Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[nostalgebraist]

My brain, out of nowhere: “Gosh, hippies!  What a bunch of goofs!”

[mitigatedchaos]

I mean,

it’s true, is it not?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Yeah, but you could take measures to ameliorate the long commute for employees--for example, running a high-speed train line there for their particular use. (If the commute is long even then, you could make that commute time paid--have people punch in/out as they get on/off the train, or just add a set amount per day.) Of course, that's expensive.

argumate answered:

Airports and sewage treatment plants have other constraints on their locations (flat land, downstream) and it’s not just the employees who have to travel to reach them but every construction vehicle, delivery truck, etc.

But eh infrastructure is hard, Melbourne doesn’t even have a regular train line to the airport yet.

[mitigatedchaos]

“It’s expensive” is such a big deal that often doesn’t get weighed in public arguments correctly.

If the train is twice as expensive, then society itself can afford half as many trains, and when you’re making the decision to buy that train, you are necessarily giving up an entire train’s worth of resources that not only could be spent on a train, but could be spent on something else instead (like hospitals, schools, or golf courses).

So yeah, “NIMBY” is getting used to criticize people who are opposing things society needs.  However, because there are costs and they’re not currently dealt-with well, instead of doing something stupid like building a train line to no where, might I suggest insuring them for the difference in property values caused by the NIMBY item.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

You can’t subdivide out entities that way, though, even if we distinguish them due to the complex interactions involved. The lack of a unified, detached ‘will’ animating our meat puppets doesn’t change the fact that at the core, it remains a single entity, a single actor. You are attempting to granulate things that don’t have any business being so granulated.

Actually, the effects of Ritalin prove that it IS so granulated.  And I, myself, have taken it and am familiar with its effects.  So yeah, actually I can subdivide entities out that way.

That is a thing, even if it’s one you don’t like.  

You have created a false boundary that ignores causal distinctions and elevated it to full status, but reality is not so cleanly delineated, which is something I’ve tried to get at with you for a long time but which hasn’t gotten through to you.  

Some kind of nihilistic type might object that a boat is just a collection of atoms that we have arbitrarily labeled as a boat, and that reality doesn’t care.  (They’d likely also take your “but you just don’t like it” shtick, too.)

However, even though the natural categories are fuzzy (for instance, when is a skin cell a part of someone, and when isn’t it?), we can still define object boundaries - but we have to use causal bundling instead.

That is, the impact on the world.  A “boat” is defined as a cluster of possibilities based on its effects on the world compared to alternative configurations of matter at the same time and place.

There are natural boundaries around people, but it is necessary to also consider the natural boundaries within them, rather than arbitrarily declaring them off limits for moral consideration.  These are themselves real causal clusters with impacts on the state of the world.

I think you need to justify placing your causal cutoffs where you place them.  Why is placing them at the total mind level valid, but both the sub-agent and incoming-causes levels are invalid?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Airport Gothic

[argumate]

I started writing this, then realised that factual description of time spent in an airport was already sufficiently horrifying, and no further comment was required.

[davetheinverted]

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression “As pretty as an airport.” Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only exception of this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.   – Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

That said, the S2 concourse (D gates) of Terminal 4 at Sky Harbor is not bad at all.

[ms-demeanor]

Airports are prime liminal space, which is why I love them. People sitting tailor style on the ground in business wear and charging their phones, a line of children with small faces lit by tablets, silent under headphones too large for little heads, chest-high counters often abandoned, side-scrolling orange led displays that make subtle changes to the lighting, the resonant thunk as a luggage carousel starts an empty rotation before bags tumble noisily down its chute, the omnipresent sports team made up of teen girls in matching uniforms with matching bags and matching ribbons in their hair.

I love that everything is in motion and everyone is going somewhere and sometimes it all goes to shit but mostly it works and sends people all over the world to meet family or start a job or take a break.

My local airport reminds me of a cross between a cathedral and a library; it’s all high glass ceilings casting beams of dusty light over broad expanses of silent travelers seated on evenly spaced benches. If you want something more to look at than that you can stand at a wall of windows liking at an endless field of blue and watch the planes fly into forever.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

learn-tilde-ath asked:

If you were a committed moral realist, how do you think your other beliefs would be different? What about opinions? Basically, what is committed_moral_realist!argumate like?

argumate answered:

Wow that’s a tough one. At first I think that version of me would be completely unrecognisable, but then I’m not so sure. I already have very strong moral inclinations, even though I am aware they are not baked into the universe; perhaps if I believed that these moral principles were fundamentally real then there would be few observable differences in my behaviour, besides what I might say in discussions about moral realism!

