Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

freedomproject.com

Six Baltimore Schools Can’t Produce a Single Student Proficient in English or Math

Despite spending more per pupil than all but two large school districts in America, at least half a dozen government schools in Baltimore were unable to produce one single student who was proficient in either English or math last year.

Dan Kahler

[triggeredmedia]

They spend the 3rd most in the nation per student and can’t produce a quality student.

MONEY IS NOT WHAT MAKES SCHOOLS GOOD.

It’s family values and communities. Things the left has been trying to destroy for decades. 

[ranma-official]

I completely agree, they would have been good at math if they’d hated gay people more, you make sense.

[mitigatedchaos]

Actually, Community and Family don’t require hating gay people (if you aren’t a member of [SUBSET OF RELIGIONS]). It is this blog’s belief that stable and beneficial families can be the new cultural norm without stomping all over the LGBTs.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

uk.businessinsider.com

There are almost 20,000 'ghost' homes sitting empty in London

Research from Property Partner shows London is the vacant home capital of the country, with 19,845 homes sitting idle for over six months in 2016.

Oscar Williams-Grut, Business Insider UK

[commissarchrisman]

The hotspot for ‘ghost’ houses — those left empty to appreciate in value — is in the affluent borough of Kensington & Chelsea in London, where 1,399 houses sit empty. The number represents an 8.5% rise on 2015 and a 22.7% rise between 2006 and 2016.

Why on Earth are any people from Grenfell still sleeping in sports halls after the disaster? London and Kensington especially is chock full of empty luxury apartments being sat on by speculators. These must be opened up immediately.

[the-darkest-of-souls]

Unless they’re owned by the gov you can’t just take people’s bloody property even if it’s empty that’s why

[ace-pervert]

thats fucked up

[notyourmoderate]

The problem in essence is that property owners would rather leave their property empty than to accept less than market value for rent. The question is not “no rent”, it’s “less rent”. Virtually anyone you find sleeping rough on the streets is going to have *some* degree of walking-around money, hardly anyone has literally *no* money. But, the owners of housing don’t want that money, they want market value. They believe that a better offer will come along, and if they accept a low offer they will miss their opportunity for the high offer. It’s a failing of people’s payoff-to-probability calculation.

And also it’s a failing of core concepts of how contemporary capitalism is executed. Not to go too deep into it, the crux is this: If they accept a low offer, their property is worth less. If a fork is sold for five dollars, it is worth five dollars. If a fork is sold for five cents, it is worth five cents. So marking down the rent on a property depreciates the property, marking it up appreciates the property. Because value is determined by common belief rather than any concrete consistencies, sellers try to fix the value of property high and buyers try to negotiate value low. So if one party wants to raise their profit, and one party wants to not sleep on a bench, they have similar ability to set the price but wildly disproportionate levels of need. It’s a conundrum, and there’s virtually no way to feasibly and achievably solve that problem.

[argumate]

set a reasonable level of land tax, then holding on to an empty house in an expensive area costs you money, encouraging you to rent it out or sell it.

[mitigatedchaos]

Alternatively, allow them to actually build more housing units.  Japan isn’t seeing similar massive price spikes in its cities that are undergoing population growth.  Send a guy over there and copy whatever it is they’re doing.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Alternative Fact: Japan isn't a real country. It didn't exist before 1853. The illusion of Japan is created by successively more dedicated layers of weebs. Images of Tokyo are filmed on a series of large-scale movie sets with CGI composites. Japanese people abroad are nothing more than paid actors, hired by the anime industry to protect its profit margins. There's no way it could be a real country - it's almost as ridiculous as Australia! Lol, like the platypus is even a thing. WAKE UP SHEEPLE

argumate answered:

That’s why most Japanese stuff is anime instead of live action: too expensive to fake the backgrounds and keep finding Chinese actors who can pretend they speak “Japanese”.

[mitigatedchaos]

I can’t believe you would publish such a slanderous ask against the country that was once the 大日本帝国, you treacherous kangaroo farmer, the light of their mighty rising sun nearly covered all of Asi–

* gasping *

* coughing * 

* wheezing *

Phew, don’t know what came over me, there.  One moment I was just reading Tumblr and then I just… blacked out.  It was almost like that time a foreign hypernationalist ideo-virus got past my memetic barriers and infected my cyberbrain.  But fortunately I got that removed.  No traces left.

A-argumate, why are you looking at me like that? 

Argumate-kun?  Is something wrong?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[theunitofcaring]

It seems like at least one of the things that’s gone wrong with American politics is that the Democrats have absolutely zero interest in taking up the language, priorities, rhetoric or politics of the left, which kind of leaves them without much of a message except for ‘I mean, we do actually know how to govern and when we get the chance to do it we improve peoples’ lives. and have you seen the other guys’. But if people aren’t happy with how things are going, that’s a really unappealing message - and no one is happy with how things are going.

I don’t know what a good message for the Democratic party would be, but they keep losing with this one.

[mitigatedchaos]

One of the issues is that the Democrats would have to get smarter on policy, not just shift in a left-wing direction.  They’d also have to actually follow through better on some of their policies.

For instance, a program of direct-to-employee wage subsidies would help the working class and boost employment.  This is to the left of current Democrat policy (increasing the minimum wage), but has some good acceptance by economists.  It would also put them in a better position for courting working class whites, especially when the Truckpocalypse hits.

