Hizzonor Adams and Hochul are constantly using the c word to describe it, and are bemoaning the lack of Fedbux for them to deal with it.
And since randomly bussing migrants places is a cruel, inhumane political stunt, they naturally are dealing with it by bussing migrants to random upstate communities where they are being welcomed with open arms sometimes disguised as lawsuits and protests.
Huh. For some reason I just don't see much reporting about it. Nor about the pro-Palestinian protests in NY, saying things like "cancel Christmas". (I mean, I **know** why I don't see these stories.)
I know someone who is 18 and has no clue what to do in life. Is going to university and just taking whatever prereqs with no idea, not even the first clue, despite all kinds of probing questions, what she wants to do.
I recommended maybe volunteering for charity. As a first pass, I went to Givewell's site to see if they had some recommendation where to volunteer and, surprisingly, I could find nothing.
So what are the best charities to volunteer for right now? How do you find out?
How do people even do that? Does this include, like, having no hobby? This sounds to me like a horrible way of existing, regardless of the university problems.
My recommendation would be to get as much experience as possible, as quickly as possible. Like, call all the people you know, ask them to give you a list of things they enjoy doing or find meaningful, and then spend one afternoon trying each one of them, with the help of the person who already does that. (Read a book. Play a board game. Play a computer game. Take a hike. Go dance. Cook something. Feed the homeless. Teach kids math. Just talk. Meditate. Clean the beach.) At the end of each week write a diary entry about what you tried and how much you enjoyed it.
I was the same way, up until age 21, when I randomly took a CS-for-majors course and discovered that not only did I like programming, I was also good at it. Up until then, there was a lot of stuff I was decent at, and enjoyed a bit, but nothing that could come close to being described as a "calling". I'd have been just another bright, aimless kid, puttering around in the professional-managerial class, trying desperately to find meaning in a world of bullshit jobs. And if I didn't happen to be dating someone who was taking that CS course, I'd never have found out.
I agree with your recommendation of trying lots of stuff. That's part of why I mentioned the social work jobs - rather than jump in to something EA right away, why not try a lot of other things first and see how they fit? If you're already thinking in EA terms, and vaguely planning to end up there, this would provide a chance to test out your theorizing in the real world. It's like one of those chains of literature or science or engineering, where to understand why we do things the way we do them today, it's helpful to understand the other things we've tried first, and the evolution of the state of the art in the field.
Yeah, some people grew up during Covid and had a harder time of it than others, I guess. I struggle to imagine that state of being myself, to the point where I wonder if she's lying... but it is what it is!
As a counterpoint, find the closest organization that provides free food for homeless people, and volunteer there for a while. It's hands-on experience with ground truth in the place she lives, and gives a context for human suffering that might be otherwise missing. Alternatively, if she's in a moderately left-wing city, the local government should be contracting with agencies to manage housing homeless people, so she could probably find a (messy, disgusting, but paying) job there doing clean-up work. Apparently, a lot of people burn out of that type of job after a few months, so if she goes into it with that expectation, she'll spare herself some angst.
Like, even from a cold tactical view, if she's pretty sure she wants to go into EA later, it will give her a perspective that many people around her will be lacking, and allow her to address questions from first-hand experience rather than from regurgitating someone else's reporting.
If you feed the pigeons, you get more pigeons. If you feed the homeless you get more homeless.
If you want to do some good for the world, go out and pick up litter off the beach, on yor own. There's no social aspect to it, so you won't be pulled into some kind of stupid groupthink, it's just you and your litter bag and a strip of clean beach behind you.
>If you want to do some good for the world, go out and pick up litter off the beach, on yor (sic) own
If you assert without evidence that feeding the homeless creates more homeless people, maybe we should also worry about the possibility that picking up litter will incentivize more litter.
[Incidentally, even were it true that feeding the homeless would "create more homeless" that wouldn't be equivalent to feeding homeless people being a net negative. If e.g. there are a total of 1 million homeless people and feeding them all would create a small relative incentive to be homeless and the total number of better fed homeless people would rise to 1 million and 1, that would almost certainly be a large net positive.
If you are very worried, though, about the effects of various charitable efforts, you can check out GiveWell's recommended charities, as GiveWell conducts extensive analyses on optimal charities.]
Sorry about that. I had just stumbled off a red-eye after getting about 2 hours of sleep. But in my defense:
It's Christmas Eve, and you sounded exactly like Ebeneezer Scrooge. :-)
To address your point, I've done that sort of volunteering, there was no groupthink, and it doesn't work like that. I'm quite confident that the number of people who are incentivized at the margin to become homeless because of free food, is approximately zero. The descent into the visible, "problematic" sort of homelessness is overdetermined.
As an example, take the woman who was sitting in front of a grocery store, panhandling and asking people to buy her a sandwich, when **literally** half a block away there was a place serving free hot all-you-can-eat meals. When I told her about this place, she thought for a moment and then said that she preferred to stay where she was because otherwise she would "lose her place". Of all the things going wrong there, free food was not the problem.
What does happen is space-shifting (but not the sort caused by Dr. Frankenfurter's castle). Providing better services to homeless people draws in existing ones from the surrounding areas, making it seem like there are more. There's a potentially valid criticism about encouraging people to uproot from their original communities where they might have received personalized support. But the homeless aren't a homogenous population, and my impression is that this sort of migration is mostly of the sort who're far enough gone that they've already burned whatever bridges they had left (or had the bridges burned for them). (These would be the visible, "problematic" ones I mentioned, who usually have some combination of mental illness, drug addiction, and chronic antisocial behavior.)
I'm not surprised that GW doesn't have recommended volunteering options, as volunteering probably isn't generally particularly impactful. Following GW's sort of reasoning, the most impactful charities will help the poorest people in the world, very few of whom are in the West. The most impactful help to those people, like distributing mosquito nets, vitamin supplements, or vaccines, is probably not particularly amenable to volunteering - particularly from Westerners.
How efficient would it be for a Westerner to fly to sub-Saharan Africa and back to perform essentially unskilled labor in mosquito net warehouse, or something, rather than sitting back and sending some money to GW. The savings to them through such volunteering over local labor may be worth less than the plane tickets to get there and back, to speak nothing of the expenses of staying there.
Going to uni and taking random prereqs without knowing what exactly you're going to do, actually sounds like a course of action with a fairly high expected value.
College graduates generally significantly out earn non-college graduates, even with soft degrees. And higher paying jobs generally require hard degrees, which generally require various prerequisites.
Earning a lot of money in and of itself would probably tremendously impactful, as income could be seen as a proxy for productivity. And certainly, earning a lot of money would be allow someone to be very impactful through donations - probably much more so than they could be through charitable volunteering.
This doesn't preclude, of course volunteering in free time. And if someone is going to volunteer, they could try do do so as effectively as possible. But even outside of the primary path towards impact of career (probably facilitated by college degree), depending on one's goal, one could still consider alternative routes towards impact. E.g. instead of contributing $10 per hour of labor in a soup kitchen, a college student could tutor students for $60 an hour, and donate the proceeds to that soup kitchen (or GW, for even more impact).
If someone *does* want to contribute to charity through labor, rather than money, it seems reasonable to try to help the poorest people you can find. If the people will be local, perhaps soup kitchens could be a good option.
I guess one question I would have (reading that reply) would be, is your primary concern (a) the future “impact” of the 18-year-old, as denominated in dollars or some fungible equivalent, or (b) her actual future as a flourishing individual that you personally care about? Hope I don’t come across as dunking on Mallard here, but the two are not the interchangeable imo.
Does anyone here have any (personal or second-hand) experience in successfully treating height-related body image issues in men through therapy, and could recommend a good therapist (possibly from the ACX list) in the Bay Area or remote?
I’m 5’5 and past therapy attempts have been pretty unsuccessful, with some of my past therapists basically having taken the position of this just being a minor cosmetic issue with few real-life implications (I also got the feeling that it used to be way less of an issue before online dating, but alas I live in those changed times).
I’m looking for medical blog recommendations with a similar style to Scott’s but focused almost entirely on doctoring and medicine. Ideally one with thoughtful takes on both the day-to-day of medicine and interesting topics in medicine as a whole. As medical student, I’ve searched around for one but never found one anywhere near the quality of Scott’s.
Not just that, but he also pretty much seems to have given up on moderating the comments section. People used to get permabans for 1% of the crap NS has been spamming here.
Edit: Turns out, Scott has recently become a father of twins, which kinda explains it.
I don't have a problem with NS sharing their opinion – even though I almost completely disagree with it – but with how they present it: by spamming links to random Twitter accounts, with maybe a one-liner about how Israelis are pure evil. Even people that agree with NS have called them out on it.
For what it's worth, I've also asked another person whom I agree with, to stop with this style of posting.
Very very peculiar that you (apparently) haven't been doing the same thing to the pro-israelis flippantly dismissing the suffering of gazans or basically calling for gaza to be ethnically cleansed, which represents a lower quality of posting than NS.
Perhaps you need to be less sensitive towards being exposed to opinions from outside of your ideological echo chamber. At least Adrian is objecting to the style of the posts as opposed to the opinion expressed, while you seem to be objecting entirely to the opinion.
There's a thing I'm annoyed about, and it isn't worthy of a full post, so ... here we go.
If you’re baffled/confused/upset about why the American public is still up in arms about inflation, even though it’s down - here’s a question for you.
Were you equally baffled/confused/upset when the public didn’t react at all to inflation until it had been going on for a little while?
Let's say for the sake of argument that 10% inflation is bad. We had 10% inflation -before- the public really got upset about it. Were you looking around wondering why nobody was getting upset about it at the time? Or did you not notice, for the same reason none of them noticed - it hadn't had time to actually have a substantive impact on your wallet?
Demanding everybody calm down about inflation after prices have inflated by some amount, because they're no longer rising as quickly, only means something if you were also demanding something be done about inflation when prices were rising more quickly but hadn't yet inflated to the point where it was causing problems.
People aren't upset about inflation because, a year from now, they'll be paying more for their food and rent. They're upset about inflation because they're paying more for their food and rent than they were paying a year ago. Necessarily, public opinion on inflation is a trailing indicator for inflation itself - and demanding people calm down about it, because it's in the past, is in effect demanding that nobody ever get upset about inflation, because they thing they're upset about is, necessarily, always in the past.
In the metamodern memespace, there's sort of a low-key debate about which religion is the most insightful or helpful. A lot of people single out Buddhism as displaying a lot of sophistication and insight, and being relatively less harmful than many other traditions. However, since I have appreciated what Buddhism has to offer, it has changed the way I look at Christianity and other religions.
Now that I relate to concepts and doctrines as more like meditation prompts that can potentially alter my perception or state of consciousness for the better, I see how Christian doctrines that seem arbitrary are actually potentially helpful for achieving altered or mystic states consciousness. I've seen rankings that suggest that the Christian mystics can achieve states of consciousness almost as enlightened as Buddhist adepts, and I think I'm beginning to see why.
In particular, I've been relating to the Christian doctrine of grace as a tool for helping me to generate the ideal complement to my state of consciousness. I think of it metaphorically as similar to equalizing waves, whether sound or light waves. You can reduce any sound wave to silence by producing its perfect complement. You can change any light wave to pure white light if you create the perfect complement to it so that the sum of the two adds up to white light, balanced activation of all light frequencies.
Likewise, during meditation or prayer, the idea of grace is not just to look for something outside of yourself, but, in some sense, to look for the thing which is MOST outside of yourself, the thing which is least like your current shape. Except, of course, that actually makes it easier to locate computationally. It may not be a simple as multiplying your current shape by -1, but the exact complement to your shape is actually implicit in your shape. In this way, the Christian approach also seems to preserve individuality. Instead of achieving smooth states of consciousness by reducing everything to nothing, it tries to provide a means by which you can access the perfect complement to each moment of experience, allowing each individual thing to enjoy its own idiosyncratic nature while also participating in a complementary dynamic that sums up to perfect, unified totality.
This is all very unlike the Christianity I grew up with, which suggested that the only important thing was making sure you performed the right ritual so that you would go to the right afterlife when you died. But I've now looked back on some of the C.S. Lewis stuff I read growing up, and Buddhism has helped me see it in a new light. I've heard some stuff from Tolkien and from famous Christian mystics like St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, and from poets, that seems to be making reference to similar concepts.
I wish there was a modern community of Christian mystics I could ask about their practices, like a Christian Sangha. The closest I've found is the community of Jonathan Pageau's fans. Does this conceptualization of Christianity sound familiar to you, or are you familiar with a memespace that discusses such things (inside or outside of metamodern circles)?
i think those mystics would tell you to become a Christian first, and do the first things; their mysticism is done to better know a God they love who saved them, and grace is not what you think it is. You are using them as a means to your own ends of altered consciousness.
id also think they'd warn you it is dangerous to break the self down via technique, and that it can lead to being naked and starving in a desert in the pursuit of a holiness that is monstrous. Chasing ecstasy is not really a good thing; i was raised charismatic, and saw plenty of ecstatic experiences that only lasted so long as the revivalist was in town.
Any religious mysticism is designed to experience the reality stated in their own dogma, not yours. Even then personally the focus on mysticism is silly imo; the original state of man in Christianity was Adam in a beautiful garden talking with God, and Jesus pointed at children as closer to accepting the kingdom. Sometimes people get a little too disembodied for their own good.
I can't comment on a lot of this, but my appreciation for Christian theology increased significantly a few years ago. I got interested in certain aspects of Orthodox mysticism, and read up on some of their theology, and wanted to see how that compared with Catholic theology, and it turns out they're explicitly describing the same things, just in very different ways. At that point, a number of things that I thought were silly in Catholic/Anglican theology just turned out to be me trying to play word games with something I didn't understand, obsessing over the pores of the finger pointing at the moon.
What an interesting direction to go in. I have no info for you at all, though I've listened to Pageau's podcast with interest, and wish you Godspeed on your journey, and hope you share what you discover.
I think YouTube is not even trying to remove all the scam ads with "Elon Musk" promising to send you lots of money if you give him access to your bank account. I see them every day.
But if your video contains something that resembles copyrighted music, it gets taken down automatically. Yes, it is important to have priorities.
A friend-of-a-friend, beloved of many in my circle, just passed away, leaving behind a family. He was suffering from several things, but chief among them was kidney failure, and complications from dialysis were a direct contributor to his sudden decline.
As someone who has considered kidney donation from time to time - but never that seriously - it has me asking questions. Including the obvious one, which is "would he still be alive if I had given him a kidney?"
And I realized I have some thoughts, and in reading the previous discussions (both Scott's, and the followup from the comments, and the comments on _that_ one) I'm still fuzzy on some parts of this.
I would not - I think - hesitate to give a kidney to a family member or close friend. Indeed, one of my reasons for not donating to a stranger is my worry that then I wouldn't have a spare for just that situation.
Which makes me wonder - in a case where someone is in dire need of a kidney, and has friends and family, what is generally going on? Is it that none of them are a match? Or that none of them offered? Are match rates that low? Or is it just that so many people are so typically biased against it that they would never offer even for someone dear to them?
I think a relatively big part is that kidney failure is often just one failure out of several; in one study, only 4% of people with CKD stage 3 had no comorbidities. Most had two or more.
The most common comorbidities are age-related, which isn't a surprise, given the median age is >70 years old.
Your picture of the median person with severe kidney issues should probably be an elderly person on multiple medications for multiple conditions (and some of those medications are likely to be contributing factors to the kidney failure). The death, in a sense, is expected, and friends and family, while they may regret the death, are entirely reasonable in being unlikely to undertake a heroic effort to prevent it.
The relatively low rate of kidney donation, relative to the number of people with kidney failure, thus probably shouldn't be taken to reflect upon the friends and family of thus with kidney failure generally; many of those dying of kidney failure aren't going to be helped a lot by a kidney donation.
This is not to argue against kidney donation, because even if 80% of people with kidney failure who have a long life ahead of them otherwise have somebody willing to donate, that implies that 20% do not, and kidney donations are prioritized by the medical system for that 20%.
> Indeed, one of my reasons for not donating to a stranger is my worry that then I wouldn't have a spare for just that situation.
Donating a kidney allows you to designate loved ones as getting highest priority for donation if they ever need one, so that's not the best reason.
---
I haven't donated a kidney because i'm terrified of pain... I know it's about as bad as pregnancy and I have been pregnant, but being pregnant sucks... And you don't even get to have contact with an adorable recipient afterwards... Sure there's the warm glow of having done something nice but I'm a very selfish person and altruism doesn't really make me feel noticeably more warm and fuzzy for a long time vs like huffing baby fumes.
Are you sure you're not thinking about passing a kidney stone? That's something that people compare to pregnancy a lot. Couldn't find that sort of comparison w.r.t. kidney donation.
>Donating a kidney allows you to designate loved ones as getting highest priority for donation
Wait, really? I know that donors get priority for themselves but I didn't realize it was transferable. I wonder how much of the problem is just making that fact public?
Anyway, this still raises questions about the system in general. Thinking about it more generally - we have X people who need kidneys. I would hope that many of these people have at least one person in their lives willing to give them a kidney. As long as the average is >1 willing donor per recipient, we should have enough kidneys for everyone who needs one.
So why don't we? Is it that matching rates are so low?
Or is it that even people with close friends & family don't have many willing donors due to fear of the process?
Or is it that people with close friends & family _are_ getting kidneys, and the remaining people (who have to hope for strangers) are either genetically unlucky, or loners with no potential donors in their circle?
I think what I'm struggling with is how we jump all the way to needing random strangers to make the system work. I understand it with something like bone marrow, where the matching rate is extremely low. I'm trying to understand if that's also going on here, or if something else is.
(None of this would invalidate the EA conclusion that it makes sense for you to donate your kidney to a stranger right now, but I'm curious how we came to this pass).
From what I understand, matching rates are low enough between some subsection of donors and recipients, that you need to set up a donation chain, where incompatible but willing pairs are in a pool, and as new compatible pairs come in, they get added to a chain, the hope is that eventually a pair comes in that completes the circle.
Undirected donations in this sense are very powerful since you just need the "head" of the chain to be compatible with the incoming kidney instead of a pair of people, a recipient at the end of the chain AND a donor for the head.
I think there are quite a few caveats to exactly how useful an undirected donation is, and also I don't know exactly how long these donor chains get, but hopefully this provides a good intuition for what's going on.
Even if people are willing, they may not be able. If ten people are drinking buddies, and one of them needs a kidney, the other nine may be unable to donate due to having similar damage. Or if they're a two income household, and are already losing one to kidney disease, they may not be able to afford to suspend the other for surgery recovery.
As a fellow Pro-Palestinian and an Arabic-loving Arab, as well as a vaguely left-ist-ish person who generally prefers Mercy over Justice and have a cosmpolitan interest in every Lost People's plea, I couldn't be more empathetic to the general direction and intent behind your post, but you couldn't have possibly picked a more hostile and alienating posting policy if you have planned it for 20 years.
Here's a bunch of unsolicited frank advice that you can heed, feel free to throw it in the trash and continue on course as usual, but feel free to also examine it and see if it, some of it at any rate, might help you.
1- Please Stop Posting Twitter Links.
2- Please recognize, don't minimize, the pain and fear of Israelis. In the vast majority of the Animal kingdom, Aggression almost always traces back to fear.
3- Please write, write anything. Express what you have in mind, in your own words. There is a place for quotation and link aggregation, but this place can't be "everywhere" at a time that is "everywhen". At some point you have to write in your own words.
4- When you write, people will counter-write, meaning they will pick things in your writing to poke holes through. At this point you can (1) Retract them, this will be relatively rare and only the case if you really fucked up and - say - quoted a factually incorrect source very confidentally or said something really cruel in anger. (2) Defend them, and you must do that while resisting the temptation to call the one(s) talking with you stupid and cruel, even though in fact they might very well be stupid and/or cruel (or running a functionally-indistinguishable simulation thereof) (3) Not Respond, which is always an option and is preferable than responding with twitter links, ad-hominems, whataboutery, or just plain meanness.
5- Changing minds is not a sequential, linear process. It's not a process with immediately visible effects. Beliefs form a network, they depend on other beliefs, which in turn depend on other beliefs, which depend ..... and so on. To make matters even more complicated, in a Broadcast setting like a public forum, different people (who you're not even aware of) have their beliefs (which might appear the same on the surface) rooted at different roots. So someone might believe Israel is fully justified in what it does because Muslims are the Earth's trash and God chose Jews as the Master Race, I'm not sure someone like that is worth changing their minds, but assuming that you wanted to, surely you will go about it very differently than from someone else who holds the legalistic view and believes Israel is fully justified because it's a state while its adversary is a non-state militant actor with extremist rhetoric. People are complex, people are not honest with each other and themselves about their own web of beliefs (they will claim to themselves that belief A traces back to beliefs B and C, while in fact it actually traces back to beliefs D and E but they just don't want to admit it), sometimes they don't even know what the roots of their belief networks are, and so on. He who wants to change minds must have patience, he must have respect and empathy, he must have a necessary dose of relativism ("I, too, would think like that if I lived their life") along with the conviction that he is right.
6- This is a bit depressing, but it's a perspective that you have to have in the back of your mind somewhere : the battle of words is just a metaphor. Even the trashiest hahah-I'm-glad-Palestinians-are-dying commenter is still not killing actual Palestinians. Even a complete and utter "win" in the field of words and signals and any quantity or quality of media will still not liberate Palestinians or guarantee starving Gazans a meal. The pen is mightier than the sword only because it **sometimes** has the ability to move several swords, but the pen that can't move swords (i.e. most of us most of the time) is actually quite useless, materially speaking. I say this only to lower the stakes somewhat and open your eyes to the fact that arguments need not always proceed by the terrible rules of war, with its terrible fight-or-flight logic and total disrespect for the opposing party. Argument-as-Fighting is just a Metaphor We Live By, you can and should try others.
7- Those rules are not a holy book, they're ill-defined and not all-encompassing (so maybe just like a holy book after all). Sometimes your instincts will get the better of you and you will violate them, repeatedly, it's okay, I don't follow a lot of them a lot of the time, that's not hypocrisy since I'm openly admitting it, that's what it means to have a (vaguely-defined) ideal to strive to.
Palestine deserves better advocates. Palestine deserves selfless ambassadors who are not looking to "win" arguments vis-a-vis Ben Shapiro or Andrew Tate or any of the countless Merchants of Rage that are a dime a dozen at every level in the media ecosystem, but are simply looking to be beacons : Humble, omni-directional SOS beacons transmitting at full power and at all wavelengths such that those who don't know there is a place called Palestine where people starve and suffer and experience humiliation through no fault of their own, know. It's not about you, it should never be.
Ten times yes to this. One of the most depressIng aspects of NS’s shitposting is that it makes a tiny but nonzero impact in the wrong direction by making an average observer dislike Palestinians slightly more.
Yeah I agree with much of what you say here, I suppose there is a part of me that wants to piss off some of these genocidal freaks to get even a little payback in the face of their powerful onslaught on kids but the goal should be to help Palestinians and bite down on the pain we feel over the child slaughter, that they gleefully cheer on.
I'd say there's one thing I don't agree with you and maybe another thing I'd say things are a bit mixed (and perhaps I'm unfairly addressing your point)
So for
1) I don't think these people are are genuinely motivated by fear. Jews are a wealthy, talented, highly politically and culturally influential group today. The modern world is distinct from the pre modern world and people aren't out to lynch them for killing their god as they did in the past. The fact that they are so committed in spite of their numerous options to live thriving, wealthy, powerful and influential lives here in America, committed to stealing land and slaughtering children indicates they prefer the feeling of dominating so much that they will commit these demonic crimes, inspite of the stellar alternative, even RISKING a new rise in world antisemitism. This is sadism and the urge to dominate, not fear. Or at least if it is fear it is fear over losing that privilege. This makes them far more evil for it in my eyes. Most Muslims condemn muslim extremism but slaughter of infants isn't Jewish extremism it's something 95% of Israelis SUPPORT! I remember you asking for a link for that which i shared.
2) you've seen I'm sure how that brinkley guy responded to me. I showcase just a droplet of links on Israeli evil he dismisses it, literally 3 fully documented articles on Israeli atrocities none written by an Arab or Muslim in case he is racist or Islamophobic respectively and he dismisses that too. We are up against people who are very committed to being unjust, often breaking even their own values they would otherwise claim to uphold our of sheer bloodthirsty animosity towards Muslims. A tweet, a line of argument a full article they will just dismiss, deny, downplay on reflex while repeating zionist bullshit. It's the world's most extreme version of selective demands for rigor.
However relatively speaking it seems better to share links that are comprehensive whose authors can't so easily be dismissed because there probably are a number of lurkers silently reading this back and forth and I give brinkley credit for displaying the nasty unfairness pro Palestinian advocates are typically subject to.
The other thing I've personally found is if you are engaging in a dialogue with a Jewish zionist (yes I recognize most jews are, overwhelmingly so) you are typically arguing with a bad faith individual who jumps from scattershot point to scattershot point, often spreading lies or half truths in an effort to stall and distract anyone listening in while his tribe makes life more and more unlivable for Palestinians, kills more of their children and steals more of their land. They are nearly NEVER arguing from anything more than bloodthirsty chimp-level tribalism. He/she wants more land for his tribe, knows he is getting that and wishes to stall you.
So it is challenging that way to even decide to have dialogue with some of these people.
You make a really good point about the process not being linear, another spectacular point about the pen being mightier than the sword working only when it is, and the analogy of debate to war having its limitations. And also the need to place Palestinian welfare over our own emotions. I will try to consider and factor these in to see how I can be more effective. We will probably always disagree to a degree on approach and there will always probably be limitations to various approaches and settings in the end.
To add, another good point of yours I missed was not responding often being better than responding badly. I agree with this though I've often (LOL ALWAYS) failed to apply it.
I suspect, but cannot prove, that NS is clickfarming. (It's consistent with that behavior, but also consistent with NS genuinely upset over Israelis and not being particularly well-read, which to me begs correction, but not banning.)
Do you mean, post links so that people will click on them so that the links will show more traffic?
I don't really understand the BS that makes the internet run the terrible way that it does.
It's not really important for me to understand it being as I have a pretty good idea of how it could run a lot better based upon being a part of the internet for the entirety of its duration and experience and get from many different angles and in many different countries.
But once you mentioned this specific bit of bullshit and the response by this individual seems to back it up, I'm wondering what this bullshit is and why people would do it?
In case anyone reading this missed it. None of these articles was written by a Muslim or Palestinian and the first and last are written by jews the last of whom is literally an Israeli professor who studies the holocaust.
There is a great deal more documented savagery from Palestinians toward Israelis, to the point that any time you see a tweet like this, you should be looking into whether it's faked in some way long before you just conclude "Israeli savagery is just unmatched".
(The video appears to be an Israeli soldier performing some sort of detonation operation. It's not clear to me what. AFAICT, his tone isn't that of a fanatic. The tweeter claims some yelling in the background is "the echoes of their voices", presumably to imply innocent Palestinians just got hit by that blast. She provides no proof, and I've seen evidence of multiple fakes in the past. She leaves out the well-documented attacks by Palestinians on Israelis, barely two months ago, and routinely further back, for decades.)
> There is a great deal more documented savagery from Palestinians toward Israelis
I actually call bullshit.
How can one even quantify "documented savagery" let alone actually measure the numbers ? Whatever the metric is, I can guarantee that Israeli savagery towards Palestinians in the West Bank will "win" as long as it's remotely fair and unbiased.
No it's true, there's literally no shortage of evidence of Israelis savages targeting and slaughtering civilians. I am inclined to think the same of you.
The funny thing is that you would be absolutely livid if someone so much as thought about justifying Oct Shava using the actions of the Israeli government for the last 30/50/70 years.
"If"? A lot of people, both from the Western as well as the Muslim world, have been doing exactly that non-stop since the morning of 2023-10-07.
It's also an invalid justification, because Israel withdrew from Gaza 18 years ago, and yet various groups in Gaza have been attacking Israel ever since.
Presumably you think those justifying October 7th to be reprehensible individuals, presumably you have something colorful to say about their character or how their mother raised them. So it's again baffling how you emulate them so faithfully just with a 180 direction reversal.
Does it make you feel better ? Do you see a starving Gazan child with 3 killed siblings and think "Ahhhh, nothing like the smell of JUSTICE in the morning, that's the natural and desirable outcome for children born on HAMAS land, those future terrorists" ?
Moreover, Palestinians everywhere feel kinship with their brethrens in the West Bank, who are under a nonstop occupation and attack for north of 50 years now, to say nothing of their (both Gazans and West Bank Palestinians) ancestors who used to live in what is today Israel, all 800K of them, and were expelled in massacres and atrocities by the pre-IDF Zionist militias.
So if the actions of governments justify violence against their populations, you have one hell of an uphill fight to argue that Israelis don't deserve October 7th in light of what their government has been doing for the last 3/4 of a century. The other alternative, of course, is to recognize that governments and their populations are 2 very intertwined but nonetheless conceptually separate things, and that collective punishment is a type of savagery that humans have long ago agreed to abandon.
> Do you see a starving Gazan child with 3 killed siblings and think [...]
No, the suffering of innocent men, women, and children in Gaza deeply saddens me, and I don't feel the least bit of satisfaction or even joy about their plight. Most of them are not directly responsible for the violence committed by Hamas, just like most citizens of Dresden weren't directly responsible for the violence committed by the Nazi regime.
I wish this war would end soon, with Hamas being eradicated for good. And I hope that certain members of Israel's government will be put on trial for their complicity in the current situation, and locked away for a very long time. I'm being sincere, although I wouldn't blame you if you don't believe me.
> Moreover, Palestinians everywhere feel kinship with their brethrens in the West Bank [...]
Strangely, their leaders don't seem to feel much compassion towards the Palestinians in Gaza, or else they wouldn't have launched such an unprecedented attack as on Oct 7. Hamas' leadership aren't stupid enough to not have predicted that Israel would be forced to retaliate on an equally unprecedented scale, inflicting more suffering and misery than in the last decades combined.
So no, your "they only did it to support their brothers in the West Bank" thesis doesn't hold up, unless you believe that Hamas willfully sacrificed themselves and the lives of many, many Gazans to maybe perhaps create a small chance that Israel might stop their illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Hamas has the right to fight Israel because Israel is occupying the west Bank, Israel had the right to end its occupation. Palestinians are one people.
Israelis are merely committing crimes to protect their occupation. They are the nazis here.
>>Hamas has the right to fight Israel because Israel is occupying the west Bank, Israel had the right to end its occupation.
Even assuming this to be true, there are constraints as to how one may lawfully fight, even when one has the right to do so. Shooting up civilians at a bus stop or machinegunning a concert are not included.
You seem quite capable of recognizing those limitations when Israel is doing the fighting - can you see your way to a world where they apply to Hamas as well?
It's true some hamas members committed transgressions as the allies did. But Israelis are fundamentally the aggressor here, they're defending their oppression not themselves. Hamas and the rest of the world recognize 67 borders. Isrselis just want to steal the land.
There are no shortage of examples of Israelis targeting and sadistically murdering civilians
That's a TikTok dancing video. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised if there are people who want to invade China over this, but I'm inclined to count dancing as non-violent. (And again, if you want to submit this as Israelis being mean, you're submitting against a great deal more evidence in the other direction.)
Are you unaware that the laptop also contained evidence of felonies? By The Big Guy I mean. Obviously Hunter's felonies are NBD 'cause he's a white guy and the sonof soemone important.
You're the one pretending that the significance of the laptop was it had naked pics of Hunter. Your declaration that other people are not being straight is laughable.
Hunter is currently indicted on a bunch of charges, actually, and after the court cases finish will likely be sentenced like anyone else who did what he did.
Also, what specific felonies? Because there have been two separate senate Republican investigative committees and a single congress Republican one that looked at the contents of the laptop and found nothing that incriminates the POTUS, so I find your claim very surprising.
> Safely after the election and years after the laptop was made public.
That is entirely normal. Trump is currently on trial for things that happened before he was ever president. The justice system is generally much slower than people expect it to be, even when you expect it to be slow. Currently the greatest threat to Trump facing justice is not that the prosecutors cannot make a good case, it's that prosecuting him for the worst stuff might literally take longer than his expected remaining lifespan.
Please give me specifics on what on the laptop incriminated the POTUS. Not vague "it's totally there" statements, but statements of specific facts. Because I have yet to find anything even resembling that.
Because the closest thing to that I have seen anywhere is the claim that a certain ledger represented funneling money to the POTUS from foreign entities. This claim was simply not true; the ledger tallied the rent payments for a property not owned by the POTUS.
Are you deliberately ignoring the context of "would have surely swung the election?" I'd like to know before I do any work for someone that may be completely uninterested in learning anything.
>Please give me specifics on what on the laptop incriminated the POTUS. Not vague "it's totally there" statements, but statements of specific facts.
You were asked a specific question in the interest of converging on truth, and you keep ignoring it. Any further responses without putting for a concrete answer should be taken as evidence that such information does not credibly exist, and that you are, therefore, trolling.
Swedish researcher who investigated the influence of the muslim brotherhood in swedish politics now facing the prospect of being charged of a crime for his research
OK, I'm going to post a guess here, before I look up the story.
I'm going to guess (with extremely high confidence) that what he's being charged for is not researching the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood per se but some specific thing he did while doing so, and (with lower but still moderately high confidence) that that thing constitutes an at least reasonably solid justification for charging him, and that the insinuation that this is about trying to punish him for his conclusions is unfounded.
Having now looked up the story: he's accused of mishandling private/personal data; my Swedish google-fu is too weak to have an informed opinion of how justified that charge is.
If he mishandled the personal data of the far right, such as by doxxing, libeling, and cancelling them, would he have been charged with a crime? Or would he have been lauded as a hero fighting the good fight?
Thank you for taking the time to look into the additional background. Can't say it's surprising (who put this hyperbole into a culture-war post? You *never* see those 2 things together), but good to have clear in the thread.
I only see the ethics committee charging his dissertation, presumably an academic disciplinary action, alleging publication of private data (I might be misunderstanding, as my Swedish is weak). Is a lawsuit coming with it?
Why do spell checkers suck now? I'm a terrible speller, and also I tend to hit keys out of order sometimes. And yet when I spell something wrong the list of words I get never has the word I want.
It wasn't like this in the past. What went wrong? (Do I need to compile a list?)
Rule 7: If a common word can be made by switching the position of two adjacent letters, then that word should appear on the list.
I am a good speller, and from my perspective the spell checkers are improving, because in the past they didn't know many existing words and happily "corrected" them to something random... and now they mostly leave me alone.
"thousands of Tesla documents....chronic failures, many in relatively new vehicles, dat[ing] back at least seven years...across Tesla’s model lineup and across the globe, from China to the United States to Europe...nine former Tesla managers or service technicians...."
"the documents, which have not been previously reported, offer the most comprehensive view to date into the scope of the problems and how Tesla handled what its engineers have internally called part “flaws” and “failures.” The records and interviews reveal for the first time that the automaker has long known far more about the frequency and extent of the defects than it has disclosed to consumers and safety regulators. The documents, dated between 2016 and 2022, include repair reports from Tesla service centers globally; analyses and data reviews by engineers on parts with high failure rates; and memos sent to technicians globally, instructing them to tell consumers that broken parts on their cars were not faulty...."
The lede anecdote is of a new-Tesla owner whose family was endangered when the steering failed, and Tesla declared that the incident was due to "prior" suspension damage. Um with 115 miles on the odometer? "prior" to what exactly?
European regulators are no doubt reading that article with great interest. Meanwhile the fresh class-action lawsuits to be soon launched by Tesla car owners in the US could be epic -- looks like they could propose that the courts skip the discovery stage and proceed straight to verdict/damages.
Presumably Musk's initial responses will be to ban Reuters from Twitter, file a histrionic lawsuit against them, declare that whoever leaked the Tesla records is to be found and flayed alive or whatever, etc. The professional managers at Tesla though will surely try to respond in some more-organized ways.
>Presumably Musk's initial responses will be to ban Reuters from Twitter,
I REALLY hope you were incensed that twitter helped bury the hunter biden laptop scandal, which was tantamount to them conspiring with a political party to help them win the election, rather than the owner of a website hypothetically restricting what he wants to restrict.
It's not big news because it's tiny news. "At least 11 drivers told Tesla a crash was caused by a failure in the suspension, steering or wheel assembly, company records show. Those accident claims, which have not been previously reported by the media, were recorded by Tesla staff between 2018 and 2021 and assigned to engineers or technicians for review."
11 drivers out of millions.
The tone of the hitpiece makes it sound like it's a persistent issue affecting teslas in general instead of a relatively minor problem. Even the bigger numbers elsewhere in the piece are small scale compared to the company as a whole.
The bigger numbers don't look very good. Depending on what tens of thousands means, the failure rate might be on the order of 1-4% of all cars delivered during the period under scrutiny. Memos directing technicians to lie don't look good, either.
The Takata airbag recall is a comparable case study, but theyre not blaming the customer.
It's unclear if the automakers knew about the issue (I mean, probably not? It's more likely a failure to do due diligence, but this was pretty much every major car manufacturer for years!). They also didn't make the part themselves so there is at least some plausible deniability.
I don't think emissions diddling is quite in the same league.
The nearest comparison would be the Toyota accelerator fiasco about a decade ago, which started with a single crash, though quite an awful one. And it did make big news.
I was curious about buying an empty lot and building a house there to rent out, until I talked to my real estate agent about the idea. He says building a house from scratch is always longer and more expensive than owners realize.
It made me think: If you want to build your dream house and don't have a multimillionaire budget, isn't it best to buy a small house and then transform it into what you want through renovations and additions?
My building knowledge is mostly secondhand, but the big delays to building a new house are going to be stuff like weather, and unforeseen problems like one of your boards being slightly too short, or a builder's truck breaking down. Plus I know one guy who had an engineer friend that convinced him to build a very complicated roof with some supposed engineering advantage (like, a dome, or something); not being an engineer himself, the guy was struggling to build that roof for months.
Renovations include those problems and then add problems of prior construction; the existing walls have load-bearing posts, and water pipes and electrical wires running through them. You can't just knock an existing wall down; it's a whole operation to make sure the rest of the house stays up.
Of the two, as long as you already have a place to stay, you'd want to build from scratch.
Not true for production builders, they can build a house in 3-4 months for a normal price. But they don't usually build on your land, not sure if they would do that because they like to build a lot of houses at the same time in the same area.
Custom home builders are different. They are small companies so it all depends on who you hire.
But buying a small house and renovating is always going to be worse than building a new house. No one does that for good reasons.
>But buying a small house and renovating is always going to be worse than building a new house. No one does that for good reasons.
Depends on whether or not there's available land in a convenient location that's zoned for single-family residential construction, and on how many hoops the local government makes you jump through to get permits and planning approval to build a new house vs renovating an existing house. For these reasons, major renovations of existing houses (most common pattern was to strip the existing house down to its frame, expand the foundation, and build essentially a new house on the site; another pattern was to do a large addition and doing a superficial remodel on the existing house) were incredibly common in Bay Area suburbs c 2010 through at least when I move away from Sunnyvale in 2018.
IME, the same factors that make building a new house expensive and unpredictable also cause major renovations and additions to be expensive and unpredictable. (although if you could find a house that was say 90% of the way towards being your dream house, then at least you are minimizing the expensive/unpredictable part!)
I don't know so much about American housebuilding, but over here - if you know what you're doing and have family members/friends who are both able to do construction work (including plumbing and electrical) and willing to assist, it's not so bad.
Of course, it often helps that it's young married couples building their own houses on a plot of land donated by parents/family. If you have to buy a site, yes that is more expensive. And yeah, it will take longer because you're building in your spare time rather than having a crew work on it for you full-time.
We have the saying: "Wer zu viel Geld hat und ist dumm, kauft ein altes Haus und baut es um" = "Whoever has too much money and is stupid, buys an old house and rebuilds it". Not sure how much truth is in there, though...
Yug Gnirob here. Substack banned me without any notification.
Their appeal process is a joke. They don't tell you what the supposed violation is and instead demand you defend yourself in a void. They then send an email which just says
>Upon additional review we've determined that your account is in violation of Substack's Content Guidelines and will not be reactivated.
They have said nothing about which part of the Guidelines I supposedly violated, but I know accounts who have repeatedly linked pictures of dead babies in these threads are still unbanned, so I highly doubt this list is actually what they're using in their determinations. (This is the only place I post, so any violation would have had to be from here; everyone feel free to guess what rule exactly they're saying I violated. If you do it quickly enough then this post will remain on the page with "Removed" as the name and contents, instead of being deleted completely.)
Well, it appears they've repealed the ban today. Whether that was because of this post or just the natural process I don't know, but I'm still going to hold it against them that "upon additional review" apparently did not include an actual additional review.
So. Exciting journeys into the Substack appeal process.
I had similar experiences twice with KDP, Amazon's self-publishing subsidiary. At one point I sent them two emails making different arguments. After I received back two identical form letters, signed with the same name, sent three minutes apart, I concluded that I was dealing with software not humans.
I sent one reply to the original email (the post-appeal one), asking what exactly they were saying the problem was, then made this post assuming I wouldn't get a response. One of those things presumably got past the software.
So are your removed posts, even the ones that didn't get any comments, now back up, or is your psst self still canceled? If they're back up, maybe having a look at them would provide a clue. Though I still think you should tell Scott about this. It's not like he reads every one of these open threads, so your posting here isn't all that likely to come to his notice.
They're all back up. The thing is, I say a lot of stupid jokey stuff and could think of half a dozen posts that might have caused someone to object, from this thread alone (which you can now read again by doing a search for Yug). The unban message from Substack just says "I've corrected the issue", which reads to me like it was caused by none of them. Getting banned wouldn't bother me too badly as long as someone justified it; it was very much the lack of it that got my back up.
Strangely, the notifications under the bell are still gone for the last eight months, I'd have to go through my email to find those again.
What!? I haven’t read enough of your comments to have a mental picture of what you’re like, and can’t call to mind a single one of them offhand. But I do have a general sense that you’re a reasonable commenter. If somebody says something cruel, unusually rude or wacko I tend to remember that. And if somebody is quite funny or blows me away with their smarts, I remember that. I think you said said one thing a couple weeks ago that I found quite funny. Except for that you are untagged in my mind.
It’s weird that something you said triggered the Substack police. Somebody a couple of open threads ago wrote that Jews lusted for the blood of children. I have used every single one of George Carlin'f forbidden words on here, except for 'cocksucker,' which seems to depend for its impact on contempt for gay men -- and as of this post I am somebody who even wrote 'cocksucker' in a post. And I've never heard a peep out of Scott or Substack about it. What the hell could you have written that tops those? And how do they even find remarks that break their rules? There's a sea of comments on ACX, and of course there are other blogs with big comment sections too. They *can't* be reading it all. Seems like it must be that somebody writing or lurking in the comments section must have complained to Substack about something you said.
How about you search your name on the last few comments sections and get a list of your recent comments. Maybe also read reactions to them, see if there was anyone who seemed to think one of them was awful and unacceptable. And I think you should let Scott know about this. He cares about this issue, and I think would hate the idea that people who comment here can be canceled by Substack. His email address is scott@slatestarcodex.com. Put "NOT SPAM" in both the subject line and within the body of the email itself.
If you look down to the comment about military code names, you'll see that searching for the name of someone who got banned by Substack rather than the blog owner won't work because the username will be replaced by 'Removed'. In this case I don't know what the problem was with military code names either, but I'm assuming that it was something similar in Yug's case, nothing morally offensive, just legally risky for Substack itself.
Oh, you're right. But that's better, in a way, because he can just search for 'Removed.' That way he'll know which of his comments was the one. But what will remain unexplained still are why he was banned by Substack (do they do that to all who post something legally risky to Substack?) and what led them to notice the comment. Do you have any theory about the latter?
It only shows "Removed" for comments that had replies; all the unreplied ones are simply gone. But I shouldn't have to search for anything, they should tell me what they think the problem is, which they haven't done. Presumably their silence means they know their reasoning is gross.
I think Eremolalos is right, and some nubbins reported a comment of yours which triggered the banbot to automatically remove it (I highly doubt Substack has Real People sorting these cases out anymore, since bots are Cheap even if they're not accurate or reliable).
If it was automatically done and they have nobody flesh and blood reading these complaints, then I think you're probably out of luck. It's stupid but this is how AI is going to be used, rather than solving world problems: just automate the hell out of everything because it's cheaper than even dirt-cheap Third World labour, and who cares if it's shitty customer service? Look our share price do gooder!
I thought comment reports all went to Scott. If Substack is going to ban commenters based on criteria they enforce site-wide, then I hardly expect them to rely on individual reports when any two blogs could have completely opposite moderation policies and readerships.
This doesn't really apply here, since freedom of speech doesn't mean entitlement to every platform. Unless you're talking about legally formalizing internet moderation, in which case I'm curious how could this be done without causing a huge mess.
You're right, people posting here can't claim a right to freedom of speech. But one of the things people with blogs on Substack like is that it does very little censorship, and I'm sure Substack is aware of that. If they are now doing more censorship, what's up with that, and how much worse is it going to get?
"Freedom doesn't mean freedom from consequences" is a dumb and dangerous slogan - that's most of what it does mean.
Total freedom from consequences is meaningless - the reductio ad absurdam is "freedom to say 'pass the salt' without receiving condiments".
So when you talk about "speaking freely" like this, I take you to mean "it should be forbidden to impose certain sorts of consequence for certain sorts of speech on the internet".
And that obviously covers a multitude of sins - what forms of reaction to what forms of speech do you think should and shouldn't be legal?
> "Freedom doesn't mean freedom from consequences" is a dumb and dangerous slogan
Yeah, by that logic, you had a lot of free speech in Soviet Union, you just later got a bullet for what you said, but... you know, things have consequences, and that's okay.
I guess, technically, internet is more analogical to press than to speech. Freedom of press only applies to those who have printers, and you are not one of them.
The most extreme case I can think of would be a blog promoting child abuse. Motto "after 8 is too late." (That's the real motto of some underground group of pedophiles.)
I don't know who you are but I was just disallowed to share a link on my own youtube channel unless I uploaded a video for them to run against their database to ensure that I was never suspended from their platform.
I never was and I assume this is just another tightening of the reigns against everybody by the Faceless Unaccountables who have a chokehold on all of human communication.
Which kind of makes it worse than if they had some particular reason to suspect me personally.
I don't understand how ANYBODY can allow this continue.
There is SO MUCH WRONG with how society is managed. And yet, rather than be activists against the tyrannical elite we leave such activism to crazy conspiracists and are proud to laugh at them when they accurately describe the present tyranny as tyranny.
THERE IS NO "hope in the proles".
Let history not say that there was no hope in us either.
here's the thing; the only reason you can post a video at all is because of Google bearing the costs. If you tried to self-host it, it probably would be far too expensive to do so unless you were a business. Hobbyist video might be impossible. Video hosting is hard and costly, which is why YouTube exists.
people dont get that they are begging from others; they are vastly underpaying for a service but are vulnerable because of it.
The internet was once free and equal (please don't nitpick). If you were around during google's genesis you know what I am saying, and Net Neutrality aimed to keep it that way.
And if it cost us the ability to upload more than one video a week that would be an okay cost for the benefit of a more equal internet (and I'm not even sure we would consider it a cost.)
If the problem we have is that land grabs have left large swathes of the internet a patchwork of privately-owned enclaves run by a class of gentry accountable to none but themselves, then Urbit, a project started by an unironic monarchist that encodes feudalism into its very fabric, is the opposite of a solution.
Yes, he would of course like to own the internet and everything in it. But, as history has shown us, so does everyone.
The fact that he says it up front at least means that he will have to engage with the matter as things move along.
I know nothing about Urbit and only use android currently, but trustbusting can be good. It won't solve everything forever, but, it takes a while for companies and people to build up enough credibility before they become any kind of real threat.
Besides, maybe along the way we'll find him to be the king we never knew we wanted?
Anyway, all I'm saying is that while the old free internet would be better (and with what we've learned since then we can make it even a whole lot better than that, as well solve many of the problems which that internet itself had) taking a few big chunks out of the handful of people who currently own all of the portals of worldwide conversation would be an improvement.
I'm sure most of you good people live in large cities on one coast or the other. I, on the other hand, live in the middle of the country on a small peninsula that runs out into northern Lake Michigan. But even here in our little village, politics can get a little crazy: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/brouhaha-at-the-council
eh you come across badly in the council meeting, which undermines the point. You disrespected the leader and showed an "i'm too good for this" attitude. Keep in mind people have long memories and in a village you will rely on them because you have less of the resources suburbs and cities have that let you ignore your neighbors.
a little grace goes a long way, and they've seen more rich people play at chicken raising than you have councils.
"The language of the letter was official, very official. There were no charges, per se, just several concerns about the housing, feeding, watering, psychological welfare and eventual fate of the birds on our farm property."
