>It’s a “maybe going down the rabbit hole was a mistake” episode
How so? Those are exactly the numbers I expected.
Working more hours is a key part to how men make more money than women on average, so not too surprising.
>It’s a “maybe going down the rabbit hole was a mistake” episode
How so? Those are exactly the numbers I expected.
Working more hours is a key part to how men make more money than women on average, so not too surprising.
lol i bet this is a exhilarating read
Honestly, these sorts tend to overestimate the degree to which marketers are just being desperate.
@mitigatedchaos how about this sci-fi take on gendpol:
“Men are indeed worse than women in various ways, more antisocial, violent etc…
And we have egg-combining technology so we can make a Lesbian Utopia…
HOWEVER, we should still keep the population at approximately 50:50… For the long-term psychological benefits of romantic interaction, given most women are straight.”
You say this, but I already once did a fake nation writeup where they created a single-sex and it turned out terrible - not because they weren’t gay enough, but rather, because they embraced the worst aspects of both masculinity and femininity simultaneously. (And also, they would have been less bad off if they had just a few teaspoons of Feminism, but that wasn’t going to happen, for Reasons.)
“Movies will be free after the revolution!”
Movies take the work of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people. How will we decide where to allocate our resources for the best results?
Centralized committee!
Yes! The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television smiles upon you!
Look, I get that some people find religion more than just a little helpful, but extremely helpful, something that prevents their lives from falling apart.
And so I get concerned about the “we need to purge all religion everywhere” position, since I worry that it might accidentally break something that we won’t even realize is broken for some time, and then it will take a lot of time and effort to fix.
However, having experienced pretty directly that our control of ourselves is partially indirect, including ways in which personality is biologically-rooted, I cannot endorse infinite moral liability for finite moral flaw.
That’s also one of my oppositions to Anarcho-Capitalism. None of us truly have the agency to agree to an infinite deal, much less to be threatened into one.
With businesses as well as employers as well as landowners, large entities are better at ruthlessly maximising profit and also are better at responding to regulations. Whereas small entities often go for something other than maximising profit, and if it’s “being decent”, great, but then for some reason sometimes it’s “being pointlessly petty and cruel”. So you get a situation where large entities are often worse on average in very specific ways, but the very very worst and most unfathomable are the small ones.
Even HPMOR points out that people who obsess over avoiding death are typically considered evil, and Peter blood-of-the-youth Thiel isn’t really doing anything to counter that impression, is he.
I kinda hope someone shoots Thiel, not just because he deserves it, but also because it would be so great for all his research into human longevity to go to waste. You might be able to outrun telomere decay or whatever, but you can’t outrun hot lead.
unless I’m woefully misinformed about the level of his crimes against humanity, I’d be extremely hesitant to endorse murdering the man as I think any grounds on which to do so would apply to way too many people.
Being a billionaire in and of itself constitutes an extremely serious crime. One cannot possess that level of power and influence over other people’s lives without, not even intending to, carelessly harming and killing people.
There’s a reason people use the word “obscene” to describe extreme wealth. Because that’s what it is, disgusting, brutal, bloody, destructive.
guess Jack Ma is ten times as bad, then
does it make a difference if his billions are invested in shares of publicly traded companies, US government bonds, or cash stashed in a storage locker?
if you divided the ownership of his wealth between ten people, but they kept it in the exact same form as he has it now, would that make them each 1/10 as evil as he is, even though the net effect of the wealth on society hasn’t changed?
…why do I suddenly find myself rooting for Peter Thiel to become immortal, and not just discover life extension technologies that can eventually be extended to most of humanity?
Anyhow, what difference does it make if it’s a person that has that power, versus vast, impersonal forces? Vast, impersonal forces carelessly harm and kill lots of people as well, but their perceived liability is spread so wide that it’s hard to see - and composed of the same personal failings but spread out over a lot of smaller and imperfect humans.
….vast, impersonal forces that could easily exist, or have equivalents, under other economic modes.
For instance, if we executed all the billionaires, how many people would die due to subsequent lack of technological progress and making that technology cheap enough to be widely accessible?
It seems to me like the pro-guillotine camp here would deny any moral liability for these after-effects.
Protectionism is supposed to be an evil bastion of inefficiency, but I’m not so sure that, in a loose sense over the policy space of various protectionisms, none of them are wise policy.
It isn’t just about protecting a baby industry in your country while it develops, but *also* there is the matter of retaining a network of industry necessary to achieve economies of scale in the first place, which may also have an impact on other industries. The marginal cost of the first auto factory is much higher since it includes the entire rest of the supplier network!
Motorola’s attempt to build a phone in the US did not fail due to insufficient virtue of the American worker (“shame on you for not living in a company barracks! lazy! so lazy!”), but rather the lack of this network, and we must also NOT ignore the political and geopolitical environment, where a slight marginal cost may be worth paying in order to avoid strengthening major ideological and political rivals.
@neoliberalism-nightly
um, you mean that the virtue of the american worker was insufficient to overcome the apparent lack of the relevant supply chains. you could change either of them, or some combination, and other variables that are unspecified but yet still exogenous.
