blue-rondo said: Transhumanists are scum.
shhhh they’ll hear you and swoop down from above on their polycarbonate wings and slap you in the face with five of their seven dicks
CREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
[Translated from Synthwave by my Samsung Omniverse™ O7]
okay so someone tell me why this won’t work
transgender people should get to use the correct bathroom and not be misgendered, and it is an issue of basic rights. and trans people are not going into bathrooms to commit sex crimes, that whole idea is absurd
but the conflict is not relevant to most people in the country and they view it as either a distraction, or just more culture war or at worst an attempt to sexually threaten precious and vulnerable women. pushing on the issue almost unavoidably creates disproportionate blowback because to the majority of people, the issue is being given a disproportionate focus and that means it must be nefarious
so why haven’t we, instead of saying “we keep pushing in exactly the same way, casting it as an issue where everyone who opposes us is ideologically befouled and deserving of punishment, thus getting disproportionate blowback and alienating people who we should not be alienating because that leads to a loss of our political power”, and instead of saying “we get so much blowback from how we present this issue as one where people must bend the knee to us or be cast out of respectable society, so we should give up on trying to secure rights for trans people as it’s not convenient for us to do so any more”
why don’t we make the law “people are allowed to use the bathroom of their gender identity, but if someone is convicted of sexual assault in a bathroom that they entered by pretending to be a different gender, their sentence is more severe”?
like from our point of view, we’re not losing anything. we know trans people are far less likely than baseline to commit sex crimes and bathroom access is not about enabling sex crimes. but for the people who don’t already agree with us, it looks like we’re both taking measures to deter the thing they don’t want to happen, and putting our money where our mouth is, instead of telling them “this is how things are you are not allowed to notice otherwise now bow to our worldview”. by making it a sentencing rider, we don’t increase the ability of transphobes to frame trans people for sex crimes – if we are afraid this law would encourage them to do so we should be exactly as afraid of them doing so without this law.
like if your position is “we should allow X because it is just, and will not allow Bad Thing Y at all” and your opposition says “we should not allow X because it will just promote Bad Thing Y”, it seems to me that “How about we allow X, but punish Bad Thing Y more harshly if it gets promoted by X, so people don’t do it?” is pretty much the easiest compromise ever.
so why won’t that work?
I imagine people would just say it’s already creating a dangerous situation where sexual assault is more likely to happen and reject it. They will say you are already allowing a risk and that in itself is unacceptable. (Same reasoning why same sex parents adopting kids is not allowed here, even when there is heaps of data showing kids elsewhere are fine, they insist we cannot put children at such a risk not knowing the consequences (even if we DO know!) and it’s too much of a gamble.)
Also we both know cases of fake sexual assault stories, who are widely believed even when there is plain evidence of the contrary, exist. What makes you think it would not happen in this case, when trans women are seen as even more inherently predatory than men?
If they say “Punishing people more won’t deter them from doing bad things” then we just won a huge victory and we get to reduce all the Draconian sentences for all this other shit, since they are the exact people who say we need to have incredibly harsh sentences to prevent people from doing bad things. But I doubt they’ll say that.
And yes, we do know cases of fake sexual assault stories exist. The point is that by being a rider on a sexual assault conviction instead of a crime in and of itself, it does not increase the ability of anyone to frame trans people for sexual assault. It doesn’t even increase the incentive to do so, as it isn’t like the utility of framing someone for being trans is correlated with the number of years they serve is convicted.
We keep saying that there’s no reason to be afraid because letting trans people use the right bathroom is not exposing anyone to danger. If we won’t do this, then either
A: we believe that trans people will commit enough sexual assault in bathrooms that this will be a problem and that means we have been lying this whole time, or
B: we believe that trans people using the right bathroom in transphobic areas will lead to a rash of them being falsely accused of sexual assault, in which case why the fuck are we trying to push this law on transphobic areas when we believe it will just lead to trans people being falsely accused?
right-wingers keep saying “The left wants to let people into the women’s room to assault them because they can claim they ‘identify’ as a woman! It’s just a way for perverts to threaten (precious, wonderful) women!”
we keep telling them “That isn’t what this law is about and that isn’t a thing that happens anyway, the thing you are concerned with is not an event that occurs, you are imagining it, this is only about not harming people for being trans”
if the slightest token effort to put our money where our mouth is and say “this is so much not about letting people attack women in the bathroom that if anyone actually tries to do that we’ll come down way harder on them, because we want to show that we are not about letting women get attacked, and because we don’t think trans people being allowed to use the right bathroom will cause them to attack women” gives us pause, then we need to stop and figure out how we have fucked up because we have fucked up very very very badly.
