Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

immigration policy is the equivalent of the state offering insurance for damages to the host nation. not gonna convince progs, might convince libertarian or ancap types.

esoteric-hoxhaism answered:

what

[mitigatedchaos]

I tried to figure this one out, but I don’t get it either, and I think about applying insurance to everything.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[collapsedsquid]

Today I want to overthrow our economic system and replace it with one that can make shoes that last at least a full goddamn year without falling apart.

[mitigatedchaos]

I have an idea for this that doesn’t destroy the whole economic system!

The simple version is to make all products carry mandatory insurance for a number of years based on the product’s functional category - this can also be used to relax some safety standards.

This will increase the cost of a product at the start, but it reveals previously-hidden reliability information to consumers, and uses their cheapo behavior to drive down risk and drive up reliability.  It also turns reliability from something management can skimp on to temporarily drive up the profits at the company before bailing and leaving in the brand in ruins, into a monthly or annual expense attached to every pair of shoes from which the management cannot escape.

The insurance company is going to be pissed if they have to payout on a batch of cruddy six-month shoes.  They will fight with the management over dumb cost-cutting measures.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

@statist-shill-cuck:

I know it’s considered pretty paternalist by some to give people stuff rather than money that they could spend on what they desire, but I think free food, free housing, and free healthcare should just be a thing. It really wouldn’t even be very disruptive to integrate all that into an existing capitalist society. Turn restaurants into people’s kitchens where food is served buffet style, for free, to all. Socialize housing and build some skyscrapers where the poor can live for free. And most rich and semi-rich countries already have that free healthcare thing down already. Only barbarian nations like the US are easily able to pay for it but don’t have it.

Free healthcare might be the easiest part of that actually, as barring a few pathological cases people generally don’t enjoy spending more time in hospital.

Free food incentivizes ways to exploit it in a way that just giving people money to buy food does not, and makes it harder for other food production services to compete by offering better products or service.

Some level of socialised housing may be necessary, but if you overdo it you end up creating crime ridden ghettos that no one actually wants to live in, bringing you back to square one.

[mitigatedchaos]

Where should the people live?  What food should they eat, and how much?

For the majority of cases, the individual has more information about this than the central planner.  A housing voucher or a food voucher, if one insists on something more like an in-kind transfer, is still a better option than direct food and housing, because it can adapt to individual and local conditions.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

neoliberalism-nightly said: man argumate u can do better than this

Do I have to, though? Seems like without basic income you have to bite at least some of these bullets:

1. Existing welfare systems deliver better outcomes more efficiently.

2. Some people will starve and that’s okay.

3. Automation won’t inevitably increase unemployment.

4. People will never rebel if forced into menial labour to survive.

5. Society without basic income will involve less suffering over all.

That just seems unlikely to me.

[voximperatoris]

What happens when people squander the basic income and then need additional assistance to avoid starving (or “starving” in the sense of not having an acceptable first-world standard of living)?

I don’t know enough about the history of it to say whether it was justified or not, by that sort of consideration is the main reason why welfare has historically shifted from cash grants to in-kind aid.

[argumate]

Pay it on a daily basis.

[mitigatedchaos]

It can be put on a card system actually, for efficiency.  Then they don’t even need to have a check or mailing address, visit an office, or so on.

Regardless, this will need to be tested by experiment.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[wirehead-wannabe]

> Although the method’s success rate was about 3.5%, experts in the field are calling the study a “stunning achievement” that could potentially “eradicate infertility” if it can be applied in humans. The ability to make artificial eggs from any cell in the body could allow women who lack viable eggs or male-male couples to have genetic children of their own. “Reproductive age” may become obsolete.

Oh great, let’s just take the breaks off of the Quiverfull problem completely.

[ozymandias271]

I am not sure why you think this is a big issue?

In the short run: the set “has ten kids” selects really hard for smart, highly religious, nonconformist people who take ideas seriously. With the exception of the second thing, I’m not sure why anyone in this community would object. It doesn’t seem like desire-to-be-Quiverfull is genetic: the religions in which people have ten kids don’t seem to have particularly high retention rates, particularly given that they’re willing to e.g. not educate their children to get them to stay.

If you’re like “eventually the world will be full of people who have evolved to want lots of kids because the others don’t reproduce, and then overpopulation”, yes, but an allele reaching fixation takes long enough that I’d be surprised if we were still meat by the time it happened, and if we’re not meat this is irrelevant. And I’m honestly uncertain which way the sign of this particular technology goes: sure, very enthusiastic people could use it to have a twentieth kid, but women who don’t want kids that strongly and thus didn’t have a kid until they were fifty could also use it. 

