Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[voximperatoris]

Forget Bitcoin: I could mail someone physical gold coins in a shorter time than it takes to fully transfer money from one bank account to another.

I just don’t understand why this is…

[argumate]

antiquated systems? transfers are typically overnight or in some cases close to immediate within Australia, but international can be anywhere from 24-72 hours depending on the banks involved.

[voximperatoris]

I just don’t understand what the bottleneck is. Are they using the Pony Express to deliver the request from one bank to the other?

I can take a picture of a check and deposit it into my bank account overnight. That’s about the fastest thing I can think of involving banks.

Anything else, such as withdrawing money from any kind of online service (such as Paypal or whatever) takes at least 3 business days. It even takes 4 business days for my dad to send me money electronically—and he uses the same bank!

This post was prompted by the fact that I was just told by Amazon that withdrawing $13.49 from Mechanical Turk (yay, surveys!) would take 5-7 business days before it is actually spendable in my bank account. ?!?!

[mitigatedchaos]

Don’t they collect interest on the money while they wait to transfer it?  

Supposedly it would be in their interests to transfer money faster, but since everyone does it, and a faster money transfer presumably would not get them a significant number of new customers because it isn’t particularly glamorous, what’s their incentive to do better?  

Not that I haven’t always been annoyed at it, too.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

@wirehead-wannabe

m8, none of those things are guaranteed.  I mean, the establishment that we thought was supposed to be so invincible couldn’t even keep a reality TV star from becoming the President of the United States.  Solar panels are still getting cheaper just as we need them to, CPU development is probably slowing and with it AI will take longer to eat all the jobs, basic income is gaining more support, and people are becoming at least somewhat more environmentally conscious, especially the new generations.

Yes, it could all become a cyberpunk dystopia, but there’s also a reasonable chance of a golden age if we manage to make it through the time window as a civilization.

[wirehead-wannabe]

None of that will stop the dysgenics, the hedonic treadmill, the pro-life attitudes, the loss of privacy, the shitiness of the discourse, or the overpopulation. Also, it’s improvement in AI, not computing powers, that will take our jerbs. And even then it’s not about the jerbs so much as the feeling that you’re capable of doing SOME difficult task that a robot can’t. Plus the fact that you can’t reasonably defend yourself from robots with even slightly above-human intelligence.

[mitigatedchaos]

There’s little reason to worry about the dysgenics for now, since by the time they actually start biting with real teeth, genetic engineering will be cheap enough to reverse the effect. The pro-life attitudes will also die off in time - by necessity when life extension arrives - and there will still be privacy in virtual reality. Population growth is still cratering and I think with higher average intelligence the political will for some restrictions will emerge when life extension does. The big reason people don’t support it right now is the literal Nazis and the previous racists in various countries.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@wirehead-wannabe

m8, none of those things are guaranteed.  I mean, the establishment that we thought was supposed to be so invincible couldn’t even keep a reality TV star from becoming the President of the United States.  Solar panels are still getting cheaper just as we need them to, CPU development is probably slowing and with it AI will take longer to eat all the jobs, basic income is gaining more support, and people are becoming at least somewhat more environmentally conscious, especially the new generations.

Yes, it could all become a cyberpunk dystopia, but there’s also a reasonable chance of a golden age if we manage to make it through the time window as a civilization.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[rustingbridges]

(noting again: I’m not an ancap, and don’t think it’s a realistic or even necessarily desirable outcome)

The amusing thing here is that Syria is one of the places that shows what happens when you get a collapse of the state

You can also pretty easily label syria as an example of what happens when you get a collision of four states, all shitty to different degrees (the old syrian regime, their russian backers, ISIL, and the us coalition proxy state).

History suggests almost nobody actually wants to live in this atomized state, they will form associations and thus attempt to reform the state almost immediately. Although that state could be one of aristocrats or warlords.

I agree, statelessness is probably not stable and this one of the reasons I am not an ancap. However, this still leaves 95% of the ancap position intact, even if it ruins their sound bytes. There are ancaps who will admit that statelessness may be unachievable, but that this has no real bearing on the rest of their platform.

The whole anarcho-capitalist idea set is filled with such astonishingly unrealistic projections on what people will do it astounds me.

