The new Alligator Alcatraz facility is supposed to cost $450 million a year, and with 5000 detainees, that's about $250 per day. Looking at the quality of the infrastructure, isn't that absurdly high?
I made a web app that scans ingredient lists (including photos of them) for concerning ingredients from a variety of sources, including Scott's Obscure Pregnancy Interventions. While it's primarily designed for skincare and topical products with kid-focused branding, it's useful for anyone who cares about this kind of thing, not just parents or those who are pregnant. It's free if you want to try it. parentscan.net
If there will soon be millions of robot workers, then it means the cost of skilled physical labor will sharply drop, and many projects that were unaffordable will become affordable. Does this mean the old museum ships like the USS Missouri will be modernized and reactivated? I think it would be awesome to see it plying the waves with a cyborg captain and a robot crew while it blasts the enemy using lasers and railguns alongside the old 16 inch guns.
Can someone explain to me why everyone started calling missiles "drones"?
I'm very confused.
I keep hearing that "drones" are this groundbreaking revolutionary weapon. Isn't it amazing, a "drone" flies straight to a tank and explodes! That's pretty old technology, it's called a guided missile. How come everyone treats it as revolutionary and calls it "drones"?
How come American cruise missiles are called "missiles" but Iranian cruise missiles are called "drones"? I hear all the time about the latest Iranian volley of "missiles and drones", like it's a distinction that matters and you're not allowed to just say missiles.
Is it because a drone can land? Can all drones land?
But how can this definition of "drone" be compatible with their reputation for being revolutionary? People say drones are revolutionary because they're "cheap" and "expendable", what does the ability to land have to do with being cheap and expendable???
Instead of missiles that look like helicopters, why can't armies simply use missiles that look like missiles (thus not "drones" by that definition), and are as cheap and expendable as "drones"?
A rocket is cheap, and goes faster than a mini-helicopter. If the elements that grant a "drone" remote control/AI, vision and steering exist in a cheap and expendable mini-helicopter, why not in a cheap and expendable rocket?
Then why is everyone worried about how to counter "drone swarms"? Why not missile swarms? What does the ability to send information back have to do with being cheap and expendable and a swarm?
They ARE worried about missile swarms too! And have been since the Second World War. Drones are the NEW thing to worry about.
I agree that the existence of autonomous drones muddies this distinction, but I suppose ultimately, the practical difference is what kind of defense you need against them, and if there are two kinds of missiles needing different countermeasures, calling one kind by a different name is sensible.
But why do most of the cheap suicide drones look like helicopters instead of rockets? I find it bizarre that when soldiers want to take out a vehicle, instead of launching a guided rocket at it like in the olden days, now they launch a guided helicopter at it. What's the advantage, compared to a rocket? Everyone says the helicopter (what they call a "drone") is cheaper, but how can a helicopter be cheaper than a rocket (all else being equal)?
If I google "drone swarm" and "missile swarm" (in brackets, to ensure that the whole phrase is searched for as a whole) the former gets 50 times more hits.
"As advanced cruise missiles approach their target, remote operators can use a camera in the nose of the missile to see what the missile sees. This gives them the option to manually guide the missile to its target or to abort the strike."
Which seems to contradict your explanation of what sets apart drones from missiles.
When they're missiles, it's called a "barrage" instead. Basically the same idea, but they're traditionally coördinated only at launch and not during flight.
As I said, yes, modern tech makes the distinction is fuzzy. The point is that there are two qualitatively different kinds of long range offensive weapons.
because drones ('helicopters') can loiter; return to base after dropping a payload; are human-guided and can use on-the-fly decision making by the controller; can be retasked to specific target or aimpoint; can be very, very precisely guided (i.e. stop when they see a defense; find a hole in it; then fly through that hole), are not as heavy as rocket engines (but are slower); can be easily adapted (i..e different warhead); can serve purpose as reconnaissance or repeater platforms; can land next to a road containing potential targets, shut their rotors off, and wait until a vehicle passes. All of these are obvious if you watched a few day's worth of footage from the Ukraine war.
>how can a helicopter be cheaper than a rocket
scale. The drone consumer market made construction at scale possible.
Technically you could have some of these in a rocket, but not all, and not for the price of a drone.
Shouldn’t predictive processing theory be having a larger effect on personal and clinical psychology? I feel like it’s still a kind of a secret that reality is not actually poring into us through the orifices in our heads…
I ask periodically, and this is one of the few places I won't be seen as obnoxiously well off, so: ~45M, no wife/kids (my fears of divorce settlements were probably decisive though there were of course other factors), net worth roughly $2M in taxable brokerage (mostly index funds), $1M in retirement accounts (same), est. 30-40 year life expectancy given actuarial data. Currently earning about $400K gross at a woke job I secretly hate, save about $200K/yr all told, roughly $75K spend (I really need to give up the book-buying; I did *not* need that Arkham House first edition).
What should I do with the remainder of my life? Any ideas?
I've given up on the novel idea; it would take too long to get good at writing, and I don't expect the current trend toward mostly-female literary audiences to reverse in my lifetime. Also, I've realized ChatGPT is a better writer than I am.
I'm resentful of feminism, but all the manosphere guys tend to have a 'meathead' aesthetic I probably can't pull off. Other than that my politics are in a weird in-between place where I don't really want to help either side.
Is there anything that grieves you about the state of the world? Not politics, that'll just depress you. But does it bother you that science isn't progressing quickly enough? That architecture in your city isn't beautiful or functional? That people die of preventable disease? That we don't have some awesome technology you dreamed about as a kid? Or something much smaller would work too. Quit the job you hate, and find a way to work on it.
Generic advice follows, but maybe you need some...
A steady stream of minor achievements or acheiving mini goals can be pleasurable. Have fun! In some sense, a sense of progress = fun.
If your work is actively making you unhappy, and you have achieved financial independence, consider optimizing your life around more meaningful work.
If you actively *hate* your work, you are probably going to be somewhat unhappy. To mangle a quote, happiness is when your thoughts, feelings, and actions are aligned.
Join a writers club near you! Take workshops along the way to understand structuring, techniques, and get practice. If you see a novel as the way to influence the world, then maybe recognize that and find better ways to do so. Why do you want to write? Fiction? Character exploration? If you *really* want so see a novel happen, you can lower your expectations and write a bad novel. And build from there.
I don't think I'd influence the world; I'm not that grandiose. (It's quite possible I'm not egotistical enough to be a great artist.) I used to look at all the sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks as a kid in Barnes and Noble and dream of seeing my name up there with a fun colorful cover, but now the market has shifted.
Consider picking up skiing if you don't already. It's a sport you can reasonably do for the next 35-40 years, and incredibly enjoyable.
Otherwise it's always an upgrade in life if you can build something of your own, where you're your own boss. My dad worked in construction until he was 45, saved much of his excess income, then partnered with his best friend to build a Marina. Now he's in his 80s and runs a small lumber yard using 18th century technology. He's one of the most satisfied people I've ever seen.
Help fulfill Thich Nhat Hanh's prediction that the next "Buddha" will be a Sangha (small group) rather than an individual!
Or your preferred non-Buddhist equivalent: Help humanity achieve its untapped potential by the synergy of small groups with big goals
Or your preferred non-small-group equivalent. Help humanity achieve the next generation in human cooperation: our best chance for bottom-up AI safety (plus solves many other problems for free if we can do it)
Hehe, thanks! I really can't see myself as a Buddha. Way too selfish. I'm pretty morally average.
Thing about targeted charity is I don't have the interpersonal awareness to tell when I'm being scammed. (A big reason my investments are so vanilla!) I feel like I'd just toss a bunch of money at some dude who'd use it to run a cult.
I'm not touching any of the AI stuff. People know way more about it than me.
I remember going around this with the pronatalists on here a while back and people seemed to agree giving the kid an old dad was kind of wrong. Plus I'm honestly kind of lazy, selfish, and self-absorbed. I don't do much damage to others on my own but if kids are involved I'd be a shitty dad.
David Deida recommends locking yourself in a remote cabin with no distractions -- no phone, no books or magazines etc -- and just thinking. Stay there until you find a purpose.
His book "Way of the Superior Man" is a good read. It was published in 1997 and not infected with 21st century feminism or manosphere.
Ah, between the end of the cold war and the coming of the age of woke. (Yes, that was an oblique Conan reference; I love that line.) I think I'll check out the book, thanks!
Take a two-year sabbatical. Go try stuff and see what you like. One strong recommendation and then a few suggestions.
Recommendation: move. If you're in a woke job, you probably live in a woke place (although SF/NY/LA seem unlikely on $75k annual spend). You dramatically underestimate how liberating it is to live in any unwoke area/culture and how much resentment rises from feeling trapped, at least in my case. Do not live life with a mask on around people who hate you; it's doable but it really sucks.
If kids are important, there's a big beautiful world of women who would be very interested in a foreign multimillionaire. Some people really like travel, you might or might not, but dating in the US clearly isn't working for you so try something else.
Lots of guys who are...kinda manosphere, more mellow, are really into hiking. Very peaceful, very calming.
One thing to consider is that at your wealth, money gets weird. Let's say you keep withdrawing $75k/year but cease working. At 8% real growth, you'll still be at almost $4 million at 50 and ~$7.5 million at 60. It just keeps growing and it grows in doubles, so $1->$2 takes as long as $5-$10.
Try spending money on yourself. Buy nice shoes. Buy nice socks. A lot of...our kind of people dramatically underestimate how nice this can be. If you're spending <$30/pair on underwear, go try this: https://www.bn3th.com/products/classic-boxer-brief-black. Your nuts will float on a cloud of silk, carefully out of the way of any potential harm or...awkward sitting. You just...wakeup one day and realize you can't remember the last time you accidentally scrunched "the boys" and it's nice. Spending money is hard because spending money is super easy, spending money on things that actually make you happy is an underappreciated skill.
Take a road trip across America, stop by the ACX meetups in every city. You'll have an awesome time and see a lot of cool people.
Why are you still working? Mental hangups? I feel that.
I'm not sure I'd be better off in a more 'red' area is the thing (and yes I am being cagey about my location for obvious reasons). I'm very much a product of deep blue America and look more Mediterranean and have a suspiciously large nose; I understand the reasons for rural antisemitism (am half, nonpracticing, other half's Southern European) but don't really think 'hey, I support immigration restriction' is going to keep a brick from coming through my window.
I thought a multimillionaire was in the hundreds of millions; I could theoretically retire but would have to watch money carefully...and in the case of a crash or something could be wiped out. Sure, according to all the FIRE calculators I could walk out tomorrow, but...I don't know. I have a lot less faith in this country's stability than I have in a long time (like I said, politically homeless). Maybe the dollar gets hyperinflated or crashes, maybe I get sick and can't get health insurance or the expenses wipe me out... of course no matter what I do I will die eventually, so it's a matter of when to cash out.