And *this* is why I am very non-gruntled about Scott's grant to the Legal Impact for Chickens bunch, because *this* is precisely the kind of lawfare I expect them, or the people who want to take cases which they will then assist to do so, to engage in.
'But we're only going after factory farms!' Yeah, my eye they are.
And also yeah, townies who visit the country and have no idea about how animals are raised or how animals live in the wild, but they just love the poor little animals and are so concerned about their welfare, they learned it all from the Disney anthropomorphised animal movies so they know what animals are like better than you do!
Hey, Not All Townies (tm). I'm a townie and while I fed the chickens one week in summer back when I was five years old, I have no idea how they're raised. I saw a chicken running around in the forest once and was confused. But still, the only thing I am concerned about re: chickens is 1). the taste, and 2). whether they contain any chemicals that are hazardous to my health. That's it. Chickens aren't animals to me, they're protein.
No I meant the social/legal repercussions. Was there any further impact from the town council? What were they actually investigating? Were they accusing you of animal cruelty? Is everyone mad at you now? What's the deal?
Joshua Moon runs a Kiwi Farms, a forum that has many supporters and even more enemies. Regardless of what you may have heard or think about his forum (please don't rail off to comment about it here), his essays are better journalism than most WSJ long forms. They tend to not to defend his site as a specific case but small websites in general (i.e are not heavily biased). Moon has experience very few have, and at least this new essay on the DDoS mitigation industry makes very good use of it: https://madattheinternet.substack.com/p/a-handful-of-companies-rule-the-internet
KF is extremely mean-spirited and as such I don't know how much its troubles generalize, but there's a real problem with the internet that I think this article speaks to. Nothing but boring, safe, corporate websites these days.
Regarding the reactions to this post: I do not know who the hell Joshua Moon is, but judging by the comments here and the people who are making them, I think it's likely that I, too, would despise him if I knew more about him. Still, it seems unreasonable to reject the blog poster, and the person posting the link to the post here, rather than the content of the blog post itself. Why not just shred the views in Moon's post? If he is both evil and a mediocre thinker and writer that should be easy to do.
Here's an instance of that ad hominem and ad ad hominem rejection.
<For what it's worth, if you can't find anyone who isn't a B-grade monster expressing an opinion, that should tell you something (if you still think the opinion is worth spreading, rewrite it in your own words); if you can, don't source it to someone who is
Ok, I clicked, so that others don't have to. My attempt at summary...
There are only 16 Tier 1 internet providers in the world, half of them are American. They "effectively dictate what is allowed to be on the Internet in the United States" and "are complicit in allowing a form of network abuse" called DDoS.
DDoS attacks are cheap, defense is expensive. Cloudflare provides security against DDoS for half of the internet. "If they decide you don’t get to be on their network, you will quickly realize there’s no real alternatives." There are two subtypes of DDoS attacks -- application attacks and network attacks -- a good programmer could write something analogical to Cloudflare to protect against the former, but the latter would just directly increase his bills. There are companies providing solutions to that, too, but most of them accept only big corporate customers; the remaining ones "get to be choosy about their customers" and are very expensive. They have rejected Kiwi Farms, and tomorrow, they might reject you!
Also, Joshua Moon suspects that the DDoS protection companies may be organizing DDoS attacks themselves, to increase their profits.
As I was reading your comment, I thought I had once read a WIRED or some other article about Cloudflare continuing to provide service to the Daily Stormer (and then something else about the founder having a brain tumor, not related). So I looked it up and found this: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
> The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
I don't know what else to say.
Re your last paragraph: this piece https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/6/23339889/cloudflare-kiwi-farms-content-moderation-ddos mentions that "Cloudflare provides security services to… makers of cyberattack software! That’s the claim made in this blog post from Sergiy P. Usatyuk, who was convicted of running a large DDoS-for-hire scheme". I haven't looked into this. That seems like a good reason for refusing a client service, though. Does Cloudflare routinely reject clients on the basis of refusing to support illegal /other activity, or are the high-profile cases the main instances?
Maybe instead of rejecting vigilanteism in the realm of content moderation, we should embrace it in a principled way, because legislation is slow to do so? I suppose that's what most platforms are starting to do already.
I can't comment on the technical part, of if it's possible for ISPs to make it harder for people to send DDOSes. I imagine that the "distributed" part makes it fairly difficult, though - there's not an individual source of the attacks that you can ban, all you can do is look for patterns that make you think "these connections are probably from a botnet."
As for the fact that ISPs and infrastructure companies can be choosy about their customers, I think I value freedom of association more than I value keeping KiwiFarms on the air. It's pretty normal for a business to be able to fire a client who's too much trouble to work with, or who's costing them reputation and money.
And like, if he was *just* an annoying right-winger you could maybe have a "spirit of the first amendment" argument, arguing that even if "right-wing asshole" isn't *legally* protected, the *spirit* of the law demands that we let KF exist online like everyone else. But KF in particular is famous for organized doxxing and harassment, and trying to protect that on "spirit of the law" grounds strikes me as incoherent. "Everyone has the right to be in the public square no matter how much you hate them" can't coexist with "You have the right to bully people you hate into withdrawing from the public square."
>> As for the fact that ISPs and infrastructure companies can be choosy about their customers, I think I value freedom of association more than I value keeping KiwiFarms on the air. It's pretty normal for a business to be able to fire a client who's too much trouble to work with, or who's costing them reputation and money.
+1
Forcing a business to serve anyone, regardless of who they are or how reprehensible their conduct, is a significant infringement on individual rights for a government to impose on a private company. I wouldn't say that such a requirement should never be imposed (electricity and hospital services come to mind), but given the conflict it presents trading against freedom of association, I think it's a high bar for very special cases. And while I would be a strong advocate that a hospital or water utility not be permitted to refuse Mr. Moon service, the DDoS Defense Industry does not strike me as critical enough to life and livelihood to rise to that level.
And I certainly wouldn't advocate for the government to enforce some kind of tailored privilege specific to Mr. Moon and people like him, along the lines of a Civil Rights Act. I mean, what's the protected class? "People dedicated to pissing on other people's shoes online?"
Refusing to provide internet service or infrastructure to someone is *also* not harassment or bullying.
You can either take a legalistic approach and say "Well, bullying is okay, and so is refusing to associate with bullies, they're both legal." Or you can take a spirit-of-the-law approach and say "Denying people internet access is not okay, and neither is harassing them off of it, they both are harmful to the marketplace of ideas." But I don't see a coherent set of norms in which it's okay to bully people but not okay to refuse to associate with bullies.
EDIT: I should also point out that while DDOSing is a crime, so is harassment. So even the legalistic approach doesn't get you very far.
"But I don't see a coherent set of norms in which it's okay to bully people but not okay to refuse to associate with bullies."
The same set of norms that says a Jewish baker has to bake a Hitler's Birthday cake, or a Christian wedding chapel host a gay poly pagan pre-orgy ceremony.
"I was informed, on accident, that their motivation for this decision was that my website’s Wikipedia page was unfavorable." - translation: once ISPs become aware of what is on his website, they cancel him because of that.
Moon does not mention once what his website is about because he knows that decent men everywhere will oppose it. He feels his sophistry can make the situation someone else's fault and not his own.
The enemies of Kiwi Farms aren't just good men, decent men, but true men's men. Some of the most square-jawed, testosterone-soaked men I've ever seen! Like Atlas, they carry the weight of the world on their exceedingly broad shoulders! Like Zeus, a furrow of their manly brow will change destinies!
Well I must be an indecent man, or maybe not even a man at all. I don't know this guy, I don't know his website, I have no idea if all this is true or it's a few disgruntled special snowflakes causing trouble (this does happen on the Internet, you know), so how about you explain to me why Decent Men Oppose?
It looks like Kiwi Farms was created in 2013 as a forum where people who didn't like some fancomic author named Christine Weston Chandler, as a place to coordinate plans to harass her. Specific details in the article, but it includes highlights like convincing a 13-year-old boy into masquerading as a 19-year-old girl in order to have phone sex with Chandler and record it, sending prostitutes to visit Chandler’s house then calling the family to taunt them about it, etc.
From there KF seems to have evolved into a preferred platform for people who want to coordinate harassment, trolling, stalking, doxing, etc of online figures and communities. Wikipedia says they've been tied to 3 suicides by targeted figures.
So yeah, pretty dirtbag stuff.
Also kind of entertaining that the "guy who runs the site where people can coordinate to harass other people" is apparently asking for more government intervention in the DDOS marketplace so that "people can't coordinate to harass me with DDOS attacks."
In reality it's just a gossip forum full of women. Certain demographics with outsized influence in the tech industry don't like it because the nastiness of their social circles gets regularly exposed there and laughed at.
Things like "sending prostitutes to somebody's house" and "convincing a 13-year-old to impersonate a 19-year-old, have phone sex with somebody, and record it" seem to me to go significantly beyond "gossip."
On the other hand, looking up "Christine Weston Chandler", I get the information that this was a guy before they came out as trans, and have admitted committing incest with their mother.
So there's a lot of "what the hell" on both sides, and it seems to be the worst of the Internet with people finding a target who responded with equal vigour and it all took off from there:
On the one hand, yeah, that site appears to be full of dirtbags. On the other hand, as long as they're not doing anything actually illegal, they deserve to have their dirtbag website. ISPs should not get to dictate who does and who doesn't get to speak, because no one died and elected them Commissar.
Wait, who has been prevented from speaking here? I mean, Chandler is probably having a harder time reaching her audience on account of being in jail, but she's in jail for a crime she apparently committed in meatspace. And "freedom of speech" has never meant "if you publicly admit to committing crimes, you can't be prosecuted because that would be punishing you for your speech".
If other participants in this drama are being harassed or DDOSed into silence, then they're being effectively prevented from speaking, but it's not the ISP that's doing that, it's the harassers and DDOSers.
Which perhaps the ISP, or Cloudflare or whomever, could help with. But if I'm a bodyguard with time on my schedule and the head of Hamas's US chapter asks me to protect him from a bunch of pissed-off Jews, my decision to sit this one out doesn't mean I'm the one denying his right to life.
Nobody’s stopping the dirtbags from starting their own DDoS defense service and taking all comers.
There’s a very limited number of services (water, hospitals, electricity) where I’d support a utility model that denies a private company agency over who its customers are. DDoS protection isn’t one of them.
My refusal to give you a ride does not mean I’m acting as “Commissar of Transit” preventing you from getting to work.
You'll find that KF's targets are themselves horrific people, almost always shielded by being a person of protected identity status. As such they'll be one of the only places online you'll find true information about their targets.
Unfortunately, you can also find a lot of untrue information there.
...so, vigilanteism is good and should be permitted, and therefore KF is a valid target for vigilante takedowns just like anyone else? ...or vigilanteism is bad and shouldn't be permitted, and therefore it's valid to refuse to work with KF?
Yeesh. So its dirtbags bagging on dirtbags bagging on dirtbags all the way down. Can't say I'm surprised.
Still, to the extent that Moon wants to lean on the "the target of my dirtbag behavior is, himself, a dirtbag who totally deserves it" defense, I don't see any reason we should be sympathetic when he finds that shoe fitted for his own foot as well.
I will stop commenting here, and in ACX in general, and probably never go to an ACX meeting. You are hopelessly far away from old LW rationalism.
He plainly advocates for more transparency from payment network, a better Section 230, and regulation to have Tier 1 ISPs prevent DDoS by informative and well-argued essays about these topics. There essays are kind of content that could have been published in a high quality magazine. There's almost no mention of Kiwi Farms. The only case Moon defends in them is the general case.
Arguing about the specific instead of the general case is absurd. I said please don't rail off, and get four replies that do exactly that!
It has always been Lesswrong tradition to go on tangents. If you were making this comment on lesswrong I would downvote you for being dramatic and whiny about it.
Please do - I think a critical mass of people like you would drive decent posters with worthwhile things to say away.
For what it's worth, if you can't find anyone who isn't a B-grade monster expressing an opinion, that should tell you something (if you still think the opinion is worth spreading, rewrite it in your own words); if you can, don't source it to someone who is. If you want people on the internet to take something you have to say seriously - especially people who have no reason to assume you're acting in good faith, if indeed you are - then saying "look, this is the opinion of someone evil" is not a good way to promote it, and adding "and please don't criticise them" only makes things worse.
And if - as I suspect - your actual motivation is to destigmatise Moon rather than any particular passion for internet regulation, so that none of that advice is actually helpful to you in achieving what you want, then I think your stopping commentating here would be an excellent outcome.
His arguments are self-serving, the prose is mediocre, and it reeks of conspiracy theories. His personal animus colors the post too much; it is not an impartial argument in defense of ideals.
He is also self-contradictory; he says "ISPs should not be able to choose their customers", but he also says ISPs need to kick off the DDOS-ers.
You've explicitly asked people not to discuss Moon or Kiwi Farms, and therefore I cannot further elaborate on reasons why Moon's experiences in particular are ones that very few others have.
> I get impression that I tell everyone "bad person X does good thing(s) Y that I find very informative", and your response is "the bad person is bad."
The issue with "bad person wrote interesting post I want to discuss" is that I have 0 interest in giving bad person any clicks so it doesn't matter how good the post is, I'm not going to their site and that's it. As such if all you provide is a link no conversation can happen.
I've seen this issue solved before with people copying the article or the relevant bits to the forum they want to discuss them in. This way the points can be discussed without giving support to the author.
FWIW I've actually been on Kiwi Farms once, years ago, following a link to an article and not knowing the kind of place it was. It was something something mediocrity. Felt like reading a horoscope, many words pretending to be heavy with meaning, but nothing of value was said.
I worry about voting with clicks too, but also, I guess a single click is not that significant, and it' better to participate in the discussion knowing what the topic is actually about.
Viliam gave a TL;DR in another thread, so I guess until then, fair enough.
It's a rule of thumb that clicks support the creator in some way shape or form. I don't know the internals of substack enough but presumably some amount of clicks to their free substack will have positive consequences for the author, whatever the business model is.
And maybe it doesn't matter at all under how substack operates but I don't care enough to find out.
If your favorite book is Mein Kampf, people are going to think you're a Nazi. And if you show up someplace, and start handing out copies of Mein Kampf, and ask people not to say anything bad about the author, people are going to think you're promoting Nazism.
I don't think you're (necessarily) a Nazi, but I do think you're promoting Joshua Moon.
It takes some real chutzpah to go into a thread where the OP said to ignore the specific example presented and take a look at the general issue, and then dismiss someone's argument because of the specific example they brought up.
Hi, I'm hoping to be able to conduct a conversation with humanity.
Setting aside the odds, methods and reasons -- as an ordained Orthodox Rabbi, despite neither believing nor practicing as most Orthodox Jews do, those sentiments and studies are probably what I know best and care about most. So, because my language automatically leans towards these texts I use that language when discussing my utopian ideals (i.e. in maimonidean messianic language).
Yesterday I took a foray into the comment section of a fellow who refers to himself as a rationalist rabbi (and more or less is) but whose comment section is polluted by lesser lights.
I wrote briefly about the experience here (feel free to skip the email at the end if you aren't excited to see if you can decipher some of the yeshiva'isms).
Being a rabbi I couldn't help but add a comment below the article regarding the actual meaning of the adjacent contradictory biblical verses.
This led to my sharing the viscerak frustration with fools that Rabbi Eleazar had and then some suggestion for how we few good and smart guys could reform society such that we wouldn't have to run around all day stabbing trolls.
This particular blog is not short on smart people patiently listening to smart people. There are still too many fools jotting down words without understanding but at literally 1% of what takes place elsewhere.
I'm curious as to whether my suggestion in the comment is understandable to you.
I really think mankind needs a revolution in how we relate to each other. And I think that rulers will only appear to be legitimate if they are in adult-level communication with the masse of humanity.
And furthermore, I think that most of the uber-privileged would gladly join a movement for greater equality if they believed that it would lead to a safer, friendlier world for them too.
Do you think this is comprehensible in the comment?
P.S. It's long(ish) so please only read it if it looks like fun. 😉 - Oh, snd if you like it please leave a nice comment. I intend to share it with the audience for (and about) whom it was written and it would be nice if the 20% of worthy people from that page should see a few appreciative comments in intelligent language before it is sullied with a dozen comments by high school dropouts with vuvuzelas.
Why did the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia have the code name "noble anvil"? What kind of a name is that? What does an anvil have to do with anything? How can an anvil be noble?
(Please don't start a culture war battle in the subcomments to my comment specifically. Otherwise I will cry.)
I heard somewhere (may not be true) that the military has a machine to generate two random letters for a mission. Say N and A in this case. and then they pick some words to go with the letters.
I asked ChatGPT to give me some more code names for military operations and here's what they wrote:
1. Operation "Unified Protector" - NATO's mission in Libya in 2011.
2. Operation "Resolute Support" - Ongoing NATO-led mission in Afghanistan since 2015.
3. Operation "Deliberate Force" - NATO air campaign in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995.
4. Operation "Allied Force" - NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia in 1999.
5. Operation "Ocean Shield" - NATO's anti-piracy mission in the Indian Ocean, off the Horn of Africa from 2009 to 2016.
6. Operation "Enduring Freedom" - NATO mission in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014.
7. Operation "Balkan Shield" - NATO's mission in the Balkans in the 1990s.
8. Operation "Silver Wake" - Evacuation mission in Albania in 1997.
9. Operation "Sharp Guard" - Naval blockade of the Adriatic Sea from 1993 to 1996 during the Yugoslav Wars.
10. Operation "Eagle Assist" - Operation after the September 11 attacks where NATO aircraft were sent on patrol flights over the United States.
11. Operation "Active Endeavour" - NATO naval missions in the Mediterranean to deter and disrupt terrorist activity from 2001 to 2016.
12. Operation “Essential Harvest” - NATO mission in Macedonia in 2001.
13. Operation "Allied Harmony" - NATO operation in Macedonia in 2002.
14. Operation "Joint Enterprise" - NATO's Kosovo Force (KFOR) peace-support operation ongoing since 1999.
15. Operation “Allied Action” - Military operation in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the late 90s.
16. Operation “Joint Guard” - Stabilization force operation during the Bosnian war in the 90s.
17. Operation “Allied Harbour” - NATO's operation to assist refugees during the 1999 Kosovo refugee crisis.
This all sounds vague and brave and strong and patriotic, like it doesn't reveal much details but gives off a feeling of military might and justice. But they don't sound absurd, unlike the noble anvil. But maybe anvils don't sound absurd except to me? Maybe they have some military/patriotic significance I'm missing?
I'm not entirely convinced by his argument, so here are some other hypotheses:
(1) The size of the US affords greater specialization
(2) The liberal legacy of the US (together with its conservative political system) has kept the government from getting as authoritarian as in other countries
(3) The less centralized system of the US has allowed competition between states – c.f. Germany where 95% of taxes are federal, or France, where all real power lies in Paris.
(4) The people who migrated to the US were somehow better than those who remained.
Genetic explanation, or the ideas of welfare state, tax codes etc. do not really explain why this gap really only started widening and widening from 2008 on. Indeed, before it, Western Europe had almost caught the US in GDP-per-capita measurement (https://cdn.ecipe.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Fig8-2048x926.png). I'd say more important is the dysfunction of EU as a structure, as it is now.
For the most part, there's a stop-start dynamic to Western Europe's growth, with periods of sclerosis followed by periods of rapid growth. The most recent period of rapid growth - roughly the 00s, until the 2008 crisis - happened congruent to the adoption of euro, and it's not surprising that this would hit the wall after 2008 expose the structural weaknesses of the common currency.
Previous periods of stagnation, as far as I've understood, have also tended to be periods when EU institutions have faltered or had their weaknesses exposed, and previous periods of growth have followed EU reforms and deepening integration.
The current problem is that there's very little to do beyond actually forming a bonafide European federation, and that's been a bridge too far for many European countries, especially the wealthier Northern countries that are needed for paying the bills, so EU has been stuck on a permanent shit-or-get-off-the-pot stage. Can't form a federation, can't break the whole thing up (also widely unpopular and would create an immense economic crisis).
I've previously been cold towards federalism myself, but after the Ukraine War started have grown increasingly convinced there does exist enough commonality at themoment in Europe to enable one, considering the surprising amounts of solidarity and even self-sacrifice countries have been able to implement to help Ukraine. (Ironically, at the same time, many of the strongest previous pro-Europeans I've seen seem colder to EU than before since they expected vastly more support for Ukraine and haven't gotten it...)
Of course US also has many more things going for it (resource, the pole position in the global community etc.), but at the very least a new bout of integration might again switch the growth engine on and bring some new gains, whatever the amount, instead of the endless sludge that the continent's been going through for 15 years. It won't by itself solve issues like the graying of the continent and the assorted costs, of course.
You are not presenting a serious source for your claim, so I can't have the pleasure to show you what its methodology got wrong. But if I must guess, it seems that you (by quoting the wiki page) are comparing means? Medians may tell a different story. Edit: wiki does report the medians, my bad; would be cool to do a qq-plot
I"m not an economist, but I would assume it's because the US has a much more business-friendly tax code, less restrictive employment regulation, and a more entrepreneurial culture. The US cultivates and incentivizes entrepreneurial risk-taking. That's a self-catalyzing effect, as the lure of outsized rewards attracts a disproportionate percentage of the world's talent whose presence further reinforces a culture of entrepreneurship. Stock options and venture capital aren't really a thing in Europe (at least, not commonly). Just look at the internet revolution. Almost every tech company of note is based in the US. All of the innovation happened here. I'm certain that that's downstream of a more business-friendly, risk-tolerant culture, which leads to higher growth.
Geopolitics is also very likely a factor. US hegemony results in control of lots of global infrastructure (including internet infrastructure). This is leveraged for financial gain.
> even accounting for that they are still vastly poorer
Is that really true, though?
e.g. going bankrupt due to medical bills (or, y'know, going without medical care because your family can't afford it) is just... not a thing in the UK.
You have to take lifestyle and cost of living into account. Yes, in the US you generally get more disposable income; more money dropped in your bank account each month doing the same job than elsewhere. But if most of it goes straight back out again to pay for the bottom layer of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, are you actually better off? If such luxuries as homeownership - indeed, living in a house, - taking holidays abroad, having much vacation time at all, indeed working just one job rather than two (yes, glorify the hustle!), are all the preserve of the top few percent in one place, but within reach of the working class in another, which society is rich and which poor?
> If such luxuries as homeownership - indeed, living in a house, - taking holidays abroad, having much vacation time at all, indeed working just one job rather than two (yes, glorify the hustle!), are all the preserve of the top few percent in one place,
None of these things are relegated to the top few percent in America so idk what the fuck you're going on about.
If this is a bad faith argument. then how on earth is is saying "American go bankrupt from cancer" not a bad faith argument when no figures are given around how common this is and no source for them is given?
>Anyway, the stats say Europeans just live longer than Americans and it's not even close.
Have you considered at all the remote possibility that factors beyond health care explain the bulk of life expectancy differences in developed nations? Like, you know, LIFESTYLE FACTORS?
RandomCriticalAnalysis did a deep dive on this several years ago. Europeans live longer because of lifestyle differences (esp. obesity and drug use) not because their health system is any more effective.
It's not really a thing in the U.S. either, since you get free health insurance if you are in poverty and then heavily subsidized insurance up to a pretty high income.
Yeah, the only people who believe stuff like that are Americans. Left-wingers in the UK would never say that, they say the problem is that the "stingy" Conservative Party government will not provide care.
It's the fallacy of assuming that because you haven't heard of a problem, it doesn't exist.
I actually think this is an interesting question, even if your wording is somewhat strange.
The problem is of course what metric you should measure. There are a lot of ways to measure income (mean/ median, household/person, age standardized/ not, comparing price levevels etc).
By looking at a bunch of things and what others think (Matthew Yglesias has a good article on this subject) it sems that the US has been getting a slightly higher true median income since roughly 2010. This might be because of A: More young people (retired people drag it down), and B: The US having a historic oil boom.
>However! If you look at other factors that you would usually use to determine if a country is developed (Child mortality and life expectancy), Scandinavia is way above the US. I mean by a factor of two for infant mortality :
So China is more developed than the US ?
Lifestyle factors explain the differences, not Scandinavia being "more developed"?
Is Japan the “most developed” country in the world?
> child mortality
Child mortality is primarily caused by things like birth defects, genetic disorders, disease, bad maternal health.
Why would this have anything to do with income, or even “developed”-ness as you have now changed the metric to? This is a measure of the health of the populace, which is weakly correlated at best with income (see: US vs Asia)
Side note: I’m willing to bet these metrics don’t account for the fact that many European countries heavily encourage abortions for babies with birth defects, in large part to improve these metrics?
I agree life expectancy have too much to do with personal choices to be a good metric on it's own. People in a rich country might just choose to smoke more.
Child mortality however is relevant. It is the main way we can claim that we are better off now than back in the 'good old days' when the rate was 30 - 40 %. And it correlate heavily with what we usually considers 'richness' of a country.
Now, with regards to abortion I am not certain. I know that Denmark had a stricter abortion law than the US did, before Roe vs Wade was overturned. A quick search on wikipedia told me that the rate was 12.1 abortion pr 1000 women in DK in 2013.
But my mortality statistics is from 2020, and I can't find any abortion statistics from that year.
It might be that DK aborts more sick fetuses, since we offer free ultra sound scans for all mothers. I don't know if this is done in the US or not. I think that abortions might play a much larger role in some poor Eastern European countries that have both higher abortion rates and surprisingly low infant mortality. But on the other hand, nobody is disputing that former East-bloc countries are poorer than the US.
But if we were to take this comparison, then we should also allow Scandinavia to shred its poorest 10% of the population before making their statistics. Saying 'when we remove the poorest groups from consideration, then country X is very rich' really doesn't tell you that much.
Notice that I am not arguing that the US system is necessarily any worse than the Scandinavian one. It is a tradeoff: The US middle class is actually richer than Scandinavians, and the US economy is probably turning out more innovation. But the cost of this is an actual worse outcome for the lowest quartile or so.
>But if we were to take this comparison, then we should also allow Scandinavia to shred its poorest 10% of the population before making their statistics.
No, because black americans are categorically different than poor white scandies. It's not just a matter of wealth and there's ZERO evidence that these black people would fare any better in scandinavia than the US.
It's a number of things - there are differences in accounting stillbirths vs live births:
"However, accounting for differential reporting is quantitatively important. Compared to the average of the five European countries we analyze, limiting to a comparable sample lowers the apparent US IMR disadvantage from 2.5 deaths per 1000 births to 1.5 deaths."
There are also more premature births in the US, affecting weight at birth, and a good part of that excess is due to the US tackling "harder" cases and trying to salvage very premature births where the EU simply won't:
"Worse health at birth is widely cited as the major driver of the US IMR disadvantage (MacDorman and Mathews, 2009; National Research Council, 2013; Wilcox et al., 1995); we are able to investigate this issue after restricting attention to our comparably-reported sample. Consistent with past evidence that has focused on comparing the US with Scandinavian countries, we find that birth weight can explain around 75% of the US IMR disadvantage relative to Finland or Belgium. However, birth weight can only explain 30% of the US IMR disadvantage relative to Austria or the UK. "
Then the rest is a huge gap in post-birth deaths due primarily to low SES populations:
Is this accounting for different methods of calculating infant mortality? Scandinavia is also way healthier than the U.S. in general, and not because of medical care.
Yes, it is counted by infant (<5 years) deaths pr 1000 live births. Denmark has 3.6, US 6.3, Argentina 8.6 just for comparison. Since good statistics are kept on both of those occurences I can't see any way the stats can be very much away from the true numbers.
Scandinavians might be more healthy (fewer are obese and fewer opiods) which could explain the higher total life expectancy. Infant mortality seems more like a true sign that poverty in the US is worse than in Scandinavia.
Notice that in many countries an infant born under a certain weight, even if alive when born, isn't counted as a live birth. Many don't count sufficiently premature births.
The US has one of, if not the, the broadest definitions of "live birth", which makes comparisons of infant mortality rates not particularly useful for comparison purposes.
If you are right that the method of counting is completely different between countries then of course we can't compare them (seems the European one counts 500g + whereas to that the US one asks for 20+ weeks of gestation.)
But if we compare them, the Nordic countries had around 3.1 deaths pr 1000 births, and the US around 5.7 at 2021. But again, if it is truly apples and oranges, then the comparison is useless.
It is apples and oranges, if we approach the statistics that way - there are, however, ways around the issues, for countries with really good reporting data: You can also compare late term fetal mortality rates.
This comparison, as I understand it, brings the US more in line with European nations generally. The US is still slightly worse, arising as I understand it from higher preterm births in the US compared to Europe. Which might also be a reporting artifact - but I doubt it, because (IIRC) when you compare the infant mortality rates this way with European infant mortality rates, European-descended US citizens have slightly -better- infant mortality rates than in their native countries; the difference arises primarily from minority groups in the US. I can't quickly find the studies I encountered (a while ago) there, but https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8870826/ points to vast racial discrepancies, which, after you adjust for reporting differences, should at least suggest plausibility for the claim.
For the higher infant mortality groups, my understanding is that this is primarily driven by preterm births; this could be related to poverty, except https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-019-7651-y suggests that it isn't poverty, or at least not solely poverty (it finds an effect, but not large enough to explain the discrepancy). So, it could also be genetic, cultural, linguistic (health campaigns may not effectively target all populations equally), or geographic (ease of transportation / hospital access - see https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/146/5/e20200464/75318/Infant-Mortality-in-Rural-and-Nonrural-Counties-in for evidence that hospital access may play a role, although there's going to be some considerable poverty overlap here - when they control for poverty a lot of the effect disappears, but I think controlling for poverty is also incidentally controlling for hospital proximity with respect to rural counties - wealthy people tend to live near hospitals).
Edit: Actually, there's probably a decent quick-and-dirty comparison you can make specifically with Scandinavian countries - the upper peninsula of Michigan is predominantly home to descendants of Scandinavian countries. https://vitalstats.michigan.gov/osr/InDxMain/AllHDTbl.asp has infant mortality rates by region, and eyeballing it, the upper peninsula looks a lot more like Scandinavia in terms of infant mortality rates than the rest of Michigan.
I've been reading comments here since, I don't know, about 2015, and I agree in general. I think it's largely because this substack has a wider readership than the old SSC blog, and possibly less strict moderation. It also seems like Scott is just less focused on blogging.
However, I think you're being unnecessarily rude about this comment in particular. If you have a reason to think Wikipedia's statistics on per capita income are wrong, explain that reason, and post statistics you think are better. (I realize the part about disposable income is less relevant but I think we're intended to scroll down to the second table.) Taking a cursory glance at someone's link and then posting a two sentence, overtly insulting reply wouldn't have been well received on SSC either.
I think you might be overreacting. Even if one doesn't like the tone of a question, or if there might be some flaw in the first argument, we should always treat it as a chance to engage with the actual problem being brought up.
And in this particular case, the article actually contains both a mean household income and median income pr country section. I think those numbers really do need to be seriously discussed both by Americans and Europeans.
Fair point but, honestly....I realized the other day that my interest in checking this comment section has been waning and it feels like Nolan's point is the reason why.
Things may also be getting meaner here, not sure. And if true then those two trends may of course be related.
Scott does not put much time these days into reading the comments section and imposing bans. The last time he made an announcement about commenters he'd banned was several months ago. I occasionally report really godawful comments -- the last one was about Jews lusting for the blood of children -- and when I check back a few weeks later the comments I reported are still sitting there on the threads. And of course there are lots of comments that do not meet the 2-out-of-3 rule, probably dozens on every thread, and that's not counting exchanges where people are just joking around together (those seem fine to me). I suggested a while ago that Scott hire a grad student to go through the comments and send him a list of those that don't meet his criteria. Scott can have final say -- or, if he decides the grad student is choosing accurately and well, he can just turn the job of imposing bans on people who make bad comments over to the grad student. Alternatively, we could have a system that users as a group implement. What do you think of that?
As for your feeling that the comments section is less smart and interesting: I have only been participating here for 2 years. My sense is that there are a good number of awesome posts -- I don't know of any online forum that equals ACX in that respect. However the open threads are getting larger and larger, and a lot of the extra comments are just blah. Do you think there's less really good stuff, or just more blah stuff mixed in?
Hmm....not sure offhand but it's an interesting question. I'll keep that distinction in mind while perusing and see how it starts shaking out if it does.
Does anyone have any good recommendations for small business / personal tax preparers?
Honestly, I'm not even sure thats *exactly* what I need, and help formulating the question would probably be really valuable as well. What I can say is that I have abnormally complicated taxes for an individual (a few small businesses, K1s, lots of stuff) but simultaneously my small businesses are unusually simple.
I'm currently working with a high end tax pre team, and have been for the last few years, but every time I interact with them I feel like I want to tear my hair out. I feel like I am constantly filling out endless forms / ect for them.
What I (think) I want is someone I can just open up my (sloppy) books to, and who will take care of my taxes without sucking tons of hours out of my day, and making me get super angry multiple times.
Does anyone have any recommendations? I'm also open to suggestions to the question "what am I even looking for"
The fact that in USA you have to fill the tax forms yourself is absolutely bizzare. Does anyone support this status quo? Why don't you demand to change it?
In this case, the taxpayer *is* the business owner, so he needs to file taxes himself in any case - there is no employer to do it for him. Only he has the raw information required to do it.
Yes, the status quo is supported a $14 billion tax preparation industry which uses some of that money to block any meaningful change which would reduce their profits.
You probably just need to find a local CPA and tell him what you're looking for. Odds are, they've got other clients with sloppy books and who also don't enjoy filling out forms.
Sounds like you need to find a different person. I love my tax guy, but my taxes are simple. I'd talk to some local business people get some recommendations and then take last years taxes and talk to them... yeah a bunch of leg work on your part.
Oh dear looking for a US CPA in Singapore? I don't think you'll find one here. And certainly not if you don't tell people you're in Singapore. Try to give as much pertinent info with your question as possible.
Did tax prep for three months several years ago, and can say the absolute simplest form still takes about fifteen minutes to fill out, so pretty sure you're stuck with hours of paperwork no matter what.
I do my taxes myself. I once tried having a tax preparer do it, and the forms she had me fill out were very similar to the tax forms themselves. Cost money and didn't really save much time, plus I didn't learn anything. It's not *that*complicated. Plan to spend a coupla days on it the first time through. In later years it gets easier.
I used to do my own taxes. At this point I'm _way_ out over the complexity level for me to just do my own ( My tax submission last year was ~ 250 pages long per state, and happened in 6 states + the fed)
I second this. The learning bit is important. Even if you later decide that youd rather pay the money and save the time, youll be in a position to better evaluate the value being created by that particular provider. There are many expensive providers which are essentially just handing you the tax forms to fill out yourself and are only handling the actual act of filing.
Do your own taxes is underrated amongst the professional classes.
Emily oster is good. The birth partner is ok but pretty wordy. Also a new eddition replaced "she" with "they" and wasn't well edited to acount for the change, which makes some sentences hard to parse.
I've seen that book. She delivers babies in tree houses in Santa Cruz. Boomers went back to Mother Earth for about six years in the 70s, just before bell bottoms, polyester shirts, and unisex haircuts buried the 60s for good, but some of the back-to-the-earth ideas were sound.
Does anyone have any good resources for summaries of British politics post WW2? I’m esp interested in the Thatcher-Brown era. Looking for something polemic, from someone that was on the inside, à la Cummings.
There's a guy with the unfortunately undistinctive name of John Campbell who's written biographies of several politicians of the period, including Thatcher, Edward Heath, Roy Jenkins, and Aneurin Bevan. Also he has a book with the delightful title of "Pistols at Dawn: 200 Years of Political Rivalry," which covers several postwar cases, including Macmillan/Butler and Blair/Brown. Campbell is an excellent writer and I'd recommend any of his books highly.
For the Thatcher years, you could read the 1983-1992 portion of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Clark_Diaries. Clark was a Thatcher ally in her cabinet. His writing is detailed and sometimes catty.
I found Clark's day-by-day coverage of Thatcher's downfall the most entertaining part of the book. It probably helped me better understand what sort parliamentary maneuvering was going on during the downfalls of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
Also memorable:
-Clark's running complaint that he deserved to switch jobs with his boss, the Secretary of State for Defence;
-considering the possibility that the Queen was dim-witted - I was surprised that any self-consciously traditionalist Tory, MP or not, would be so bold;
I really enjoyed reading Alan Clark. I'm hesitant to recommend a book I haven't read, but I hear that Chris Mullin's diaries are equally entertaining. He was a Labour MP during the Blair & Brown years, so should give you a view from the other team.
There is a noted reduction of fecundity in humans. Likewise, some of us boomers have noticed a reduction in the population of insects. Though I don't know if this is due to more effective insecticides or insect control programs, increased urbanization, or whatnot. Are these drops (human/insect fecundity) related? I don't know.
What I wonder, as additional data; is there a reduction in natural mice & rats? Is there a reduction in the fecundity of laboratory mice and rats?
For natural, or domestic pest mice & rats, we might find data from the insurance industry in losses due to mice & rats. Does anyone know hot to access this data? For the lab side, how can we find production records for fecundity, i.e. litter size, productive life of female rats (dams?) ?
One hypothesis ... please don't hate me for it; but the timing suggests cellular phone networks, which came on the market in the 90s. Indoor WIFI didn't come in until after 2000.
If we could see the insurance industry sees a reduction in rodent damage, with increased reduction in multi-story buildings. This would in my mind indicate ground dwelling rodents are less susceptible to reduce fecundity, that could suggest an RFI link.
I don't hate you for it, but I would like to see someone attempt to explain an actual causal mechanism. If we're just hand-waving, I'm more inclined to wave at herbicides, pesticides, and other chemicals.
I often wonder about 'natural' predator/ prey cycles. Maybe we remember the insect peak, and now it's more of an insect valley. but I really have no idea.
Why isn't American labour productivity significantly higher than European productivity? Where exactly it is on the scale seems to depend on how exactly you measure, but afaict it's fairly uncontroversial that US productivity (unlike GDP/PPP per capita) is at most slightly higher than european productivity, meaning that most US gains are purely working more hours.
But the US has more natural resources than most EU countries, is (at least stereotypically) more business-friendly/cutthroat capitalist, and you'd expect someone working 50 hours a week to be more than twice as productive as someone working 25 hours a week (since there's more experience/agglomeration). Anecdotally, US companies just seem generally more organized and on the ball. You'd expect all these to push US productivity up on a per-hour basis.
Is this countered by US regulatory burden and public sector inefficiency? Something else?
An athlete can run 200m more than twice as fast as they can run 400m. Spending more time on something and less breaks makes you less efficient at a task (but this effect does reverse on very low time scales).
(A) Your premise is wrong. Ignoring Ireland (where the data is heavily distorted by corporate flags of convenience for income-tax purposes), the US has lower labour productivity than just four nations all of them small: Norway, Luxumbourg, Denmark, Switzerland. U.S. productivity per worker is somewhat higher than those of Germany and France and much higher than those of the UK, Spain and Italy as well as smaller nations like Finland, Belgium, Iceland, Austria.
(B) Within the US, productivity per worker maps strongly to our great cultural/political divide. The ten US states with the greatest productivity per worker are mostly political/cultural "blue" ones:
1. New York
2. Washington
3. Delaware (though with a similar statistical distortion as Ireland's)
4. California
5. Massachusetts
6. Connecticut
7. New Jersey
8. Alaska
9. Illinois
10. Maryland
Whereas the states with the lowest worker productivity are mostly "red" welfare states:
I think you are right about the differences between European countries. But what if we changed the question to ask: Why does the US have lower productivity than Denmark?
Surely the point still holds about culture etc, and now we also have the fact that a tiny social democratic country speaking their strange language should by all normal economic models be less productive than a huge free market speaking the internatioal tongue.
"a tiny social democratic country speaking their strange language should by all normal economic models be less productive than a huge free market speaking the international tongue."
Why? Offhand that assumption seems not at all obvious.
In any case that idea is demonstrably untrue in the real world and has been for as long as this particular data exists. Literally all of the nations having greater per-worker productivity than the US/Germany/France (as of 2019 i.e. not confounded by any COVID effects in the figures) are drastically-smaller ones. Among Norway/Luxumbourg/Denmark/Switzerland the _largest_ of those would be just a mid-sized US state. And if you dig up the same data from the 2000s or the 1990s it's the same general picture.
Yes, I agree most wholeheartedly. It does seem that small nations often do better than large ones in productivity.
What I meant was that the seize of your country should push your productivity up according to the standard economic viewpoint (Larger country = more specilisation possible, less bureaucracy caused by borders). So reality goes against our economic intuition.
My point is just that Shaked's original question still is unanswered: Why does Denmark have higher productivity pr hour than the US, even though the US is (or claims to be) more perfectly capitalistic?
"small nations often do better than large ones in productivity" -- no. Most small developed nations lag behind the largest ones in productivity.
But there are many more small nations than large ones, and at any given moment a handful of small ones are managing to overachieve in this regard.
"the size of your country should push your productivity up according to the standard economic viewpoint" -- as evidently it does. The largest OECD nations (the US and Germany) have higher worker productivity most of the time than do nearly all of the smaller OECD nations. Etc.
As for the single arbitrary case of Denmark in particular compared to the US in particular, I have no idea. Obviously there would in the real world be a number of variables to consider. It could also be simple random fluctuation, I notice for instance that the OECD's preliminary 2022 figures place Denmark slightly behind the US on this statistic. (Which could be some sort of difference in COVID hangovers, or maybe something else, or not, without in the least disturbing the overall picture that I just summarized.)
Hmmm, I think I get your point. If a person says 'look the tiny country of X has a higher productivity than the US, how come?' then we might actually just be looking at a statistical fluctuation. Since there is only one United Stats and many small nations with other weird policies, at any one moment in time we should expect some of them to have a higher productivity than the US.
I like the point in general, as it highlights a statistical fallacy. On the other hand, I did not choose Denmark arbitrarily, I chose it purely since I live there and so know more about it than France. But assuming that there were French and Polish readers reading the discussion and then not joining in, the general explanation still holds on a global level.
The whitest state populations according to the federal census are in order Maine, Vermont, West Virginia, New Hampshire, Wyoming, Iowa, Montana, North Dakota, Kentucky, Idaho. In personal income adjusted for purchasing power those states rank 42nd, 32nd, 47th, 16th, 4th, 21st, 33rd, 5th, 44th, 45th.
The states with the highest non-white percentages are in order Hawaii, California, Maryland, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, Georgia, New Jersey, New York, Mississippi. In personal income adjusted for purchasing power those states rank 49th, 22nd, 6th, 28th, 50th, 35th, 41st, 10th, 7th, 51st.
Obviously if you control for population sizes the second list has a somewhat stronger positive correlation than the first.
But anyway no form of the racial-mix comparisons correlates nearly as strongly as does comparing state income levels by red/blue politics.
I need advice about how to handle a possible (minor) medical discovery:
My daughter recently had some warts on her foot. Of course we wanted to get rid of them. So we went to the nearest drugstore and bought whatever the had - here in Germany they had different kinds of salicylic acid based products. We followed the directions, but they did not really help. After many weeks we asked a pediatrician, who prescribed a product with a different acid - that one hurt, so my daughter did not want to be treated with it.
Then my wife remembered that she had a wart too when she was little - and that her uncle cured it within a week. She asked her uncle what he did - we did the same, and a few days later, all three warts just fell off.
The weird thing: If I google for what we did, there are no hits. And there are many "cures for warts" on the internet (and even many more from times before the internet). But not this one. And it's nothing weird (unlike the German tradition of touching a toad under a full moon), just apply some pretty standard substance, that is sold for a different usecase for a fiver on amazon, twice a day. According to the wikipedia page of the substance, it's even used for (different) medical purposes. I don't know why it works, I don't know which exact component of the substance is responsible - basically I don't even know for sure if it's working at all or if it was just luck, placebo effect, something else, ...
So, what do I do now?
I have two things that would be nice to achieve:
1. Help people cure their warts.
2. Maybe earn a bit of money on the way.
My thoughts so far (in no particular order):
- Just posting it on the internet somewhere will surely not help with 2. and probably also not with 1.
- It would probably be good to run some kind of study/trial/... to figure out if there is an effect at all. I have neither the know how nor the means to do that.
- I don't have any connections to the pharma industry.
- As it's a pretty standard substance, I don't expect that there is tons of money to be made.
- I would be willing to invest a bit of money (maybe 1000€, which I think is the price for a patent) into this if it would mean I had a decent chance of making a bit more money back.
- I don't want to spend too much time on this - but just keeping it for myself feels wrong. If earning money from it requires too much effort, goal 1 is more important than goal 2.
- As I don't have any medical background going to the nearest university to get a scientist interested is about as unlikely to succeed as sending a random letter to a random pharma company.
Any other thoughts that might be relevant? Advice?
Could you please share your solution? I have 3 plantar warts that continue growing because I anxiously avoid dealing with the pain of removal… the acid also did not work for me, even after months of daily use.
So far I tried this on my daughter, and it could have been a happy accident that the warts were gone after a week. We could do a trial!
As I haven't told my recipe yet, we could even do a proper one - I can try to come up with a plausible placebo. And as you have three warts we could try duct tape on the third?
If anyone else wants to try, you can contact me there. I'll report back with results when either 10 people participated or noone is interrested anymore.
I think your best bet would be to offer your secret to some Youtube influencer or advice website like fragmutti.de. Perhaps they'll buy it for a token amount, or give you a percentage of their advertising revenue.
I guess the "standard substance" isn't duct tape? Because if you google that you definitely find some stuff https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12585986/ . And it's probably not much of a business venture
I got my foot warts cured through an extremely painful liquid nitrogen method, and then a couple of years later it turned out you can just use duct tape.
How many times did you? I had it several times over the course of a summer, and it got bad enough that on my final visit to the doctor I was prepared to refuse treatment. But that happened to be the visit where the doctor found that I had been cured.
I don’t think this is a viable path to a business, long-term. You could probably make some money initially (after a lot of setup work), but if it’s already commonly available and in fact sold by existing companies, then it’ll be a simple matter for them (and Amazon and every other retailer with generic brands) to add “Cures warts!” To their packaging. From there you’re relying on whatever brand recognition you’ve built up to compete with their probably lower prices, favored placement, superior efficiency, etc.
Reread your comment, sounds like you’re OK with just making a quick buck. Then maybe? You’d probably need a much bigger investment than 1000€ to source the product, design packaging, manufacture, and then do a big marketing push, even if you only sell online. After all of that my wager is that you have a decent chance of turning a profit, but it’s far from guaranteed.
Your first comment matches my thoughts quite well.
The second one might be true, but I don't have the money for such an investment - and also not the time as I'm quite busy with my family and my regular job.
So I'd be willing to not make any money from it - but without a big marketing push probably noone will care about this new anti-wart.
Does anyone else find that their posted comments here sometimes randomly disappear? I'm sure I posted a lunar rock sample based debunking of the notion of moon landings having been faked, but now it has gone. I think it was a direct reply to the thread OP, so it couldn't have been lower in the heirarchy and some parent comment was deleted taking mine with it.
Also, in last week's Open Thread I posted a top-level comment about my former confusion between Jessica Mulroney and Dylan Mulvaney until I twigged that they were different people! OK that may have been a bit frivolous and inconsequential and could thus have been removed by Scott, but I don't think the moon rock reply was objectionable in either tone or content.
Just recently I thought that, but it turned out that my comment was available as one of the "new replies".
It was as if the original set of comments (when I first loaded the page) had been cached, and every time I subsequently reloaded that page, it returned to that original set. With every more recent comment hidden behind a "Show new replies" link.
Substack needs to rewrite their comment system, or let site owners swap over to some alternative open source system for handling the comments. (A quick search suggests perhaps Lemmy?)
It's in response to questions put to him about irregular unions, and the guys over at the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition or Holy Office, fact-fans!) got to introduce it.
What is really going to put the cat among the pigeons is the permission for blessing gay couples. You can't call it a marriage ceremony or a wedding, but you can exercise pastoral discretion:
"39. In any case, precisely to avoid any form of confusion or scandal, when the prayer of blessing is requested by a couple in an irregular situation, even though it is expressed outside the rites prescribed by the liturgical books, this blessing should never be imparted in concurrence with the ceremonies of a civil union, and not even in connection with them. Nor can it be performed with any clothing, gestures, or words that are proper to a wedding. The same applies when the blessing is requested by a same-sex couple.
40. Such a blessing may instead find its place in other contexts, such as a visit to a shrine, a meeting with a priest, a prayer recited in a group, or during a pilgrimage. Indeed, through these blessings that are given not through the ritual forms proper to the liturgy but as an expression of the Church’s maternal heart—similar to those that emanate from the core of popular piety—there is no intention to legitimize anything, but rather to open one’s life to God, to ask for his help to live better, and also to invoke the Holy Spirit so that the values of the Gospel may be lived with greater faithfulness.