To think otherwise is to fall into the Jack Chick fallacy, where an absence of the god of Abraham immediately gives one a license to kill, cheat, and steal.

[mitigatedchaos]

That’s actually my estimate about what would be different in the Moral Owl Argumate AU, but the Argumate fanfic writers disagree with me.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

We’ve already had that talk? The short form is that we recognize ourselves as thinking entities, IE: I think, therefor I am as you’ve repeatedly stated. What follows is a recognition that our actions have effects upon the world, and those can be directly, due to being directed by our thinking minds, attributed consequentially to us. We ‘own’ the results of our actions, we are responsible for them. From this flows such necessary moral precepts such as the illegitimacy of initiating force against another thinking actor and the necessary fact that because are responsible for the results of our actions, we also own them, and that includes actions that mix with other material goods.

What follows is a recognition that our actions have effects upon the world, and those can be directly, due to being directed by our thinking minds, attributed consequentially to us. We ‘own’ the results of our actions, we are responsible for them.

This requires a kind of internal unity of agents/minds that I’ve already established does not exist.  You want absolute moral liability, but people do not have absolute control over their minds and never did, which is why brain injuries, drugs, and mental illness can alter behavior.

For your position to make sense, the effectiveness of drugs such as Ritalin should be impossible.  It shouldn’t be feasible to change someone’s level of alignment between their will and its execution through biochemical means if their will is absolute and unified.  

And if will isn’t absolute, if it’s subject to all the limitations and complex complications of life in physical bodies in a physical world, then the result of binding liability (if we even accept that) is far, far lower.

Because of this lack of perfect unity, if we took your proposition seriously, then it should be possible to charge someone’s executive functioning capability with a crime (or just moral liability) independently of the other subcomponents of their mind.  

Some sort of unification of limited moral binding based on limitations of execution, limitations of information, the default will, targeting of subcomponents of mind, does not, I think, move towards AnCap, but some new class of moral theory that has yet to be born, which is the first thing new/valuable I think I’ve actually gotten out of these discussions with you.

…though not entirely without precedent, but rather not formalized into a total system.  See typical handling of limitations in many common courtrooms, and many laws.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[antoine-roquentin]

so apparently a dude at a pizza shop in oslo was looking at an ad when the system running it crashed and revealed the output for the facial recognition software it had behind the scenes to discern people’s demographics and how long they stared at certain ads

[argumate]

Idea! Regulation that requires all active camera systems in public to be adorned with Groucho Marx glasses / nose / moustache combination.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

What do you even like about the west?

mutant-aesthetic answered:

I live here, it’s a pretty nice place to live.

[mitigatedchaos]

Yeah, what are you supposed to do, move to Asia?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

“the yellow black snake” seems like a reasonable tag for that cluster.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Why is the historical entrenchment of property ownership never touched on by libertarians? I think the overwhelming majority of landholdings were acquired through what they define as theft and then passed on. And even if we started from scratch in ancapistan utopia you'd have to deal with the issue of already existing public infrastructure and how even the most basic infrastructure would require cooperation that is coerced on some level

argumate answered:

That recent essay went over this, the fact that if you freeze property rights in their current state you may be condoning stolen property, yet Libertarians typically shrink from a large-scale one-off redistribution that would cancel out earlier thefts and allow everyone to start fresh.

Ultimately much of the Libertarian concept is based on an aesthetic of a small landholding being worked by a rugged freeman mixing his labour with the soil (but like, not in a kinky way).

In practice this falls apart: the rugged freeman is either standing over the body of the guy he just killed to take the land in the New World or is bound by a complex web of mutual obligations and tradition and common law in the Old World, both of which are far removed from Libertarian paradise.

[mitigatedchaos]

For these purposes, I was discussing property in the sense of land.

Either property is transcendent, in which case basically all the land in the United States is owed to descendants of various Native Americans - or it isn’t and property is subordinate to some other consideration.  The argument laid out by the anon is essentially trying to force the issue that many people who are very pro property have compartmentalized that position away from not tearing apart the bulk of North America.