I don't want to get into the dating thing; it's complicated and I do *not* expect dating advice from ACX readers, we're all nerds here!
I actually do plan to donate leftover assets to prostate cancer research (this might be a case where 'earn to give' might actually make sense), though my parents are still alive, so if I predecease them I'd rather let them have it to smooth out their remaining years.
Thanks! That is a fun idea. At this age, though, I'm not going to pick up the coding skills and I don't have the familiarity with the medium over the past 30 years or so...I think the last game I played the heck out of was DOOM 2 (EDIT: Final Fantasy 7).
I goofed around with RPG Maker a little. I had fun, but the videogame space seems so hugely crowded these days I doubt anyone would play it. Also there's a whole culture that's built up around it I have little familarity with...raids, griefing, spawn point camping, too many things to name.
I understand that failures are a normal part of a rocket testing process, and SpaceX "iterative development" philosophy in particular is bound to have a lot of them. I am not implying neither that the Starship is "doomed", nor that it "should" progress much faster. But it looks to me like there are two very different trend lines here.
From the beginning of Starship high-altitude testing and then for integrated flight tests 1 through 6 we see steady improvements, where basically each flight goes a bit better than the previous one. Then for flight tests from 7 onwards we switch to a different mode, where it looks like each flight only discovers additional problems (flights 7-9 all had various problems with the ship, and the ship for flight 10 blew up during the static fire).
I notice that I am confused here. It looks like there is some latent variable which changed between flights 6 and 7, switching them from one mode to another. Does anyone have reasonable ideas for what this could be?
Some hypotheses (not necessarily plausible, just things that *would* explain the change if they somehow turned out to be true):
* Starship block 2 problems. Basically, there were some serious design problems with block 2, leading to it having not one but at least 3 different failure causes. If this is the case, why was their design *so* bad, much worse than block 1?
* Musk problems. Maybe for some reason Musk's supervision and decision making are crucial to SpaceX success. Then between November 2024 and January 2025 he became much more busy with the government, didn't have enough time for SpaceX, and the problems followed.
* China intervention. Maybe the CCP decided that SpaceX was progressing a little too smoothly a little too fast and gave an order to sabotage them somehow? (Again, I don't have any model for this, I really have no idea whether this is even possible, let alone plausible)
* The gods are angry with them. Maybe the coin really happened to first land on heads 6 times, and then land on tales 4 times after that.
"Block 1" was the first iteration of starship that was used for the first 6 flight tests. "Block 2" which is slightly larger with significantly more ambitious internals, has been used from flight 7 onward.
I think it's too much of a coincidence for the first 6 flights to go incrementally better each time, then the next 3 launches to all have unique mission-ending problems with the updated starship design. It looks like they got the booster right judging by its incredible success at both catching, and reusing it, but something is definitely wrong in Block 2.
I wouldn't update too much on it. They are extremely ambitious with every new development, and although SpaceX innovates quickly, at launch you're looking at rockets that were designed at least a year earlier. S35, the Starship that launched most recently in May began construction back in October 2024, about 3 months before the first Block 2 Starship, S33 Failed. Thus, very few lessons from S33 could have been used for S35, if any at all. And certainly no lessons were learned from after RUD, which for flight 7 and 8 was before the problems seen in flight 9.
It's of course a bad sign that they have had multiple failures in a row, as any test failure is. However, if you look at SpaceX as designing a Starship manufacturing system as much as Starship itself, then the loss of any individual rocket isn't actually that big of a deal. Combine that with infinite money for all practical purposes, and while each failure sets the mission back, it doesn't move it meaningfully towards cancelation. As is, they have the largest rocket booster on the planet that they've successfully reused (this is truly an insane accomplishment), the highest output rocket engine production facility on the planet (with so far high demonstrated reliability, at least on the booster), and a factory capable of producing an accelerating number of Starships and boosters. They are also building literally a second version of the entire setup they have in Texas, in Florida, which will add some serious redundancy, an internal spirit of competition, and allow for significantly faster launch cadence.
What I read (and maybe someone more into the subject can comment whether this makes sense) is that the first couple of flights revealed that the engines could not deliver the expected thrust, and hence, deliver the expected payload to orbit. So the rocket's design was revised with an emphasis on saving weight. Designing a rocket always means operating on the very edge of what's possible in terms of materials science, and trying to shave off a few percent of weight may have pushed "Starship" from "yeah, with a little luck" into "nope" territory.
While you're right the new design, Block 2, was largely designed with weight savings in mind (anything saved on the reusable 2nd stage is a fraction of the gained payload due to the rocket equation), lack of engine thrust is not the primary driver of that.
The engines have actually over performed on thrust and SPI. They've adjusted the design to make it larger, with a higher target mass to orbit to accommodate for that increased thrust.
When I became a parent, two things happened (well more than two really but there's two I want to talk about now):
- I appreciated my own parents more
- I became familiar with dealing with the disgusting and unpleasant parts of daily life in order to support another human that I loved who couldn't take care of themselves.
Now my mother is physically disabled and my father has dementia, and I find I rely on these two benefits of having children in the care that I now help to provide for them.
Which makes me wonder: is there any research on the different attitudes to caring for elderly relatives among child-free people compared to people who are parents themselves?
I'd be very interested in any research like that. Anecdotally, I suspect there's a large difference.
I'm child free and have a disabled parent who lives in a care facility. I didn't put her there, but after living with her in both circumstances, I found it a lot easier to participate in the process when she was in a care facility.
People who've had children are absolutely more confident in handling the disabled, in my experience, but I do also sometimes think that's a bad thing.
Disabled people are not children or perfect innocent angels but seem to be commonly bucketed into one of those mental categories by the able bodied who are not familiar with disability in their personal life. I think some caregivers never update how they care for someone and default to whatever they learned as a parent taking care of their baby, and get frustrated with disabled adults being "difficult".
I think caregiving is going to be very important in the years to come and do worry that some child free people who have not challenged themselves in other areas of life will find themselves failing to help people they love because they never got over their "yuck" reflex or learned how to do boring, tedious, necessary things for the benefit of someone less capable.
Interesting. I’m not sure I share either of those experiences.
> - I appreciated my own parents more
I wouldn’t say that becoming a parent has made me appreciate my parents *less* – both before and after I became a parent, I appreciated them a lot. but I do think becoming a parent has made me focus more on parenting choices, and realize areas where they made parenting choices that I think were incorrect. (At least, according to my value system.) As a result, while I still appreciate the effort they took, I now have a slightly more mixed view of their parenting in general.
> - I became familiar with dealing with the disgusting and unpleasant parts of daily life in order to support another human that I loved who couldn't take care of themselves.
as far as this goes, although I haven’t faced the issue of elder care yet, I anticipate that the largest difficulty there will be emotional rather than physical. For example, if I need to change a diaper on one of my parents, I don’t anticipate that the physically gross nature of the task will be much of a problem compared to the emotional aspect of them, being embarrassed by the assistance/feeling shame.
And that’s obviously not an issue I face when changing my baby’s diaper, so I’m not sure it has prepared me for elder care in that meaningful of a way.
There has been a really interesting discussion about school in the book reviews, so now I am curious. In m’y European country, not only are options severely constrained, people typically view teaching as something that doesn’t mix well with a parenting relationship, so you delegate it all.
So, if you have school-aged children, do you teach them reading / math / Anglo-Saxon poetry / oboe playing yourself (in addition, or instead of teachers, whether public or private) ?
How did it go ? Do you use AI ? How much time does it take ?
I have children that are not yet ‘school age.’ I’ve taught them to read (using phonics) and they’re working on arithmetic. I intend to teach them all I can myself, and get tutors for things like music where I’m not very talented. I don’t intend to send them to school.
Teaching them to read took about 20-30m per day for about a year. It’s occasionally frustrating but the rewards greatly exceed it. I don’t have any idea what I would use an LLM for in teaching my kids (besides the usual stuff I use them for, like finding citations/sources and conducting starting research on subjects).
> people typically view teaching as something that doesn’t mix well with a parenting relationship, so you delegate it all.
I would be very interested in hearing more about this. From my (admittedly American) perspective, so much of inherent parenting seems to basically be teaching e.g. potty training, teaching manners, teaching how to eat food and not throw it on the floor, etc. How does that fit in with a social norm that teaching doesn’t mix well with a parenting relationship? Or am I misunderstanding you?
Whenever I talk about teaching my children to read / music / a language I speak / whatever, parents here tell me that 1) school will do that them better than me 2) they should enjoy their childhood and not learn to read, etc too soon 3) it is dangerous to take on the role of teacher when you are a parent, because those are not the same.
This mostly means that you have to fight with the children in order to make them listen and focus, and that a third person (like a teacher), whose relationship with your children is less emotional, can teach them more effectively.
After Covid and school closures, mort parents I know had a horrible time trying to force their kids to watch Zoom class while working from home and never wanted to do it again. So all you people teaching your kids must have tools or skills that they don’t !
I am also really curious because it seems so hard to find the time to have regular learning sessions with the children during the week while working, so I wondered how you fit that in your schedules. But that must be very individual and family-dependent.
Been thinking about the entire Alpha School vs normal school thing. When my parents went to school in rural Denmark in the 1970s they had 900 hours of teaching in 7th grade (so round 4.5 hours per day + homework ), and used a lot of the same motivation methods as the Alpha school dies . Currently it seems the US public schools have 1000 to 1100 hours per year. In 2013 we tried in Denmark to demand 1200 hours (so 6 hours per day). Despite this academic standards kept slipping, and the reverse Flynn effect are still taking away 3 IQ points per decade.
So it seems that actually the amount of hours above some limit is not very important. Perhaps with some simple incitament system even normal schools could go down to 800 hours per year + some homework and keep their current standard. That would not be very far from the ~600 hours studying that Alpha seems to be using.
Maybe culture in general has become stupider and schools have to try to compensate for this. Culture both in terms of medium and content. Eg people spontaneously read less because of TV or the internet. Music becomes less complex. And culture values ”coolness” over accomplishment (which is ”square”).
And that certainly aligns with what I'm seeing amongst my younger Millennial and Gen Z coworkers. They can't seem to absorb basic written information from emails or shift reports, nor can they adequately convey extremely basic information in writing. We are a high-end, service-centered luxury product, but they literally aren't able to put together so much as, "On Monday July 7 approx 9 AM, client complained that widget wasn't performing third state of widgeting. Widget analyst checked and says widget needs to be replaced, not repaired, will perform between noon and 1p. Offered client 50% off this widgeting as apology, client seemed satisfied."
Maybe they read more words but fewer challenging texts. I have understood college professors have experienced a decline in the reading comprehension skills of undergraduates over the last few decades.
My expectation is that they're learning just as much, but different things. Certainly reading extended text with a plot is different from browsing blogs.