In this case, I am not praising American workers as exceptionally virtuous. (Though they do work long hours by the standards of developed economies in Europe, our colleagues in Japan and Korea are very busy people indeed.)
Rather, there is an implicit argument that, in order to compete with China, America must go to the level of the Industrious Chinese Laborers living in company barracks, and remove its environmental tyranny and let the rivers run red with nickel processing runoff. That the failure to do so is a moral failure of the American people to compete adequately in the global economy.
I think, instead, that it is possible for America (and the other developed nations) to have some of these industries without doing so, assuming the correct policies are in play.
Speaking of environmental tyranny, undermining the ability of companies to engage in environmental arbitrage which allows them to get away with not paying the true costs of their environmental externalities would be one method to push for this in terms of policy vectors.
It’s not just this, it’s a fundamental inability to *identify* with other people and realize that *that could be me*.
Today I am 31 and healthy and always exercise regularly and eat well so why should I pay for other people’s expensive preexisting conditions and disabilities? Because obviously it’s not possible that when I’m 34 I might get diagnosed with an autoimmune disease or a chronic leukemia and need expensive meds forever. Or that when I’m 36 I might have a child with cerebral palsy who is able to live a full, rich, happy and ~productive~ life but will need expensive healthcare and ongoing assistance to do so. Or that when I’m 48 I might get hit by a car and be left unable to work full time, in need of assistance, etc, myself. Or that when I’m 53 I might get some random-bad-luck cancer (let’s make it easy: not even talk about how lung cancer does in fact happen to nonsmokers or how in any case it’s disgusting to call it “fair” when it happens to a smoker because that punishment doesn’t fit the crime you sadists; instead, let’s consider one of the myriad cancers that hits at genuine fucking random or by some familial genetic vulnerability the individual can’t affect) for which a curative treatment actually exists but it costs $260,000 and without it the prognosis is eighteen months.
Same applies to poverty. (And for some of the same reasons as already sketched, as well as economic cycles and industrial shifts and automation and so on.)
It’s this pervasive prosperity-gospel belief that bad things by definition only happen to the undeserving and trying to help people who experience misfortune is hubris and interfering with the will of the great gods Natural Selection and The Market and doomed to create more problems than it solves because fate favors the lucky because the lucky are deserving because Gnon because *blithering evil*.
I don’t know how to explain thermodynamics and free lunch stuff to people who don’t already have some acquired grounding in physical reality. I also keep saying that caring about other people isn’t the problem (Richard Spencer would probably say he “cares about people”). It’s caring about systems, some of which take care of people (and in a catastrophic failure would become unable to take care of people at all) that’s the problem. If you’re too nihilistically individualized, you’ll apparenrly fail to notice how systems fit together (and don’t). Screaming about it doesn’t seem to help, because systems still fail even when you scream at them. I don’t have an easy answer, but if the most widespread centrist position means ignoring Rotherham-type stuff, then fuck that too.
The economy is like the tyranny of a rocket equation. You only have so much fuel, the gravity between the worlds is already there and you can’t change it.
It is physically impossible to meet all the goals - there just aren’t enough resources (natural resources * capital * labor * technology) to accomplish them all.
American GDP-per-capita is above $50,000. Foreign GDPs outside of a few hyper-efficient places like Hong Kong or Singapore are lower.
If one person takes $3,000,000 to keep alive, you have effectively consumed the complete economic output of one person’s whole entire life.
But it’s worse than that, because our worker had to pay for housing, for food, for transport, for education, and taxes to support all the secondary systems required, and also raise a child to perpetuate the system. If all that’s leftover after all that is $10,000 per year, then any $3,000,000 case consumes the total lifetime surplus resources of five workers.
And I look at many of these cases and do think “fuck, that could be me” - which is part of why I suggested a wage subsidy program!
But a lot of Leftist or Liberal language wants to allow people to create unlimited burdens on society. They want us to pay for treatment while not allowing us to prohibit people from doing things that would require more treatment, or creating people that require more treatment.
You can’t have both! You can’t have both!
The fewer the number of people that require expensive treatment, the more resources you can spend on them. The more that need expensive treatment, relative to the size of the productive economy, the less you can spend on each one, until it falls below the level required for them to survive.
If is vitally important that society become more efficient and more technologically advanced. We must produce more, and more efficiently.
And we can’t just throw aside social technologies. If broken homes fuck people up, statistically, and cause them not to do well in the labor force, then the cost of that comes out of liver transplants, not just ferraris.
Suppose we have hired a contractor to build a bridge. We issue partial payment for the project in the form of a financial instrument (presumably in a mutual fund or something else that bears interest) which only pays out in X years from now if the bridge does not collapse by then. We then monitor the price of this instrument, particularly the sales by those holding it, in order to obtain information about the quality of the bridge. This allows us to obtain this information without incentivizing anyone to deliberately sabotage the bridge project (assuming we prohibit short-selling).
Huh.
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.
