I feel like all responses to this should just be bad business ideas.
-A service to make you seem more interesting at parties.
First package, a beautiful woman in a slim fitting dress walks up to you and throws a flute of champagne in your face. She says “that was for Monte Carlo!” Then a slap across the face, she cries, “and that was for breaking my heart.”
10% discount if you remember to shout “I would give anything to be different than I am if it meant I could be worthy of you!” as she runs from the party.
Second package, a scary thickly muscled Jiu Jitsu soldier guy pretends that when he sees you he becomes instantly terrified. He seems to want to go the other way but can’t. In a stage whisper he asks how you got away. He thought you died in Cairo. You tell him your actual name and say he’s made a mistake, he goes white as a sheet. Stuttering he says of course he must need glasses, no one could have lived through that and flees the party.
Theravada Buddhism is about self-liberation. In the Mahayana traditions, though, it's considered selfish to reach enlightenment before everyone else does.
(Disclaimer: this is based on a half-remembered college course.)
The immortal cancer thing is a plot point in the Baru Cormorant fantasy series by Seth Dickinson. It's an interesting series, if not exactly my cup of tea.
> “The moneychangers in the Temple were a housing problem!” objects the YIMBY. “If first-century Jerusalem had been vertically denser, there would have been room for banks in the commercial district. The only reason they had to invade the Temple grounds was because of artificial land scarcity.“
Believe it or not, I have heard nearly this exact sermon preached at an Eastern Orthodox Church. Not the bit about "room for banks in the commercial district," but the rest of it. The thrust of the argument was that the Sadducees, the Jewish faction that controlled the temple (and the rivals of the Pharisees, the other major Jewish sect, from whose tradition both Christianity and modern Judaism descend), interpreted the law in an incredibly strict way, particularly the bit about not travelling on the Sabbath. The upshot was that in order to live up to the strictures of the law to the Sadducee standard, you essentially had to be very rich, and you had to live close to the temple. This had a predictable effect on housing prices close to the temple.
Further, the bit about the money-changers had to do with the monopolization of a scarce non-produced asset, e.g. Hasmodean currency from before the Romans took over (you couldn't use pagan money with the Emperor's image in the temple, but you could exchange it for these ancient coins, at exchange rates the moneychangers set. And then give the ancient coins right back when you made your purchase). So in addition to an economic struggle over literal land, you also had one over a scarce non-produced monopolized asset (Hasmodean coins).
It offends my sense of social justice that Scott is this funny in addition to being so smart. I'm really looking forward to gpt5 so I can tell myself he's having the humor parts written by ai.
Buying an anti-stock seems pretty similar to being short a call option: you take in a small premium in exchange for the obligation to buy a share at a specific time in the future
This was really good but I think repeats what I think of as a misconception about the effects of a land value tax:
"Land value tax could ensure that every parcel is put to its most productive use."
Compared with having no land value tax, I don't think a land value tax does anything to incentivise more productive use of land.
I have two arguments.
The first is that a land value tax is usually argued as being efficient because no one changes their behaviour due to the tax - land is in fixed supply and while there will be a price change of land, there is nothing anyone can do to avoid the tax. But if no one is changing their behaviour due to the tax, then they can't suddenly use it more productively. They will continue doing what they were always doing.
The second is that currently, if there is a better, significantly more productive use to which land could be put, the landowner is already incentivised to put it to that use - they are bearing a large opportunity cost by not doing that.
The real gain from a land value tax is the abolition of the tax that it replaces. If that's an income tax, then the efficiency gains are from the reduced deadweight loss from abolishing the income tax.
Oh, I laughed so hard at translating 'Mahayana' as 'monster truck,' and had several more laugh out louds after that. "Live forever in the hearts of those you love." Thank you, Scott.
Back to Mahayana as monster truck: Would anyone like to try to come up with equivalent translations of 'Form is emptiness, emptiness is form'? I want to laugh some more.
Having spent several cumulative party-hours explaining transmissible cancers to everyone involved, I am contractually obligated to point out that there are in fact _three_ mammals that have achieved immortality: one dog and _two_ tasmanian devils!
Masterpiece. Sounded exactly like all those EA events I used to attend. Also, wasn't there an immortal woman who is still being used in labs (hela cells)?
After thinking a little more I think Antistocks as written might actually be legal? They're described as essentially annuities with payment amounts tied to dividends or corporate income (not the same thing) or rents. That's not quite the same as a conventional bucket shop where synthetic bets were made on asset prices.
I keep reading about land tax in this forum but, STEM mindset that I am, no-one ever talks about the things I see as crucial. Can someone please crunch some real numbers on a real example so I can see what sort of $ we are looking at? Maybe there’s a manifesto of axioms somewhere that I haven’t seen and everyone else knows about. For the purposes of this comment, I’ll assume that a land tax us useful or desirable societally. If so:
1. How is each parcel of land valued?
2. Why is it valued this way and not some other way? Who has set the parameters and rules?
3. Who values the land?
4. How are they chosen, and why are they valuing the land, and not someone else?
5. What is the land tax rate per annum typically?
6. How is the tax rate calculated?
7. Why is it that rate and not something else?
8. Who calculates the tax rate, and why not somebody else?
9. What factors determine changes to the rate? Who decides what those factors are?
10. Our (in Australia) local councils apply a land plus improved value price to our house (generally very different to an expected market value) for the purpose of calculating rates (usually some $2000-4000 per annum) to pay for local roads, rubbish collection, etc. Is this a land tax?
