enough contrarianism levels from the normies you wrap around and say “actually, constructing nations is Good.”
Sometimes it strikes me as really really immoral that schools exist. They seem like an almost universally terrible experience, though I suppose that might be biased by who I discuss things with.
I don’t really see why more people haven’t tried something different, especially considering how painful the entire thing is. You’d think that the Elite would at least realize that school sucked.
Maybe it’s a way for them to control their children, though.
it’s free childcare
I don’t think so, though- there are easier ways to get free childcare. It’s probably aimed at edifying the children and preparing them for adulthood.
It is often not-great at that. This is quite possibly an organizational problem, in that it’s very hard to control and also educate a large number of people who often have a bad grasp of their own preferences and long-term needs.
What it probably comes down to is that a standardized set of Stuff to Learn and ways to judge that is far easier and more coherent to measure and encourage. In general people want to make sure that schools are Actually Working to educate children, and standardization gives them a good measure.
(To be clear, it is perfectly reasonable to want schools to Actually Work and I myself would like, in theory, to ensure that schools Actually Work. It is just the implementation that is often botched.)
It is way harder, less reliable, and probably leads to more upset or worried parents to set up a non-railroady, truly open-ended experience. It might also have not-that-many appreciable benefits, except to a few students.
School is probably also in some sense a competition for positional goods and status. If your kid doesn’t go to school, then they’ll lose out! If they don’t get into this school they will be a loser forever. I suppose that part of this is also tradition/family based.
(I’ll address other responses later today.)
Please keep in mind that the supply of high-IQ individuals to run both our nation’s institutions and industries is very limited.
Someone posted this on facebook and I sort of can’t stop thinking about how bad it (and the report it’s based on) is. Not in an it’s-wrong-about-literally-everything way, but in the conceptual and mathematical dog’s breakfast of a calculation that is the hook of this article.
Anyway, I suspect some of my mutuals might enjoy tearing it apart.
I was expecting generic anti free trade stuff, but the article I’m reading here is about tax dodging, noxious debt practices, and outright theft.
“Theft” is hyperbole. Tax dodging and predatory lending are legit problems where foreign interests are at fault. Others are problems that are not fully or at all attributable to “us.”
There are some more particular issues with the analysis, but the general point is that the calculation is pseudomercantilist nonsense, confusing currency with wealth.
For instance, it puts direct investment on one side of the ledger, and profit repatriation on the other, notes that the profit is greater than the investment, and calls that theft. But, like, that’s what capital is–you put in some, you get more out. Anything else is not capital, it’s aid.
The neoliberal point is that investment creates wealth, much of which will stay in Africa. That wealth is hard to quantify, but includes money paid to local employees and that money’s movement in the local economy, the resulting upward pressure on salaries, the provision of necessary products and services, the multiplying effects that these products and services might have on the local economy (e.g. IT, transportation, automation), the know-how that foreign companies bring into the local market, and quite a bit more. I can’t speak for Africa in particular, but I’ve seen it happen in Brazil.
(The same logic works for loans–you pay more than you take. And while some of those are in fact abusive, there’s no inkling in the paper of the idea that loans are not universally abusive and might have a role in creating wealth.)
Not to mention that much of what is lost is not about outside powers but rather the failure or nonexistence of local institutions. Leftist analysis of how foreign economic interests have undermined the formation of these institutions is important, but insufficient.
Overall, I’m against the simplistic but pervasive idea that all that needs to happen for countries to develop is for foreign “plunder” to stop. Foreign powers can help by policing tax evasion, by policing the trade of illegal extractivism, by policing damage to the environment and by providing fair loans, sure. But most of the work is internal–in the development of local institutions and economy.
When I say ‘theft’ I am referring to their complaint of “illegal logging, fishing and trade in wildlife.“
And your description of “profit“ works equally well for theft‘ or fraud, you get more money out than you put in for those as well. They are describing how wealth can leave in that amount, and you have to ask. “Is ordinary profit sufficient to get that level of return?“ Or is it theft and fraud going on there?
