Oceans Yet to Burn — What Wirehead said, but also we as a society need...

academicianzex

mitigatedchaos

What Wirehead said, but also we as a society need to redevelop the social technologies so that groups other than those who can massively overspend on rent can have comfortable, low-crime communities.

Source: dataandphilosophy

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mutant-aesthetic

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Julian Assange 🔹 on Twitter

“10/ Here's Singapore's long term prime minister Lee Kuan Yew:”

a-sleepygoldenstorm

What neither side of US politics wants to admit: the promotion of identity politics combined with the declining white super majority has led to turbo charged white identity politics. Since Dems catered for non-white identity politics, Trump and the GOP took hold of white identity politics.

Most countries that do not have a 70%+ super majority ethnic group have ethnicized electoral politics.

mitigatedchaos

Yes, my fear is that Lee Kuan Yew is right.

Source: a-sleepygoldenstorm politics torches in the night racepol

xhxhxhx

voxette-vk replied to your link: Towards the Garfield Left (Away from Basic Income)

Terrible essay.

please elaborate

mitigatedchaos

Well, while I’m not ideologically inclined to agree with Voxette, I still think it’s misguided. The economies with more restricted worker hours below 40 seem to be underperforming and have lower employment, basic income plus fewer work hours simultaneously will cause a bigger hit on the economy, basic income (or other alternatives) already creates more worker leverage to negotiate for fewer hours and safer conditions, and slashing everyone’s Mondays across the board will hit a lot harder than alternatives, because not every worker’s time is equally valuable. Also, I don’t think it will sell well politically - and business will fight like dogs to prevent it from happening.

Which, is odd enough for me to say, seeing as with executive functioning stuff a 4-day workweek (perhaps leaving out Wednesday instead) would fit me well.

Additionally, just on shear economic cost vs efficiency, I can’t see a reason to prefer a combination of 4-day workweek + basic income in the short-medium term, given that the level of automation in the future is uncertain, over a low minimum wage plus direct-to-employee declining hourly livable wage subsidies.

Wage subsidies + low minimum wage would create lots of new jobs, which is a good sell politically, while also taking a lot of pressure off the poor and lower classes and giving them a lot more leverage. Businesses won’t fight it as hard, even though it will need a tax increase, since they’ll benefit from lower labor costs at the low end. It multiplies government spending with private spending for a larger potential effect. It can also be rolled out incrementally in different amounts to test out just how much economic efficiency is lost.

There are other potential advantages, I really should write a post on it specifically, but it doesn’t seem to be getting much coverage vs UBI. I think the Republicans might support it as their alternative to UBI come 2024/2028.

politics economics

collapsedsquid

xhxhxhx

voxette-vk replied to your link: Towards the Garfield Left (Away from Basic Income)

Terrible essay.

please elaborate

mitigatedchaos

Which, is odd enough for me to say, seeing as with executive functioning stuff a 4-day workweek (perhaps leaving out Wednesday instead) would fit me well.

collapsedsquid

There’s a few points I could make, but one of the great things about giving people time off is that it doesn’t affect the value of time off, and it’s not something that can just cause a decrease in employer contribution leaving people no better off. Giving money, that’s not as straightforward.

mitigatedchaos

Considering it hasn’t seemed to perform well in other countries, I’d rather make simpler overtime rules, then crack down hard on those that don’t follow them.

Anyhow, as part of how I’d sell this, I’d set the starting wage with subsidies higher than the current minimum wage, and since it would make labor relatively cheaper, there’s not much reason to expect a decrease in hours at the low end.

In addition to the risks involved with yanking 20% of the work hours out of the economy, killing Monday also incentivizes workers to work under the table in violation of the employment law in order to get enough money, since the employers can actually cut their salaries to compensate, either directly or through attrition.

With state-backed wage subsidies, there’s no incentive to work under the table, because if the income isn’t reported, you don’t get the subsidy. Though, it is key for this plan that subsidies taper off more slowly than employer wages increase, but that’s how it should be to prevent a new Welfare Trap.

