Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

@ranma-official 

We’ve got a group that’s too ideology huffed and/or moronic to get rid of the welfare cliff, that wants no caps on lifetime healthcare payouts, that is likely to completely botch a single-payer healthcare rollout and thereby utterly trainfuck almost 1/5th of the US economy, and so on…

And we have a group that is too stupid and/or ideology-huffed to realize that welfare doubles as a form of riot insurance, that can’t get rid of the welfare cliff because they spend their scarce political capital trying to abolish welfare entirely, and which routinely cuts taxes and fails to adequately fund infrastructure in ways that somehow make the entire process more costly.

Overall, this is an obstacle to good policy.

If people in general were somehow able to hold the position that economic growth/efficiency/etc were absolutely vital and also how we can afford to have nice things for our poor, and as such we cannot just encourage people to do whatever they want (and yet should balance that according to actual harms), then we’d see something that was on balance less stupid (IMO).

Doing otherwise is why we have the situation with rising rents because there aren’t enough housing units, because various regulations make it more difficult to build housing units and not just for actual safety reasons, and this is decried as the fault of oppressive white cishet techies somehow.

---

And like, I’m sure you disagree with my proposal to issue healthcare vouchers, or think a higher minimum wage is preferable to wage subsidies, but I’d imagine you’d take all of that over a ‘solid’ GOP platform without that much hesitation.

[mitigatedchaos]

@discoursedrome here with the Real Discourse

everyone will utterly trainfuck 1/5th of the US economy but it’s important to vote on which fifth and how it’s fucked

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@ranma-official 

We’ve got a group that’s too ideology huffed and/or moronic to get rid of the welfare cliff, that wants no caps on lifetime healthcare payouts, that is likely to completely botch a single-payer healthcare rollout and thereby utterly trainfuck almost 1/5th of the US economy, and so on…

And we have a group that is too stupid and/or ideology-huffed to realize that welfare doubles as a form of riot insurance, that can’t get rid of the welfare cliff because they spend their scarce political capital trying to abolish welfare entirely, and which routinely cuts taxes and fails to adequately fund infrastructure in ways that somehow make the entire process more costly.

Overall, this is an obstacle to good policy.

If people in general were somehow able to hold the position that economic growth/efficiency/etc were absolutely vital and also how we can afford to have nice things for our poor, and as such we cannot just encourage people to do whatever they want (and yet should balance that according to actual harms), then we’d see something that was on balance less stupid (IMO).

Doing otherwise is why we have the situation with rising rents because there aren’t enough housing units, because various regulations make it more difficult to build housing units and not just for actual safety reasons, and this is decried as the fault of oppressive white cishet techies somehow.

---

And like, I’m sure you disagree with my proposal to issue healthcare vouchers, or think a higher minimum wage is preferable to wage subsidies, but I’d imagine you’d take all of that over a ‘solid’ GOP platform without that much hesitation.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

The proper role of the state, I believe, is most often (though not always) to establish frameworks for private action.

Macro-information vs micro-information.  Macro-coordination vs micro-coordination.  Flexible hierarchies.  Coordination of rules for predictability and thus lowered computational and compliance cost.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Although, if anything, that post about healthcare costs is perhaps a better summary of my current politics than any.

Efficiency - in government, in the private sector, anywhere - doesn’t just mean some nice bonus that lets rich people we don’t care about have more sports cars.  

As efficiency and production increase, you stop having to triage.  If one unit of sovereign services costs $1.00 to deliver and you have $1.00, then you can purchase only one unit.  If one unit of sovereign services costs $0.50, then you can purchase two.  

If there were two of you and you collectively only had one dollar to spend, then in the first case you have to fight about who gets that one unit of sovereign services, and in the second case you don’t.  

The adequate planning of cities and efficient distribution of resources are absolutely vital.  Surplus regulations don’t just have a cost in corporate bureaucrat annoyance, but in bus stops.  

Private property, government regulations, wealth redistribution… these are tools, not moral imperatives.

Now I know many people would say “sure, but my politics is about using them correctly as tools,” and for some people that’s true.  But a lot of the time that’s not what we see in practice.

So the great question, I think, is how we can make systems of governance better, to promote better and more accurate approaches to policy that more effectively accomplish what will benefit people.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@ “free speech” fetishists

[uiruu]

do you defend the free speech of leftists, antifascists, feminists, queer people, etc?

[thenegative1andonly]

Yes. On the other hand, do you think that censorship of right wing people is acceptable, or even understandable?

[connard-cynique]

You’re both listening to each other before slandering, misinterpreting, spamming and derailing what the other have to say.

So it’s not really “defending free speech” or “respecting free speech” as much as it is “eagerly waiting for ammunition to prove the other side wrong”.

