Oceans Yet to Burn

peridieu-deactivated20171003

thivus

if u accept the idea that the porn industry is toxic bc of how they treat the actors then hentai is basically veganism for porn

mitigatedchaos

Now see, this makes for a very interesting screening question.

Is someone actually arguing due to the treatment of women in the porn industry, or are they arguing to reduce sexual alternatives to straight women for straight men, relatively increasing straight womens’ sexual power/negotiating leverage? Or, are they arguing for women (or rather their faction) collectively owning the cultural intellectual property of the idea “women”?

Etc.

peridieu

See, um, there’s one other reason that you guys are kinda missing, I think, and it’s the idea that porn isn’t actually bad in and of itself, but that virtually all porn is bad because it teaches bad, um, morals? And you can, like, say that these morals are, um, inherent to the pornographic medium or just, like, products of our, uh, patriarchal society, but, like, people are definitely anti-porn on the assumption that they’re there.

mitigatedchaos

Obviously, the solution is to mandate multiple age grades for pornography starting with simple nudity and progressing through “sex within the context of a healthy relationship between two consenting adults,” before getting on to the weirder and more extreme stuff, thus setting up sensible expectations for future relationships, like alcohol laws in Europe.

This isn’t a shitpost, by the way. Depending on the country and its legal and political environment, I think this could potentially be a good policy.

(Edit: Also, to a degree this “bad morals” explanation falls under “ownership of [the idea of women] as intellectual property.”)

Source: thivus porn discourse cw policy politics

Logarithmic Policing

@collapsedsquid

That’s basically just secret police
of a totally ordinary sort
that then indulge in kickbacks and protection rackets

Yeah, I realized I forgot to tag that #half shtpost, as I wasn’t being entirely serious. It’s a bit of wishful thinking.

The thing is, I don’t think we adequately police the police. We need cop cops. Metacops, if you will.

The disutility of a crime can be modeled as the risk of getting caught times the penalty for getting caught. Thus, a crime with a 5% chance of getting caught, times a 20 year sentence as penalty, is then modeled with an effective disutility of a one year sentence.

However, people tend to time discount and so on, so you might not get much more out of a 40 sentence than you would out of a 20 year sentence. They’re both “a long time.” This means that you can get more oomph out of increasing the capture & conviction rate.

Regular people, despite not being police, commit crimes for some reason. Cops, who we send to increase the chances of catching them, also commit crimes. However, since they’re the ones that we typically send to stop crimes, it’s harder to deal with this, especially when prosecutors have to work with the same police to prosecute normal cases, and thus can’t afford to anger the larger police force.

So we should have a dedicated force to investigate, police, and prosecute police misconduct. “Sting operations all the way down,” so to speak. Of course, we’ll need to have someone keep an eye on them, too.

…but won’t that result in endless layers of bureaucracy?

Not necessarily.

Just as we only need some limited factor number of police for a given population size, we only need some limited number of metaⁿ-cops to police the cops.

We can model the required number of layers of metaⁿ-cops as log_{cop_ratio}(num_cops). With a cop_ratio of 2, for instance, our total number of all metaⁿ-cops is roughly the same as our total number of non-meta cops. A more reasonable cop_ratio of 10-20 gets us a more affordable ~5-11% for a city with 10,000 cops.

The purpose of each layer is to increase the uncertainty of successfully getting away with a crime at the layer below through arrest and conviction through multiple means, including informants, patrols, sting operations, reports of suspicious activity, investigations, etc.

This would be in addition to other means, such as introducing randomness to make various forms of corruption more difficult, moving people around to prevent building up loyalty between layers, etc. We want any corrupt personnel to always have to act very carefully and in the face of a great deal of uncertainty, as anyone they are interacting with could be one of our meta-cops.

We’d have to trim some of the other laws before we enact this, though, or else be careful just what policies we’re enforcing. Some laws currently not being enforced should just not exist, and we don’t actually want them enforced.

politics policy flagpost

argumate

mafia protection rackets are so infuriating, probably because all the incentives are to just pay up, which is how they work.

it’s so tempting to try and imagine impractical ways of breaking the system.

flakmaniak

It always impresses me how these gangs can be “more powerful than the police” and operate with relative impunity even in first-world countries.

