Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

"would say worst idea but I think I should probably expect even worse ones." Different anon here, and I notice I am confused. Obviously war with NK would be horrifying-likely very heavy casualties (especially in Seoul) and diplomatic backlash. Yet a nuclear attack on the US is becoming increasingly likely-at some point, mightn't it be worth it? Better a war than getting nuked and fighting anyway, unless you're confident they won't use their missiles. Are you, and if so, why and how confident?

theunitofcaring answered:

I am confident of that. I don’t think the NK regime actually is suicidal. The instances I have read of of political maneuvering by Kim Jong-un suggest absolutely no moral compass but plenty of attention to his image and consolidating his power and advancing his political goals. He’s not impulsive and he understands the geopolitics he’s operating in and he wants to stay in power. If NK seriously attacked the U.S. or Korea or anybody else with nuclear weapons he’s dead inside eight hours. I think there is basically zero chance he’ll do that. 

Most of the risk of nuclear war comes from people misinterpreting signs during a high-tension period, and going to war with North Korea honestly seems like the kind of thing that increases that risk, as it dramatically increases international tensions with other nuclear powers, means there are missiles flying and more potential for confusion, and generally weakens the U.S. yet further, which makes us worse at discouraging proliferation. I think overall the risk of nuclear war is substantially higher if we get into a messy, diplomatically disastrous, protracted mess in Korea now.

(I am less absolutely certain it’s a bad idea to just bomb their facilities for refining. It’s probably a bad idea but it has ever worked before and arguably depends on information you and I don’t have access to.)

[nuclearspaceheater]

I’d think the best thing that would discourage proliferation was if they had nukes and we went to war with them anyway, since it would mean that nukes don’t make you invasion proof, which is a big part of their appeal.

On the other hand, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi gave up their nuclear program, and that just freed the West to overthrow him as soon as they felt like it, which you supported. Would you have supported casually overthrowing his regime if he had nukes?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Politicals baffled majority of industry in country caters to majority of customers, products selling in lower volume priced higher.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[memecucker]

The way people use the whole “marginalized people actually support CENTRIST policies” talking point based on really nothing lol is a good example of how identity politics supports neoliberalism

[ranma-official]

marginalized people support centrist policies because they’ve been duped into thinking that other marginalized people are stealing their jobs and taxes or whatever, not because centrist policies help marginalized people holy shit

[mitigatedchaos]

You have to be careful though, because if you fuck it up you get things like French companies being really cautious about hiring people because they can’t easily fire them and have to manage all the productivity limitations.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

But who the fuck are these people? Are they blind? Are they crazy? Have they been brainwashed by all the giant signs? Or is it possible they see something in Trump that the rest of us don’t? What makes someone want to seriously consider voting for this man? I didn’t know what the answer was, but I wanted to see for myself. I needed to make it make sense. So I went to Iowa—Iowa: The State You Grew Up Swearing You’d Leave One Day!™—to meet them. And to see The Donald in the flesh.

GQ

Trump supporters as described in the media 12 months ago.

(via argumate)

two years on, voting for Trump remains a head-scratcher.

(via argumate)

Me: There could be side-effects to this whole culture war thing with these unethical tactics that you are not anticipating.

Them: I don’t know what you’re talking about. Getting outgroup members fired is definitely Good because outgroup members are Bad? There would only be consequences to this because outgroup members are Evil??

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

One of the classic problems around requiring regulations is that people just don’t have, and cannot easily obtain, that much information about businesses sometimes, which is required for markets to actually work.  

(Even when information is free or nearly-free, the Market pays people to sabotage it, just like it pays people to sabotage Market competition through buying politicians.)

This is part of my interest in substituting mandatory insurance schemes for explicit regulations, provided the insurance regulations are themselves well-designed.  The customer may not know much about the safety of the business, but the insurance company, which has a long-standing relationship with the business, does.  

And the less the insurance company knows about the business, the more money it charges for insurance, offsetting some of the risk of harm and potentially communicating risk information to customers.

[mitigatedchaos]

What we actually wanted to mitigate was risk/externalities, not the number of hair clippers, which is only a proxy.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

One of the classic problems around requiring regulations is that people just don’t have, and cannot easily obtain, that much information about businesses sometimes, which is required for markets to actually work.  

(Even when information is free or nearly-free, the Market pays people to sabotage it, just like it pays people to sabotage Market competition through buying politicians.)

This is part of my interest in substituting mandatory insurance schemes for explicit regulations, provided the insurance regulations are themselves well-designed.  The customer may not know much about the safety of the business, but the insurance company, which has a long-standing relationship with the business, does.  

And the less the insurance company knows about the business, the more money it charges for insurance, offsetting some of the risk of harm and potentially communicating risk information to customers.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Bisexuality, the naive centrism of sexuality.

Anon, honey kun, this is a really bad take and you should feel bad.

Modern political theorists haven’t modeled orientation-party-metaphor as a single axis since at least the publication of the Ganymede Papers in 1917.  Most now model it as either a 17 or 5-dimensional manifold, depending on whether their simulations need full granularity.

Even using the outdated dual-axis Barker-McWillis partition of the orientation space shows that bisexualism isn’t centrism.  

I really don’t know how I and every other gender-ideostruct theorist can be clearer about this.  

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[transgirlkyloren]

a good test of the “women are not programmers because they prefer people jobs” hypothesis would be to teach, like, a year-long programming class for girls with a lot of pair programming and the entire class collaborating on a final project the way they’ll collaborate on projects in the work world

and see if the graduates are more likely to go into tech

[mitigatedchaos]

I haven’t done pair programming but I’m really not looking forward to it.

How can pair programmers, like, think, when at any moment their thoughtstream could be interrupted?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[wirehead-wannabe]

I would feel a lot safer if there were employers committed to freeze peach in the same way that there are universities committed to freeze peach. Every offering on the market seems to want to reserve arbitrary power to fire people for saying unpopular or offensive things.

[mitigatedchaos]

That would require customers to not boycott over dumb things.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

You can’t deny my validity as a rationalist just because I’m not autistic!

(via rationalists-out-of-context)