I don’t think this is a reasonable criticism. Sure, the bottom 95% of ancaps are hugely unrealistic, but this is true of every ideology. I’ve not read the literature widely, but in his book, the thing about david friedman (one of the more important ancap writers) that impressed me the most was how realistic he was.

I disagree with him in a number of places (I wrote an entire series of posts mostly criticizing him!) but his arguments were mostly well thought out and set realistic expectations for how successful such policies could be.

One of the things that tends to draw me to libertarian policies is that they are often the only people in the room who are actually paying attention to incentive systems and how people actually act. The places where I most often disagree with libertarians are, in my estimation, the places where they’ve failed to consider historical precedent, but this is not the most common case.

[collapsedsquid]

See, I think incentives are the problem with their system.  One of the main times you see this is when they think of everything in property rights. You can see that’s the primitive they use to manipulate the world.  The problem is, it’s a legal construct. It’s this whole idea that society is governed by rules and not power.  The attempts they try to use to patch this are ridiculous, and without it the whole system falls apart instantly into violence.

I see these incentives, but I see these incentive arguments as ridiculous because there is so much they fail to consider.  It’s the classic libertarian-arguing point, when they say “Let us suppose“ you have to say “Let’s absolutely not suppose“ because the whole thing is often based on unrealistic assumptions.  These synthetic problems are constrained to give the result that they want and these  toy problems are used to show how great their system is.

I’m of the opinion that “incentives“ is not a good system to use, because you can construct problems such to give any incentive you want.  People take actions because they have an incentive, opium knocks people out because it has a dormitive power.  These arguments have the problem of unfalsifiability, I prefer to pay attention to what people do than make arguments about incentives.  You can tell just-so stories to give anyone any incentive you want, doesn’t mean that corresponds to any reality.  Much better to observe what people actually do.

[mitigatedchaos]

It isn’t even that incentives are a terrible way to predict actions, it’s just that AnCaps are so horrible at using them that their analysis is useless. You can do analysis with incentives, but not if you chop half of them out. I would also have to say that my experience is the opposite of rustingbridges’ - AnCaps are way worse at predicting how people actually act than boring centrists, and the shear gap between how they think people act and how people actually act is part of why I find their neofeudal ideological system so frustrating.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[rustingbridges]

(noting again: I’m not an ancap, and don’t think it’s a realistic or even necessarily desirable outcome)

The amusing thing here is that Syria is one of the places that shows what happens when you get a collapse of the state

You can also pretty easily label syria as an example of what happens when you get a collision of four states, all shitty to different degrees (the old syrian regime, their russian backers, ISIL, and the us coalition proxy state).

History suggests almost nobody actually wants to live in this atomized state, they will form associations and thus attempt to reform the state almost immediately. Although that state could be one of aristocrats or warlords.

I agree, statelessness is probably not stable and this one of the reasons I am not an ancap. However, this still leaves 95% of the ancap position intact, even if it ruins their sound bytes. There are ancaps who will admit that statelessness may be unachievable, but that this has no real bearing on the rest of their platform.

The whole anarcho-capitalist idea set is filled with such astonishingly unrealistic projections on what people will do it astounds me.

I don’t think this is a reasonable criticism. Sure, the bottom 95% of ancaps are hugely unrealistic, but this is true of every ideology. I’ve not read the literature widely, but in his book, the thing about david friedman (one of the more important ancap writers) that impressed me the most was how realistic he was.

I disagree with him in a number of places (I wrote an entire series of posts mostly criticizing him!) but his arguments were mostly well thought out and set realistic expectations for how successful such policies could be.

One of the things that tends to draw me to libertarian policies is that they are often the only people in the room who are actually paying attention to incentive systems and how people actually act. The places where I most often disagree with libertarians are, in my estimation, the places where they’ve failed to consider historical precedent, but this is not the most common case.

[collapsedsquid]

See, I think incentives are the problem with their system.  One of the main times you see this is when they think of everything in property rights. You can see that’s the primitive they use to manipulate the world.  The problem is, it’s a legal construct. It’s this whole idea that society is governed by rules and not power.  The attempts they try to use to patch this are ridiculous, and without it the whole system falls apart instantly into violence.