11. The value of land in our current system is only known when it comes up for sale in the free market, and is highly dependent on location and the surrounding milieu. The same land area in the same street but at different locations in the street can command vastly different prices on sale day, with corner blocks attracting a premium and narrow frontage strips of the same area a discount, regardless of the dwelling in situ. How would a land tax deal with microclimate variability?
12. A 10 story apartment block could have 100 dwellings but no-one owns the land at base – that could belong to a separate person or corporation. Is land tax charged to the landowner on the land only, since they do not own the building, or are they slugged an improved value rate because the building makes it more valuable than empty land? (This is a common scenario in Australia, termed strata title – ownership of airspace rather than land area.)
So I asked DALL-e for an image of Mahayana in the form of a monster truck with a bodhisattva driving it, and DALL-e's head exploded with truly hideous results:
I think we should try to make this same scenario happen here in the comments!
> “We finally did it...We got a YIMBY, a crypto bro, and a youth pastor in the same room at the same party..."
Currently recruiting for a YIMBY and a crypto bro... oh, what am i thinking? I'm not sure how good my odds are of getting marshwiggle to jump in to the fray are if we got those two roles filled... he might just look at me and go "Really?" (even though he would be WAY more amusing than the Bay-Area-House-Party one!) ...So I'd better ask if anyone around here besides him is a youth pastor?
Wow, a threepeat success. This has quickly become one of my favourite series of posts of all time, and I'd hope it's either capped off at a good stopping point or the well never runs dry. Thanks for brightening a deeply miserable IRL day. I guess I can keep on bearing living in ridiculous SF if it helps generate satirical content like this...
There's a very on-the-nose short book by Ian McEwan, *The Cockroach*, which imitates *Metamorphosis* to satirize Brexit and modern British politicians (at the start a cockroach wakes up to find he has become the Prime Minister). The ridiculous policy that acts as a stand-in for Brexit is 'reversalism', the idea of switching the direction of all the money in the economy, so you'd pay to work, get paid to shop, etc. Anti-stocks would fit right in.
I've actually been a mentor for something called the Innovation Forum. https://inno-forum.org/
The best idea was a thing you wear on your arm when doing heroin that will automatically inject you with something if you OD. We had difficulty with the question of who would pay for it.
> “Max,” she says, “that’s really interesting. Would you be willing to talk more about your work, as an honored guest at next week’s Innovation Forum?”
That was really sweet. And I love how the conclusion ties up everything together. Thanks for this!
Speaking of Kabbalistic meaning, what is the significance of all those weird “brands” on Amazon with all-caps names like “QNTRY?” I can only imagine something bad would come of it.
You know, there's a fringe theory that myxozoans are the remnants of an ancient jellyfish tumor that moved to fish and kept reproducing there, until it was visited by the Turquoise-Haired Fairy and became a real animal. And they aren`t even immortal, they now produce spores instead of infecting things directly! They're an industrial concern nowadays, because they grow in the spine and brain stems of salmon, causing them to swim around in cycles and die.
Even the authors say 'yeah, that's probably not what happened' (although they do show that myxozoans lack over a hundred of the universal anti-cancer genes found in other jellies...), but it's fun to think about. An entire subphylum of parasitic brain-eating ex-cancer jellyfish that ditched their immortality to reproduce faster.
Fun fact: Among their number is the only purely terrestrial jellyfish on the planet, the couple of shrew liver jellies in the genus Soricimyxum. They're making the transition to land mammals! Myxozoa: coming soon to a human brain near you!
Fun fact 2: If Arknights ever makes a character design contest, I'll enter with a myxozoan. The irony is that they already have a brain-eating horror jellyfish (and certified good boy), but he's a moon jelly instead.
Naked mole rats arguably achieved immortality as a mammal species. Not literally, they do die, but their death odds doesn't increase with time. They don't age.
My mind is whimsical. I flashed on all the Buddha statues inflating rapidly then exploding like Thunder blowing up near the end of Big Trouble in Little China.
Protagonist should have hijacked the conversation about betting on conversation hijacking, by arguing that this betting should have been set up as a prediction market instead.
I thought the Innovation Forum was going to be a voluntary wealth distribution plan, where CEOs pay money to go to the forum and then the leftist uses the money to fund free healthcare in a local area. Maybe hard to do with a conference but people pay millions of dollars for art so it could happen.
You can think of it sort of like the stocks / antistocks in the article, but they settle to a reference value at a specific time in the future. If you don't have a reference value, as in the case of illiquid startup shares, just designate an oracle or settle them when the co goes public. They're very popular outside the US, but never caught on here for some reason. One could even make markets in them and trade them OTC with trusted friends.
"You just have to rephrase it[Buddhism] in the right language."
I'd say it's more fundamental than "language"
"But from the moment that we are dealing with "consciousness" we face the fact that there is quite probably, as William Haas maintained, a profound difference between consciousness in the East and in the West, at least in the traditions of East and West. The Western consciousness is object-oriented. The Eastern consciousness, says Haas, does not shrink from the possibility of a pure subjectivity that needs no object. For the West, consciousness is always "consciousness of." In the East, this is not necessarily so: it can be simply "consciousness." Zen summons one to a realization which will at first confuse and mislead the Western mind."
