Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[taxloopholes]

libertarians: there’s a small elite class of people that shouldn’t have such a huge amount of control over the economy

me: yah

libertarians: it’s only the public sector

me: nah

[triggeredmedia]

Have you ever met a libertarian?

You are describing liberals. They believe public sector rules and we need more govt.

[taxloopholes]

…that’s not what this means. i explained it here: http://taxloopholes.tumblr.com/post/160617784322/the-libertarian-transhumanist-the-only

[triggeredmedia]

So you are against wealth?

Do you believe someone else being rich prevents you from being rich?

Do you believe their is any govt regulations that help people gain wealth?

Do you believe people do not have a right to be wealthy?

[taxloopholes]

that’s not what I said.

I’m pointing out that the argument from libertarians that it’s governments making corporations push their interests against the public good is bullshit because it disregards how and what brought about basic regulation in the first place and what corporations do overseas WITHOUT regulations protecting workers.

I also said it’s ridiculous that just 8 people have more wealth than 3.6 BILLION people is a bit ridiculous, especially considering Western corporations rely on global poverty for cheap labor. so yes I have a problem with multi billion dollar corporations paying people starvation wages and pushing the narrative that they earned that money without exploitation. even billionaires admit to this which is pretty ironic.

if you already disagree there’s not much I can do to change your mind, though.

[ranma-official]

The “8 people have more wealth than X billion” statisic is a bit disingenuous if I’m right about the exact statisic you’re citing.

It’s not that we can just redistribute that wealth amongst these X billion and fix poverty, because these X billion actually have zero or negative net worth, meaning it won’t even make a dent. So that’s a completely different problem that needs a completely different solution.

I’m not sure what kind, though.

[mitigatedchaos]

Only what is produced can be consumed. Need to keep teching up and expanding production.

Were I in charge I might also pursue development programs in stable militarily-allied countries in order to build a high-powered international bloc, transforming the national interest into one that could justify this kind of investment, buuut much of the Left would despise me.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

AnCaps acting as if we forgot about workers locked into burning factories, rivers so polluted they became fire hazards, meat packing plants so vile they contributed to more deaths of soldiers than enemy action, women licking radium paint, dumping PFOA in the water supply, and every other abuse by business. They would have us believe voluntary consumer action is sufficient to address all these and other problems, when it already isn’t sufficient now. They say that “well that isn’t worse than what states have done”, but that’s mostly because these companies do not have freely-operating military arms and are instead militarily subordinate to states. Even abolishing LLCs does not actually solve it, since it’s possible to set up alternate webs to escape liability, and it’s far easier and cheaper to cause damage than to fix it. People cheated at Commie rules. No reason they wouldn’t cheat at AnCap rules, too.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

Even the axiom of self-ownership isn’t so simple to pin down, and biological experimentation is only going to make it worse.

[remedialaction]

I literally could just amend “to you” to every post you make on the subject, at this point. :P

[argumate]

It’s pretty tough to define self-ownership given the existence of chimeras and conjoined twins, let alone psychological issues like split personalities and all the future weirdness that biotech is going to unleash.

Given that people have been arguing over the definition of “self” for thousands of years so far and it shows no sign of abating I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that there are still unresolved issues here.

[barryogg]

So this post has helped me finally crystalize a recurring train of thought I am having when confronted with other people’s opinions. See, my first reaction to the post above is absolute terror.

Because my brain tends to very quickly and wildly extrapolate any given view to its most extreme consequences. And boy howdy can you extrapolate a lot of things from a negation of self-ownership. Existing terrible things, like the war on drugs (of course the actual historical reasons for the war on drugs are horrible and racist but in theory you can rederive it from one’s health being a public matter), or reproductive coercion; but also lots of speculative terrible things. So th thoughts short-circuit from ‘there are weird things going on in the margins’ to ‘Argumate wants use the fact that chimeras exist to be able to kill me and harvest my organs for the greater good, and I will not have any moral foundation to object to that’.

Of course this is a bizarre way of thinking because the majority of people argue for issues because they care for these specific issues and not some wild consequences that are conceptually related, and aren’t trying to use foot-in-the-door tactics (and those who do try to get a foot in your door can be identified pretty easily). And in the concrete example of this here conversation it’s not even a policy discussion, but rather a theoretical musing. So all that anxiety is completely unfounded. Alas.

