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Sep 29, 2023
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There needs to be a word for "saying things that are probably true, but saying them with an unjustified degree of confidence". Because this is the current standard mode of communication shoved down our throats by those with the big megaphones regarding things like election fraud and covid and global warming and so forth.

The fact that they say "Noooo, of course there was no fraud, shut up you lunatic" instead of saying "Well yeah, obviously there's always some fraud, but come on, it's unlikely that it's going to amount to a hundred thousand net votes in several different states" makes me very suspicious. But in reality it probably doesn't make them wrong, it just makes them terrible people.

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Sep 29, 2023
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"It never happens, and if it does that's a good thing" attitude.

A couple years back I looked at the Mariposa County results, as that was very disputed, in part because of a long-standing perception that elections there were corrupt and rigged, because previous election - Mariposa and surrounding counties all red. That election - surrounding counties remain red, Mariposa flips blue, this wins the state for Biden. *Looks* suspicious, but is it?

Digging down into the results, Mariposa was red in 2016 by a slim margin, and turned blue in 2020 by a slim margin (I think but can't remember definitely that it was something like 5,000 votes). Now, that *could* be the result of vote fraud, but it could also, perfectly credibly, be wibbly voters who had been swayed to Trump in 2016 being swayed to Biden in 2020. No fraud needed or proven.

But when there was such blanket denial that any fraud could possibly have taken place at all ("most secure election ever!") that was a terrible reaction born of pure defensiveness and didn't help the same way explaining debatable results like Mariposa would have. Different states had different standards, and when I read one (can't remember the particular state) that accepted post-in votes up to a week after the ballot ended, with no postmark being needed - well, can you blame anyone for thinking this was less than secure and could be exploited for fraud?

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I think you're confusing "D's now basically admit" with "I wrongly believe".

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Oh, gawd. Thank you for this. The comment is now deleted. It was a remarkable piece of irony oblivious malarkey.

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Sep 28, 2023
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I think that's an obvious idea, I've seen many references to it before. It's just the practical implementation (and the cost of designing, manufacturing and maintaining the system that can do that) is the challenge. I think I'd pay some additional money for a car that can do that, but I have no idea if that would cover the added complexity... I suspect it'd take a while until it becomes a feature of mainstream car models, if at all.

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For point 7, the one on the right seems to have a cat ear right in the center of the picture, not to mention lines that make me see whiskers. It seems pretty obvious to me, so I'm wondering if this is a typical mind thing?

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I hope you mean the one on the left?

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Oops, yes I do, I can't see the pictures when I commented. So yes, the one on the left

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I stared at those pictures til my eyes bled and didn’t see no cat.

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Look in the upper-right corner, there are some obvious tabby-like vertical stripes and some triangular shapes that could read as ears. EDIT: also in the left image, directly above the driver's cab door, there appears to have been what looks a *lot* like a cat's right ear superimposed over the image, possibly continuous with the rest of a cat's face superimposed on the rest of the train (suggestive but difficult to make out). It's a sharp-cornered orange-brown feature rather than a more purely dark foliage shadow.

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I appreciate your valiant effort to describe where you see these things. But I fail to perceive them. Too bad we can't post photos in the replies. I'd like to see what you're talking about with some helpful arrows and circles.

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Wow this is really interesting. For me it was like, "of course people say it's more catlike it literally has ghostly cat ears"

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Huh? It's so obvious that I thought it was a joke or something. Wild that some people can't see it. Have you considered that you may just be an NPC?

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Yeah, I wonder what the difference is. I did very well in a semester long color mixing course, so I don't think it's partial color blindness, but I cannot see it at all. My husband can see it a bit, and ones like the New York picture much faster than I can.

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What would NPC have to do with not seeing the cat? And I'm not color blind. But my visual perceptions seem to be more along the autistic spectrum than normal people. For instance, I'm able to pick out underlying patterns hidden in a lot of noise quickly because I immediately focus on a detail of the pattern and visually connect my way through a pattern — rather than taking in a gestalt of the picture (not sure I'm explaining this well). So, even though I now see the "cat ear" object in the lefthand image of the train, the train refuses to resolve itself as a cat to me. I was never able to see the images in those magic eye patterns, either. And I've never been able to see the cat in the Georgian cat image (link below). I've given up trying.