I've been wresting for decades whether libertarian ideas are right and wrong, eventually I ran across an interesting one. Do not see the market as an institution, like a bunch of businesses, but as a meta-institution evolving other institutions, it can evolve something like a government if that is best. Okay, but in that case shouldn't there be a partnership with the real government, and the real government helping that kind of market-government out?
Imagine the kind of town where half the population is working in the same privately owned mine. I think it is necessary that the town government and the mine will have a complicated partnership. The government needs to regulate against some abuses, but cannot possibly treat the mine as some sort of an unfriendly entity, they have to help them a lot, in order to secure those jobs. What I cannot imagine is being entirely neutral and indifferent to the mine, libertarian style.
The short version is competition, incentives and safeguards. It's not about companies being better than states; All large organizations eventually suck if they have no competition, no good incentives, and no safeguards.
A market of many, minimally regulated companies offering similar products and employing similar workers will naturally gravitate towards efficiency to extract more money from each product and/or get a greater share of the market by undercutting the competition, and naturally gravitate towards better pay and better conditions for the workers because otherwise those will go elsewhere. Not perfectly so, and if you let them get away with it they will probably try to employ cartel tactics to get more, but as a general direction they will do these things. Markets also have the advantage that accommodating different people is a legitimate way of carving out a safe niche for yourself (though again there are some shitty tactics here).
Democracies also have, in principle, these components. But they tend to select most strongly for the things that sound good, as opposed to the things that actually work well, and they have a tendency to enforce the same thing for everyone. Nevertheless, you need some entity to oversee that the companies do not employ cartel and other shitty tactics, and democracies seem to be the least bad of the bunch.
The very worst is bureaucracies. Bureaucracies exist in most states, they are not voted in, they do not have to survive competition, their only incentives are rent seeking, entrenching themselves and insulating themselves. In many states, bureaucracies have successfully managed to make the democratic state dependent on itself as necessary middle managers. Likewise, large companies have realized that they can enter a symbiotic relationship with the bureaucracy through excessive regulation, wherein they insulate themselves from new competition by making entry into the market so prohibitively expensive and difficult that very few dare trying. This is were the idea of deep states, BigCorps, etc. come from.
As far as I can see, pure ancap libertarians are very rare. But it's imo reasonably to look at the current state of the, well, state and conclude that we need to regulate less, reduce the state coefficient and try to spread out power from a few big corps to many smaller again as much as possible. The main point of contention is usually whether the latter happens mostly automatically in a minimally regulated market, or whether you really need to outright smash the large corps.
For your example, there isn't really a market, so I expect no good outcomes. Maybe if you aggressively enable other smaller competitors.
If you have to introduce a very simplified and kind of unintuitive thought experiment to understand something (when you already have lots of direct evidence you could use), you probably have some preconceived notions about how the subject should work that the existing real world data doesn’t justify for you.
It’s difficult for me to understand why we should follow your intuitions about what kind of government policy we can imagine, right? Some people cannot imagine a government which doesn’t have a policy prohibiting hate speech, and yet I find it very easy to imagine a place where nobody gets arrested for saying things, just for doing things.
Especially in the case of a massive employer, the laissez-faire attitude is to offer no enticements whatever, partially because the more you do so the more the mine has captured the town and if the mine ever closes the town’s industry will die. Rather you should make sure the market is open to new entrants which can compete against the mine. The best way to do this is lowering trade barriers. By default, the mine has no power to do anything ‘evil’ to the town except leave, which it can do regardless of your attempt to bribe it to stay, and history says that’s exactly what will happen.
An entity which employs 50% of the working population directly has just about cornered the employment market: those who do not work for them likely work in service industries which depend on the miners -- stores selling stuff to them, schools full of miner kids, doctors treating their families, policemen stopping their brawls and so forth.
Likely, it would be common knowledge that without the mine, the natural size of the town would be three farms and a graveyard.
In this environment, the natural state of affairs is that the owners of the mine end up running the town, e.g. through bankrolling officials. Likely the mine owners will get away with pretty much anything short of hunting townfolks for sport. They will not get pulled over for speeding, there will be no town council hearings about elevated cadmium levels in the creek and so on. Any oversight will have to happen at a higher government level where 99% of the constituents are completely indifferent to the fate of the mine.
If the same happens on a national level, whatever polity is dependent on that single source of employment is in deep shit. Private ownership of the means of production is only good in so far as it leads to a working market, a private monopoly is not better than a state-run monopoly, so they could just opt to nationalize their mining industry. A better approach would probably be to split the mining company into different mining companies though, but even this will leave them beholden to overall industry interests. If you want to regulate mine pollution, don't get yourself into a situation where half of your population work in mines.
Suppose you think labor unions are bad because they slow progress. For example, they ban automation in order to protect jobs, or they ban more efficient ways of doing things.
How does this work on a theoretical level? It seems like you should have three parties who are all fighting to collect the surplus from a transaction: company management/shareholders, workers, and consumers. Even if we grant that "public interest" = the interest of the consumers, that seems to leave management/shareholders and workers on an equal footing as potential rent-seekers. What's the theoretical argument for why management/shareholder interests are aligned with consumers' (in increasing efficiency / bringing down prices) but workers are against?
Improvements in technology that might make the firm more profitable and competitive, might reduce the demand for labor within the firm. While the firm is motivated for profit, it's also motivated to cut unnecessary costs, which may include a large number of longshoremen preventing automation in ports so as to protect their own jobs.
I think the argument is just that monopolies in any necessary input of production, whether capital or production stifle innovation. Whether that's Standard Oil buying up all the competition, or a union that covers all the available ports, you're going to end up with significant deadweight loss. Compare the longshoreman's union to the auto unions. Tesla can outcompete ford, partially because it's significantly more flexible in how it can allocated labor.
I believe it's a principal agent problem, although I'm open to correction. From Adam Smith (1)
"
The interest of the second order, that of those who live by wages, is as
strictly connected with the interest of the society as that of the first.
The wages of the labourer, it has already been shewn, are never so high as
when the demand for labour is continually rising, or when the quantity
employed is every year increasing considerably. When this real wealth of
the society becomes stationary, his wages are soon reduced to what is
barely enough to enable him to bring up a family, or to continue the race
of labourers. When the society declines, they fall even below this. The
order of proprietors may perhaps gain more by the prosperity of the
society than that of labourers; but there is no order that suffers so
cruelly from its decline. But though the interest of the labourer is
strictly connected with that of the society, he is incapable either of
comprehending that interest, or of understanding its connexion with his
own. His condition leaves him no time to receive the necessary
information, and his education and habits are commonly such as to render
him unfit to judge, even though he was fully informed. In the public
deliberations, therefore, his voice is little heard, and less regarded;
except upon particular occasions, when his clamour is animated, set on,
and supported by his employers, not for his, but their own particular
purposes.
"
The fact that you can collectively appoint someone to represent worker interests is a potential solution but one with obvious principal agent problems. Not just corruption amongst labor union officials but...most workers want stability, a lot. Automation resulting in market disruption that increases wages is a difficult sell to people who just hear that they're losing their job and union officials have no incentive to explain that.
Imagine a technology or process of sufficient difficulty to master that a worker must invest years of training in order to perform it at a satisfactory level. In such cases the protections and guarantees of a union might be needed to incentivize workers to enter that track and assure them they will not be terminated before they have learned the process and been able to earn the higher wages it commands for some number of years. If I am looking at investing years of my life into an industry, some degree of insurance from the vagaries of the market or management whim might be the factor that tips my decision one way or another. Without this incentive, the shareholders and consumers cannot reach the labor tipping point to manufacture the widget at all (an ‘everyone loses’ scenario). The average ACX reader who is an auto-didact may underrate the difficulty of learning a new trade for the average worker and thus how valuable union protections can be.
“The average ACX reader who is an auto-didact may underrate the difficulty of learning a new trade for the average worker and thus how valuable union protections can be.”
Good point. I feel like this often in the Slow Boring comments where unusually high agency high efficacy commenters seem to assume everyone has the same potential if they would only make better choices.
It's about pay structure. The workers pay is only very loosely correlated to the profit of the company. The shareholders are directly so. Workers wages get impacted by labor market competition. Shareholders by productivity competition (among corporations).
Shareholders become unaligned with consumers if the market economy fails (monopolies, etc)
If you profit share with employees things start to align, but now you have a free rider issue (I can slack off if others work hard to increase company profits and this my wage)
I think Scott's point is that unionization changes this dynamic. Sure, one employee is minimally influenced by overall company profits. But if a union represents most/all company labor, the relationship changes. Now the union should care of its decisions impact company profits.
And while I think that's probably right, it functions within different constraints than the management/ownership branches of the company. For example, a union shouldn't want to eliminate jobs and reduce pay, as that minimizes their stakeholders' benefits from the company. But more importantly, it reduces the union's total power. At the extreme, a union that reduced its size to one person would no longer function as a union, having eliminated its power base.
In contrast, if I'm a shareholder, my incentive is to maximize my profits, but not to maximize the number of shareholders (or employees or managers, obviously). My power is inversely proportional to the number of shareholders. At the extreme, a single shareholder owns the company outright and collects all the benefits from it. If they can also eliminate employees without impacting productivity, there would be no competition for resource extraction from the firm.
The communist approach says, "Let's minimize/eliminate the power of owners, since they want to reduce the number of workers. If unions were in charge, they'd set a productivity floor - i.e. not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs - and this would lead to prosperity." Of course, this does kill the proverbial goose, since new firm generation (and the value derived from entrepreneurial creation) isn't compatible with this model, and the overall market stagnates. (There's the Red Plenty argument that communism leads to better production, but this is incompatible with observation.)
The libertarian approach says everyone would be better off if they were their own entrepreneur with their own firm, extracting maximum profits from their labor. The problem is that not everyone is an entrepreneur, and since most entrepreneurs aren't successful, you can't build a society on that kind of ultra Darwinian struggle. (There's another argument that, "you need workers to make a firm grow" but that assumption may not hold in the future with AI and robotics advancements?)
Good comment. German unions were famously aware that they needed to justify wage increases with increased revenue - thus deals on wage increases depended on productivity increases. This ship has sailed for a lot of the west as it’s much harder to guarantee productivity in service industries.
The rise of AI is having a toll on software engineers is partly karma, many software workers lean libertarian but the abscence of unionisation will probably decimate wages, while in a unionised environment they could have bargained for more money for more productivity
Companies with a monopoly are just as likely to rip off customers as unions are, but in a healthy market you have more than one company. If a company rips off customers too much, another company will eat their lunch.
By contrast, trade unions typically try to cover all the jobs in all the companies in a particular field. If you want to build an elevator in a US city, finding a company which does not employ IUEC members is, to my understanding, simply not an option.
I would also claim that the interests of shareholders and consumers are at best locally aligned. The ideal world for the consumer is one where their product is a standardized commodity produced by multiple companies with tiny margins, the ideal world for the company is a monopoly. In a healthy market, their local path both takes them in the same direction though.