--William Haas via Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters, 1961
...
"The aim of Buddhism is then the creation of an entirely new consciousness which is free to deal with life barehanded and without pretenses. Piercing the illusions in ourselves which divide us from others, if must enable man to attain unity and solidarity with his brother through openness and compassion, endowed with secret resources of creativity. This love can transform the world. Only love can do this."
--Thich Nhat Hanh via Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters, 1961
A while back I was working on a hiring/culture website for a company, and we were discussing what DEI sort of stuff we'd have to do; I think the end result wasn't "let's do stuff to keep them away" so much as "let's just not do stuff to court them, which they find offensive anyway, and then we won't have to deal with it".
Note that the "they" here was sort of a special use. There's a lot of people who are really good at, say, software engineering from a lot of woke-protected groups, and we'd want to hire those people. But the people to whom diversity important in the way that they bring it up, unbidden, in interviews are disproportionately bad. If this is true (impressions often aren't, and I wasn't leading this charge) I'd guess it's because if you aren't great at your job you HAVE to find other stuff to hide behind, and it's hard to imagine a better shield than "find a really woke company that is afraid to bring up your shortcomings".
"When was the last time you heard of someone preaching the dharma in a red state? Never, I bet."
Don't bet before you've done the research, Astra (as anyone hoping to make easy Rationalist money by running sports betting on prediction markets should also bear in mind; see the Five Thirty Eight prediction for Liverpool (61%) to beat Brentford (20%) on Monday - final result, Brentford 3 - Liverpool 1).
You knew I had to do this (every time someone goes "this beacon of civilisation and urbanity and simple act of being a true human cannot possibly exist amongst the knuckle-dragging troglodytes of the redneck lands", as a bred-and-buttered culchie my Neanderthal sloped brow furrows and I grunt in exasperation and frustration, since not being a fully rounded true human I lack the capacity for intelligible speech). I Googled "list of red states" and then "Buddhism in [name of state]" and here are the results. I'm not saying there are a *lot* of Buddhism monasteries/centres out there, or outside the major cities, but they *are* there:
Alabama Yes
Alaska Yes
Arkansas Yes
Florida Yes
Idaho Yes
Indiana Yes
Iowa Yes
Kansas Yes (centre founded by Lama Chuck, since retired)
Kentucky Yes
Louisiana Yes
Mississippi Yes
Missouri Yes
Montana Yes
Nebraska Yes
North Carolina Yes
North Dakota Yes
Ohio Yes
Oklahoma Yes
South Carolina Yes
South Dakota Yes
Tennessee Yes
Texas Yes
Utah Yes
West Virginia Yes
Wyoming Yes
And if they wanted a youth pastor to win a bet, then they needed Father Noel Furlong:
The problem is, it is no longer based at all on their use value, it is based entirely on speculative value. Stocks are almost entirely a financial product now bought or sold based on the stocks performance and not the company's performance. Which provides perverse incentives to the company management, basically the market is eating itself.
Given the amount of enjoyment I (and probably other people) get out of these posts, someone should found an EA charity whose mission it is to lure Scott to as many of these parties as possible so that he will keep writing lots of these posts.
Always appreciate a good Merton quote, but I disagree with our monastic friend(at least as the shortish quote presents him), in that 'pure charity' is specifically the definition given to Judaic Law(Deuteronomy 6 if memory serves the famous Two Greatest Commandments). I can agree with your definition of legalism. I don't know that I disagree that faith in Christ is unavailable among Judaism or even those wholly ignorant of what we usually call Spe ial Revelation. The existence of a transcendent God almost implies in itself his Immediate Presence to all creatures, at least rational spiritual creatures. So, fundamentally every consciousness is always in a crisis, a crossroads of choosing to trust this unseen but inescapable Other and His numinous claims on our lives, or to treat Him with suspicion, with the doubt and fear which seems so appropriate in our minds to the One and only real Alien, the one who is ontologically unlike us. Presumably, differing circumstances might make this choice easier or harder, but as Paul makes it clear if you continue reading we have all made the decision that the truly Alien is truly frightening. He is unpredictable, uncontrollable and so inescapably terrifying.
Christianity's paradoxical answer to this is to introduce a man who gets treated worse than any other man, a Scapegoat of sorts, and yet still chooses to trust in this Invisible Father, and isn't introducing the perennial difficulties between fathers and sons into the crisis of faith the final twist of the knife for all of us who war with our fathers? Thus, I look on the Cross and say that if an Innocent Man betrayed, forsaken by the Law/Tao still declares that His hope is in 'the Judge of All the Earth' the unknowable Lawgiver, to revise the Tao on His behalf, not because the Perfect Law is flawed but because it is not beneficial to the ones that it's Maker loves(not beneficial to us by our fault not the fault of the law or lawmaker). So, I guess that is my response. I wrote a nice piece about the Alienness of God dragging in Sitchin here: https://comfortwithtruth.substack.com/p/ancient-alien and an examination of the unexpected faith and poor pitiful attempt to look at the Lord's psychology here:https://comfortwithtruth.substack.com/p/the-cross-considered-as-revelation
Speaking of legalizing housing, college dormitories routinely house people at densities north of 100k per mi^2 for 8k/year without issues, even though colleges are not known for competing on price. Sort of implies any perceived negative externalities of SRO hotels elsewhere were just a function of the sort of people who lived there.