[loona-cry]

Technically, free speech lets you say anything you want (so long as it’s not an incitement of violence) and it prevents the government from intervening. It doesn’t prevent the angry black neighbor from next door kicking the shit out of them for being racist, even if the neighbor is willing to risk getting arrested for beating the shit out of them.

I don’t really care if two sides have a ferocious verbal shitslinging match, provided it doesn’t get violent or incite violence, I’m fine with it. Even if they are nasty pricks, there’s an audience waiting to hand out consequences for being shit human beings. Charlottesville was case in point for that even before the violence started.

[isaacsapphire]

Free speech laws don’t have a direct relationship with assault laws. I can’t imagine that the law will be kind to your hypothetical angry Black man from next door kicking the shit out of someone, regardless of that someone’s racial opinions.

Consider https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_words#United_States and note that in important fighting words case, Chaplinsky vs New Hampshire, some of the words in question were calling someone a Facist. This was upheld as counting as fighting words.

Please also note Cohen vs California, where wearing a jacket reading “Fuck the Draft” in a court house was judged to not be fighting words, as it was not reasonable for anybody who was or who reasonably might be present to understand it as a personal insult. Presumably, wearing a t-shirt reading “Fuck Bob Bobson” in the presence of Bob Bobson would still count as fighting words.

Please also compare https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.A.V._v._City_of_St._Paul where literally burning a cross on the lawn of an African American family was the act in question. The Supreme Court unanimously struck down the conviction under a city Bias-motivated Crime ordinance, saying, “it (the city of Saint Paul) has proscribed fighting words of whatever manner that communicate messages of racial, gender, or religious intolerance. Selectivity of this sort creates the possibility that the city is seeking to handicap the expression of particular ideas… St. Paul has no such authority to license one side of a debate to fight freestyle, while requiring the other to follow Marquess of Queensberry rules… Let there be no mistake about our belief that burning a cross in someone’s front yard is reprehensible. But St. Paul has sufficient means at its disposal to prevent such behavior without adding the First Amendment to the fire.”

[loona-cry]

I don’t know why you wasted your time writing this when my entire point is that the guy kicking in the door is doing something illegal as a consequence of someone’s entirely legal free speech. Freedom of speech =/= freedom from consequence. It not being legal doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen and I never so much as implied the judge would be kind to law breakers or that there’d be an excuse in sentencing for it. I don’t really need to note anything when nothing you’ve written is of any relevance to my point.

[isaacsapphire]

Huh, I’ve become used to “consequences for speech” being essentially meaning; *taps club threateningly* “there will be consequences for saying that” with complete endorsement of the morality of beating and killing people for their speech, and an implication that it is immoral that the government would object to that.

The “consequence” is getting assaulted. Which, ok, the consequence of yelling at the next car over in traffic might be getting shot in the head in a road rage incident, or the consequence of getting drunk at a frat party might involve getting raped, but you phrase it like that, *shrug* “actions have consequences” and you will be pilloried as a victim blaming jackass who is justifying murder and rape, respectively.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[anaisnein]

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*.

[slartibartfastibast]

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.

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

basic income: guaranteed

tech giants: refactored

gaystralians: able to conspicuously delay getting married just like straightalians

[mitigatedchaos]

These were the original policy positions of the Argumate Party when it was founded in 2017.  None foresaw that it would eventually lead to the literal breakaway of Western Australia, in one of few recorded uses of nuclear weapons for civil engineering in history.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

i'm starting to think universla basic income for is not perfect, but could really help. for example, victims of abuse, at home, in jobs etc would have some means at least to get out when they know it's time

argumate answered:

right, it’s not a panacea, but it helps to put a floor on exactly how terrible things can get.

[mitigatedchaos]

Though it does create a risk of potentially unlimited obligation, depending on national population policies.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@mailadreapta

Now, I suspect that we disagree a lot more on the object-level recommendations of how to achieve this (but I’m not actually sure about this given how cryptographically secure your politics are), but the general shape of what you describe is entirely compatible with the whole neoreactionary project.

I mean, I don’t really think I’ve been especially cryptic, particularly in policy recommendations.  And while Outer Hong Kong is structured as corporation, it’s more of a consumer cooperative, not something Moldbug would dream up of Fnargl mining the Earth, and I’m hardly saying one should create such a thing, merely that they could.

It may be that I see some of these object-level disagreements as a far more unbridgeable gulf between those who call themselves Neoreactionaries and myself.  I certainly feel they’re optimizing for something other than what I’m optimizing for, and sometimes becoming dangerously racist or uselessly sexist.

Perhaps it appears more cryptic because I believe there can be no instantiated pure form of National Technocracy.  Once invented, if adopted, it must be adapted to the needs, capabilities, and culture of each country to which it is applied.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

The rumors circulating around me are false,

I do not own a Machiavelli dakimakura.