Right. Competition. Some other company will start using said automation and lower prices. The other company has to go to workers (union) and say, "Look we either automate too or close our doors."
I think increased efficiency is not in the interest of workers in cases where markets are already saturated and the improvements are industry-wide. When improvements are limited to a single company or set of companies (in cases of patents, etc) workers are usually rewarded as the company captures market share. When the market is not fully saturated and there is demand for more, increased efficiency -> increased profits -> increased worker compensation (hopefully). However, when neither of these is the case any industry-wide improvement ends up being almost exclusively in the interest of consumers.
Using example Thingamajig industry, let's assume that Thingamajigs are sold at 20$ and 10$ of that is profit, with 5$ being labor and 5$ being materials. An improvement is discovered allowing workers to create Thingamajigs at twice the rate. If this improvement is put into place, the labor cost drops to 2.5$ and companies could drop the price to 15$ while maintaining the same profit margin % (or they could keep the price the same for a higher profit margin). However, the increase in sales if they do drop the price is not going to match the increase in efficiency, so a portion of the workforce has just been made irrelevant by the improvement.
Workers are not fighting to collect a transaction surplus, they're fighting to collect a paycheck from management. Whether management/shareholders make transactions with consumers doesn't affect workers as long as management still has enough money to get them their paycheck.
I think that Scott's characterization of three parties fighting over the gains created by a transaction is fair.
At the end of the day a typical company transaction involves shareholders (capital), workers (labor) and a customer (cash). It creates some surplus compared to the world where the transaction did not take place and the customer had to take the next best option, e.g. riding a bike instead of driving a Ford Model T, or using dial-up instead of DSL.
The surplus is what the product is worth to the customer minus what the product would cost to produce at a wage level just above starvation.
The customers would prefer to just pay that production cost and pocket all the surplus themselves.
The shareholders would prefer the customers to pay what the product is worth to them while keeping the wages low and pocket all the surplus.
The workers would prefer the customer what the product is worth to them and use the gains to bolster their wages.
The fact that different parties may call their cut of the pie different names, "paycheck", "gross profit", "???" and that the modalities of payments are slightly different should not distract from the fact that at the end of the day, all three parties are competing for the same pie.
One argument would be that normal cartel rules don't apply to unions. Management has to be afraid of other companies outcompeting them, which is how prices are kept down etc. But unions can work across whole sectors and exclude non-unionized workers.
So the longshoremen can unionize every port and coordinate the rent-seeking, while the management of any individual port would not be allowed to do that.
I find the apply rent seeking to workers quite odd. I suppose it could work if the cost is passed onto consumers from monopolies. Only there could there be a surplus the workers are benefitting from, because otherwise only the workers can have a surplus extracted.
Libertarian arguments against unions in general show the entire philosophy to be anti worker. Unions are people freely associating, yet there’s a lot of bile directed at this free association that’s not applied elsewhere.
It's the other way around. There is generally a lot of bile directed at monopolies, but unions get special treatment despite by design employing very standard cartel-style rigging. The idea that workers are magically exempt from rent seeking is itself very odd; Everyone tries to get away with rent seeking if enabled to do so.
Rent seeking is extracting rent based on some kind monopoly of ownership, the rent is extracted from productive value adding forces. Workers add value, which is why they are employed. There are perhaps some legacy unions who have rent sought in the past, harming the consumer but it’s rare.
The drop in union power hasn’t really seen relative increases in wages, if union power had meant general rent seeking it would mean that workers would have gained less from unions pushing up consumer prices (If wages go up without a productivity increase, prices might go up to cover it) then they gained from wage increases, but that is not what we see.
Rent seeking does not require official ownership; It suffices if you control a bottleneck, which plenty of unions past and present do and have done. For the left leaning readers, police unions in the US are usually an accepted example, since they control a legal bottleneck. But it's just not very specific to them, and the longshoremen are a particularly extreme contemporary example (which unfortunately still seem to enjoy the political support of both parties based on good PR).
You can of course simply claim that harming the consumer is rare, but I can just claim the opposite and say that is common. For most unions I have looked into I'd say that harming the consumer is the default. The problem is that in the longterm unions need capital, and they need to offer similar terms compared to other fields, as capital can always go elsewhere (consumers usually only have limited means - if they need a specific product, and that product is indirectly controlled by a union, there is no way around it).
On your second point, I don't think this really works out. Many things have been happening simultaneously, and in particular regulations have only been increasing, which also enabled centralizing markets into a semi-monopoly of only a few large companies. It's not particularly surprising that these employ just as much if not more rent seeking. As said, I'm not really against unions specifically, but against all large organizations that take advantage of controlling bottlenecks. But that doesn't mean I want to go back to the old days when unions were powerful and machine politics could control elections, either.
I'm probably not the best person to answer this, but I think when there's insufficient competition in a market and the management/shareholders can take all the benefit, it's not beneficial to the public. But with healthy competition, it's not about privileging management over workers, as we expect competition to keep their margins slim (at least in the long term). We want to reduce inefficiency from both workers and management, and privilege only the public. A union can be seen as privileging workers the same way a government-granted monopoly privileges owners. So the theoretical argument is to get rid of all privileging and let competition drive companies towards greater efficiency.
Most consumers are workers. A competitive industry would sell its products at as low price as possible, for sure, but that isn’t dependent on low wages. The best for consumer/workers is high wages and competitive prices, thus low margins. Higher margins don’t directly harm the consumer as a consumer if the price is the same, but low wages do affect most consumers, and consumption in general.
Let's look at the upsides and downsides of an improvement for the management and the median worker.
An improvement that increases efficiency is great for the management. They are likely shareholders and profit from the increased value of the company. Implementing a few technology successfully looks great on your resume. I'm ignoring the risk inherent in any change for simplicity
On the other hand, for the median worker it's much less rosy. In the best case they now use a new technology and become more productive but this doesn't automatically increase their wages. In the worst case they lose their job, either because it's been automated or because they can't adapt to the new tech.
So it's not surprising that many actually existing unions would be more hostile to progress.
I have gatecrashed weddings in India as a child over 30 years ago. It seems possible even now. Just show up, greet the couple, and eat.
My husband has told me he would be walking home from school or sports past a hall in Bombay and just walk in for ice cream (they always had a fancy wedding going on). He says it was pretty much expected some random kids would come to eat.
The hosts gladly accept your wishes and give you a dessert, even if they know you're gatecrashing (which is hard to know if it's crowded). Sometimes a whole meal although kids typically gatecrash for dessert.
Such a different and informal wedding culture :). Partly because each guest costs a lot less than in America.
I thought about this because people we know getting married in America take the wedding event so seriously. They plan for it for a year. They limit how many guests parents can invite, which I find utterly shocking. They say no to kids under 12. Ultimately what limits the number of guests, I figured, in America, is the fire code.
It is changing in India too and the wedding, especially among the wealthy, is now very similar to weddings in America. But the speeches haven't made it into any Indian weddings in India, as far as I can tell. Any delays are often due to the proper alignment of stars in the sky (literally!).
I knew a guy (in America) who used to gatecrash weddings for free food (he didn't have a big budget for college). He had to get gussied up, but it was easy to get in.
One more point. In India it's considered really rude and even bad luck to turn away a guest who wants to attend your wedding. So Indian Americans struggle with this. Their kids run it all (not the grandparents or parents, like in India) and they get a small allowance for number of guests.
(There's no edit button on my comment using the substack app on my mobile device).
>Ultimately what limits the number of guests, I figured, in America, is the fire code.
As an European, I am really blown away how extremely regulated America is. I mean surely restaurants have a fire code here too, but I cannot imagine the average half-drunk quarter-educated ex-waiter restaurant owner has any idea how many people that means or really cares about it at all. What is the chance that someone from the state will pop in and count the wedding guests?
As another European I don’t find this at all shocking. The risk is not that someone would come count the guests, the risk is that something would happen and then it would turn out the fire code was violated and the business would be sued or closed or something.
I also don’t think what limits the number of guests is the fire code. I think people just want to control who is at their wedding.
I guess the fire code is one thing that increases the price of renting a locale.
I don’t know much about India, but from some articles I have read I got the impressions weddings are a bigger deal in India.
But probably Indian culture is more communal than in Europe or America? I guess in the past a village wedding in Europe was something everyone could partake in but nowadays people live increasingly in social bubbles that are detached from local geography.
What kills me is the reason for the large gaps under the doors in public toilets is also for fire code/emergency reasons. "A person" has to be able to crawl under the door. I'm not that fat and could probably still not fit under it (yes I've been to the US). With the US obesity rate...
The large gap under the door is to make it easier to mop the floor. Plenty of multi-stall restrooms in the US have full-length doors. They are just harder to clean and more time consuming to install (full height doors have tighter tolerances), so most restrooms do not use them.
Wrote a longform essay inspired by Venkatesh Rao’s concept of life intensification, combined with thoughts from Henrik Karlsson, Virginia Woolf, and a few of my own spirals at 18. It’s about how we don’t “find ourselves” so much as we generate ourselves — through feedback loops, relationships, and the people who draw different tones out of us. I touch on Rao’s ghost-to-character metaphor, the idea of “container people” who midwife our full expression, and how selfhood might be less about discovering a hidden essence and more about becoming legible in motion.
In psychology, it turns out there is a distinction between high self-monitor and low self-monitor people. High self-monitors change or mold their personalities according to who they're with, but low self-monitors show the same personality to everyone. It's apparently not a human universal, that experience of different people drawing different aspects of you.
And of course, neither is wrong, but I think both come with pros and cons.
The new Alligator Alcatraz facility is supposed to cost $450 million a year, and with 5000 detainees, that's about $250 per day. Looking at the quality of the infrastructure, isn't that absurdly high?
Anyone knows some good intro articles about Polymarket? My hands are itching to try it, but I never did betting in my life.
I made a web app that scans ingredient lists (including photos of them) for concerning ingredients from a variety of sources, including Scott's Obscure Pregnancy Interventions. While it's primarily designed for skincare and topical products with kid-focused branding, it's useful for anyone who cares about this kind of thing, not just parents or those who are pregnant. It's free if you want to try it. parentscan.net
If there will soon be millions of robot workers, then it means the cost of skilled physical labor will sharply drop, and many projects that were unaffordable will become affordable. Does this mean the old museum ships like the USS Missouri will be modernized and reactivated? I think it would be awesome to see it plying the waves with a cyborg captain and a robot crew while it blasts the enemy using lasers and railguns alongside the old 16 inch guns.
Can someone explain to me why everyone started calling missiles "drones"?
I'm very confused.
I keep hearing that "drones" are this groundbreaking revolutionary weapon. Isn't it amazing, a "drone" flies straight to a tank and explodes! That's pretty old technology, it's called a guided missile. How come everyone treats it as revolutionary and calls it "drones"?
How come American cruise missiles are called "missiles" but Iranian cruise missiles are called "drones"? I hear all the time about the latest Iranian volley of "missiles and drones", like it's a distinction that matters and you're not allowed to just say missiles.