41. What has been said in this Declaration regarding the blessings of same-sex couples is sufficient to guide the prudent and fatherly discernment of ordained ministers in this regard. Thus, beyond the guidance provided above, no further responses should be expected about possible ways to regulate details or practicalities regarding blessings of this type."
And hoo-boy, I'm expecting everyone to start losing their lives over this, particularly the set who (both in approval and disapproval) will be going "the pope says gay marriage is okay!"
No, the Pope does not say that, but this is.... yeah. It's a step. One that got the Anglicans into trouble, and I'm not at all confident that this will remain a simple blessing for certain circumstances and not at all an ersatz wedding ceremony, because that's not how it worked out for the Church of England when they tried it.
The left continue to obsess over this crap while either blithely ignoring or actively defending the genuine repression of gays throughout the muslim world. Because at base, it's always about race.
Interesting that this one was released, of course it got overshadowed by the 'gay marriage' one 😁
I think this is pertinent, what with the rush for the magic money fountain and the AI goldrush:
“Intelligent” machines may perform the tasks assigned to them with ever greater efficiency, but the purpose and the meaning of their operations will continue to be determined or enabled by human beings possessed of their own universe of values. There is a risk that the criteria behind certain decisions will become less clear, responsibility for those decisions concealed, and producers enabled to evade their obligation to act for the benefit of the community. In some sense, this is favoured by the technocratic system, which allies the economy with technology and privileges the criterion of efficiency, tending to ignore anything unrelated to its immediate interests."
Actually, the "responsibility for those decisions concealed" has been pervasive for a long time. Every policy notice signed by "The Management" conceals who actually made a decision.
Personally, as someone who want to _see_ AGI, my most immediate concern was with
>In this regard, I urge the global community of nations to work together in order to adopt a binding international treaty that regulates the development and use of artificial intelligence in its many forms.
My hope is that this treaty either never happens, or takes long enough to be agreed on that it is moot, and does not block progress.
BTW, just in terms of effects that Pope Francis _himself_ cares about, he is mistaken in combining hopes for peace with opposition to surveillance. In general, surveillance makes it _easier_ to e.g. monitor compliance with arms control treaties.
My thought is that is more like "you can give general blessings and not worry about same sex couples being present." Say a priest is asked to bless a graduating high school class; they don't need to refuse because some of the students may be so. The blessing is just an exhortation to godliness for everyone regardless of status.
it seems fairly forwards that no, you can't do a marriage blessing, but you can give a couple the regular ones you would give people. you can pray over same sex couples without endorsing the act.
to be honest you don't need to argue same sex stuff, you can just point out the guys who want to change the church over it don't really believe any of its teachings anyways. It's not like they believe the church's stance is kind of leading people into damnation; they don't believe in damnation anyways or much about Christian doctrine period. thats kind of why left christianity always seems to slide into atheism; its not done from a person who is orthodox on basics, but they keep going to cut the core out entirely. Not believing in sin at all rather than arguing if gayness is one or not.
its not like they are going to turn around and say "ok you are in, but you must be the husband of one husband, only have sex within marriage, and must still 'work out your salvation with fear and trembling'-that is realize god is the master, not you." its more the Church needs to get with the times and change for them; its not important in itself
The main issue I have with this is that it takes the problem from the wrong end. You can not change the doctrine on same sex unions blessings without a complete rewrite of the ethic of sexuality and this should start in the (heterosexual) married bedroom, not in a public place.
The Catholic Church is not a democracy, and the group of people who don't want homosexual blessings also has more political power than the group who really don't want married people to use condoms.
I might have found a low-hanging fruit to improve online dating?
Alice is weird, in several ways, that she hides in superficial encounters but wouldn't want to keep hiding forever in an intimate relationship. Examples: her brother is in prison and she doesn't know what'll happen when he gets out, she has a pretty extreme kink and she's seriously afraid of the paperclip maximizer. In the context of dating, these are things that would make some people not want to date her. Disclosing them too early would be alarming and would make her look obsessed about, or overly identified with, these weirdnesses. But disclosing then too late would be misleading - and of course misdirection may also make people not want to date her.
So maybe a dating site should treat weirdnesses something like as follows. Alice sets up her normal public profile, and enters her weirdnesses separately and individually. These get rated, anonymously, by other users, on scales like "how gross", "how dangerous" and "how much I wouldn't want to date someone who has that". This should also allow some positive ratings like "that's hot actually". Alice's profile only shows the number of weirdnesses, and maybe how they rank on some scales, and until she has some minimum number of weirdnesses (each above some minimum threshold of badness), her profile is marked "incomplete" as the site declares "everyone is weird".
When Bob comes to her profile, how he has previously rated anonymized weirdnesses like Alice's gets calculated into the match prediction. If Bob and Alice have weirdnesses that are identical or similar, this has a strong pro-matching effect! (On top of how this may already affected their ratings of each other's weirdnesses.) Users can choose to disclose a weirdness to a specific user, but the recipient gets to choose whether they want to know.
Has something like this been done? I think it should, because I think the non-obvious reasons someone might not want to date someone are pretty central to the problem of online dating, or even of dating in general. I even suspect the ability to handle them with care is why getting set up for a date by mutual friends is the most successful form of matchmaking.
People are often willing to compromise on squicks if they like someone enough, and often have inaccurate reads on how much X matters to them. It's also a matter of stereotypes - e.g I would say that using drugs is a deal-breaker for me, but if I found out someone I liked is a drug user, I might be ok with it. I don't have drug use triggers, I just don't like behaviours typically associated with drug use, so if I already liked someone I wouldn't consider them a Drug User, I'd consider them Person I Like (happens to use drugs). Same thing can happen with dating - first date dealbreakers often become negotiable by the fifth date. If it matters that much to some people, they can always just ask before making the commitment. Which they do.
The other issue is that it would fall foul of the usual dating market thing - people figure out why they're not getting matches and lie about the thing, which defeats the point of the filter.
>If your dating app has an onboarding is very complex, because it requires answering x hundreds fields to run your magic algorithm, or writing novels or uploading many pictures or whatever -- Guess what, your dropoff rate is going to be 9x%, with x being large. This one is very specific to each company so giving numbers here is useless, we can run with 80% dropoff during onboarding, if you have a genius designer, but if you want something complex enough to make it into a SSC blogpost that's 95%.
This seems like a good idea on the surface but it's one zero day vulnerability away from a catastrophic data leak, exposing everyone's weirdness to the world. To prevent that you would need to encrypt every users' list of weirdnesses with password-level security and hope that you can still do enough to match them against each other, so that your input can tell you "13% of other users contain a matching encrypted token". Less useful, but I wouldn't want to have my data on an app that is any less secure.
Many potential users would consider the risk tolerable, including me.
The idea seems more suited to people looking for long-term relationships, and as soon as you start a relationship your sensitive data could be deleted (or securely archived), thus minimising the risk duration.
One possibility is an 'advanced settings' page, where users get to configure some of their own functionality versus security trade-offs.
That’s a good point. As an active user of the apps (I went on 3 first dates in the past two weeks and have two more this week), I’m excited enough by it that I would risk it, or just post sanitized versions of my weirdnesses. E.g. “I’m 27 and I currently live with my parents” is something that I’d like dates to have some way of filtering on, and don’t mind being public info, but I want to spend my precious profile space being charming.
I just read through all of Unsong, and really liked it. One could say I had a whale of a time (sorry, I had to).
Note to anyone wanting to read it over the holidays: when the Hell chapter comes with a content warning, Scott really means it. Like, even for the kind of people who don't normally care about content warnings.
General question: Scott, although Jewish, is clearly familiar with the New Testament and various Christian interpretations of that. Is that completely normal for Jews growing up in the US (except perhaps the ultra-orthodox) that you learn about the Gospels and Revelation etc. in school or pick it up through "background noise"? Or are those books considered off-limits, but the most liberal and/or atheist Jews don't mind so much? I'm wondering how many readers would have deatailed cultural knowledge of both Lurianic Kabbalah and the Book of Revelations.
This is a very good question to which I do not know the answer. A few data points:
- I knew an Orthodox girl in college who had to read something in the gospels for a class. She made a point of putting on an I-am-eating-spinach face (this was at the library) and also couldn't understand why there were what looked like four versions of the same thing.
- Some very liberal figures in Judaism (more in the UK than in the US) see early Christians as valid figures within the history of Judaism whose texts are very much worth studying.
- A fair number of things filter down through popular culture
- The period roughly around the life of Jesus is interesting to people who are seriously into Judaism (especially non-Orthodox Judaism) because it was a critical time in several ways: last gasp of the Hasmoneans, time right before the destruction of the Temple, split between Saduccees and Pharisees, etc.
Summary of the New Testament from a Jew, this is literally all I know:
The Four Gospels(Luke, Mathew, John, and Marcus?): Jesus was born in a stable in Bethlehem to Mary who was an unmarried virgin and three Persian Kings gave him gifts. They found him because there was a bright star near him. Jesus then did a lot of moving. First to Egypt cause Herod wanted to kill him, and then moved to Nazareth where he got a job in carpentry. A guy named John the Baptist dunked him in the Jordan River, and he walked on the Galilee and gave people wine and fish. He got 12 followers, and they went to Jerusalem. On the way he made pit stops where he cursed a fig tree and helped a Samaritan person. He married? Mary Magdalane and cured a leper. He went into Jerusalem riding on a donkey on Passover. He gave a speech at the Cheesemakers valley about blessing people and doing onto others that was interrupted by people shouting big nose at each other so Brian couldn't hear. He climbed a wall of Jerusalem and almost jumped because the Devil told him to. He went to the Temple and yelled at people who were exchanging currencies and knocked over their tables.
Then he had a meal with his 12 friends(I'm sure they have names in-canon) where he drank from the Holy Grail and said something about rendering Caesar what was due to him, but also wore a crown of thorns and said he was king. This got people mad, and Judas turned him over to the authorities. Pontius Pilate washed his hands, blamed the Jews, and Jesus got crucified and died. He might also have been stabbed with the Spear of Destiny, and had the Holy Grail collect his blood. He is buried and the Shroud of Turin is put on his face. At some later point, Mary Magdalene finds his grave empty and turns around, horror movie jump scare-esque, and sees him with holes in his hands. He then ascends to Heaven and promises he will be back.
Book of Acts?: All of the twelve friends(is Judas still included here?) die in various horrifying ways. One gets crucified upside down, one gets crucified on a Scottish cross, one goes to India, and worst of all the last one left has to become pope?
Book of Paul?: He was named Saul and he hated the Christians, then he saw a light on the road to Damascus and became a Christian and switched the S for a P. He ditched all the Jewish elements of Christianity, no more kosher food and circumcisions. He moves to Corinth? He writes the thing people in movies say in Christian weddings about love being patient and fair. He doesn't want woman to speak and wants them to cover their hair. He becomes Pope #2?
Other books: No idea if they exist.
Book of Revelations: There is a many horned creature that maybe is also the Anti-christ. He might be the devil too, and is also the Whore of Babylon. This also involves Gog and Magog somehow. He opens seven seals and blows seven trumpets and Death rides out on a pale horse, and also Famine and War and another bad thing(Aging?). The Devil takes over for a thousand years and then Jesus fights him in a city made of diamonds. Jesus wins and puts the Devil in the center circle of hell, either in ice or in fire. Jesus then rules for a thousand years in the diamond city(probably Jerusalem right?) and then the universe ends.
You did better than I, and I'm Christian. Where were you when I struggled through a Bible class at Liberty University? Semester ended 4 days ago. ChatGPT got me through it.
Really the main place you're off is Acts: the only people martyred in that one are Stephen (the OG martyr), and James (bro of Jesus, hit in the head with a roofing tile). None of the disciples die in Acts that I can recall, all that stuff you listed is extra-Biblical tradition.
Of course for Paul to become the new pope he has to gather all the relics of the old pope, which have been buried with him, hence the term "borrowing from Peter to pay Paul."
Pop culture has bad thing #4 as Pestilence, though apparently the book says something like Conquest. Translation is a fickle thing.
The battle between Jesus and the Devil is also the inspiration for basketball.
The Book of Revelation is something that people are familiar with because of its cultural diffusion into American society, not because they have read the thing in a religious context.
As far as the rest of the New Testament: other than "it's about Jesus" and "these famous quotes are from it", I don't recall ever being taught about it.
Scott isn't ordained(?), but he is as well-educated as any rabbi, and any American rabbi will know the New Testament better than the average Christian does. It isn't considered "off-limits" to Jews.
I've never heard of Jews having a problem with reading the Christian Bible.
I know a Chasidic Jew who wouldn't look at a creche. I've wondered whether my reflex to evaluate creches for artistic quality is the secular equivalent.
There's a book I've read called Modern Jews Engage The New Testament (Rabbi M. J. Cook) which starts from the assumption that Jews don't read the NT, so I wondered.
Mind you that was a generation ago, so maybe things have changed now. The article also talks about the time there was pressure to teach "the NT as history, and creationism as literal truth".
I don't have statistics, but I can share a few anecdotes from some 20th century Jewish intellectuals who I read this year:
* Harold Bloom (1930-2019), Jewish literary critic, raised Haredi, said the first book he ever owned himself was a Yiddish translation of the New Testament, which he hid from his parents and read several times.
* Martin Buber (1878-1965), Jewish philosopher and zionist, raised Hasidic, descended from a rabbi, wrote a book _Vom Geist des Judentums_ characterizing early Christianity as an authentic expression of Jewish religious sentiment.
* Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Jewish philosopher, raised assimilated/liberal, celebrated Christmas and Easter, and kept art depicting images of Jesus in his home.
How had I never heard of this fascinating workaround! Here’s a hypothetical scenario: the manufacturer of an existing mint-family tea product applies for conditional approval to use the tea for treating Covid in pet hamsters. Jan and colleagues have conclusively documented the fact that mint tea can work for this purpose: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33452205/
The tea manufacturer could then slap a label on the box saying “conditionally FDA-approved for treating Covid*” with the asterisk noting that it’s conditionally approved for hamsters. The entire maneuver would look like a marketing stunt – but I don’t think that’s a legally valid justification for the FDA to reject the conditional use application. And it's actually not just a marketing stunt - the hamster maneuver could have the socially desirable side-effect of finally getting the word out about the fact that mint tea realistically might prevent or treat Covid in people. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37007799/
If somebody could get their foot in the door with a mint-for-hamsters application then the next step on the slippery slope would be for Shionogi to apply for permission to market Xocova for use in hamsters. If buying a pet hamster could get me a "veterinary" Xocova prescription, I would buy a pet hamster.
there is this weird thing where we have one guy upthread arguing the experts are full of crap and the moon landings were faked and people think thats nuts, but when the medical experts are full of crap and random libertarian guy knows the REAL cure for cancer, thats ok?
i mean in other fields anyone trying to sidestep established safety processes to get his pet theory disseminated past the gatekeepers is someone not to trust, why is medicine seemingly immune to the same worries?
I 100% agree with you. This does not make sense. Being understandably frustrated with some aspects of the regulatory system certainly does not mean that "let's try things!" is a promising approach...
Thanks for the valuable push-back, lyomante and Emma_B! After more thinking and poking around I believe you're both right. Mint-versus-Covid is peskily at the front of my mind, but it isn't a very good argument for Conditional Approval. I'm realizing that under existing guidelines somebody could probably put a mint tea product called "Might Fight Covid" on the human food market. With the "Might" qualifier - and with citations for the human clinical trial data showing that mint family herbs are safe and effective for fighting Covid in humans https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37606476/https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.20.21266229v2 - I bet the FDA would allow such labeling. Although I guess it's just a bet. Under current law, FDA veto authority is inscrutable and unaccountable - so I could easily be wrong. I'm considering forming a not-for-profit mint tea LLC and doing the regulatory experiment myself, as a form of effective altruism.
Thanks also for helping me refine my stronger argument. Conditional Approval would be very useful for drugs like Xocova. It's deeply regrettable that Conditional Approval is only available for hamsters.
If my family and I could get Xocova, second-generation Covid vaccines, or even just simple basic Paxlovid and metformin we wouldn't be screwing around with mint. The basic problem we're wrestling with here is that established so-called safety processes are denying us the right to try to protect ourselves with what peer-reviewed scientific literature tells us are the best available medicines.
An anti-vaxxer in my family followed the advice of random full-of-crap libertarian guys on the internet and she tried horse de-wormer. It was an incredibly foolish decision, but the argument that I shouldn't be allowed to choose Xocova because some other people might make foolish decisions isn't persuasive. Denying me Xocova doesn't make anybody safer. We should have the right to try it. I would rather choose medicines in a well-regulated competitive marketplace, but if a veterinary black market is all we can get it'd be an improvement over the status quo - even if all it does is highlight the fact that pets effectively have more of a right to choose than people in the current system.
"If my family and I could get Xocova, second-generation Covid vaccines, or even just simple basic Paxlovid and metformin we wouldn't be screwing around with mint."
So because you think that some drugs are overreuglated you suggest doing publicity for something extremely unlikely to work? Why would that be helpful to anybody?
If a drug had been proven to be helpful but is not available because it is not deemed safe enough, it might be logical to try to make it available if the benefice/risk balance is in fact often positive. But we are already drowning in a sea of products that someone think can cure cancer/covid/disease X even it has never been convincingly demonstrated. I really don't think that it is a good idea to add more.
Xocova has a solid track record in Japan. It's conclusively clear that it's safer and more effective than Paxlovid. Here's an Atlantic article entitled, "Americans Don’t Get to Have the Best New COVID Drug"
Conflating Xocova with a sea of snake oil is a straw man.
There's solid scientific literature indicating that mint stands a reasonable chance of fighting Covid - and thousands of years of experience show it's as safe as any other commonly consumed food. People can easily get or grow mint and they can safely add it as a backstop for clinically proven medicines. Things like mint become especially important if FDA/physicians/pharmacists/insurers are unilaterally denying people access to clinically proven medicines - which seems to be more the rule than the exception for Paxlovid and metformin these days.
The main trouble with mint is simply that manufacturers are too afraid of FDA's unchecked veto powers to print "might fight Covid" on the label - and without any advertising it's harder for people to become aware of the scientific literature on the topic. Getting permission to print "might fight Covid in hamsters" could be a major step forward.
Anecdote: my husband and I still haven't had Covid yet. The closer we get to the strange status of being the last two novids in America the harder it is to accept knee-jerk claims of "extremely unlikely to work." Daily mint realistically might have been the secret to our success.
I was talking about mint, not the currently being evaluated Xocova antiviral.
I am pretty sure that no solid scientific literature indicates that mint stands a reasonable chance of fighting Covid. Yes, mint is safe to eat, yes mint demonstrates some antiviral activity in cell cultures. This is not solid evidence at all that eating mint is helpful for avoiding Covid. Many many products kill cancerous cells or inhibit virus replication in petri dishes. The vas majority of these products are NOT effective treatment agains cancer or viral infection. It is certainly not impossible but very unlikely that mint is helpful against Convid infection. Daily mints are great if you like them, not because they are likely protective against Covid.
I hear you - and I share your dismay about the fact that we're swimming in a sea of snake oil. But that's not a strong argument for the claim that the specific case of mint-versus-Covid can safely be presumed to also be snake oil.
I regret the fact that my peer-reviewed scholarly manuscript doesn't allow reader comment:
The proposal is to start with an existing human food (mint tea) and label it as an animal drug. The labeling would help humans connect the dots that there's a scientifically reasonable expectation that the food might also work as medicine for humans. For Xocova, I'm proposing labeling an existing human drug that Americans are currently forbidden to try as a drug that pets can try. That would move Xocova into the same black market category where ineffective horse de-wormer was back at the beginning of the pandemic. With the difference being that Xocova is known to actually work.
Building checks, balances, and transparency into FDA's default blanket veto authority and developing systems for independent testing of drugs would be much better solutions. But while we wait for better laws to be written, the existing Conditional Approval law seems to provide an interesting workaround. Even if it doesn't work, the process of trying helps highlight the fact that the current system is denying humans some rights we routinely afford to pets.
The definitions of "food" and "drug" are somewhat vague, but mutually exclusive. To make a tea a drug would mean it's no longer a food and could no longer be sold as one..
Yes - good point - under current law, the hamster tea and the human tea might need to be sold separate packaging - even if the packages contain exactly the same substance. The fubar would effectively highlight how messed up current law is. Here's a passage from the Introduction section of my mint-versus-Covid paper (cited above):
"More recent studies have found that preparations of whole wormwood
leaves might serve as reasonable low-cost anti-malarial treatments,
particularly for populations who can’t afford artemisinin
combination therapy [26]. In clinical trials, wormwood leaf-based
treatments appeared to be more effective than much higher doses of
purified artemisinin products. It has also been shown that the use of
whole plant preparations could help combat the emergence of
artemisinin-resistant parasites because the crude mixture contains a
range of additional antimalarial compounds that complement or synergize
with artemisinin [27–29]. Wormwood leaf preparations,
including preparations of Artemisia species that don’t contain artemisinin,
have also been shown to block SARS-CoV-2 infection at a step
downstream of infectious entry in cell culture systems [30–33]."
I'm a huge admirer of Reviewer #2, who I'm pretty sure is an author of citations [30-33]
Why hasn't Ukraine drafted more troops? I recently learned that they've exempted relatively young men from mandatory service- I think under 30. That's why reports of Ukrainian troops in the field are generally older men, the average age is in the 40s or so. Russia has not really gone full mobilization or conscription on their end, so despite fighting a larger population country Ukraine could (in theory) have as many or even more troops on the ground by mobilizing a higher % of their citizens. In practice they seem to be outnumbered at least 3 to 1 on the battlefield.
Is exempting younger men meant to save their economy? As presumably they're more likely to be in the IT field. I'd imagine not having drafted them when the war started is now some pretty strong path dependency- patriotism/willingness to die on a frozen muddy battlefield for Donetsk has probably dimmed some versus 18 months ago. I can't imagine drafting all of the younger men now would go over very well. Or is there some other angle that I'm missing?
I think you are under an impression of at least two misconceptions.
For one, there is no blanket exemptions form men under 30. Conscription age is 18.
I really doubt that Russian soldiers on the frontlines outnumber Ukrainians 3 to 1. War would look very differently had it been the case. Russian army has been overall always better equipped than Ukrainian, at least when we consider airforce (which we absolutely should) notwithstanding the fact that Ukraine got several special systems from the West which are beyond Russian technical capabilities. I totally believe that Ukrainian infantrymen are on average better than Russian infantrymen, but not that they would be able to cause Russians so many problems had they been so heavily outnumbered.
My guess is that Ukraine has, as many troops on the front as it can train and logistically support.
What is true that Ukrainian army is older than what we are used to from, like, WW2 or Vietnam. Partly, this reflects Ukrainian society, which like othet post-communist countries has hone through birthrate collapse in the 90s, partly other factors about which I can only speculate - maybe older man have more of technical skills useful for the army? Maybe they are more often in need of money and so more likely to volunteer (Ukrainian soldiers are paid well compared to abysmally low wages common in Ukraine)?
Another thing which is true is that Ukraine seems to be running out of willing volunteers and losses are being replaced by gradually still less and less cooperative recruits.
Here is a Washington Post article on this very subject this morning, which disagrees with most of your points (well, not your last sentence). It explicitly states 'The military hasn’t drafted men under the age of 27 so far', which I've seen reported elsewhere too. So my assertion is correct
Interesting and thanks; it seems there are apparently various levels of, um, draftability; from that article "The military hasn’t drafted men under the age of 27 so far, although Parliament has authorized a lower age limit of 25", plus 18 as limit for men who are not permitted to leave the country. I didn't know that. Plus various not age related exemptions.
I am still not sure whether it really never happens that people under 27 are drafted; I live in Czechia where we definitely see Ukrainians that are generally assumed to be draft-dodgers (well, by us Czechs, anyway; maybe we are just wrong), and they often seem to be below 27 but above 18. In that article it is also noted that older skew of the army is caused by troops coming disproportionately from rural areas, where people are poorer, and thus less able to bribe recruitment officials; I heard about that as well. And army salaries are presumably more attractive to poorer people.
Mobilization is done in stages, now we are at stage 3 (drafting specialists and officers from reserve), next stage will be for all men 18-60. So in some sense younger men are not draft dodgers just yet, but soon would be most likely.
I think there are several reasons for not mobilizing more at this moment:
- it would start a race to mobilize more and more with Russia and would give Putin an excuse to mobilize -- and this is not a race in which Ukraine can win
- current process of drafting is a soviet relic -- you can easily get away with not registering for the draft, not carrying a draft card, etc... the only way to draft efficiently is to grab all people from the streets, arrest them and sort them out later. which is illegal, frowned upon by people, and is bad PR for politicians
Among other things, Ukraine is limited in their ability to *train* troops. A lot of that is being done abroad, e.g. 30,000 so far in the UK I believe. There's probably some ability to train soldiers at home as well, but that would require training cadres composed of people who are presently busy fighting the Russians, so it's hard to scale quickly.
And grabbing a million untrained, undisciplined men, giving them all AK-47s, and telling them to go kill Russians, doesn't work very well.
To be fair, the Russian "regular army" has been using several strategies in parallel, and some of them (FPV drone warfare, defense in depth along prepared lines) are working pretty well for them. But on the "we need to put our flags on more bits of Ukraine so social media says we're winning!" front, yeah, a lot of that consists of people who were drafted(*) into the "regular army" over the past year or so, given very little training or equipment, and told to go kill Ukrainians.
We don't have a good count on how many of those people have died, but it's almost certainly into six figures and hasn't accomplished anything remotely proportional to that cost.
(*) including some not-technically-a-draft forms of coercive and deceptive recruitment.
If by "regular army" you mean yesterday's conscripts pushed into signing contracts and immediately sent to the frontline, than yes, technically Russia is mostly using regular army.
Second wave of mobilization is expected in March 2024, after presidents elections.
I just read Michael Sandel's book — Justice: What's the right thing to do?
Sandel summarises John Rawls as saying that, from behind the veil of ignorance, most people would prefer an egalitarian society to one where people are rewarded for merit. I think Rawls is wrong about this and wrote a response here:
I think most people behind the veil of ignorance would prefer egalitarian socety to meritocratic one if overall wealth is constant, but real meritocratic society is just richer. You deserve (in some sense) something good for your talent or hard work, because this fact motivate you to use your talent or hard work for the good of the society.
I agree with your post, RC. I don’t think many people would choose such a society, and I am fairly confident that those who did choose it would later regret doing so.
I think people, from behind a veil of objectivity/ignorance would choose the society which would lead them and their progeny/loved ones to have optimum expected outcomes, perhaps adjusted for potential downsides. IOW, a society with high standards of living, long healthy enriched lives and reasonable safety nets.
Yes, I think this is right, Swami. The idea that I would choose would be the opportunity to be successful and to be rewarded for it but a safety net in case I am not successful.
I think a lot people tend to think of merit in terms of dollars — that is, people with merit become rich. I prefer to think of rewards much more broadly — it's not just about dollar rewards.
That's strange because Rawls certainly does not say this. He says that from behind the veil of ignorance most people would prefer a society were they don't get completely screwed if they don't happen to be part of the elite (wether the elite is meritocratic or anything else).
That's strange because Rawls certainly does not say this. He says that from behind the veil of ignorance most people would prefer a society were they don't get completely screwed if they don't happen to be part of the elite (wether the elite is meritocratic or anything else).
That's strange because Rawls certainly does not say this. He says that from behind the veil of ignorance most people would prefer a society were they don't get completely screwed if they don't happen to be part of the elite (wether the elite is meritocratic or anything else).
"But I think that Rawls is wrong to want everyone — the hapless, the shiftless and the workshy — to enjoy the same rewards as the hardworking and the talented"
Is that really what Rawls is saying? I confess I don't understand how the difference principle is supposed to work in practice, but I understood it to mean that the rich shouldn't get richer at the expense of the poor.
Does anyone think that the work-shy should enjoy the same rewards as the hardworking? Not even straight out communists say that.
I took him to be saying that the ideal is equality and that inequality is acceptable only to the extent that it improves the lot of the least well-off.
If someone talented creates value, they are entitled to a reward only if it provides value to those at the bottom of society which, presumably, includes the work-shy. I think they deserve a reward whether or not it helps the poorest.
I expect that you, Rawls and I would all agree that people should not get rich at the expense of the poor. But what about when it is neither to their benefit nor at their expense?
I often come back to Brian Caplan's “missing mood” razor.
My wish is that every one be happy, with an equal distribution of happiness if perfection is not atainable.
But in order to have a functionning society, the rules of the universe say that I have to reward effort somehow.
So I institute a society where unequal contribution results in unequal states of happiness ; but I'm not missing the mood that it is a sad state of affair, only necessary because of the laws of sociology.
Inequality is acceptable if it improves the lot of the least well-off, but it doesn't do that to the same extent as it improves the lot of the better-off. So the better-off are still enjoying more rewards.
He's not accepting it because true equality is impossible, he is accepting it because he values prosperity as well as equality. (Economy A has equality, everyone has 10,000. -- I take it we are assuming all four economies are possible.)
I think the veil of ignorance requires some kind of dualism where the soul contains preferences but the body contains talents, but somehow this soul that doesn't have any talent for reason is supposed to reason about what kind of society it wants to be in. This all just seems crazy to me and I've never understood why people take that thought experiment seriously.
I would argue that the actual preferences should also be behind the veil of ignorance for this to work. Otherwise people would just pick a society which favors their particular kinks.
Of course, large parts of human preferences are almost universal. I prefer to not starve. If I was a random inhabitant of Asia in 1000 BCE, I am fairly certain that I would also prefer not to starve, no matter if my IQ was 80 or 120. To the degree that I can imagine being a non-human mammal, I am also fairly certain that I would prefer not to starve.
Things get more difficult if there are trade-offs between values which are person-dependent, like if you prefer a society which has n% more sex but also m% more starvation.
To me, the veil of ignorance provides a simple, widely comprehensible way for average people to explore compassionate positions that are difficult to evaluate due to our inevitable biases. I think that by itself amounts to more than “crazy” and shows practical utility.
That’s a really clever and original critique, and it’s damning of the veil of ignorance as metaphysics. But the veil is not a claim about how reality works or could work, it’s a question getting at the meaning of justice.
I don't know if it's a clever or original critique (no offence to Herr Guineapig), it seems like the obvious one.
Why does this hypothetical situation have any bearing on what justice is? What if the pre-existence deal was struck not between all humans, but between all humans plus all crocodiles? We would probably settle on a society in which humans do a bunch of work to support crocodiles in some degree of comfort. Or what if the deal were between all men, with all women to be played by unconscious p-zombies? We'd come to a different deal again.
Acausal bargaining is one thing, but "we should behave as if we'd made one particular, arbitrary, acausal deal" is something else.
But if the thought experiment is logically impossible, all we're left with is ex falso quodlibet, i.e. conclusions about justice drawn from it can carry no weight. And even if that were not the case, the conclusions would be about what justice looks like for intrinsically equal inanimate souls, not what justice looks like for animate humans that intrinsically differ from each other in preferences and abilities.
The thought experiment absolutely does not have to actually work in reality, and I really have a hard time with people who don’t get that about most thought experiments. I think you don’t like the conclusion rather than the thought experiment.
Let’s modify his idea for slavery.
Imagine we could know what society we could be born into. Imagine that one of the possible societies is a slave society and we have a high chance of being a slave. Would we want to be born into that society.
It's useful as a primitive tool; it is like classical physics, in that it isn't an entirely accurate model of things, but rather a simplification that helps us slow-and-small-brained humans actually keep enough information in our heads to help us reason through something.
The particular aspect of it which is useful is that it permits acausal negotiation with other humans; it permits humans that don't exist yet (and do not yet have talents) to negotiate with -us-, as it should have permitted us to negotiate with the past.
So the conclusions drawn from the Veil of Ignorance are best interpreted with respect to the future, not the now; we aren't deciding things for ourselves, but rather our descendants, and making judgment about these untalented souls. We are intrinsically different, but the future is uncertain, and we can treat -those- people as intrinsically equal. Thus, how should we organize society for them?
The chain of acausal negotiation is flawed, however, because there is an informational asymmetry; when the future is trying to negotiate with us, on the basis of what we would have negotiated with the past, we already know what the past has done, and we are already differentiated in the now. There's a patch on this asymmetry; a "debt to the future". But this is just one debt out of many, and how much priority we give it is, well, rather variable; certainly we may feel a greater debt to our specific descendants, which kind of throws a wrench in the whole affair.
So, not useless, but not quite perfect, either.
Personally I prefer other forms of acausal negotiation, in particular "spite". (If you do something bad enough to me, I will go so far as to harm myself in order to do something bad to you; therefore, you should not do something bad to me.)
Other approaches also work; ancestor worship/respect, I think, is an unintentional mechanism of bridging the acausal negotiation asymmetry by creating another asymmetry to balance things out; we prioritize the future's interests more in the expectation that they will appreciate us for it. Meaning the current trend of hating one's predecessors for their moral failings might be damaging a key support structure in society; if our descendants will hate us as much as we hate our ancestors, what exactly do we owe them?
Honestly? Good point. Yeah, I guess you need to separately assert the inherent equality of persons, something about the categorical imperative, whatever. For people who see those sorts of premises as intuitively correct, I maintain that it’s a useful tool for organizing discussion on how to build a just society. But a tool is not the same as an argument.
The veil of ignorance requires you to step completely outside your existence to think about justice. It's not meant to be an actual recipe for designing a society.
Can someone point me to some good "plain English" exposition on unconditional election and conditional election? I don't find the wikipedia very helpful on this. For instance, wouldn't this permit debauchery? If [edit: an] evangelical believes that someone else's fate is predestined either for redemption or salvation [correction ~11 hours later: redemption or damnation], wouldn't lecturing to that person create pointless suffering?
Leave it to the Christians to have elections with no strategic voting despite Arrow's theorem. :)
Otherwise, the idea of predestination seems to be isomorphic to Newcomb's problem, as far as decision theory is concerned.
People who favor Causal Decision Theory would two-box and also embrace a life of sex, drugs and rock&roll if they believe in predestination.
People who follow the more esoteric variants of decision theory from lesswrong would probably one-box and live their life as if they were the sort of person who would be Saved.
I think, if you use evidential or functional decision theory, that's not a problem? Obviously, religious people who believe in this don't use the same terminology, but maybe they have a similar logic.
In my experience most Evangelicals are not Calvinists, and don't believe in election. But I don't have any hard data to back that up, just lived experience.
As a young man my father warned to "Beware the yeast of the Calvinists." :-)
Evangelical ethics are not exactly utilitarian. If lecturing to a person is the Right Thing To Do, it's the Right Thing To Do, independent of whether the endeavor is either fated to have no outcome or fated to be the means by which the redemption is accomplished.
As to your question, "wouldn't this permit debauchery", Paul addresses this in Romans 6.
Thank you. I see that Paul addresses and purports to explain this for "the elect" in Romans 6, but how is this addressed for the damned? And this seems to take for granted that someone knows whether they are saved or damned.
Good question! My hunch is that they would say if someone is predestined for damnation, debauchery is still wrong, and if someone was committed to continuing to commit it, that would simply be further evidence of their damnation! They also might say that if you are still concerned about the ethics of your debauchery, that's pretty good evidence that you are *not* counted among the damned and are being encouraged to turn to the truth. Then again, my experiences with believers in unconditional election were still steeped in enough modern American culture that they tended toward a "soft" election where whatever you end up choosing is simply what reveals what you were destined to choose all along; I'm likely to have more errors in speculating about interpretations from the harder edge of the spectrum. (Side note: I wonder if you could ask ChatGTP to simulate someone who believes in unconditional election and ask these things, or if discussing damnation would trip the censors!)
Thank you. I can believe that this is what one might hear from believers in unconditional election, because this matches what I have heard/expect from other reading to to hear from Jains regarding their notion of who will eventually attain liberation and who can never (I am not a jain). As in such cases, textual references would be great, but one gets the feeling that they are hard to find if at all they exist, and beliefs one hears tend to be determined by psychology. As for GPT etc., I don't have a lot of practice in prompting.
Thanks, this would be clarifying to me if it is to be interpreted as disproving unconditional election. But if it is to be read as consistent with unconditional election, I would need an explanation to make sense of that: how does it make sense to talk of the wicked changing course and "surviving", if hell's future population is predetermined?
I've never understood the unconditional election approach; the Bible is full of "give them a chance to repent" and "because of this action, you will suffer".
where God just lies to everyone and does something different. Maybe the parts between plagues in Exodus where God hardens pharaoh's heart so he won't repent.
Yes, unconditional election is bonkers. Martin Luther espouses the idea (I think it’s in The Freedom of a Christian) that God has a revealed will and an inscrutable will—His revealed will being that all be saved out of His love and His inscrutable will being that He plans to damn a great many and we shouldn’t question that. Luther’s God is two-faced, quite a repugnant idea! There are good aspects to his theology but that one is awful.
Definitely not in the Freedom of a Christian. I can't say if it's found somewhere else, but not there. All in all it sounds more like Calvinism than something I could imagine finding in Luther.
Okay, I will admit I have only read the first half of Bondage. But I think this is not quite the same as the Calvinist doctrine just judging from the given quote.
Luther says that there exist a hidden will, that we cannot know.
Calvin seems to directly say that God will predestine people to be sinners and others to be saved. So it is a clear thing, the only thing that is hidden is who exactly happens to be predestined in each direction.
Thanks, and indeed thank you for digging up that helpful Luther quote, and I see that this backs up your earlier comment, but I still don't see how it addresses Christian Z R's comment: it only says that the inscrutable will is for sinners to be damned, not whether being a sinner is predestined or not, which is what unconditional election is about?
Maybe explaining God's exact algorithm is an infohazard, so a truly good God would not disclose it, and would instead give us something like the closest approximation that is not an infohazard yet.
“But the Diatribe is deceived by its own ignorance, in not making a distinction between GOD PREACHED and GOD HIDDEN: that is, between the word of God and God Himself. God does many things which He does not make known unto us in His word: He also wills many things which He does not in His word make known unto us that He wills. Thus, He does not ‘will the death of a sinner,’ that is, in His word; but He wills it by that will inscrutable. But in the present case, we are to consider His word only, and to leave that will inscrutable; seeing that, it is by His word, and not by that will inscrutable, that we are to be guided; for who can direct himself according to a will inscrutable and incomprehensible? It is enough to know only, that there is in God a certain will inscrutable: but what, why, and how far that will wills, it is not lawful to inquire, to wish to know, to be concerned about, or to reach unto — it is only to be feared and adored!”
Apologies in advance if this has been discussed ad nauseam in the past, but what do readers think about the prospect of abolishing cash? Is it likely, or inevitable, and if so is that desirable?
In the UK a few months ago our PM, Rishi Sunak, let slip in a newspaper (Telegraph) interview that cash was "transitional", and in the last year or two banks have been frantically pushing mobile phone apps for transactions. So it doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to conclude that abolishing cash is a medium-term plan at least here.
I think it would (or will) be a Very Bad Idea, from a civil liberties standpoint. It is bad enough that credit card transactions are recorded, but having to use mobile phone apps adds a vast new dimension of state surveillance possibilities by enabling past and present location tracking as well as transactions!
When one adds constant nannying health advice, with possible insurance implications for unhealthy purchases, and aggressive and peremptory "debanking" (closing bank accounts) of customers who the banks decide may have non-PC views, the future for personal liberties looks bleak.
>I think it would (or will) be a Very Bad Idea, from a civil liberties standpoint.
I would say Bad, but perhaps not Very Bad, given the general spread of surveillance that has been and is continuing to happen anyway.
( Full disclosure - I make most of my purchases with a credit card, partially because it makes my record-keeping easier, and partially because it enables some consumer protections. So from my point of view, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-307/comment/45608085 's "cash is a corner case" rings true. )
I would guess that, in the USA, cash wouldn't be outlawed (at least not for a long time), but would gradually become rarer and rarer.
Re https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-307/comment/45607899 vulnerability. Yes, that is a problem, but there are similar vulnerabilities now. I've been in grocery stores where _all_ transactions ground to a halt when their computers went down. Nothing is perfectly robust, and there are always trade-offs in deciding how robust to make a system.
Out here in Trump country cash is often favored. Many businesses will charge you more for credit (you pay the ~3% credit charge) Some places are cash only. People working in restaurants favor cash for tipping because it isn't shown on the bill. So cash and writing checks is good by me. What we need to do in the US is get rid of the penny and maybe the nickel. Round up to the nearest $0.1
From the governments view, the lack of anonymity is a feature, not a bug. Charitably a government might just want to make it more difficult to fund terrorism. The problem is that once the infrastructure is in place, it will inevitably end up being used to filter for all sorts of behaviors.
Personally I think having some people funding terrorists using cash (or whatever other big bad you want to insert) is a price worth paying for also having the ability to buy controversial literature or fund other controversial organizations (wikileaks, pro-life, pro-choice, etc) using cash.
Aha! Found it. The article was free when it first appeared, but now seems to be behind a paywall (which is unusual for the Telegraph, as most articles start out paywalled but later become free! )
I think the final paragraph of the extract quoted below shows that I was not misrepresenting the PM's comment.
2023-08-05 Red Wall voters want legal right to pay in cash
Survey follows Nigel Farage’s claim that ‘dozens’ of small businesses have been de-banked for trading in cash
ARTICLE EXTRACT:
Last week, Rishi Sunak said that access to cash had to be protected despite the rise in electronic money transfers.
The Prime Minister said that as an MP for a rural constituency he represented people who are “concerned about this particular issue”.
“That’s why, as chancellor, I started the process, and recently we’ve concluded it, where we have legislated in law for access to cash regulations, which will allow the Government to ensure that, particularly in rural communities, that people do have access to cash,” he said.
He added: “Obviously, many people are transitioning to using either their phones or online to do their banking but whilst that transition happens, people still need to have access to cash.”
Seems the Telegraph might be misquoting it, in which case John, perhaps you can reduce your concern level somewhat.
And for any Brits reading, the campaign the interviewer refers to may still be ongoing. Their petition page is still 'up': https://www.gbnews.com/cash (currently 310,072 "signatures" ... I wonder if we, the people of ACX Open Thread 307, can push that higher)
At least in the US abolishing cash totally would be incredibly hard, but OTOH there are many businesses that don’t accept cash. I can’t speak for legality of this - it says right on the US money that it’s a legal tender, but barring someone suing the business the practice just continues.
There’s a good reason small retail businesses like food trucks avoid cash: too much risk and hassle.
Abolishing USD cash would be a disaster for many countries, and China or someone else would step in to fill the void. Right now I am travelling in Laos and USD is king.
"The rest of the world holds a great deal of U.S. currency, i.e., cash. Although the amount can’t be precisely tracked, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors recently estimated that foreigners held $950 billion in U.S. banknotes at the end of the first quarter of 2021, or about 45% of all Federal Reserve notes outstanding, including two-thirds of all $100 bills."
Cash in the US is legal tender "for all debts, public and private". If you owe someone money, they have to take it in cash if you offer such, or waive the debt. You can pay your income tax with a briefcase full of Benjamins delivered to the appropriate IRS office, if you really want. But if you and a merchant are contemplating a transaction where no debt will be incurred, because the thing you're paying for will be delivered when you pay for it, they they can insist on pretty much whatever payment terms they want.
Although a v fun case recently limited the scope to which cash is legal tender. Someone tried to pay a contract with a shipping container of pennies - the courts said such a payment could be rejected as not legal tender.
Yeah, I believe the "legal tender for all debts, public and private", starts with George Washington's face on the $1 bill. Not sure what would happen if you tried to make say a megabuck tax payment in Washingtons; I *think* they'd ultimately have to accept it but I don't know how they'd go about making your life miserable for having been a dick about it. Using $100 bills at least shows that you're trying to minimize the inconvenience of the cash payment.
According to the 1040 instructions you have to make cash payments at certain retail payment establishments which have a limit of $500 or $1,000 dollars. You can't show up at an IRS office with a suitcase of cash to pay the bill.
There's no limit on the amount, it's just that the quick and easy route at the various retail outlets is capped at $1000. And the IRS isn't going to go out of their way to point out that you can pay $bignum in cash, because that's a PITA for all concerned and they'd rather you didn't, but if you insist they will go along with it and they'll tell you in advance how to make it somewhat less inconvenient.
I don't have much of a dog in this hunt, but academically speaking, this seems like an unjust way around the legal tender rule. Otherwise, you could just declare any establishment as having a limit of $500 or $1000. What gives the IRS the ability to do that?
I looked into the legality of not accepting cash and this is my understanding: It’s legal to not accept cash if payment is made before service is rendered — for instance, at a deli where you order at the counter, pay, and then they make your food. However, if you pay after service is rendered — for example at a sit-down restaurant where you pay after eating — you are discharging a debt when you pay, and they are required to accept cash.
AFAIK a large chunk of the US economy (and not even speaking of the black market here, but of basic infrastructure) relies on the labour of "off the books" workers, paid 100% in cash (getting around not only immigration laws, such as are still enforced in parts of the country, but also expensive safety regulations, tax collection, etc.) While this continues to be the case, paper money is unlikely to disappear.
Basically yes. One can argue about the meaning of "large" in this context, but it's easily in the many-billions range. For all these reasons it's hard to imagine cash being outlawed in the US, or even have any politician run on such a platform.
Oh, that (outright robbery) is rare, although you personally not hearing about it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen (since the tone doesn’t translate, this is a neutral statement not in any way directed at “you” personally 😁). The hassle is, for example, having to go to the bank to deposit it (especially in rural areas). The risk is anything from the employees helping themselves to fake bills to honest loss.
Just think, if cash were outlawed then George Floyd would still be alive.
(Well, probably not, but he'd have died quietly in some alley and we'd have been spared a whole bunch of riots.)
((Well, probably not, another excuse for riots would have been found. Remember how the week before George Floyd everyone was upset about some argument about a dog in Central Park?))
Come on, this is… unnecessary…. Floyd was a piece of work but he did not deserve to die the way he did. I’ve been training MMA for years - I’d tap to that neck pressure in seconds if there were no way out. BTW Chauvin didn’t deserve the sawing machine stabbing either.
I don’t want to re-litigate this, it really is not the topic.
Also, from a practical standpoint, small informal community stuff relies heavily on cash, like school cake sales, Scouts/Guides fundraising fairs, etc. Even Covid didn't manage to move these things to electronic payments, partly because they're often run by children too young to have bank accounts or banking apps. Similarly, I give my kids pocket money in cash. So any plan to abolish cash will have to come up with a solution for how young children and small community organisations can still participate in the economy.
It’s also highly vulnerable to attack. Bring down a few banks and people starve. In fact I hate that I need a phone to do online shopping. My recent update to a new phone broke it for me.
Nah. If you're unable to use your banking service, you starve. If a few banks have all their clients unable to use their banking services, the store get looted.
I tend to use cash for transactions less than $10, though in some cases it is still more convenient to use a credit card, such as at kiosks. Cash is also useful as, for example, gifts to young family members, especially in smaller amounts.
I'm not saying cash is useless, but most people don't keep large amounts and many people don't keep any at all. A cyber attack that removed our ability to pay for things electronically would be deeply unpleasant is short lasting and catastrophic if long lasting, and the amount of cash currently in use isn't enough to significantly change that.
Oh, and tips. Let us not get sidetracked into the argument of whether or not tipping is an acceptable thing for society, since it certainly already exists as a thing. One ought not make the argument that doing away with cash causing tipping go away is a supporting argument, since the custom of tipping ought to be made on its own merits, and doing otherwise assumes not tipping is already accepted as the correct way of doing things.
Some places I tip where it would be difficult to impossible to provide money include the following: car wash people that dry my car, hotel housekeeping staff, bell hops, valet parking. When I was a golf caddy, I was paid nothing at all, and only earned tips.
It would be trivial for tip workers to carry around a contactless kiosk. Medieval Times in Dallas was doing that for their waiters when I went in September. Something something cashapp.
There's a coordination problem at work here. When everybody used cash, traders would round their prices to the nearest 10 cents or dollar, but now that everyone uses contactless, if you mention that you want to pay cash, they still make you take out your little coins.
To the 20-odd people who replied to the moon landing guy: stop feeding the trolls! You're making it so damn easy, good quality comments never get that much engagement and it's sad to see it wasted.
In general, you can't win an argument just by saying that the position is too silly to respond to. "How do we know the moon landing wasn't fake" could make a great final exam question in a course on epistemology.
But, when the person making the argument has demonstrated repeatedly they are trolling and have no intention of acknowledging points made against them, you actually do win the argument by pointing out they are silly. Or, just ignoring them.
This implicitly assumes a point-to-point model of communication where a reply is made solely for the benefit of the party being replied to and nobody else can possibly read it, which is wrong. As a rule of thumb, in any public forum the lurkers outnumber the writers by anywhere between 5 to 1 and 10 to 1, not to mention that the writers are themselves readers of other writers.