I see these incentives, but I see these incentive arguments as ridiculous because there is so much they fail to consider.  It’s the classic libertarian-arguing point, when they say “Let us suppose“ you have to say “Let’s absolutely not suppose“ because the whole thing is often based on unrealistic assumptions.  These synthetic problems are constrained to give the result that they want and these  toy problems are used to show how great their system is.

I’m of the opinion that “incentives“ is not a good system to use, because you can construct problems such to give any incentive you want.  People take actions because they have an incentive, opium knocks people out because it has a dormitive power.  These arguments have the problem of unfalsifiability, I prefer to pay attention to what people do than make arguments about incentives.  You can tell just-so stories to give anyone any incentive you want, doesn’t mean that corresponds to any reality.  Much better to observe what people actually do.

[mitigatedchaos]

It isn’t even that incentives are a terrible way to predict actions, it’s just that AnCaps are so horroble

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[collapsedsquid]

One of the reasons that’s generally given for Trump wanting a war against Iran, China, or somewhere else is the idea that it will unify the nation behind him.  Could prove unpopular in the long run, but as long as the long run after re-election that’s not too much of a problem.

This time though, I’m not sure if a war would be unifying barring a Chinese attack on Japan or something equally extreme.  I can’t think of a scenario that both doesn’t involve Xi acting like an extreme dumbass that gets war without massive day one opposition.  Maybe I’m just comically naive though.

[youzicha]

The 2003 Iraq war had massive opposition from day one, and it still bumped Bush’s approval rating from 55% to 75% overnight.

From eyeballing the graph, it’s seems that the 20% boost basically persisted (the approval decays at the same rate, but from a higher starting point), which if true was probably enough to carry the 2004 election?

“I oppose no war; I opposed one once and it ruined me. Henceforth I’m for war, pestilence, and famine!” —Justin Butterfield

[collapsedsquid]

Yeah, this is why you could think it could unify, but I’m thinking the opposition here could be on a different level.  At least then it was tacitly accepted that Bush had the authority to take the US to war and we had the 9/11 attacks. Even people against the war felt we had to “support our troops.”  Don’t think that’s the case for Trump, the war would be not just bad, but illegitimate.

Don’t really know though.

[mitigatedchaos]

Speaking as someone who did not oppose the Iraq War (I was too young to realize the implications), and who has never attended a protest - I have never forgiven the Republicans for the Iraq War, and I will be out in the streets if they try to start some fake war with Iran or China. I, who rolls eyes at protesters and have never protested. Keep in mind the new President denounced the Iraq War, too.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

tactical-vanguard-deactivated20 asked:

Do you think Reinhardt is broken? I think he is. He gets shit all over by everyone. They need to either give him a speed or damage boost. (Only slight, obviously."

overwatchmemes answered:

He’s pretty much required in every game. He really isn’t underpowered.

[mitigatedchaos]

No one else can quite do his role.  That’s why he ends up in every game.

I have no opinion on whether he’s overpowered.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Tell me something about urban combat, please, because I'm worried that the right really will win, especially if they control the food supply

kontextmaschine answered:

Well what’s true about urban warfare is you can fortify prepared positions against bullets and use local knowledge and interior lines well enough that the defender’s at a huge advantage if you’re limited to small arms. You’d want air support or artillery, howitzers at least. Maybe you could do it with support weapons or explosive charges for breaching, but that’s very expensive in time and men, and explosives aren’t just lying around anymore. (Tannerite?)

I’m thinking of Vienna in the Austrian Civil War, the Karl-Marx-Hof housing development that leftists held against trained soldiers. Until they brought cannons in.

Which is the thing, when you line up your logistics and your politics (in a civil war, the besieger often starts off wanting to capture intact) to the point where you have heavy weapons, things change.

The MOVE bombing in Philadelphia - that was a group that had fortified their base, which was in a rowhouse block with party walls that could be tunneled through, and explicitly planned a dramatic final stand, but the Philly police had the logistical and political support to bring in a helicopter and bombs and they won it in a rout.

Guernica, you remember the Picasso painting, that’s from the Spanish Civil War, that’s a thing a right-insurrection pulled against a left-held town when it got bomber planes and worked up a “gloves are off” ideology.