Reads even more like a 100-years-later update to "The Great Gatsby." I wonder, given the continuing slow stream of tech biz RIFs, maybe next time you could throw in a character with a sphincter suddenly clenched tight enough to dent a golf ball, because he just received a Tweet that's he's being let go -- so sorry! best of luck! -- and the monthly nut on the house is about to become a problem far more urgent than finding a satisfying sex partner or achieving maximum personal spiritual growth. It could speak to people! Comfort them as they watch their 401(k)s implode and the price of hot dogs and buns, let alone organic kale and basmati rice, rocket endlessly up.
1. Any system with an 'afterlife', whether this is after a single life or after the conclusion of a cycle of rebirth deaths etc., of rewards and punishments has an incentive to death we might say, particularly as all such systems define this afterlife as, at least potentially, preferable to life.
2. Secular utilitarianism does not necessarily have this incentive to death, as it has no built in assumption that afterlife is preferable to life.
We might say that the difference is that something like EA is not intended to be complete in itself but depends on what you bring to the table, as far as assumptions beliefs and preferences?
If you send cells through your testicles to then grow and mature in someone else, isn’t this basically how babies are made (yes, I know that the answer is sort of no, but it feels… not different enough to call immortality)
Well Phil, most of your points could be addressed by reading the cited work, The Abolition of Man. Mr Lewis can speak for himself. He is comparing and contrasting different systems used to understand the universe as a teaching tool. A very standard use case but one which you dismiss out of hand as useless.
Since you have already indicated that there are no valid Christian paradigms for understanding the Law except the ones that you have experienced, and that to say otherwise is not worth a response, I won't point out that your limited experience may simply not have the vast universal applicability you attribute to it. Or that your understanding of those Christians you met may owe more to your presuppositions than to the actual beliefs of the people you met.
I would consider being offended but the way you teach with such authority on a number of faiths makes it clear that I am in the presence of a master with whom I am incapable of disputing intelligently, so please continue to teach us what we believe, oh unbelieving ass.
No way both the YIMBY dude and Crypto bro in Bay Area knew the cleansing of the temple story. A generation ago, sure pretty much all Americans would have known it, but 20 something people these days in cities, not really.
I want to say “wtf did I just read?” because I can’t tell if this is a piece of fiction or a personal account of a party you went to with some embellishments - and as a Bay Area tech slav, if I can’t tell, can anyone? - but I think maybe that is the point of this?
Well On pondering at least 3 Immortal Mammals - hmmm 🤔 that depends on the lexicon of beastiaries you may be consulting. In Australian Dream time- all the mammals are dreaming their songs that bring them into the physical world
much of this went over my head but "Bitcoin is a depiction of God - an immaterial, formless, omnipresent entity. What you do with your Bitcoin is between you and God and nobody else.”" was fucking HILARIOUS
Antistocks sound like a great idea!
...so, all the financial instruments mentioned in here have to already exist in some form, right? :P
Buddhism preaches nonself, yo.
I feel like all responses to this should just be bad business ideas.
-A service to make you seem more interesting at parties.
First package, a beautiful woman in a slim fitting dress walks up to you and throws a flute of champagne in your face. She says “that was for Monte Carlo!” Then a slap across the face, she cries, “and that was for breaking my heart.”
10% discount if you remember to shout “I would give anything to be different than I am if it meant I could be worthy of you!” as she runs from the party.
Second package, a scary thickly muscled Jiu Jitsu soldier guy pretends that when he sees you he becomes instantly terrified. He seems to want to go the other way but can’t. In a stage whisper he asks how you got away. He thought you died in Cairo. You tell him your actual name and say he’s made a mistake, he goes white as a sheet. Stuttering he says of course he must need glasses, no one could have lived through that and flees the party.
Theravada Buddhism is about self-liberation. In the Mahayana traditions, though, it's considered selfish to reach enlightenment before everyone else does.
(Disclaimer: this is based on a half-remembered college course.)
The immortal cancer thing is a plot point in the Baru Cormorant fantasy series by Seth Dickinson. It's an interesting series, if not exactly my cup of tea.
Thanks.
Brilliant.
And canine transmissible venereal tumor is real.
This struck too close to home... Up to and including the fact that my daughter's name is Astra 😂😂
> “The moneychangers in the Temple were a housing problem!” objects the YIMBY. “If first-century Jerusalem had been vertically denser, there would have been room for banks in the commercial district. The only reason they had to invade the Temple grounds was because of artificial land scarcity.“
Believe it or not, I have heard nearly this exact sermon preached at an Eastern Orthodox Church. Not the bit about "room for banks in the commercial district," but the rest of it. The thrust of the argument was that the Sadducees, the Jewish faction that controlled the temple (and the rivals of the Pharisees, the other major Jewish sect, from whose tradition both Christianity and modern Judaism descend), interpreted the law in an incredibly strict way, particularly the bit about not travelling on the Sabbath. The upshot was that in order to live up to the strictures of the law to the Sadducee standard, you essentially had to be very rich, and you had to live close to the temple. This had a predictable effect on housing prices close to the temple.
