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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
argumate
argumate

mods are asleep, post discourse

mitigatedchaos

The existence of tall buildings is racist against short people.  Also, with a unique culture and phenotypical presentation, short people are a race.

The Mongols should be charged - with interest - for the costly effects of the raids of their ancestors, just as some people consider doing for other countries and ethnic groups.

Eucalyptus is an invasive species within the range of the United States.  The President should task the military with eradicating it from the country.

Instead of making protein bars out of crickets, we should breed cricket-sized chickens.

The Institute for Ethical Supervillainy is not a valid cause for Effective Altruism.

Trolley Problem Waifus for Those with No Laifus: Real Facebook page, produced by a neural network, or something I made up just now?  Our fifteen-member expert panel debates.

argumate

The existence of tall people is racist against short people.

The Mongols countersue for retroactive carbon credits for the forest boom that occurred after they depopulated a swath of central Asia.

People are an invasive species within the United States.

We should take regular protein bars and give them feathers and sentience.

Since supervillains are proactive and superheroes reactive, supervillainy is ultimately humanity’s only chance of surviving the long-term threats it faces.

In the future all panels of talking head pundits will be structured like anime harem comedies.

mitigatedchaos

Since supervillains are proactive and superheroes reactive, supervillainy is ultimately humanity’s only chance of surviving the long-term threats it faces.

Fuck, he’s on to me.

shtpost
argumate
argumate

mods are asleep, post discourse

mitigatedchaos

The existence of tall buildings is racist against short people.  Also, with a unique culture and phenotypical presentation, short people are a race.

The Mongols should be charged - with interest - for the costly effects of the raids of their ancestors, just as some people consider doing for other countries and ethnic groups.

Eucalyptus is an invasive species within the range of the United States.  The President should task the military with eradicating it from the country.

Instead of making protein bars out of crickets, we should breed cricket-sized chickens.

The Institute for Ethical Supervillainy is not a valid cause for Effective Altruism.

Trolley Problem Waifus for Those with No Laifus: Real Facebook page, produced by a neural network, or something I made up just now?  Our fifteen-member expert panel debates.

shtpost
wirehead-wannabe
Perhaps the most widely practiced code of ethical behaviour is human rights. However, statements of human rights are often vague, and give little guidance on the question of when it’s permissible to violate someone’s rights, or how to deal with conflicts between them.

80000 Hours explains in two sentences why humans are fucked (via wirehead-wannabe)

At this point, I like to imagine you have a big collection labeled “issues” like some people collect butterflies, all conveniently sorted so you can show them to guests.

“And this book is my issues with overly-aggressive criminal justice systems.”

“What about this one?  It looks pretty.”

“My issues with collecting issues.  It’s a bit too meta so I don’t like to talk about it.”

argumate
argumate

@sadoeconomist:

And what Hayek was saying was that it was very murky indeed even back in 1977 how exactly social justice was defined

Hayek presumably is fighting a rearguard action against any attempt to include redistribution under the label of “justice”.

mitigatedchaos

Of course, there’s always a risk if you include redistribution in justice and then get carried away with it or apply it selectively, so I’m mostly opposed to collective intergenerational justice in anything more than weak forms.

di--es---can-ic-ul-ar--es
gogomrbrown

*Capitalism could never

fake

BRUH ARE U KIDDING ME THE HIGHWAY I LIVE NEAR HAS BEEN UNDER CONSTRUCTION FOR LIKE 4 DAMN YEARS AND IT TAKES THEM 6 MONTHS JUST TO FIX A DAMN POT HOLE

whaleologist

The hell do you mean “capitalism could never”??????? Last I checked, the UK is still a capitalist nation. The US could never because the US doesn’t invest in public works to the same level as other comparably large economies because we spend all our money on the military.

trelesire

Whaleologist is right but….fuckin what? You can seriously do that shit in 15 hours. I honestly am amazed. That’s how you know I’m a fucking American, like, my goddamned mind is blown.

thecuckoohaslanded

This isn’t an issue of capitalism or even public works investment.

This is an issue of how American budgets work, because America is the most idiotically designed country you could ever imagine.

American budgets are not organized by need, they’re effectively PRESCRIBED.  There’s no pool of government funding that is assigned according to where money needs to go at any given time.  We assign budgets in advance and they’re extremely difficult to change.  Guaranteed if you ask any American politician about this, they’ll tell you it’s to “reduce government waste” by making people use their resources carefully instead of taking on unnecessary projects.

This is not what actually happens.