I am all about this kind of ideological trade.
So this came up and, like, I have mixed feelings about means testing but this is the worst argument against it. People aren’t advocating for means testing because they resent wealthy people getting social benefits, they’re doing it because there’s a finite, usually too-small budget, and there’s an obvious appeal to spending $2000 a person on the bottom 25% of earners instead of spending $500 a person on everybody, many of whom can the same service out-of-pocket. It’s commonly the case that the amount of service you could provide with the budget you have is so low that if you extend it to everybody it won’t actually serve the needs of the people it’s intended for, and the most common way of addressing this is “make the service so terrible that everyone who can afford it pays for something else”, which is not that far from means testing.
The better objection to means testing is that it creates a marginal tax on earning more income, and it stigmatizes the benefit in question. People will be more likely to want to retool or repeal it if it’s overtly redistributive rather than being pitched as a “dividend of citizenship.” I practice I don’t think this usually overcomes the practical benefit of having four to ten times as much money to work with, but it’s something.
Well, the idea with these universal programs, such as some kind of healthcare voucher or a universal basic income, is that you just tax more to make up for it. If it’s well-designed, then it will add on to the rich people’s personal spending rather than attempting to replace it with sub-par service, but they’ll still not come out ahead due to the higher taxes.
I would think this is sort of implicit in these kinds of arguments. Maybe not, though?
The House Obamacare replacement bill does nothing to end the primary problem with Obamacare, which is the wildly popular but also psychotic ban on rejecting people over pre-existing conditions.
Would you buy car insurance if you could buy it after you crashed your car and still get paid? Would you buy life insurance if your heirs could buy it after you died and have it pay out? Then why would anyone buy health insurance if you can buy it after you already get sick and still be covered? Obamacare’s answer to this was threatening people with the unconstitutional individual mandate ‘tax,’ but they wimped out on actually making the penalty steep enough to force compliance and they wound up putting the insurance industry into an adverse selection death spiral. The House’s answer is to give people tax credits for it, which also is completely inadequate to reverse the death spiral. Nobody is actually going to try to stop the government from destroying the health insurance market entirely. They are going to keep stumbling until they’re forced to institute a single-payer system as an emergency and we’re going to see highly inefficient non-price rationing for health care like in Europe.
At some point people are going to have to accept that we need to actually economize on health care or we will spend the entire GDP of the country on trying to keep everyone alive forever at any cost until the economy collapses. I don’t know that the public is going to ever get to that point though. The government is just going to destroy the market and then blame the market for being destroyed.
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that liberalization isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Normal people lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.
You want to get this liberalization to go through? You need to take a lesson from Trump. You’re going to have to publicly sacrifice something very expensive to prove that you’re serious. Charity is NOT going to cut it.
Everything you just said applies many times over in the opposite direction
“ Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that regulation isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Legislators lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.”
I find it very hard, in the general case, to see “giving people free stuff, but in a different way”, as screwing over. Given that a reasonable alternative is “you get nothing” (this is definitely reasonable, as people 60 years ago did not receive medical care from the state and nobody thinks this was screwing anything), why the hell should you be allowed to tar refactoring the system as “screwing”
I’m guessing this applies to me and not SE…
That basically ignores the massive impact that both random chance and imbalances of power have on people. Illness is largely not distributed in a meritocratic way, and even just staying employed in a Capitalist system can contribute to it.
Also, there was a post not long ago about normalizing private charity as the way to provide healthcare for those who can’t afford it, which implies that the alternative is indeed “you get nothing,” since there is no way that private charity will truly replace the cost.
Mostly, though, I don’t mind some level, quite possibly even a very significant level, of liberalization, but I’m seeking something from a basket of ideological trades. Think of it in the vein of “you hate minimum wage because it lowers employment, I think we normally would need minimum wage because those at the bottom are often desperate (thus less negotiating power) and they have a minimum cost for survival, so let’s ideologically trade by lowering minimum wage while simultaneously issuing direct wage subsidies.”
Or having a well-regulated insurance requirement for worker safety or environmental damage by corporations, since causing damage is so much cheaper than fixing it, executives are gone before the damage actually hits, the company can cause more damage than it can ever pay back, etc, so not having a pot of money to solve it creates externalities… That sort of thing. Technically, it’s a kind of state intervention. Technically, it’s a kind of wealth transfer. Also, it pulls on optimization from markets in the hope of more accurately pricing the externalities of injuries/environmental damage/etc. So is it a “market solution”? Or is it evil Statism? Etc.