Like Florent says, it's deliberate target practice. Like Bertrand Russel and Alfred Whitehead spending 350 pages excruciatingly building Mathematics from the logical subterrain upwards then diligently noting that the resulting edifice agrees with "1 + 1 = 2". Like Euclid spending the entirety of the first book of Elements building up to the Pythagorean theorem, already well known and obvious to Egyptian and Sumerian architects for centuries. Proving the obvious is a virtue that teaches many things, and is fun as hell.
I had fun listing my own personal evidence that the earth is round. Contrarily to evolution where I mostly have to rely on other people's observations and trust their deductions until I find a blatant mistake ; for the shape of the earth, I have personnally observed :
* the sun setting at a different time after taking a plane to the other side of the earth
* the length of day being different from the tropics up to scotland.
* the course of the sun in the sky all over the day during various seasons
* the horizon and all effects connected to it
* what stars are visible from where and when.
It's great to have at least one subject where you don't have to trust anybody, and you can re-derive all your knowledge from scratch.
This is an arguing Kata : everyone including the OP knows that the subject is ridiculous, so we can fine-tune our arguing skills without worrying too much about the subject level.
Surely the ideal of an intellectual community of philosophers and debaters like this one is that any subject can be debated in good faith, irrespective of how low status the subject or whether either side is arguing in fun or in earnest.
So I think the moon landing guy is using ACX for its intended purpose, and you are not.
It's all fair game, the moon guy, the guy annoyed by the moon guy.
I appreciate the moon guy's thread. I don't follow the "controversy" but I'm interested enough in space science to be entertained by the two sides' exchanges.
This was arguably true to begin with but they quickly started citing provably false premises and obviously fallacious reasoning, and doubling down when the flaws were pointed out - surely that's when any sensible person disengages.
I've been playing with Leonardo.ai (an AI image generator). It has a "make good mode" called Alchemy, which brings its images up to pretty nice quality, in exchange for costing three times more credits to use. I have no idea what the difference is on the back end when Alchemy mode is used.
However, I don't think I'm interested in signing up to Leonardo.ai in the long term. For one thing, the Alchemy feature turned out to be a free trial, and now it's expired, Leonardo's output is pretty shit by comparison.
But the main reason is that they've overcompensated so much with their offensive content sanitisation efforts that I keep running into the censor for innocuous things. And even when the censor lets me through, the resulting image often willfully misunderstands what I want (for eg, asking for two emaciated people having a knife fight over a loaf of bread produces an image of two friendly smiling people holding cutlery knives while passing loaves of bread to each other. This kind of mistake never gets made when asking for non-violence- or non-sex-adjacent scenarios, where most of the time I've been surprised and impressed by the nuances the AI has picked up on.)
I'm not paying Leonardo.ai a subscription when I suspect I'll only burn through all the extra credits trying to cajole the system into producing a result it's trying not to give me. I also dislike distributed systems in general and prefer the idea of being able to do things just as easily when the Internet is down as not.
I know other people have got local copies of image generators running, and I'm thinking I wouldn't mind having one of my own. I have a coding background, and I'm fine with Python, which I gather has become the language of choice for AI programming. But haven't actually followed any AI tutorials (not since it all took off anyway). I also have other projects on and can't really do a deep dive into something new right now.
Basically I can't justify going off and learning all this stuff on my own, but that doesn't mean I can't ask for advice from people who already know it, just to get a sense of what I would be letting myself in for.
So, to boil it down: if I were to decide to roll my own local AI image generator:
- what's the best setup/software/library to use?
- what's the procedure (installation, coding, training, parameter tweaking, etc) and how labour-intensive is it?
- what kind of resources do I need (how much training data, GPU cycles, etc) to get a decent result?
- what kind of quality can a lone player expect to achieve? Something 90% as good as the pro tools, or something 1% as good?
Google "AUTOMATIC1111" for any guides you need. If you can install packages from a command line, you should be good for base knowledge. You can download pre-trained models, there's no need to do it yourself. Quality is...the ultimate subjective question, isn't it? There's tons of discussion on "negative prompts," which is what you need to get the AI to draw hands instead of eldritch abominations.
Cheers! I cloned it in and was greeted by the usual sea of errors. If I can sort through all those and get it running, I'll be able to have a play and see what it can do.
An offshore, crypto-financed 100%-uncensored "AI" service is starting to look like a rather lucrative idea. Eventually it will happen. It'll have massively-cheaper staffing than today's services -- no need to hire censors, "safety" busybodies, "regulatory compliance" nonsense specialists, etc.
Is it ethical to have a child, knowing that this child will be born into a life of slavery? What should we make of all the slaves who have chosen to have children throughout history?
> Is it ethical to have a child, knowing that this child will be born into a life of slavery?
No, it's not. Every suffering and pain someone experiences are the responsibility of their parents, and parents who know their children will suffer and still have them are immoral.
> What should we make of all the slaves who have chosen to have children throughout history?
People acting immorally, is that so rare or surprising?
Given that suffering is a more or less inherent part of our existence, that would seem to lead to the conclusion that it's never permissible to have a child.
Is every pleasure and joy a child experiences also the responsibility of their parents? What about the pleasure and joy of that child's children?
If so, then certainly, say, slaves in the American South who procreated were morally good to do so, as the positive experiences of generations of now free descendants almost certainly outweigh the pain that their children and grandchildren experienced.
Slaves back then had below-replacement fertility. In a Malthusian environment, the advantage of capturing slaves was that you didn't have to pay to raise them. The New World, with its non-Malthusian abundance of land, was very different.
True. Organized slave breeding didn't happen until after 1808 when the importation of slaves was banned in the US. Wikipedia seems to have an article for just about everything...
Yes, they weren't given enough food in the Old World to reproduce themselves, but were in antebellum North America (where populations like Yankees or French Canadians were exploding).
"Choosing" to have children hasn't really been a thing for almost *anyone* for most of human history. While of course one might attempt total abstinence to avoid conception, very few people can actually manage it, and of course there's a tremendous amount of social pressure to participate in family systems that result in procreation.
It's been a thing for most men through most of history. And really, I think norms against rape have been strong enough that a fair number of women could reasonably have expected to abstain from parenthood in most cultures, if they wanted.
Until recently, it required also abstaining from certain kinds of sexyfuntimes. That's a thing people can choose to do.
But, male or female, with or without sex, most people do seem to want to have children.
You do know that marital rape was literally formally legal in every state in the US until the 1970s, right? That it was so legal and normal that many people were deeply confused by the notion that it was possible for a husband to rape his wife as late as 1993, when Lorena Bobbitt brought the issue into popular culture?
And that women weren't able to have their own banking accounts until the 1960s, or be guaranteed the same access as men to mortgages until the mid 1970s?
Which meant...you know...most had to depend on husbands for shelter for approximately all of human history? Husbands who wanted sex in a time where everyone believed they were entitled to have it on demand?
And that survival with things like retirement, livelihoods, and securing land was often highly dependent on having children?
There was almost *endless* survival pressure on almost everyone to have children, whether they genuinely welcomed them or not, whether it was ethical or not. For most people, there wasn't really a meaningful choice not to.
There are other species of animals that manage to reproduce just fine without social pressure. Natural selection handled it prior to sociality evolving in the first place.
I think other species of animals are intelligent. Octopi, corvids, dolphins, chimpanzees... Less intelligent than humans, but I don't think of it as a binary in which we're intelligent but they're not.
I agree that intelligence isn't a binary, but I also agree with Skull that there's a massive difference in intelligence between humans and any other organism we know of. (Or perhaps we've merely passed some important threshold that other organisms haven't quite reached.) Rather than culture, I'd put the other key innovation as being "language", although IMO even that is just an evolved enhancement to something that intelligence could come up with by itself.
I remember a fantasy book essentially about this topic. A shaman has found a way to store all the slave's emotions so they can go through slavery without breaking down, the hero undoes it on the grounds that if no one is ever upset about it then nothing will ever change for the better.
So, more angry people now helps solve the problem long-term.
The revealed preference of slaves who don't kill themselves is that a life of slavery is better than non-existence, so it's ethical for them to procreate.
One might also note that in much of the contemporary West, children are subject to that form of slavery that is known as compulsory schooling, and young adults to military conscription, and most don't seem too traumatized by those experiences.
I think typically, schools are compared to prisons by their critics, not forced labor camps. I think that comparison is much less offensive. (Why not call traffic rules slavery, while you are at it?)
I am much more sympathetic to the claim that military conscription can be a form of slavery. In Eritrea it certainly is.
The revealed preference argument models humans as self-interested rational actors. However, that is only an approximation, as humans are a product of evolution, which strongly selects against suicides and refusal to procreate. If you put starving mice in a cage, would you also claim that the revealed preference of the survivors is clearly cannibalism and clinging to life despite being in severe pain?
More broadly, the utility threshold for creating new life is not necessarily the same as the threshold for unmaking already existing life.
Alright, let's just call compulsory schooling another form of forced labour instead of another form of slavery. Then the fact that people don't have any ethical qualms about having children born into the contemporary forms of unfreedom (schooling, conscription, taxes and regulation in the typical Western case) suggests to me that having children born into ancient forms of unfreedom probably wasn't too ethically problematic either.
As for revealed preference, the way I understand that term is that any observed behaviour is considered preferred, so if the mice practice cannibalism but say that they would rather starve, I'd say they clearly have a revealed preference for cannibalism over starving and another revealed preference for lying about it.
For your argument to carry, your would have to contend with the revealed preferences everyone who said or lived by the mantra “give me liberty or give me death”. I've always considered that mantra an indication that the right to move about was higher on the hierarchy of rights than the right to life.
That position has historical basis, yes. See also "live free or die; death is not the worst of evils".
But Wasserschweinchen's position is compatible: different people are allowed to have different preferences. The "in this house we believe..." signs are good indications that the values expressed are not in fact universal. (Not going to touch the children part, though.)
I would think that those who do live by that mantra typically do not produce children who are born into slavery, so those who do would still be following the golden rule.
I can think of a few explanations, bearing in mind that we're talking about people who lived in poverty and oppression and were in effect "owned" by someone:
- in the past having a child was not really a choice but a fact of life
- no contraception means that the only way to choose would be through abortion, and I imagine that was something extremely dangerous and diffcult to attain, plus all the religious issues
- in a more optimist and hopeful note, the fact that a given child may change the status quo enough to give them freedom
Celibacy was entirely possible prior to the existence of birth control. But back then people didn't view the birth of a child as an inherently bad thing to be avoided.
I don't think a lack of bodily autonomy explains why people weren't celibate, I think hardly any wanted to be. With the end of slavery freedmen traveled over long distances to reunite with spouses that had been sold away from them, and they kept reproducing without needing the help of any slaveowners to "push" them as Nancy Lebowitz put it.
I was referring obliquely to rape and other forms of coercion, and in this case I was thinking of time periods several thousand years ago. But one can look at certain modern-day cultures, and notice their incredible fecundity, and then notice that the treatment of women in those cultures leaves them little choice in whether they reproduce.
Four ships are sailing the sea, each moving with a constant speed (speeds of different ships may be different). None of their courses are parallel to one another. It is known that the first three ships all meet with each other at some point, though not all three at once. It is also known that the fourth ship meets with the first one, and then with the second. Prove that the fourth ship must also inevitably meet with the third one at some point (in the past or the future with respect to its other meetings).
* Not only the speed (the magnitude of the velocity), but also the direction of the velocity have to be constant.
* The sea should be modeled as an Euclidian vector space R^n, likely for n=2. (This has the advantage that one does not have to argue what a constant velocity means in e.g. S2 geometry.)
* Two courses are parallel if their world lines are parallel, e.g. if they have an equal velocity vector.
(Having colinear velocity vectors is not a conserved property under transformations of the frame of reference, while the last two ships meeting obviously is.)
Yrg e_v(g) or gur cbfvgvba fuvc v (mreb .. guerr) bpphcvrf ng gvzr g. Jvgubhg ybff bs trarenyvgl, nffhzr gung e_0(g) = 0.
Sbe v!=w, yrg G_vw qrabgr n fbyhgvba gb e_v(g)==e_w(g).
Nyy cbffvoyr pbhefrf e_v(g) juvpu vagreprcg e_0 sbyybj gur sbez e_v(g)=i_v(g-G_0v), r.t. gurl tb guebhtu gur bevtva ng G_0v. Sbe v>0, i_v vf abamreb.
Jvgubhg ybff bs trarenyvgl, frg G_01 gb mreb. Sebz gur erdhverzrag bs gur svefg guerr fuvcf abg zrrgvat ng gur fnzr gvzr, vg sbyybjf gung sbe w=2, G_01=0, G_0w naq G_1w ner cnvejvfr hardhny. Sbe w=3, gur fnzr, jr ernfbanoyl vagrecerg "zrrgf svefg jvgu gur bar fuvc, gura jvgu gur bgure" nf gur fuvc guerr abg funevat n pbhefr jvgu rvgure irffry mreb be bar (va juvpu pnfr gur ceboyrz jbhyq orpbzr gevivny), abe vagreprcgvat gurz ng gur fnzr gvzr, juvpu nzbhagf gb G_v3 orvat havdhr naq ubyqvat gur fnzr eryngvbafuvc.
Sbe w>1, G_1w unf gb fngvfsl gur rdhngvba
e_1(G_1w)=e_w(G_1w)
i_1*(G_1w)=i_w*(G_1w-G_0w)
Tvira gur nobir pbaqvgvbaf sbe G_vw, guvf lvryqf:
i_w = i_1 * G_1w / (G_1w - G_0w)
Guvf nyybjf hf gb fvzcyvsl gur rdhngvba sbe G_23 gb:
"Tvira gur nobir pbaqvgvbaf sbe G_vw, guvf lvryqf:
i_w = i_1 * G_1w / (G_1w - G_0w)"
Va bgure jbeqf vs V'z ernqvat vg evtug, va gur senzr bs ersrerapr jurer gur mrebgu fuvc vf cnexrq ng gur bevtva, nyy bgure fuvcf ner nyjnlf ba n yvar gung tbrf guebhtu gur bevtva. Lbh pna guvax bs gur cbfvgvbaf bs gur fuvcf va guvf senzr bs ersrerapr nf fvzcyl orvat gur qvfgnapr bs gubfr fuvcf sebz gur mrebgu fuvc (vapyhqvat va n senzr bs ersrerapr jurer gur mrebgu fuvc vf zbivat). Va juvpu pnfr gur fuvcf ner nyy fgvyy ng nyy gvzrf ba n fvatyr yvar, ohg abg arprffnevyl n svkrq yvar be bar gung tbrf guebhtu gur bevtva.
Naljnl guvf svgf jryy jvgu gur nafjre sebz Tatterdemalion. Va uvf irefvba jurer nyy gur fuvc'f jbeyqyvarf ner va n fvatyr cynar va gur 3-qvzragvbany fcnpr jurer gur m-nkvf vf gvzr, gur cynarf trarengrq ol g=m_0 ercerfrag gur fuvcf' cbfvgvbaf ng inevbhf zbzragf, naq gur vagrefrpgvba bs gur cynar jvgu gur fuvcf naq n g=m_0 cynar vf n yvar. Va bgure jbeqf, gur fnzr pbapyhfvba, gung nyy fuvcf ner ng nyy gvzrf ba n fvatyr yvar (ntnva gung yvar pna zbir).
Bapr lbh trg gurer, V guvax lbh trg gur nafjre jvgu gur pbaqvgvba gung gurl'er nyy zbivat jvgu gur fnzr fcrrq naq abg cnenyyry.
Cvpgher gur sbhe fuvcf va guerr qvzrafvbany fcnpr, jvgu gvzr nf gur guveq qvzrafvba, fb gung rnpu bs gurve pbhefrf vf n yvar, naq fuvcf zrrg vs gur yvarf vagrefrpg.
Fvapr rnpu cnve bs gur svefg guerr fuvcf zrrg, gubfr yvarf zhfg or pbcynane.
Fvapr gur sbhegu fuvc zrrgf gur svefg gjb, vgf cngu zhfg yvr va gung cynar gbb.
Naq gjb aba-cnenyyry yvarf va n cynar nyjnlf vagrefrpg.
Fjnc gvzr qvzrafvba sbe n fcnpr qvzrafvba. Rnpu fuvc'f pbhefr vf abj n yvar va fcnpr. Gur svefg guerr yvarf ner va gur fnzr cynar. Fb vs gur sbhegu yvar vagrefrpgf jvgu gjb bs gubfr yvarf gura vg zhfg or ba gur fnzr cynar gbb, naq guhf fbzrjurer pebff gur guveq yvar.
and as an aside, a steady course isn't in general the same as a constant heading. If the ship sails in a constant compass direction then it is usually changing course, slowly or otherwise. Near the poles for example it will be travelling in a spiral.
Why is inflation bad? I am not an economist, but it seems to me their explanations are woefully unpersuasive. I'll post my own attempt at answer in a subordinated comment, this is just a problem statement.
Normies will tell you that inflation is bad because it impoverishes them. Economists will tell you that is not necessarily true, but then fail to provide explanation why then we should be concerned inflation.
Here I am going to use as a foil an open source textbook from something called Rice university (here: https://openstax.org/details/books/principles-economics-3e). I’ve read, like, two to three another textbooks, and if my memory serves me well, their explanations of inflation costs are fairly similar.
a) unintended redistribution of purchasing power between various groups in society, like creditors vs debtors. Well, ok, but the word “unintended” here is used strangely; what distributions of purchasing power are “intended”? Who is the one who intends?
It seems to me that uninteded redistributions of purchasing power in this broad sense happen all the time in societies not based on central planning, and economists are pretty chill about them, when inflation is not involved. E.g. new technology is invented which boosts wages of some workers and puts others out of work, price of oil falls on global markets, increasing incomes of people driving gasoline cars and depressing prospects of people dependent on electric vehicle sales, etc.
b) blurred price signals; explained as
>In a world where inflation is at a high rate, but bouncing up and down to some extent, does a higher price of a good mean that inflation has risen, or that supply of that good has decreased, or that demand for that good has increased? Should a buyer of the good take the higher prices as an economic hint to start substituting other products—or have the prices of the substitutes risen by an equal amount? Should a seller of the good take a higher price as a reason to increase production—or is the higher price only a sign of a general inflation in which the prices of all inputs to production are rising as well? The true story will presumably become clear over time, but at a given moment, who can say? [end quote]
Perhaps I am missing something, but this seems to me as authors being partly confused and partly making a big deal out of something trivial.
Inflation is in itself a price signal; if you are a producer and prices of the thing you are producing are going up together with prices of other things, it is absolutely rational to increase production compared to an alternative universe where prices are staying the same, given the same costs of production.
It is true that there are costs associated with checking whether your costs of production as before you fire up the machines, but those are imho almost negligible in a modern economy; as a producer of the thing you probably have an established mechanism to check your costs.
d) problems with long-term planning. This is the correct reason, although it is not connected with inflation in itself, but with an uncertainty about the future rate of inflation.
When you are reasonably confident that in next years, inflation will average around 2 %/year, your financial planning will be easier than when you think it could be anything from 1 % to 120 % per year. However.
Presumably the reason why difficulty of long-term planning is something to be avoided is because it messes up production; if companies do not know what will happen tomorrow, they’ll reduce production and lay off workers, right? Or workers would quit themselves and enter a barter economy or something. And if everyone is doing that, unemployment should go up, right? This indeed happens when a country enters an inflationary collapse territory, but it takes quite a lot of uncertainty about future inflation before employment starts being affected.
Not only are highly-above-2 % levels of inflation evidently compatible with low unemployment, but the the whole philosophy of inflation-fighting through interest rate hikes espoused by world’s central banks is based on an idea that sometimes it is worthwhile to reduce employment to bring inflation down. See results of so called Volcker disinflation in the 80s, when US unemployment rate hit a post-WW2 record, only to be outdone by a covid panic in 2020.
Maybe economists are slacking when writing textbook chapters on why inflation needs to be avoided because they think that an explanation is unnecessary - public already opposes inflation more than it should, so there is no immediate danger that it will turn pro-inflationary. From the same textbook:
>Economists usually oppose high inflation, but they oppose it in a milder way than many non-economists. Robert Shiller, one of 2013’s Nobel Prize winners in economics, carried out several surveys during the 1990s about attitudes toward inflation. One of his questions asked, “Do you agree that preventing high inflation is an important national priority, as important as preventing drug use or preventing deterioration in the quality of our schools?” Answers were on a scale of 1–5, where 1 meant “Fully agree” and 5 meant “Completely disagree.” For the U.S. population as a whole, 52% answered “Fully agree” that preventing high inflation was a highly important national priority and just 4% said “Completely disagree.” However, among professional economists, only 18% answered “Fully agree,” while the same percentage of 18% answered “Completely disagree.” [end quote]
Nevertheless, there isn’t widespread opposition among economists against crushing relatively mild (e.g. below 5 %) inflation by choking of credit supply and potentially increasing unemployment, so presumably they are ok with that. It’s just they haven’t bothered to provide a good explanation why.
Supply and demand don't just apply to the things you are buying with money, although that is generally a convenient shorthand. Money itself is also a thing with supply and demand. You can create high inflation by increasing the supply of money - but you can also create high inflation by decreasing the demand for money.
This may seem counterintuitive - why would low demand create inflation? But low demand creates a *decrease* in value. It may be easier understood as low demand for a specific amount of money - a dollar. You don't want a dollar as much if it isn't worth very much, compared to the things you want to spend it on. Which implies a nasty little feedback loop: High inflation decreases demand for money, increasing inflation.
We express this idea, often, in terms of "faith". Faith in the money supply. Lose faith in the money supply, and you can quickly get to hyperinflation, where the value of money is so volatile that it becomes difficult to actually use it. This is tied to expectations.
Outside that, there are wide classes of goods that are regarded as safe stores of value - real estate, for example. Even relatively mild inflation can increase investment in these safe stores of value, driving up the price - an increase in demand which doesn't make anybody better off, and makes many people worse off. So relatively mild inflation can make things like housing less affordable.
I think there's a problem with your question itself. It sounds similar to a question such as "Why is baldness bad?". There's a phenomenon, like bald heads, that just happens sometimes, and we might wonder whether it's bad, since if it isn't, there's no point spending effort on trying to change it.
But this is not what your question about inflation is like. It's more like, "Why is false advertising bad?". To answer this question as if false advertising is something that just happens, sort of like tornados or rat infestations, is to entirely miss the point. False advertising is almost always (apart from honest mistakes) a deliberate action by someone, that is aimed at obtaining an advantage for themselves (and their associates) by fraudulently acquiring wealth at the expense of other people. It's bad, for other people, to the extent they succeed in this goal.
Similarly, inflation is usually not some natural phenomenon that we need to decide how much effort to put into ameliorating. It's a deliberate policy, which benefits some people, and harms other people. Of course the people whom it benefits won't see it as bad. But everyone else should.
Now, without getting into the details, you may ask yourself who the likely beneficiaries of inflation are. Do you think it benefits the common people? Or is it more likely that the beneficiaries of inflation are the people who are responsible for it - the central bankers and the rich and powerful people with whom they are allied?
> Or is it more likely that the beneficiaries of inflation are the people who are responsible for it - the central bankers and the rich and powerful people with whom they are allied?
You are right to suspect that these institutions protect themselves. However they are not pro inflation (except low inflation) and that’s protecting themselves, often at the cost of jobs.
You're right that the powerful people who determine how much inflation there is might conceivably believe that their interests are best served either by high inflation or by low inflation. And for some years until recently, they did favour fairly low inflation of around 2% per year - though note that this "low" rate halves the value of money in just 35 years. However, historically, fiat money has usually been debased at a higher rate than that, so I don't think one can conclude that they usually think their interests are served by low inflation.
It's also not necessarily a zero-sum situation - perhaps the interests of the common people and those in power coincide with regard to inflation rate. I think this might be true if those in power were thinking long-term. But they may not be, because there's no guarantee that those in power will be able to stay in power, so there may be a tendency to get what they can now.
Apriori it isn't implausible that inflation redistributes wealth downwards - from rich (who are more likely to be creditors) to poor (who are more likely to be debtors). I know that in practice it is considerably more complicated, but still
The first response, which you hinted at, is that economists don’t think low inflation is a bad thing, they consider it a good thing. Deflation is the bugbear.
The problem with high inflation is that it can obviously reduce people’s wages and savings.
Now if you are talking about a situation where wages continue to increase more than inflation there are also price signalling issues with that, and people never feel as well off as in low inflation environments - the ever changing numbers confuse people.
What’s good though is that relative debt is reduced - mortgages get more affordable relative to incomes. And that’s also true of the debt to gdp for a country that borrows in its own currency.
> What’s good though is that relative debt is reduced - mortgages get more affordable relative to incomes. And that’s also true of the debt to gdp for a country that borrows in its own currency.
I do not think that this is true in equilibrium for a constant inflation. If you have an inflation of X, and assuming that there are alternative assets which are not subject to devaluation (e.g. gold), I would expect the interest rates demanded from borrowers to be X+P, where P is some positive rate. If you can't turn a profit by lending, you should obviously invest your money elsewhere.
Likewise, a country with a high inflation will not get good credit conditions for borrowing its own currency.
Also, most contracts specify wages, rent and the likes in non-inflation-adjusted terms. So a nonzero inflation creates some additional coordination costs (like worker strikes for inflation compensation). I think negative interests would be a better alternative to inflation, but then one needs some way to devaluate banknotes to make hoarding them unattractive.
> IMF economists noted last month that unexpected inflation is eroding the real value of government debt again today. Their analysis found that for countries with a debt-to-GDP ratio of more than 50 per cent, each percentage point of unexpected inflation reduces public debt by 0.6 per cent of GDP – with the effect lasting for several years. As the chart shows, this exerted a downward force on government debt in both advanced and developing economies last year.
This doesn’t apply to inflation that gets locked in as interest rates w I’ll increase permanently.
All true. However that last part happens gradually and takes a while to be tangible for most people, while the other effects happen visibly in real time. So for most people a high-inflation period feels crappy for a good while before they see the positive impact. And in a national economy consumer sentiment is not just a indicator of national mood it is also a significant factor in the economy's performance at any given moment.
Economists classify inflation, quite sensibly, into two types - supply-driven or demand-driven. Supply-driven inflation means there is less overall stuff in the economy at a given price, and demand stays unchanged, so, stuff costs more. Demand-driven inflation means that supply stays the same, but demand increases, so, again, stuff costs more.
In practice, both kinds of inflation might occur at the same time - e.g. demand driven inflation might follow supply driven inflation because after a general rise in prices banks might succumb to a pressure to erode consumer credit standards, allowing more money into an economy. But theoretically they are distinct.
Evidently, supply-driven inflation is more of a symptom of an underlying problem of the interruption of supply - rise in prices is one possible reaction to it, other is rationing. Those alternative approaches have their advantages and disadvantages, but they are both suboptimal solutions compared to a restoration of supply.
It is a demand-driven inflation that lies in the heart of the problem. By definition, it occurs when people on average decide, for whatever reason, to spent more on consumption, i.e. when they save less from the same income, or when their incomes increase and their savings rate stays the same or increases less than income.
When people start spending more on consumption, there is a bunch of industries providing that consumption. If labor market is working, those industries respond by hiring or at least trying to hire more people, with wages in those industries consequently increasing. When are they getting those new workers? Perhaps from the ranks of the until-now unemployed. But eventually , as there will be too few unemployed with required skills, more and more workers pouring into “consumption industries” will switch from jobs that do not experience an increase in demand because of inflation. And those are a) public services, and b) investment, i.e. production of capital goods.
In economics parlance, investment is a word for a production of capital, i.e. of wealth, of stuff that, if privately owned, is supposed to make money to its owner. Obviously the reason why people pay for using capital equipment is that it is useful for producing consumption goods and services. Classic example is a machine in a factory, but, like, movie production is an investment, with its result, copyrighted movie, being a capital good. Most important category of investment in our time is residential construction, with residential housing in many countries worth more than all other capital put together.
Underinvestment, i.e. underproduction of capital goods, leads over time fairly obviously to suboptimal outcomes. It is easy to imagine bad things would happen if all employment would be redirected from producing capital goods to consumption. Most obviously, buildings would fall apart and, by definition, no one would construct new ones.
But: it would seem that increased consumption would lead to an increase in prices of capital goods and thus everything would stay in its place? Like, if people are willing to spent more on shelter, revenues of construction companies should go up. Well, maybe.
Direct consumption producing workers can by by definition paid directly from consumer spending, but this is not possible for workers producing capital. In China households apparently sometimes pay in advance to developers for apartments that are to be constructed; this looks weird to us in the US and the EU, but our own system of financing investment is far more complicated.
With producers of capital goods need to borrow money to bridge the time gap between increases in wages of consumption workers and increased revenue from investment. Of course some of them might be able to borrow money from themselves, in the form of reduced profit, but others can’t or don’t want to. So, they need cooperation from banks and similar financial actors. And that is where a rubber of markets adjusting efficiently to equilibrium meets the road of rational risk avoidance slash financial bureaucracy of lawyers, bank compliance officers, regulators etc. Real world provision of credit is thus unlikely to prevent wages in investment industries from falling behind consumption industries.
It is worth noting that if the system would be able to increase wages in investment industries so well that they would not suffer job drain to consumption, after exhausting the pool of unemployed workers with required skills real consumption would not increase despite increased consumption spending.
So, at least a priori, there are reasons why an inflationary wave, or more precisely, increased wages of workers in consumption industries caused by an inflationary wave, would lead to a decline in private investment. Also to underprovision of public services, where the mechanism is imho more obvious - if wages of soldiers decline compared to wages of consumption workers, of course an army will have a recruitment problem.
So, why our chosen weapon of inflation fighting is hiking of interest rates? (even lower epistemic confidence)
Choking of credit supply is something that seems to hit investment hard, so if the goal of fighting inflation is to protect private investment, it does not seem to make sense to fight inflation the way we do it.
But details matter: central banks fight inflation by hiking short-term interest rates. Maybe the real purpose of that operation is to make long-term lending, crucial for long-term investment, relatively more attractive compared to short-term lending? If that would be the case, Fed seems to be quite successful in that goal.
One month rate on US government debt is currently higher than 30 year rate, since investors expect dramatic declines in short term rates.
Yet, I suspect that current mode of inflation fighting is suboptimal and is in place primarily because of historical path dependency. Perhaps something like operative tax hikes on discretionary consumption in the event of demand-driven inflationary spike would be better?
>"So, why our chosen weapon of inflation fighting is hiking of interest rates? (even lower epistemic confidence)"
It's actually not, despite that being the way it's usually discussed.
High interest rates can be a symptom of either tight or loose money.
In the the former (inflation-fighting) case, the Fed sells Treasuries; that takes money out of circulation (which is what actually reduces inflation) while simultaneously driving the prices of Treasuries down (which mechanically increases their interest rates).
The latter case is just the credit market accounting for already high inflation and demanding to be compensated. Real value of debts can only be reduced by *unanticipated* inflation, and that trick stops working real fast.
Is there any advice for being less toxic when playing multiplayer games? Sometimes I engage in toxic behavior like flaming my allies for their mistakes, and I always end up regretting it. Intellectually, I should know better, but sometimes monkey brain wins and it just happens.
This also happens when playing with people I know, especially if there's a large skill gap. Why do I care so much about winning rather than enjoying spending time with others? Even when I like someone, if we lose too many games in a row I'll just get frustrated and have to take a break.
It's important to recognize that these games run on narcissism. They encourage you to scapegoat others when your ego gets bruised. You might find it helpful to:
A) Focus on your own locus of control.
-- Pretend it's soloplayer. Your allies might as well be NPC's. Treat their actions as you would the output of a random number generator.
-- Focus on the next objective. You can't change the past, and you can't change your present circumstances, so there's little point dwelling on either.
B) Adopt a process-oriented attitude, rather than a results-oriented attitude.
-- It's not about winning, it's about learning. Be willing to experiment. Lose is improve. I guarantee your own gameplay has leaks you don't even notice.
-- "But I played perfectly and still lost." Watch out, we got a bonjwa over here! But in the unlikely case that you did, rejoice. You've fulfilled your obligations in the eyes of God.
C) Find humor in chaos.
-- Ya'll are just monkeys banging on a keyboard. There's an ongoing youtube series I follow called The Florencio Files [0], where an SC2 streamer named Flo gets his matches sports-casted by another streamer named Pig. The schtick is that Flo deliberately gravitates towards absurd, cheese strats just because it's hilarious to watch opponents struggle while outside of their comfort zone. The victory per se is less important than the psychological warfare.
Played League for many years. My best advice is to reframe everything as being your own fault. There is almost always more you could do to support your allies in League (namely, roaming to other lanes to help them at the expense of your own). Even your teammates flaming out is just you not being encouraging enough. I'm not sure whether this a healthier worldview, but I do think that it makes you less likely to flame and an overall better player
it's not worth playing competitive multiplayer games.
The psychic cost of losing is just too strong and will always color the experience. The games are set up so someone always loses, and secondary mechanics like rankings or rewarding organized team play kind of add to the sting rather than mitigate it.
You also can't even remain effective; the game always changes so one patch and the character you like becomes substantially weaker or unexpected buffs can cause a cancerous meta that isnt fun to play against. And over time the skill level of all players rises, so many people lose more and more because their rate of improvement is slower than average. they get better yet lose more.
i think honestly the games are the problem; best thing i did was to quit them. i dont think its possible to play them long term or with any level of involvement and not have to deal with tilting.
I have a friend who suffers this too, especially if he plays Overwatch after a tough day at work and he's all stressed out. One trick that always distracts him is playing games in chat. If we're getting stomped by some smurf on the other team we'll be like "wow I can't believe you guys are beating us even though [insert really good player here] is throwing!". Other favorites are telling the other team they C9'ed when they clearly didn't, or saying "wow I can't believe you guys had that thrower" at the end of the game to see if you can get the other team to start fighting with each other. If that doesn't work, a couple of beers usually helps.
I would seriously suggest that as an attempt; play a solo game you're really bad at, lose in ways that are unambiguously your own fault, and when you get back to multiplayer games you'll likely be more chill about what other people are doing.
I've also got cheap plastic furniture that can be kicked apart pretty easily and/or hurled across the room. It's good for the heart and acceptable for the wallet.
Try a different game. Many competitive games are set up in a way that makes people cross.
My personal favourite -- and the only game I ever play online with strangers -- is Deep Rock Galactic. Player versus environment with the game built on a model that rewards cooperation. In-game communication is "automated" in the sense that you make inputs which cause your character to say voice lines, and this removes much of the temptation to be abusive as well.
The community is about 95-98% non-toxic as a result. There are occasional assholes but no more than that. People make a point of tolerating or even welcoming players with less experience or ability.
> Neural repair: As a test of the little biobots, the Tufts team created a 2D layer of neurons in a petri dish and then scratched it with a metal rod. They then place a dense concentration of anthrobots on part of the “wound.”
> Surprisingly, their presence seemed to encourage healing — new neurons grew below the anthrobots, but not on gaps that were left uncovered.
It sounds like a big deal, but I am no biologist. Anyone would like to chime in?
What's the end game for the migration crisis in NY?
I wasn't aware that it was still a "crisis". Maybe that attitude will spread to NYC? Do you still have local politics there?
Alternatively, declare that America isn't safe because it's "the most racist country in the world", and send them on to Canada?
Hizzonor Adams and Hochul are constantly using the c word to describe it, and are bemoaning the lack of Fedbux for them to deal with it.
And since randomly bussing migrants places is a cruel, inhumane political stunt, they naturally are dealing with it by bussing migrants to random upstate communities where they are being welcomed with open arms sometimes disguised as lawsuits and protests.
Huh. For some reason I just don't see much reporting about it. Nor about the pro-Palestinian protests in NY, saying things like "cancel Christmas". (I mean, I **know** why I don't see these stories.)
The media stops covering it once election year ramps up and everybody forgets about it.
They managed to studiously avoid the (genuine) crisis in Texas so I'm sure they can figure out how to avoid the (tiny) crisis in New York.
I know someone who is 18 and has no clue what to do in life. Is going to university and just taking whatever prereqs with no idea, not even the first clue, despite all kinds of probing questions, what she wants to do.
I recommended maybe volunteering for charity. As a first pass, I went to Givewell's site to see if they had some recommendation where to volunteer and, surprisingly, I could find nothing.
So what are the best charities to volunteer for right now? How do you find out?
> 18 and has no clue what to do in life
How do people even do that? Does this include, like, having no hobby? This sounds to me like a horrible way of existing, regardless of the university problems.
My recommendation would be to get as much experience as possible, as quickly as possible. Like, call all the people you know, ask them to give you a list of things they enjoy doing or find meaningful, and then spend one afternoon trying each one of them, with the help of the person who already does that. (Read a book. Play a board game. Play a computer game. Take a hike. Go dance. Cook something. Feed the homeless. Teach kids math. Just talk. Meditate. Clean the beach.) At the end of each week write a diary entry about what you tried and how much you enjoyed it.
> How do people even do that?
I was the same way, up until age 21, when I randomly took a CS-for-majors course and discovered that not only did I like programming, I was also good at it. Up until then, there was a lot of stuff I was decent at, and enjoyed a bit, but nothing that could come close to being described as a "calling". I'd have been just another bright, aimless kid, puttering around in the professional-managerial class, trying desperately to find meaning in a world of bullshit jobs. And if I didn't happen to be dating someone who was taking that CS course, I'd never have found out.
I agree with your recommendation of trying lots of stuff. That's part of why I mentioned the social work jobs - rather than jump in to something EA right away, why not try a lot of other things first and see how they fit? If you're already thinking in EA terms, and vaguely planning to end up there, this would provide a chance to test out your theorizing in the real world. It's like one of those chains of literature or science or engineering, where to understand why we do things the way we do them today, it's helpful to understand the other things we've tried first, and the evolution of the state of the art in the field.
Yeah, some people grew up during Covid and had a harder time of it than others, I guess. I struggle to imagine that state of being myself, to the point where I wonder if she's lying... but it is what it is!
As a counterpoint, find the closest organization that provides free food for homeless people, and volunteer there for a while. It's hands-on experience with ground truth in the place she lives, and gives a context for human suffering that might be otherwise missing. Alternatively, if she's in a moderately left-wing city, the local government should be contracting with agencies to manage housing homeless people, so she could probably find a (messy, disgusting, but paying) job there doing clean-up work. Apparently, a lot of people burn out of that type of job after a few months, so if she goes into it with that expectation, she'll spare herself some angst.
Like, even from a cold tactical view, if she's pretty sure she wants to go into EA later, it will give her a perspective that many people around her will be lacking, and allow her to address questions from first-hand experience rather than from regurgitating someone else's reporting.
If you feed the pigeons, you get more pigeons. If you feed the homeless you get more homeless.
If you want to do some good for the world, go out and pick up litter off the beach, on yor own. There's no social aspect to it, so you won't be pulled into some kind of stupid groupthink, it's just you and your litter bag and a strip of clean beach behind you.
> If you feed the homeless you get more homeless.
>If you want to do some good for the world, go out and pick up litter off the beach, on yor (sic) own
If you assert without evidence that feeding the homeless creates more homeless people, maybe we should also worry about the possibility that picking up litter will incentivize more litter.
[Incidentally, even were it true that feeding the homeless would "create more homeless" that wouldn't be equivalent to feeding homeless people being a net negative. If e.g. there are a total of 1 million homeless people and feeding them all would create a small relative incentive to be homeless and the total number of better fed homeless people would rise to 1 million and 1, that would almost certainly be a large net positive.
If you are very worried, though, about the effects of various charitable efforts, you can check out GiveWell's recommended charities, as GiveWell conducts extensive analyses on optimal charities.]
Sorry about that. I had just stumbled off a red-eye after getting about 2 hours of sleep. But in my defense:
It's Christmas Eve, and you sounded exactly like Ebeneezer Scrooge. :-)
To address your point, I've done that sort of volunteering, there was no groupthink, and it doesn't work like that. I'm quite confident that the number of people who are incentivized at the margin to become homeless because of free food, is approximately zero. The descent into the visible, "problematic" sort of homelessness is overdetermined.
As an example, take the woman who was sitting in front of a grocery store, panhandling and asking people to buy her a sandwich, when **literally** half a block away there was a place serving free hot all-you-can-eat meals. When I told her about this place, she thought for a moment and then said that she preferred to stay where she was because otherwise she would "lose her place". Of all the things going wrong there, free food was not the problem.
What does happen is space-shifting (but not the sort caused by Dr. Frankenfurter's castle). Providing better services to homeless people draws in existing ones from the surrounding areas, making it seem like there are more. There's a potentially valid criticism about encouraging people to uproot from their original communities where they might have received personalized support. But the homeless aren't a homogenous population, and my impression is that this sort of migration is mostly of the sort who're far enough gone that they've already burned whatever bridges they had left (or had the bridges burned for them). (These would be the visible, "problematic" ones I mentioned, who usually have some combination of mental illness, drug addiction, and chronic antisocial behavior.)
> I'm quite confident that the number of people who are incentivized at the margin to become homeless because of free food, is approximately zero.
I am trying to imagine a food so delicious it would motivate me to become homeless just so I could get it for free every day...
Nope, I think I would rather buy it.
> a food so delicious it would motivate me to become homeless
Aha, this is how the AIs will destroy civilization!
Do you believe in ghosts?
I'm not surprised that GW doesn't have recommended volunteering options, as volunteering probably isn't generally particularly impactful. Following GW's sort of reasoning, the most impactful charities will help the poorest people in the world, very few of whom are in the West. The most impactful help to those people, like distributing mosquito nets, vitamin supplements, or vaccines, is probably not particularly amenable to volunteering - particularly from Westerners.
How efficient would it be for a Westerner to fly to sub-Saharan Africa and back to perform essentially unskilled labor in mosquito net warehouse, or something, rather than sitting back and sending some money to GW. The savings to them through such volunteering over local labor may be worth less than the plane tickets to get there and back, to speak nothing of the expenses of staying there.
Going to uni and taking random prereqs without knowing what exactly you're going to do, actually sounds like a course of action with a fairly high expected value.
College graduates generally significantly out earn non-college graduates, even with soft degrees. And higher paying jobs generally require hard degrees, which generally require various prerequisites.
Earning a lot of money in and of itself would probably tremendously impactful, as income could be seen as a proxy for productivity. And certainly, earning a lot of money would be allow someone to be very impactful through donations - probably much more so than they could be through charitable volunteering.
This doesn't preclude, of course volunteering in free time. And if someone is going to volunteer, they could try do do so as effectively as possible. But even outside of the primary path towards impact of career (probably facilitated by college degree), depending on one's goal, one could still consider alternative routes towards impact. E.g. instead of contributing $10 per hour of labor in a soup kitchen, a college student could tutor students for $60 an hour, and donate the proceeds to that soup kitchen (or GW, for even more impact).
If someone *does* want to contribute to charity through labor, rather than money, it seems reasonable to try to help the poorest people you can find. If the people will be local, perhaps soup kitchens could be a good option.
A website that can help find volunteering options by location and category is: https://www.volunteermatch.org/.
If they want to volunteer for one of the most impactful charities, they can try to sign up for Against Malaria Foundation: https://www.againstmalaria.com/Volunteers.aspx.
Thank you for this very thorough reply! I shall ponder it.
I guess one question I would have (reading that reply) would be, is your primary concern (a) the future “impact” of the 18-year-old, as denominated in dollars or some fungible equivalent, or (b) her actual future as a flourishing individual that you personally care about? Hope I don’t come across as dunking on Mallard here, but the two are not the interchangeable imo.
My pleasure!
Does anyone here have any (personal or second-hand) experience in successfully treating height-related body image issues in men through therapy, and could recommend a good therapist (possibly from the ACX list) in the Bay Area or remote?
I’m 5’5 and past therapy attempts have been pretty unsuccessful, with some of my past therapists basically having taken the position of this just being a minor cosmetic issue with few real-life implications (I also got the feeling that it used to be way less of an issue before online dating, but alas I live in those changed times).
Find a way to meet a lot of asian women so you can date one with your height being less important
I’m looking for medical blog recommendations with a similar style to Scott’s but focused almost entirely on doctoring and medicine. Ideally one with thoughtful takes on both the day-to-day of medicine and interesting topics in medicine as a whole. As medical student, I’ve searched around for one but never found one anywhere near the quality of Scott’s.
Is it just me or has Scott's posting frequency dropped substantially?
Not just that, but he also pretty much seems to have given up on moderating the comments section. People used to get permabans for 1% of the crap NS has been spamming here.
Edit: Turns out, Scott has recently become a father of twins, which kinda explains it.
I'm glad it was a happy thing keeping him from posting!
Perhaps you need to be less sensitive towards being exposed to opinions from outside of your ideological echo chamber.
I don't have a problem with NS sharing their opinion – even though I almost completely disagree with it – but with how they present it: by spamming links to random Twitter accounts, with maybe a one-liner about how Israelis are pure evil. Even people that agree with NS have called them out on it.
For what it's worth, I've also asked another person whom I agree with, to stop with this style of posting.
Very very peculiar that you (apparently) haven't been doing the same thing to the pro-israelis flippantly dismissing the suffering of gazans or basically calling for gaza to be ethnically cleansed, which represents a lower quality of posting than NS.
Perhaps you need to be less sensitive towards being exposed to opinions from outside of your ideological echo chamber. At least Adrian is objecting to the style of the posts as opposed to the opinion expressed, while you seem to be objecting entirely to the opinion.
Looking forward to the anecdotal twin study posts that are coming a decade from now
There's a thing I'm annoyed about, and it isn't worthy of a full post, so ... here we go.
If you’re baffled/confused/upset about why the American public is still up in arms about inflation, even though it’s down - here’s a question for you.
Were you equally baffled/confused/upset when the public didn’t react at all to inflation until it had been going on for a little while?
Let's say for the sake of argument that 10% inflation is bad. We had 10% inflation -before- the public really got upset about it. Were you looking around wondering why nobody was getting upset about it at the time? Or did you not notice, for the same reason none of them noticed - it hadn't had time to actually have a substantive impact on your wallet?
Demanding everybody calm down about inflation after prices have inflated by some amount, because they're no longer rising as quickly, only means something if you were also demanding something be done about inflation when prices were rising more quickly but hadn't yet inflated to the point where it was causing problems.
People aren't upset about inflation because, a year from now, they'll be paying more for their food and rent. They're upset about inflation because they're paying more for their food and rent than they were paying a year ago. Necessarily, public opinion on inflation is a trailing indicator for inflation itself - and demanding people calm down about it, because it's in the past, is in effect demanding that nobody ever get upset about inflation, because they thing they're upset about is, necessarily, always in the past.
That's why the focus on the term 'inflation' is a mistake - it should have always been 'cost of living'
In the metamodern memespace, there's sort of a low-key debate about which religion is the most insightful or helpful. A lot of people single out Buddhism as displaying a lot of sophistication and insight, and being relatively less harmful than many other traditions. However, since I have appreciated what Buddhism has to offer, it has changed the way I look at Christianity and other religions.
Now that I relate to concepts and doctrines as more like meditation prompts that can potentially alter my perception or state of consciousness for the better, I see how Christian doctrines that seem arbitrary are actually potentially helpful for achieving altered or mystic states consciousness. I've seen rankings that suggest that the Christian mystics can achieve states of consciousness almost as enlightened as Buddhist adepts, and I think I'm beginning to see why.
In particular, I've been relating to the Christian doctrine of grace as a tool for helping me to generate the ideal complement to my state of consciousness. I think of it metaphorically as similar to equalizing waves, whether sound or light waves. You can reduce any sound wave to silence by producing its perfect complement. You can change any light wave to pure white light if you create the perfect complement to it so that the sum of the two adds up to white light, balanced activation of all light frequencies.
Likewise, during meditation or prayer, the idea of grace is not just to look for something outside of yourself, but, in some sense, to look for the thing which is MOST outside of yourself, the thing which is least like your current shape. Except, of course, that actually makes it easier to locate computationally. It may not be a simple as multiplying your current shape by -1, but the exact complement to your shape is actually implicit in your shape. In this way, the Christian approach also seems to preserve individuality. Instead of achieving smooth states of consciousness by reducing everything to nothing, it tries to provide a means by which you can access the perfect complement to each moment of experience, allowing each individual thing to enjoy its own idiosyncratic nature while also participating in a complementary dynamic that sums up to perfect, unified totality.
This is all very unlike the Christianity I grew up with, which suggested that the only important thing was making sure you performed the right ritual so that you would go to the right afterlife when you died. But I've now looked back on some of the C.S. Lewis stuff I read growing up, and Buddhism has helped me see it in a new light. I've heard some stuff from Tolkien and from famous Christian mystics like St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, and from poets, that seems to be making reference to similar concepts.
I wish there was a modern community of Christian mystics I could ask about their practices, like a Christian Sangha. The closest I've found is the community of Jonathan Pageau's fans. Does this conceptualization of Christianity sound familiar to you, or are you familiar with a memespace that discusses such things (inside or outside of metamodern circles)?