And loans can create wealth, but one of the nice things about ordinary lending is bankruptcy. With sovereign debt it’s a bit harder, and the US has a whole industry talking foreign leaders into large debts that cannot be repaid and cause crisis, and can end with IMF programs that force reforms on countries that they are now admitting do not work.
And is this debt used to finance productive investments? A lot of these projects are not. A lot of these are the product of bribery and fraud. But that’s OK, because then you or the next dude can sell off bits of the country to pay them off. That’s how this type of debt can work.
They need more to develop than the stoppage of plunder, yeah, but it’s hard to do that when you’re being plundered.
Calling illegal logging, fishing and poaching “theft” is exactly what I was referring to as hyperbole. The harm is in lost tax revenue and environmental damage–there is no outright theft going on.
(Also, most products of illegal extractivism, by far, go to China. Does that make it less “our” fault?)
The issue is that the logic of the calculation is that all loans and all investment are going to be net-negatives. The only logical conclusion is that Africa is better off with zero debts (business and sovereign) and zero investment.
Taking this further–let’s talk a little about Brazil, because it’s a case I know well. Brazil basically eliminated its foreign debts. It did this essentially by converting that debt into government bonds. By all accounts, this has worsened the situation. The financial market is far less forgiving–defaulting would tank the economy, no relief of forgiveness programs possible because the bonds are distributed, so there’s no single entity to negotiate with.
We’re embroiled in a historic corruption scandal that involves the President, most of his cabinet, the leaders of both houses of Congress and most of the congresspeople therein. This involves extensive graft schemes, largely connected to a meat conglomerate, a construction giant and a publicly-administered oil and gas company–Brazilian-owned and -run companies all.
Where I’m trying to get at is this: a kleptocracy is a kleptocracy. If foreign companies are knee-deep in corruption, then local companies and politicians are chin-deep. Africa is not poor because it’s being plundered, Africa is poor because Africa does not have the institutions and local conditions to be rich. Forgiving debts and policing corruption in foreign multinationals will help, but will not lift Africa out of poverty.
(The study points to a yearly deficit of $41 billion, which sounds like a lot, until you realize that’s less than 40 bucks per person per year. Even if those figures made any kind of sense, this is definitely not what is impoverishing Africa.)
What else can help? Exporting Western institutions is called colonialism and it’s a bad scene. What we have left apart from aid (much of which is counter-productive) is loans and investment, while hoping for the best as institutions develop locally.
“Removing without the permission of the legal authority“ is the goddamn definition of theft. You can argue that it’s not the government that’s being stolen from, but rampant theft tends not to improve the economy even when it’s not the government’s property being stolen. And those resources are what those governments could use to get capital rather than loans.
You are arguing that kleptocracy retards development. I can argue that it’s development that retards kleptocracy. While the US was developing we were a massively corrupt nation, we had whole political systems based on giving political jobs to friends and the transcontinental railroad was an amazingly corrupt endeavor from start to finish. But we developed, and now we are less corrupt.
The thing about debt is that, it can prevent development. It prevents it because instead of building schools and roads or even just pay off troublemakers to shut up, you have to scrape together everything you can sell for foreign exchange. It means that, rather than attract kleptocrats who benefit from a growing pie, you attract kleptocrats who extract and cheat to get money. And you get your country taken over, previously by armed forces, now by the IMF. Then the measures they need to take to develop become even more impossible.
Given the poverty that many people in Africa are living under 40 bucks per person per year ain’t nothing, that’s a good start on roads and school that they can then use to make more money to build more roads and schools. I don’t claim that that they’ll instantly industrialize, but I think it would help.
And the argument is not so much that loans are net-negative, but that loans should pay for themselves. The fact that those countries remain creditors suggests that they are not. You may believe this is the result of good faith attempts at investment, I think that’s bullshit.