And I think that most concepts are useful even if they’re fuzzy at the margins. Non-relativisitc moleds were wrong but still we’ve managed to come up with planes.

[argumate]

Personally I think that some kind of contractualism is a better approach for getting the outcome that you want.

I don’t want to have my organs harvested without my consent, and nor does anyone I know, and even though the veil of ignorance is not mandatory, in practice in a world of seven billion people it’s very difficult to make rules that say you can’t be a dick to anyone except barry specifically.

Negotiating the individual issues is always going to be necessary; simple axioms either imply too much or too little, and are best used as slogans and rallying points to guide the political process.

While I believe in self-ownership, that really means I support most of the positions associated with the concept of self-ownership, not that I think they can necessarily be derived from this single axiom nor that this axiom is necessarily the foundation for morality and politics.

[remedialaction]

The issue I have with this, my esteemed strigiform and self-employed pharmacist, is idea that someone can like the arguments and concepts that surround a thing (ie: self-ownership in the recent case, but broadly libertarian ideals in general seem to get caught up in this a lot) but then dislike or even reject the principles behind those arguments. In short, there is a lot of folks who seem to like the results of libertarian arguments but don’t like where they come from.

Which is sort of a running issue, because in many cases the principles the arguments are founded upon can lead to some unpalatable ends, at least to some people. Folks will seem to say they don’t want to throw out the baby with the bashwater and ditch the principles with the unfortunate implications for their wants and desires, and keep the results, but the problem is you can’t really do that.

Like, the arguments and the like that surround self-ownership, and the derived protections from it, cannot be defended by the merits of how you, or anyone else likes them. The issue is that far from being difficult to make rules that say you can’t be a dick to any of the seven plus billion people except Barry, it’s actually exceedingly easy to do so unless your moral and ethical foundations are in order, and are universal.

Because that’s the only way to avoid explicitly allowing arbitrary and subjective choices into the system of morals and ethics.

Like, yeah, you have to use negotiation and navigate the complex network of human interactions and any society is going to be heavy on contract, but you can’t build your ethical framework from the top down. It’s got to have a base to build up from. Folks like the results of the principles but hate the principles, and that is just a recipe for disaster. 

[mitigatedchaos]

In practical terms, people liking something enough to take up arms to force others to comply with it - like property in general for instance - is how a political theory is physically realized. So if everyone hates the principles, then it doesn’t matter how much you think they’re true, unless you have all the guns. And from what I’ve seen of actual human behavior and actual markets and not hypothetical spherical cow markets, AnCap/pure libertarianism’s consequences will ensure that it is never the most viral meme. Which, IMO, is good because it lacks the ability to recognize that entire categories of human suffering are bad.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

> 2058
> arguing with Commies on minicom
> point out that the GDP per capita of the DSAZ is 8x that of Seattle
> point out no lines for antirejection drugs in DSAZ
> mfw “the Free Peoples’ Republic of Seattle isn’t real Socialism”
> mfw “Detroit Special Autonomous Zone is Fascist Dictatorship”
> mfw receiving these messages at coffee shop w/in DSAZ

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

multiheaded1793 asked:

Solution to the previous anon: GTFO those two places, you are the traffic, etc.

wirehead-wannabe answered:

The point of the two-income trap is that housing prices are rising faster than can be accounted for simply by expanding populations, iirc

[mitigatedchaos]

ＺＯＮＩＮＧ ＬＡＷＳ
ＣＲＩＭＥ ＲＡＴＥＳ

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Yeah, I think it would probably be deemed to be a tip and not a gift. Just *saying* "this is a personal gift and not taxable" isn't a magic spell you can recite to make something nontaxable! Of course, nobody's going to actually care about an unreported, looks like $7 there, per se, but if it's a regular thing it could be a problem.

argumate answered:

I think to make it stick you’d have to switch to a complete gift economy, where you regularly give gifts to people who aren’t currently providing you services, and don’t give gifts to people who are (as that is their gift to you).