Is it because a drone can land? Can all drones land?
But how can this definition of "drone" be compatible with their reputation for being revolutionary? People say drones are revolutionary because they're "cheap" and "expendable", what does the ability to land have to do with being cheap and expendable???
Instead of missiles that look like helicopters, why can't armies simply use missiles that look like missiles (thus not "drones" by that definition), and are as cheap and expendable as "drones"?
A rocket is cheap, and goes faster than a mini-helicopter. If the elements that grant a "drone" remote control/AI, vision and steering exist in a cheap and expendable mini-helicopter, why not in a cheap and expendable rocket?
My understanding was that drones send information back.
Then why is everyone worried about how to counter "drone swarms"? Why not missile swarms? What does the ability to send information back have to do with being cheap and expendable and a swarm?
They ARE worried about missile swarms too! And have been since the Second World War. Drones are the NEW thing to worry about.
I agree that the existence of autonomous drones muddies this distinction, but I suppose ultimately, the practical difference is what kind of defense you need against them, and if there are two kinds of missiles needing different countermeasures, calling one kind by a different name is sensible.
But why do most of the cheap suicide drones look like helicopters instead of rockets? I find it bizarre that when soldiers want to take out a vehicle, instead of launching a guided rocket at it like in the olden days, now they launch a guided helicopter at it. What's the advantage, compared to a rocket? Everyone says the helicopter (what they call a "drone") is cheaper, but how can a helicopter be cheaper than a rocket (all else being equal)?
If I google "drone swarm" and "missile swarm" (in brackets, to ensure that the whole phrase is searched for as a whole) the former gets 50 times more hits.
According to the following link:
https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Ballistic-vs.-Cruise-Missiles-Fact-Sheet.pdf
"As advanced cruise missiles approach their target, remote operators can use a camera in the nose of the missile to see what the missile sees. This gives them the option to manually guide the missile to its target or to abort the strike."
Which seems to contradict your explanation of what sets apart drones from missiles.
When they're missiles, it's called a "barrage" instead. Basically the same idea, but they're traditionally coördinated only at launch and not during flight.
As I said, yes, modern tech makes the distinction is fuzzy. The point is that there are two qualitatively different kinds of long range offensive weapons.
because drones ('helicopters') can loiter; return to base after dropping a payload; are human-guided and can use on-the-fly decision making by the controller; can be retasked to specific target or aimpoint; can be very, very precisely guided (i.e. stop when they see a defense; find a hole in it; then fly through that hole), are not as heavy as rocket engines (but are slower); can be easily adapted (i..e different warhead); can serve purpose as reconnaissance or repeater platforms; can land next to a road containing potential targets, shut their rotors off, and wait until a vehicle passes. All of these are obvious if you watched a few day's worth of footage from the Ukraine war.
>how can a helicopter be cheaper than a rocket
scale. The drone consumer market made construction at scale possible.
Technically you could have some of these in a rocket, but not all, and not for the price of a drone.
> The drone consumer market made construction at scale possible.
This is surprising: I read that Russia is making about 500 drones a day for the war, and Ukraine about 100. Is the consumer market that significant?
Shouldn’t predictive processing theory be having a larger effect on personal and clinical psychology? I feel like it’s still a kind of a secret that reality is not actually poring into us through the orifices in our heads…
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/
It certainly IS a secret: I only know of it because of that post, and haven't encountered it anywhere else.
I ask periodically, and this is one of the few places I won't be seen as obnoxiously well off, so: ~45M, no wife/kids (my fears of divorce settlements were probably decisive though there were of course other factors), net worth roughly $2M in taxable brokerage (mostly index funds), $1M in retirement accounts (same), est. 30-40 year life expectancy given actuarial data. Currently earning about $400K gross at a woke job I secretly hate, save about $200K/yr all told, roughly $75K spend (I really need to give up the book-buying; I did *not* need that Arkham House first edition).
What should I do with the remainder of my life? Any ideas?
I've given up on the novel idea; it would take too long to get good at writing, and I don't expect the current trend toward mostly-female literary audiences to reverse in my lifetime. Also, I've realized ChatGPT is a better writer than I am.
I'm resentful of feminism, but all the manosphere guys tend to have a 'meathead' aesthetic I probably can't pull off. Other than that my politics are in a weird in-between place where I don't really want to help either side.
Is there anything that grieves you about the state of the world? Not politics, that'll just depress you. But does it bother you that science isn't progressing quickly enough? That architecture in your city isn't beautiful or functional? That people die of preventable disease? That we don't have some awesome technology you dreamed about as a kid? Or something much smaller would work too. Quit the job you hate, and find a way to work on it.
Generic advice follows, but maybe you need some...
A steady stream of minor achievements or acheiving mini goals can be pleasurable. Have fun! In some sense, a sense of progress = fun.
If your work is actively making you unhappy, and you have achieved financial independence, consider optimizing your life around more meaningful work.
If you actively *hate* your work, you are probably going to be somewhat unhappy. To mangle a quote, happiness is when your thoughts, feelings, and actions are aligned.
Join a writers club near you! Take workshops along the way to understand structuring, techniques, and get practice. If you see a novel as the way to influence the world, then maybe recognize that and find better ways to do so. Why do you want to write? Fiction? Character exploration? If you *really* want so see a novel happen, you can lower your expectations and write a bad novel. And build from there.
I don't think I'd influence the world; I'm not that grandiose. (It's quite possible I'm not egotistical enough to be a great artist.) I used to look at all the sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks as a kid in Barnes and Noble and dream of seeing my name up there with a fun colorful cover, but now the market has shifted.
Consider picking up skiing if you don't already. It's a sport you can reasonably do for the next 35-40 years, and incredibly enjoyable.
Otherwise it's always an upgrade in life if you can build something of your own, where you're your own boss. My dad worked in construction until he was 45, saved much of his excess income, then partnered with his best friend to build a Marina. Now he's in his 80s and runs a small lumber yard using 18th century technology. He's one of the most satisfied people I've ever seen.
Thanks! Did skiing for a while as a kid, was always too lazy to go out as an adult.
I don't have the visuospatial or manual skills for construction, frankly. I have great admiration for people who do!
But your larger point is well taken.
Help fulfill Thich Nhat Hanh's prediction that the next "Buddha" will be a Sangha (small group) rather than an individual!
Or your preferred non-Buddhist equivalent: Help humanity achieve its untapped potential by the synergy of small groups with big goals
Or your preferred non-small-group equivalent. Help humanity achieve the next generation in human cooperation: our best chance for bottom-up AI safety (plus solves many other problems for free if we can do it)
Hehe, thanks! I really can't see myself as a Buddha. Way too selfish. I'm pretty morally average.
Thing about targeted charity is I don't have the interpersonal awareness to tell when I'm being scammed. (A big reason my investments are so vanilla!) I feel like I'd just toss a bunch of money at some dude who'd use it to run a cult.
I'm not touching any of the AI stuff. People know way more about it than me.
Find an egg donor with extraordinary genetics and have children.
I remember going around this with the pronatalists on here a while back and people seemed to agree giving the kid an old dad was kind of wrong. Plus I'm honestly kind of lazy, selfish, and self-absorbed. I don't do much damage to others on my own but if kids are involved I'd be a shitty dad.
I appreciate your honesty.
Why don't you use your money to travel? A common deathbed regret for people is not traveling more.
On second thought, there are probably much worse dads out there. I just feel like 'having kids as a duty' is likely to work out poorly.
David Deida recommends locking yourself in a remote cabin with no distractions -- no phone, no books or magazines etc -- and just thinking. Stay there until you find a purpose.
His book "Way of the Superior Man" is a good read. It was published in 1997 and not infected with 21st century feminism or manosphere.
Ah, between the end of the cold war and the coming of the age of woke. (Yes, that was an oblique Conan reference; I love that line.) I think I'll check out the book, thanks!
Take a two-year sabbatical. Go try stuff and see what you like. One strong recommendation and then a few suggestions.
Recommendation: move. If you're in a woke job, you probably live in a woke place (although SF/NY/LA seem unlikely on $75k annual spend). You dramatically underestimate how liberating it is to live in any unwoke area/culture and how much resentment rises from feeling trapped, at least in my case. Do not live life with a mask on around people who hate you; it's doable but it really sucks.
If kids are important, there's a big beautiful world of women who would be very interested in a foreign multimillionaire. Some people really like travel, you might or might not, but dating in the US clearly isn't working for you so try something else.
Lots of guys who are...kinda manosphere, more mellow, are really into hiking. Very peaceful, very calming.
One thing to consider is that at your wealth, money gets weird. Let's say you keep withdrawing $75k/year but cease working. At 8% real growth, you'll still be at almost $4 million at 50 and ~$7.5 million at 60. It just keeps growing and it grows in doubles, so $1->$2 takes as long as $5-$10.
Try spending money on yourself. Buy nice shoes. Buy nice socks. A lot of...our kind of people dramatically underestimate how nice this can be. If you're spending <$30/pair on underwear, go try this: https://www.bn3th.com/products/classic-boxer-brief-black. Your nuts will float on a cloud of silk, carefully out of the way of any potential harm or...awkward sitting. You just...wakeup one day and realize you can't remember the last time you accidentally scrunched "the boys" and it's nice. Spending money is hard because spending money is super easy, spending money on things that actually make you happy is an underappreciated skill.
Take a road trip across America, stop by the ACX meetups in every city. You'll have an awesome time and see a lot of cool people.
Why are you still working? Mental hangups? I feel that.
I'm not sure I'd be better off in a more 'red' area is the thing (and yes I am being cagey about my location for obvious reasons). I'm very much a product of deep blue America and look more Mediterranean and have a suspiciously large nose; I understand the reasons for rural antisemitism (am half, nonpracticing, other half's Southern European) but don't really think 'hey, I support immigration restriction' is going to keep a brick from coming through my window.
I thought a multimillionaire was in the hundreds of millions; I could theoretically retire but would have to watch money carefully...and in the case of a crash or something could be wiped out. Sure, according to all the FIRE calculators I could walk out tomorrow, but...I don't know. I have a lot less faith in this country's stability than I have in a long time (like I said, politically homeless). Maybe the dollar gets hyperinflated or crashes, maybe I get sick and can't get health insurance or the expenses wipe me out... of course no matter what I do I will die eventually, so it's a matter of when to cash out.
I don't want to get into the dating thing; it's complicated and I do *not* expect dating advice from ACX readers, we're all nerds here!
Help people and/or animals with your money?
I actually do plan to donate leftover assets to prostate cancer research (this might be a case where 'earn to give' might actually make sense), though my parents are still alive, so if I predecease them I'd rather let them have it to smooth out their remaining years.
Video games might still have the audience you desire. Become a developer!
Thanks! That is a fun idea. At this age, though, I'm not going to pick up the coding skills and I don't have the familiarity with the medium over the past 30 years or so...I think the last game I played the heck out of was DOOM 2 (EDIT: Final Fantasy 7).