However, they appear to be committed to a policy of demographic shift or even replacement, so it’s unlikely they’ll go for this option.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

If I might make a charitable interpretation of @sinesalvatorem Community posts, here…

Let’s suppose our goal is to get religious communities to tolerate LGBT people, maybe by becoming less religious or maybe by just being less fundamentalist about it.  (And this sort of thing isn’t just religious in origin.)

It makes sense to know just what it is we’re asking them to give up.

Religion actually is a social technology.  Coal is an energy technology.  That doesn’t mean soot is good for you.

If a non-religious or religious-but-tolerant community can be designed and instantiated, then exiting from previous non-tolerant religious communities has a much lower cost.  (Plus there is the issue of everything else society needs.)

[mailadreapta]

Progressive Christianity is a thing. It’s a thing that has existed for several centuries now, which is abundantly available in every city and most small towns in America. If a “religious-but-tolerant” Christianity were a viable option, you should be able to copy and spread the existing progressive churches to good effect. People can and do move from conservative churches to progressive churches if they find that their beliefs grow out of sync with the conservatives.

Of course, by now you’ve probably noticed that progressive Christianity is dramatically less successful than conservative Christianity. There’s probably a reason for that. You should find out what that reason is.

(And it’s not just Christianity. Reformed and Orthodox Judaism have approximately the same relationship. Progressive Islam is much younger than either of those, but I’d be shocked if it didn’t turn out the same way as the others.)

[mitigatedchaos]

Honestly, from what I can see, the supernatural stuff is part of the glue that holds it all together, and one of the memeplex’s components about it being true to the exclusion of all other worldviews.  You can weaken it a little, but if you weaken it too much, it risks falling apart.

Of course, I don’t believe in the supernatural elements, and many of them I find absurd.  (More deeply, I find the entire concept of eternal damnation deeply unethical.  …though, there are those who believe it’s only salvation or nothing, which has far fewer issues.)

And in many ways, religious tolerance is based on the implicit possibility that one’s religion could be wrong.

For me though, in my interactions with religion, it seems like it’s trying to hack my brain in ways not so different from Social Justice or Communism, so I intuitively resist.  Anything that involves an internal shutdown of mental defenses looks like that to me.  (This actually pisses off SJ and Communists more than religionists, at least in this country.)  On the other hand, there are men out there, criminals, who found their way back into society through religious conversion, and others who staved off suicide, so you won’t see me posting negatively about Christianity in the West that much.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[soundlogic2236]

That feeling when you have been clothes/shoe shopping and you want to shout in the middle of the store

Just give me a freaking nanofab already!

[vessel-haver]

I want to pick some shoe designs, scan my feet, and have a computer deal with everything else.

[mitigatedchaos]

You don’t need nanotechnology for that, and it’s only going to be about 20 years before it starts to become mainstream.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

You, an anti-Modernist: YOUR WORLD IS DEAD, BLIGHTER

Me, looking on sternly as I inject raw Transhumanism into my veins: I haven’t given up just yet, primmy.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

If I might make a charitable interpretation of @sinesalvatorem Community posts, here…

Let’s suppose our goal is to get religious communities to tolerate LGBT people, maybe by becoming less religious or maybe by just being less fundamentalist about it.  (And this sort of thing isn’t just religious in origin.)

It makes sense to know just what it is we’re asking them to give up.

Religion actually is a social technology.  Coal is an energy technology.  That doesn’t mean soot is good for you.

If a non-religious or religious-but-tolerant community can be designed and instantiated, then exiting from previous non-tolerant religious communities has a much lower cost.  (Plus there is the issue of everything else society needs.)

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[transgirlkyloren]

it is actually really annoying that feminist porn requires so much emotional labor from its performers. like, I don’t really care if it is your authentic and empowered sexuality, I think it is weird and entitled to think that I as a porn consumer deserve to have access to your authentic and empowered sexuality, I just want to pay for some porn where I can feel confident that the workers earned a decent wage and weren’t coerced into anything. 

[mitigatedchaos]

Sometimes irony hurts.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[heavilyarmedvirtue]

And then he’s shocked and horrified when people accuse him of being a reacto

[argumate]

The head-slapping part of this is that it assumes that the difficult part about running a government is all the gosh-darned records processing, and not the bit about maintaining the consent of the governed.

States don’t fail because they can’t process paperwork efficiently enough, they fail because the people decide that an alternative offering is more compelling.

(or more uncharitably: this is the most ignorant post X has ever made, and will remain so until X posts again).

[mitigatedchaos]

Oh, Eliezer, honey kun,

Culture is a wave, government is a wave, nations are a wave, and they’re all a web.

Libertarianism is not the default policy position into which society falls if it isn’t interrupted.  Democracy is not the default policy position into which society falls if it isn’t interrupted.  

They are both high-level ideological constructs that require constant reinforcement and social, cultural, and material support to maintain.

[andhishorse]

I had assumed that EY’s post was satire.

But failing that…libertarianism isn’t any sort of default policy position, but it’s presumably easier to administrate than many others?

[mitigatedchaos]

Libertarianism prohibits buying off the interest groups you need to hold the country together.

Although I’ll admit, I didn’t consider the possibility that it was satire, since it fits the Clueless Silicon Valley Contextless Political Thinking to a T.