The House Obamacare replacement bill does nothing to end the primary problem with Obamacare, which is the wildly popular but also psychotic ban on rejecting people over pre-existing conditions.
Would you buy car insurance if you could buy it after you crashed your car and still get paid? Would you buy life insurance if your heirs could buy it after you died and have it pay out? Then why would anyone buy health insurance if you can buy it after you already get sick and still be covered? Obamacare’s answer to this was threatening people with the unconstitutional individual mandate ‘tax,’ but they wimped out on actually making the penalty steep enough to force compliance and they wound up putting the insurance industry into an adverse selection death spiral. The House’s answer is to give people tax credits for it, which also is completely inadequate to reverse the death spiral. Nobody is actually going to try to stop the government from destroying the health insurance market entirely. They are going to keep stumbling until they’re forced to institute a single-payer system as an emergency and we’re going to see highly inefficient non-price rationing for health care like in Europe.
At some point people are going to have to accept that we need to actually economize on health care or we will spend the entire GDP of the country on trying to keep everyone alive forever at any cost until the economy collapses. I don’t know that the public is going to ever get to that point though. The government is just going to destroy the market and then blame the market for being destroyed.
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that liberalization isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Normal people lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.
You want to get this liberalization to go through? You need to take a lesson from Trump. You’re going to have to publicly sacrifice something very expensive to prove that you’re serious. Charity is NOT going to cut it.
Everything you just said applies many times over in the opposite direction
“ Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that regulation isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Legislators lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.”
Look. You claim you want an efficient system, right? Not just trading someone else’s increase in suffering for another $10,000 worth of luxury car for yourself, right?
I like an efficient system. More healthcare can be purchased for the same amount of money in an efficient system. But as far as I’m concerned, if the money just gets redistributed upwards it’s worthless to my goals, so I have no reason to free up those resources for the sole purpose of them being captured by the wealthy so they can plow them into political campaigns to further undermine public ownership of the state.
And I have no reason to believe that the people complaining about how they have to pay taxes to help those accursed poor single mother welfare recipients are really going to put an equivalent amount of money into charity. Why would I?
But I do like efficiency, so I’m willing to make a trade. If it’s really an efficiency solution, not just a cash grab for the upper class, then we can keep current healthcare spending, oh, or maybe a little lower, so let’s say on par with those evil European countries as a percentage of GDP, and cut everyone a check evenly just for healthcare funds. Let them put it in a health savings account, spend it on insurance, maybe let the unspent health savings be inherited or something. Collect %s of future checks to offset the costs of emergency care for the uninsured.
Maybe not a check, maybe that’s not the most efficient method in particular, but you get the idea.
If you’re willing to make that sacrifice or one like it, then, maybe I and others could believe that this is actually, really about efficiency.
(Edit: Also, on a side-note since it’s not really the core purpose of this post, as the core purpose is to offer that above ideological trade - legislators are actually paid to do legislation, and they have staffs and think-tanks that work for the parties at their disposal. Specialization of labor doesn’t just apply to the private sector. Individual citizens largely don’t have these things and the trust networks around them are different since there’s a lot of money to be made by scamming people (see: homeopathics are still a thing). So there is some reason to believe that the political parties and legislators might outperform individuals. Now, regulatory capture is an issue, but since the proposed solution tends to be “just let companies do whatever they want”, and that usually is the situation that caused regulation to come into existence in the first place, it often isn’t a real solution. I think government itself can be designed much better, but others seem to either believe we don’t need to, or that it’s impossible, so…)
Your fetish is the main topic of a two hours long movie where it’s applied to the whole world. There’s no sexy time, the whole movie is about the financial and societal consequences on your fucked up fetish on society.
How boring is it?
Oh my goodness.
Well, at least there would be immortality, and an effective guarantee that the universe wouldn’t end. On the other hand, prepare for one helluva culture shock, we’re going deep, and magic is real.
thermostatic public opinion is a bitch
@evilelitest2 Why do you think this is? With Orange’s isolationist and xenophobic plans you’d think that percentage would go down right?