Further, the bit about the money-changers had to do with the monopolization of a scarce non-produced asset, e.g. Hasmodean currency from before the Romans took over (you couldn't use pagan money with the Emperor's image in the temple, but you could exchange it for these ancient coins, at exchange rates the moneychangers set. And then give the ancient coins right back when you made your purchase). So in addition to an economic struggle over literal land, you also had one over a scarce non-produced monopolized asset (Hasmodean coins).
I'd been very content in my decision to not move to California, but now I have intense FOMO.
It offends my sense of social justice that Scott is this funny in addition to being so smart. I'm really looking forward to gpt5 so I can tell myself he's having the humor parts written by ai.
Buying an anti-stock seems pretty similar to being short a call option: you take in a small premium in exchange for the obligation to buy a share at a specific time in the future
“What, please tell me, is the right branding for gaining immortality by becoming a sexually-transmitted cardiac tumor?”
This made me laugh out loud. Bravo.
Loved it, thank you!
>”There are immortal species of mammal? I didn’t know that!”
>“Not species. Two individuals.
OK, but what about Henrietta Lacks?
New idea: make a cell line from the person, popularize it in biomedical research, and hope scientists keep using it for the next 1000 years.
This was really good but I think repeats what I think of as a misconception about the effects of a land value tax:
"Land value tax could ensure that every parcel is put to its most productive use."
Compared with having no land value tax, I don't think a land value tax does anything to incentivise more productive use of land.
I have two arguments.
The first is that a land value tax is usually argued as being efficient because no one changes their behaviour due to the tax - land is in fixed supply and while there will be a price change of land, there is nothing anyone can do to avoid the tax. But if no one is changing their behaviour due to the tax, then they can't suddenly use it more productively. They will continue doing what they were always doing.
The second is that currently, if there is a better, significantly more productive use to which land could be put, the landowner is already incentivised to put it to that use - they are bearing a large opportunity cost by not doing that.
The real gain from a land value tax is the abolition of the tax that it replaces. If that's an income tax, then the efficiency gains are from the reduced deadweight loss from abolishing the income tax.
Now I want the SHRIMP LOVE ME T shirt.
Oh, I laughed so hard at translating 'Mahayana' as 'monster truck,' and had several more laugh out louds after that. "Live forever in the hearts of those you love." Thank you, Scott.
Back to Mahayana as monster truck: Would anyone like to try to come up with equivalent translations of 'Form is emptiness, emptiness is form'? I want to laugh some more.
Having spent several cumulative party-hours explaining transmissible cancers to everyone involved, I am contractually obligated to point out that there are in fact _three_ mammals that have achieved immortality: one dog and _two_ tasmanian devils!
There are two lineages of DFTD: DFT1, which arose from a female devil, and DFT2, which arose from a male devil. https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108(18)30117-X
(There are also all the immortalized cell lines we have in labs, but none of those would be viable in the wild afaik)
How about multiple Syrian hamsters? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagious_reticulum_cell_sarcoma
Masterpiece. Sounded exactly like all those EA events I used to attend. Also, wasn't there an immortal woman who is still being used in labs (hela cells)?
This is amazing!
After thinking a little more I think Antistocks as written might actually be legal? They're described as essentially annuities with payment amounts tied to dividends or corporate income (not the same thing) or rents. That's not quite the same as a conventional bucket shop where synthetic bets were made on asset prices.
The SEC would still probably not be a fan
> I translate nirvana as ‘freedom’, maya as ‘fake news’, and Mahayana as ‘monster truck’. Gādhrakūta is ‘Mt. Eagle’.
OK, I want to read that. And I live in a red state. I think they are onto something here.
Many of these jokes are great, but some I'm not getting. What is "cheems mindset"? Why is "SHRIMP LOVE ME, UNALIGNED AIS FEAR ME" funny?
Haha, thanks. I hate it.
the blindness of this world is intolerable, so it ought to be put to sleep or at least in some kind of timeout
This stuff is pretty good
The title made me predict that I would wind up leaving a comment amounting to "this is getting old".
However, that prediction has been falsified.
When I read a Scottposts like today's I realize what real genius is like. When all other writers become GPT'd, Scott will be the last remaining.
I keep reading about land tax in this forum but, STEM mindset that I am, no-one ever talks about the things I see as crucial. Can someone please crunch some real numbers on a real example so I can see what sort of $ we are looking at? Maybe there’s a manifesto of axioms somewhere that I haven’t seen and everyone else knows about. For the purposes of this comment, I’ll assume that a land tax us useful or desirable societally. If so:
1. How is each parcel of land valued?
2. Why is it valued this way and not some other way? Who has set the parameters and rules?
3. Who values the land?
4. How are they chosen, and why are they valuing the land, and not someone else?
5. What is the land tax rate per annum typically?
6. How is the tax rate calculated?
7. Why is it that rate and not something else?
8. Who calculates the tax rate, and why not somebody else?
9. What factors determine changes to the rate? Who decides what those factors are?
10. Our (in Australia) local councils apply a land plus improved value price to our house (generally very different to an expected market value) for the purpose of calculating rates (usually some $2000-4000 per annum) to pay for local roads, rubbish collection, etc. Is this a land tax?
11. The value of land in our current system is only known when it comes up for sale in the free market, and is highly dependent on location and the surrounding milieu. The same land area in the same street but at different locations in the street can command vastly different prices on sale day, with corner blocks attracting a premium and narrow frontage strips of the same area a discount, regardless of the dwelling in situ. How would a land tax deal with microclimate variability?