[jack-rustier]

Worst case scenario: what will probably end up happening, if anything happens, is that you get a world where a million mutually exclusive cults try to outbreed each other. Which is to say, the world isn’t going to look very much different from this current version of it. The only difference is that everyone is able to have more kids without their own age becoming a factor.

Today’s meme magic phenomena will continue apace regardless of this technology being freely available or not.

[wirehead-wannabe]

I was focusing more on the genetic aspect of this + overpopulation in general rather than the memetic part, though I can see why people didn’t interpret it that way. Basically, I don’t want to live in a world crammed full of as many humans as possible. I want everyone to be able to have their own huge tract of land and live densely only when they prefer to.

[sinesalvatorem]

Solution here, it seems to me, is to buy your track of land while it’s plentiful and not let new people move in. Then you only have to fear eminent domain, but I think that getting the government to stop stealing people’s land is probably actually less of a hard problem than getting people to stop undoing infertility.

I find it just as likely that we’ll manage to convince everyone to accept forced-infertility-by-default after forty as that we’ll get everyone to accept forced-death-by-default after 80 once anti-aging is a thing. Besides, in both case, the worlds in which people actually manage to be banned from editing themselves are dystopian hellscapes anyway.

[mitigatedchaos]

That’s not a real solution.  The political will under such conditions would shift, and democracy means you’ll be eminent domain’d for sure, even if it were realistic for most non-millionaires to attempt this in the first place.

Life extension would actually help here, however, since it keeps non-baby-obsessed people around and politically relevant longer.  Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.

[sinesalvatorem]

Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.

Seen here: The single most horrify thing I have ever seen a transhumanist unironically recommend, out of a vast number of horrifying futury things.

[mitigatedchaos]

Note: Continued discussion of this topic.

The entire point was to avoid shooting, starving, or forcibly sterilizing people. And, if it turns out to be unnecessary, it decays to “everyone who asks gets more baby tickets than they can even use.”

It seemed a better choice than allocating a set pool of resources which is based on one’s ancestors from the time that life extension hits. (ie, each person gets X resources which are split by their descendants, recursively) Maybe you would prefer that instead, but I felt it punished the descendants unfairly.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[testblogdontupvote]

The argument “if you like taxes then simply go donate money to the government. You don’t? Then stop being a hypocrite and talking about how taxes are good” seems a bit silly to me. Sure, if you believe that any centralized taxation and spending is bad, then there’s no reason to support taxation. But if you do think that centralized spending can in certain situations outperform a free market, then you see taxes as a prisoner’s dilemma. If everyone cooperates, and voluntarily donates to the government, then everyone would be better off, but this is not a stable equilibrium, and every individual agent can benefit from defecting, and then everyone is much worse off, but trying to unilaterally start cooperating and donating money would make you even worse off. So you employ a very common way to resolve prisoner’s dilemmas: elect a guy with a gun who shoots at defectors. In this situation you end up being better off than without this guy, but your incentive structure changes only by the amount of shooting, and it’s still rational to not cooperate by any amount higher than what is being enforced. It is rational to want to resolve prisoner’s dilemmas this way, and it’s also rational to not be a cooperate-bot in dilemmas that aren’t being resolved.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[wirehead-wannabe]

> Although the method’s success rate was about 3.5%, experts in the field are calling the study a “stunning achievement” that could potentially “eradicate infertility” if it can be applied in humans. The ability to make artificial eggs from any cell in the body could allow women who lack viable eggs or male-male couples to have genetic children of their own. “Reproductive age” may become obsolete.

Oh great, let’s just take the breaks off of the Quiverfull problem completely.

[ozymandias271]

I am not sure why you think this is a big issue?

In the short run: the set “has ten kids” selects really hard for smart, highly religious, nonconformist people who take ideas seriously. With the exception of the second thing, I’m not sure why anyone in this community would object. It doesn’t seem like desire-to-be-Quiverfull is genetic: the religions in which people have ten kids don’t seem to have particularly high retention rates, particularly given that they’re willing to e.g. not educate their children to get them to stay.

If you’re like “eventually the world will be full of people who have evolved to want lots of kids because the others don’t reproduce, and then overpopulation”, yes, but an allele reaching fixation takes long enough that I’d be surprised if we were still meat by the time it happened, and if we’re not meat this is irrelevant. And I’m honestly uncertain which way the sign of this particular technology goes: sure, very enthusiastic people could use it to have a twentieth kid, but women who don’t want kids that strongly and thus didn’t have a kid until they were fifty could also use it. 