I mean, you’d think the way to beat them would be to tell the cops. And yet, the government, for all its power, is often not the biggest force, and not just in an “I can shoot you and they can get me afterwards but not stop me” sense.

And of course, the “people fled the country rather than testify” thing seems… Like something you have to have an answer to.

argumate

infuriating! I think it’s easier to stop drug smuggling than protection rackets, as that involves a physical object that has to be shipped around distributed and can be intercepted at various points in the process.

but protection rackets are just this diffuse cloud of seemingly unrelated activities; people talking to each other over here, money changing hands over there, the occasional shop burning down or dude getting whacked somewhere else.

since police can’t offer 24 hour protection for every single person in town, there is always going to be someone vulnerable to extortion, and the incentive is always going to be to pay a small fee rather than risk defying them.

maddening!

mitigatedchaos

Secret police, but instead of enforcing ideological conformity to the Party, they attempt to catch politicians with kickbacks, investigate labor and environmental regulation violations, and crash protection rackets.

policy the iron hand half shtpost

elementarynationalism

Honestly if the Indian government buying the bullet train off of the Japanese in the hopes it repeats its zero-accident track record in Delhi isn’t the most ingenious experiment in human biodiversity theory, please find me a better one.

Wait until Dinesh decides the bolts don’t really need to be screwed on as tight as Takashi told him and we’ll see if they match that record.

mitigatedchaos

Bro, m8, buddy, pal,

We don’t have a non-corrupt India with which to separate out biological factors, including environmental ones (such as poor nutrition), so “does India fuck up the bullet train” does not work as an experiment for your hypothesis.

elementarynationalism

You’re not dealing any more in the scientific method than I am. You hazard to bet the fact that bullet trains won’t work in India is down to something intangible like “corruption” and I’m suggesting it’s got more to do with human capital.

People who shit in the street and ride on the top of freight trains aren’t doing so because of poor nutrition, fam.

mitigatedchaos

But they might out of cultural factors. (Also, poor nutrition, in the aggregate, could harm national IQ and mental health, among other things.)

Corruption is a norm, it can be removed (Singapore) by sufficiently-determined group of actors passing and enforcing the right laws.

The trick is that it’s based on expectations about others engaging in corruption and expectations of getting caught. It also arises when it’s impossible to function without violating the rules.

When corruption rates are high, there is not only a social expectation that one will get away with it, but there’s also the effect of “but everyone else is doing it - why do they get to benefit, but not me?” Additionally, there are networks of corruption that can be relied on.

Increasing the odds of getting caught and punished above a certain level eradicates the pro-corruption network effects. (This could be achieved with a series of sting operations all unleashed at once as a form of shock therapy.) At that point, corrupt officials become isolated individuals with far less expectation of getting away with it.

After a while, the next generation of bureaucrats rises in which the default is that corruption is almost unthinkable, and the relative rarity at that point makes it much less costly to police.

Under Communism, because it’s so at odds with reality, arresting the corrupt officials won’t work as well because they may have to lie and be corrupt to survive, normalizing corruption. Similarly, some cultures with a strong external locus of control or other elements may be prone to corruption.

politics racism cw policy racepol the red hammer the iron hand

rictic

mitigatedchaos

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.

mitigatedchaos

@neoliberalism-nightly

construction surety bonds

So they (or rather, something like them) do exist. Though in this case, I’m thinking that these are offered to the employees, rather than, or in addition to, the company, with less access to the external market for a while, so that we can obtain this information in addition to not rewarding if the project fails to complete adequately.

And perhaps, more importantly, offer these across all sectors of government contracting and even public sector employment generally.

Though… if we have the mechanisms, why the fuck do we still have so many massive time and budget overruns?

And why aren’t we using these on government IT projects?

So many of them fail spectacularly, imagine if we made 1/3rd of the pay into deferred compensation in this format. We could not only see some of these failures coming and plan for them, but we could drive some of these people that cannot deliver a project and turn everything into dragged-out, cost-plus, out of the sector.

shieldfoss

>why does the government still pay out so much extra money to their connected contractors?

But of course there are budget- and time-overruns in private contracting as well.

