Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

mobile.nytimes.com

Make America Singapore - NYTimes.com

[slartibartfastibast]

Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.

[mitigatedchaos]

Forget the fact that Singapore is something like 75% ethnic Chinese. The government there is just flat out more competent, responsive, and self-disciplined. You and I both know, Slart, that the Central Provident Fund (and its component healthcare programs) cannot exist in the United States of America because even if it weren’t shot down as evil anti-freedom paternalism, it would be raided for either tax cuts (Republicans) or social programs (Democrats) within ten years of its creation.

[slartibartfastibast]

That’s fair.

Hopefully we can automate medical specialist jobs soon.

[mitigatedchaos]

Look Slart, all I’m saying is that I should be made technocratic dictator of the North American Union. Then I can enact thousands of weird ideological trades and replace congress with a legislature made up of delegated voting think tanks that bet competitively on the outcomes of their laws to determine their funding.

It’ll be great.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

Re: Not making refugees

I’m told Bush campaigned on not getting into as many wars. Obama, of course, campaigned on not getting into as many wars, though his not-wars still created more refugees. Trump campaigned on the Iraq War being a costly disaster, on not getting into a fight with Russia, on going up against ISIS militarily (which could just mean a return to Iraq, which would not really be a new war), and on not needlessly attempting to knock over strong men and replace them with democracy - thus implicitly against getting into as many wars.

So there is demand there among the American public for reducing the number of wars, but somehow the wars happen anyway. If the second part could be rectified, the number of wars could be successfully reduced.

[argumate]

what does America spend on defence, $600 billion a year?

I’ve seen costs for the Iraq war being bandied about in the trillions.

difficult to turn off the tap, I think.

[mitigatedchaos]

I’ve been infuriated by the shear cost of the Iraq War simply in economic terms since around 2008. Either they’re looters or they’re freakishly incompetent, and I don’t like either. I’m really hoping this whole Trump thing works out. He’s at least smart enough to realize that you can’t just export democracy to other countries like it was done to Japan - or that you have to actually stay there and make it stick, like Japan.

Of course if you actually notice that not all cultures can support democracy and that hey, you’re going to have to do some real proper imperialism to make it stick and overwrite non-trivial chunks of the local culture, that marks you as right-wing these days…

Maybe I am right wing now. I did, after all, say that if a Communist Revolution emerged, I’d have to back the Anti-Communists. (Struggle sessions and famines aren’t really my thing.)

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

mobile.nytimes.com

Make America Singapore - NYTimes.com

[slartibartfastibast]

Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.

[mitigatedchaos]

Forget the fact that Singapore is something like 75% ethnic Chinese. The government there is just flat out more competent, responsive, and self-disciplined. You and I both know, Slart, that the Central Provident Fund (and its component healthcare programs) cannot exist in the United States of America because even if it weren’t shot down as evil anti-freedom paternalism, it would be raided for either tax cuts (Republicans) or social programs (Democrats) within ten years of its creation.

[argumate]

Christopher Balding has described significant accounting weirdness around these funds, where the numbers just don’t add up:

http://www.baldingsworld.com/2015/09/09/a-brief-note-about-singapore/

I’m not qualified to investigate these claims (or indeed any claims) but given the level of corrupt investment money flowing from Malaysia and Singapore into Australia recently I would certainly not take any government figures for granted.

[mitigatedchaos]

Thank you for this information. The last time I read about this, it was just noticing the discrepancy between GIC and Temasek growth (7-16%) and the CPF payout (2.5-4%), making it seem that the Dark Open Secret was that the government bureaucrats were using the population’s savings for cheap capital which they could then out-earn on and give themselves handsome salaries. But if the actual growth is not that strong, it could be a big problem.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

mobile.nytimes.com

Make America Singapore - NYTimes.com

[slartibartfastibast]

Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.

[mitigatedchaos]

Forget the fact that Singapore is something like 75% ethnic Chinese. The government there is just flat out more competent, responsive, and self-disciplined. You and I both know, Slart, that the Central Provident Fund (and its component healthcare programs) cannot exist in the United States of America because even if it weren’t shot down as evil anti-freedom paternalism, it would be raided for either tax cuts (Republicans) or social programs (Democrats) within ten years of its creation.

Edit: The zoning laws aren’t going to be fixed. The law enforcement is not going to be fixed. We aren’t going to pay our politicians an amount which actually reflects how dangerous/important they are to the economy, and we’re going to get a higher minimum wage and higher unemployment and a trash fractional UBI rather than wage subsidies. Cities will go bankrupt and urban sprawl will drain our energy. Money for clean energy will be invested into solar walkways that don’t even work.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Re: Not making refugees

I’m told Bush campaigned on not getting into as many wars. Obama, of course, campaigned on not getting into as many wars, though his not-wars still created more refugees. Trump campaigned on the Iraq War being a costly disaster, on not getting into a fight with Russia, on going up against ISIS militarily (which could just mean a return to Iraq, which would not really be a new war), and on not needlessly attempting to knock over strong men and replace them with democracy - thus implicitly against getting into as many wars.