[jack-rustier]

Worst case scenario: what will probably end up happening, if anything happens, is that you get a world where a million mutually exclusive cults try to outbreed each other. Which is to say, the world isn’t going to look very much different from this current version of it. The only difference is that everyone is able to have more kids without their own age becoming a factor.

Today’s meme magic phenomena will continue apace regardless of this technology being freely available or not.

[wirehead-wannabe]

I was focusing more on the genetic aspect of this + overpopulation in general rather than the memetic part, though I can see why people didn’t interpret it that way. Basically, I don’t want to live in a world crammed full of as many humans as possible. I want everyone to be able to have their own huge tract of land and live densely only when they prefer to.

[sinesalvatorem]

Solution here, it seems to me, is to buy your track of land while it’s plentiful and not let new people move in. Then you only have to fear eminent domain, but I think that getting the government to stop stealing people’s land is probably actually less of a hard problem than getting people to stop undoing infertility.

I find it just as likely that we’ll manage to convince everyone to accept forced-infertility-by-default after forty as that we’ll get everyone to accept forced-death-by-default after 80 once anti-aging is a thing. Besides, in both case, the worlds in which people actually manage to be banned from editing themselves are dystopian hellscapes anyway.

[mitigatedchaos]

That’s not a real solution.  The political will under such conditions would shift, and democracy means you’ll be eminent domain’d for sure, even if it were realistic for most non-millionaires to attempt this in the first place.

Life extension would actually help here, however, since it keeps non-baby-obsessed people around and politically relevant longer.  Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

@bambamramfan

I believe a fair chunk of the alienation that concerns you isn’t just a result of competitive economic systems, but also urban planning.

When in a city, you have significantly less personal connection to, and knowledge of, the people around you.  This makes it harder not only to judge their intentions, but also to punish them.  Thus, you are at increased risk when interacting with them (as I think slavojzyzzek mentioned).

Part of the way to combat this may be to turn cities into collections of ten thousand villages.  Build each block of the city as a mixed-use unit, with internal green space and, critically, controlled access beyond the shops at the perimeter.  That could be as simple as just making people check in when they enter and refusing anyone not approved by a specific resident.  Have the block owned or managed by a sort of cooperative responsible for creating cultural festivals and whatnot to encourage social interaction and a sense of community.  Specific police officers could be assigned to each block (as the population is high enough) and get to know the residents.

With increased trust and more limited populations, the residents can get to know their neighbors more on the scale of a small town than a big city, reducing the social distance by one or two orders of magnitude.  If you’re Communitarian enough, you can also have police/healthcare/etc units focus on specific high-risk people within the block to prevent situations from spiraling out of control.

[nuclearspaceheater]

This seems like treating a symptom of the real problem, which is needing to know and get along with the people you happen to live near, and is the opposite of “high-trust.”

Low-trust vs high-trust is about how you have to deal with strangers. If tight-knit communities are required to form connections or even so much as not expected to get attacked or ripped off, then that is a failure of civil society and a damage-control motivated return to the tribalism and provincialism that modernity is an effort to solve/depends on already being solved.

And we certainly have at out disposal far greater tools for creating shared context and trust between unrelated strangers than has perhaps ever existed, if there existed the will to use them. (And certainly, if you’re entertaining a scenario where the pursuit of your goals can affect the direction of urban planning, then you’re already imagining the use of a lot of political will!)

I consider that much of what gets called “alienation” is a feature. It would be worth fighting for as a goal rather than fought as a problem, even absent its economic benefits.

[mitigatedchaos]

I would consider that in high-crime areas, civil society has in fact failed to some degree and that a return to a more structured form of community as a method of preventing it from getting even further off the rails can be considered justified.  Preventing and policing crime and misbehavior are both quite challenging tasks on their own.

What I have proposed does not undermine modernity any more than the existence of suburban towns does.  (Though, perhaps you wish to abolish suburban towns as well for some reason.)  Specifically, it’s also primarily for residential areas.  It isn’t as though you can’t just walk right off the block and be back in the rest of the city.

As for political willpower, something not so different from what I have proposed already appears to exist in Singapore.  I once thought that cop cameras, while a good idea, weren’t politically tractable, but that situation changed and they began to emerge in various cities.  I wouldn’t expect this idea to take off for another 20 years, anyway.

I probably have different values from you, since I believe that human beings are social creatures and function best if they have at least some social context and support network, people that they know they can depend on (which, absent some pretty powerful culture, is not something that can be counted on from strangers).