I think it’s both kleptocracy and lack of development that empower each other. Low trust society is a sort of local stable equilibrium that makes everything more expensive at once. Suggesting that it’s just lack of development is reducing humans to economybots. It also suggests that societies with lower levels of technology - basically every society before 1950 - must necessarily have been more and more corrupt, and that managing corruption was something essentially impossible in some place like ancient China or feudal Japan.
Within this consideration, I’m not sure on how to manage this. I have some ideas that a more ideal nation could execute, but hooooo boy most modern Liberals and Leftists would not like it.
I’m usually against judging people from their icons but anime girls with MAGA hats is never a good sign, let’s be real here.
you have to go back
Libertarianism / AnarchoCapitalism / Minarchism - The belief that class action lawsuit waivers as mandatory conditions of employment show that low-level employees really want this and deserve it, and that there is no sort of questionable negotiating leverage involved which might undermine the sanctity of the deal.
I can easily do so thanks to Tinder, but it makes my dysphoria worse.
I don’t understand what you’re getting at. What framework are you operating under where men prove their value via sexual conquests?
Could it be…
… the patriarchy?
I’m reasonably attractive and can play an alpha male, so I get laid easily. I just really don’t want to, and that makes me feel like shit. When I act feminine, women shit on me too.
“Don’t kill yourself,” wrote the anon, “kill your Self and achieve nirvana.”
achieve nirvana yourself you fucking coward
Admittedly, anons may not be the best source of spiritual advice.
“Don’t kill yourself,” wrote the anon, “kill your Self and achieve nirvana.”
While rattumb probably enjoys weird ideological compromises, I have a feeling most of them wouldn’t like it if I were in charge of the country.
Friday night and one’s thoughts turn to cellular automata.
Friday Nights at Nier: Automata
- my tired brain
“I’m telling you, we just haven’t smacked the bee hive hard enough yet.”
- random repurposable metaphor quip
I’m somewhat confused by all the hatred for lawns – people saying that they are useless.
I don’t disagree that they are costly in terms of water and some kinds of maintenance. A better material culture would have fewer of them and there seem to be some perverse expectations (even regulations sometimes) that various landscaped areas should have lawns rather than other, more appropriate plants or landscape.
However, it’s totally obvious what lawns are for, to me. They’re for kids to play on or to play soccer or run around or sit for a picnic or whatever. And I don’t see why people don’t get *any* of that.
These people don’t have kids. Furthermore, children are so removed from their social circle and frame of mind that they don’t even think about what they would use the lawn for if they did have kids.
(Or they live in dense urban areas where playgrounds are no more than a few blocks away.)
I think it’s more the latter, but even a bit further. The broader model people are using here I think is “suburbia is cancer,” which I think is accurate even (especially?) if you have kids. It gets you suburban-brand Safety at the cost of making you into a suburbanite. Like yeah, there are reasons people make that tradeoff, but it’s hard to argue that it isn’t an example of widespread civilizational inadequacy. @sinesalvatorem @michaelblume back me up here.
OK, let’s actually talk about this. Why? What does “making you into a suburbanite” mean?
Unsurprisingly, I’ve had this exact conversation with a lot of people who are reflexively hostile to the suburbs. The answers I’ve gotten mostly seem to boil down to some combination of four things:
1) Prestige. We all know that only boring thick-necked American morons like the suburbs! You don’t want to be one of them, do you?
2) Aesthetics. To which, well, sure, you’re allowed to like or not-like whatever you want, but then this falls into the general category of “if you’re going to be vehemently angry about enforcing an aesthetic preference you should at least own up to it.”
3) The suburban lack of Social Culture in the form of clubs, neighborhood bars, Town Spirit, etc. There are obviously people for whom this is a legitimately a big deal. But I’d be surprised if it were a meaningful motivating factor amongst the hordes of introverted Internet nerds who mostly want to hang out with their friends and wish that they could just not have to deal with the rest of the world.