The thing is, most Americans don’t even understand how trade works or what it is, so they don’t really have consistent solid opinions of it. Basically if their personal economic situation is good and the president says “Trade is good” then they like trade. If the economy crashes, then they will go “Trade was great, fucking anti trade president” if the economy does well they will say “Yes, tursn out he was right, fuck trade” most people don’t know what Trade is so their opinions on the matter will change depending on the moment
but general optimism about the economy hasn’t rebounded that much, has it?
maybe trump’s being unpopular causes opinions (such as trade skepticism) associated with him to sink as well? though i’m not sure if that’s supported by the timing of the graph there
I think Trump really is responsible for this. Eventually I want to write an SSC post presenting more evidence, but here’s some preliminaries:
Some data on immigration attitudes I cobbled together from a couple of different polls on CNN. The dashed line is a different poll than the solid line but the two polls matched pretty well when I had data for both. It looks like there’s an unusual deviation from the trend, in favor of immigrants, right when Trump started campaigning.
Ratio of people who prefer amnesty to deportation for illegal immigrants. Again, people became a lot less accepting of deportation right about when the Trump campaign started.
I think two things are going on here:
First, most people don’t like Trump - remember, he lost the popular vote to the least-popular Democratic candidate ever. These policies are associated with Trump, so now people are against these policies. It’s the same as all those Republicans who hated Obamacare but liked (the broadly identical) Romneycare. The strongest form of this is that now that the media has convinced us there’s an “alt-right” and many people are in it, everyone is tripping over themselves trying to signal that they’re not “alt-right”-ists. We’ve all read that study about “extreme protests” by now, and in a sense the Trump movement is the most extreme “protest” of all.
Second, ever since Trump started focusing on these issues, the anti-Trump media (ie the entire media except Breitbart and maybe Fox) has been going into overdrive talking about how great foreign trade is, how immigration is at the center of what it means to be an American, and so on.
This was predictable and I predicted it (see eg Part VII here). And it’s why, when the issues I care about get coded conservative (eg free speech), I keep trying to convince conservatives not to bring them up. God help us if the Culture Wars ever start centering on free speech as thoroughly as they’re centering on immigration right now.
Also, Trump didn’t promise to eliminate trade, he promised to “get better trade deals”, which may be confounding this. If they actually do something about the trade deals and this potential net flow of goods or whatever tax, the trade deficit might start to balance out, and trade would no longer be as threatening to those workers.
The House Obamacare replacement bill does nothing to end the primary problem with Obamacare, which is the wildly popular but also psychotic ban on rejecting people over pre-existing conditions.
Would you buy car insurance if you could buy it after you crashed your car and still get paid? Would you buy life insurance if your heirs could buy it after you died and have it pay out? Then why would anyone buy health insurance if you can buy it after you already get sick and still be covered? Obamacare’s answer to this was threatening people with the unconstitutional individual mandate ‘tax,’ but they wimped out on actually making the penalty steep enough to force compliance and they wound up putting the insurance industry into an adverse selection death spiral. The House’s answer is to give people tax credits for it, which also is completely inadequate to reverse the death spiral. Nobody is actually going to try to stop the government from destroying the health insurance market entirely. They are going to keep stumbling until they’re forced to institute a single-payer system as an emergency and we’re going to see highly inefficient non-price rationing for health care like in Europe.
At some point people are going to have to accept that we need to actually economize on health care or we will spend the entire GDP of the country on trying to keep everyone alive forever at any cost until the economy collapses. I don’t know that the public is going to ever get to that point though. The government is just going to destroy the market and then blame the market for being destroyed.
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that liberalization isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Normal people lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.
You want to get this liberalization to go through? You need to take a lesson from Trump. You’re going to have to publicly sacrifice something very expensive to prove that you’re serious. Charity is NOT going to cut it.
Anonymous asked:
oktavia-von-gwwcendorff answered:
(telling workers “YOU ARE SELFISH RACIST SCUM” doesn’t count as an argument)
Additionally, by trying to refocus their campaigning for lower taxes and reduction of artificial costs of living by showing them the calculations on how much even minimum-wage workers can end up paying (an awful lot, possibly even more than some millionaire investors) and how the state wastes most of the money it takes instead of spending it in any useful way, and how much of the price in the things they would want to spend those minimum wages on is artificially created through dysfunctional regulation.
It’s also worth noting that they’re probably the worst demographic to campaign with. Not to say it can’t be done, but it’s playing on Very Hard.
Protectionism is genuinely beneficial to the people protected (that being the whole point). It’s inefficient, it’s bad overall, and everybody loses when many groups are protected (as now), but it ‘works’ locally. Licensed cosmetologists are going to be hard to sell on “cosmetology doesn’t need a license, abolish that rule”. Opening up more competition to drive down wages is an easy sell for the new competitors, but damned hard with the established people. (Hence “some of you will get fired” being one of the only arguments that plays with people getting the raise.)