What are these methods that people lack the political will to use, that are only as difficult as urban planning?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@bambamramfan

I believe a fair chunk of the alienation that concerns you isn’t just a result of competitive economic systems, but also urban planning.

When in a city, you have significantly less personal connection to, and knowledge of, the people around you.  This makes it harder not only to judge their intentions, but also to punish them.  Thus, you are at increased risk when interacting with them (as I think slavojzyzzek mentioned).

Part of the way to combat this may be to turn cities into collections of ten thousand villages.  Build each block of the city as a mixed-use unit, with internal green space and, critically, controlled access beyond the shops at the perimeter.  That could be as simple as just making people check in when they enter and refusing anyone not approved by a specific resident.  Have the block owned or managed by a sort of cooperative responsible for creating cultural festivals and whatnot to encourage social interaction and a sense of community.  Specific police officers could be assigned to each block (as the population is high enough) and get to know the residents.

With increased trust and more limited populations, the residents can get to know their neighbors more on the scale of a small town than a big city, reducing the social distance by one or two orders of magnitude.  If you’re Communitarian enough, you can also have police/healthcare/etc units focus on specific high-risk people within the block to prevent situations from spiraling out of control.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[leftist-daily-reminders]

If you would go out of your way to argue how easy it is for capital to automate away jobs when labor costs become too high, then you should probably know that you’re giving all kinds of credibility to those of us who advocate fully-automated luxury communism. I mean, think about it: you’re arguing that so much of human labor ISN’T NECESSARY because said jobs can be done by machines, and yet you STILL want the bulk of humanity to pointlessly scrape by laboring for the capitalist class, receiving meager wages to buy the shit they helped generate in the first place. The above billboard is a THREAT. Let’s not mince words – that billboard is bourgeois propaganda designed to turn the working class against each other and against the broader goals of resource democratization. “If you fight for a basic livable wage, just know that you’re easily replaceable, peon!”

This is what leftists mean when they say that capitalism is an economic system filled to the brim with tensions and contradictions; it’s also what they mean when they say that capitalism inevitably produces its own gravediggers. Automation is one of those gravediggers, and it’s a major one at that. As more and more jobs become automated in the coming decades, the working class will face widespread dispossession, ramping up revolutionary class consciousness in the process. At that point, capitalism will either focus on generating more superfluous jobs for people to work or set about instituting a universal basic income – regardless, the point is to keep enough scraps flowing downward so that people don’t call for a broader system change. In this way, capitalism’s ruling class can maintain control over the wealth-producing means of production and imperialist capital accumulation can continue unrestrained.

For these reasons, “more jobs” and universal basic incomes are not enough. We need to democratize the broader social infrastructure and eliminate the profit system. If you recognize how possible it is to automate away human labor, then you should defenestrate yourself out of the Overton Window and use some political imagination – cut out the unnecessary jobs, automate all the labor you can, produce for human need rather than elite profit, and you end up with drastically reduced working hours and bountiful leisure time. This is the essence of fully-automated luxury communism – the natural conclusion of the conditions that capitalism set in motion.

Be wary of automation in the present climate, but always trace it back to the class struggle. Robots taking our jobs SHOULD be cause for celebration; why should we treat these potential liberators as harbingers of dispossession? Technological advancements are pushing us exponentially towards a de facto post-scarcity world, where everyone’s needs can be comfortably met alongside their desires for community and leisure and entertainment, and yet we’re held back by Empire’s insistence on keeping the means of production hoarded under the command of a superfluous ruling class. As long as we are divided into capitalists and workers, humanity will never know full liberation.

[thescalexwrites]

TL;DR: automating jobs will eventually get rid of working for profit, cut down the class system, and give everybody time to focus on whatever they want to do.

[mysticalmoonstone]

Exactly, with automation will actually come more jobs and better paying jobs to manage those technologist. Technology always statistically creates more jobs than it destroys.

[leftist-daily-reminders]

Okay but that’s also what we want to avoid. It’s not about resigning ourselves to HAVING to work a job just so we can access resources – it should be about determining what jobs are actually necessary for meeting people’s needs and for the maintenance of society, what jobs can be automated away, and how to properly transition towards a system that produces for need rather than for profit (and hopefully eventually reaching a point of abundant post-scarcity that money itself could be feasibly abolished from there), all accomplished by democratic control of the means of production and the infrastructure. I’m sick of this liberal discourse that keeps shifting all these radical developments in technology back towards the status quo, where the wealth-producing machines are still controlled by elites and where we have to just keep inventing new jobs for people to work so they can access resources. If feudalism couldn’t cope with the advancements in technology that eventually made feudal relations obsolete, then capitalism won’t be able to cope with the coming advancements in technology as well, try as it might – scarcity will have to be enforced (more so than it is now), more pointless jobs will be created, and politicians will opt for redistributive universal basic incomes in an attempt to stabilize the whole thing. We need to seize the opportunity to put the exponentially-increasing reach of technology to work for the benefit of humanity, not just for human benefit when it’s convenient to capitalists.