4) Environmental issues. Which are of course real and salient, and to the extent that’s what you mean, I’m not going to object. But people don’t generally talk about suburbia like “this is an awesome thing that we’re sadly going to have to give up to save the planet…”
…is that, in fact, it? Am I missing something? Where is all the “civilizational cancer” stuff coming from?
From my own personal standpoint, suburbia seems like a super good deal all around, except for the fact that you might want to have kids someday. You get lots of space at an almost-reasonable price! And privacy! And pretty trees! And you can still get to pretty much anything you want within like forty-five minutes, which is really not that much worse than living in most parts of a major city! It’s just a shame that, if you raise children in the suburbs, you’re signing up for them being totally dependent on your willingness to drive them to any single thing they might ever want to do…
Forty-five minutes? In a reasonably dense city with decent transit you have everything within less than half that.
Density is more than just Social Culture, and even for introverted nerds Social Culture that needs density is a benefit. Good luck trying to start an anime club in Bumfuck, Nowhere when the number of people inside a 45 minute drive is small, and then trying to get them together. Assuming they have cars, of course. Density significantly helps hanging out with friends, you know. And it means there can be better places for it.
Even if you don’t want to see anyone at all, the goods you have access to in a dense city are so much more diverse.
Also you know what the worst kind of having to deal with people is? Traffic. I don’t get how people can stand driving for like 2 hours every day. Driving is boring at best and traffic SUCKS. (Yes, I own a car.)
When I lived in Cincinnati, it was much more reliably 30-45 minutes to get anywhere else in the city, than when I lived in New York when I needed to book 1-2 hours to get to another borough.
But ignoring that empirical fact… @balioc and others aren’t arguing about whether you’d prefer suburbia or urbia, but “why do people hate the existence of suburbs so much?” “Can’t form an anime club” seems to be a weird rationale to despite other people for choosing to live there.
I don’t actually hate suburbs that much, I hate the rules that suburbanize what are supposed to be “cities”. We have one actual decent city in the US (Manhattan) and I think we could stand to have a few more, so that everyone who wants to live in a Real City doesn’t have to live in Manhattan.
I liked living in a relatively small town (Tuscaloosa) a whole lot better than living in the suburbs of D.C.
Mainly because the traffic didn’t turn to complete shit every morning and evening—because hey, the capacity of the roads was actually proportionate to the population. (That’s the problem: there’s not enough roads! The beltway should be like three times wider.)
It was just a lot quicker to drive everywhere in general.
On the other hand, it was not the location of a huge number of think tanks, etc. to work at.
Generally speaking, if you build that many roads, the parking situation eats you alive.
Given that the average Manhattan apartment is about twice the size of a parking space and support….
That’s why I think self-driving cars are going to really transform cities, if the government will get out of the way.
Still doesn’t really solve the parking problem. It opens up new options, but new options means: “Car parks itself a neighborhood over”, not “Let’s get rid of these forever”.
I think it does solve it?
For one, people can rent them on-demand instead of having a car that’s not in use the vast majority of the time.
For excess capacity (or for those who still want to pay the premium for their own, private car @the or , they can valet-park themselves in huge warehouses on cheap land outside the city center.
It vastly reduces the number of cars that need to be parked, and solves the bigger problem of needing them to be parked right next to where the user lives/works, in spots that are individually accessible. Most of the space in parking garages is empty, to allow the cars to get in and out. If they can drive themselves, you could park 20 in a row, end-to-end.
The basic problem is that it’s still not in use the vast majority of the time.
A lot of people seem to think self-driving cars will be like regular cars, except you can multitask while commuting.
I (and apparently also @voxette-vk – I knew I liked her for a reason) think self-driving cars will end up being Ubers for 1/3 the price.