12. A 10 story apartment block could have 100 dwellings but no-one owns the land at base – that could belong to a separate person or corporation. Is land tax charged to the landowner on the land only, since they do not own the building, or are they slugged an improved value rate because the building makes it more valuable than empty land? (This is a common scenario in Australia, termed strata title – ownership of airspace rather than land area.)
So I asked DALL-e for an image of Mahayana in the form of a monster truck with a bodhisattva driving it, and DALL-e's head exploded with truly hideous results:
https://i.imgur.com/ywGuvNn.png
https://i.imgur.com/5gFF52o.png
https://i.imgur.com/HrINJJs.png
And is the second one Trump sitting in a giant wheelbarrow?
Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha, y'all.
I especially loved translating Mahayana as "monster truck". Another great piece.
I think we should try to make this same scenario happen here in the comments!
> “We finally did it...We got a YIMBY, a crypto bro, and a youth pastor in the same room at the same party..."
Currently recruiting for a YIMBY and a crypto bro... oh, what am i thinking? I'm not sure how good my odds are of getting marshwiggle to jump in to the fray are if we got those two roles filled... he might just look at me and go "Really?" (even though he would be WAY more amusing than the Bay-Area-House-Party one!) ...So I'd better ask if anyone around here besides him is a youth pastor?
Wow, a threepeat success. This has quickly become one of my favourite series of posts of all time, and I'd hope it's either capped off at a good stopping point or the well never runs dry. Thanks for brightening a deeply miserable IRL day. I guess I can keep on bearing living in ridiculous SF if it helps generate satirical content like this...
Have you considered publishing your short stories in a book format? I would love to gift them to some of my friends.
There's a very on-the-nose short book by Ian McEwan, *The Cockroach*, which imitates *Metamorphosis* to satirize Brexit and modern British politicians (at the start a cockroach wakes up to find he has become the Prime Minister). The ridiculous policy that acts as a stand-in for Brexit is 'reversalism', the idea of switching the direction of all the money in the economy, so you'd pay to work, get paid to shop, etc. Anti-stocks would fit right in.
I've actually been a mentor for something called the Innovation Forum. https://inno-forum.org/
The best idea was a thing you wear on your arm when doing heroin that will automatically inject you with something if you OD. We had difficulty with the question of who would pay for it.
> “Max,” she says, “that’s really interesting. Would you be willing to talk more about your work, as an honored guest at next week’s Innovation Forum?”
That was really sweet. And I love how the conclusion ties up everything together. Thanks for this!
Thanks for this latest episode of BAHP Season 01. I plan to binge the whole season again before watching the finale.
Scott's parties get ever better! The dog-virus is Greg Cochran, I presume. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/cell-line-infections-or-my-dog-has-no-bones/
I'm just trying to figure out how much of this is just-for-laughs exaggeration, and how much of it is truth. 50% exaggeration/comedy? 90%?
please write a novel scott
I'm so obtuse I came here hoping it was an actual party that I could get myself invited to. I've been isolated too long...
Speaking of Kabbalistic meaning, what is the significance of all those weird “brands” on Amazon with all-caps names like “QNTRY?” I can only imagine something bad would come of it.
Are we gonna get self-referential house party posts at some point? Clearly, people at the party might read the stories here
These posts are the best
You know, there's a fringe theory that myxozoans are the remnants of an ancient jellyfish tumor that moved to fish and kept reproducing there, until it was visited by the Turquoise-Haired Fairy and became a real animal. And they aren`t even immortal, they now produce spores instead of infecting things directly! They're an industrial concern nowadays, because they grow in the spine and brain stems of salmon, causing them to swim around in cycles and die.
Even the authors say 'yeah, that's probably not what happened' (although they do show that myxozoans lack over a hundred of the universal anti-cancer genes found in other jellies...), but it's fun to think about. An entire subphylum of parasitic brain-eating ex-cancer jellyfish that ditched their immortality to reproduce faster.
Fun fact: Among their number is the only purely terrestrial jellyfish on the planet, the couple of shrew liver jellies in the genus Soricimyxum. They're making the transition to land mammals! Myxozoa: coming soon to a human brain near you!
Fun fact 2: If Arknights ever makes a character design contest, I'll enter with a myxozoan. The irony is that they already have a brain-eating horror jellyfish (and certified good boy), but he's a moon jelly instead.
You know who else decided against having sex ever again after learning interesting new things about the world?
Naked mole rats arguably achieved immortality as a mammal species. Not literally, they do die, but their death odds doesn't increase with time. They don't age.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole-rat#Longevity
"Stop trying to bring more Buddhism to the West."
My mind is whimsical. I flashed on all the Buddha statues inflating rapidly then exploding like Thunder blowing up near the end of Big Trouble in Little China.
Protagonist should have hijacked the conversation about betting on conversation hijacking, by arguing that this betting should have been set up as a prediction market instead.
Is "Antireward" a real term people use or a Scott satire?
did chatgpt write this?
I thought the Innovation Forum was going to be a voluntary wealth distribution plan, where CEOs pay money to go to the forum and then the leftist uses the money to fund free healthcare in a local area. Maybe hard to do with a conference but people pay millions of dollars for art so it could happen.