The funny thing though, is I've probably got a better ability to distinguish subtle hue differences in colors than most people. And I used to have a photographic memory for maps and diagrams (but that's faded with old age). I could accurately draw a map or diagram from a single viewing—which made me a whiz at geography. Nowhere near as good as Stephen Wiltshire, though (second link below). I could only remember 2-d images. He can do it 3-D!

https://www.henrygeorge.org/catsup.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire#:~:text=Stephen%20Wiltshire%20MBE%2C%20Hon.,after%20seeing%20it%20just%20once.

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I don't think anyone claims the train "resolves itself as a cat to the viewer". They're just saying that the left image have certain features which look like cat ears etc. so of course an AI would score that image as more "cat-like" than the right image.

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I couldn't see it on my PC monitor, and on my laptop monitor I can only see it when looking straight at the screen - tilting the screen seems to reduce contrast and hide the effect.

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The cat in the upper right is visible in both pictures, though.

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The cat ear is in the dark green foliage above the center of the train. Don't feel bad; I had to turn up my monitor brightness by a lot in order to see it. You might even need to turn off your blue light filter (if you have one).

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OK. I can see the cat-ear-shaped object that you're talking about in the foliage. It doesn't help me to resolve the cat face in the train, though. To me the "ear" vaguely resembles a giant manta ray with its tail behind it crashing into the train. Lol! Now that you've pointed out the "ear" I can't unsee the manta ray.

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its a giant cat head looming over the train, made out of foliage. the cat has its eyes closed and mouth open.

i think the difference is they changed the deep shadow to emphasize the illusion of a jaw and open mouth.

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I can see it on the PC but not on my phone. This explains the Google antitrust case.

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😆

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Wow you are right. I don't know how I missed that

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The left picture look like it was Deep Dreamed a bit (though those usually produced dog faces and pagodas).

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I see it as well. Does someone want to help me out with the text in the skyscrapers, though? The obvious text Scott referred to is nevertheless eluding me.

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New York in the dark space between the skyscrapers

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Ahhh....yes, I see it now. Thank you.

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Thank you! Cat was fast but could not get that one until I saw your answer here.

Maybe we should get a |Spoiler| tag

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Yeah, I can make out a cat but it's a lot like looking at clouds and seeing a bunny rabbit or a fish or an omen form the gods or whatever.

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I've stared at both of these pics for 10 minutes, and I can't perceive any difference between the two pictures except that the chromatic values of the greens in the foliage seem to be different. Not sure if I'm seeing a difference in contrast between the two. I do happen to see two eyes and a smile on the cow-catcher in both the photos, though.

Full disclosure, when I take the pattern detection test for autism, I test as autistic. So, even though I don't consider myself to be autistic, I seem to be quite neurodivergent at least when it comes to visual perception.

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Have you ever done those "magic eye" images that were popular in, I think, the late 80s early 90s? The trick is to defocus your eyes slightly, as if you're looking at something behind the picture, or as if you have a 1000-yard stare. Doing that with a pair of side-by-side images, like this pair, can make the differences jump out more clearly.

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This blog has discussed Georgist ideas before, so it isn't too surprising that many here can see the cat.

https://www.henrygeorge.org/catsup.htm

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**applause**

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This is the most SSC comment ever, and I love it.

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When I first looked at the image on my PC monitor, I couldn't see anything cat-like. Now that I try it on my laptop monitor, it pops out pretty clearly, but only when viewed a certain angles - tilting my screen seems to reduce the contrast and hide the cat features. I totally think it's a monitor thing, as Scott theorized originally.

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Yeah, I saw the cat ear too. Seemed obvious.

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#7 it literally looks like there is a faint picture of a cat superimposed on the train on the left. I would think the selection would be practically unanimous.

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I saw the cat in the leaves above the train cabin

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Same here.

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It helps that it's an unusually catlike train to begin with. The driver's windscreen panels and the little red circle already have roughly the right shape and proportions to look like a cat's eyes and mouth.

You wouldn't get this result without an already catlike locomotive (this is a sentence I have never written before).

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I don't think that's it. As other commentators are saying, there's a faint picture of a cat superimposed on the adversarial image, that humans can see.

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I can barely see the ear above the left train. Maybe this is a visual contrast thing? I’m nearly 50 and have less good contrast than I used to

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i am the same age and saw it right away. the shadows are altered to define the side of the kittys jaw and open mouth more.

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Yes. Anyone else see a giraffe similarly superimposed on the right image?

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I see an ostrich/emu-shaped bird on top of the train in the shadows of the foliage.