Thomas Merton is certainly to be recommended for anyone interested in both Christian mysticism and buddhism
i think those mystics would tell you to become a Christian first, and do the first things; their mysticism is done to better know a God they love who saved them, and grace is not what you think it is. You are using them as a means to your own ends of altered consciousness.
id also think they'd warn you it is dangerous to break the self down via technique, and that it can lead to being naked and starving in a desert in the pursuit of a holiness that is monstrous. Chasing ecstasy is not really a good thing; i was raised charismatic, and saw plenty of ecstatic experiences that only lasted so long as the revivalist was in town.
Any religious mysticism is designed to experience the reality stated in their own dogma, not yours. Even then personally the focus on mysticism is silly imo; the original state of man in Christianity was Adam in a beautiful garden talking with God, and Jesus pointed at children as closer to accepting the kingdom. Sometimes people get a little too disembodied for their own good.
sorry, this is the frustrated preacher in me.
I can't comment on a lot of this, but my appreciation for Christian theology increased significantly a few years ago. I got interested in certain aspects of Orthodox mysticism, and read up on some of their theology, and wanted to see how that compared with Catholic theology, and it turns out they're explicitly describing the same things, just in very different ways. At that point, a number of things that I thought were silly in Catholic/Anglican theology just turned out to be me trying to play word games with something I didn't understand, obsessing over the pores of the finger pointing at the moon.
What an interesting direction to go in. I have no info for you at all, though I've listened to Pageau's podcast with interest, and wish you Godspeed on your journey, and hope you share what you discover.
I think YouTube is not even trying to remove all the scam ads with "Elon Musk" promising to send you lots of money if you give him access to your bank account. I see them every day.
But if your video contains something that resembles copyrighted music, it gets taken down automatically. Yes, it is important to have priorities.
I suppose people who have all their money stolen by Fake Elon Musk are less likely to sue than the RIAA.
Yeah, one group has a dozen senators on speed-dial, the other group is invisible and poor and obscure.
A friend-of-a-friend, beloved of many in my circle, just passed away, leaving behind a family. He was suffering from several things, but chief among them was kidney failure, and complications from dialysis were a direct contributor to his sudden decline.
As someone who has considered kidney donation from time to time - but never that seriously - it has me asking questions. Including the obvious one, which is "would he still be alive if I had given him a kidney?"
And I realized I have some thoughts, and in reading the previous discussions (both Scott's, and the followup from the comments, and the comments on _that_ one) I'm still fuzzy on some parts of this.
I would not - I think - hesitate to give a kidney to a family member or close friend. Indeed, one of my reasons for not donating to a stranger is my worry that then I wouldn't have a spare for just that situation.
Which makes me wonder - in a case where someone is in dire need of a kidney, and has friends and family, what is generally going on? Is it that none of them are a match? Or that none of them offered? Are match rates that low? Or is it just that so many people are so typically biased against it that they would never offer even for someone dear to them?
I think a relatively big part is that kidney failure is often just one failure out of several; in one study, only 4% of people with CKD stage 3 had no comorbidities. Most had two or more.
The most common comorbidities are age-related, which isn't a surprise, given the median age is >70 years old.
Your picture of the median person with severe kidney issues should probably be an elderly person on multiple medications for multiple conditions (and some of those medications are likely to be contributing factors to the kidney failure). The death, in a sense, is expected, and friends and family, while they may regret the death, are entirely reasonable in being unlikely to undertake a heroic effort to prevent it.
The relatively low rate of kidney donation, relative to the number of people with kidney failure, thus probably shouldn't be taken to reflect upon the friends and family of thus with kidney failure generally; many of those dying of kidney failure aren't going to be helped a lot by a kidney donation.
This is not to argue against kidney donation, because even if 80% of people with kidney failure who have a long life ahead of them otherwise have somebody willing to donate, that implies that 20% do not, and kidney donations are prioritized by the medical system for that 20%.
> Indeed, one of my reasons for not donating to a stranger is my worry that then I wouldn't have a spare for just that situation.
Donating a kidney allows you to designate loved ones as getting highest priority for donation if they ever need one, so that's not the best reason.
---
I haven't donated a kidney because i'm terrified of pain... I know it's about as bad as pregnancy and I have been pregnant, but being pregnant sucks... And you don't even get to have contact with an adorable recipient afterwards... Sure there's the warm glow of having done something nice but I'm a very selfish person and altruism doesn't really make me feel noticeably more warm and fuzzy for a long time vs like huffing baby fumes.
Are you sure you're not thinking about passing a kidney stone? That's something that people compare to pregnancy a lot. Couldn't find that sort of comparison w.r.t. kidney donation.
>Donating a kidney allows you to designate loved ones as getting highest priority for donation
Wait, really? I know that donors get priority for themselves but I didn't realize it was transferable. I wonder how much of the problem is just making that fact public?
Anyway, this still raises questions about the system in general. Thinking about it more generally - we have X people who need kidneys. I would hope that many of these people have at least one person in their lives willing to give them a kidney. As long as the average is >1 willing donor per recipient, we should have enough kidneys for everyone who needs one.
So why don't we? Is it that matching rates are so low?
Or is it that even people with close friends & family don't have many willing donors due to fear of the process?
Or is it that people with close friends & family _are_ getting kidneys, and the remaining people (who have to hope for strangers) are either genetically unlucky, or loners with no potential donors in their circle?
I think what I'm struggling with is how we jump all the way to needing random strangers to make the system work. I understand it with something like bone marrow, where the matching rate is extremely low. I'm trying to understand if that's also going on here, or if something else is.
(None of this would invalidate the EA conclusion that it makes sense for you to donate your kidney to a stranger right now, but I'm curious how we came to this pass).
From what I understand, matching rates are low enough between some subsection of donors and recipients, that you need to set up a donation chain, where incompatible but willing pairs are in a pool, and as new compatible pairs come in, they get added to a chain, the hope is that eventually a pair comes in that completes the circle.
Undirected donations in this sense are very powerful since you just need the "head" of the chain to be compatible with the incoming kidney instead of a pair of people, a recipient at the end of the chain AND a donor for the head.
I think there are quite a few caveats to exactly how useful an undirected donation is, and also I don't know exactly how long these donor chains get, but hopefully this provides a good intuition for what's going on.
I did this from memory, but apparently https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-treatments/k/kidney-transplant-surgery/types/paired-kidney-donation.html the cycles are very short when there's no undirected donation. Huh.
Even if people are willing, they may not be able. If ten people are drinking buddies, and one of them needs a kidney, the other nine may be unable to donate due to having similar damage. Or if they're a two income household, and are already losing one to kidney disease, they may not be able to afford to suspend the other for surgery recovery.
Happy Winter Solstice to you all! And those who celebrate it, a blessed Advent waiting for Christmas Day which is fast approaching.
Israeli savagery is just unmatched. What a disgusting people. Pure evil.
https://twitter.com/NourNaim88/status/1737584585372836035
As a fellow Pro-Palestinian and an Arabic-loving Arab, as well as a vaguely left-ist-ish person who generally prefers Mercy over Justice and have a cosmpolitan interest in every Lost People's plea, I couldn't be more empathetic to the general direction and intent behind your post, but you couldn't have possibly picked a more hostile and alienating posting policy if you have planned it for 20 years.
Here's a bunch of unsolicited frank advice that you can heed, feel free to throw it in the trash and continue on course as usual, but feel free to also examine it and see if it, some of it at any rate, might help you.
1- Please Stop Posting Twitter Links.
2- Please recognize, don't minimize, the pain and fear of Israelis. In the vast majority of the Animal kingdom, Aggression almost always traces back to fear.
3- Please write, write anything. Express what you have in mind, in your own words. There is a place for quotation and link aggregation, but this place can't be "everywhere" at a time that is "everywhen". At some point you have to write in your own words.
4- When you write, people will counter-write, meaning they will pick things in your writing to poke holes through. At this point you can (1) Retract them, this will be relatively rare and only the case if you really fucked up and - say - quoted a factually incorrect source very confidentally or said something really cruel in anger. (2) Defend them, and you must do that while resisting the temptation to call the one(s) talking with you stupid and cruel, even though in fact they might very well be stupid and/or cruel (or running a functionally-indistinguishable simulation thereof) (3) Not Respond, which is always an option and is preferable than responding with twitter links, ad-hominems, whataboutery, or just plain meanness.
5- Changing minds is not a sequential, linear process. It's not a process with immediately visible effects. Beliefs form a network, they depend on other beliefs, which in turn depend on other beliefs, which depend ..... and so on. To make matters even more complicated, in a Broadcast setting like a public forum, different people (who you're not even aware of) have their beliefs (which might appear the same on the surface) rooted at different roots. So someone might believe Israel is fully justified in what it does because Muslims are the Earth's trash and God chose Jews as the Master Race, I'm not sure someone like that is worth changing their minds, but assuming that you wanted to, surely you will go about it very differently than from someone else who holds the legalistic view and believes Israel is fully justified because it's a state while its adversary is a non-state militant actor with extremist rhetoric. People are complex, people are not honest with each other and themselves about their own web of beliefs (they will claim to themselves that belief A traces back to beliefs B and C, while in fact it actually traces back to beliefs D and E but they just don't want to admit it), sometimes they don't even know what the roots of their belief networks are, and so on. He who wants to change minds must have patience, he must have respect and empathy, he must have a necessary dose of relativism ("I, too, would think like that if I lived their life") along with the conviction that he is right.
6- This is a bit depressing, but it's a perspective that you have to have in the back of your mind somewhere : the battle of words is just a metaphor. Even the trashiest hahah-I'm-glad-Palestinians-are-dying commenter is still not killing actual Palestinians. Even a complete and utter "win" in the field of words and signals and any quantity or quality of media will still not liberate Palestinians or guarantee starving Gazans a meal. The pen is mightier than the sword only because it **sometimes** has the ability to move several swords, but the pen that can't move swords (i.e. most of us most of the time) is actually quite useless, materially speaking. I say this only to lower the stakes somewhat and open your eyes to the fact that arguments need not always proceed by the terrible rules of war, with its terrible fight-or-flight logic and total disrespect for the opposing party. Argument-as-Fighting is just a Metaphor We Live By, you can and should try others.
7- Those rules are not a holy book, they're ill-defined and not all-encompassing (so maybe just like a holy book after all). Sometimes your instincts will get the better of you and you will violate them, repeatedly, it's okay, I don't follow a lot of them a lot of the time, that's not hypocrisy since I'm openly admitting it, that's what it means to have a (vaguely-defined) ideal to strive to.
Palestine deserves better advocates. Palestine deserves selfless ambassadors who are not looking to "win" arguments vis-a-vis Ben Shapiro or Andrew Tate or any of the countless Merchants of Rage that are a dime a dozen at every level in the media ecosystem, but are simply looking to be beacons : Humble, omni-directional SOS beacons transmitting at full power and at all wavelengths such that those who don't know there is a place called Palestine where people starve and suffer and experience humiliation through no fault of their own, know. It's not about you, it should never be.
Many Thanks! Your advice is very wise. Peace and blessings to you.
“ Palestine deserves better advocates.”
Ten times yes to this. One of the most depressIng aspects of NS’s shitposting is that it makes a tiny but nonzero impact in the wrong direction by making an average observer dislike Palestinians slightly more.
Here’s a better example (and even more poignant because it comes from an otherwise vapid word-thrower): https://samkriss.substack.com/p/but-not-like-this
Yeah I agree with much of what you say here, I suppose there is a part of me that wants to piss off some of these genocidal freaks to get even a little payback in the face of their powerful onslaught on kids but the goal should be to help Palestinians and bite down on the pain we feel over the child slaughter, that they gleefully cheer on.
I'd say there's one thing I don't agree with you and maybe another thing I'd say things are a bit mixed (and perhaps I'm unfairly addressing your point)
So for
1) I don't think these people are are genuinely motivated by fear. Jews are a wealthy, talented, highly politically and culturally influential group today. The modern world is distinct from the pre modern world and people aren't out to lynch them for killing their god as they did in the past. The fact that they are so committed in spite of their numerous options to live thriving, wealthy, powerful and influential lives here in America, committed to stealing land and slaughtering children indicates they prefer the feeling of dominating so much that they will commit these demonic crimes, inspite of the stellar alternative, even RISKING a new rise in world antisemitism. This is sadism and the urge to dominate, not fear. Or at least if it is fear it is fear over losing that privilege. This makes them far more evil for it in my eyes. Most Muslims condemn muslim extremism but slaughter of infants isn't Jewish extremism it's something 95% of Israelis SUPPORT! I remember you asking for a link for that which i shared.
2) you've seen I'm sure how that brinkley guy responded to me. I showcase just a droplet of links on Israeli evil he dismisses it, literally 3 fully documented articles on Israeli atrocities none written by an Arab or Muslim in case he is racist or Islamophobic respectively and he dismisses that too. We are up against people who are very committed to being unjust, often breaking even their own values they would otherwise claim to uphold our of sheer bloodthirsty animosity towards Muslims. A tweet, a line of argument a full article they will just dismiss, deny, downplay on reflex while repeating zionist bullshit. It's the world's most extreme version of selective demands for rigor.
However relatively speaking it seems better to share links that are comprehensive whose authors can't so easily be dismissed because there probably are a number of lurkers silently reading this back and forth and I give brinkley credit for displaying the nasty unfairness pro Palestinian advocates are typically subject to.
The other thing I've personally found is if you are engaging in a dialogue with a Jewish zionist (yes I recognize most jews are, overwhelmingly so) you are typically arguing with a bad faith individual who jumps from scattershot point to scattershot point, often spreading lies or half truths in an effort to stall and distract anyone listening in while his tribe makes life more and more unlivable for Palestinians, kills more of their children and steals more of their land. They are nearly NEVER arguing from anything more than bloodthirsty chimp-level tribalism. He/she wants more land for his tribe, knows he is getting that and wishes to stall you.
So it is challenging that way to even decide to have dialogue with some of these people.
You make a really good point about the process not being linear, another spectacular point about the pen being mightier than the sword working only when it is, and the analogy of debate to war having its limitations. And also the need to place Palestinian welfare over our own emotions. I will try to consider and factor these in to see how I can be more effective. We will probably always disagree to a degree on approach and there will always probably be limitations to various approaches and settings in the end.
To add, another good point of yours I missed was not responding often being better than responding badly. I agree with this though I've often (LOL ALWAYS) failed to apply it.
Was that necessary/true/kind thing deprecated?
3 articles on Israelis committing atrocities past and present
https://jewishcurrents.org/teshuvah-a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return
https://colterlouwerse.substack.com/p/does-israel-target-civilians
https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
I suspect, but cannot prove, that NS is clickfarming. (It's consistent with that behavior, but also consistent with NS genuinely upset over Israelis and not being particularly well-read, which to me begs correction, but not banning.)
Do you mean, post links so that people will click on them so that the links will show more traffic?
I don't really understand the BS that makes the internet run the terrible way that it does.
It's not really important for me to understand it being as I have a pretty good idea of how it could run a lot better based upon being a part of the internet for the entirety of its duration and experience and get from many different angles and in many different countries.
But once you mentioned this specific bit of bullshit and the response by this individual seems to back it up, I'm wondering what this bullshit is and why people would do it?
Here is an article that goes into some Jewish atrocities
https://jewishcurrents.org/teshuvah-a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return
I am testing your resoluteness to respond solely with further links right now!
3 articles on Israelis committing atrocities past and present
https://jewishcurrents.org/teshuvah-a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return
https://colterlouwerse.substack.com/p/does-israel-target-civilians
https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
In case anyone reading this missed it. None of these articles was written by a Muslim or Palestinian and the first and last are written by jews the last of whom is literally an Israeli professor who studies the holocaust.
https://x.com/rafaelshimunov/status/1737219725187305890?s=20
There is a great deal more documented savagery from Palestinians toward Israelis, to the point that any time you see a tweet like this, you should be looking into whether it's faked in some way long before you just conclude "Israeli savagery is just unmatched".
(The video appears to be an Israeli soldier performing some sort of detonation operation. It's not clear to me what. AFAICT, his tone isn't that of a fanatic. The tweeter claims some yelling in the background is "the echoes of their voices", presumably to imply innocent Palestinians just got hit by that blast. She provides no proof, and I've seen evidence of multiple fakes in the past. She leaves out the well-documented attacks by Palestinians on Israelis, barely two months ago, and routinely further back, for decades.)
> There is a great deal more documented savagery from Palestinians toward Israelis
I actually call bullshit.
How can one even quantify "documented savagery" let alone actually measure the numbers ? Whatever the metric is, I can guarantee that Israeli savagery towards Palestinians in the West Bank will "win" as long as it's remotely fair and unbiased.
The disgusting slaughter of kids Israelis commits go back two decades and beyond all the way to 75 years ago
False, and you should have little problem looking up why.
At this point, I suspect you are simply trolling.
No it's true, there's literally no shortage of evidence of Israelis savages targeting and slaughtering civilians. I am inclined to think the same of you.
I am inclined to think this is an AI-assisted troll account. If so, why would I care what a small program thinks of me?
Or can you prove otherwise? Did you do the research? It's not hard - certainly no harder than pulling up the links you did.
3 articles on Israelis committing atrocities past and present
https://jewishcurrents.org/teshuvah-a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return
https://colterlouwerse.substack.com/p/does-israel-target-civilians
https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
Here is an article written by a jew on just some of zionist Jewish atrocities
https://jewishcurrents.org/teshuvah-a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return
Maybe next time the Palestinians shouldn't allow a dictatorial, terrorist regime to take power. The German people learned that same lesson towards the end of WW2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fotothek_df_ps_0000010_Blick_vom_Rathausturm.jpg
The funny thing is that you would be absolutely livid if someone so much as thought about justifying Oct Shava using the actions of the Israeli government for the last 30/50/70 years.
"If"? A lot of people, both from the Western as well as the Muslim world, have been doing exactly that non-stop since the morning of 2023-10-07.
It's also an invalid justification, because Israel withdrew from Gaza 18 years ago, and yet various groups in Gaza have been attacking Israel ever since.
Presumably you think those justifying October 7th to be reprehensible individuals, presumably you have something colorful to say about their character or how their mother raised them. So it's again baffling how you emulate them so faithfully just with a 180 direction reversal.
Does it make you feel better ? Do you see a starving Gazan child with 3 killed siblings and think "Ahhhh, nothing like the smell of JUSTICE in the morning, that's the natural and desirable outcome for children born on HAMAS land, those future terrorists" ?
> because Israel withdrew from Gaza 18 years ago
This point is often parrotted again and again and again without context behind it. Israel withdrew precisely so that this happens, so that the peace process breaks and Palestinians are pushed to the brink further and further, they are literally on record saying it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza#Rationale_and_development_of_the_policy.
Moreover, Palestinians everywhere feel kinship with their brethrens in the West Bank, who are under a nonstop occupation and attack for north of 50 years now, to say nothing of their (both Gazans and West Bank Palestinians) ancestors who used to live in what is today Israel, all 800K of them, and were expelled in massacres and atrocities by the pre-IDF Zionist militias.
So if the actions of governments justify violence against their populations, you have one hell of an uphill fight to argue that Israelis don't deserve October 7th in light of what their government has been doing for the last 3/4 of a century. The other alternative, of course, is to recognize that governments and their populations are 2 very intertwined but nonetheless conceptually separate things, and that collective punishment is a type of savagery that humans have long ago agreed to abandon.
> Do you see a starving Gazan child with 3 killed siblings and think [...]
No, the suffering of innocent men, women, and children in Gaza deeply saddens me, and I don't feel the least bit of satisfaction or even joy about their plight. Most of them are not directly responsible for the violence committed by Hamas, just like most citizens of Dresden weren't directly responsible for the violence committed by the Nazi regime.
I wish this war would end soon, with Hamas being eradicated for good. And I hope that certain members of Israel's government will be put on trial for their complicity in the current situation, and locked away for a very long time. I'm being sincere, although I wouldn't blame you if you don't believe me.
> Moreover, Palestinians everywhere feel kinship with their brethrens in the West Bank [...]
Strangely, their leaders don't seem to feel much compassion towards the Palestinians in Gaza, or else they wouldn't have launched such an unprecedented attack as on Oct 7. Hamas' leadership aren't stupid enough to not have predicted that Israel would be forced to retaliate on an equally unprecedented scale, inflicting more suffering and misery than in the last decades combined.
So no, your "they only did it to support their brothers in the West Bank" thesis doesn't hold up, unless you believe that Hamas willfully sacrificed themselves and the lives of many, many Gazans to maybe perhaps create a small chance that Israel might stop their illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Hamas has the right to fight Israel because Israel is occupying the west Bank, Israel had the right to end its occupation. Palestinians are one people.
Israelis are merely committing crimes to protect their occupation. They are the nazis here.
>>Hamas has the right to fight Israel because Israel is occupying the west Bank, Israel had the right to end its occupation.
Even assuming this to be true, there are constraints as to how one may lawfully fight, even when one has the right to do so. Shooting up civilians at a bus stop or machinegunning a concert are not included.
You seem quite capable of recognizing those limitations when Israel is doing the fighting - can you see your way to a world where they apply to Hamas as well?
Israel does not behave lawfully though
3 articles on Israelis committing atrocities past and present
https://jewishcurrents.org/teshuvah-a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return
https://colterlouwerse.substack.com/p/does-israel-target-civilians
https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
It's true some hamas members committed transgressions as the allies did. But Israelis are fundamentally the aggressor here, they're defending their oppression not themselves. Hamas and the rest of the world recognize 67 borders. Isrselis just want to steal the land.
There are no shortage of examples of Israelis targeting and sadistically murdering civilians
These are the kinds of demonic people Hamas is fighting
https://x.com/dimitrilascaris/status/1737619716657558008?s=20
https://twitter.com/DrLoupis/status/1737298086911734023
That's a TikTok dancing video. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised if there are people who want to invade China over this, but I'm inclined to count dancing as non-violent. (And again, if you want to submit this as Israelis being mean, you're submitting against a great deal more evidence in the other direction.)
There js no shortage of instances of Israelis murderingkids in occupied territory from before the 7th
Truly the power of Hunter's nudes would have surely swung the election.
Are you unaware that the laptop also contained evidence of felonies? By The Big Guy I mean. Obviously Hunter's felonies are NBD 'cause he's a white guy and the sonof soemone important.
What evidence of what felonies? I expect no straight answer to this question.
You're the one pretending that the significance of the laptop was it had naked pics of Hunter. Your declaration that other people are not being straight is laughable.
Sorry, what evidence of what felonies?
Hunter is currently indicted on a bunch of charges, actually, and after the court cases finish will likely be sentenced like anyone else who did what he did.
Also, what specific felonies? Because there have been two separate senate Republican investigative committees and a single congress Republican one that looked at the contents of the laptop and found nothing that incriminates the POTUS, so I find your claim very surprising.
"Hunter is currently indicted on a bunch of charges."
Safely after the election and years after the laptop was made public.
"and found nothing that incriminates the POTUS"
That is simply untrue. Motte/Bailey that with "not conclusive proof when excluding other evidence not contained on the laptop."
> Safely after the election and years after the laptop was made public.
That is entirely normal. Trump is currently on trial for things that happened before he was ever president. The justice system is generally much slower than people expect it to be, even when you expect it to be slow. Currently the greatest threat to Trump facing justice is not that the prosecutors cannot make a good case, it's that prosecuting him for the worst stuff might literally take longer than his expected remaining lifespan.
Please give me specifics on what on the laptop incriminated the POTUS. Not vague "it's totally there" statements, but statements of specific facts. Because I have yet to find anything even resembling that.
Because the closest thing to that I have seen anywhere is the claim that a certain ledger represented funneling money to the POTUS from foreign entities. This claim was simply not true; the ledger tallied the rent payments for a property not owned by the POTUS.
Are you deliberately ignoring the context of "would have surely swung the election?" I'd like to know before I do any work for someone that may be completely uninterested in learning anything.
>Please give me specifics on what on the laptop incriminated the POTUS. Not vague "it's totally there" statements, but statements of specific facts.
You were asked a specific question in the interest of converging on truth, and you keep ignoring it. Any further responses without putting for a concrete answer should be taken as evidence that such information does not credibly exist, and that you are, therefore, trolling.
Swedish researcher who investigated the influence of the muslim brotherhood in swedish politics now facing the prospect of being charged of a crime for his research
https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/1737502854162645254
LIberal democratic propaganda org Freedom House of course rates a society capable of such authoritarian madness 100 out of 100 for freedom: https://freedomhouse.org/explore-the-map?type=fiw&year=2023&country=SWE
OK, I'm going to post a guess here, before I look up the story.
I'm going to guess (with extremely high confidence) that what he's being charged for is not researching the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood per se but some specific thing he did while doing so, and (with lower but still moderately high confidence) that that thing constitutes an at least reasonably solid justification for charging him, and that the insinuation that this is about trying to punish him for his conclusions is unfounded.
Having now looked up the story: he's accused of mishandling private/personal data; my Swedish google-fu is too weak to have an informed opinion of how justified that charge is.
If he mishandled the personal data of the far right, such as by doxxing, libeling, and cancelling them, would he have been charged with a crime? Or would he have been lauded as a hero fighting the good fight?
Thank you for taking the time to look into the additional background. Can't say it's surprising (who put this hyperbole into a culture-war post? You *never* see those 2 things together), but good to have clear in the thread.
I only see the ethics committee charging his dissertation, presumably an academic disciplinary action, alleging publication of private data (I might be misunderstanding, as my Swedish is weak). Is a lawsuit coming with it?
It's a criminal matter, currently being handled by the prosecutor. https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/skane/sameh-egyptsons-avhandling-om-politisk-islam-anmals-for-brott
Ah, that's a lot more informative. Thank you!
Why do spell checkers suck now? I'm a terrible speller, and also I tend to hit keys out of order sometimes. And yet when I spell something wrong the list of words I get never has the word I want.
It wasn't like this in the past. What went wrong? (Do I need to compile a list?)
Rule 7: If a common word can be made by switching the position of two adjacent letters, then that word should appear on the list.
I am a good speller, and from my perspective the spell checkers are improving, because in the past they didn't know many existing words and happily "corrected" them to something random... and now they mostly leave me alone.
Huh, even realizing that our news cycles nowadays are crowded with batshittery I'm a bit surprised that this isn't generating broader headlines:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-musk-steering-suspension/
"thousands of Tesla documents....chronic failures, many in relatively new vehicles, dat[ing] back at least seven years...across Tesla’s model lineup and across the globe, from China to the United States to Europe...nine former Tesla managers or service technicians...."
"the documents, which have not been previously reported, offer the most comprehensive view to date into the scope of the problems and how Tesla handled what its engineers have internally called part “flaws” and “failures.” The records and interviews reveal for the first time that the automaker has long known far more about the frequency and extent of the defects than it has disclosed to consumers and safety regulators. The documents, dated between 2016 and 2022, include repair reports from Tesla service centers globally; analyses and data reviews by engineers on parts with high failure rates; and memos sent to technicians globally, instructing them to tell consumers that broken parts on their cars were not faulty...."
The lede anecdote is of a new-Tesla owner whose family was endangered when the steering failed, and Tesla declared that the incident was due to "prior" suspension damage. Um with 115 miles on the odometer? "prior" to what exactly?
European regulators are no doubt reading that article with great interest. Meanwhile the fresh class-action lawsuits to be soon launched by Tesla car owners in the US could be epic -- looks like they could propose that the courts skip the discovery stage and proceed straight to verdict/damages.
Presumably Musk's initial responses will be to ban Reuters from Twitter, file a histrionic lawsuit against them, declare that whoever leaked the Tesla records is to be found and flayed alive or whatever, etc. The professional managers at Tesla though will surely try to respond in some more-organized ways.
>Presumably Musk's initial responses will be to ban Reuters from Twitter,
I REALLY hope you were incensed that twitter helped bury the hunter biden laptop scandal, which was tantamount to them conspiring with a political party to help them win the election, rather than the owner of a website hypothetically restricting what he wants to restrict.
It's not big news because it's tiny news. "At least 11 drivers told Tesla a crash was caused by a failure in the suspension, steering or wheel assembly, company records show. Those accident claims, which have not been previously reported by the media, were recorded by Tesla staff between 2018 and 2021 and assigned to engineers or technicians for review."
11 drivers out of millions.
The tone of the hitpiece makes it sound like it's a persistent issue affecting teslas in general instead of a relatively minor problem. Even the bigger numbers elsewhere in the piece are small scale compared to the company as a whole.
The bigger numbers don't look very good. Depending on what tens of thousands means, the failure rate might be on the order of 1-4% of all cars delivered during the period under scrutiny. Memos directing technicians to lie don't look good, either.
sure it doesn't look good but if you're not focused on attacking Elon Musk it doesn't look notably bad https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/8/22568356/volkswagen-bmw-daimler-emissions-cartel-fine-audi-porsche-eu
The Takata airbag recall is a comparable case study, but theyre not blaming the customer.
It's unclear if the automakers knew about the issue (I mean, probably not? It's more likely a failure to do due diligence, but this was pretty much every major car manufacturer for years!). They also didn't make the part themselves so there is at least some plausible deniability.
Tesla famously makes all their own parts!
I don't think emissions diddling is quite in the same league.
The nearest comparison would be the Toyota accelerator fiasco about a decade ago, which started with a single crash, though quite an awful one. And it did make big news.
Ha! We're on the leelanau, south of Northport. Manton is a nice area
I was curious about buying an empty lot and building a house there to rent out, until I talked to my real estate agent about the idea. He says building a house from scratch is always longer and more expensive than owners realize.
It made me think: If you want to build your dream house and don't have a multimillionaire budget, isn't it best to buy a small house and then transform it into what you want through renovations and additions?
My building knowledge is mostly secondhand, but the big delays to building a new house are going to be stuff like weather, and unforeseen problems like one of your boards being slightly too short, or a builder's truck breaking down. Plus I know one guy who had an engineer friend that convinced him to build a very complicated roof with some supposed engineering advantage (like, a dome, or something); not being an engineer himself, the guy was struggling to build that roof for months.
Renovations include those problems and then add problems of prior construction; the existing walls have load-bearing posts, and water pipes and electrical wires running through them. You can't just knock an existing wall down; it's a whole operation to make sure the rest of the house stays up.
Of the two, as long as you already have a place to stay, you'd want to build from scratch.
Not true for production builders, they can build a house in 3-4 months for a normal price. But they don't usually build on your land, not sure if they would do that because they like to build a lot of houses at the same time in the same area.
Custom home builders are different. They are small companies so it all depends on who you hire.
But buying a small house and renovating is always going to be worse than building a new house. No one does that for good reasons.
>But buying a small house and renovating is always going to be worse than building a new house. No one does that for good reasons.
Depends on whether or not there's available land in a convenient location that's zoned for single-family residential construction, and on how many hoops the local government makes you jump through to get permits and planning approval to build a new house vs renovating an existing house. For these reasons, major renovations of existing houses (most common pattern was to strip the existing house down to its frame, expand the foundation, and build essentially a new house on the site; another pattern was to do a large addition and doing a superficial remodel on the existing house) were incredibly common in Bay Area suburbs c 2010 through at least when I move away from Sunnyvale in 2018.
IME, the same factors that make building a new house expensive and unpredictable also cause major renovations and additions to be expensive and unpredictable. (although if you could find a house that was say 90% of the way towards being your dream house, then at least you are minimizing the expensive/unpredictable part!)
I built my (non-dream, but adequate) house for considerably less than a single megabuck.
Modern construction is vastly better than the existing stock in this part of NY.
I don't know so much about American housebuilding, but over here - if you know what you're doing and have family members/friends who are both able to do construction work (including plumbing and electrical) and willing to assist, it's not so bad.
Of course, it often helps that it's young married couples building their own houses on a plot of land donated by parents/family. If you have to buy a site, yes that is more expensive. And yeah, it will take longer because you're building in your spare time rather than having a crew work on it for you full-time.
We have the saying: "Wer zu viel Geld hat und ist dumm, kauft ein altes Haus und baut es um" = "Whoever has too much money and is stupid, buys an old house and rebuilds it". Not sure how much truth is in there, though...
Any reading recommendations on status? I have read the book review
Yug Gnirob here. Substack banned me without any notification.
Their appeal process is a joke. They don't tell you what the supposed violation is and instead demand you defend yourself in a void. They then send an email which just says
>Upon additional review we've determined that your account is in violation of Substack's Content Guidelines and will not be reactivated.
Which links to the Content Guidelines. https://substack.com/content
They have said nothing about which part of the Guidelines I supposedly violated, but I know accounts who have repeatedly linked pictures of dead babies in these threads are still unbanned, so I highly doubt this list is actually what they're using in their determinations. (This is the only place I post, so any violation would have had to be from here; everyone feel free to guess what rule exactly they're saying I violated. If you do it quickly enough then this post will remain on the page with "Removed" as the name and contents, instead of being deleted completely.)
Substack's breaking your comment section, Scott.
Well, it appears they've repealed the ban today. Whether that was because of this post or just the natural process I don't know, but I'm still going to hold it against them that "upon additional review" apparently did not include an actual additional review.
So. Exciting journeys into the Substack appeal process.
I'm glad you're back, too.
Glad to have you back!
I had similar experiences twice with KDP, Amazon's self-publishing subsidiary. At one point I sent them two emails making different arguments. After I received back two identical form letters, signed with the same name, sent three minutes apart, I concluded that I was dealing with software not humans.
I sent one reply to the original email (the post-appeal one), asking what exactly they were saying the problem was, then made this post assuming I wouldn't get a response. One of those things presumably got past the software.
So are your removed posts, even the ones that didn't get any comments, now back up, or is your psst self still canceled? If they're back up, maybe having a look at them would provide a clue. Though I still think you should tell Scott about this. It's not like he reads every one of these open threads, so your posting here isn't all that likely to come to his notice.
They're all back up. The thing is, I say a lot of stupid jokey stuff and could think of half a dozen posts that might have caused someone to object, from this thread alone (which you can now read again by doing a search for Yug). The unban message from Substack just says "I've corrected the issue", which reads to me like it was caused by none of them. Getting banned wouldn't bother me too badly as long as someone justified it; it was very much the lack of it that got my back up.
Strangely, the notifications under the bell are still gone for the last eight months, I'd have to go through my email to find those again.
Congratulations on being on another list!
The part that sucks about being a suspected spy is your computer performance degrades once the NSA installs their monitoring software.
What!? I haven’t read enough of your comments to have a mental picture of what you’re like, and can’t call to mind a single one of them offhand. But I do have a general sense that you’re a reasonable commenter. If somebody says something cruel, unusually rude or wacko I tend to remember that. And if somebody is quite funny or blows me away with their smarts, I remember that. I think you said said one thing a couple weeks ago that I found quite funny. Except for that you are untagged in my mind.
It’s weird that something you said triggered the Substack police. Somebody a couple of open threads ago wrote that Jews lusted for the blood of children. I have used every single one of George Carlin'f forbidden words on here, except for 'cocksucker,' which seems to depend for its impact on contempt for gay men -- and as of this post I am somebody who even wrote 'cocksucker' in a post. And I've never heard a peep out of Scott or Substack about it. What the hell could you have written that tops those? And how do they even find remarks that break their rules? There's a sea of comments on ACX, and of course there are other blogs with big comment sections too. They *can't* be reading it all. Seems like it must be that somebody writing or lurking in the comments section must have complained to Substack about something you said.
How about you search your name on the last few comments sections and get a list of your recent comments. Maybe also read reactions to them, see if there was anyone who seemed to think one of them was awful and unacceptable. And I think you should let Scott know about this. He cares about this issue, and I think would hate the idea that people who comment here can be canceled by Substack. His email address is scott@slatestarcodex.com. Put "NOT SPAM" in both the subject line and within the body of the email itself.
If you look down to the comment about military code names, you'll see that searching for the name of someone who got banned by Substack rather than the blog owner won't work because the username will be replaced by 'Removed'. In this case I don't know what the problem was with military code names either, but I'm assuming that it was something similar in Yug's case, nothing morally offensive, just legally risky for Substack itself.
Oh, you're right. But that's better, in a way, because he can just search for 'Removed.' That way he'll know which of his comments was the one. But what will remain unexplained still are why he was banned by Substack (do they do that to all who post something legally risky to Substack?) and what led them to notice the comment. Do you have any theory about the latter?
It only shows "Removed" for comments that had replies; all the unreplied ones are simply gone. But I shouldn't have to search for anything, they should tell me what they think the problem is, which they haven't done. Presumably their silence means they know their reasoning is gross.
I think Eremolalos is right, and some nubbins reported a comment of yours which triggered the banbot to automatically remove it (I highly doubt Substack has Real People sorting these cases out anymore, since bots are Cheap even if they're not accurate or reliable).
If it was automatically done and they have nobody flesh and blood reading these complaints, then I think you're probably out of luck. It's stupid but this is how AI is going to be used, rather than solving world problems: just automate the hell out of everything because it's cheaper than even dirt-cheap Third World labour, and who cares if it's shitty customer service? Look our share price do gooder!
I thought comment reports all went to Scott. If Substack is going to ban commenters based on criteria they enforce site-wide, then I hardly expect them to rely on individual reports when any two blogs could have completely opposite moderation policies and readerships.
Yes, of course they should tell you. I hope you contact Scott. Besides being unfair to you, what's happening threatens ACX itself.
The right to speak freely on the internet (perhaps so long as no other person is named or shown) must be added to the bill of rights.
And while we're at it, we should reinstate the other ones too.
No one speaks up for the fourth amendment. I feel like it's been swept aside. (for various reasons.)
This doesn't really apply here, since freedom of speech doesn't mean entitlement to every platform. Unless you're talking about legally formalizing internet moderation, in which case I'm curious how could this be done without causing a huge mess.
You're right, people posting here can't claim a right to freedom of speech. But one of the things people with blogs on Substack like is that it does very little censorship, and I'm sure Substack is aware of that. If they are now doing more censorship, what's up with that, and how much worse is it going to get?
What really applies better would be this one:
Article 3
Artificial Intelligence
Everyone has the right to know that the algorithms imposed on them are transparent, verifiable and fair. Key decisions must be taken by a human being.
https://jeder-mensch.eu/en
Free from what?
"Freedom doesn't mean freedom from consequences" is a dumb and dangerous slogan - that's most of what it does mean.
Total freedom from consequences is meaningless - the reductio ad absurdam is "freedom to say 'pass the salt' without receiving condiments".
So when you talk about "speaking freely" like this, I take you to mean "it should be forbidden to impose certain sorts of consequence for certain sorts of speech on the internet".
And that obviously covers a multitude of sins - what forms of reaction to what forms of speech do you think should and shouldn't be legal?
> "Freedom doesn't mean freedom from consequences" is a dumb and dangerous slogan
Yeah, by that logic, you had a lot of free speech in Soviet Union, you just later got a bullet for what you said, but... you know, things have consequences, and that's okay.
I guess, technically, internet is more analogical to press than to speech. Freedom of press only applies to those who have printers, and you are not one of them.
The bill of rights doesn't give you a right to someone else's press.
The most extreme case I can think of would be a blog promoting child abuse. Motto "after 8 is too late." (That's the real motto of some underground group of pedophiles.)
I don't know who you are but I was just disallowed to share a link on my own youtube channel unless I uploaded a video for them to run against their database to ensure that I was never suspended from their platform.
I never was and I assume this is just another tightening of the reigns against everybody by the Faceless Unaccountables who have a chokehold on all of human communication.
Which kind of makes it worse than if they had some particular reason to suspect me personally.
I don't understand how ANYBODY can allow this continue.
There is SO MUCH WRONG with how society is managed. And yet, rather than be activists against the tyrannical elite we leave such activism to crazy conspiracists and are proud to laugh at them when they accurately describe the present tyranny as tyranny.
THERE IS NO "hope in the proles".
Let history not say that there was no hope in us either.
Oh dear, I think I knida agree with you. And yet it's such a soft and comfy prison. Back the Dave the Diver. (fun game.)
here's the thing; the only reason you can post a video at all is because of Google bearing the costs. If you tried to self-host it, it probably would be far too expensive to do so unless you were a business. Hobbyist video might be impossible. Video hosting is hard and costly, which is why YouTube exists.
people dont get that they are begging from others; they are vastly underpaying for a service but are vulnerable because of it.
The internet was once free and equal (please don't nitpick). If you were around during google's genesis you know what I am saying, and Net Neutrality aimed to keep it that way.
And if it cost us the ability to upload more than one video a week that would be an okay cost for the benefit of a more equal internet (and I'm not even sure we would consider it a cost.)
Urbit
If the problem we have is that land grabs have left large swathes of the internet a patchwork of privately-owned enclaves run by a class of gentry accountable to none but themselves, then Urbit, a project started by an unironic monarchist that encodes feudalism into its very fabric, is the opposite of a solution.
Yes, he would of course like to own the internet and everything in it. But, as history has shown us, so does everyone.
The fact that he says it up front at least means that he will have to engage with the matter as things move along.
I know nothing about Urbit and only use android currently, but trustbusting can be good. It won't solve everything forever, but, it takes a while for companies and people to build up enough credibility before they become any kind of real threat.
Besides, maybe along the way we'll find him to be the king we never knew we wanted?
Anyway, all I'm saying is that while the old free internet would be better (and with what we've learned since then we can make it even a whole lot better than that, as well solve many of the problems which that internet itself had) taking a few big chunks out of the handful of people who currently own all of the portals of worldwide conversation would be an improvement.
I don't know about your other comments, but I appreciate, and learned from, both the comments you had made in response to me.
I'm sure most of you good people live in large cities on one coast or the other. I, on the other hand, live in the middle of the country on a small peninsula that runs out into northern Lake Michigan. But even here in our little village, politics can get a little crazy: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/brouhaha-at-the-council
When was this? It looks like all the council meetings are on YouTube and I’d love to watch it.
Java Center, NY. my piece of woods.
eh you come across badly in the council meeting, which undermines the point. You disrespected the leader and showed an "i'm too good for this" attitude. Keep in mind people have long memories and in a village you will rely on them because you have less of the resources suburbs and cities have that let you ignore your neighbors.
a little grace goes a long way, and they've seen more rich people play at chicken raising than you have councils.
"The language of the letter was official, very official. There were no charges, per se, just several concerns about the housing, feeding, watering, psychological welfare and eventual fate of the birds on our farm property."
And *this* is why I am very non-gruntled about Scott's grant to the Legal Impact for Chickens bunch, because *this* is precisely the kind of lawfare I expect them, or the people who want to take cases which they will then assist to do so, to engage in.
'But we're only going after factory farms!' Yeah, my eye they are.
And also yeah, townies who visit the country and have no idea about how animals are raised or how animals live in the wild, but they just love the poor little animals and are so concerned about their welfare, they learned it all from the Disney anthropomorphised animal movies so they know what animals are like better than you do!
Hey, Not All Townies (tm). I'm a townie and while I fed the chickens one week in summer back when I was five years old, I have no idea how they're raised. I saw a chicken running around in the forest once and was confused. But still, the only thing I am concerned about re: chickens is 1). the taste, and 2). whether they contain any chemicals that are hazardous to my health. That's it. Chickens aren't animals to me, they're protein.
Another Northern Michigander? Where is the small peninsula you live on?
Your picture almost made me think of Old Mission peninsula in Traverse City.
We recently moved south from TC to Manton to get away from the bustle, and we could afford a couple of acres here.
Leelanau, south of Northport. Manton is a nice area, lots of Amish right?
I think so. I grew up in East Jordan south of Charlevoix and Petoskey. They have an Amish store there now
Cute story! You're an excellent writer. Please tell me that didn't actually happen. If it did ... ugh. What was the epilogue?
It's strange how many people have asked the same question! Epilogue, chickens are in the freezer, minus a few, Thanks for reading, best, Tom
No I meant the social/legal repercussions. Was there any further impact from the town council? What were they actually investigating? Were they accusing you of animal cruelty? Is everyone mad at you now? What's the deal?
Does anyone know of a smart and conscientious online marketing person? Ideally someone who will accept a cut of incremental revenue as payment.
So many online marketing people seem scammy!
Joshua Moon runs a Kiwi Farms, a forum that has many supporters and even more enemies. Regardless of what you may have heard or think about his forum (please don't rail off to comment about it here), his essays are better journalism than most WSJ long forms. They tend to not to defend his site as a specific case but small websites in general (i.e are not heavily biased). Moon has experience very few have, and at least this new essay on the DDoS mitigation industry makes very good use of it: https://madattheinternet.substack.com/p/a-handful-of-companies-rule-the-internet
Kiwifarms is a stalker terrorist network. The people involved in running it and many contributors should be arrested, charged with crimes, and jailed.
KF is extremely mean-spirited and as such I don't know how much its troubles generalize, but there's a real problem with the internet that I think this article speaks to. Nothing but boring, safe, corporate websites these days.
...and, y'know, here. Not boring, safe or corporate; QED
Regarding the reactions to this post: I do not know who the hell Joshua Moon is, but judging by the comments here and the people who are making them, I think it's likely that I, too, would despise him if I knew more about him. Still, it seems unreasonable to reject the blog poster, and the person posting the link to the post here, rather than the content of the blog post itself. Why not just shred the views in Moon's post? If he is both evil and a mediocre thinker and writer that should be easy to do.
Here's an instance of that ad hominem and ad ad hominem rejection.
<For what it's worth, if you can't find anyone who isn't a B-grade monster expressing an opinion, that should tell you something (if you still think the opinion is worth spreading, rewrite it in your own words); if you can, don't source it to someone who is
Ok, I clicked, so that others don't have to. My attempt at summary...
There are only 16 Tier 1 internet providers in the world, half of them are American. They "effectively dictate what is allowed to be on the Internet in the United States" and "are complicit in allowing a form of network abuse" called DDoS.
DDoS attacks are cheap, defense is expensive. Cloudflare provides security against DDoS for half of the internet. "If they decide you don’t get to be on their network, you will quickly realize there’s no real alternatives." There are two subtypes of DDoS attacks -- application attacks and network attacks -- a good programmer could write something analogical to Cloudflare to protect against the former, but the latter would just directly increase his bills. There are companies providing solutions to that, too, but most of them accept only big corporate customers; the remaining ones "get to be choosy about their customers" and are very expensive. They have rejected Kiwi Farms, and tomorrow, they might reject you!
Also, Joshua Moon suspects that the DDoS protection companies may be organizing DDoS attacks themselves, to increase their profits.
Thanks for the summary!
As I was reading your comment, I thought I had once read a WIRED or some other article about Cloudflare continuing to provide service to the Daily Stormer (and then something else about the founder having a brain tumor, not related). So I looked it up and found this: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
> The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
I don't know what else to say.
Re your last paragraph: this piece https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/6/23339889/cloudflare-kiwi-farms-content-moderation-ddos mentions that "Cloudflare provides security services to… makers of cyberattack software! That’s the claim made in this blog post from Sergiy P. Usatyuk, who was convicted of running a large DDoS-for-hire scheme". I haven't looked into this. That seems like a good reason for refusing a client service, though. Does Cloudflare routinely reject clients on the basis of refusing to support illegal /other activity, or are the high-profile cases the main instances?
Maybe instead of rejecting vigilanteism in the realm of content moderation, we should embrace it in a principled way, because legislation is slow to do so? I suppose that's what most platforms are starting to do already.
I can't comment on the technical part, of if it's possible for ISPs to make it harder for people to send DDOSes. I imagine that the "distributed" part makes it fairly difficult, though - there's not an individual source of the attacks that you can ban, all you can do is look for patterns that make you think "these connections are probably from a botnet."
As for the fact that ISPs and infrastructure companies can be choosy about their customers, I think I value freedom of association more than I value keeping KiwiFarms on the air. It's pretty normal for a business to be able to fire a client who's too much trouble to work with, or who's costing them reputation and money.
And like, if he was *just* an annoying right-winger you could maybe have a "spirit of the first amendment" argument, arguing that even if "right-wing asshole" isn't *legally* protected, the *spirit* of the law demands that we let KF exist online like everyone else. But KF in particular is famous for organized doxxing and harassment, and trying to protect that on "spirit of the law" grounds strikes me as incoherent. "Everyone has the right to be in the public square no matter how much you hate them" can't coexist with "You have the right to bully people you hate into withdrawing from the public square."
>> As for the fact that ISPs and infrastructure companies can be choosy about their customers, I think I value freedom of association more than I value keeping KiwiFarms on the air. It's pretty normal for a business to be able to fire a client who's too much trouble to work with, or who's costing them reputation and money.
+1
Forcing a business to serve anyone, regardless of who they are or how reprehensible their conduct, is a significant infringement on individual rights for a government to impose on a private company. I wouldn't say that such a requirement should never be imposed (electricity and hospital services come to mind), but given the conflict it presents trading against freedom of association, I think it's a high bar for very special cases. And while I would be a strong advocate that a hospital or water utility not be permitted to refuse Mr. Moon service, the DDoS Defense Industry does not strike me as critical enough to life and livelihood to rise to that level.