AI has dramatically reduced the level of skill you need. And your unfamiliarity with recent trends are likely an advantage.
I goofed around with RPG Maker a little. I had fun, but the videogame space seems so hugely crowded these days I doubt anyone would play it. Also there's a whole culture that's built up around it I have little familarity with...raids, griefing, spawn point camping, too many things to name.
Does chatgpt actually induce psychosis in people?
I suspect that "induce" is probably wrong, but "amplify" would be correct.
Maybe of interest to the Georgists here - I wrote about the heterodox interpreters of Henry George's ideas (Theodor Herzl, Peter Thiel among others) for Asterisk: https://open.substack.com/pub/asteriskmag/p/the-georgist-roots-of-american-libertarianism.
Does anyone know how to apply for the Astral Codex grants? The last post I can find about it is from 2024. Do you need to be a subscriber?
It's not continuous, Scott announces it when it happens. You don't need to be subscribed.
What is happening with SpaceX Starship?
I understand that failures are a normal part of a rocket testing process, and SpaceX "iterative development" philosophy in particular is bound to have a lot of them. I am not implying neither that the Starship is "doomed", nor that it "should" progress much faster. But it looks to me like there are two very different trend lines here.
From the beginning of Starship high-altitude testing and then for integrated flight tests 1 through 6 we see steady improvements, where basically each flight goes a bit better than the previous one. Then for flight tests from 7 onwards we switch to a different mode, where it looks like each flight only discovers additional problems (flights 7-9 all had various problems with the ship, and the ship for flight 10 blew up during the static fire).
I notice that I am confused here. It looks like there is some latent variable which changed between flights 6 and 7, switching them from one mode to another. Does anyone have reasonable ideas for what this could be?
Some hypotheses (not necessarily plausible, just things that *would* explain the change if they somehow turned out to be true):
* Starship block 2 problems. Basically, there were some serious design problems with block 2, leading to it having not one but at least 3 different failure causes. If this is the case, why was their design *so* bad, much worse than block 1?
* Musk problems. Maybe for some reason Musk's supervision and decision making are crucial to SpaceX success. Then between November 2024 and January 2025 he became much more busy with the government, didn't have enough time for SpaceX, and the problems followed.
* China intervention. Maybe the CCP decided that SpaceX was progressing a little too smoothly a little too fast and gave an order to sabotage them somehow? (Again, I don't have any model for this, I really have no idea whether this is even possible, let alone plausible)
* The gods are angry with them. Maybe the coin really happened to first land on heads 6 times, and then land on tales 4 times after that.
Does anyone have a good model for this?
"Block 1" was the first iteration of starship that was used for the first 6 flight tests. "Block 2" which is slightly larger with significantly more ambitious internals, has been used from flight 7 onward.
I think it's too much of a coincidence for the first 6 flights to go incrementally better each time, then the next 3 launches to all have unique mission-ending problems with the updated starship design. It looks like they got the booster right judging by its incredible success at both catching, and reusing it, but something is definitely wrong in Block 2.
I wouldn't update too much on it. They are extremely ambitious with every new development, and although SpaceX innovates quickly, at launch you're looking at rockets that were designed at least a year earlier. S35, the Starship that launched most recently in May began construction back in October 2024, about 3 months before the first Block 2 Starship, S33 Failed. Thus, very few lessons from S33 could have been used for S35, if any at all. And certainly no lessons were learned from after RUD, which for flight 7 and 8 was before the problems seen in flight 9.
It's of course a bad sign that they have had multiple failures in a row, as any test failure is. However, if you look at SpaceX as designing a Starship manufacturing system as much as Starship itself, then the loss of any individual rocket isn't actually that big of a deal. Combine that with infinite money for all practical purposes, and while each failure sets the mission back, it doesn't move it meaningfully towards cancelation. As is, they have the largest rocket booster on the planet that they've successfully reused (this is truly an insane accomplishment), the highest output rocket engine production facility on the planet (with so far high demonstrated reliability, at least on the booster), and a factory capable of producing an accelerating number of Starships and boosters. They are also building literally a second version of the entire setup they have in Texas, in Florida, which will add some serious redundancy, an internal spirit of competition, and allow for significantly faster launch cadence.
What I read (and maybe someone more into the subject can comment whether this makes sense) is that the first couple of flights revealed that the engines could not deliver the expected thrust, and hence, deliver the expected payload to orbit. So the rocket's design was revised with an emphasis on saving weight. Designing a rocket always means operating on the very edge of what's possible in terms of materials science, and trying to shave off a few percent of weight may have pushed "Starship" from "yeah, with a little luck" into "nope" territory.
While you're right the new design, Block 2, was largely designed with weight savings in mind (anything saved on the reusable 2nd stage is a fraction of the gained payload due to the rocket equation), lack of engine thrust is not the primary driver of that.
The engines have actually over performed on thrust and SPI. They've adjusted the design to make it larger, with a higher target mass to orbit to accommodate for that increased thrust.
The only comment I have is that,
reviewing the history of Starship tests, I don’t see the pattern you describe.
My only comment is 'neither do I'
When I became a parent, two things happened (well more than two really but there's two I want to talk about now):
- I appreciated my own parents more
- I became familiar with dealing with the disgusting and unpleasant parts of daily life in order to support another human that I loved who couldn't take care of themselves.
Now my mother is physically disabled and my father has dementia, and I find I rely on these two benefits of having children in the care that I now help to provide for them.
Which makes me wonder: is there any research on the different attitudes to caring for elderly relatives among child-free people compared to people who are parents themselves?
I'd be very interested in any research like that. Anecdotally, I suspect there's a large difference.
I'm child free and have a disabled parent who lives in a care facility. I didn't put her there, but after living with her in both circumstances, I found it a lot easier to participate in the process when she was in a care facility.
People who've had children are absolutely more confident in handling the disabled, in my experience, but I do also sometimes think that's a bad thing.
Disabled people are not children or perfect innocent angels but seem to be commonly bucketed into one of those mental categories by the able bodied who are not familiar with disability in their personal life. I think some caregivers never update how they care for someone and default to whatever they learned as a parent taking care of their baby, and get frustrated with disabled adults being "difficult".
I think caregiving is going to be very important in the years to come and do worry that some child free people who have not challenged themselves in other areas of life will find themselves failing to help people they love because they never got over their "yuck" reflex or learned how to do boring, tedious, necessary things for the benefit of someone less capable.
Interesting. I’m not sure I share either of those experiences.
> - I appreciated my own parents more
I wouldn’t say that becoming a parent has made me appreciate my parents *less* – both before and after I became a parent, I appreciated them a lot. but I do think becoming a parent has made me focus more on parenting choices, and realize areas where they made parenting choices that I think were incorrect. (At least, according to my value system.) As a result, while I still appreciate the effort they took, I now have a slightly more mixed view of their parenting in general.
> - I became familiar with dealing with the disgusting and unpleasant parts of daily life in order to support another human that I loved who couldn't take care of themselves.
as far as this goes, although I haven’t faced the issue of elder care yet, I anticipate that the largest difficulty there will be emotional rather than physical. For example, if I need to change a diaper on one of my parents, I don’t anticipate that the physically gross nature of the task will be much of a problem compared to the emotional aspect of them, being embarrassed by the assistance/feeling shame.
And that’s obviously not an issue I face when changing my baby’s diaper, so I’m not sure it has prepared me for elder care in that meaningful of a way.
There has been a really interesting discussion about school in the book reviews, so now I am curious. In m’y European country, not only are options severely constrained, people typically view teaching as something that doesn’t mix well with a parenting relationship, so you delegate it all.
So, if you have school-aged children, do you teach them reading / math / Anglo-Saxon poetry / oboe playing yourself (in addition, or instead of teachers, whether public or private) ?
How did it go ? Do you use AI ? How much time does it take ?
Thank you !
I have children that are not yet ‘school age.’ I’ve taught them to read (using phonics) and they’re working on arithmetic. I intend to teach them all I can myself, and get tutors for things like music where I’m not very talented. I don’t intend to send them to school.
Teaching them to read took about 20-30m per day for about a year. It’s occasionally frustrating but the rewards greatly exceed it. I don’t have any idea what I would use an LLM for in teaching my kids (besides the usual stuff I use them for, like finding citations/sources and conducting starting research on subjects).
> people typically view teaching as something that doesn’t mix well with a parenting relationship, so you delegate it all.
I would be very interested in hearing more about this. From my (admittedly American) perspective, so much of inherent parenting seems to basically be teaching e.g. potty training, teaching manners, teaching how to eat food and not throw it on the floor, etc. How does that fit in with a social norm that teaching doesn’t mix well with a parenting relationship? Or am I misunderstanding you?
Whenever I talk about teaching my children to read / music / a language I speak / whatever, parents here tell me that 1) school will do that them better than me 2) they should enjoy their childhood and not learn to read, etc too soon 3) it is dangerous to take on the role of teacher when you are a parent, because those are not the same.
This mostly means that you have to fight with the children in order to make them listen and focus, and that a third person (like a teacher), whose relationship with your children is less emotional, can teach them more effectively.
After Covid and school closures, mort parents I know had a horrible time trying to force their kids to watch Zoom class while working from home and never wanted to do it again. So all you people teaching your kids must have tools or skills that they don’t !
I am also really curious because it seems so hard to find the time to have regular learning sessions with the children during the week while working, so I wondered how you fit that in your schedules. But that must be very individual and family-dependent.
Been thinking about the entire Alpha School vs normal school thing. When my parents went to school in rural Denmark in the 1970s they had 900 hours of teaching in 7th grade (so round 4.5 hours per day + homework ), and used a lot of the same motivation methods as the Alpha school dies . Currently it seems the US public schools have 1000 to 1100 hours per year. In 2013 we tried in Denmark to demand 1200 hours (so 6 hours per day). Despite this academic standards kept slipping, and the reverse Flynn effect are still taking away 3 IQ points per decade.
So it seems that actually the amount of hours above some limit is not very important. Perhaps with some simple incitament system even normal schools could go down to 800 hours per year + some homework and keep their current standard. That would not be very far from the ~600 hours studying that Alpha seems to be using.
Maybe culture in general has become stupider and schools have to try to compensate for this. Culture both in terms of medium and content. Eg people spontaneously read less because of TV or the internet. Music becomes less complex. And culture values ”coolness” over accomplishment (which is ”square”).
People spontaneously read more because of computers and smartphones.
Not necessarily, or at least, not "reading" as I imagine Kristian was describing it.
There's this, by a college professor:
https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today
And that certainly aligns with what I'm seeing amongst my younger Millennial and Gen Z coworkers. They can't seem to absorb basic written information from emails or shift reports, nor can they adequately convey extremely basic information in writing. We are a high-end, service-centered luxury product, but they literally aren't able to put together so much as, "On Monday July 7 approx 9 AM, client complained that widget wasn't performing third state of widgeting. Widget analyst checked and says widget needs to be replaced, not repaired, will perform between noon and 1p. Offered client 50% off this widgeting as apology, client seemed satisfied."