The Siege of Sarajevo, that went on for years and there was hostile artillery in the hills encircling the town, but the New World Order crimped the besiegers’ materiel supply, denied airspace, and resupplied the city with UN convoys, you’d need US or Russian government patronage to pull that off.

The food supply - yeah, on one hand the just-in-time supply system cuts down stocks but from the French and Russian Revolutions we know cities are perfectly capable of fielding expeditionary forces of sufficient mass to seize food from more thinly populated areas.

(when it looked like Trump was going to lose and things might get rough in that direction, I looked up the location of nearby distribution centers, not the worst idea)

On the other hand, the idea that rightist forces would be able to lay sieges on cities strong enough to contain breakout attempts, long enough to force submission, prevent resupply by air or sea, either prevent reinforcements from elsewhere from breaking the siege or siege all leftist centers simultaneously while holding off any external intervention, but at that point we’re still talking militia guys with ARs and not an actual military, what scenario is that?

[alexanderrm]

Re: The besieger still wanting to capture intact: I want to stress that’s most common in cases where the idea of you winning militarily is utterly ridiculous, at least for cases like the MOVE bombing anyway- where I should note the entire thing was handled by the Philadelphia police rather than the U.S. military, and even then the police used much less force than they could potentially have sued. I think this bears stressing because while a civil war is very unlikely, tiny groups who murder a handful of random police officers and maybe some civilians before getting themselves killed happen all the time and will continue to happen.

But more importantly, seconding the last sentence; we’re very unlikely to have a true civil war which comes down to grassroot leftists vs. grassroot rightists; any even slightly possible situations would be one or the other rising against the U.S. government- and would probably lose eventually. I could maybe see a situation in which a big chunk of the military splits off, which… would get pretty bad, probably in new and interesting ways that have never been seen before. The only way I could really picture that happening though if a president openly suspended the constitution and declared themselves King.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[quoms]

‘citizenship’ is revolting

[argumate]

surely lack of citizenship is revolting, ie. the fact that a person can be abandoned by every state on Earth, trapped in no-mans-land without support or freedom of movement.

[mitigatedchaos]

Actually, it’s against international law to make someone stateless.  Everyone is supposed to belong to some state, even if many people would rather belong to a different one.

Having mechanisms of citizenship is just acknowledging incentives, though.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[nostalgebraist]

So am I a leftist (not a liberal) because I am unmoved by arguments that XYZ activist tactic is “incompatible with the norms we must maintain as a free society” or the like

Or am I a liberal (not a leftist) because when I read the news about whichever XYZ people are talking about in this way, it usually looks to me like no political goals are being accomplished and it’s not helping anyone

I want people to tell me about effectiveness and not principles, and a lot of leftist pro-XYZ stuff is still about principles, just the other way around: “since I have no principle against doing this, it’s a good idea”

When I read stuff like this

The bloc takes care to stay together, move together, and blend together. Within minutes, bottle rockets were shooting skyward and bricks were flying through bank windows. You don’t know who does what in a bloc, you don’t look to find out. If bodies run out of formation to take a rock to a Starbucks window, they melt back to the bloc in as many seconds. Bodies reconciled, kinetic beauty. If that sounds to you like a precondition for mob violence, you’re right. But this is only a problem if you think there are no righteous mobs, or that windows feel pain, or that counter-violence (like punching Richard Spencer) is never valid.

I feel like I’ve woken up to find that my bed is covered in piles of fertilizer, and I’m like “why is my bed covered in piles of fertilizer,” and my weird roommate, who put piles of fertilizer on my bed, is all “do you think there should never be fertilizer anywhere?  you think farmers should just not fertilize their crops?”

[statist-shill-cuck]

Or like smashing banks’ property is a perfectly acceptable expression of rage and revenge at such powerful institutions causing immense suffering and if there any fucking justice in this world someone in power would punish the bastards so violent mobs don’t have to do it themselves.

[mitigatedchaos]

Hah, as if those in charge of the banks will let the burden fall on themselves and not push it off on their underlings and customers, as they have the power to do!  Smashing banks is meaningless self-gratification that is used to fuel the Police State.

I’m not going to tell you what kind of political violence would be necessary to be more effective, because I don’t want to encourage political violence, much less effective political violence, but that sure isn’t it.