And I certainly wouldn't advocate for the government to enforce some kind of tailored privilege specific to Mr. Moon and people like him, along the lines of a Civil Rights Act. I mean, what's the protected class? "People dedicated to pissing on other people's shoes online?"
Good thing DDOSing is neither harassment nor bullying someone into withdrawing from the public square.
I mean technically, you're not giving them a chance to withdraw, you're forcing it.
Refusing to provide internet service or infrastructure to someone is *also* not harassment or bullying.
You can either take a legalistic approach and say "Well, bullying is okay, and so is refusing to associate with bullies, they're both legal." Or you can take a spirit-of-the-law approach and say "Denying people internet access is not okay, and neither is harassing them off of it, they both are harmful to the marketplace of ideas." But I don't see a coherent set of norms in which it's okay to bully people but not okay to refuse to associate with bullies.
EDIT: I should also point out that while DDOSing is a crime, so is harassment. So even the legalistic approach doesn't get you very far.
"But I don't see a coherent set of norms in which it's okay to bully people but not okay to refuse to associate with bullies."
The same set of norms that says a Jewish baker has to bake a Hitler's Birthday cake, or a Christian wedding chapel host a gay poly pagan pre-orgy ceremony.
Bog-standard Colorado.
> a Jewish baker has to bake a Hitler's Birthday cake
...wait, are we arguing for or against letting ISPs decide not to work with Kiwi Farms, again? It's hard to keep track.
"I was informed, on accident, that their motivation for this decision was that my website’s Wikipedia page was unfavorable." - translation: once ISPs become aware of what is on his website, they cancel him because of that.
Moon does not mention once what his website is about because he knows that decent men everywhere will oppose it. He feels his sophistry can make the situation someone else's fault and not his own.
> decent men everywhere will oppose it
The enemies of Kiwi Farms aren't just good men, decent men, but true men's men. Some of the most square-jawed, testosterone-soaked men I've ever seen! Like Atlas, they carry the weight of the world on their exceedingly broad shoulders! Like Zeus, a furrow of their manly brow will change destinies!
"decent men everywhere will oppose it"
Well I must be an indecent man, or maybe not even a man at all. I don't know this guy, I don't know his website, I have no idea if all this is true or it's a few disgruntled special snowflakes causing trouble (this does happen on the Internet, you know), so how about you explain to me why Decent Men Oppose?
Coming to this with zero knowledge myself, I found the wiki and this article helpful:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/kiwi-farms-the-webs-biggest-community-of-stalkers.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
It looks like Kiwi Farms was created in 2013 as a forum where people who didn't like some fancomic author named Christine Weston Chandler, as a place to coordinate plans to harass her. Specific details in the article, but it includes highlights like convincing a 13-year-old boy into masquerading as a 19-year-old girl in order to have phone sex with Chandler and record it, sending prostitutes to visit Chandler’s house then calling the family to taunt them about it, etc.
From there KF seems to have evolved into a preferred platform for people who want to coordinate harassment, trolling, stalking, doxing, etc of online figures and communities. Wikipedia says they've been tied to 3 suicides by targeted figures.
So yeah, pretty dirtbag stuff.
Also kind of entertaining that the "guy who runs the site where people can coordinate to harass other people" is apparently asking for more government intervention in the DDOS marketplace so that "people can't coordinate to harass me with DDOS attacks."
People's issue with KF isn't what it's used for, it's whom it's used against.
Taylor Lorenz's career is living proof of that.
Speak for yourself, my issue is very much with what it is used for
I don't wish to interact with you. You're Bad People and I don't want to promote you.
In reality it's just a gossip forum full of women. Certain demographics with outsized influence in the tech industry don't like it because the nastiness of their social circles gets regularly exposed there and laughed at.
Things like "sending prostitutes to somebody's house" and "convincing a 13-year-old to impersonate a 19-year-old, have phone sex with somebody, and record it" seem to me to go significantly beyond "gossip."
On the other hand, looking up "Christine Weston Chandler", I get the information that this was a guy before they came out as trans, and have admitted committing incest with their mother.
So there's a lot of "what the hell" on both sides, and it seems to be the worst of the Internet with people finding a target who responded with equal vigour and it all took off from there:
https://www.insider.com/chris-chan-saga-timeline-incest-charges-arrest-2021-8#christine-chandler-was-arrested-on-august-1-2021-1
On the one hand, yeah, that site appears to be full of dirtbags. On the other hand, as long as they're not doing anything actually illegal, they deserve to have their dirtbag website. ISPs should not get to dictate who does and who doesn't get to speak, because no one died and elected them Commissar.
Wait, who has been prevented from speaking here? I mean, Chandler is probably having a harder time reaching her audience on account of being in jail, but she's in jail for a crime she apparently committed in meatspace. And "freedom of speech" has never meant "if you publicly admit to committing crimes, you can't be prosecuted because that would be punishing you for your speech".
If other participants in this drama are being harassed or DDOSed into silence, then they're being effectively prevented from speaking, but it's not the ISP that's doing that, it's the harassers and DDOSers.
Which perhaps the ISP, or Cloudflare or whomever, could help with. But if I'm a bodyguard with time on my schedule and the head of Hamas's US chapter asks me to protect him from a bunch of pissed-off Jews, my decision to sit this one out doesn't mean I'm the one denying his right to life.
Nobody’s stopping the dirtbags from starting their own DDoS defense service and taking all comers.
There’s a very limited number of services (water, hospitals, electricity) where I’d support a utility model that denies a private company agency over who its customers are. DDoS protection isn’t one of them.
My refusal to give you a ride does not mean I’m acting as “Commissar of Transit” preventing you from getting to work.
You'll find that KF's targets are themselves horrific people, almost always shielded by being a person of protected identity status. As such they'll be one of the only places online you'll find true information about their targets.
Unfortunately, you can also find a lot of untrue information there.
...so, vigilanteism is good and should be permitted, and therefore KF is a valid target for vigilante takedowns just like anyone else? ...or vigilanteism is bad and shouldn't be permitted, and therefore it's valid to refuse to work with KF?
Yeesh. So its dirtbags bagging on dirtbags bagging on dirtbags all the way down. Can't say I'm surprised.
Still, to the extent that Moon wants to lean on the "the target of my dirtbag behavior is, himself, a dirtbag who totally deserves it" defense, I don't see any reason we should be sympathetic when he finds that shoe fitted for his own foot as well.
I will stop commenting here, and in ACX in general, and probably never go to an ACX meeting. You are hopelessly far away from old LW rationalism.
He plainly advocates for more transparency from payment network, a better Section 230, and regulation to have Tier 1 ISPs prevent DDoS by informative and well-argued essays about these topics. There essays are kind of content that could have been published in a high quality magazine. There's almost no mention of Kiwi Farms. The only case Moon defends in them is the general case.
Arguing about the specific instead of the general case is absurd. I said please don't rail off, and get four replies that do exactly that!
It has always been Lesswrong tradition to go on tangents. If you were making this comment on lesswrong I would downvote you for being dramatic and whiny about it.
Please do - I think a critical mass of people like you would drive decent posters with worthwhile things to say away.
For what it's worth, if you can't find anyone who isn't a B-grade monster expressing an opinion, that should tell you something (if you still think the opinion is worth spreading, rewrite it in your own words); if you can, don't source it to someone who is. If you want people on the internet to take something you have to say seriously - especially people who have no reason to assume you're acting in good faith, if indeed you are - then saying "look, this is the opinion of someone evil" is not a good way to promote it, and adding "and please don't criticise them" only makes things worse.
And if - as I suspect - your actual motivation is to destigmatise Moon rather than any particular passion for internet regulation, so that none of that advice is actually helpful to you in achieving what you want, then I think your stopping commentating here would be an excellent outcome.
His arguments are self-serving, the prose is mediocre, and it reeks of conspiracy theories. His personal animus colors the post too much; it is not an impartial argument in defense of ideals.
He is also self-contradictory; he says "ISPs should not be able to choose their customers", but he also says ISPs need to kick off the DDOS-ers.
"Businesses should have to serve anyone."
"OMG, you're calling the police on a shoplifter? You hypocrite!"
Remember CNN and HanAssholeSolo?
> Moon has experience very few have
Quite; and there is a reason for this.
What do you mean? Reason he has experience, reason he makes good use of it (problems in internet legislation) or something else?
I get impression that I tell everyone "bad person X does good thing(s) Y that I find very informative", and your response is "the bad person is bad."
> What do you mean?
You've explicitly asked people not to discuss Moon or Kiwi Farms, and therefore I cannot further elaborate on reasons why Moon's experiences in particular are ones that very few others have.
It is, however, pretty self-evident.
> I get impression that I tell everyone "bad person X does good thing(s) Y that I find very informative", and your response is "the bad person is bad."
The issue with "bad person wrote interesting post I want to discuss" is that I have 0 interest in giving bad person any clicks so it doesn't matter how good the post is, I'm not going to their site and that's it. As such if all you provide is a link no conversation can happen.
I've seen this issue solved before with people copying the article or the relevant bits to the forum they want to discuss them in. This way the points can be discussed without giving support to the author.
FWIW I've actually been on Kiwi Farms once, years ago, following a link to an article and not knowing the kind of place it was. It was something something mediocrity. Felt like reading a horoscope, many words pretending to be heavy with meaning, but nothing of value was said.
I worry about voting with clicks too, but also, I guess a single click is not that significant, and it' better to participate in the discussion knowing what the topic is actually about.
Viliam gave a TL;DR in another thread, so I guess until then, fair enough.
You are currently reading a Substack. Viewing another persons free Substack doesn't support them.
Maybe?
It's a rule of thumb that clicks support the creator in some way shape or form. I don't know the internals of substack enough but presumably some amount of clicks to their free substack will have positive consequences for the author, whatever the business model is.
And maybe it doesn't matter at all under how substack operates but I don't care enough to find out.
If your favorite book is Mein Kampf, people are going to think you're a Nazi. And if you show up someplace, and start handing out copies of Mein Kampf, and ask people not to say anything bad about the author, people are going to think you're promoting Nazism.
I don't think you're (necessarily) a Nazi, but I do think you're promoting Joshua Moon.
It takes some real chutzpah to go into a thread where the OP said to ignore the specific example presented and take a look at the general issue, and then dismiss someone's argument because of the specific example they brought up.
Yes, but he's doing it righteously. That makes it goodful.
Hi, I'm hoping to be able to conduct a conversation with humanity.
Setting aside the odds, methods and reasons -- as an ordained Orthodox Rabbi, despite neither believing nor practicing as most Orthodox Jews do, those sentiments and studies are probably what I know best and care about most. So, because my language automatically leans towards these texts I use that language when discussing my utopian ideals (i.e. in maimonidean messianic language).
Yesterday I took a foray into the comment section of a fellow who refers to himself as a rationalist rabbi (and more or less is) but whose comment section is polluted by lesser lights.
I wrote briefly about the experience here (feel free to skip the email at the end if you aren't excited to see if you can decipher some of the yeshiva'isms).
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/cast-not-thy-pearls
Being a rabbi I couldn't help but add a comment below the article regarding the actual meaning of the adjacent contradictory biblical verses.
This led to my sharing the viscerak frustration with fools that Rabbi Eleazar had and then some suggestion for how we few good and smart guys could reform society such that we wouldn't have to run around all day stabbing trolls.
This particular blog is not short on smart people patiently listening to smart people. There are still too many fools jotting down words without understanding but at literally 1% of what takes place elsewhere.
I'm curious as to whether my suggestion in the comment is understandable to you.
I really think mankind needs a revolution in how we relate to each other. And I think that rulers will only appear to be legitimate if they are in adult-level communication with the masse of humanity.
And furthermore, I think that most of the uber-privileged would gladly join a movement for greater equality if they believed that it would lead to a safer, friendlier world for them too.
Do you think this is comprehensible in the comment?
P.S. It's long(ish) so please only read it if it looks like fun. 😉 - Oh, snd if you like it please leave a nice comment. I intend to share it with the audience for (and about) whom it was written and it would be nice if the 20% of worthy people from that page should see a few appreciative comments in intelligent language before it is sullied with a dozen comments by high school dropouts with vuvuzelas.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/cast-not-thy-pearls
Why did the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia have the code name "noble anvil"? What kind of a name is that? What does an anvil have to do with anything? How can an anvil be noble?
(Please don't start a culture war battle in the subcomments to my comment specifically. Otherwise I will cry.)
I heard somewhere (may not be true) that the military has a machine to generate two random letters for a mission. Say N and A in this case. and then they pick some words to go with the letters.
Codes aren't supposed to make sense to an outside observer; if they do then they're bad codes.
Only if they are for secret operations. If it is a public operation then code names that convey the public intent are appropriate.
So this is how all military code names work?
I asked ChatGPT to give me some more code names for military operations and here's what they wrote:
1. Operation "Unified Protector" - NATO's mission in Libya in 2011.
2. Operation "Resolute Support" - Ongoing NATO-led mission in Afghanistan since 2015.
3. Operation "Deliberate Force" - NATO air campaign in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995.
4. Operation "Allied Force" - NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia in 1999.
5. Operation "Ocean Shield" - NATO's anti-piracy mission in the Indian Ocean, off the Horn of Africa from 2009 to 2016.
6. Operation "Enduring Freedom" - NATO mission in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014.
7. Operation "Balkan Shield" - NATO's mission in the Balkans in the 1990s.
8. Operation "Silver Wake" - Evacuation mission in Albania in 1997.
9. Operation "Sharp Guard" - Naval blockade of the Adriatic Sea from 1993 to 1996 during the Yugoslav Wars.
10. Operation "Eagle Assist" - Operation after the September 11 attacks where NATO aircraft were sent on patrol flights over the United States.
11. Operation "Active Endeavour" - NATO naval missions in the Mediterranean to deter and disrupt terrorist activity from 2001 to 2016.
12. Operation “Essential Harvest” - NATO mission in Macedonia in 2001.
13. Operation "Allied Harmony" - NATO operation in Macedonia in 2002.
14. Operation "Joint Enterprise" - NATO's Kosovo Force (KFOR) peace-support operation ongoing since 1999.
15. Operation “Allied Action” - Military operation in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the late 90s.
16. Operation “Joint Guard” - Stabilization force operation during the Bosnian war in the 90s.
17. Operation “Allied Harbour” - NATO's operation to assist refugees during the 1999 Kosovo refugee crisis.
This all sounds vague and brave and strong and patriotic, like it doesn't reveal much details but gives off a feeling of military might and justice. But they don't sound absurd, unlike the noble anvil. But maybe anvils don't sound absurd except to me? Maybe they have some military/patriotic significance I'm missing?
>Maybe they have some military/patriotic significance I'm missing?<
It does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer_and_anvil
That does a lot to dispel my confusion, thanks!
Why are Western Europeans so much poorer than Americans, even after adjusting for social transfers?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income
Their growth is also shockingly low:
https://www.ft.com/content/80ace07f-3acb-40cb-9960-8bb4a44fd8d9
The typical excuse was always “something something welfare,” but it’s clear that even accounting for that they are still vastly poorer.
Maybe there’s just a fundamental genetic difference that makes the Europine creature inferior?
No mystery: GDP per hour worked is similar between the US and Europe. Americans just work more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_productivity
Hanania wrote a post about this: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/diversity-really-is-our-strength
I'm not entirely convinced by his argument, so here are some other hypotheses:
(1) The size of the US affords greater specialization
(2) The liberal legacy of the US (together with its conservative political system) has kept the government from getting as authoritarian as in other countries
(3) The less centralized system of the US has allowed competition between states – c.f. Germany where 95% of taxes are federal, or France, where all real power lies in Paris.
(4) The people who migrated to the US were somehow better than those who remained.
Isn't the answer higher taxes, I don't know the numbers but that seems likely.
Genetic explanation, or the ideas of welfare state, tax codes etc. do not really explain why this gap really only started widening and widening from 2008 on. Indeed, before it, Western Europe had almost caught the US in GDP-per-capita measurement (https://cdn.ecipe.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Fig8-2048x926.png). I'd say more important is the dysfunction of EU as a structure, as it is now.
For the most part, there's a stop-start dynamic to Western Europe's growth, with periods of sclerosis followed by periods of rapid growth. The most recent period of rapid growth - roughly the 00s, until the 2008 crisis - happened congruent to the adoption of euro, and it's not surprising that this would hit the wall after 2008 expose the structural weaknesses of the common currency.
Previous periods of stagnation, as far as I've understood, have also tended to be periods when EU institutions have faltered or had their weaknesses exposed, and previous periods of growth have followed EU reforms and deepening integration.
The current problem is that there's very little to do beyond actually forming a bonafide European federation, and that's been a bridge too far for many European countries, especially the wealthier Northern countries that are needed for paying the bills, so EU has been stuck on a permanent shit-or-get-off-the-pot stage. Can't form a federation, can't break the whole thing up (also widely unpopular and would create an immense economic crisis).
I've previously been cold towards federalism myself, but after the Ukraine War started have grown increasingly convinced there does exist enough commonality at themoment in Europe to enable one, considering the surprising amounts of solidarity and even self-sacrifice countries have been able to implement to help Ukraine. (Ironically, at the same time, many of the strongest previous pro-Europeans I've seen seem colder to EU than before since they expected vastly more support for Ukraine and haven't gotten it...)
Of course US also has many more things going for it (resource, the pole position in the global community etc.), but at the very least a new bout of integration might again switch the growth engine on and bring some new gains, whatever the amount, instead of the endless sludge that the continent's been going through for 15 years. It won't by itself solve issues like the graying of the continent and the assorted costs, of course.
You are not presenting a serious source for your claim, so I can't have the pleasure to show you what its methodology got wrong. But if I must guess, it seems that you (by quoting the wiki page) are comparing means? Medians may tell a different story. Edit: wiki does report the medians, my bad; would be cool to do a qq-plot
I"m not an economist, but I would assume it's because the US has a much more business-friendly tax code, less restrictive employment regulation, and a more entrepreneurial culture. The US cultivates and incentivizes entrepreneurial risk-taking. That's a self-catalyzing effect, as the lure of outsized rewards attracts a disproportionate percentage of the world's talent whose presence further reinforces a culture of entrepreneurship. Stock options and venture capital aren't really a thing in Europe (at least, not commonly). Just look at the internet revolution. Almost every tech company of note is based in the US. All of the innovation happened here. I'm certain that that's downstream of a more business-friendly, risk-tolerant culture, which leads to higher growth.
Geopolitics is also very likely a factor. US hegemony results in control of lots of global infrastructure (including internet infrastructure). This is leveraged for financial gain.
> even accounting for that they are still vastly poorer
Is that really true, though?
e.g. going bankrupt due to medical bills (or, y'know, going without medical care because your family can't afford it) is just... not a thing in the UK.
Banned for this comment.
You have to take lifestyle and cost of living into account. Yes, in the US you generally get more disposable income; more money dropped in your bank account each month doing the same job than elsewhere. But if most of it goes straight back out again to pay for the bottom layer of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, are you actually better off? If such luxuries as homeownership - indeed, living in a house, - taking holidays abroad, having much vacation time at all, indeed working just one job rather than two (yes, glorify the hustle!), are all the preserve of the top few percent in one place, but within reach of the working class in another, which society is rich and which poor?
You can't eat money.
> If such luxuries as homeownership - indeed, living in a house, - taking holidays abroad, having much vacation time at all, indeed working just one job rather than two (yes, glorify the hustle!), are all the preserve of the top few percent in one place,
None of these things are relegated to the top few percent in America so idk what the fuck you're going on about.
Seems like a bad faith argument to me.
Anyway, the stats say Europeans just live longer than Americans and it's not even close.
If this is a bad faith argument. then how on earth is is saying "American go bankrupt from cancer" not a bad faith argument when no figures are given around how common this is and no source for them is given?
>Anyway, the stats say Europeans just live longer than Americans and it's not even close.
Have you considered at all the remote possibility that factors beyond health care explain the bulk of life expectancy differences in developed nations? Like, you know, LIFESTYLE FACTORS?
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2019/11/07/a-tale-of-two-covariates-why-owid-and-company-are-wrong-about-us-healthcare/#rcatoc-when-combined-with-other-known-factors-theres-little-left-to-explain
RandomCriticalAnalysis did a deep dive on this several years ago. Europeans live longer because of lifestyle differences (esp. obesity and drug use) not because their health system is any more effective.
Thanks, this is very interesting. Would be neat to see the numbers run again in a few years to see how much Covid exacerbated the situation.
What's a variable you have in mind?
It's not really a thing in the U.S. either, since you get free health insurance if you are in poverty and then heavily subsidized insurance up to a pretty high income.
People in the UK just go without medical care because 'our NHS' refuses to treat them.
Yeah, the only people who believe stuff like that are Americans. Left-wingers in the UK would never say that, they say the problem is that the "stingy" Conservative Party government will not provide care.
It's the fallacy of assuming that because you haven't heard of a problem, it doesn't exist.
I actually think this is an interesting question, even if your wording is somewhat strange.
The problem is of course what metric you should measure. There are a lot of ways to measure income (mean/ median, household/person, age standardized/ not, comparing price levevels etc).
By looking at a bunch of things and what others think (Matthew Yglesias has a good article on this subject) it sems that the US has been getting a slightly higher true median income since roughly 2010. This might be because of A: More young people (retired people drag it down), and B: The US having a historic oil boom.
However! If you look at other factors that you would usually use to determine if a country is developed (Child mortality and life expectancy), Scandinavia is way above the US. I mean by a factor of two for infant mortality : (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_and_under-five_mortality_rates).
So whether the US is richer or poorer I really can't say
>However! If you look at other factors that you would usually use to determine if a country is developed (Child mortality and life expectancy), Scandinavia is way above the US. I mean by a factor of two for infant mortality :
So China is more developed than the US ?
Lifestyle factors explain the differences, not Scandinavia being "more developed"?
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2019/11/07/a-tale-of-two-covariates-why-owid-and-company-are-wrong-about-us-healthcare/#rcatoc-when-combined-with-other-known-factors-theres-little-left-to-explain
> life expectancy
Is Japan the “most developed” country in the world?
> child mortality
Child mortality is primarily caused by things like birth defects, genetic disorders, disease, bad maternal health.
Why would this have anything to do with income, or even “developed”-ness as you have now changed the metric to? This is a measure of the health of the populace, which is weakly correlated at best with income (see: US vs Asia)
Side note: I’m willing to bet these metrics don’t account for the fact that many European countries heavily encourage abortions for babies with birth defects, in large part to improve these metrics?
I agree life expectancy have too much to do with personal choices to be a good metric on it's own. People in a rich country might just choose to smoke more.
Child mortality however is relevant. It is the main way we can claim that we are better off now than back in the 'good old days' when the rate was 30 - 40 %. And it correlate heavily with what we usually considers 'richness' of a country.
Now, with regards to abortion I am not certain. I know that Denmark had a stricter abortion law than the US did, before Roe vs Wade was overturned. A quick search on wikipedia told me that the rate was 12.1 abortion pr 1000 women in DK in 2013.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Denmark
In 2013 the rate in the US was 12.5 pr 1000 women (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/ss/pdfs/ss6512.pdf) almost identical.
But my mortality statistics is from 2020, and I can't find any abortion statistics from that year.
It might be that DK aborts more sick fetuses, since we offer free ultra sound scans for all mothers. I don't know if this is done in the US or not. I think that abortions might play a much larger role in some poor Eastern European countries that have both higher abortion rates and surprisingly low infant mortality. But on the other hand, nobody is disputing that former East-bloc countries are poorer than the US.
The US rate for only non-hispanic whites is 4.4 pr 1000 live births, still higher than all Scandinavian countries, though only by 30%.
https://gateway.euro.who.int/en/indicators/hfa_82-1160-fetal-deaths-per-1000-births/#id=18887
But if we were to take this comparison, then we should also allow Scandinavia to shred its poorest 10% of the population before making their statistics. Saying 'when we remove the poorest groups from consideration, then country X is very rich' really doesn't tell you that much.
Notice that I am not arguing that the US system is necessarily any worse than the Scandinavian one. It is a tradeoff: The US middle class is actually richer than Scandinavians, and the US economy is probably turning out more innovation. But the cost of this is an actual worse outcome for the lowest quartile or so.
>But if we were to take this comparison, then we should also allow Scandinavia to shred its poorest 10% of the population before making their statistics.
No, because black americans are categorically different than poor white scandies. It's not just a matter of wealth and there's ZERO evidence that these black people would fare any better in scandinavia than the US.
It's a number of things - there are differences in accounting stillbirths vs live births:
"However, accounting for differential reporting is quantitatively important. Compared to the average of the five European countries we analyze, limiting to a comparable sample lowers the apparent US IMR disadvantage from 2.5 deaths per 1000 births to 1.5 deaths."
There are also more premature births in the US, affecting weight at birth, and a good part of that excess is due to the US tackling "harder" cases and trying to salvage very premature births where the EU simply won't:
"Worse health at birth is widely cited as the major driver of the US IMR disadvantage (MacDorman and Mathews, 2009; National Research Council, 2013; Wilcox et al., 1995); we are able to investigate this issue after restricting attention to our comparably-reported sample. Consistent with past evidence that has focused on comparing the US with Scandinavian countries, we find that birth weight can explain around 75% of the US IMR disadvantage relative to Finland or Belgium. However, birth weight can only explain 30% of the US IMR disadvantage relative to Austria or the UK. "
Then the rest is a huge gap in post-birth deaths due primarily to low SES populations:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4856058/figure/F2/
Source:
>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4856058/
I don't see how having a racial underclass is not an argument for USA inferiority.
>I don't see how having a racial underclass is not an argument for USA inferiority.
Because there's literally no evidence they would fare any better in scandinavia!
Africans are poor and criminal in scandinavia too, they just make up a much smaller percent of the population.
Where are all these european countries where there's complete racial equality for non-selected black populations?
Is this accounting for different methods of calculating infant mortality? Scandinavia is also way healthier than the U.S. in general, and not because of medical care.
Yes, it is counted by infant (<5 years) deaths pr 1000 live births. Denmark has 3.6, US 6.3, Argentina 8.6 just for comparison. Since good statistics are kept on both of those occurences I can't see any way the stats can be very much away from the true numbers.
Scandinavians might be more healthy (fewer are obese and fewer opiods) which could explain the higher total life expectancy. Infant mortality seems more like a true sign that poverty in the US is worse than in Scandinavia.
The problem is that "true numbers" isn't consistent. See https://gateway.euro.who.int/en/indicators/hfa_82-1160-fetal-deaths-per-1000-births/#id=18887
Notice that in many countries an infant born under a certain weight, even if alive when born, isn't counted as a live birth. Many don't count sufficiently premature births.
The US has one of, if not the, the broadest definitions of "live birth", which makes comparisons of infant mortality rates not particularly useful for comparison purposes.
Okay, I just looked at your figure for the nordic countries, and then I compared it with this one:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr72/nvsr72-08.pdf
If you are right that the method of counting is completely different between countries then of course we can't compare them (seems the European one counts 500g + whereas to that the US one asks for 20+ weeks of gestation.)
But if we compare them, the Nordic countries had around 3.1 deaths pr 1000 births, and the US around 5.7 at 2021. But again, if it is truly apples and oranges, then the comparison is useless.
It is apples and oranges, if we approach the statistics that way - there are, however, ways around the issues, for countries with really good reporting data: You can also compare late term fetal mortality rates.
This comparison, as I understand it, brings the US more in line with European nations generally. The US is still slightly worse, arising as I understand it from higher preterm births in the US compared to Europe. Which might also be a reporting artifact - but I doubt it, because (IIRC) when you compare the infant mortality rates this way with European infant mortality rates, European-descended US citizens have slightly -better- infant mortality rates than in their native countries; the difference arises primarily from minority groups in the US. I can't quickly find the studies I encountered (a while ago) there, but https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8870826/ points to vast racial discrepancies, which, after you adjust for reporting differences, should at least suggest plausibility for the claim.
For the higher infant mortality groups, my understanding is that this is primarily driven by preterm births; this could be related to poverty, except https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-019-7651-y suggests that it isn't poverty, or at least not solely poverty (it finds an effect, but not large enough to explain the discrepancy). So, it could also be genetic, cultural, linguistic (health campaigns may not effectively target all populations equally), or geographic (ease of transportation / hospital access - see https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/146/5/e20200464/75318/Infant-Mortality-in-Rural-and-Nonrural-Counties-in for evidence that hospital access may play a role, although there's going to be some considerable poverty overlap here - when they control for poverty a lot of the effect disappears, but I think controlling for poverty is also incidentally controlling for hospital proximity with respect to rural counties - wealthy people tend to live near hospitals).
Edit: Actually, there's probably a decent quick-and-dirty comparison you can make specifically with Scandinavian countries - the upper peninsula of Michigan is predominantly home to descendants of Scandinavian countries. https://vitalstats.michigan.gov/osr/InDxMain/AllHDTbl.asp has infant mortality rates by region, and eyeballing it, the upper peninsula looks a lot more like Scandinavia in terms of infant mortality rates than the rest of Michigan.
This comment section is getting stupider. Why is your first link a link to a Wikipedia article on disposable income in general?
Minor warning, 25% of a ban, for this comment.
I've been reading comments here since, I don't know, about 2015, and I agree in general. I think it's largely because this substack has a wider readership than the old SSC blog, and possibly less strict moderation. It also seems like Scott is just less focused on blogging.
However, I think you're being unnecessarily rude about this comment in particular. If you have a reason to think Wikipedia's statistics on per capita income are wrong, explain that reason, and post statistics you think are better. (I realize the part about disposable income is less relevant but I think we're intended to scroll down to the second table.) Taking a cursory glance at someone's link and then posting a two sentence, overtly insulting reply wouldn't have been well received on SSC either.
I think you might be overreacting. Even if one doesn't like the tone of a question, or if there might be some flaw in the first argument, we should always treat it as a chance to engage with the actual problem being brought up.
And in this particular case, the article actually contains both a mean household income and median income pr country section. I think those numbers really do need to be seriously discussed both by Americans and Europeans.
It certainly is getting stupider. Maybe try reading the very first section?
This comment seems unnecessarily harsh. I hope that this comment section is not getting meaner.
Fair point but, honestly....I realized the other day that my interest in checking this comment section has been waning and it feels like Nolan's point is the reason why.
Things may also be getting meaner here, not sure. And if true then those two trends may of course be related.
Scott does not put much time these days into reading the comments section and imposing bans. The last time he made an announcement about commenters he'd banned was several months ago. I occasionally report really godawful comments -- the last one was about Jews lusting for the blood of children -- and when I check back a few weeks later the comments I reported are still sitting there on the threads. And of course there are lots of comments that do not meet the 2-out-of-3 rule, probably dozens on every thread, and that's not counting exchanges where people are just joking around together (those seem fine to me). I suggested a while ago that Scott hire a grad student to go through the comments and send him a list of those that don't meet his criteria. Scott can have final say -- or, if he decides the grad student is choosing accurately and well, he can just turn the job of imposing bans on people who make bad comments over to the grad student. Alternatively, we could have a system that users as a group implement. What do you think of that?
As for your feeling that the comments section is less smart and interesting: I have only been participating here for 2 years. My sense is that there are a good number of awesome posts -- I don't know of any online forum that equals ACX in that respect. However the open threads are getting larger and larger, and a lot of the extra comments are just blah. Do you think there's less really good stuff, or just more blah stuff mixed in?
Hmm....not sure offhand but it's an interesting question. I'll keep that distinction in mind while perusing and see how it starts shaking out if it does.
Does anyone have any good recommendations for small business / personal tax preparers?
Honestly, I'm not even sure thats *exactly* what I need, and help formulating the question would probably be really valuable as well. What I can say is that I have abnormally complicated taxes for an individual (a few small businesses, K1s, lots of stuff) but simultaneously my small businesses are unusually simple.
I'm currently working with a high end tax pre team, and have been for the last few years, but every time I interact with them I feel like I want to tear my hair out. I feel like I am constantly filling out endless forms / ect for them.
What I (think) I want is someone I can just open up my (sloppy) books to, and who will take care of my taxes without sucking tons of hours out of my day, and making me get super angry multiple times.
Does anyone have any recommendations? I'm also open to suggestions to the question "what am I even looking for"
The fact that in USA you have to fill the tax forms yourself is absolutely bizzare. Does anyone support this status quo? Why don't you demand to change it?
In this case, the taxpayer *is* the business owner, so he needs to file taxes himself in any case - there is no employer to do it for him. Only he has the raw information required to do it.
Yes, the status quo is supported a $14 billion tax preparation industry which uses some of that money to block any meaningful change which would reduce their profits.
You probably just need to find a local CPA and tell him what you're looking for. Odds are, they've got other clients with sloppy books and who also don't enjoy filling out forms.
Sounds like you need to find a different person. I love my tax guy, but my taxes are simple. I'd talk to some local business people get some recommendations and then take last years taxes and talk to them... yeah a bunch of leg work on your part.
I guess that's the long and the short of it.
The tax people I'm working with (who are run under the umbrella of a CPA) seem to just not be meshing with me.
I think I'm basically trying to do that legwork here. I'm currently living in Singapore, so folks with US based CPAs are sort of short on the ground.
Oh dear looking for a US CPA in Singapore? I don't think you'll find one here. And certainly not if you don't tell people you're in Singapore. Try to give as much pertinent info with your question as possible.
Did tax prep for three months several years ago, and can say the absolute simplest form still takes about fifteen minutes to fill out, so pretty sure you're stuck with hours of paperwork no matter what.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/sole-proprietorships
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/independent-contractor-self-employed-or-employee
You can save yourself some time by not making any deductions and horribly overpaying.
I do my taxes myself. I once tried having a tax preparer do it, and the forms she had me fill out were very similar to the tax forms themselves. Cost money and didn't really save much time, plus I didn't learn anything. It's not *that*complicated. Plan to spend a coupla days on it the first time through. In later years it gets easier.
I used to do my own taxes. At this point I'm _way_ out over the complexity level for me to just do my own ( My tax submission last year was ~ 250 pages long per state, and happened in 6 states + the fed)
Yikes! I agree.
I second this. The learning bit is important. Even if you later decide that youd rather pay the money and save the time, youll be in a position to better evaluate the value being created by that particular provider. There are many expensive providers which are essentially just handing you the tax forms to fill out yourself and are only handling the actual act of filing.
Do your own taxes is underrated amongst the professional classes.
It’s a “take a few days” that would encourage me to hire someone.
Does anyone have any recommended reading for a soon-to-be father? Advice on late pregnancy, birth, and early parenthood is what I'm looking for.
The one I often see bandied about is "The Birth Partner", but I'm wondering if there are any others.
"The Expectant Father" was a good month-by-month overview of pregnancy.
Emily oster is good. The birth partner is ok but pretty wordy. Also a new eddition replaced "she" with "they" and wasn't well edited to acount for the change, which makes some sentences hard to parse.
Spiritual Midwifery. It's an ecstatic 60's hippie book, but it's not silly and is actually quite smart about obstetrics.
I've seen that book. She delivers babies in tree houses in Santa Cruz. Boomers went back to Mother Earth for about six years in the 70s, just before bell bottoms, polyester shirts, and unisex haircuts buried the 60s for good, but some of the back-to-the-earth ideas were sound.
The classic "What to expect when you're expecting" and "What to expect the first year" covers the basics.
Does anyone have any good resources for summaries of British politics post WW2? I’m esp interested in the Thatcher-Brown era. Looking for something polemic, from someone that was on the inside, à la Cummings.
There's a guy with the unfortunately undistinctive name of John Campbell who's written biographies of several politicians of the period, including Thatcher, Edward Heath, Roy Jenkins, and Aneurin Bevan. Also he has a book with the delightful title of "Pistols at Dawn: 200 Years of Political Rivalry," which covers several postwar cases, including Macmillan/Butler and Blair/Brown. Campbell is an excellent writer and I'd recommend any of his books highly.
For the Thatcher years, you could read the 1983-1992 portion of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Clark_Diaries. Clark was a Thatcher ally in her cabinet. His writing is detailed and sometimes catty.
I found Clark's day-by-day coverage of Thatcher's downfall the most entertaining part of the book. It probably helped me better understand what sort parliamentary maneuvering was going on during the downfalls of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
Also memorable:
-Clark's running complaint that he deserved to switch jobs with his boss, the Secretary of State for Defence;
-considering the possibility that the Queen was dim-witted - I was surprised that any self-consciously traditionalist Tory, MP or not, would be so bold;
-his trade mission(s) to Eastern Bloc countries.
Thanks! That looks really good
I really enjoyed reading Alan Clark. I'm hesitant to recommend a book I haven't read, but I hear that Chris Mullin's diaries are equally entertaining. He was a Labour MP during the Blair & Brown years, so should give you a view from the other team.
Is there a long term change in fecundity?
I mean on a range from 1980 to today.
There is a noted reduction of fecundity in humans. Likewise, some of us boomers have noticed a reduction in the population of insects. Though I don't know if this is due to more effective insecticides or insect control programs, increased urbanization, or whatnot. Are these drops (human/insect fecundity) related? I don't know.
What I wonder, as additional data; is there a reduction in natural mice & rats? Is there a reduction in the fecundity of laboratory mice and rats?
For natural, or domestic pest mice & rats, we might find data from the insurance industry in losses due to mice & rats. Does anyone know hot to access this data? For the lab side, how can we find production records for fecundity, i.e. litter size, productive life of female rats (dams?) ?
One hypothesis ... please don't hate me for it; but the timing suggests cellular phone networks, which came on the market in the 90s. Indoor WIFI didn't come in until after 2000.
If we could see the insurance industry sees a reduction in rodent damage, with increased reduction in multi-story buildings. This would in my mind indicate ground dwelling rodents are less susceptible to reduce fecundity, that could suggest an RFI link.
Seconding geoduck’s comment. Without a plausible mechanism of action this cannot be anything but a coincidence.
I don't hate you for it, but I would like to see someone attempt to explain an actual causal mechanism. If we're just hand-waving, I'm more inclined to wave at herbicides, pesticides, and other chemicals.
I often wonder about 'natural' predator/ prey cycles. Maybe we remember the insect peak, and now it's more of an insect valley. but I really have no idea.
Why isn't American labour productivity significantly higher than European productivity? Where exactly it is on the scale seems to depend on how exactly you measure, but afaict it's fairly uncontroversial that US productivity (unlike GDP/PPP per capita) is at most slightly higher than european productivity, meaning that most US gains are purely working more hours.
But the US has more natural resources than most EU countries, is (at least stereotypically) more business-friendly/cutthroat capitalist, and you'd expect someone working 50 hours a week to be more than twice as productive as someone working 25 hours a week (since there's more experience/agglomeration). Anecdotally, US companies just seem generally more organized and on the ball. You'd expect all these to push US productivity up on a per-hour basis.
Is this countered by US regulatory burden and public sector inefficiency? Something else?
An athlete can run 200m more than twice as fast as they can run 400m. Spending more time on something and less breaks makes you less efficient at a task (but this effect does reverse on very low time scales).
>But the US has more natural resources than most EU countries, <
Well the first thing is, are you comparing the US to various countries, or the whole continent of Europe?
>you'd expect someone working 50 hours a week to be more than twice as productive as someone working 25 hours a week<
Well no, they set the average at 40 because past that you start losing productivity from exhaustion mistakes.
(A) Your premise is wrong. Ignoring Ireland (where the data is heavily distorted by corporate flags of convenience for income-tax purposes), the US has lower labour productivity than just four nations all of them small: Norway, Luxumbourg, Denmark, Switzerland. U.S. productivity per worker is somewhat higher than those of Germany and France and much higher than those of the UK, Spain and Italy as well as smaller nations like Finland, Belgium, Iceland, Austria.
(B) Within the US, productivity per worker maps strongly to our great cultural/political divide. The ten US states with the greatest productivity per worker are mostly political/cultural "blue" ones:
1. New York
2. Washington
3. Delaware (though with a similar statistical distortion as Ireland's)
4. California
5. Massachusetts
6. Connecticut
7. New Jersey
8. Alaska
9. Illinois
10. Maryland
Whereas the states with the lowest worker productivity are mostly "red" welfare states:
50. Mississippi
49. Arkansas
48. Idaho
47. Maine
46. Montana
45. Alabama
44. Oklahoma
43. Vermont
42. Kentucky
41. South Carolina
Aren't the bottom 10 just rural states with few large metro areas?
I think you are right about the differences between European countries. But what if we changed the question to ask: Why does the US have lower productivity than Denmark?
Surely the point still holds about culture etc, and now we also have the fact that a tiny social democratic country speaking their strange language should by all normal economic models be less productive than a huge free market speaking the internatioal tongue.
"a tiny social democratic country speaking their strange language should by all normal economic models be less productive than a huge free market speaking the international tongue."
Why? Offhand that assumption seems not at all obvious.
In any case that idea is demonstrably untrue in the real world and has been for as long as this particular data exists. Literally all of the nations having greater per-worker productivity than the US/Germany/France (as of 2019 i.e. not confounded by any COVID effects in the figures) are drastically-smaller ones. Among Norway/Luxumbourg/Denmark/Switzerland the _largest_ of those would be just a mid-sized US state. And if you dig up the same data from the 2000s or the 1990s it's the same general picture.
Yes, I agree most wholeheartedly. It does seem that small nations often do better than large ones in productivity.
What I meant was that the seize of your country should push your productivity up according to the standard economic viewpoint (Larger country = more specilisation possible, less bureaucracy caused by borders). So reality goes against our economic intuition.
My point is just that Shaked's original question still is unanswered: Why does Denmark have higher productivity pr hour than the US, even though the US is (or claims to be) more perfectly capitalistic?
"small nations often do better than large ones in productivity" -- no. Most small developed nations lag behind the largest ones in productivity.
But there are many more small nations than large ones, and at any given moment a handful of small ones are managing to overachieve in this regard.
"the size of your country should push your productivity up according to the standard economic viewpoint" -- as evidently it does. The largest OECD nations (the US and Germany) have higher worker productivity most of the time than do nearly all of the smaller OECD nations. Etc.
As for the single arbitrary case of Denmark in particular compared to the US in particular, I have no idea. Obviously there would in the real world be a number of variables to consider. It could also be simple random fluctuation, I notice for instance that the OECD's preliminary 2022 figures place Denmark slightly behind the US on this statistic. (Which could be some sort of difference in COVID hangovers, or maybe something else, or not, without in the least disturbing the overall picture that I just summarized.)
Hmmm, I think I get your point. If a person says 'look the tiny country of X has a higher productivity than the US, how come?' then we might actually just be looking at a statistical fluctuation. Since there is only one United Stats and many small nations with other weird policies, at any one moment in time we should expect some of them to have a higher productivity than the US.
I like the point in general, as it highlights a statistical fallacy. On the other hand, I did not choose Denmark arbitrarily, I chose it purely since I live there and so know more about it than France. But assuming that there were French and Polish readers reading the discussion and then not joining in, the general explanation still holds on a global level.
Now give the same ranking but with racial breakdowns of each of those states.
Alternatively...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_adjusted_per_capita_personal_income
Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska all in the top 10.
Hawaii, Maine, Arizona, New Mexico in the bottom 10.
The whitest state populations according to the federal census are in order Maine, Vermont, West Virginia, New Hampshire, Wyoming, Iowa, Montana, North Dakota, Kentucky, Idaho. In personal income adjusted for purchasing power those states rank 42nd, 32nd, 47th, 16th, 4th, 21st, 33rd, 5th, 44th, 45th.
The states with the highest non-white percentages are in order Hawaii, California, Maryland, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, Georgia, New Jersey, New York, Mississippi. In personal income adjusted for purchasing power those states rank 49th, 22nd, 6th, 28th, 50th, 35th, 41st, 10th, 7th, 51st.
Obviously if you control for population sizes the second list has a somewhat stronger positive correlation than the first.
But anyway no form of the racial-mix comparisons correlates nearly as strongly as does comparing state income levels by red/blue politics.
It's pretty trivially true that states vote democrat as they become wealthy, not that democratic governments make a state wealthier.
California is wealthy for mostly legacy reasons and most of its historic growth occurred when the democrats had less support.
I need advice about how to handle a possible (minor) medical discovery:
My daughter recently had some warts on her foot. Of course we wanted to get rid of them. So we went to the nearest drugstore and bought whatever the had - here in Germany they had different kinds of salicylic acid based products. We followed the directions, but they did not really help. After many weeks we asked a pediatrician, who prescribed a product with a different acid - that one hurt, so my daughter did not want to be treated with it.
Then my wife remembered that she had a wart too when she was little - and that her uncle cured it within a week. She asked her uncle what he did - we did the same, and a few days later, all three warts just fell off.
The weird thing: If I google for what we did, there are no hits. And there are many "cures for warts" on the internet (and even many more from times before the internet). But not this one. And it's nothing weird (unlike the German tradition of touching a toad under a full moon), just apply some pretty standard substance, that is sold for a different usecase for a fiver on amazon, twice a day. According to the wikipedia page of the substance, it's even used for (different) medical purposes. I don't know why it works, I don't know which exact component of the substance is responsible - basically I don't even know for sure if it's working at all or if it was just luck, placebo effect, something else, ...
So, what do I do now?
I have two things that would be nice to achieve:
1. Help people cure their warts.
2. Maybe earn a bit of money on the way.
My thoughts so far (in no particular order):
- Just posting it on the internet somewhere will surely not help with 2. and probably also not with 1.
- It would probably be good to run some kind of study/trial/... to figure out if there is an effect at all. I have neither the know how nor the means to do that.
- I don't have any connections to the pharma industry.
- As it's a pretty standard substance, I don't expect that there is tons of money to be made.
- I would be willing to invest a bit of money (maybe 1000€, which I think is the price for a patent) into this if it would mean I had a decent chance of making a bit more money back.
- I don't want to spend too much time on this - but just keeping it for myself feels wrong. If earning money from it requires too much effort, goal 1 is more important than goal 2.
- As I don't have any medical background going to the nearest university to get a scientist interested is about as unlikely to succeed as sending a random letter to a random pharma company.
Any other thoughts that might be relevant? Advice?
If the substance is nail polish, your uncle didn't invent the cure, and you can just relax and share your tale.
Either share the solution or don't post. Your post in its current form is absolutely terrible.
Could you please share your solution? I have 3 plantar warts that continue growing because I anxiously avoid dealing with the pain of removal… the acid also did not work for me, even after months of daily use.
That gives me an idea!
So far I tried this on my daughter, and it could have been a happy accident that the warts were gone after a week. We could do a trial!
As I haven't told my recipe yet, we could even do a proper one - I can try to come up with a plausible placebo. And as you have three warts we could try duct tape on the third?
Just chiming in to say that this is awesome. :-)
I'm happy to give that a shot! How should we proceed? My email is mmbye@protonmail.com if you prefer :)
I just sent you an email from Sunnyafternoon123@proton.me
If anyone else wants to try, you can contact me there. I'll report back with results when either 10 people participated or noone is interrested anymore.
I think your best bet would be to offer your secret to some Youtube influencer or advice website like fragmutti.de. Perhaps they'll buy it for a token amount, or give you a percentage of their advertising revenue.
I guess the "standard substance" isn't duct tape? Because if you google that you definitely find some stuff https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12585986/ . And it's probably not much of a business venture
No, not duct tape. Not quite such a household staple, but not much more exotic.
I got my foot warts cured through an extremely painful liquid nitrogen method, and then a couple of years later it turned out you can just use duct tape.
I once did the painful liquid nitrogen treatment and it didn't work. :(
Oh, that sucks.
How many times did you? I had it several times over the course of a summer, and it got bad enough that on my final visit to the doctor I was prepared to refuse treatment. But that happened to be the visit where the doctor found that I had been cured.
I think only once. It seemed to be effective at first, but they came right back after a week or two.
I don’t think this is a viable path to a business, long-term. You could probably make some money initially (after a lot of setup work), but if it’s already commonly available and in fact sold by existing companies, then it’ll be a simple matter for them (and Amazon and every other retailer with generic brands) to add “Cures warts!” To their packaging. From there you’re relying on whatever brand recognition you’ve built up to compete with their probably lower prices, favored placement, superior efficiency, etc.
Reread your comment, sounds like you’re OK with just making a quick buck. Then maybe? You’d probably need a much bigger investment than 1000€ to source the product, design packaging, manufacture, and then do a big marketing push, even if you only sell online. After all of that my wager is that you have a decent chance of turning a profit, but it’s far from guaranteed.
Not an expert on any of this, btw
Your first comment matches my thoughts quite well.
The second one might be true, but I don't have the money for such an investment - and also not the time as I'm quite busy with my family and my regular job.
So I'd be willing to not make any money from it - but without a big marketing push probably noone will care about this new anti-wart.