I'm not exaggerating.
Maybe they read more words but fewer challenging texts. I have understood college professors have experienced a decline in the reading comprehension skills of undergraduates over the last few decades.
But the same was being reported in the 1980's.
My expectation is that they're learning just as much, but different things. Certainly reading extended text with a plot is different from browsing blogs.
What you're looking at is deliberate addiction to quick-stimulus, leading to dramatically decreased attention spans.
What is the reputation of the FAR AI lab in the alignment circles?
I've been wresting for decades whether libertarian ideas are right and wrong, eventually I ran across an interesting one. Do not see the market as an institution, like a bunch of businesses, but as a meta-institution evolving other institutions, it can evolve something like a government if that is best. Okay, but in that case shouldn't there be a partnership with the real government, and the real government helping that kind of market-government out?
Imagine the kind of town where half the population is working in the same privately owned mine. I think it is necessary that the town government and the mine will have a complicated partnership. The government needs to regulate against some abuses, but cannot possibly treat the mine as some sort of an unfriendly entity, they have to help them a lot, in order to secure those jobs. What I cannot imagine is being entirely neutral and indifferent to the mine, libertarian style.
The short version is competition, incentives and safeguards. It's not about companies being better than states; All large organizations eventually suck if they have no competition, no good incentives, and no safeguards.
A market of many, minimally regulated companies offering similar products and employing similar workers will naturally gravitate towards efficiency to extract more money from each product and/or get a greater share of the market by undercutting the competition, and naturally gravitate towards better pay and better conditions for the workers because otherwise those will go elsewhere. Not perfectly so, and if you let them get away with it they will probably try to employ cartel tactics to get more, but as a general direction they will do these things. Markets also have the advantage that accommodating different people is a legitimate way of carving out a safe niche for yourself (though again there are some shitty tactics here).
Democracies also have, in principle, these components. But they tend to select most strongly for the things that sound good, as opposed to the things that actually work well, and they have a tendency to enforce the same thing for everyone. Nevertheless, you need some entity to oversee that the companies do not employ cartel and other shitty tactics, and democracies seem to be the least bad of the bunch.
The very worst is bureaucracies. Bureaucracies exist in most states, they are not voted in, they do not have to survive competition, their only incentives are rent seeking, entrenching themselves and insulating themselves. In many states, bureaucracies have successfully managed to make the democratic state dependent on itself as necessary middle managers. Likewise, large companies have realized that they can enter a symbiotic relationship with the bureaucracy through excessive regulation, wherein they insulate themselves from new competition by making entry into the market so prohibitively expensive and difficult that very few dare trying. This is were the idea of deep states, BigCorps, etc. come from.
As far as I can see, pure ancap libertarians are very rare. But it's imo reasonably to look at the current state of the, well, state and conclude that we need to regulate less, reduce the state coefficient and try to spread out power from a few big corps to many smaller again as much as possible. The main point of contention is usually whether the latter happens mostly automatically in a minimally regulated market, or whether you really need to outright smash the large corps.
For your example, there isn't really a market, so I expect no good outcomes. Maybe if you aggressively enable other smaller competitors.
If you have to introduce a very simplified and kind of unintuitive thought experiment to understand something (when you already have lots of direct evidence you could use), you probably have some preconceived notions about how the subject should work that the existing real world data doesn’t justify for you.
It’s difficult for me to understand why we should follow your intuitions about what kind of government policy we can imagine, right? Some people cannot imagine a government which doesn’t have a policy prohibiting hate speech, and yet I find it very easy to imagine a place where nobody gets arrested for saying things, just for doing things.
Especially in the case of a massive employer, the laissez-faire attitude is to offer no enticements whatever, partially because the more you do so the more the mine has captured the town and if the mine ever closes the town’s industry will die. Rather you should make sure the market is open to new entrants which can compete against the mine. The best way to do this is lowering trade barriers. By default, the mine has no power to do anything ‘evil’ to the town except leave, which it can do regardless of your attempt to bribe it to stay, and history says that’s exactly what will happen.
In your example, I do not see any markets.
An entity which employs 50% of the working population directly has just about cornered the employment market: those who do not work for them likely work in service industries which depend on the miners -- stores selling stuff to them, schools full of miner kids, doctors treating their families, policemen stopping their brawls and so forth.
Likely, it would be common knowledge that without the mine, the natural size of the town would be three farms and a graveyard.
In this environment, the natural state of affairs is that the owners of the mine end up running the town, e.g. through bankrolling officials. Likely the mine owners will get away with pretty much anything short of hunting townfolks for sport. They will not get pulled over for speeding, there will be no town council hearings about elevated cadmium levels in the creek and so on. Any oversight will have to happen at a higher government level where 99% of the constituents are completely indifferent to the fate of the mine.
If the same happens on a national level, whatever polity is dependent on that single source of employment is in deep shit. Private ownership of the means of production is only good in so far as it leads to a working market, a private monopoly is not better than a state-run monopoly, so they could just opt to nationalize their mining industry. A better approach would probably be to split the mining company into different mining companies though, but even this will leave them beholden to overall industry interests. If you want to regulate mine pollution, don't get yourself into a situation where half of your population work in mines.
Commanding heights of economy will be inevitably coordinated with the state.
Suppose you think labor unions are bad because they slow progress. For example, they ban automation in order to protect jobs, or they ban more efficient ways of doing things.
How does this work on a theoretical level? It seems like you should have three parties who are all fighting to collect the surplus from a transaction: company management/shareholders, workers, and consumers. Even if we grant that "public interest" = the interest of the consumers, that seems to leave management/shareholders and workers on an equal footing as potential rent-seekers. What's the theoretical argument for why management/shareholder interests are aligned with consumers' (in increasing efficiency / bringing down prices) but workers are against?
Improvements in technology that might make the firm more profitable and competitive, might reduce the demand for labor within the firm. While the firm is motivated for profit, it's also motivated to cut unnecessary costs, which may include a large number of longshoremen preventing automation in ports so as to protect their own jobs.
I think the argument is just that monopolies in any necessary input of production, whether capital or production stifle innovation. Whether that's Standard Oil buying up all the competition, or a union that covers all the available ports, you're going to end up with significant deadweight loss. Compare the longshoreman's union to the auto unions. Tesla can outcompete ford, partially because it's significantly more flexible in how it can allocated labor.
I believe it's a principal agent problem, although I'm open to correction. From Adam Smith (1)
"
The interest of the second order, that of those who live by wages, is as
strictly connected with the interest of the society as that of the first.
The wages of the labourer, it has already been shewn, are never so high as
when the demand for labour is continually rising, or when the quantity
employed is every year increasing considerably. When this real wealth of
the society becomes stationary, his wages are soon reduced to what is
barely enough to enable him to bring up a family, or to continue the race
of labourers. When the society declines, they fall even below this. The
order of proprietors may perhaps gain more by the prosperity of the
society than that of labourers; but there is no order that suffers so
cruelly from its decline. But though the interest of the labourer is
strictly connected with that of the society, he is incapable either of
comprehending that interest, or of understanding its connexion with his
own. His condition leaves him no time to receive the necessary
information, and his education and habits are commonly such as to render
him unfit to judge, even though he was fully informed. In the public
deliberations, therefore, his voice is little heard, and less regarded;
except upon particular occasions, when his clamour is animated, set on,
and supported by his employers, not for his, but their own particular
purposes.
"
The fact that you can collectively appoint someone to represent worker interests is a potential solution but one with obvious principal agent problems. Not just corruption amongst labor union officials but...most workers want stability, a lot. Automation resulting in market disruption that increases wages is a difficult sell to people who just hear that they're losing their job and union officials have no incentive to explain that.
(1) https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3300/pg3300.txt (Conclusion of Book 1)
Imagine a technology or process of sufficient difficulty to master that a worker must invest years of training in order to perform it at a satisfactory level. In such cases the protections and guarantees of a union might be needed to incentivize workers to enter that track and assure them they will not be terminated before they have learned the process and been able to earn the higher wages it commands for some number of years. If I am looking at investing years of my life into an industry, some degree of insurance from the vagaries of the market or management whim might be the factor that tips my decision one way or another. Without this incentive, the shareholders and consumers cannot reach the labor tipping point to manufacture the widget at all (an ‘everyone loses’ scenario). The average ACX reader who is an auto-didact may underrate the difficulty of learning a new trade for the average worker and thus how valuable union protections can be.
“The average ACX reader who is an auto-didact may underrate the difficulty of learning a new trade for the average worker and thus how valuable union protections can be.”
Good point. I feel like this often in the Slow Boring comments where unusually high agency high efficacy commenters seem to assume everyone has the same potential if they would only make better choices.
If companies engage in collective bargaining like workers do in unions that's just a cartel, a text book example of rent seeking.
It's about pay structure. The workers pay is only very loosely correlated to the profit of the company. The shareholders are directly so. Workers wages get impacted by labor market competition. Shareholders by productivity competition (among corporations).
Shareholders become unaligned with consumers if the market economy fails (monopolies, etc)
If you profit share with employees things start to align, but now you have a free rider issue (I can slack off if others work hard to increase company profits and this my wage)
I think Scott's point is that unionization changes this dynamic. Sure, one employee is minimally influenced by overall company profits. But if a union represents most/all company labor, the relationship changes. Now the union should care of its decisions impact company profits.
And while I think that's probably right, it functions within different constraints than the management/ownership branches of the company. For example, a union shouldn't want to eliminate jobs and reduce pay, as that minimizes their stakeholders' benefits from the company. But more importantly, it reduces the union's total power. At the extreme, a union that reduced its size to one person would no longer function as a union, having eliminated its power base.
In contrast, if I'm a shareholder, my incentive is to maximize my profits, but not to maximize the number of shareholders (or employees or managers, obviously). My power is inversely proportional to the number of shareholders. At the extreme, a single shareholder owns the company outright and collects all the benefits from it. If they can also eliminate employees without impacting productivity, there would be no competition for resource extraction from the firm.
The communist approach says, "Let's minimize/eliminate the power of owners, since they want to reduce the number of workers. If unions were in charge, they'd set a productivity floor - i.e. not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs - and this would lead to prosperity." Of course, this does kill the proverbial goose, since new firm generation (and the value derived from entrepreneurial creation) isn't compatible with this model, and the overall market stagnates. (There's the Red Plenty argument that communism leads to better production, but this is incompatible with observation.)
The libertarian approach says everyone would be better off if they were their own entrepreneur with their own firm, extracting maximum profits from their labor. The problem is that not everyone is an entrepreneur, and since most entrepreneurs aren't successful, you can't build a society on that kind of ultra Darwinian struggle. (There's another argument that, "you need workers to make a firm grow" but that assumption may not hold in the future with AI and robotics advancements?)