Because if you DON’T USE 100% of your budget every year, you will be assigned a lower budget for the next year, “to prevent government waste.”  So they prescribe you a budget in advance and then you HAVE to use all of it, or else it’s a NIGHTMARE to do anything new in the future – you have to go through a billion hoops to get funding for a new infrastructure project that is a one-time expense.  It’s not cheap to build a new thing, but because it’s a public good that will last a long time, you don’t need to budget for it every year – but the one year you do need to budget for it, it’s an enormous pain in the ass because everyone responsible is desperate to “cut government waste.”

So with American construction projects, especially on roadways, you basically have a system where people are FORCED to take longer than necessary just to use up their budgets.  It is literally a regular occurrence in America for a road to be torn up for no reason, just so they can spend money filling it back in for the next four months.

And that’s why the crumbling, outdated, and underfunded infrastructure in America is an embarrassment to western civilization.

And the fact that this fucks up transportation, stresses people out, makes us all sicker and more miserable, and forces us to sit in traffic wasting gas that we have to spend a bunch of money on because one of the things we never invest in is mass public transit (because of heavy lobbying by the automotive and oil industries) – all of that should probably not be considered a coincidence.

In the name of “efficiency” and “cutting government waste,” we’ve invented the most fucked up, purposefully wasteful mandatory maximum budgeted spending that has totally eliminated our ability to respond to short term budgetary needs.  Potholes take years to fix, construction goes on for years even as nothing actually gets done, etc.  All because the budgets HAVE to be wasted in order for anyone to keep their funding – and notice how much of American budgets go toward things like “administrative costs”.  

Our entire country is a money laundering conspiracy.

American capitalism is the most wasteful garbage budgeting system on earth.

It is fundamentally designed to be inefficient and stupid, because doing it this way allows us to keep government spending (on public goods) as close to the absolute minimum as humanly possible in order to preserve the lowest possible tax rates on the people who ‘matter’ to the people who are making the decisions – which of course means the wealthy donor class created by the dramatic shift in economic policy under Ronald Reagan.

Because every single goddamn problem in America is Ronald Reagan’s fault.

mitigatedchaos

Thus why the system of infrastructure should be shifted over to grants out of a pool.

Which requires a better overall design of governments.  Most governments are still running on organizational technology a century old.

di--es---can-ic-ul-ar--es

great thread. Was thinkin about comin at that “grants from a pool” comment cuz I see a lot of how we already have that in education bureaucracies and other things, and it’s a great example of “college-educated people don’t care how absurd they need to get to justify the value of college-educated people” but i’m definitely tryin to fall asleep and don’t feel like writingthe comment out properly

mitigatedchaos

Actually, I’d ideally have it as part of a broader system under a new ideology of National Technocracy, where the conventional legislature would be replaced with one composed of voter-delegate think-tanks that bet on the outcomes of their legislation (across baskets of metrics, not just individual ones).

Such an arrangement could make it far more feasible to break all these construction projects down into grant-based chunks and metaphorically sort them by (voter preference) x (return on investment).

I just suggested grants because it’s easier.

Source: gogomrbrown politics national technocracy
ranma-official

hot take

ranma-official

the general right-wing sentiment that children aren’t being abused at optimal rates and the cure for being transgender is as much abuse as possible is pretty much reified in Kenneth Zucker’s trans youth conversion therapy program

mitigatedchaos

Now see, someone assumed I identified as right-wing, but if I identified as right-wing, people would either expect me to defend Libertarianism or “youth conversion therapy” and I’m not interested in defending either.

politics
argumate
leavesofmass

F.A. Hayek on Social Justice (Firing Line, 1977)

See everybody talks about social justice but if you press people to explain to you what they mean by social justice, nobody knows. I am telling you because I’ve been trying for the past 20 years, asking people, what really are your principles of social justice? 

sadoeconomist

40 years later, this is still unanswerable

argumate

don’t most people refer to “social justice” as being many individual acts of injustice that happen to fit into a common pattern?

I mean like “individual height” vs. “average height”; if the average height of a country declines over time that is a meaningful statistic, even though it is just a way of accumulating lots of individual heights.

mitigatedchaos

I think it’s partly a kind of selective belief in Collective Intergenerational Justice, the instincts of which would normally be to prevent something like an outside country coming in, taking all your land, and then normalizing it on the next generation, with the ethical hit only applying to the invading generation.

The problem is that Collective Intergenerational Justice is the basis of ethnic revenge killings, wars, etc, and is generally just a bad idea.  It becomes more obvious how questionable it is once you realize it can’t just be applied to [LOCAL ETHNIC MAJORITY], since many [LOCALLY OPPRESSED ETHNIC MINORITY] had ancestors of the same ethnicity that engaged in widespread slaving, sexual violence, and conquest.

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