>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!
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.
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.
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.
If you want to claim that the distinction between economic incentives and physical force is often irrelevant, fine, make your case. But if you’re going to pretend it doesn’t exist, why should people who built their whole economic system on that difference pay attention?
Hmm, I dunno. Pretty much all states forbid some kinds of physical force but not others, and some kinds of economic incentives but not others. This is especially true when looking at de facto rather than de jure enforcement. In the eyes of the institution, I’d say that the kinds of economic incentives that are banned are more like the kinds of physical force that are banned than they are like the kinds of economic inventives that are permitted. “Is this permitted or not” is just about the most institutionally-salient quality.
Thus, I’m not sure any actually-existing systems really are built on a clear differentiation between those two categories. They tend to be grouped as distinct species in the sense that, say, bribery is distinct from assault, but this seems more like statutory syntactic sugar than the kind of substantive qualitative difference that the “physical versus and economic coercion” distinction is purported to represent under liberalism. It seems like more of a rhetorical distinction than one that people actually build societies around.
@poipoipoi-2016
In response to that last, I’ve heard enough stories about my paternal grandparents to really want divorce to be a thing that happens more often, but at the same time, I heard enough stories about Grandma and her six husbands to be deeply suspect of divorce.
I realized that something related showed up in my life. There was a guy I knew online. Black guy living in a city. His step dad had him working at his small business, and it interfered with his ability to complete school. Then he was of age, and the step dad tried to kick him out, but he didn’t have a job, so he was sneaking into the house to avoid ending up homeless. His resume was terrible, just a few cobbled-together, unformatted paragraphs. I would say “shouldn’t they teach resume writing in school?” but even if they did, the terrible step dad might have had him working or something so that he wasn’t able to attend or complete that! But he was a decent guy, and had a good work ethic, so I went through carefully building a resume with him, and he got a job soon enough after and was able to move out. It’s no wonder he had been depressed earlier! And, like, in between then, we got advice from my ex-girlfriend’s partner, who has lived the low-class life, on how to try to keep him out of the street at night until he could move out.
But how many guys like him are out there, even in this country, you know? Who don’t have a hand-me-down laptop and a connection to a bunch of random nerds who know how to write a resume for him so he can get a stable income?
So I can’t really be a true GOPper, but also the risk with the step parents stuff is real.
@neoliberalismnightly
still though, aren’t libraries a thing?
Having libraries is good in part for these reasons, but it isn’t really enough.
Does the US have anything equivalent to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau? They can probably help with 2, 3, maybe 4, maybe 5, and 6, and they’re in at least some of the libraries here.
I’ve literally never heard of such a thing. It might be a suitable use of government funds. After all, markets don’t function correctly without information, right?
So, recent news brings an interesting question to mind, would a total cessation of US-China trade be worse for the US than a single thermonuclear missile strike on the US mainland?
Well, we’d have “less money”, but hiring would go through the roof, national sovereignty would increase, and less than one million people would die (probably - difficult to calculate secondary economic effects of what would be an across-the-board price increase), so…
I’m pretty sure that both the US and China are reliant on the other for things that they can’t actually replace autarchically even at much higher prices (e.g. certain rare earth metals for the US, a lot of IP for China). The adjustment would be pretty steep.
Think it’s the expertise that would be killer. I suspect are whole ranges of manufacturing activities that nobody in the US knows how to do anymore, could be decades before we can do them competently again.
You’s also have the problem of what this would to to southeast asia in general. We may not intend to cut off trade with the rest, but this is the sort of move that could lead to the entire region being cut off to US trade. I guess we didn’t really need computers anyways.
The problem when they went to build a smartphone in the US was not “no Americans know how to build a smartphone”, it was “we lack a sufficiently large and redundant supply chain to respond quickly to unexpected issues, because there isn’t a sufficient density of smartphone component manufacturers.”
This isn’t just “we’re building a new product“ this is “We are taking over all production of all existing products.“ This is an orders-of-magnitude difference..
Sure, but aside from the fact that there are still lots of countries that aren’t China (including Taiwan, which is not China China) to import from, I think the issue is less “lack of expertise” and inability to build computers, than it is the necessary volume of capital expenditures to build all the new plants and buy all the new robots necessary to fill those plants. And we still do a lot of manufacturing here. Manufacturing revenue in the US is up, it’s manufacturing employment that’s down.
I’m not sure it would even be all that much of an increase in price for consumers after the capital expenditures are complete. We’re probably already headed towards manufacture-on-demand programmable modular factories closer to the sites of sale, and this might just accelerate the trend.
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.