So if I had to push for this one, I think I’d try to redirect or sell people on a larger reform package. $15/hour isn’t nearly as good as “actually not having lots of protectionism". Maybe package it with slashing zoning laws to allow new development and lower rent, and tax cuts or a redirection from government spending to mere transfers like EITC?
Kool-Aid Man hot take nobody asked for, because I’ve been meaning to talk about the Fight for 15 for a while:
You’re definitely not going to convince anybody with “economists agree, look at these papers!” @thefutureoneandall has a good point that this is a case where one person’s benefit tends to come at another’s expense, but the problem here is that the people benefitting from minimum wage increases (which includes people who make above, but in the vicinity of, minimum wage) are a very large group who are generally much worse off than other groups. These people are mad and will not be impressed by arguments that amount to giving employers more leverage over them in the short term.
There are, of course, tacks you could pursue, but you need to look like you’re going to bat for workers and not going to bat for employers but actually it’s good for workers too! One thing I think hasn’t been looked at seriously is reform and enforcement of employment laws. Like, I’m certainly not in favour of reducing the minimum wage under current circumstances, but I also think that increasing it is kind of dumb right now, because companies – especially big companies – have become incredibly sophisticated at pushing unbooked costs onto workers and will simply respond by doing more of that. But you need to have a counterproposal that puts you clearly in the workers’ corner, and that largely rules out economic arguments, since a lot of people have a (not unfounded!) suspicion that the economic consensus is mostly just a lot of handwaving used to justify screwing them.
First of all, whatever the minimum wage is going to be, you need peg it to inflation with the as much legislative force as you can muster in order to have any sort of credibility. It’s insane that that even needs to be discussed – virtually every statute built around a fixed dollar value should be pegged to inflation (probably with some lag or infrequent updates for stability, like a four-year average updated every four years) by default.
But the big thing is that the government needs to aggressively enforce existing labour laws. Some might need to be repealed if the only alternative were to take them seriously, but for the most part the laws regarding hiring, scheduling, overtime, sick leave and such are sensible laws that are near-universally flouted simply because the government is eager to look the other way. A serious, systematic crackdown on wage theft and illegal employment practices would take a lot of the pressure off the working class even at the current wage rate, would look good to workers, and would be harder for opponents to object to since it’s a rule-of-law initiative. Of course, this won’t be a satisfying answer to libertarians, but I should think even a libertarian ought to be able to get behind “a wage labourer should be paid wages for all the time they’re actually working or otherwise unable to go about their lives freely due to job-related responsibilities.”
Also continuing the theme of “answers libertarians won’t like”, you can also go a long way to winning people over with more aggressive state-level wealth redistribution. The reason people are suspicious of economic liberalization is because they observe that the wealthy are hyperefficient at absorbing as much as possible of the benefits it creates. If you take large-scale measures to explicitly redistribute wealth toward the bottom (which paradoxically will still benefit the wealthy more than anyone else, but potentially to a lesser degree), it’s a lot easier to push for economic liberalization on the side as an everybody-gets-something approach.
Finally, note people are suspicious of big moves in general, and the best argument for something is seeing other people doing it with good results. Skeptics of a reduced minimum wage are probably going to need to see a case where you lower the minimum wage in a specific city, county, or state, and the good effects you say this will create happen in a way that’s obvious to the workers who live there. (If you need a comparative analysis to demonstrate cause-and-effect, it’s not obvious enough for this to work.)
Wage subsidies, man. Break the welfare trap and the poor enforcement of employment laws simultaneously. It’s known that, according to economic models by the same sorts of people who ignore the effect desperation to survive might have on negotiating wages at the low end (like some Libertarians), a lower minimum wage creates more potential jobs for employment. However, many of those jobs won’t create enough money to live on. If we introduce an hourly, declining wage subsidy direct to employees, we can hit the point of making wages more livable while simultaneously reducing the minimum wage. The increase in available jobs will help blunt the effects of automation and increase the ability of workers to walk away from “work in unsafe conditions or we fire you lolo”. I’d type more but I’m on mobile. Also it multiplies the spending with private money so it should be more cost effective than welfare, and even perhaps rich people won’t whine about it as much because you actually have to work to get it and businesses will have lower costs of labor and fewer unions.