Holy shit the comments section here IS the Bay Area House Party!
More rationalists should know about CFD's, contracts for difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_for_difference
You can think of it sort of like the stocks / antistocks in the article, but they settle to a reference value at a specific time in the future. If you don't have a reference value, as in the case of illiquid startup shares, just designate an oracle or settle them when the co goes public. They're very popular outside the US, but never caught on here for some reason. One could even make markets in them and trade them OTC with trusted friends.
[cue the Looney Tunes outro music]
All of this was entirely believable until I got to the youth pastor. No way is there a youth pastor in the Bay Area.
"You just have to rephrase it[Buddhism] in the right language."
I'd say it's more fundamental than "language"
"But from the moment that we are dealing with "consciousness" we face the fact that there is quite probably, as William Haas maintained, a profound difference between consciousness in the East and in the West, at least in the traditions of East and West. The Western consciousness is object-oriented. The Eastern consciousness, says Haas, does not shrink from the possibility of a pure subjectivity that needs no object. For the West, consciousness is always "consciousness of." In the East, this is not necessarily so: it can be simply "consciousness." Zen summons one to a realization which will at first confuse and mislead the Western mind."
--William Haas via Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters, 1961
...
"The aim of Buddhism is then the creation of an entirely new consciousness which is free to deal with life barehanded and without pretenses. Piercing the illusions in ourselves which divide us from others, if must enable man to attain unity and solidarity with his brother through openness and compassion, endowed with secret resources of creativity. This love can transform the world. Only love can do this."
--Thich Nhat Hanh via Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters, 1961
A while back I was working on a hiring/culture website for a company, and we were discussing what DEI sort of stuff we'd have to do; I think the end result wasn't "let's do stuff to keep them away" so much as "let's just not do stuff to court them, which they find offensive anyway, and then we won't have to deal with it".
Note that the "they" here was sort of a special use. There's a lot of people who are really good at, say, software engineering from a lot of woke-protected groups, and we'd want to hire those people. But the people to whom diversity important in the way that they bring it up, unbidden, in interviews are disproportionately bad. If this is true (impressions often aren't, and I wasn't leading this charge) I'd guess it's because if you aren't great at your job you HAVE to find other stuff to hide behind, and it's hard to imagine a better shield than "find a really woke company that is afraid to bring up your shortcomings".
> “What, please tell me, is the right branding for gaining immortality by becoming a sexually-transmitted cardiac tumor?”
Serious question: how do you come up with this kind of stuff?
"When was the last time you heard of someone preaching the dharma in a red state? Never, I bet."
Don't bet before you've done the research, Astra (as anyone hoping to make easy Rationalist money by running sports betting on prediction markets should also bear in mind; see the Five Thirty Eight prediction for Liverpool (61%) to beat Brentford (20%) on Monday - final result, Brentford 3 - Liverpool 1).
You knew I had to do this (every time someone goes "this beacon of civilisation and urbanity and simple act of being a true human cannot possibly exist amongst the knuckle-dragging troglodytes of the redneck lands", as a bred-and-buttered culchie my Neanderthal sloped brow furrows and I grunt in exasperation and frustration, since not being a fully rounded true human I lack the capacity for intelligible speech). I Googled "list of red states" and then "Buddhism in [name of state]" and here are the results. I'm not saying there are a *lot* of Buddhism monasteries/centres out there, or outside the major cities, but they *are* there:
Alabama Yes
Alaska Yes
Arkansas Yes
Florida Yes
Idaho Yes
Indiana Yes
Iowa Yes
Kansas Yes (centre founded by Lama Chuck, since retired)
Kentucky Yes
Louisiana Yes
Mississippi Yes
Missouri Yes
Montana Yes
Nebraska Yes
North Carolina Yes
North Dakota Yes
Ohio Yes
Oklahoma Yes
South Carolina Yes
South Dakota Yes
Tennessee Yes
Texas Yes
Utah Yes
West Virginia Yes
Wyoming Yes
And if they wanted a youth pastor to win a bet, then they needed Father Noel Furlong:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk_-E2eBrrQ
The problem is, it is no longer based at all on their use value, it is based entirely on speculative value. Stocks are almost entirely a financial product now bought or sold based on the stocks performance and not the company's performance. Which provides perverse incentives to the company management, basically the market is eating itself.
> Did he just say that land value tax could have solved the Resurrection of the Christ?
I love every part of this. Somebody should make George vs. Jesus vs. Crypto into a YouTube series.
Given the amount of enjoyment I (and probably other people) get out of these posts, someone should found an EA charity whose mission it is to lure Scott to as many of these parties as possible so that he will keep writing lots of these posts.
I am lucky to have achieved "fuck-you social success."
https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
This series of posts is amazing. That is all.
Always appreciate a good Merton quote, but I disagree with our monastic friend(at least as the shortish quote presents him), in that 'pure charity' is specifically the definition given to Judaic Law(Deuteronomy 6 if memory serves the famous Two Greatest Commandments). I can agree with your definition of legalism. I don't know that I disagree that faith in Christ is unavailable among Judaism or even those wholly ignorant of what we usually call Spe ial Revelation. The existence of a transcendent God almost implies in itself his Immediate Presence to all creatures, at least rational spiritual creatures. So, fundamentally every consciousness is always in a crisis, a crossroads of choosing to trust this unseen but inescapable Other and His numinous claims on our lives, or to treat Him with suspicion, with the doubt and fear which seems so appropriate in our minds to the One and only real Alien, the one who is ontologically unlike us. Presumably, differing circumstances might make this choice easier or harder, but as Paul makes it clear if you continue reading we have all made the decision that the truly Alien is truly frightening. He is unpredictable, uncontrollable and so inescapably terrifying.