When I’ve seen it, it has typically been one of the following:

Commissioned personnel pushing through a contract that’ll be good for them but not good for the company
rank optimism
VIPs slowing things down by being too busy to have time for you when you need the go-ahead signed
VIPs slowing things down by being too fucking self-important and unable to get it hard unless they first delay a project by grandstanding
Seriously don’t get me started on VIPs
On my tombstone, just write “Sure he’s dead now, but you should see what he did to the other guy once he learned they’d changed the project requirements during the project.”

mitigatedchaos

Sounds like some of these government contracts need what I’ll call “adversarial review”. Imagine, having a department who gets paid by reading through the contract and thinking of all the ways to fuck it up.

Not just some rubber stamp review, but getting paid for all the flaws (and by the magnitude of the flaw) they find.

There’s gotta be some way to bring the rate of costs and fuckups down. Certainly, other countries that are also developed are paying much less for infrastructure.

rictic

How do you keep that productive? Criticism is easy, accurate and actionable criticism is hard. Who criticises the critics? Scott’s IRB experience for example didn’t even have payouts per criticism, ordinary human and bureaucratic motivations were enough to make it counterproductive.

mitigatedchaos

Perhaps we put a contract synthesizer on top that pits the two sides against each other a few times and decides which criticisms actually matter to the organization, and then we also issue a few more employee deferred compensation instruments based on things like the number and magnitude of change orders.

Source: mitigatedchaos policy

shieldfoss

mitigatedchaos

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.

mitigatedchaos

@neoliberalism-nightly

construction surety bonds

So they (or rather, something like them) do exist. Though in this case, I’m thinking that these are offered to the employees, rather than, or in addition to, the company, with less access to the external market for a while, so that we can obtain this information in addition to not rewarding if the project fails to complete adequately.

And perhaps, more importantly, offer these across all sectors of government contracting and even public sector employment generally.

Though… if we have the mechanisms, why the fuck do we still have so many massive time and budget overruns?

And why aren’t we using these on government IT projects?

So many of them fail spectacularly, imagine if we made 1/3rd of the pay into deferred compensation in this format. We could not only see some of these failures coming and plan for them, but we could drive some of these people that cannot deliver a project and turn everything into dragged-out, cost-plus, out of the sector.

shieldfoss

>why does the government still pay out so much extra money to their connected contractors?

But of course there are budget- and time-overruns in private contracting as well.

When I’ve seen it, it has typically been one of the following:

Commissioned personnel pushing through a contract that’ll be good for them but not good for the company
rank optimism
VIPs slowing things down by being too busy to have time for you when you need the go-ahead signed
VIPs slowing things down by being too fucking self-important and unable to get it hard unless they first delay a project by grandstanding
Seriously don’t get me started on VIPs
On my tombstone, just write “Sure he’s dead now, but you should see what he did to the other guy once he learned they’d changed the project requirements during the project.”

mitigatedchaos

Sounds like some of these government contracts need what I’ll call “adversarial review”. Imagine, having a department who gets paid by reading through the contract and thinking of all the ways to fuck it up.

Not just some rubber stamp review, but getting paid for all the flaws (and by the magnitude of the flaw) they find.

There’s gotta be some way to bring the rate of costs and fuckups down. Certainly, other countries that are also developed are paying much less for infrastructure.

Source: mitigatedchaos policy

mitigatedchaos

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.

mitigatedchaos

@neoliberalism-nightly

construction surety bonds

So they (or rather, something like them) do exist. Though in this case, I’m thinking that these are offered to the employees, rather than, or in addition to, the company, with less access to the external market for a while, so that we can obtain this information in addition to not rewarding if the project fails to complete adequately.

And perhaps, more importantly, offer these across all sectors of government contracting and even public sector employment generally.

Though… if we have the mechanisms, why the fuck do we still have so many massive time and budget overruns?

And why aren’t we using these on government IT projects?

So many of them fail spectacularly, imagine if we made 1/3rd of the pay into deferred compensation in this format. We could not only see some of these failures coming and plan for them, but we could drive some of these people that cannot deliver a project and turn everything into dragged-out, cost-plus, out of the sector.

policy

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.

policy flagpost the iron hand the invisible fist

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

Logarithmic Policing