[saltymantears]

So this post reminded me of something from my childhood, and I couldn’t place what, until I remembered this joke from the Jetsons:

Now in the show this is obviously a statement about how easy Mr Jetson has it in the future’s workforce, but it more effectively highlights the absurdity of a capitalist system once technology has become able to automate entry-level labor: no one NEEDS Mr Jetson to do anything, but because his value in society is entirely based on income and thus employment, they need to FABRICATE a role for him to fill. In reality the only human necessary to keep the plant running is (maybe) Mr. Spacely, but goodness knows we can’t let EVERYONE enjoy an upper-middle class income in management, so they give him a bunch of useless peons to boss around all day.

The capitalist system the Jetsons live in finds THIS absurd future preferable to a system where everyone’s basic needs are met using the massive surplus generated by a fully automated workforce. The people who paid for the billboard in the original post above are even LESS sympathetic, as they’d apparently blame US for “making” them fire 90% of their employees in order to remain competitive. What a grand system, this capitalism.

[whitemarbleblock]

Always reblog.

[mitigatedchaos]

“Tensions within Capitalism” is mostly overly-academic hogwash, the same way one might talk about “tensions in the human body” or indeed any successful animal. On the other hand, the threat from automation is quite real, and it’s different this time. The “Luddite Fallacy” label is itself fallacious. Better to cut a check based on %GDP and ride it into space, or pursue some similar program. I also don’t trust anyone who hasn’t said the words “prediction market” entirely unironically to have a solid plan for what comes after The Revolution, violent revolution or peaceful.

[bambamramfan]

“Tensions within capitalism” refer to things like the unemployed person who is denied any job to do, but also told she is lazy and a leech for not having steady work. It’s a contradiction our entire society believes, but the weight of the contradiction lies on one person.

Eventually it snaps. Possibly by these unemployed people voting for unethical leaders spouting nonsense, just for any hope of making sense of their senseless situation.

“What to do after the revolution” is a very important question, but pondering how to answer it does not change the fact that the resolution of snapping tensions is coming towards you at a pretty fast clip. Even I thought Trump wouldn’t get elected till 2020. The people may pick someone else’s revolution while you’re waiting to perfect your own.

The human body also contains tensions. After enough years it dies.

[mitigatedchaos]

Had the world waited to perfect their revolutions a bit longer, several dozen million people who died might have lived.  Overthrowing a government is far easier than developing a fully workable alternative for real (not just hoping a half-finished untested alternative works out) and far more exciting than actually testing things before implementing them on a wide scale.  It’s more dangerous, of course, but that’s a different matter.

Given how straight-up murderous revolutions have tended to be in the past, it is right to distrust revolutionaries.

Doing something like cutting a % of the GDP and handing it out is less likely to crash the economy or kill millions of people.

[bambamramfan]

No argument about the disasters of bad revolutions, but my point is that shit is coming anyway. Did you not see the latest US election?

[mitigatedchaos]

A change is needed, but it shouldn’t be something irreversible that might crash the economy, and with that, extinguish the desperately-needed fires of technological progress.  There appears to be this idea, now, that with robots, the economy has become less fragile, and radical experimentation on the entire country with systems that either haven’t been adequately tested or have failed catastrophically in the past is called for.  

The economy is just not that robust.  

Direct wage subsidies and basic income/basic share are both types of programs that can be implemented gradually, don’t require armed military action, don’t threaten to derail the whole economy by seizing the means of production, don’t introduce terrible incentive structures that tend to result in violent purges, and can be rolled back if they turn out not to work as well as expected.

Direct wage subsidies can even be sold to conservative types, with the right language, then transition to basic share later.

A revolution, if it could even gather enough mass to start (and not result in a terrible civil war that divides the country into new ones) will do nothing except kill a lot of people and trash the economy, with little to no net improvement in government.

Basic income is picking up steam.  Wage subsidies haven’t quite yet, but they might as the so-called “right-wing alternative”.  Millenials in the US have lower hostile reaction to “Socialism” (in part because Republicans called every single government program they don’t like “Socialism”).  Once the truck drivers start getting laid off en masse, the political will for these programs will emerge.