Source: xhxhxhx politics economics

collapsedsquid

Instead, the attempted transformation of the euro area into Greater Germania has simply dumped the persistent surpluses of German-speaking Europe, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia onto the rest of the world. Between 2008 and 2016 the combined current account balance shifted by 0.8 percentage points of world GDP. This can be explained almost entirely by a collapse in consumption and investment in Greece, Ireland, Italy, and Spain. That was mostly a consequence of policy choices pushed by the European Central Bank, the Eurogroup, and the IMF, with strong guidance from Germany and the Netherlands.

https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/02/01/2183509/the-us-shouldnt-blame-mexico-for-losing-at-trade-it-should-blame-germany/

AKA: Michael Pettis has been saying this for 2 decades, Mark Blyth’s been on the train since… at least 2012, and now we’re finally catching up.

Free Trade doesn’t work.

(via poipoipoi-2016)

Heck, Keynes said it in the 1940s and gave the solution.

(via collapsedsquid)

If this is doing what I think it’s doing, a single country could get part of the way there by having its own currency and applying tariffs at a rate based on its trade balance. I was kind of hoping the Orange Man might do something like that, but it looks like he won’t and will do per-country punitive tariffs instead.

Source: poipoipoi-2016 politics policy economics capitalism trump

argumate

nuclearspaceheater

The situation I’m imagining that brings about massive technological unemployment is one in which most workers’ marginal value contains both a positive and negative component. If the net is positive, then the concept of comparative advantage applies and there is always something that they have comparative advantage at that they can trade with the people who own and operate robots, and still come out ahead. This is the standard rebuttal to the claim that technological unemployment is even possible in a decently free economy.

But given that there is a negative component, this does not follow, because it is enough for automation to reduce the positive component to a sufficiently small (but still positive, by comparative advantage) level that it cannot compensate for the negatives of dealing with them and their marginal value as employees becomes zero or negative if you have access to robots instead, which is not a situation normally dealt with in analysis that assumes that the median worker’s marginal productivity is always positive, even if small.

(If we’re opening up net marginal productivity into a positive and negative component, then robots have their negatives to, of course. But I don’t think this affects the point.)

shieldfoss

My worry has long been that their marginal productivity is positive (because I’ve made the exact mistake you point out) but that it wasn’t positive enough.

My “comparative advantage” doesn’t matter if it’s small enough that my resulting gain from trade isn’t enough to live on.

nuclearspaceheater

Now that you mention it, the concept of comparative advantage only guarantees that you will always be better off under trade than you would be under self-sufficiency. (Except the unlikely situation where you are inferior at everything by the exact same factor, in which case you are still not worse off.)

But a worker is already involved with trade when they sell their labor to an employer. Comparative advantage itself says nothing whatsoever about what might happen to your position when new traders appear in the market to compete with you.

So if your “self-sufficiency” is below sustenance, then comparative advantage, even where it’s assumptions are valid, only guarantees that trade will at worst leave you just as dead but will most likely let your live slightly longer. There is no guarantee that it can raise you above sustenance if you don’t have anything valuable enough on offer.

I’m puzzled that I’d never realized this before. Apparently the main concept used to argue that technological unemployment is impossible doesn’t actually apply to the situation at all? Maybe I’m missing something.

mitigatedchaos

I thought this was reasonably obvious, and was continuously surprised on people not noticing this.

See also, my recent post about the issue with the idea of the cost of goods going towards zero.

Source: nuclearspaceheater politics economics

Missing Scarcity?

A number of the “No Robot Jobpocalypse” arguments seem to hinge on the idea that as productivity increases, the costs of goods and services will approach zero.

But this seems based on the assumption that resources are effectively a function of labor. However, if base resources are largely fixed after some level of labor (e.g., there are only so many iron atoms in a volume of dirt), and there are other potential uses for those resources than feeding the proles, then the laborers must competitively bid for the resources.

In that bidding, they may have to bid with someone several orders of magnitude more productive than they are (either due to owning the robots or just being that much more skilled/productive). What guarantee is there that, even as the price of goods produced from the resources decreases overall, they are not bid out of the reach of the low-marginal-production workers?

@collapsedsquid

politics policy economics robot jobpocalpyse

I actually suspect that the switch to identity politics over class politics may have been based on a growing ineffectiveness of class politics.

“BUT THE POOR!” lost ground as more cached arguments were built up against it, even if it wasn’t entirely justified.

“BUT RACISM!” still had a lot of bite and could circumvent some of those cached arguments. So, it’s natural to shift to it and build the platform around it.