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For 6, the giant plane: does anyone know the name of a sci-fi novel featuring huge passenger planes that circle the Earth, never landing, refueling in mi-air? Passengers use small shuttle planes to dis/embark. It was written no later than early-80's.

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That sounds like Timothy Zahn's story "Between a Rock and a High Place", published in Analog in 1982. IIRC the large, permanently flying craft was called a Skyport, and the plot involved a feeder plane crashing into it in a way that didn't immediately take it down but made it impossible to evacuate.

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Yes, this is it! Thank you.

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Also on the giant plane: you refer to a normal-sized plane "bottom left", which I think should be "bottom right".

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Based on my knowledge this is not possible with most fusion designs which don't have the thrust to weight ratio to fly but may be possible with Zap and Helion's reactors. Particularly Helion which wouldn't require a steam generator. They may reach tantalizing levels of performance in the next few years looking to demonstrate step before a full size reactor results

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27: Rolling machine setters, operators, and tenders? One of these things is not like the others.

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They're just too desirable to stick to one partner.

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"Brandy, you're a fine girl" (you're a fine girl)

"What a good wife you would be" (such a fine girl)

"But my life, my lover, my lady is setting, operating, and tending rolling machines"

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This is great.

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5, flying aircraft carrier: The Soviets actually did make something like this, though not nearly as big. It was done by sticking fighters on existing bombers, and it turns out that while they added weight, they also increased its lift ability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zveno_project

16, defund the police: Doesn't this proposal rely on the fact that societally you have majority support, or at least a very significant minority? Also would those who want Chauvin punished be happy with something like community service? (Also killing someone because they didn't do the right amount of community service seems like it would cause more problems than it solves, especially for those advocating defunding the police...)

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It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.

Like, Joe the Random Shoplifter gets sentenced to community service, and he fails to do it. Is anyone sufficiently bloodthirsty to go murder him over it?

What if he's part of a gang, and I'm pretty sure that his gang will murder me if I kill him? And those murderers feel confident that they can murder any further state-sanctioned killers that come their way to murder them?

When this kind of thing was tried in medieval Iceland, did it lead to a just and peaceful society, or did it lead to generations-long blood feuds and shockingly high levels of axe murder?

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Sep 28, 2023
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Turning into Medieval Iceland would be a step down for a lot of places but it would probably be a step up for, say, Philadelphia. So yeah, why not?

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>It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.

That's not obvious. If it's legal to take an outlaw's stuff (it usually is), well, then, you have to deal with enterprising gentlemen who make "killing outlaws for their stuff" their entirely-legal profession (the most recent case of this I'm aware of is privateers, who typically weren't paid by the state issuing the letter of marque).

The problem of warlords/gangs that can defy such gentlemen, however, is a real one.

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The "defying efforts to kill them" issue seems like a serious one even without bringing gangs and warlords into the picture.

If you have a regular person who's already known to have a gun and a propensity for violence who's declared an outlaw, they're probably not going to want to be killed, and will make efforts to defend themself. If someone tries to kill them and take they're stuff, they'll probably try to kill them back. The other person isn't legal to murder, but so what? They're already an outlaw.

If out of every several people condemned to outlawry, at least one ends up killing more people in defense of their life and property, then the system ends up looking a whole lot worse than our current police force.

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The English privateers in fact were paid by the state, in theory at least. Every ship they captured was supposed to be brought in to an English port to be condemned as being a valid target. If this happened, the ship and its cargo could then be sold.

If the court ruled against the capture, the captain (the one with the letter) was personally liable for compensation to the owners of ship and cargo - and likely would be bankrupt as a result.

Now there were a lot of ways around this. The courts in the Caribbean were much more lenient (and much faster) than the ones in England, since they were often short on things and ships. A personal relationship between the owner of the letter and the governor could cover many sins. The downside was that they were often also short on cash money.

For that matter, a privateer with a letter for e.g. French ships, could take a Danish ship (or take a ship and then find out it was Danish). They could then take it to e.g. a Portuguese colony for condemnation and sale. The "condemnation" in this case would likely be very informal.

It could be chancy to do this if word got back to England though - the ship owners could end up suing the letter owner in English court, likely years later. It would be an uphill battle, but still expensive.

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>The English privateers in fact were paid by the state, in theory at least. Every ship they captured was supposed to be brought in to an English port to be condemned as being a valid target. If this happened, the ship and its cargo could then be sold.

That is not what I'd call "paid by the state". They were taking stuff from merchants, and then selling it to - for the most part - other merchants, with the state's permission; no money was coming out of the state's coffers except if the state happened to be the buyer. The state could be literally bankrupt and the privateers could still sell to someone else. And certainly they're not being paid for the attack *per se*.