So there is demand there among the American public for reducing the number of wars, but somehow the wars happen anyway. If the second part could be rectified, the number of wars could be successfully reduced.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Is there any way to get Muslim immigrants to Western countries to integrate better, or are the cultures just totally incompatible?

sadoeconomist answered:

I don’t think they can integrate and stay substantially Muslim, no, but I think they can integrate just fine if they drop Islam or water it down into meaninglessness like most Christians and Jews in the West have with their religions. And for that to happen I think people need to be way less *socially* tolerant of sincere Islam and recognize it as the enemy of any free society instead of virtue-signaling about how they’re not racist against a religion. Like, on the basis of how badly its claims have been debunked and how immoral its teachings are, I’d put Islam well below even Mormonism and Scientology on the religion tier list, it’s somewhere swimming in the deep abyss along with the Christian Identity Movement and Aum Shinrikyo. That’s how you should treat serious Muslims - their ideas are worthy of nothing but mockery, the principles they teach are vile, their religious traditions absurd. If you made it to the West, you’re free, you don’t have to pretend you believe in that self-contradictory nonsense any more, and you shouldn’t be bringing it with you. Ex-Muslims, though, should be especially praised and respected, like people who grew up in a cult but were strong enough to free themselves from it as adults. And beer-drinking bacon-eating cultural Muslims should just be shrugged at.

The alternative to integration, though, would be having distinct Muslim residential enclaves like Muslim Chinatowns, and I think that could also be somewhat practical - but Western states would have to allow voluntary self-segregation and greatly increased local autonomy for communities to make that happen, and they’ve spent the last half-century forcibly integrating and atomizing everyone and centralizing power. You’d need to let them enforce their abhorrent religious laws at the local level to keep them from forcing them on the country at the national level - I’m not sure that that’s something that should be tolerated, either, though.

If not either of those voluntary-leaning solutions you’d have to start doing serious 180s on a lot of the Western democratic consensus and start stripping voting rights from them, or expelling them from the country by force and becoming explicitly nationalist, or just banning Islam, if you didn’t want to wind up being reduced to dhimmi status by the inevitable consequences of the combination of democracy and a Muslim majority.

[mitigatedchaos]

I’m honestly really surprised to see someone else say this.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Why do communists seem to think that competitive markets and providing a standard of social welfare for people are mutually exclusive?

argumate answered:

Well, not all of them do, see market socialism, but there are aesthetic and political yearnings for a more communitarian approach which run much deeper.

[mitigatedchaos]

Also, some of them think markets will inevitably subvert public ownership of the state, since they tend to accumulate wealth, and wealth is a form of power.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

This whole EU thing would be going a lot better without the Euro.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Lets say no one used nukes or chemical weapons, how devastating would a world war on the same scale as the previous 2 in numbers be but with modern weaponry?

argumate answered:

I don’t think that’s a feasible scenario.

[mitigatedchaos]

“Hahaha,” laughed the CPC Chairman, gesturing towards the smog-choked city outside. “Now this mess is your problem instead of mine! I’m free! I’m free!”

Mr. Liu continued to laugh as the NATO soldiers lead him away towards the armored convoy.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[xhxhxhx]

voxette-vk replied to your link: Towards the Garfield Left (Away from Basic Income)

Terrible essay.

please elaborate

[mitigatedchaos]

Well, while I’m not ideologically inclined to agree with Voxette, I still think it’s misguided.  The economies with more restricted worker hours below 40 seem to be underperforming and have lower employment, basic income plus fewer work hours simultaneously will cause a bigger hit on the economy, basic income (or other alternatives) already creates more worker leverage to negotiate for fewer hours and safer conditions, and slashing everyone’s Mondays across the board will hit a lot harder than alternatives, because not every worker’s time is equally valuable.  Also, I don’t think it will sell well politically - and business will fight like dogs to prevent it from happening.

Which, is odd enough for me to say, seeing as with executive functioning stuff a 4-day workweek (perhaps leaving out Wednesday instead) would fit me well.

Additionally, just on shear economic cost vs efficiency, I can’t see a reason to prefer a combination of 4-day workweek + basic income in the short-medium term, given that the level of automation in the future is uncertain, over a low minimum wage plus direct-to-employee declining hourly livable wage subsidies.

Wage subsidies + low minimum wage would create lots of new jobs, which is a good sell politically, while also taking a lot of pressure off the poor and lower classes and giving them a lot more leverage.  Businesses won’t fight it as hard, even though it will need a tax increase, since they’ll benefit from lower labor costs at the low end.  It multiplies government spending with private spending for a larger potential effect.  It can also be rolled out incrementally in different amounts to test out just how much economic efficiency is lost.

There are other potential advantages, I really should write a post on it specifically, but it doesn’t seem to be getting much coverage vs UBI.  I think the Republicans might support it as their alternative to UBI come 2024/2028.

[collapsedsquid]

There’s a few points I could make, but one of the great things about giving people time off is that it doesn’t affect the value of time off, and it’s not something that can just cause a decrease in employer contribution leaving people no better off.  Giving money, that’s not as straightforward.

[mitigatedchaos]

Considering it hasn’t seemed to perform well in other countries, I’d rather make simpler overtime rules, then crack down hard on those that don’t follow them.

Anyhow, as part of how I’d sell this, I’d set the starting wage with subsidies higher than the current minimum wage, and since it would make labor relatively cheaper, there’s not much reason to expect a decrease in hours at the low end.

In addition to the risks involved with yanking 20% of the work hours out of the economy, killing Monday also incentivizes workers to work under the table in violation of the employment law in order to get enough money, since the employers can actually cut their salaries to compensate, either directly or through attrition.

With state-backed wage subsidies, there’s no incentive to work under the table, because if the income isn’t reported, you don’t get the subsidy.  Though, it is key for this plan that subsidies taper off more slowly than employer wages increase, but that’s how it should be to prevent a new Welfare Trap.