It had a lot of bite, anyway.

There was always the focus on what was morally right, even in the minds of people who claimed they didn’t believe in morality, over what was effective policy, so now we get a lot of talk about guilt, or about pie in the sky ideas of “dismantling the systems of X oppression requires dismantling capitalism” (and people remember how “we need to dismantle capitalism” went last time), and not so much about “we should distribute multivitamins to the poor.”

I mean, that does sometimes get through, but the zeitgeist doesn’t seem to care about it as much as it cares about language policing and thinks that beneficial policies will just naturally unfold once everyone acknowledges their sin.

politics

sinesalvatorem

Anonymous asked:

It's not how white you are on the outside that counts, but how white you are, in your heart.

sinesalvatorem answered:

Leukemia is not actually a good thing, anon. If your blood is over-saturated with white cells then please seek medical assistance.

mitigatedchaos

I just saw an article last week suggesting that using identity politics in the US was a bad plan because the majority can practice identity politics, too, and the definition of “white” has expanded in the past.

I’m pretty hyped. What exciting new races or ethnic groups will be considered “white” in the future? Could Asian-Latin fusion cuisine become the next official white people food? When will they be issued their official White Man™ polo shirts?

race politics politics maybe a shtpost

collapsedsquid

mitigatedchaos

Hell, why don’t we re-enact Sherman’s march and raze the US south, the southern US is full of shitty people with shitty politics. Maybe burn down all Mormon churches and compounds, they got both nasty shit going on and nasty politics.
I get you wanna piss your fuckin pants because it’s those dirty furriners doing those dirty furriner crimes, but horrible shit didn’t start with immigration and it won’t end when it’s cut off.

Things being bad is not a reason to make them worse. (This part of the problem with arguments about alcohol/drugs, too.)

We have no obligation to import these people. We do not have an obligation to import people that will make the country worse. We don’t have an obligation to tolerate criminal acts favored by their cultures, or tear our national social cohesion to shreds to tolerate those acts.

So some fringe groups of Mormons are still polygamists and practice shady things with young brides and that sort of thing. Oh look, Westerners doing a bad thing. Better import enough people that have similar practices so that it becomes normalized and gains political power! That’ll sure improve things! Yay justice!

but horrible shit didn’t start with immigration and it won’t end when it’s cut off.

How much FGM was happening in the US before it was imported? It won’t stop now if immigration is shut off only because we won’t literally kick all those who practice it out of the country.

Kicking out only individuals who are actually convicted of it is the individualist approach. And it makes sense. The preconditions for citizenship included not bringing foreign criminal/terrorist activity to this country. Those preconditions were violated.

In light of that, how does removing citizenship not make sense?

And I don’t really think the problem we have is “We don’t execute criminals grotesquely enough.“ I think there’s a reason why we don’t do that sort of thing anymore. If you wanted to heighten investigation, that could make sense, but public executions don’t really help anyone.

It apparently cost $500,000 to prosecute three guys, and the number of crimes committed is far worse.

However, “diversity” ideology covered up that the crimes were even happening in the first place. Admitting that some cultures practice this bullsht more than others was “racist”. I mean it’s just economics, right? Cultural differences beyond food aren’t real, right?

What is your plan to force assimilation on this issue?

Maybe we don’t have to publicly execute them. Maybe we can just ordinarily execute them and make sure it gets in the news where their buddies we read it.

Maybe I don’t even want to go that far. Maybe I just want to throw the Overton Window far enough to the right that Cultural Antirealism will die and Left/Libs will at least start admitting that there is a problem and we can get a gentler solution that actually works.

uncharitable politics

bambamramfan

Jon Stewart, John Oliver…mostly enact the pure arrogance of the liberal intellectual elite: “Parodying Trump is at best a distraction from his real politics; at worst it converts the whole of politics into a gag. The process has nothing to do with the performers or the writers or their choices. Trump built his candidacy on performing as a comic heel—that has been his pop culture persona for decades. It is simply not possible to parody effectively a man who is a conscious self-parody, and who has become president of the United States on the basis of that performance.”

Zizek citing Stephen Marche
(via slavoj–zizek)

Source: slavoj--zizek politics trump

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

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Julian Assange 🔹 on Twitter

Missing Scarcity?