Good comment. German unions were famously aware that they needed to justify wage increases with increased revenue - thus deals on wage increases depended on productivity increases. This ship has sailed for a lot of the west as it’s much harder to guarantee productivity in service industries.
The rise of AI is having a toll on software engineers is partly karma, many software workers lean libertarian but the abscence of unionisation will probably decimate wages, while in a unionised environment they could have bargained for more money for more productivity
Competition.
Companies with a monopoly are just as likely to rip off customers as unions are, but in a healthy market you have more than one company. If a company rips off customers too much, another company will eat their lunch.
By contrast, trade unions typically try to cover all the jobs in all the companies in a particular field. If you want to build an elevator in a US city, finding a company which does not employ IUEC members is, to my understanding, simply not an option.
I would also claim that the interests of shareholders and consumers are at best locally aligned. The ideal world for the consumer is one where their product is a standardized commodity produced by multiple companies with tiny margins, the ideal world for the company is a monopoly. In a healthy market, their local path both takes them in the same direction though.
Right. Competition. Some other company will start using said automation and lower prices. The other company has to go to workers (union) and say, "Look we either automate too or close our doors."
I think increased efficiency is not in the interest of workers in cases where markets are already saturated and the improvements are industry-wide. When improvements are limited to a single company or set of companies (in cases of patents, etc) workers are usually rewarded as the company captures market share. When the market is not fully saturated and there is demand for more, increased efficiency -> increased profits -> increased worker compensation (hopefully). However, when neither of these is the case any industry-wide improvement ends up being almost exclusively in the interest of consumers.
Using example Thingamajig industry, let's assume that Thingamajigs are sold at 20$ and 10$ of that is profit, with 5$ being labor and 5$ being materials. An improvement is discovered allowing workers to create Thingamajigs at twice the rate. If this improvement is put into place, the labor cost drops to 2.5$ and companies could drop the price to 15$ while maintaining the same profit margin % (or they could keep the price the same for a higher profit margin). However, the increase in sales if they do drop the price is not going to match the increase in efficiency, so a portion of the workforce has just been made irrelevant by the improvement.
Workers are not fighting to collect a transaction surplus, they're fighting to collect a paycheck from management. Whether management/shareholders make transactions with consumers doesn't affect workers as long as management still has enough money to get them their paycheck.
I think that Scott's characterization of three parties fighting over the gains created by a transaction is fair.
At the end of the day a typical company transaction involves shareholders (capital), workers (labor) and a customer (cash). It creates some surplus compared to the world where the transaction did not take place and the customer had to take the next best option, e.g. riding a bike instead of driving a Ford Model T, or using dial-up instead of DSL.
The surplus is what the product is worth to the customer minus what the product would cost to produce at a wage level just above starvation.
The customers would prefer to just pay that production cost and pocket all the surplus themselves.
The shareholders would prefer the customers to pay what the product is worth to them while keeping the wages low and pocket all the surplus.
The workers would prefer the customer what the product is worth to them and use the gains to bolster their wages.
The fact that different parties may call their cut of the pie different names, "paycheck", "gross profit", "???" and that the modalities of payments are slightly different should not distract from the fact that at the end of the day, all three parties are competing for the same pie.
One argument would be that normal cartel rules don't apply to unions. Management has to be afraid of other companies outcompeting them, which is how prices are kept down etc. But unions can work across whole sectors and exclude non-unionized workers.
So the longshoremen can unionize every port and coordinate the rent-seeking, while the management of any individual port would not be allowed to do that.
I find the apply rent seeking to workers quite odd. I suppose it could work if the cost is passed onto consumers from monopolies. Only there could there be a surplus the workers are benefitting from, because otherwise only the workers can have a surplus extracted.
Libertarian arguments against unions in general show the entire philosophy to be anti worker. Unions are people freely associating, yet there’s a lot of bile directed at this free association that’s not applied elsewhere.
It's the other way around. There is generally a lot of bile directed at monopolies, but unions get special treatment despite by design employing very standard cartel-style rigging. The idea that workers are magically exempt from rent seeking is itself very odd; Everyone tries to get away with rent seeking if enabled to do so.
Rent seeking is extracting rent based on some kind monopoly of ownership, the rent is extracted from productive value adding forces. Workers add value, which is why they are employed. There are perhaps some legacy unions who have rent sought in the past, harming the consumer but it’s rare.
The drop in union power hasn’t really seen relative increases in wages, if union power had meant general rent seeking it would mean that workers would have gained less from unions pushing up consumer prices (If wages go up without a productivity increase, prices might go up to cover it) then they gained from wage increases, but that is not what we see.
Rent seeking does not require official ownership; It suffices if you control a bottleneck, which plenty of unions past and present do and have done. For the left leaning readers, police unions in the US are usually an accepted example, since they control a legal bottleneck. But it's just not very specific to them, and the longshoremen are a particularly extreme contemporary example (which unfortunately still seem to enjoy the political support of both parties based on good PR).
You can of course simply claim that harming the consumer is rare, but I can just claim the opposite and say that is common. For most unions I have looked into I'd say that harming the consumer is the default. The problem is that in the longterm unions need capital, and they need to offer similar terms compared to other fields, as capital can always go elsewhere (consumers usually only have limited means - if they need a specific product, and that product is indirectly controlled by a union, there is no way around it).
On your second point, I don't think this really works out. Many things have been happening simultaneously, and in particular regulations have only been increasing, which also enabled centralizing markets into a semi-monopoly of only a few large companies. It's not particularly surprising that these employ just as much if not more rent seeking. As said, I'm not really against unions specifically, but against all large organizations that take advantage of controlling bottlenecks. But that doesn't mean I want to go back to the old days when unions were powerful and machine politics could control elections, either.
I'm probably not the best person to answer this, but I think when there's insufficient competition in a market and the management/shareholders can take all the benefit, it's not beneficial to the public. But with healthy competition, it's not about privileging management over workers, as we expect competition to keep their margins slim (at least in the long term). We want to reduce inefficiency from both workers and management, and privilege only the public. A union can be seen as privileging workers the same way a government-granted monopoly privileges owners. So the theoretical argument is to get rid of all privileging and let competition drive companies towards greater efficiency.
Most consumers are workers. A competitive industry would sell its products at as low price as possible, for sure, but that isn’t dependent on low wages. The best for consumer/workers is high wages and competitive prices, thus low margins. Higher margins don’t directly harm the consumer as a consumer if the price is the same, but low wages do affect most consumers, and consumption in general.
Let's look at the upsides and downsides of an improvement for the management and the median worker.
An improvement that increases efficiency is great for the management. They are likely shareholders and profit from the increased value of the company. Implementing a few technology successfully looks great on your resume. I'm ignoring the risk inherent in any change for simplicity
On the other hand, for the median worker it's much less rosy. In the best case they now use a new technology and become more productive but this doesn't automatically increase their wages. In the worst case they lose their job, either because it's been automated or because they can't adapt to the new tech.
So it's not surprising that many actually existing unions would be more hostile to progress.
I have gatecrashed weddings in India as a child over 30 years ago. It seems possible even now. Just show up, greet the couple, and eat.
My husband has told me he would be walking home from school or sports past a hall in Bombay and just walk in for ice cream (they always had a fancy wedding going on). He says it was pretty much expected some random kids would come to eat.
The hosts gladly accept your wishes and give you a dessert, even if they know you're gatecrashing (which is hard to know if it's crowded). Sometimes a whole meal although kids typically gatecrash for dessert.
Such a different and informal wedding culture :). Partly because each guest costs a lot less than in America.
I thought about this because people we know getting married in America take the wedding event so seriously. They plan for it for a year. They limit how many guests parents can invite, which I find utterly shocking. They say no to kids under 12. Ultimately what limits the number of guests, I figured, in America, is the fire code.
It is changing in India too and the wedding, especially among the wealthy, is now very similar to weddings in America. But the speeches haven't made it into any Indian weddings in India, as far as I can tell. Any delays are often due to the proper alignment of stars in the sky (literally!).
I knew a guy (in America) who used to gatecrash weddings for free food (he didn't have a big budget for college). He had to get gussied up, but it was easy to get in.
One more point. In India it's considered really rude and even bad luck to turn away a guest who wants to attend your wedding. So Indian Americans struggle with this. Their kids run it all (not the grandparents or parents, like in India) and they get a small allowance for number of guests.
(There's no edit button on my comment using the substack app on my mobile device).
>Ultimately what limits the number of guests, I figured, in America, is the fire code.
As an European, I am really blown away how extremely regulated America is. I mean surely restaurants have a fire code here too, but I cannot imagine the average half-drunk quarter-educated ex-waiter restaurant owner has any idea how many people that means or really cares about it at all. What is the chance that someone from the state will pop in and count the wedding guests?
As another European I don’t find this at all shocking. The risk is not that someone would come count the guests, the risk is that something would happen and then it would turn out the fire code was violated and the business would be sued or closed or something.
I also don’t think what limits the number of guests is the fire code. I think people just want to control who is at their wedding.
But there is a fire code. I guess it could be used as an excuse too.
I guess the fire code is one thing that increases the price of renting a locale.
I don’t know much about India, but from some articles I have read I got the impressions weddings are a bigger deal in India.
But probably Indian culture is more communal than in Europe or America? I guess in the past a village wedding in Europe was something everyone could partake in but nowadays people live increasingly in social bubbles that are detached from local geography.
What kills me is the reason for the large gaps under the doors in public toilets is also for fire code/emergency reasons. "A person" has to be able to crawl under the door. I'm not that fat and could probably still not fit under it (yes I've been to the US). With the US obesity rate...
The large gap under the door is to make it easier to mop the floor. Plenty of multi-stall restrooms in the US have full-length doors. They are just harder to clean and more time consuming to install (full height doors have tighter tolerances), so most restrooms do not use them.
Boggles the mind. Why, I wonder, is that door expected to get stuck, but not other doors? Why not mandate that the latch is designed properly?
Wrote a longform essay inspired by Venkatesh Rao’s concept of life intensification, combined with thoughts from Henrik Karlsson, Virginia Woolf, and a few of my own spirals at 18. It’s about how we don’t “find ourselves” so much as we generate ourselves — through feedback loops, relationships, and the people who draw different tones out of us. I touch on Rao’s ghost-to-character metaphor, the idea of “container people” who midwife our full expression, and how selfhood might be less about discovering a hidden essence and more about becoming legible in motion.
Would love thoughts, critiques, or other essays that explore similar territory : https://velvetnoise.substack.com/p/how-to-become-real
In psychology, it turns out there is a distinction between high self-monitor and low self-monitor people. High self-monitors change or mold their personalities according to who they're with, but low self-monitors show the same personality to everyone. It's apparently not a human universal, that experience of different people drawing different aspects of you.
And of course, neither is wrong, but I think both come with pros and cons.