Does anyone else find that their posted comments here sometimes randomly disappear? I'm sure I posted a lunar rock sample based debunking of the notion of moon landings having been faked, but now it has gone. I think it was a direct reply to the thread OP, so it couldn't have been lower in the heirarchy and some parent comment was deleted taking mine with it.
Also, in last week's Open Thread I posted a top-level comment about my former confusion between Jessica Mulroney and Dylan Mulvaney until I twigged that they were different people! OK that may have been a bit frivolous and inconsequential and could thus have been removed by Scott, but I don't think the moon rock reply was objectionable in either tone or content.
Just recently I thought that, but it turned out that my comment was available as one of the "new replies".
It was as if the original set of comments (when I first loaded the page) had been cached, and every time I subsequently reloaded that page, it returned to that original set. With every more recent comment hidden behind a "Show new replies" link.
Is this the one you thought hard disappeared?: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-307/comment/45605086
Substack needs to rewrite their comment system, or let site owners swap over to some alternative open source system for handling the comments. (A quick search suggests perhaps Lemmy?)
So Pope Francis has issued a declaration, and I'm glumly anticipating the reaction to it:
https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/bollettino/pubblico/2023/12/18/0901/01963.html#en
It's in response to questions put to him about irregular unions, and the guys over at the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition or Holy Office, fact-fans!) got to introduce it.
What is really going to put the cat among the pigeons is the permission for blessing gay couples. You can't call it a marriage ceremony or a wedding, but you can exercise pastoral discretion:
"39. In any case, precisely to avoid any form of confusion or scandal, when the prayer of blessing is requested by a couple in an irregular situation, even though it is expressed outside the rites prescribed by the liturgical books, this blessing should never be imparted in concurrence with the ceremonies of a civil union, and not even in connection with them. Nor can it be performed with any clothing, gestures, or words that are proper to a wedding. The same applies when the blessing is requested by a same-sex couple.
40. Such a blessing may instead find its place in other contexts, such as a visit to a shrine, a meeting with a priest, a prayer recited in a group, or during a pilgrimage. Indeed, through these blessings that are given not through the ritual forms proper to the liturgy but as an expression of the Church’s maternal heart—similar to those that emanate from the core of popular piety—there is no intention to legitimize anything, but rather to open one’s life to God, to ask for his help to live better, and also to invoke the Holy Spirit so that the values of the Gospel may be lived with greater faithfulness.
41. What has been said in this Declaration regarding the blessings of same-sex couples is sufficient to guide the prudent and fatherly discernment of ordained ministers in this regard. Thus, beyond the guidance provided above, no further responses should be expected about possible ways to regulate details or practicalities regarding blessings of this type."
And hoo-boy, I'm expecting everyone to start losing their lives over this, particularly the set who (both in approval and disapproval) will be going "the pope says gay marriage is okay!"
No, the Pope does not say that, but this is.... yeah. It's a step. One that got the Anglicans into trouble, and I'm not at all confident that this will remain a simple blessing for certain circumstances and not at all an ersatz wedding ceremony, because that's not how it worked out for the Church of England when they tried it.
The left continue to obsess over this crap while either blithely ignoring or actively defending the genuine repression of gays throughout the muslim world. Because at base, it's always about race.
<very mild snark>
When I read
>So Pope Francis has issued a declaration, and I'm glumly anticipating the reaction to it:
my first thought was of a somewhat different Papal declaration
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/peace/documents/20231208-messaggio-57giornatamondiale-pace2024.html
:-)
</very mild snark>
Interesting that this one was released, of course it got overshadowed by the 'gay marriage' one 😁
I think this is pertinent, what with the rush for the magic money fountain and the AI goldrush:
“Intelligent” machines may perform the tasks assigned to them with ever greater efficiency, but the purpose and the meaning of their operations will continue to be determined or enabled by human beings possessed of their own universe of values. There is a risk that the criteria behind certain decisions will become less clear, responsibility for those decisions concealed, and producers enabled to evade their obligation to act for the benefit of the community. In some sense, this is favoured by the technocratic system, which allies the economy with technology and privileges the criterion of efficiency, tending to ignore anything unrelated to its immediate interests."
Many Thanks!
Actually, the "responsibility for those decisions concealed" has been pervasive for a long time. Every policy notice signed by "The Management" conceals who actually made a decision.
Personally, as someone who want to _see_ AGI, my most immediate concern was with
>In this regard, I urge the global community of nations to work together in order to adopt a binding international treaty that regulates the development and use of artificial intelligence in its many forms.
My hope is that this treaty either never happens, or takes long enough to be agreed on that it is moot, and does not block progress.
BTW, just in terms of effects that Pope Francis _himself_ cares about, he is mistaken in combining hopes for peace with opposition to surveillance. In general, surveillance makes it _easier_ to e.g. monitor compliance with arms control treaties.
My thought is that is more like "you can give general blessings and not worry about same sex couples being present." Say a priest is asked to bless a graduating high school class; they don't need to refuse because some of the students may be so. The blessing is just an exhortation to godliness for everyone regardless of status.
it seems fairly forwards that no, you can't do a marriage blessing, but you can give a couple the regular ones you would give people. you can pray over same sex couples without endorsing the act.
to be honest you don't need to argue same sex stuff, you can just point out the guys who want to change the church over it don't really believe any of its teachings anyways. It's not like they believe the church's stance is kind of leading people into damnation; they don't believe in damnation anyways or much about Christian doctrine period. thats kind of why left christianity always seems to slide into atheism; its not done from a person who is orthodox on basics, but they keep going to cut the core out entirely. Not believing in sin at all rather than arguing if gayness is one or not.
its not like they are going to turn around and say "ok you are in, but you must be the husband of one husband, only have sex within marriage, and must still 'work out your salvation with fear and trembling'-that is realize god is the master, not you." its more the Church needs to get with the times and change for them; its not important in itself
The main issue I have with this is that it takes the problem from the wrong end. You can not change the doctrine on same sex unions blessings without a complete rewrite of the ethic of sexuality and this should start in the (heterosexual) married bedroom, not in a public place.
Homosexuals are a significant political pressure group, whereas heterosexual married couples who'd like to try fellatio or using a condom are not.
The Catholic Church is not a democracy, and the group of people who don't want homosexual blessings also has more political power than the group who really don't want married people to use condoms.
I might have found a low-hanging fruit to improve online dating?
Alice is weird, in several ways, that she hides in superficial encounters but wouldn't want to keep hiding forever in an intimate relationship. Examples: her brother is in prison and she doesn't know what'll happen when he gets out, she has a pretty extreme kink and she's seriously afraid of the paperclip maximizer. In the context of dating, these are things that would make some people not want to date her. Disclosing them too early would be alarming and would make her look obsessed about, or overly identified with, these weirdnesses. But disclosing then too late would be misleading - and of course misdirection may also make people not want to date her.
So maybe a dating site should treat weirdnesses something like as follows. Alice sets up her normal public profile, and enters her weirdnesses separately and individually. These get rated, anonymously, by other users, on scales like "how gross", "how dangerous" and "how much I wouldn't want to date someone who has that". This should also allow some positive ratings like "that's hot actually". Alice's profile only shows the number of weirdnesses, and maybe how they rank on some scales, and until she has some minimum number of weirdnesses (each above some minimum threshold of badness), her profile is marked "incomplete" as the site declares "everyone is weird".
When Bob comes to her profile, how he has previously rated anonymized weirdnesses like Alice's gets calculated into the match prediction. If Bob and Alice have weirdnesses that are identical or similar, this has a strong pro-matching effect! (On top of how this may already affected their ratings of each other's weirdnesses.) Users can choose to disclose a weirdness to a specific user, but the recipient gets to choose whether they want to know.
Has something like this been done? I think it should, because I think the non-obvious reasons someone might not want to date someone are pretty central to the problem of online dating, or even of dating in general. I even suspect the ability to handle them with care is why getting set up for a date by mutual friends is the most successful form of matchmaking.
People are often willing to compromise on squicks if they like someone enough, and often have inaccurate reads on how much X matters to them. It's also a matter of stereotypes - e.g I would say that using drugs is a deal-breaker for me, but if I found out someone I liked is a drug user, I might be ok with it. I don't have drug use triggers, I just don't like behaviours typically associated with drug use, so if I already liked someone I wouldn't consider them a Drug User, I'd consider them Person I Like (happens to use drugs). Same thing can happen with dating - first date dealbreakers often become negotiable by the fifth date. If it matters that much to some people, they can always just ask before making the commitment. Which they do.
The other issue is that it would fall foul of the usual dating market thing - people figure out why they're not getting matches and lie about the thing, which defeats the point of the filter.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16a9g9r/look_at_the_real_world_the_reason_nobody_is/
>If your dating app has an onboarding is very complex, because it requires answering x hundreds fields to run your magic algorithm, or writing novels or uploading many pictures or whatever -- Guess what, your dropoff rate is going to be 9x%, with x being large. This one is very specific to each company so giving numbers here is useless, we can run with 80% dropoff during onboarding, if you have a genius designer, but if you want something complex enough to make it into a SSC blogpost that's 95%.
This seems like a good idea on the surface but it's one zero day vulnerability away from a catastrophic data leak, exposing everyone's weirdness to the world. To prevent that you would need to encrypt every users' list of weirdnesses with password-level security and hope that you can still do enough to match them against each other, so that your input can tell you "13% of other users contain a matching encrypted token". Less useful, but I wouldn't want to have my data on an app that is any less secure.
Many potential users would consider the risk tolerable, including me.
The idea seems more suited to people looking for long-term relationships, and as soon as you start a relationship your sensitive data could be deleted (or securely archived), thus minimising the risk duration.
One possibility is an 'advanced settings' page, where users get to configure some of their own functionality versus security trade-offs.
something like a bloom filter may give users some plausible deniability
That’s a good point. As an active user of the apps (I went on 3 first dates in the past two weeks and have two more this week), I’m excited enough by it that I would risk it, or just post sanitized versions of my weirdnesses. E.g. “I’m 27 and I currently live with my parents” is something that I’d like dates to have some way of filtering on, and don’t mind being public info, but I want to spend my precious profile space being charming.
I just read through all of Unsong, and really liked it. One could say I had a whale of a time (sorry, I had to).
Note to anyone wanting to read it over the holidays: when the Hell chapter comes with a content warning, Scott really means it. Like, even for the kind of people who don't normally care about content warnings.
General question: Scott, although Jewish, is clearly familiar with the New Testament and various Christian interpretations of that. Is that completely normal for Jews growing up in the US (except perhaps the ultra-orthodox) that you learn about the Gospels and Revelation etc. in school or pick it up through "background noise"? Or are those books considered off-limits, but the most liberal and/or atheist Jews don't mind so much? I'm wondering how many readers would have deatailed cultural knowledge of both Lurianic Kabbalah and the Book of Revelations.
The most recognizably Jewish Jews are the least representative. Compared to the US population as a whole, Jews are more liberal, more secular, and more educated. See e.g.: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-americans-in-2020/.
If you want a simple model of the "average" American Jew, just use a general highly educated American liberal.
This is a very good question to which I do not know the answer. A few data points:
- I knew an Orthodox girl in college who had to read something in the gospels for a class. She made a point of putting on an I-am-eating-spinach face (this was at the library) and also couldn't understand why there were what looked like four versions of the same thing.
- Some very liberal figures in Judaism (more in the UK than in the US) see early Christians as valid figures within the history of Judaism whose texts are very much worth studying.
- A fair number of things filter down through popular culture
- The period roughly around the life of Jesus is interesting to people who are seriously into Judaism (especially non-Orthodox Judaism) because it was a critical time in several ways: last gasp of the Hasmoneans, time right before the destruction of the Temple, split between Saduccees and Pharisees, etc.
As a not-Orthodox Jew in the US, I've never read it, and know of no member of my family or friends who has. Never taught anything biblical in school, what little I know of the contents of the New Testament come only from media depictions in movies and books. Observant Jew's wouldn't read the New Testament because it is forbidden (https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/135119/is-it-permitted-to-read-non-jewish-religious-texts/135128#135128)
Summary of the New Testament from a Jew, this is literally all I know:
The Four Gospels(Luke, Mathew, John, and Marcus?): Jesus was born in a stable in Bethlehem to Mary who was an unmarried virgin and three Persian Kings gave him gifts. They found him because there was a bright star near him. Jesus then did a lot of moving. First to Egypt cause Herod wanted to kill him, and then moved to Nazareth where he got a job in carpentry. A guy named John the Baptist dunked him in the Jordan River, and he walked on the Galilee and gave people wine and fish. He got 12 followers, and they went to Jerusalem. On the way he made pit stops where he cursed a fig tree and helped a Samaritan person. He married? Mary Magdalane and cured a leper. He went into Jerusalem riding on a donkey on Passover. He gave a speech at the Cheesemakers valley about blessing people and doing onto others that was interrupted by people shouting big nose at each other so Brian couldn't hear. He climbed a wall of Jerusalem and almost jumped because the Devil told him to. He went to the Temple and yelled at people who were exchanging currencies and knocked over their tables.
Then he had a meal with his 12 friends(I'm sure they have names in-canon) where he drank from the Holy Grail and said something about rendering Caesar what was due to him, but also wore a crown of thorns and said he was king. This got people mad, and Judas turned him over to the authorities. Pontius Pilate washed his hands, blamed the Jews, and Jesus got crucified and died. He might also have been stabbed with the Spear of Destiny, and had the Holy Grail collect his blood. He is buried and the Shroud of Turin is put on his face. At some later point, Mary Magdalene finds his grave empty and turns around, horror movie jump scare-esque, and sees him with holes in his hands. He then ascends to Heaven and promises he will be back.
Book of Acts?: All of the twelve friends(is Judas still included here?) die in various horrifying ways. One gets crucified upside down, one gets crucified on a Scottish cross, one goes to India, and worst of all the last one left has to become pope?
Book of Paul?: He was named Saul and he hated the Christians, then he saw a light on the road to Damascus and became a Christian and switched the S for a P. He ditched all the Jewish elements of Christianity, no more kosher food and circumcisions. He moves to Corinth? He writes the thing people in movies say in Christian weddings about love being patient and fair. He doesn't want woman to speak and wants them to cover their hair. He becomes Pope #2?
Other books: No idea if they exist.
Book of Revelations: There is a many horned creature that maybe is also the Anti-christ. He might be the devil too, and is also the Whore of Babylon. This also involves Gog and Magog somehow. He opens seven seals and blows seven trumpets and Death rides out on a pale horse, and also Famine and War and another bad thing(Aging?). The Devil takes over for a thousand years and then Jesus fights him in a city made of diamonds. Jesus wins and puts the Devil in the center circle of hell, either in ice or in fire. Jesus then rules for a thousand years in the diamond city(probably Jerusalem right?) and then the universe ends.
You did better than I, and I'm Christian. Where were you when I struggled through a Bible class at Liberty University? Semester ended 4 days ago. ChatGPT got me through it.
I mean you got the gist of it.
Really the main place you're off is Acts: the only people martyred in that one are Stephen (the OG martyr), and James (bro of Jesus, hit in the head with a roofing tile). None of the disciples die in Acts that I can recall, all that stuff you listed is extra-Biblical tradition.
Conservative Jew here, this guy knows about as much as I do about Christianity.
> said something about rendering Caesar what was due to him,
Not at that meal he didn’t. That was earlier on in his ministry.
The only thing that I could possibly add to that, is that Jesus was way cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVJ-Wlacc-E
This is great.
The 12 disciples are mostly named Judas.
Of course for Paul to become the new pope he has to gather all the relics of the old pope, which have been buried with him, hence the term "borrowing from Peter to pay Paul."
Pop culture has bad thing #4 as Pestilence, though apparently the book says something like Conquest. Translation is a fickle thing.
The battle between Jesus and the Devil is also the inspiration for basketball.
The Book of Revelation is something that people are familiar with because of its cultural diffusion into American society, not because they have read the thing in a religious context.
As far as the rest of the New Testament: other than "it's about Jesus" and "these famous quotes are from it", I don't recall ever being taught about it.
Scott isn't ordained(?), but he is as well-educated as any rabbi, and any American rabbi will know the New Testament better than the average Christian does. It isn't considered "off-limits" to Jews.
Any Reform Rabbi maybe. An Orthodox Rabbi, most likely not.
I've never heard of Jews having a problem with reading the Christian Bible.
I know a Chasidic Jew who wouldn't look at a creche. I've wondered whether my reflex to evaluate creches for artistic quality is the secular equivalent.
There's a book I've read called Modern Jews Engage The New Testament (Rabbi M. J. Cook) which starts from the assumption that Jews don't read the NT, so I wondered.
From an article celebrating his teaching ( http://web.archive.org/web/20200920020607/http://huc.edu/news/2020/08/17/rabbi-michael-cook-phd-retires ): "Dr. Cook, whose mission was to empower Jews with a mastery of this text that was unfamiliar to most them."
Mind you that was a generation ago, so maybe things have changed now. The article also talks about the time there was pressure to teach "the NT as history, and creationism as literal truth".
I don't think there's either rule or custom preventing Jews from reading the Christian bible. However, that doesn't mean most of them do.
I don't have statistics, but I can share a few anecdotes from some 20th century Jewish intellectuals who I read this year:
* Harold Bloom (1930-2019), Jewish literary critic, raised Haredi, said the first book he ever owned himself was a Yiddish translation of the New Testament, which he hid from his parents and read several times.
* Martin Buber (1878-1965), Jewish philosopher and zionist, raised Hasidic, descended from a rabbi, wrote a book _Vom Geist des Judentums_ characterizing early Christianity as an authentic expression of Jewish religious sentiment.
* Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Jewish philosopher, raised assimilated/liberal, celebrated Christmas and Easter, and kept art depicting images of Jesus in his home.
Conditional Veterinary Approval!
https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/resources-you/conditional-approval-explained-resource-veterinarians
How had I never heard of this fascinating workaround! Here’s a hypothetical scenario: the manufacturer of an existing mint-family tea product applies for conditional approval to use the tea for treating Covid in pet hamsters. Jan and colleagues have conclusively documented the fact that mint tea can work for this purpose: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33452205/
The tea manufacturer could then slap a label on the box saying “conditionally FDA-approved for treating Covid*” with the asterisk noting that it’s conditionally approved for hamsters. The entire maneuver would look like a marketing stunt – but I don’t think that’s a legally valid justification for the FDA to reject the conditional use application. And it's actually not just a marketing stunt - the hamster maneuver could have the socially desirable side-effect of finally getting the word out about the fact that mint tea realistically might prevent or treat Covid in people. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37007799/
If somebody could get their foot in the door with a mint-for-hamsters application then the next step on the slippery slope would be for Shionogi to apply for permission to market Xocova for use in hamsters. If buying a pet hamster could get me a "veterinary" Xocova prescription, I would buy a pet hamster.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/10/xocova-ensitrelvir-covid-antiviral/675768/
there is this weird thing where we have one guy upthread arguing the experts are full of crap and the moon landings were faked and people think thats nuts, but when the medical experts are full of crap and random libertarian guy knows the REAL cure for cancer, thats ok?
i mean in other fields anyone trying to sidestep established safety processes to get his pet theory disseminated past the gatekeepers is someone not to trust, why is medicine seemingly immune to the same worries?
I 100% agree with you. This does not make sense. Being understandably frustrated with some aspects of the regulatory system certainly does not mean that "let's try things!" is a promising approach...
Thanks for the valuable push-back, lyomante and Emma_B! After more thinking and poking around I believe you're both right. Mint-versus-Covid is peskily at the front of my mind, but it isn't a very good argument for Conditional Approval. I'm realizing that under existing guidelines somebody could probably put a mint tea product called "Might Fight Covid" on the human food market. With the "Might" qualifier - and with citations for the human clinical trial data showing that mint family herbs are safe and effective for fighting Covid in humans https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37606476/ https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.20.21266229v2 - I bet the FDA would allow such labeling. Although I guess it's just a bet. Under current law, FDA veto authority is inscrutable and unaccountable - so I could easily be wrong. I'm considering forming a not-for-profit mint tea LLC and doing the regulatory experiment myself, as a form of effective altruism.
Thanks also for helping me refine my stronger argument. Conditional Approval would be very useful for drugs like Xocova. It's deeply regrettable that Conditional Approval is only available for hamsters.
If my family and I could get Xocova, second-generation Covid vaccines, or even just simple basic Paxlovid and metformin we wouldn't be screwing around with mint. The basic problem we're wrestling with here is that established so-called safety processes are denying us the right to try to protect ourselves with what peer-reviewed scientific literature tells us are the best available medicines.
An anti-vaxxer in my family followed the advice of random full-of-crap libertarian guys on the internet and she tried horse de-wormer. It was an incredibly foolish decision, but the argument that I shouldn't be allowed to choose Xocova because some other people might make foolish decisions isn't persuasive. Denying me Xocova doesn't make anybody safer. We should have the right to try it. I would rather choose medicines in a well-regulated competitive marketplace, but if a veterinary black market is all we can get it'd be an improvement over the status quo - even if all it does is highlight the fact that pets effectively have more of a right to choose than people in the current system.
"If my family and I could get Xocova, second-generation Covid vaccines, or even just simple basic Paxlovid and metformin we wouldn't be screwing around with mint."
So because you think that some drugs are overreuglated you suggest doing publicity for something extremely unlikely to work? Why would that be helpful to anybody?
If a drug had been proven to be helpful but is not available because it is not deemed safe enough, it might be logical to try to make it available if the benefice/risk balance is in fact often positive. But we are already drowning in a sea of products that someone think can cure cancer/covid/disease X even it has never been convincingly demonstrated. I really don't think that it is a good idea to add more.
Xocova has a solid track record in Japan. It's conclusively clear that it's safer and more effective than Paxlovid. Here's an Atlantic article entitled, "Americans Don’t Get to Have the Best New COVID Drug"
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/10/xocova-ensitrelvir-covid-antiviral/675768/
Conflating Xocova with a sea of snake oil is a straw man.
There's solid scientific literature indicating that mint stands a reasonable chance of fighting Covid - and thousands of years of experience show it's as safe as any other commonly consumed food. People can easily get or grow mint and they can safely add it as a backstop for clinically proven medicines. Things like mint become especially important if FDA/physicians/pharmacists/insurers are unilaterally denying people access to clinically proven medicines - which seems to be more the rule than the exception for Paxlovid and metformin these days.
The main trouble with mint is simply that manufacturers are too afraid of FDA's unchecked veto powers to print "might fight Covid" on the label - and without any advertising it's harder for people to become aware of the scientific literature on the topic. Getting permission to print "might fight Covid in hamsters" could be a major step forward.
Anecdote: my husband and I still haven't had Covid yet. The closer we get to the strange status of being the last two novids in America the harder it is to accept knee-jerk claims of "extremely unlikely to work." Daily mint realistically might have been the secret to our success.
I was talking about mint, not the currently being evaluated Xocova antiviral.
I am pretty sure that no solid scientific literature indicates that mint stands a reasonable chance of fighting Covid. Yes, mint is safe to eat, yes mint demonstrates some antiviral activity in cell cultures. This is not solid evidence at all that eating mint is helpful for avoiding Covid. Many many products kill cancerous cells or inhibit virus replication in petri dishes. The vas majority of these products are NOT effective treatment agains cancer or viral infection. It is certainly not impossible but very unlikely that mint is helpful against Convid infection. Daily mints are great if you like them, not because they are likely protective against Covid.
I hear you - and I share your dismay about the fact that we're swimming in a sea of snake oil. But that's not a strong argument for the claim that the specific case of mint-versus-Covid can safely be presumed to also be snake oil.
I regret the fact that my peer-reviewed scholarly manuscript doesn't allow reader comment:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306987723000439
I'd be sincerely glad to hear any specific critiques anybody has on this lay summary:
https://open.substack.com/pub/cbuck/p/mint-vs-covid-a-culinary-perspective
I don't think they're going to let you label an animal drug as a human food.
The proposal is to start with an existing human food (mint tea) and label it as an animal drug. The labeling would help humans connect the dots that there's a scientifically reasonable expectation that the food might also work as medicine for humans. For Xocova, I'm proposing labeling an existing human drug that Americans are currently forbidden to try as a drug that pets can try. That would move Xocova into the same black market category where ineffective horse de-wormer was back at the beginning of the pandemic. With the difference being that Xocova is known to actually work.
Building checks, balances, and transparency into FDA's default blanket veto authority and developing systems for independent testing of drugs would be much better solutions. But while we wait for better laws to be written, the existing Conditional Approval law seems to provide an interesting workaround. Even if it doesn't work, the process of trying helps highlight the fact that the current system is denying humans some rights we routinely afford to pets.
https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/animal-health-literacy/fdas-regulation-pet-food#food
The definitions of "food" and "drug" are somewhat vague, but mutually exclusive. To make a tea a drug would mean it's no longer a food and could no longer be sold as one..
Yes - good point - under current law, the hamster tea and the human tea might need to be sold separate packaging - even if the packages contain exactly the same substance. The fubar would effectively highlight how messed up current law is. Here's a passage from the Introduction section of my mint-versus-Covid paper (cited above):
"More recent studies have found that preparations of whole wormwood
leaves might serve as reasonable low-cost anti-malarial treatments,
particularly for populations who can’t afford artemisinin
combination therapy [26]. In clinical trials, wormwood leaf-based
treatments appeared to be more effective than much higher doses of
purified artemisinin products. It has also been shown that the use of
whole plant preparations could help combat the emergence of
artemisinin-resistant parasites because the crude mixture contains a
range of additional antimalarial compounds that complement or synergize
with artemisinin [27–29]. Wormwood leaf preparations,
including preparations of Artemisia species that don’t contain artemisinin,
have also been shown to block SARS-CoV-2 infection at a step
downstream of infectious entry in cell culture systems [30–33]."
I'm a huge admirer of Reviewer #2, who I'm pretty sure is an author of citations [30-33]
https://open.substack.com/pub/cbuck/p/thanks-for-the-covid-cocktails-reviewer
Why hasn't Ukraine drafted more troops? I recently learned that they've exempted relatively young men from mandatory service- I think under 30. That's why reports of Ukrainian troops in the field are generally older men, the average age is in the 40s or so. Russia has not really gone full mobilization or conscription on their end, so despite fighting a larger population country Ukraine could (in theory) have as many or even more troops on the ground by mobilizing a higher % of their citizens. In practice they seem to be outnumbered at least 3 to 1 on the battlefield.
Is exempting younger men meant to save their economy? As presumably they're more likely to be in the IT field. I'd imagine not having drafted them when the war started is now some pretty strong path dependency- patriotism/willingness to die on a frozen muddy battlefield for Donetsk has probably dimmed some versus 18 months ago. I can't imagine drafting all of the younger men now would go over very well. Or is there some other angle that I'm missing?
I think you are under an impression of at least two misconceptions.
For one, there is no blanket exemptions form men under 30. Conscription age is 18.
I really doubt that Russian soldiers on the frontlines outnumber Ukrainians 3 to 1. War would look very differently had it been the case. Russian army has been overall always better equipped than Ukrainian, at least when we consider airforce (which we absolutely should) notwithstanding the fact that Ukraine got several special systems from the West which are beyond Russian technical capabilities. I totally believe that Ukrainian infantrymen are on average better than Russian infantrymen, but not that they would be able to cause Russians so many problems had they been so heavily outnumbered.
My guess is that Ukraine has, as many troops on the front as it can train and logistically support.
What is true that Ukrainian army is older than what we are used to from, like, WW2 or Vietnam. Partly, this reflects Ukrainian society, which like othet post-communist countries has hone through birthrate collapse in the 90s, partly other factors about which I can only speculate - maybe older man have more of technical skills useful for the army? Maybe they are more often in need of money and so more likely to volunteer (Ukrainian soldiers are paid well compared to abysmally low wages common in Ukraine)?
Another thing which is true is that Ukraine seems to be running out of willing volunteers and losses are being replaced by gradually still less and less cooperative recruits.
Here is a Washington Post article on this very subject this morning, which disagrees with most of your points (well, not your last sentence). It explicitly states 'The military hasn’t drafted men under the age of 27 so far', which I've seen reported elsewhere too. So my assertion is correct
https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraines-front-line-troops-are-getting-older-physically-i-cant-handle-this-46d9b2c7
https://archive.is/zlJPK
Interesting and thanks; it seems there are apparently various levels of, um, draftability; from that article "The military hasn’t drafted men under the age of 27 so far, although Parliament has authorized a lower age limit of 25", plus 18 as limit for men who are not permitted to leave the country. I didn't know that. Plus various not age related exemptions.
I am still not sure whether it really never happens that people under 27 are drafted; I live in Czechia where we definitely see Ukrainians that are generally assumed to be draft-dodgers (well, by us Czechs, anyway; maybe we are just wrong), and they often seem to be below 27 but above 18. In that article it is also noted that older skew of the army is caused by troops coming disproportionately from rural areas, where people are poorer, and thus less able to bribe recruitment officials; I heard about that as well. And army salaries are presumably more attractive to poorer people.
Mobilization is done in stages, now we are at stage 3 (drafting specialists and officers from reserve), next stage will be for all men 18-60. So in some sense younger men are not draft dodgers just yet, but soon would be most likely.
I think there are several reasons for not mobilizing more at this moment:
- it would start a race to mobilize more and more with Russia and would give Putin an excuse to mobilize -- and this is not a race in which Ukraine can win
- current process of drafting is a soviet relic -- you can easily get away with not registering for the draft, not carrying a draft card, etc... the only way to draft efficiently is to grab all people from the streets, arrest them and sort them out later. which is illegal, frowned upon by people, and is bad PR for politicians
Among other things, Ukraine is limited in their ability to *train* troops. A lot of that is being done abroad, e.g. 30,000 so far in the UK I believe. There's probably some ability to train soldiers at home as well, but that would require training cadres composed of people who are presently busy fighting the Russians, so it's hard to scale quickly.
And grabbing a million untrained, undisciplined men, giving them all AK-47s, and telling them to go kill Russians, doesn't work very well.
"And grabbing a million untrained, undisciplined men, giving them all AK-47s, and telling them to go kill Russians, doesn't work very well. "
As an example, that's essentially the strategy that Russia has been using against Ukraine. So far the results have been less than spectacular.
Russia used its regular army. It hasn’t fully mobilised yet at all.
To be fair, the Russian "regular army" has been using several strategies in parallel, and some of them (FPV drone warfare, defense in depth along prepared lines) are working pretty well for them. But on the "we need to put our flags on more bits of Ukraine so social media says we're winning!" front, yeah, a lot of that consists of people who were drafted(*) into the "regular army" over the past year or so, given very little training or equipment, and told to go kill Ukrainians.
We don't have a good count on how many of those people have died, but it's almost certainly into six figures and hasn't accomplished anything remotely proportional to that cost.
(*) including some not-technically-a-draft forms of coercive and deceptive recruitment.
If by "regular army" you mean yesterday's conscripts pushed into signing contracts and immediately sent to the frontline, than yes, technically Russia is mostly using regular army.
Second wave of mobilization is expected in March 2024, after presidents elections.
I just read Michael Sandel's book — Justice: What's the right thing to do?
Sandel summarises John Rawls as saying that, from behind the veil of ignorance, most people would prefer an egalitarian society to one where people are rewarded for merit. I think Rawls is wrong about this and wrote a response here:
https://raggedclown.substack.com/p/those-are-my-tomatoes
I think most people behind the veil of ignorance would prefer egalitarian socety to meritocratic one if overall wealth is constant, but real meritocratic society is just richer. You deserve (in some sense) something good for your talent or hard work, because this fact motivate you to use your talent or hard work for the good of the society.
I agree with your post, RC. I don’t think many people would choose such a society, and I am fairly confident that those who did choose it would later regret doing so.
I think people, from behind a veil of objectivity/ignorance would choose the society which would lead them and their progeny/loved ones to have optimum expected outcomes, perhaps adjusted for potential downsides. IOW, a society with high standards of living, long healthy enriched lives and reasonable safety nets.
Yes, I think this is right, Swami. The idea that I would choose would be the opportunity to be successful and to be rewarded for it but a safety net in case I am not successful.
I think a lot people tend to think of merit in terms of dollars — that is, people with merit become rich. I prefer to think of rewards much more broadly — it's not just about dollar rewards.
That's strange because Rawls certainly does not say this. He says that from behind the veil of ignorance most people would prefer a society were they don't get completely screwed if they don't happen to be part of the elite (wether the elite is meritocratic or anything else).
That's strange because Rawls certainly does not say this. He says that from behind the veil of ignorance most people would prefer a society were they don't get completely screwed if they don't happen to be part of the elite (wether the elite is meritocratic or anything else).
That's strange because Rawls certainly does not say this. He says that from behind the veil of ignorance most people would prefer a society were they don't get completely screwed if they don't happen to be part of the elite (wether the elite is meritocratic or anything else).
"But I think that Rawls is wrong to want everyone — the hapless, the shiftless and the workshy — to enjoy the same rewards as the hardworking and the talented"
Is that really what Rawls is saying? I confess I don't understand how the difference principle is supposed to work in practice, but I understood it to mean that the rich shouldn't get richer at the expense of the poor.
Does anyone think that the work-shy should enjoy the same rewards as the hardworking? Not even straight out communists say that.
I took him to be saying that the ideal is equality and that inequality is acceptable only to the extent that it improves the lot of the least well-off.
If someone talented creates value, they are entitled to a reward only if it provides value to those at the bottom of society which, presumably, includes the work-shy. I think they deserve a reward whether or not it helps the poorest.
I expect that you, Rawls and I would all agree that people should not get rich at the expense of the poor. But what about when it is neither to their benefit nor at their expense?
I often come back to Brian Caplan's “missing mood” razor.
My wish is that every one be happy, with an equal distribution of happiness if perfection is not atainable.
But in order to have a functionning society, the rules of the universe say that I have to reward effort somehow.
So I institute a society where unequal contribution results in unequal states of happiness ; but I'm not missing the mood that it is a sad state of affair, only necessary because of the laws of sociology.
Right, that's the way I see it too. Good way to think about it.
Inequality is acceptable if it improves the lot of the least well-off, but it doesn't do that to the same extent as it improves the lot of the better-off. So the better-off are still enjoying more rewards.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/
So it means that (look at the table about midway on the website, section 4.3) we should prefer economy C.
Right, but I read that as a compromise Rawls made because true equality was not possible.
He's not accepting it because true equality is impossible, he is accepting it because he values prosperity as well as equality. (Economy A has equality, everyone has 10,000. -- I take it we are assuming all four economies are possible.)
OK. Accepted.
I'll try to tighten up that part of my argument. Thank you.
I think the veil of ignorance requires some kind of dualism where the soul contains preferences but the body contains talents, but somehow this soul that doesn't have any talent for reason is supposed to reason about what kind of society it wants to be in. This all just seems crazy to me and I've never understood why people take that thought experiment seriously.
I would argue that the actual preferences should also be behind the veil of ignorance for this to work. Otherwise people would just pick a society which favors their particular kinks.
Of course, large parts of human preferences are almost universal. I prefer to not starve. If I was a random inhabitant of Asia in 1000 BCE, I am fairly certain that I would also prefer not to starve, no matter if my IQ was 80 or 120. To the degree that I can imagine being a non-human mammal, I am also fairly certain that I would prefer not to starve.
Things get more difficult if there are trade-offs between values which are person-dependent, like if you prefer a society which has n% more sex but also m% more starvation.
To me, the veil of ignorance provides a simple, widely comprehensible way for average people to explore compassionate positions that are difficult to evaluate due to our inevitable biases. I think that by itself amounts to more than “crazy” and shows practical utility.
That’s a really clever and original critique, and it’s damning of the veil of ignorance as metaphysics. But the veil is not a claim about how reality works or could work, it’s a question getting at the meaning of justice.
> Why does this hypothetical situation have any bearing on what justice is?
It gives us a way to think about certain scenarios from different perspectives without being distracted by our biases.
I think Rawles got a lot of things wrong but I think the approach was sound.
I don't know if it's a clever or original critique (no offence to Herr Guineapig), it seems like the obvious one.
Why does this hypothetical situation have any bearing on what justice is? What if the pre-existence deal was struck not between all humans, but between all humans plus all crocodiles? We would probably settle on a society in which humans do a bunch of work to support crocodiles in some degree of comfort. Or what if the deal were between all men, with all women to be played by unconscious p-zombies? We'd come to a different deal again.
Acausal bargaining is one thing, but "we should behave as if we'd made one particular, arbitrary, acausal deal" is something else.
But if the thought experiment is logically impossible, all we're left with is ex falso quodlibet, i.e. conclusions about justice drawn from it can carry no weight. And even if that were not the case, the conclusions would be about what justice looks like for intrinsically equal inanimate souls, not what justice looks like for animate humans that intrinsically differ from each other in preferences and abilities.
The thought experiment absolutely does not have to actually work in reality, and I really have a hard time with people who don’t get that about most thought experiments. I think you don’t like the conclusion rather than the thought experiment.
Let’s modify his idea for slavery.
Imagine we could know what society we could be born into. Imagine that one of the possible societies is a slave society and we have a high chance of being a slave. Would we want to be born into that society.
I'm not criticizing it for not working in reality, but for not working in theory, i.e. for being internally inconsistent.
It's useful as a primitive tool; it is like classical physics, in that it isn't an entirely accurate model of things, but rather a simplification that helps us slow-and-small-brained humans actually keep enough information in our heads to help us reason through something.
The particular aspect of it which is useful is that it permits acausal negotiation with other humans; it permits humans that don't exist yet (and do not yet have talents) to negotiate with -us-, as it should have permitted us to negotiate with the past.
So the conclusions drawn from the Veil of Ignorance are best interpreted with respect to the future, not the now; we aren't deciding things for ourselves, but rather our descendants, and making judgment about these untalented souls. We are intrinsically different, but the future is uncertain, and we can treat -those- people as intrinsically equal. Thus, how should we organize society for them?
The chain of acausal negotiation is flawed, however, because there is an informational asymmetry; when the future is trying to negotiate with us, on the basis of what we would have negotiated with the past, we already know what the past has done, and we are already differentiated in the now. There's a patch on this asymmetry; a "debt to the future". But this is just one debt out of many, and how much priority we give it is, well, rather variable; certainly we may feel a greater debt to our specific descendants, which kind of throws a wrench in the whole affair.
So, not useless, but not quite perfect, either.
Personally I prefer other forms of acausal negotiation, in particular "spite". (If you do something bad enough to me, I will go so far as to harm myself in order to do something bad to you; therefore, you should not do something bad to me.)
Other approaches also work; ancestor worship/respect, I think, is an unintentional mechanism of bridging the acausal negotiation asymmetry by creating another asymmetry to balance things out; we prioritize the future's interests more in the expectation that they will appreciate us for it. Meaning the current trend of hating one's predecessors for their moral failings might be damaging a key support structure in society; if our descendants will hate us as much as we hate our ancestors, what exactly do we owe them?
Honestly? Good point. Yeah, I guess you need to separately assert the inherent equality of persons, something about the categorical imperative, whatever. For people who see those sorts of premises as intuitively correct, I maintain that it’s a useful tool for organizing discussion on how to build a just society. But a tool is not the same as an argument.
The veil of ignorance requires you to step completely outside your existence to think about justice. It's not meant to be an actual recipe for designing a society.
Can someone point me to some good "plain English" exposition on unconditional election and conditional election? I don't find the wikipedia very helpful on this. For instance, wouldn't this permit debauchery? If [edit: an] evangelical believes that someone else's fate is predestined either for redemption or salvation [correction ~11 hours later: redemption or damnation], wouldn't lecturing to that person create pointless suffering?
Leave it to the Christians to have elections with no strategic voting despite Arrow's theorem. :)
Otherwise, the idea of predestination seems to be isomorphic to Newcomb's problem, as far as decision theory is concerned.
People who favor Causal Decision Theory would two-box and also embrace a life of sex, drugs and rock&roll if they believe in predestination.
People who follow the more esoteric variants of decision theory from lesswrong would probably one-box and live their life as if they were the sort of person who would be Saved.
I think, if you use evidential or functional decision theory, that's not a problem? Obviously, religious people who believe in this don't use the same terminology, but maybe they have a similar logic.
In my experience most Evangelicals are not Calvinists, and don't believe in election. But I don't have any hard data to back that up, just lived experience.
As a young man my father warned to "Beware the yeast of the Calvinists." :-)
Evangelical ethics are not exactly utilitarian. If lecturing to a person is the Right Thing To Do, it's the Right Thing To Do, independent of whether the endeavor is either fated to have no outcome or fated to be the means by which the redemption is accomplished.
As to your question, "wouldn't this permit debauchery", Paul addresses this in Romans 6.
Thank you. I see that Paul addresses and purports to explain this for "the elect" in Romans 6, but how is this addressed for the damned? And this seems to take for granted that someone knows whether they are saved or damned.
Good question! My hunch is that they would say if someone is predestined for damnation, debauchery is still wrong, and if someone was committed to continuing to commit it, that would simply be further evidence of their damnation! They also might say that if you are still concerned about the ethics of your debauchery, that's pretty good evidence that you are *not* counted among the damned and are being encouraged to turn to the truth. Then again, my experiences with believers in unconditional election were still steeped in enough modern American culture that they tended toward a "soft" election where whatever you end up choosing is simply what reveals what you were destined to choose all along; I'm likely to have more errors in speculating about interpretations from the harder edge of the spectrum. (Side note: I wonder if you could ask ChatGTP to simulate someone who believes in unconditional election and ask these things, or if discussing damnation would trip the censors!)
Thank you. I can believe that this is what one might hear from believers in unconditional election, because this matches what I have heard/expect from other reading to to hear from Jains regarding their notion of who will eventually attain liberation and who can never (I am not a jain). As in such cases, textual references would be great, but one gets the feeling that they are hard to find if at all they exist, and beliefs one hears tend to be determined by psychology. As for GPT etc., I don't have a lot of practice in prompting.
Old Testament Ezekiel might clarify.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel%2033&version=NIV
Thanks, this would be clarifying to me if it is to be interpreted as disproving unconditional election. But if it is to be read as consistent with unconditional election, I would need an explanation to make sense of that: how does it make sense to talk of the wicked changing course and "surviving", if hell's future population is predetermined?
I've never understood the unconditional election approach; the Bible is full of "give them a chance to repent" and "because of this action, you will suffer".
The only one I can think of that maybe follows it is 1 Kings 22:23 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Kings%2022&version=GNT
where God just lies to everyone and does something different. Maybe the parts between plagues in Exodus where God hardens pharaoh's heart so he won't repent.
Yes, unconditional election is bonkers. Martin Luther espouses the idea (I think it’s in The Freedom of a Christian) that God has a revealed will and an inscrutable will—His revealed will being that all be saved out of His love and His inscrutable will being that He plans to damn a great many and we shouldn’t question that. Luther’s God is two-faced, quite a repugnant idea! There are good aspects to his theology but that one is awful.
Definitely not in the Freedom of a Christian. I can't say if it's found somewhere else, but not there. All in all it sounds more like Calvinism than something I could imagine finding in Luther.
I was shocked as well when I read it. With your correction I think it’s at the end of Bondage of the Will.
Okay, I will admit I have only read the first half of Bondage. But I think this is not quite the same as the Calvinist doctrine just judging from the given quote.
Luther says that there exist a hidden will, that we cannot know.
Calvin seems to directly say that God will predestine people to be sinners and others to be saved. So it is a clear thing, the only thing that is hidden is who exactly happens to be predestined in each direction.
I didn’t read the whole thing either. My other reply has the Luther quote saying that God inscrutably wills damnation for some.
Thanks, and indeed thank you for digging up that helpful Luther quote, and I see that this backs up your earlier comment, but I still don't see how it addresses Christian Z R's comment: it only says that the inscrutable will is for sinners to be damned, not whether being a sinner is predestined or not, which is what unconditional election is about?
Maybe explaining God's exact algorithm is an infohazard, so a truly good God would not disclose it, and would instead give us something like the closest approximation that is not an infohazard yet.
Dug up perhaps the passage I was thinking of from Bondage: https://ccel.org/ccel/luther/bondage/bondage.xi.xxiv.html
“But the Diatribe is deceived by its own ignorance, in not making a distinction between GOD PREACHED and GOD HIDDEN: that is, between the word of God and God Himself. God does many things which He does not make known unto us in His word: He also wills many things which He does not in His word make known unto us that He wills. Thus, He does not ‘will the death of a sinner,’ that is, in His word; but He wills it by that will inscrutable. But in the present case, we are to consider His word only, and to leave that will inscrutable; seeing that, it is by His word, and not by that will inscrutable, that we are to be guided; for who can direct himself according to a will inscrutable and incomprehensible? It is enough to know only, that there is in God a certain will inscrutable: but what, why, and how far that will wills, it is not lawful to inquire, to wish to know, to be concerned about, or to reach unto — it is only to be feared and adored!”
Apologies in advance if this has been discussed ad nauseam in the past, but what do readers think about the prospect of abolishing cash? Is it likely, or inevitable, and if so is that desirable?
In the UK a few months ago our PM, Rishi Sunak, let slip in a newspaper (Telegraph) interview that cash was "transitional", and in the last year or two banks have been frantically pushing mobile phone apps for transactions. So it doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to conclude that abolishing cash is a medium-term plan at least here.
I think it would (or will) be a Very Bad Idea, from a civil liberties standpoint. It is bad enough that credit card transactions are recorded, but having to use mobile phone apps adds a vast new dimension of state surveillance possibilities by enabling past and present location tracking as well as transactions!
When one adds constant nannying health advice, with possible insurance implications for unhealthy purchases, and aggressive and peremptory "debanking" (closing bank accounts) of customers who the banks decide may have non-PC views, the future for personal liberties looks bleak.
>I think it would (or will) be a Very Bad Idea, from a civil liberties standpoint.
I would say Bad, but perhaps not Very Bad, given the general spread of surveillance that has been and is continuing to happen anyway.
( Full disclosure - I make most of my purchases with a credit card, partially because it makes my record-keeping easier, and partially because it enables some consumer protections. So from my point of view, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-307/comment/45608085 's "cash is a corner case" rings true. )
I would guess that, in the USA, cash wouldn't be outlawed (at least not for a long time), but would gradually become rarer and rarer.
Re https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-307/comment/45607899 vulnerability. Yes, that is a problem, but there are similar vulnerabilities now. I've been in grocery stores where _all_ transactions ground to a halt when their computers went down. Nothing is perfectly robust, and there are always trade-offs in deciding how robust to make a system.
As https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-307/comment/45614172 pointed out, many businesses won't accept cash now. There are hazards in handling cash too.
Out here in Trump country cash is often favored. Many businesses will charge you more for credit (you pay the ~3% credit charge) Some places are cash only. People working in restaurants favor cash for tipping because it isn't shown on the bill. So cash and writing checks is good by me. What we need to do in the US is get rid of the penny and maybe the nickel. Round up to the nearest $0.1
My instinct is that moving towards a cashless society would be bad, unless there's some kind of clever crypto alternative that retains the anonymity.
Do you have the full Sunak quote? (Googling "sunak cash transitional site:telegraph.co.uk" didn't help me find it.)
From the governments view, the lack of anonymity is a feature, not a bug. Charitably a government might just want to make it more difficult to fund terrorism. The problem is that once the infrastructure is in place, it will inevitably end up being used to filter for all sorts of behaviors.
Personally I think having some people funding terrorists using cash (or whatever other big bad you want to insert) is a price worth paying for also having the ability to buy controversial literature or fund other controversial organizations (wikileaks, pro-life, pro-choice, etc) using cash.
Aha! Found it. The article was free when it first appeared, but now seems to be behind a paywall (which is unusual for the Telegraph, as most articles start out paywalled but later become free! )
I think the final paragraph of the extract quoted below shows that I was not misrepresenting the PM's comment.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/08/05/red-wall-tory-voters-pay-cash-midlands-north-farage-sunak/
2023-08-05 Red Wall voters want legal right to pay in cash
Survey follows Nigel Farage’s claim that ‘dozens’ of small businesses have been de-banked for trading in cash
ARTICLE EXTRACT:
Last week, Rishi Sunak said that access to cash had to be protected despite the rise in electronic money transfers.
The Prime Minister said that as an MP for a rural constituency he represented people who are “concerned about this particular issue”.
“That’s why, as chancellor, I started the process, and recently we’ve concluded it, where we have legislated in law for access to cash regulations, which will allow the Government to ensure that, particularly in rural communities, that people do have access to cash,” he said.
He added: “Obviously, many people are transitioning to using either their phones or online to do their banking but whilst that transition happens, people still need to have access to cash.”
::::
Thanks. I agree that the implication of what he said is that a transition is in progress - at the end of which people won't need access to cash.
But I think it's more likely to just be due to the imperfect wording of a live interview response, than any actual intention that has been "let slip".
And now I think I've found the original interview: https://youtu.be/Kmi40eiwB_Y?t=1m22s (from 1:22)
Seems the Telegraph might be misquoting it, in which case John, perhaps you can reduce your concern level somewhat.