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You are correct - the state did not pay privateers to attack ships. Sometimes it was the other way around - the privateer would pay for the letter (or at least set up a bond). Though that would have been quite limited in time; privateering was pretty chancy; I doubt you could charge much for a license most years and get any takers.

There were things like "ship money", but that was paid to actual navy crew. The navy could "bring in" a captured ship, but that was more like buying a used car at auction.

Privateers were intended as a less formal expansion of the navy, so to make sense they had to be cheaper for the state than building and crewing more navy ships.

It's also possible that this was intended to (sort of) regulate something that might happen anyway - there was a lot of rationalizing by the English that the Spanish considered all non-Spanish in the New World to be pirates and bandits already...

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Aren't bounty hunters a simple and modern example of this? If you skip bail, a bondsman will send some armed thug after you (or a professional, but the point is that they could basically send a thug)

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No; bounty hunters are paid by the person sending them, not in stuff they loot from the target.

This conversation is about how and whether one could enforce laws without the state paying for police.

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> No; bounty hunters are paid by the person sending them, not in stuff they loot from the target.

Can't they just wave a magic wand and call it "civil forfeiture"?

(mostly joking here)

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Privateering worked bc ships were filled with valuables, or at the very least the ship itself was valuable. Getting in deadly confrontations to get somebody's clothes and smartphone sounds very stupid unless somebody has ulterior motives.

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His house, though?

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... How many criminals do you think own real property?

Most likely, you'd be ridding an owner of a troublesome tenant, and such owner would owe you nothing more than a pat on the back for the service

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Plus the problem of de facto death penalty for failing to turn up for your community service! Pretty sure defunding advocates would regard this as a bug rather than a feature (as would I, naturally).

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The gang thing gets to the interesting part of this - thinking about why it wouldn't work in, say, modern America even to the extent it worked in Iceland. For it to work, you need a broad majority of people who 1) like the law basically as it is, 2) trust the judgments of the courts at least enough to use them as a focal point and accept them if they disagree and 3) are willing (able?) to use at least enough violence that their numerical preponderance overwhelms any other group of people.

The US is an interesting case, because the Old West (at least in books/films, I know nothing about the real world version) was able to at least use the posse system which is in the same ball park. On the "do I buy it" heuristic, I feel like this would work in rural Wyoming, but not remotely in Chicago (neither of which have I ever been to).

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The only thing I know of real posse is what a friend learned about his Grandfather from Ancestory.com of all places. He knew his mother was the child of an older man, but never heard much about his grandfather. Until he got an ancestry.com account. He found a newspaper article about the trial of the posse that murdered his uncle and grandfather—who definitely had it coming. His grandfather and uncle were outlaws in a remote Arizona farming community, I don't know the dates, probably 1920s. On Sundays—when everyone was in Church—they'd steal every tool and implement from a farm. When the posse caught up to them, they were strung up, and shot into two parts. Only there was an observer who was not in the posse who reported this to the state police.

If you steal the farming tools from a subsistence farmer, you're condemning his family to death. So like I said, they had it coming.

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> It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.

There's always slavery.

One way or another, someone's going to want to do something with the meat that your mind calls home. Bodies are just made of organs that can be used for something else.

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>It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.

Disagree. There are always people who are willing to kill a man just to watch him die, and aren't terribly picky about which man so long as he lives somewhere near Reno (or wherever is convenient to the wannabe killer). Most of these people would prefer not to spend the rest of their lives in Folsom as a consequence. If the State can officially say, "hey, all you people who ever wanted to kill someone just to watch them die, if you kill *this*, then we don't put you in prison and maybe we even call you a hero!", then it will probably inspire action even against an outlaw whose boring tax-law violations would otherwise never get anyone's blood boiling.

Even more so if the killer gets to keep the outlaw's stuff.

So there's plausibly a stable equilibrium in which each community has say a hundred such wannabe killers, and every criminal who gets caught just meekly does their assigned community service or whatever because the first one stupid enough to choose outlawry is going to have a hundred guns after them. Even the protection of a gang might not be enough against those odds.

Of course there's also a stable equilibrium in which nobody does their community service, there are thousands of nominal outlaws walking around, all of them feeling pretty secure because odds are that the one killer who would eventually have chosen them as a target will instead have been killed by one of the ten other outlaws he picked first. And plenty of other reasons not to want to implement this plan, even if we would get some cool new Sagas out of it.