Christianity's paradoxical answer to this is to introduce a man who gets treated worse than any other man, a Scapegoat of sorts, and yet still chooses to trust in this Invisible Father, and isn't introducing the perennial difficulties between fathers and sons into the crisis of faith the final twist of the knife for all of us who war with our fathers? Thus, I look on the Cross and say that if an Innocent Man betrayed, forsaken by the Law/Tao still declares that His hope is in 'the Judge of All the Earth' the unknowable Lawgiver, to revise the Tao on His behalf, not because the Perfect Law is flawed but because it is not beneficial to the ones that it's Maker loves(not beneficial to us by our fault not the fault of the law or lawmaker). So, I guess that is my response. I wrote a nice piece about the Alienness of God dragging in Sitchin here: https://comfortwithtruth.substack.com/p/ancient-alien and an examination of the unexpected faith and poor pitiful attempt to look at the Lord's psychology here:https://comfortwithtruth.substack.com/p/the-cross-considered-as-revelation
Speaking of legalizing housing, college dormitories routinely house people at densities north of 100k per mi^2 for 8k/year without issues, even though colleges are not known for competing on price. Sort of implies any perceived negative externalities of SRO hotels elsewhere were just a function of the sort of people who lived there.
You know, there was no need to move to substack for the money when you could have just sold us these t-shirts you keep coming up with.
Reads even more like a 100-years-later update to "The Great Gatsby." I wonder, given the continuing slow stream of tech biz RIFs, maybe next time you could throw in a character with a sphincter suddenly clenched tight enough to dent a golf ball, because he just received a Tweet that's he's being let go -- so sorry! best of luck! -- and the monthly nut on the house is about to become a problem far more urgent than finding a satisfying sex partner or achieving maximum personal spiritual growth. It could speak to people! Comfort them as they watch their 401(k)s implode and the price of hot dogs and buns, let alone organic kale and basmati rice, rocket endlessly up.
I want to make sure I am following your points.
1. Any system with an 'afterlife', whether this is after a single life or after the conclusion of a cycle of rebirth deaths etc., of rewards and punishments has an incentive to death we might say, particularly as all such systems define this afterlife as, at least potentially, preferable to life.
2. Secular utilitarianism does not necessarily have this incentive to death, as it has no built in assumption that afterlife is preferable to life.
We might say that the difference is that something like EA is not intended to be complete in itself but depends on what you bring to the table, as far as assumptions beliefs and preferences?
If you send cells through your testicles to then grow and mature in someone else, isn’t this basically how babies are made (yes, I know that the answer is sort of no, but it feels… not different enough to call immortality)
>Offensiveness Consultant
I found my dream job.
Well Phil, most of your points could be addressed by reading the cited work, The Abolition of Man. Mr Lewis can speak for himself. He is comparing and contrasting different systems used to understand the universe as a teaching tool. A very standard use case but one which you dismiss out of hand as useless.
Since you have already indicated that there are no valid Christian paradigms for understanding the Law except the ones that you have experienced, and that to say otherwise is not worth a response, I won't point out that your limited experience may simply not have the vast universal applicability you attribute to it. Or that your understanding of those Christians you met may owe more to your presuppositions than to the actual beliefs of the people you met.
I would consider being offended but the way you teach with such authority on a number of faiths makes it clear that I am in the presence of a master with whom I am incapable of disputing intelligently, so please continue to teach us what we believe, oh unbelieving ass.
No response needed or expected.
First hard belly laugh today!
These are so good, please keep them coming!
Very imaginative. I liked the dog tumour story. Is it true? (The bit about the tumour, not the startup.)
No way both the YIMBY dude and Crypto bro in Bay Area knew the cleansing of the temple story. A generation ago, sure pretty much all Americans would have known it, but 20 something people these days in cities, not really.
Welp... I've found my new favourite analogy.
I want to say “wtf did I just read?” because I can’t tell if this is a piece of fiction or a personal account of a party you went to with some embellishments - and as a Bay Area tech slav, if I can’t tell, can anyone? - but I think maybe that is the point of this?
I'm here for the Monster Truck Buddhism
sorry, I lost interest in this column about as fast as I would if I was at the party
When the Buddha was sitting under a tree using facts and logic to reach freedom, fake news came to fact check him; in response, he touched grass.
Well On pondering at least 3 Immortal Mammals - hmmm 🤔 that depends on the lexicon of beastiaries you may be consulting. In Australian Dream time- all the mammals are dreaming their songs that bring them into the physical world
When I Google Blackrock one of the top results is this pr release claiming loudly that they aren’t buying single homes. Lol. https://www.blackrock.com/us/individual/insights/buying-houses-facts
much of this went over my head but "Bitcoin is a depiction of God - an immaterial, formless, omnipresent entity. What you do with your Bitcoin is between you and God and nobody else.”" was fucking HILARIOUS
I was at this party. Scott forgot to mention the amazing ahi tacos.