And for any Brits reading, the campaign the interviewer refers to may still be ongoing. Their petition page is still 'up': https://www.gbnews.com/cash (currently 310,072 "signatures" ... I wonder if we, the people of ACX Open Thread 307, can push that higher)
At least in the US abolishing cash totally would be incredibly hard, but OTOH there are many businesses that don’t accept cash. I can’t speak for legality of this - it says right on the US money that it’s a legal tender, but barring someone suing the business the practice just continues.
There’s a good reason small retail businesses like food trucks avoid cash: too much risk and hassle.
Abolishing USD cash would be a disaster for many countries, and China or someone else would step in to fill the void. Right now I am travelling in Laos and USD is king.
"The rest of the world holds a great deal of U.S. currency, i.e., cash. Although the amount can’t be precisely tracked, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors recently estimated that foreigners held $950 billion in U.S. banknotes at the end of the first quarter of 2021, or about 45% of all Federal Reserve notes outstanding, including two-thirds of all $100 bills."
Cash in the US is legal tender "for all debts, public and private". If you owe someone money, they have to take it in cash if you offer such, or waive the debt. You can pay your income tax with a briefcase full of Benjamins delivered to the appropriate IRS office, if you really want. But if you and a merchant are contemplating a transaction where no debt will be incurred, because the thing you're paying for will be delivered when you pay for it, they they can insist on pretty much whatever payment terms they want.
Although a v fun case recently limited the scope to which cash is legal tender. Someone tried to pay a contract with a shipping container of pennies - the courts said such a payment could be rejected as not legal tender.
Yeah, I believe the "legal tender for all debts, public and private", starts with George Washington's face on the $1 bill. Not sure what would happen if you tried to make say a megabuck tax payment in Washingtons; I *think* they'd ultimately have to accept it but I don't know how they'd go about making your life miserable for having been a dick about it. Using $100 bills at least shows that you're trying to minimize the inconvenience of the cash payment.
According to the 1040 instructions you have to make cash payments at certain retail payment establishments which have a limit of $500 or $1,000 dollars. You can't show up at an IRS office with a suitcase of cash to pay the bill.
The 1040 form is not the final word in tax law. See e.g. https://www.irs.gov/payments/what-to-expect-when-you-pay-cash-at-an-irs-office
There's no limit on the amount, it's just that the quick and easy route at the various retail outlets is capped at $1000. And the IRS isn't going to go out of their way to point out that you can pay $bignum in cash, because that's a PITA for all concerned and they'd rather you didn't, but if you insist they will go along with it and they'll tell you in advance how to make it somewhat less inconvenient.
I don't have much of a dog in this hunt, but academically speaking, this seems like an unjust way around the legal tender rule. Otherwise, you could just declare any establishment as having a limit of $500 or $1000. What gives the IRS the ability to do that?
I looked into the legality of not accepting cash and this is my understanding: It’s legal to not accept cash if payment is made before service is rendered — for instance, at a deli where you order at the counter, pay, and then they make your food. However, if you pay after service is rendered — for example at a sit-down restaurant where you pay after eating — you are discharging a debt when you pay, and they are required to accept cash.
Fascinating, thank you! This made me pull a 20 out of the wallet, and indeed the exact wording is “legal tender for all debts”.
AFAIK a large chunk of the US economy (and not even speaking of the black market here, but of basic infrastructure) relies on the labour of "off the books" workers, paid 100% in cash (getting around not only immigration laws, such as are still enforced in parts of the country, but also expensive safety regulations, tax collection, etc.) While this continues to be the case, paper money is unlikely to disappear.
Basically yes. One can argue about the meaning of "large" in this context, but it's easily in the many-billions range. For all these reasons it's hard to imagine cash being outlawed in the US, or even have any politician run on such a platform.
Huh, the opposite out here in Trump country. I don't recall ever hearing about a store or business being robbed.
There are plenty of cash-only places here in 475nm country.
Oh, that (outright robbery) is rare, although you personally not hearing about it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen (since the tone doesn’t translate, this is a neutral statement not in any way directed at “you” personally 😁). The hassle is, for example, having to go to the bank to deposit it (especially in rural areas). The risk is anything from the employees helping themselves to fake bills to honest loss.
Just think, if cash were outlawed then George Floyd would still be alive.
(Well, probably not, but he'd have died quietly in some alley and we'd have been spared a whole bunch of riots.)
((Well, probably not, another excuse for riots would have been found. Remember how the week before George Floyd everyone was upset about some argument about a dog in Central Park?))
Come on, this is… unnecessary…. Floyd was a piece of work but he did not deserve to die the way he did. I’ve been training MMA for years - I’d tap to that neck pressure in seconds if there were no way out. BTW Chauvin didn’t deserve the sawing machine stabbing either.
I don’t want to re-litigate this, it really is not the topic.
Got it, and yeah employee theft can be a problem anywhere.
I agree with your objections.
Also, from a practical standpoint, small informal community stuff relies heavily on cash, like school cake sales, Scouts/Guides fundraising fairs, etc. Even Covid didn't manage to move these things to electronic payments, partly because they're often run by children too young to have bank accounts or banking apps. Similarly, I give my kids pocket money in cash. So any plan to abolish cash will have to come up with a solution for how young children and small community organisations can still participate in the economy.
It’s also highly vulnerable to attack. Bring down a few banks and people starve. In fact I hate that I need a phone to do online shopping. My recent update to a new phone broke it for me.
Nah. If you're unable to use your banking service, you starve. If a few banks have all their clients unable to use their banking services, the store get looted.
This is already true though, it's not like most people keep stacks of cash. Cash is already an unusual corner case of payments, in practice.
I tend to use cash for transactions less than $10, though in some cases it is still more convenient to use a credit card, such as at kiosks. Cash is also useful as, for example, gifts to young family members, especially in smaller amounts.
I'm not saying cash is useless, but most people don't keep large amounts and many people don't keep any at all. A cyber attack that removed our ability to pay for things electronically would be deeply unpleasant is short lasting and catastrophic if long lasting, and the amount of cash currently in use isn't enough to significantly change that.
Oh, and tips. Let us not get sidetracked into the argument of whether or not tipping is an acceptable thing for society, since it certainly already exists as a thing. One ought not make the argument that doing away with cash causing tipping go away is a supporting argument, since the custom of tipping ought to be made on its own merits, and doing otherwise assumes not tipping is already accepted as the correct way of doing things.
Some places I tip where it would be difficult to impossible to provide money include the following: car wash people that dry my car, hotel housekeeping staff, bell hops, valet parking. When I was a golf caddy, I was paid nothing at all, and only earned tips.
It would be trivial for tip workers to carry around a contactless kiosk. Medieval Times in Dallas was doing that for their waiters when I went in September. Something something cashapp.
There's a coordination problem at work here. When everybody used cash, traders would round their prices to the nearest 10 cents or dollar, but now that everyone uses contactless, if you mention that you want to pay cash, they still make you take out your little coins.
Is there a way to hide some comments or view only the first few comments in each thread or view only abbreviated versions of most comments?
You click on the side bar line below the comment and it closes all the comments below that response.
Do they stay closed if the page is refreshed?
Yes.
Awesome. Thanks a lot.
would also love to be able to do this.
To the 20-odd people who replied to the moon landing guy: stop feeding the trolls! You're making it so damn easy, good quality comments never get that much engagement and it's sad to see it wasted.
Yup.
In general, you can't win an argument just by saying that the position is too silly to respond to. "How do we know the moon landing wasn't fake" could make a great final exam question in a course on epistemology.
But, when the person making the argument has demonstrated repeatedly they are trolling and have no intention of acknowledging points made against them, you actually do win the argument by pointing out they are silly. Or, just ignoring them.
This implicitly assumes a point-to-point model of communication where a reply is made solely for the benefit of the party being replied to and nobody else can possibly read it, which is wrong. As a rule of thumb, in any public forum the lurkers outnumber the writers by anywhere between 5 to 1 and 10 to 1, not to mention that the writers are themselves readers of other writers.
Like Florent says, it's deliberate target practice. Like Bertrand Russel and Alfred Whitehead spending 350 pages excruciatingly building Mathematics from the logical subterrain upwards then diligently noting that the resulting edifice agrees with "1 + 1 = 2". Like Euclid spending the entirety of the first book of Elements building up to the Pythagorean theorem, already well known and obvious to Egyptian and Sumerian architects for centuries. Proving the obvious is a virtue that teaches many things, and is fun as hell.
I had fun listing my own personal evidence that the earth is round. Contrarily to evolution where I mostly have to rely on other people's observations and trust their deductions until I find a blatant mistake ; for the shape of the earth, I have personnally observed :
* the sun setting at a different time after taking a plane to the other side of the earth
* the length of day being different from the tropics up to scotland.
* the course of the sun in the sky all over the day during various seasons
* the horizon and all effects connected to it
* what stars are visible from where and when.
It's great to have at least one subject where you don't have to trust anybody, and you can re-derive all your knowledge from scratch.
This is an arguing Kata : everyone including the OP knows that the subject is ridiculous, so we can fine-tune our arguing skills without worrying too much about the subject level.
Today is a good day I think for commenting on your name.
Ryan North is an influential guy.
Surely the ideal of an intellectual community of philosophers and debaters like this one is that any subject can be debated in good faith, irrespective of how low status the subject or whether either side is arguing in fun or in earnest.
So I think the moon landing guy is using ACX for its intended purpose, and you are not.
It's all fair game, the moon guy, the guy annoyed by the moon guy.
I appreciate the moon guy's thread. I don't follow the "controversy" but I'm interested enough in space science to be entertained by the two sides' exchanges.
Well they're both wrong anyway, because that thing up there is no moon. It's a space station.
When the responses start to become: "watch this YouTube link I didn't provide a title for," the game is over.
You might find this interesting! https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/
I think about this post a lot, one of the SSC classics imo
"arguing in fun" seems incompatible with "in good faith" here.
This was arguably true to begin with but they quickly started citing provably false premises and obviously fallacious reasoning, and doubling down when the flaws were pointed out - surely that's when any sensible person disengages.
Ah c'mon, it's Christmas time, if we can't have a little fun playing with a troll now, when can we?
Practical AI question:
I've been playing with Leonardo.ai (an AI image generator). It has a "make good mode" called Alchemy, which brings its images up to pretty nice quality, in exchange for costing three times more credits to use. I have no idea what the difference is on the back end when Alchemy mode is used.
However, I don't think I'm interested in signing up to Leonardo.ai in the long term. For one thing, the Alchemy feature turned out to be a free trial, and now it's expired, Leonardo's output is pretty shit by comparison.
But the main reason is that they've overcompensated so much with their offensive content sanitisation efforts that I keep running into the censor for innocuous things. And even when the censor lets me through, the resulting image often willfully misunderstands what I want (for eg, asking for two emaciated people having a knife fight over a loaf of bread produces an image of two friendly smiling people holding cutlery knives while passing loaves of bread to each other. This kind of mistake never gets made when asking for non-violence- or non-sex-adjacent scenarios, where most of the time I've been surprised and impressed by the nuances the AI has picked up on.)
I'm not paying Leonardo.ai a subscription when I suspect I'll only burn through all the extra credits trying to cajole the system into producing a result it's trying not to give me. I also dislike distributed systems in general and prefer the idea of being able to do things just as easily when the Internet is down as not.
I know other people have got local copies of image generators running, and I'm thinking I wouldn't mind having one of my own. I have a coding background, and I'm fine with Python, which I gather has become the language of choice for AI programming. But haven't actually followed any AI tutorials (not since it all took off anyway). I also have other projects on and can't really do a deep dive into something new right now.
Basically I can't justify going off and learning all this stuff on my own, but that doesn't mean I can't ask for advice from people who already know it, just to get a sense of what I would be letting myself in for.
So, to boil it down: if I were to decide to roll my own local AI image generator:
- what's the best setup/software/library to use?
- what's the procedure (installation, coding, training, parameter tweaking, etc) and how labour-intensive is it?
- what kind of resources do I need (how much training data, GPU cycles, etc) to get a decent result?
- what kind of quality can a lone player expect to achieve? Something 90% as good as the pro tools, or something 1% as good?
I appreciate any advice.
You want this:
https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui
Google "AUTOMATIC1111" for any guides you need. If you can install packages from a command line, you should be good for base knowledge. You can download pre-trained models, there's no need to do it yourself. Quality is...the ultimate subjective question, isn't it? There's tons of discussion on "negative prompts," which is what you need to get the AI to draw hands instead of eldritch abominations.
Cheers! I cloned it in and was greeted by the usual sea of errors. If I can sort through all those and get it running, I'll be able to have a play and see what it can do.
Welcome back to Dependency Hell.
An offshore, crypto-financed 100%-uncensored "AI" service is starting to look like a rather lucrative idea. Eventually it will happen. It'll have massively-cheaper staffing than today's services -- no need to hire censors, "safety" busybodies, "regulatory compliance" nonsense specialists, etc.
Is it ethical to have a child, knowing that this child will be born into a life of slavery? What should we make of all the slaves who have chosen to have children throughout history?
> Is it ethical to have a child, knowing that this child will be born into a life of slavery?
No, it's not. Every suffering and pain someone experiences are the responsibility of their parents, and parents who know their children will suffer and still have them are immoral.
> What should we make of all the slaves who have chosen to have children throughout history?
People acting immorally, is that so rare or surprising?
Given that suffering is a more or less inherent part of our existence, that would seem to lead to the conclusion that it's never permissible to have a child.
Is every pleasure and joy a child experiences also the responsibility of their parents? What about the pleasure and joy of that child's children?
If so, then certainly, say, slaves in the American South who procreated were morally good to do so, as the positive experiences of generations of now free descendants almost certainly outweigh the pain that their children and grandchildren experienced.
Slaves generally prefer life to death. So this doesn't seem like much of an ethical quandary.
Slaves couldn’t legally marry in Rome, and often offspring were parented by free born men in the family. No choice there.
Slaves back then had below-replacement fertility. In a Malthusian environment, the advantage of capturing slaves was that you didn't have to pay to raise them. The New World, with its non-Malthusian abundance of land, was very different.
I believe that isn't it. Slaves in the New World weren't pushed to reproduce until kidnapping people from Africa was shut down.
The slave population showed positive natural increase ever since 1740:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7716878/
True. Organized slave breeding didn't happen until after 1808 when the importation of slaves was banned in the US. Wikipedia seems to have an article for just about everything...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_breeding_in_the_United_States
They don't need to be "pushed" to reproduce, natural selection primes species to do that automatically when possible.
I suggest you do a little more research into the demographics of slavery in the American south.
Much of what I've said is in https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/the-biology-of-slavery/ what specifically would you suggest I read?
However, they did need time and food to raise their children. People being worked to death aren't as likely to reproduce.
Yes, they weren't given enough food in the Old World to reproduce themselves, but were in antebellum North America (where populations like Yankees or French Canadians were exploding).
"Choosing" to have children hasn't really been a thing for almost *anyone* for most of human history. While of course one might attempt total abstinence to avoid conception, very few people can actually manage it, and of course there's a tremendous amount of social pressure to participate in family systems that result in procreation.
It's been a thing for most men through most of history. And really, I think norms against rape have been strong enough that a fair number of women could reasonably have expected to abstain from parenthood in most cultures, if they wanted.
Until recently, it required also abstaining from certain kinds of sexyfuntimes. That's a thing people can choose to do.
But, male or female, with or without sex, most people do seem to want to have children.
You do know that marital rape was literally formally legal in every state in the US until the 1970s, right? That it was so legal and normal that many people were deeply confused by the notion that it was possible for a husband to rape his wife as late as 1993, when Lorena Bobbitt brought the issue into popular culture?
And that women weren't able to have their own banking accounts until the 1960s, or be guaranteed the same access as men to mortgages until the mid 1970s?
Which meant...you know...most had to depend on husbands for shelter for approximately all of human history? Husbands who wanted sex in a time where everyone believed they were entitled to have it on demand?
And that survival with things like retirement, livelihoods, and securing land was often highly dependent on having children?
There was almost *endless* survival pressure on almost everyone to have children, whether they genuinely welcomed them or not, whether it was ethical or not. For most people, there wasn't really a meaningful choice not to.
There are other species of animals that manage to reproduce just fine without social pressure. Natural selection handled it prior to sociality evolving in the first place.
And then we evolved intelligence.
I think other species of animals are intelligent. Octopi, corvids, dolphins, chimpanzees... Less intelligent than humans, but I don't think of it as a binary in which we're intelligent but they're not.
I agree that intelligence isn't a binary, but I also agree with Skull that there's a massive difference in intelligence between humans and any other organism we know of. (Or perhaps we've merely passed some important threshold that other organisms haven't quite reached.) Rather than culture, I'd put the other key innovation as being "language", although IMO even that is just an evolved enhancement to something that intelligence could come up with by itself.
There is such a massive difference between a human and any nonhuman animal that it might as well be binary in many contexts.
Have you read "The Secret of Our Success"? It argues that the big difference is not "intelligence" per se.
I remember a fantasy book essentially about this topic. A shaman has found a way to store all the slave's emotions so they can go through slavery without breaking down, the hero undoes it on the grounds that if no one is ever upset about it then nothing will ever change for the better.
So, more angry people now helps solve the problem long-term.
... Isn't that just accelerationism? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
Don't think so. Accelerationism would be making conditions worse; this is exposing more people to the same bad conditions.
The revealed preference of slaves who don't kill themselves is that a life of slavery is better than non-existence, so it's ethical for them to procreate.
One might also note that in much of the contemporary West, children are subject to that form of slavery that is known as compulsory schooling, and young adults to military conscription, and most don't seem too traumatized by those experiences.
I think typically, schools are compared to prisons by their critics, not forced labor camps. I think that comparison is much less offensive. (Why not call traffic rules slavery, while you are at it?)
I am much more sympathetic to the claim that military conscription can be a form of slavery. In Eritrea it certainly is.
The revealed preference argument models humans as self-interested rational actors. However, that is only an approximation, as humans are a product of evolution, which strongly selects against suicides and refusal to procreate. If you put starving mice in a cage, would you also claim that the revealed preference of the survivors is clearly cannibalism and clinging to life despite being in severe pain?
More broadly, the utility threshold for creating new life is not necessarily the same as the threshold for unmaking already existing life.
Alright, let's just call compulsory schooling another form of forced labour instead of another form of slavery. Then the fact that people don't have any ethical qualms about having children born into the contemporary forms of unfreedom (schooling, conscription, taxes and regulation in the typical Western case) suggests to me that having children born into ancient forms of unfreedom probably wasn't too ethically problematic either.
As for revealed preference, the way I understand that term is that any observed behaviour is considered preferred, so if the mice practice cannibalism but say that they would rather starve, I'd say they clearly have a revealed preference for cannibalism over starving and another revealed preference for lying about it.
For your argument to carry, your would have to contend with the revealed preferences everyone who said or lived by the mantra “give me liberty or give me death”. I've always considered that mantra an indication that the right to move about was higher on the hierarchy of rights than the right to life.
The right to life is not an obligation to live.
That position has historical basis, yes. See also "live free or die; death is not the worst of evils".
But Wasserschweinchen's position is compatible: different people are allowed to have different preferences. The "in this house we believe..." signs are good indications that the values expressed are not in fact universal. (Not going to touch the children part, though.)
I would think that those who do live by that mantra typically do not produce children who are born into slavery, so those who do would still be following the golden rule.
The simple answer: because Obama.
The longer answer:
I can think of a few explanations, bearing in mind that we're talking about people who lived in poverty and oppression and were in effect "owned" by someone:
- in the past having a child was not really a choice but a fact of life
- no contraception means that the only way to choose would be through abortion, and I imagine that was something extremely dangerous and diffcult to attain, plus all the religious issues
- in a more optimist and hopeful note, the fact that a given child may change the status quo enough to give them freedom
I'm not clear on what Obama has to do with this. In particular, note that none of Barack Obama's ancestors were ever slaves that we know of.
I spoke without researching, but actually there might be links to the first documented American slave as per https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/us/obamas-mother-had-african-forebear-study-suggests.html?pagewanted=all
Anyway it was a heavy handed way of making the "if your ancestors don't have kids you wouldn't be here" argument
Celibacy was entirely possible prior to the existence of birth control. But back then people didn't view the birth of a child as an inherently bad thing to be avoided.
That assumes a degree of bodily autonomy which may not be present in all social positions.
I don't think a lack of bodily autonomy explains why people weren't celibate, I think hardly any wanted to be. With the end of slavery freedmen traveled over long distances to reunite with spouses that had been sold away from them, and they kept reproducing without needing the help of any slaveowners to "push" them as Nancy Lebowitz put it.
I was referring obliquely to rape and other forms of coercion, and in this case I was thinking of time periods several thousand years ago. But one can look at certain modern-day cultures, and notice their incredible fecundity, and then notice that the treatment of women in those cultures leaves them little choice in whether they reproduce.
Math puzzle:
Four ships are sailing the sea, each moving with a constant speed (speeds of different ships may be different). None of their courses are parallel to one another. It is known that the first three ships all meet with each other at some point, though not all three at once. It is also known that the fourth ship meets with the first one, and then with the second. Prove that the fourth ship must also inevitably meet with the third one at some point (in the past or the future with respect to its other meetings).
(please ROT13 proposed answers)
Is this on a Euclidean plane, or a non-Euclidean surface such as a sphere? (I don't think this is true on a sphere.)
Also, by "meet with", do you mean the courses cross, or do you mean that the ships actually have to be in roughly the same place at the same time?
Nitpicks / Additional assumptions:
* Not only the speed (the magnitude of the velocity), but also the direction of the velocity have to be constant.
* The sea should be modeled as an Euclidian vector space R^n, likely for n=2. (This has the advantage that one does not have to argue what a constant velocity means in e.g. S2 geometry.)
* Two courses are parallel if their world lines are parallel, e.g. if they have an equal velocity vector.
(Having colinear velocity vectors is not a conserved property under transformations of the frame of reference, while the last two ships meeting obviously is.)
Yrg e_v(g) or gur cbfvgvba fuvc v (mreb .. guerr) bpphcvrf ng gvzr g. Jvgubhg ybff bs trarenyvgl, nffhzr gung e_0(g) = 0.
Sbe v!=w, yrg G_vw qrabgr n fbyhgvba gb e_v(g)==e_w(g).
Nyy cbffvoyr pbhefrf e_v(g) juvpu vagreprcg e_0 sbyybj gur sbez e_v(g)=i_v(g-G_0v), r.t. gurl tb guebhtu gur bevtva ng G_0v. Sbe v>0, i_v vf abamreb.
Jvgubhg ybff bs trarenyvgl, frg G_01 gb mreb. Sebz gur erdhverzrag bs gur svefg guerr fuvcf abg zrrgvat ng gur fnzr gvzr, vg sbyybjf gung sbe w=2, G_01=0, G_0w naq G_1w ner cnvejvfr hardhny. Sbe w=3, gur fnzr, jr ernfbanoyl vagrecerg "zrrgf svefg jvgu gur bar fuvc, gura jvgu gur bgure" nf gur fuvc guerr abg funevat n pbhefr jvgu rvgure irffry mreb be bar (va juvpu pnfr gur ceboyrz jbhyq orpbzr gevivny), abe vagreprcgvat gurz ng gur fnzr gvzr, juvpu nzbhagf gb G_v3 orvat havdhr naq ubyqvat gur fnzr eryngvbafuvc.
Sbe w>1, G_1w unf gb fngvfsl gur rdhngvba
e_1(G_1w)=e_w(G_1w)
i_1*(G_1w)=i_w*(G_1w-G_0w)
Tvira gur nobir pbaqvgvbaf sbe G_vw, guvf lvryqf:
i_w = i_1 * G_1w / (G_1w - G_0w)
Guvf nyybjf hf gb fvzcyvsl gur rdhngvba sbe G_23 gb:
i2*(G_23 - G_02 ) = i3*(G_23-G_03)
i_1* G_12 / (G_12 - G_02) * (G_23 - G_02) = i1*G_13/(G_13 - G_03) * (G_23 - G_03)
Guvf vf na rdhngvba va G_23 juvpu jvyy unir rknpgyl bar fbyhgvba vss i_2!=i_3, juvpu vf gur pnfr qhr gb gur "ab cnenyyry pbhefrf" erdhverzrag.
"Tvira gur nobir pbaqvgvbaf sbe G_vw, guvf lvryqf:
i_w = i_1 * G_1w / (G_1w - G_0w)"
Va bgure jbeqf vs V'z ernqvat vg evtug, va gur senzr bs ersrerapr jurer gur mrebgu fuvc vf cnexrq ng gur bevtva, nyy bgure fuvcf ner nyjnlf ba n yvar gung tbrf guebhtu gur bevtva. Lbh pna guvax bs gur cbfvgvbaf bs gur fuvcf va guvf senzr bs ersrerapr nf fvzcyl orvat gur qvfgnapr bs gubfr fuvcf sebz gur mrebgu fuvc (vapyhqvat va n senzr bs ersrerapr jurer gur mrebgu fuvc vf zbivat). Va juvpu pnfr gur fuvcf ner nyy fgvyy ng nyy gvzrf ba n fvatyr yvar, ohg abg arprffnevyl n svkrq yvar be bar gung tbrf guebhtu gur bevtva.
Naljnl guvf svgf jryy jvgu gur nafjre sebz Tatterdemalion. Va uvf irefvba jurer nyy gur fuvc'f jbeyqyvarf ner va n fvatyr cynar va gur 3-qvzragvbany fcnpr jurer gur m-nkvf vf gvzr, gur cynarf trarengrq ol g=m_0 ercerfrag gur fuvcf' cbfvgvbaf ng inevbhf zbzragf, naq gur vagrefrpgvba bs gur cynar jvgu gur fuvcf naq n g=m_0 cynar vf n yvar. Va bgure jbeqf, gur fnzr pbapyhfvba, gung nyy fuvcf ner ng nyy gvzrf ba n fvatyr yvar (ntnva gung yvar pna zbir).
Bapr lbh trg gurer, V guvax lbh trg gur nafjre jvgu gur pbaqvgvba gung gurl'er nyy zbivat jvgu gur fnzr fcrrq naq abg cnenyyry.
Cvpgher gur sbhe fuvcf va guerr qvzrafvbany fcnpr, jvgu gvzr nf gur guveq qvzrafvba, fb gung rnpu bs gurve pbhefrf vf n yvar, naq fuvcf zrrg vs gur yvarf vagrefrpg.
Fvapr rnpu cnve bs gur svefg guerr fuvcf zrrg, gubfr yvarf zhfg or pbcynane.
Fvapr gur sbhegu fuvc zrrgf gur svefg gjb, vgf cngu zhfg yvr va gung cynar gbb.
Naq gjb aba-cnenyyry yvarf va n cynar nyjnlf vagrefrpg.
>Prove that the fourth ship must also inevitably meet with the third one at some point
We all meet in the afterlife.
Done.
Fjnc gvzr qvzrafvba sbe n fcnpr qvzrafvba. Rnpu fuvc'f pbhefr vf abj n yvar va fcnpr. Gur svefg guerr yvarf ner va gur fnzr cynar. Fb vs gur sbhegu yvar vagrefrpgf jvgu gjb bs gubfr yvarf gura vg zhfg or ba gur fnzr cynar gbb, naq guhf fbzrjurer pebff gur guveq yvar.
[Changed this comment, because I didn't notice the question excludes the case when the three ships all meet at once! .. ]
I assume "constant speed" means a steady course as well. If the ships can change course then anything can happen!
Yes, steady course (I did say they weren't parallel to each other, but should've specified a straight line explicitly; can't edit anymore)
and as an aside, a steady course isn't in general the same as a constant heading. If the ship sails in a constant compass direction then it is usually changing course, slowly or otherwise. Near the poles for example it will be travelling in a spiral.
In case you didn't know this - if you meant constant speed (magnitude) as well as constant direction, the term that expresses it is constant velocity.
Another open thread... Another opportunity to wish everyone well.
Whoever you are, I hope you feel better - or if you are feeling down, at least not as bad.
Also please see this video of Gurdeep Pandher of the Yukon dancing:
https://www.threads.net/@gurdeeppandher/post/C091zzuLQB4
Why is inflation bad? I am not an economist, but it seems to me their explanations are woefully unpersuasive. I'll post my own attempt at answer in a subordinated comment, this is just a problem statement.
Normies will tell you that inflation is bad because it impoverishes them. Economists will tell you that is not necessarily true, but then fail to provide explanation why then we should be concerned inflation.
Here I am going to use as a foil an open source textbook from something called Rice university (here: https://openstax.org/details/books/principles-economics-3e). I’ve read, like, two to three another textbooks, and if my memory serves me well, their explanations of inflation costs are fairly similar.
Anyway, that textbook provides (https://openstax.org/books/principles-economics-3e/pages/22-4-the-confusion-over-inflation) following reasons why inflation is bad:
a) unintended redistribution of purchasing power between various groups in society, like creditors vs debtors. Well, ok, but the word “unintended” here is used strangely; what distributions of purchasing power are “intended”? Who is the one who intends?
It seems to me that uninteded redistributions of purchasing power in this broad sense happen all the time in societies not based on central planning, and economists are pretty chill about them, when inflation is not involved. E.g. new technology is invented which boosts wages of some workers and puts others out of work, price of oil falls on global markets, increasing incomes of people driving gasoline cars and depressing prospects of people dependent on electric vehicle sales, etc.
b) blurred price signals; explained as
>In a world where inflation is at a high rate, but bouncing up and down to some extent, does a higher price of a good mean that inflation has risen, or that supply of that good has decreased, or that demand for that good has increased? Should a buyer of the good take the higher prices as an economic hint to start substituting other products—or have the prices of the substitutes risen by an equal amount? Should a seller of the good take a higher price as a reason to increase production—or is the higher price only a sign of a general inflation in which the prices of all inputs to production are rising as well? The true story will presumably become clear over time, but at a given moment, who can say? [end quote]
Perhaps I am missing something, but this seems to me as authors being partly confused and partly making a big deal out of something trivial.
Inflation is in itself a price signal; if you are a producer and prices of the thing you are producing are going up together with prices of other things, it is absolutely rational to increase production compared to an alternative universe where prices are staying the same, given the same costs of production.
It is true that there are costs associated with checking whether your costs of production as before you fire up the machines, but those are imho almost negligible in a modern economy; as a producer of the thing you probably have an established mechanism to check your costs.
d) problems with long-term planning. This is the correct reason, although it is not connected with inflation in itself, but with an uncertainty about the future rate of inflation.
When you are reasonably confident that in next years, inflation will average around 2 %/year, your financial planning will be easier than when you think it could be anything from 1 % to 120 % per year. However.
Presumably the reason why difficulty of long-term planning is something to be avoided is because it messes up production; if companies do not know what will happen tomorrow, they’ll reduce production and lay off workers, right? Or workers would quit themselves and enter a barter economy or something. And if everyone is doing that, unemployment should go up, right? This indeed happens when a country enters an inflationary collapse territory, but it takes quite a lot of uncertainty about future inflation before employment starts being affected.
Not only are highly-above-2 % levels of inflation evidently compatible with low unemployment, but the the whole philosophy of inflation-fighting through interest rate hikes espoused by world’s central banks is based on an idea that sometimes it is worthwhile to reduce employment to bring inflation down. See results of so called Volcker disinflation in the 80s, when US unemployment rate hit a post-WW2 record, only to be outdone by a covid panic in 2020.
Maybe economists are slacking when writing textbook chapters on why inflation needs to be avoided because they think that an explanation is unnecessary - public already opposes inflation more than it should, so there is no immediate danger that it will turn pro-inflationary. From the same textbook:
>Economists usually oppose high inflation, but they oppose it in a milder way than many non-economists. Robert Shiller, one of 2013’s Nobel Prize winners in economics, carried out several surveys during the 1990s about attitudes toward inflation. One of his questions asked, “Do you agree that preventing high inflation is an important national priority, as important as preventing drug use or preventing deterioration in the quality of our schools?” Answers were on a scale of 1–5, where 1 meant “Fully agree” and 5 meant “Completely disagree.” For the U.S. population as a whole, 52% answered “Fully agree” that preventing high inflation was a highly important national priority and just 4% said “Completely disagree.” However, among professional economists, only 18% answered “Fully agree,” while the same percentage of 18% answered “Completely disagree.” [end quote]
Nevertheless, there isn’t widespread opposition among economists against crushing relatively mild (e.g. below 5 %) inflation by choking of credit supply and potentially increasing unemployment, so presumably they are ok with that. It’s just they haven’t bothered to provide a good explanation why.
Supply and demand don't just apply to the things you are buying with money, although that is generally a convenient shorthand. Money itself is also a thing with supply and demand. You can create high inflation by increasing the supply of money - but you can also create high inflation by decreasing the demand for money.
This may seem counterintuitive - why would low demand create inflation? But low demand creates a *decrease* in value. It may be easier understood as low demand for a specific amount of money - a dollar. You don't want a dollar as much if it isn't worth very much, compared to the things you want to spend it on. Which implies a nasty little feedback loop: High inflation decreases demand for money, increasing inflation.
We express this idea, often, in terms of "faith". Faith in the money supply. Lose faith in the money supply, and you can quickly get to hyperinflation, where the value of money is so volatile that it becomes difficult to actually use it. This is tied to expectations.
Outside that, there are wide classes of goods that are regarded as safe stores of value - real estate, for example. Even relatively mild inflation can increase investment in these safe stores of value, driving up the price - an increase in demand which doesn't make anybody better off, and makes many people worse off. So relatively mild inflation can make things like housing less affordable.
I think there's a problem with your question itself. It sounds similar to a question such as "Why is baldness bad?". There's a phenomenon, like bald heads, that just happens sometimes, and we might wonder whether it's bad, since if it isn't, there's no point spending effort on trying to change it.
But this is not what your question about inflation is like. It's more like, "Why is false advertising bad?". To answer this question as if false advertising is something that just happens, sort of like tornados or rat infestations, is to entirely miss the point. False advertising is almost always (apart from honest mistakes) a deliberate action by someone, that is aimed at obtaining an advantage for themselves (and their associates) by fraudulently acquiring wealth at the expense of other people. It's bad, for other people, to the extent they succeed in this goal.
Similarly, inflation is usually not some natural phenomenon that we need to decide how much effort to put into ameliorating. It's a deliberate policy, which benefits some people, and harms other people. Of course the people whom it benefits won't see it as bad. But everyone else should.
Now, without getting into the details, you may ask yourself who the likely beneficiaries of inflation are. Do you think it benefits the common people? Or is it more likely that the beneficiaries of inflation are the people who are responsible for it - the central bankers and the rich and powerful people with whom they are allied?
> Or is it more likely that the beneficiaries of inflation are the people who are responsible for it - the central bankers and the rich and powerful people with whom they are allied?
You are right to suspect that these institutions protect themselves. However they are not pro inflation (except low inflation) and that’s protecting themselves, often at the cost of jobs.
You're right that the powerful people who determine how much inflation there is might conceivably believe that their interests are best served either by high inflation or by low inflation. And for some years until recently, they did favour fairly low inflation of around 2% per year - though note that this "low" rate halves the value of money in just 35 years. However, historically, fiat money has usually been debased at a higher rate than that, so I don't think one can conclude that they usually think their interests are served by low inflation.
It's also not necessarily a zero-sum situation - perhaps the interests of the common people and those in power coincide with regard to inflation rate. I think this might be true if those in power were thinking long-term. But they may not be, because there's no guarantee that those in power will be able to stay in power, so there may be a tendency to get what they can now.
Apriori it isn't implausible that inflation redistributes wealth downwards - from rich (who are more likely to be creditors) to poor (who are more likely to be debtors). I know that in practice it is considerably more complicated, but still
The first response, which you hinted at, is that economists don’t think low inflation is a bad thing, they consider it a good thing. Deflation is the bugbear.
The problem with high inflation is that it can obviously reduce people’s wages and savings.
Now if you are talking about a situation where wages continue to increase more than inflation there are also price signalling issues with that, and people never feel as well off as in low inflation environments - the ever changing numbers confuse people.
What’s good though is that relative debt is reduced - mortgages get more affordable relative to incomes. And that’s also true of the debt to gdp for a country that borrows in its own currency.
> What’s good though is that relative debt is reduced - mortgages get more affordable relative to incomes. And that’s also true of the debt to gdp for a country that borrows in its own currency.
I do not think that this is true in equilibrium for a constant inflation. If you have an inflation of X, and assuming that there are alternative assets which are not subject to devaluation (e.g. gold), I would expect the interest rates demanded from borrowers to be X+P, where P is some positive rate. If you can't turn a profit by lending, you should obviously invest your money elsewhere.
Likewise, a country with a high inflation will not get good credit conditions for borrowing its own currency.
Also, most contracts specify wages, rent and the likes in non-inflation-adjusted terms. So a nonzero inflation creates some additional coordination costs (like worker strikes for inflation compensation). I think negative interests would be a better alternative to inflation, but then one needs some way to devaluate banknotes to make hoarding them unattractive.
> I do not think that this is true in equilibrium for a constant inflation.
I was thinking of a burst of inflation. Mortgages are fixed in the US so high inflation (where wages keep up) reduce the real cost of the payments.
And see here.
https://www.investorschronicle.co.uk/news/2023/04/28/why-inflation-isn-t-eroding-our-national-debt/
> IMF economists noted last month that unexpected inflation is eroding the real value of government debt again today. Their analysis found that for countries with a debt-to-GDP ratio of more than 50 per cent, each percentage point of unexpected inflation reduces public debt by 0.6 per cent of GDP – with the effect lasting for several years. As the chart shows, this exerted a downward force on government debt in both advanced and developing economies last year.
This doesn’t apply to inflation that gets locked in as interest rates w I’ll increase permanently.
All true. However that last part happens gradually and takes a while to be tangible for most people, while the other effects happen visibly in real time. So for most people a high-inflation period feels crappy for a good while before they see the positive impact. And in a national economy consumer sentiment is not just a indicator of national mood it is also a significant factor in the economy's performance at any given moment.
Does anyone know of work on the information costs of high inflation? In addition to loss of value, there's the challenge of keeping track of prices.
So my explanation (low epistemic confidence):
Economists classify inflation, quite sensibly, into two types - supply-driven or demand-driven. Supply-driven inflation means there is less overall stuff in the economy at a given price, and demand stays unchanged, so, stuff costs more. Demand-driven inflation means that supply stays the same, but demand increases, so, again, stuff costs more.
In practice, both kinds of inflation might occur at the same time - e.g. demand driven inflation might follow supply driven inflation because after a general rise in prices banks might succumb to a pressure to erode consumer credit standards, allowing more money into an economy. But theoretically they are distinct.
Evidently, supply-driven inflation is more of a symptom of an underlying problem of the interruption of supply - rise in prices is one possible reaction to it, other is rationing. Those alternative approaches have their advantages and disadvantages, but they are both suboptimal solutions compared to a restoration of supply.
It is a demand-driven inflation that lies in the heart of the problem. By definition, it occurs when people on average decide, for whatever reason, to spent more on consumption, i.e. when they save less from the same income, or when their incomes increase and their savings rate stays the same or increases less than income.
When people start spending more on consumption, there is a bunch of industries providing that consumption. If labor market is working, those industries respond by hiring or at least trying to hire more people, with wages in those industries consequently increasing. When are they getting those new workers? Perhaps from the ranks of the until-now unemployed. But eventually , as there will be too few unemployed with required skills, more and more workers pouring into “consumption industries” will switch from jobs that do not experience an increase in demand because of inflation. And those are a) public services, and b) investment, i.e. production of capital goods.
In economics parlance, investment is a word for a production of capital, i.e. of wealth, of stuff that, if privately owned, is supposed to make money to its owner. Obviously the reason why people pay for using capital equipment is that it is useful for producing consumption goods and services. Classic example is a machine in a factory, but, like, movie production is an investment, with its result, copyrighted movie, being a capital good. Most important category of investment in our time is residential construction, with residential housing in many countries worth more than all other capital put together.
Underinvestment, i.e. underproduction of capital goods, leads over time fairly obviously to suboptimal outcomes. It is easy to imagine bad things would happen if all employment would be redirected from producing capital goods to consumption. Most obviously, buildings would fall apart and, by definition, no one would construct new ones.
But: it would seem that increased consumption would lead to an increase in prices of capital goods and thus everything would stay in its place? Like, if people are willing to spent more on shelter, revenues of construction companies should go up. Well, maybe.
Direct consumption producing workers can by by definition paid directly from consumer spending, but this is not possible for workers producing capital. In China households apparently sometimes pay in advance to developers for apartments that are to be constructed; this looks weird to us in the US and the EU, but our own system of financing investment is far more complicated.
With producers of capital goods need to borrow money to bridge the time gap between increases in wages of consumption workers and increased revenue from investment. Of course some of them might be able to borrow money from themselves, in the form of reduced profit, but others can’t or don’t want to. So, they need cooperation from banks and similar financial actors. And that is where a rubber of markets adjusting efficiently to equilibrium meets the road of rational risk avoidance slash financial bureaucracy of lawyers, bank compliance officers, regulators etc. Real world provision of credit is thus unlikely to prevent wages in investment industries from falling behind consumption industries.
It is worth noting that if the system would be able to increase wages in investment industries so well that they would not suffer job drain to consumption, after exhausting the pool of unemployed workers with required skills real consumption would not increase despite increased consumption spending.
So, at least a priori, there are reasons why an inflationary wave, or more precisely, increased wages of workers in consumption industries caused by an inflationary wave, would lead to a decline in private investment. Also to underprovision of public services, where the mechanism is imho more obvious - if wages of soldiers decline compared to wages of consumption workers, of course an army will have a recruitment problem.
So, why our chosen weapon of inflation fighting is hiking of interest rates? (even lower epistemic confidence)
Choking of credit supply is something that seems to hit investment hard, so if the goal of fighting inflation is to protect private investment, it does not seem to make sense to fight inflation the way we do it.
But details matter: central banks fight inflation by hiking short-term interest rates. Maybe the real purpose of that operation is to make long-term lending, crucial for long-term investment, relatively more attractive compared to short-term lending? If that would be the case, Fed seems to be quite successful in that goal.
One month rate on US government debt is currently higher than 30 year rate, since investors expect dramatic declines in short term rates.
Yet, I suspect that current mode of inflation fighting is suboptimal and is in place primarily because of historical path dependency. Perhaps something like operative tax hikes on discretionary consumption in the event of demand-driven inflationary spike would be better?
>"So, why our chosen weapon of inflation fighting is hiking of interest rates? (even lower epistemic confidence)"
It's actually not, despite that being the way it's usually discussed.
High interest rates can be a symptom of either tight or loose money.
In the the former (inflation-fighting) case, the Fed sells Treasuries; that takes money out of circulation (which is what actually reduces inflation) while simultaneously driving the prices of Treasuries down (which mechanically increases their interest rates).
The latter case is just the credit market accounting for already high inflation and demanding to be compensated. Real value of debts can only be reduced by *unanticipated* inflation, and that trick stops working real fast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErMSHiQRnc8&ab_channel=AlanBecker
Remember Animation vs. Math? This is a new one by the same person. I'd say it's not as concept-dense, but the special effects are spectacular.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1J6Ou4q8vE&t=156s
Thanks for sharing, this was excellent to watch (especially the Math one).
I think you meant to link to Animation vs. Physics?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErMSHiQRnc8
So far, I still like vs. Math better, but vs. Physics is growing on me fast.
I put in links to both of them.
Gah, you're right, I didn't check thoroughly enough and thought the top link was Alan Becker's general channel.
Something about the music along with the content makes me able to watch vs.Math again and again.
Is there any advice for being less toxic when playing multiplayer games? Sometimes I engage in toxic behavior like flaming my allies for their mistakes, and I always end up regretting it. Intellectually, I should know better, but sometimes monkey brain wins and it just happens.
This also happens when playing with people I know, especially if there's a large skill gap. Why do I care so much about winning rather than enjoying spending time with others? Even when I like someone, if we lose too many games in a row I'll just get frustrated and have to take a break.
It's important to recognize that these games run on narcissism. They encourage you to scapegoat others when your ego gets bruised. You might find it helpful to:
A) Focus on your own locus of control.
-- Pretend it's soloplayer. Your allies might as well be NPC's. Treat their actions as you would the output of a random number generator.
-- Focus on the next objective. You can't change the past, and you can't change your present circumstances, so there's little point dwelling on either.
B) Adopt a process-oriented attitude, rather than a results-oriented attitude.
-- It's not about winning, it's about learning. Be willing to experiment. Lose is improve. I guarantee your own gameplay has leaks you don't even notice.
-- "But I played perfectly and still lost." Watch out, we got a bonjwa over here! But in the unlikely case that you did, rejoice. You've fulfilled your obligations in the eyes of God.
C) Find humor in chaos.
-- Ya'll are just monkeys banging on a keyboard. There's an ongoing youtube series I follow called The Florencio Files [0], where an SC2 streamer named Flo gets his matches sports-casted by another streamer named Pig. The schtick is that Flo deliberately gravitates towards absurd, cheese strats just because it's hilarious to watch opponents struggle while outside of their comfort zone. The victory per se is less important than the psychological warfare.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hGsrlWElnU&list=PLFUDU8AOevUfznFLMRCxI0ez9HZTyL6Tk
Stop playing League of Legends with randos and instead get some friends to play with you consistently.
Played League for many years. My best advice is to reframe everything as being your own fault. There is almost always more you could do to support your allies in League (namely, roaming to other lanes to help them at the expense of your own). Even your teammates flaming out is just you not being encouraging enough. I'm not sure whether this a healthier worldview, but I do think that it makes you less likely to flame and an overall better player
it's not worth playing competitive multiplayer games.
The psychic cost of losing is just too strong and will always color the experience. The games are set up so someone always loses, and secondary mechanics like rankings or rewarding organized team play kind of add to the sting rather than mitigate it.
You also can't even remain effective; the game always changes so one patch and the character you like becomes substantially weaker or unexpected buffs can cause a cancerous meta that isnt fun to play against. And over time the skill level of all players rises, so many people lose more and more because their rate of improvement is slower than average. they get better yet lose more.
i think honestly the games are the problem; best thing i did was to quit them. i dont think its possible to play them long term or with any level of involvement and not have to deal with tilting.
I have a friend who suffers this too, especially if he plays Overwatch after a tough day at work and he's all stressed out. One trick that always distracts him is playing games in chat. If we're getting stomped by some smurf on the other team we'll be like "wow I can't believe you guys are beating us even though [insert really good player here] is throwing!". Other favorites are telling the other team they C9'ed when they clearly didn't, or saying "wow I can't believe you guys had that thrower" at the end of the game to see if you can get the other team to start fighting with each other. If that doesn't work, a couple of beers usually helps.
I play Chess and simply flame myself.
I would seriously suggest that as an attempt; play a solo game you're really bad at, lose in ways that are unambiguously your own fault, and when you get back to multiplayer games you'll likely be more chill about what other people are doing.
I've also got cheap plastic furniture that can be kicked apart pretty easily and/or hurled across the room. It's good for the heart and acceptable for the wallet.
Try a different game. Many competitive games are set up in a way that makes people cross.
My personal favourite -- and the only game I ever play online with strangers -- is Deep Rock Galactic. Player versus environment with the game built on a model that rewards cooperation. In-game communication is "automated" in the sense that you make inputs which cause your character to say voice lines, and this removes much of the temptation to be abusive as well.
The community is about 95-98% non-toxic as a result. There are occasional assholes but no more than that. People make a point of tolerating or even welcoming players with less experience or ability.
More of Scott's old travel posts: in "Stuff" (https://archive.ph/x1Hpm https://sharetext.me/wb5wbwiukp), Scott ascends Mt. Fuji and not much good comes out of it. Then in "Stuff" (https://archive.ph/zxkK8 https://sharetext.me/a1aotukelw) he goes to visit the infamous Yasukuni Jinja. The true winner of WWII is revealed, and the duplicity of the Chinese is laid bare.
I was surprised to learn from the latter link that India was "temporarily liberated by the Japanese".
From https://bigthink.com/health/tiny-biobots-surprise-their-creators-by-healing-wound/
> Neural repair: As a test of the little biobots, the Tufts team created a 2D layer of neurons in a petri dish and then scratched it with a metal rod. They then place a dense concentration of anthrobots on part of the “wound.”
> Surprisingly, their presence seemed to encourage healing — new neurons grew below the anthrobots, but not on gaps that were left uncovered.
It sounds like a big deal, but I am no biologist. Anyone would like to chime in?
Mostly hype. You're not going to put these "biobot" cell aggregate in anyone's brain or spinal cord.
Still, the self-organization aspect of the "biobots" is pretty cool.
This year’s review of Why Nations Fail suggests it’s not very good. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-why-nations-fail The comments on the review seem to agree.
Is there a better book that tackles this, but is aimed at the same audience?