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The Johnny Cash reference is a nice touch, John

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The question really comes down to whether Youtube or Twitch would allow you to monetize the video of you hunting down and killing various criminals across the country. If so then there would definitely be 'content creators' filling that void in the market.

Also relevant is whether 'it's ok to kill this person' means 'it's ok to kill this person and take their stuff' or 'it's ok to threaten to kill this person in order to mug them' or etc. Having an asymetrical right to kill someone gives you a lot of power over them that can be easily exploited to gain things other than the simple joy of murder, if the law allows it.

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community service isn't a thing if you haven't someone who actually compels you to do the service.

It's the whole libertarian mantra about how the government threatens to kill you if you don't pay your taxes : yes, ultimately every system of punishment must be able to excalate until obedience is obtained, otherwise the system doesn't work.

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It is amazing how many people don't understand this. At the foundation of all enforcement is well FORCE.

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Yup. There's a reason why the polisci definition of a "state" is "a [political entity] that maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence".

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I think you've misread or misunderstood something.

The proposal is "community service, or we declare that it's now legal to kill you and take your stuff". That's a threat of force, but it doesn't actually need police to enforce it.

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Gangs remain problematic, but as far as killing-for-shoplifting goes, it seems reasonable to extend the idea to different levels of outlaw-ness. Maybe for petty crimes the judge can declare that it’s legal to steal your stuff and call you names, but murder’s still out.

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It still means any punishment is limitless. If you get caught stealing a loaf of bread (though without police, who would catch you?), then everything you own is now fair game. People talk about a cycle of poverty, but this seems even worse.

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Oh I wouldn't want to live in this society, to be clear. I just think it *could* reach a stable equilibrium (or at any rate, the reasons it couldn't, e.g. gangs, are not the same as the counterargument you were gesturing at).

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Yeah I'm sure it could do that, I'm just arguing any implementation would be far worse than today for everything the Defund the Police crowd cares about.

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If you have no police, then the shopkeeper catches you. He can't hand you over to the police, so what do you think happens then?

Police are to protect the criminal from the public, as mob justice is famously error-prone.

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Or you do the community service/pay the fine that the court orders; at the moment if you don't do that you're sent to prison. In any system, option 1 is stealing stuff's illegal, in which case there's either a penalty a thief doesn't have to co-operate with (incarceration/execution/mutilation/outlawry) or a penalty the thief needs to cooperate with (fines/community service) backed up the threat of a non-co-operative penalty if they don't co-operate. Option 2 is no penalty or an unenforceable co-operation-requiring penalty.

Of course, if you had a purely digital currency then fines become a non-co-operative penalty, and similarly things like employment blacklists or social credit systems could work in the same way.

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In the given example, you would probably be assigned a relatively small amount of community service or fine for shoplifting. The punishment would only be limitless if you refuse to comply.

(this doesn't mean it's a good idea and I think even the contest winner was more interested in creativity than practicality)

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16. Trying to discuss this with a straight face reminds me of my days of smoking way too much pot with my friends. “No really Gunflint, tell me why this wouldn’t work” passes me the joint.

Or of the professor played by Donald Sutherland in Animal House having a high bros discussion with his students.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JUOGxePBs50

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Not relevant, but I also like the exchange in the classroom.

Jennings : Don't write this down, but I find Milton probably as boring as you find Milton. Mrs. Milton found him boring too. He's a little bit long-winded, he doesn't translate very well into our generation, and his jokes are terrible.

[Bell rings, students rise to leave]

Jennings : But that doesn't relieve you of your responsibility for this material. Now I'm waiting for reports from some of you... Listen, I'm not joking. This is my job!

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#15 Two points. To your question, my understanding is that the Czech government has been giving very generous subsidies to parents for almost 20 years now (in the range of $10,000 per child per year). Looks like it's having the intended effect. Link below.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/07/improve-us-birth-rate-give-parents-money-and-time/619367/

That being said, making sense of this graph for other countries is complicated by the changes in the scale of the birth rates. Top birth rate changes from >1.96 to >1.76. Just pointing that out for others to beware.

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The trouble with flat-rate subsidies to parents is that you largely wind up incentivising poor people to breed, whereas what you _want_ is to encourage rich people to breed.

My preferred solution is to allow tax thresholds to be shared across a whole family. So if the top tax rate cuts in at $200K for a single and $400K for a couple it should be $600K for a couple with one kid, $800K for a couple with two kids, and so on.