That works for small groups, but doesn’t work so well in cities of millions where you can’t effectively maintain personal social ties with every single person you might possibly interact with. Then if you use an app or something to keep track of gifts you’ve just invented a new form of currency, which would actually be kind of cool.

[mitigatedchaos]

On the magic spell angle, see also SovCits who are too dumb to realize that the state is not validated by laws but by force. (Property, of course, also ultimately comes from force and not moral law.)

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

Well, NIMBYs killed microhousing in Seattle which was going to be the kinds of small, affordable apartments that people could actually afford to live in.

Yeah, that’s one of the problems with the whole “but that isn’t REAL Capitalism!  We need to deregulate!” things.  The regulatory capture that corrupted the existing process will also corrupt its dismantling unless you fix it, and Capitalism pays people to subvert public ownership of the state.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[dragon-in-a-fez]

there is so much going on here.

[mitigatedchaos]

We want to be tolerant.

But Capitalism.

But restroom materials and service cost money.

[bambamramfan]

The issue is not money to run the restrooms. The marginal cost of extra people using the restrooms is trivial. You already have spent the capital to build it, so anything more is… some more rolls of toilet paper, and a few more hours of minimum wage janitorial staff?

The issue is who would use publicly available, free restrooms. Which is to say randos: homeless people, criminals, passerby’s and tourists who do not have money to spare, etc. Free facilities often attract that kind of people, and store managers are deathly afraid of their consumerist utopia looking like a waystation for riffraff (like our stereotypes of bus stations or public libraries.)

Which is why the exclusion of capitalism is so vital. It’s for everyone who is clean and responsible and will draw more people to want to be a customer at that store. In the new era that includes transgender people and handicap people and racial minorities, which is great progress, but it still relies on the idea that some groups of people are unwanted, and too many of them are a nuisance not a blessing.

[mitigatedchaos]

Problem: While some people are unwanted for reasons that are griping, others are unwanted for reasons that are valid.

Quite frankly I think restricting it to customers in environments where there are a lot of people that would muck it up is a valid decision, and while I suggested materials and money, I should have included opportunity-cost type stuff as well.  

I get that it’s ‘ironic’, but it doesn’t feel particularly deep to me, and the secondary side-effects - either those that brought this situation about, or of whatever solution will be undertaken to ‘fix’ this - are being ignored.  (Though less so by you.  More in the general case.)

You might just think of it as my having developed an emotional eye-rolling reaction to this type of critique.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[dataandphilosophy]

Things I wish existed: apartment buildings with a “mandatory savings clause.” Add in whatever is needed to make it palatable, but fundamentally make people contribute to a savings account each month an amount equal to their rent (increase or decrease by factors required), and that savings account can’t be withdrawn from such that it would fall below min(“months paid in * amount per month”, 24) before the person retires or leaves the apartment building.

Why on earth would this be a good idea? Wealthy people may be assholes in many ways, but they aren’t going to be obviously dealing drugs in the corridors, they will be more considerate about loud music and parties, and they generally prefer being around other wealthy people for this and other reasons. Traditionally, we’ve kept poor people out of places by actually charging them money, but this results in low savings, insecurity, and much more being spent on wasteful housing than needs to be spent. This method allows for individuals to live cheaply without having to suffer the injury of dealing with low-income people

[wirehead-wannabe]

@athrelon

[mitigatedchaos]

This is a good idea, but it won’t happen because it isn’t market-competitive.  Only a Rationalist apartment building owner actively trying to help the country would do this.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[jaiwithani]

We should outlaw firefighting. We’re exploiting people who need money, coercing them to put themselves at risk so that others may live. What kind of society allows people to sell their own bodies like that?

On an unrelated note, it’s still illegal to purchase kidney transplants everywhere but Iran. 12 people in the United States alone die every day waiting for one. There are few if any long-term negative health impacts of kidney donation, though it does require taking some time off which anyone but the rich would need to be compensated for.

[mitigatedchaos]

There are probably ways to mitigate the incentive risks in paid organ donation, or opt-out organ donation, but given how conditions are it won’t happen. Even something as simple as “yes Dr. Richmann you may purchase a higher place in the organ recipient list, but you must pay for the procedure for four other people”.