So, like, most of the price of an Uber is the driver’s time. With self-driving cars, a robot’s time is significantly less expensive than a human’s – basically free. You’d be paying the marginal cost per mile (which you’d have to pay if you owned the car, too) and the company’s profit margin, in exchange for not having to buy the car itself.
Basically, if you use self-driving Ubers or whatever Waymo’s equivalent is (apparently self-driving Lyfts), you effectively get a car for free. Who would want to own a car if they could get one for free?
Well, one reason might be so you could have a car in your garage whenever you need it. You’d have to pay for a parking space (which in cities can get pretty expensive, and in suburbs trades off against having a larger house), but you’d get instant access to a car, instead of having to wait for a self-driving Uber.
How long would it take to get a self-driving Uber, anyway? Currently it’s around five minutes, but if their price dropped drastically, they’d probably be popular and common enough to be around a minute. Is that worth paying for a car and a parking space and insurance?
And, sure, the self-driving taxi company (Uber or whatever) is going to need a profit margin, but they aren’t going to demand so high a profit margin to prevent themselves from replacing most personally-owned cars.
That’s not actually the problem.
The problem is that on any given day, 90% of people are boring.
They wake up, go to work, go home, maybe stop at the grocery store. This is why rush hour exists in the first place. There’s two enormous, tremendous spikes in demand for 2-3 hours in the morning and evening, and then pretty much nobody uses anything for the other 18 hours of the day and they can be handled with a tenth of your capacity.
So a world in which Uber has no parking problems is:
- A world in which demand at 9:23 PM on a Tuesday goes way up and demand at 5:30 goes way, way, way down.
- A world in which rush hour traffic has been replaced by hour-long waits/10x surge pricing for your taxi home.
Self-driving cars will improve this scenario immensely (Pool, warehouses a neighborhood over, giving 3-4 rides every morning). They won’t solve it entirely. Most of your cars aren’t being used 80% of the day, where do they sit when they aren’t being used?
/And then of course, there’s the special hell that is LA and their housing/jobs mismatches. That’ll be the real test.
I feel like 90% is a severe overestimate. Do you really think rush hour means that 90% of all cars in existence in a city are on the road at the same time? I feel like “below 50%” is probably more accurate.
Assuming rush hour lasts 2 hours and the average commute is half an hour, this gives a minimum of 75% reduction in cars even if every single car in the city is used during rush hour (which I still think is a serious overestimate). I guess if you consider that rush hour is mostly one way, you might cut it down to 60%. I think fewer than half of cars in a city are used during rush hour, so I’d guess 85% reduction.
And grouping up (like UberPool) is a lot easier to coordinate in a self-driving taxi system. Assuming half of people UberPool, we’re now at 90% reduction.
So parking space demand would decrease 90%. But also consider that during non-peak hours, self-driving cars can drive a decent distance to park. So the densest parts of cities won’t need parking in like a 30-mile radius.
This gets even easier if most of the trip can be taken on a train of some kind.
Hmm. What if the interior of a car became more like a semi trailer, where you would get in, be automatically connected to a train by your taxi, then transferred between trains by more taxis, none of which ever travels outside of a mile or so radius?
(still doesn’t solve the problem of privacy though)
I’m a bit concerned, as “the poor don’t have to own cars” means “the poor won’t own cars” (as their wages will shrink to reflect this) which has been at least somewhat of a buffer against homelessness in this country.
And the marketeer types aren’t going to want to do anything about that, because they rarely ever do, as either they think suffering is justified or they cover themselves with platitudes about private charity that is frankly just not going to materialize.
WW’s concern about privacy is valid. The car company will have round-the-clock cameras in cars so that they can fine people for leaving messes or damaging them.
Additionally, there are concerns not even on the radar, such as that currently the spare vehicular capacity is enough to evacuate an entire city, but won’t be under this plan. But then I can’t convince people to up the level of emergency readiness generally, and if I had my way the level of North American civil defense might accidentally convince foreigners that we were preparing to survive nuclear war, so…