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Sep 28, 2023Edited
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As another low fertility rich person, I agree with everything you said. It’s a hard problem to solve.

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I would expect that subsidies are going to make the biggest difference in a family where it tips the scales towards the wife becoming a stay-at-home mom. Because the decision to become a SAHM is associated with a higher probability of additional children -- the marginal cost of another child is now much lower.

I think this scenario is common enough in the upper middle-class: the husband is a businessman, engineer, lawyer, or doctor; his wife is a teacher, nurse, administrative worker, etc., whose gross salary is around 1/3 to 1/2 of his, less than that on an after-tax basis. She could quit her job, and she's not exactly passionate about her work and probably a little burnt out by the time her 30s arrive, but the pinch from the lower income will be a little painful, particularly in his late 20s or early 30s when his career is still gathering steam but key baby-making years (he might be earning 2x her income at age 30 but 4x at age 50).

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I agree. Good childcare is better than extra cash, because cash often can't buy you good childcare. It would probably help if part-time jobs were more available (also for men!); then two partners could each have a job and have enough time left for kids.

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Not to tell you about yourself, but that last paragraph is a really big impact. A lot of the problems become easier when you start sooner, but many people wait because they want to get "established" first (whatever that means to them). So extra money isn't to incentivize people of your age, but to instead help them feel safe to start sooner.

See https://thezvi.substack.com/p/fertility-rate-roundup-1

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My solution is cheaper housing.

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I think that's a bit of a red herring. They are not, as they say, printing any more land. So "cheaper housing" either means:

1. More housing in undesirable areas, or

2. Denser housing in desirable areas.

But 1 already exists, there's loads of cheap housing in undesirable areas and people still don't choose to move there. And 2 is probably counterproductive, because you don't want to raise a big family in a goddamned high-rise apartment, you want to raise them in a big house with a proper backyard.

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There's also

3. Make more areas be desirable.

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Or, if you are a Georgist, accept that housing in desirable areas costs a lot purely because of supply and demand, but extract as tax the part of the profit that’s due to area being desirable and not due to the landlord building a particularly appealing dwelling.

Then, however, you circle back to the question of what to do with the funds collected this way, and if subsidizing parents is the right thing to do, whether to give more money to specific groups of parents.

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This is a Europe vs US thing. In the US, you could literally do a China and just build 20 new megacities* in the Great Plains, give businesses epic tax breaks/subsidies to move there, and use the resulting de-densification to reduce house prices.

In Europe, adopting US-style zoning rules and better infrastructure would probably reduce house prices enough to push commutable family houses into affordability territory, even before any further price effect from bursting housing bubbles.

*Realistically even 5 kilocities would probably be plenty.

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We lack the resources to supply the houses. We can build houses all day, getting water to them is another matter.

We could take water away from farms—as is the constant mantra from the land developers; but then what would we eat?

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What is the difference between “US style” zoning rules and European rules (though the latter surely change from state to state)?

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If govt gave me $100,000 in cash for each child I would have to have about 4 children before I'd financially ahead rather than if they just gave me cheap housing instead.

PS: My metric for housing affordability is average area income to average housing price ratio.

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Simple logic and the evidence both say that enabling young couples to form their own households earlier (early 20s rather than late 20s or 30s) means they have more children over the course of their fertile years. Cheap housing would indeed seem to be better than direct cash in this case. Rare!

But why not both?

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The idea of raising a family in a house with a big backyard is very American. Lot of people do not see that as a necessary component of raising a family. Hell, you don't even have to leave America. How many people in NYC or Chicago are raising their kids with big back yards? If you live in a desirable area presumably there are other benefits that make up for what you're losing.

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I've never met a kid raised in an apartment who wasn't an emotionally stunted drone.

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What's your problem?

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That is the system in France, you divide the total salary by (adults + (kids/2)) below 3 kids. Starting from the third kid, they count as 1 each, and not 1/2.

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If your population is crashing hard enough I don't think you care about who is doing the breeding. You just need people.

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"If your population is crashing hard enough I don't think you care about who is doing the breeding. You just need people."

If the new people are net resource consumers (or even net tax consumers) then more can be bad. For the same reason that you can't make up in volume a loss on each item sold.

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>If the new people are net resource consumers (or even net tax consumers) then more can be bad.

That does sound like a good argument against rich people breeding, but I'm afraid the problem is not the number of rich individuals, but the amount of resources they have at their disposal.

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