Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
52m ago
Your last paragraph is, I think, part of why the discussion on the left is often framed as wages rather than tax cuts. The two proposals are only really equivalent with some assumptions about what you mean by "tax cut" and the underlying facts. If its implementation is as a reduction in one's tax rate or taxable income then they are only really equivalent if you are earning sufficient wages and paying sufficient tax to benefit. I have in mind something more in the vein of Unemployment Insurance or perhaps the refundable EITC. In the most straightforward case, the woman having the child expects to face some lifetime earning reduction of X. If society thinks her having that child is worth more than that lifetime earnings reduction it ought to pay her some amount Y > X. Or, women themselves presumably capture some of the benefit of having kids so perhaps society should only pay something like 0.5*X. The general point is that we need to set the payment amount such that it is actually competitive with the opportunity cost, or we are not going to get anywhere.
I think a combination of feminism-consumerism-hyperindividualism has convinced both men and women, but, especially women, that not having the means to support yourself (even within the context of a family) makes your morally reprehensible.
I suppose my perception is not that it's perceived as a moral failing per-se. Rather, lots of women have heard horror stories from other women about feeling or being trapped in a bad situation due to a lack of access to money. I'm optimistic that this is not the typical case but I think it's understandable women want some downside protection. I, personally, would be uncomfortable in the woman's position in some stories I've read.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5hr ago
I suppose it's all a matter of framing. I don't think women are obliged to give society children such that their failure to do so is a "harm" to society in a sensible way. Would it be sensible to say you are doing "harm" to every person you could give money to, but don't?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5hr ago
The impression I get from the rest of the article is not just the boy avoided school discipline immediately but even after having been charged with a crime for his actions. Maybe that's wrong, the boy goes unidentified and the school claims it also can't provide any information. Surely if there's enough evidence for the police to charge a crime there's enough evidence for a school to act.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5hr ago
I suppose I imagine it's of a piece with something like false light which operates along similar lines to defamation. The harmed party would obviously be the individual whose photo was edited. Especially if their was an intention to pass off the photo as genuine. I don't think you could reach any edited picture with this doctrine but I think you could likely get non-consensual NSFW edits. In the underage case my understanding is that digital edits of minors can already be considered CSAM so I don't know why this would be different.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
6hr ago
How about a different kind of AI culture war? I speak of course of non-consensual pornography generation. The most outrageous article I read about this recently was probably this AP article: Boys at her school shared AI-generated, nude images of her. After a fight, she was the one expelled. The girl in question is 13 and she started a fight on a school bus with one of the boys later charged with a crime for sharing the images.
The girls begged for help, first from a school guidance counselor and then from a sheriff’s deputy assigned to their school. But the images were shared on Snapchat, an app that deletes messages seconds after they’re viewed, and the adults couldn’t find them. The principal had doubts they even existed.
Among the kids, the pictures were still spreading. When the 13-year-old girl stepped onto the Lafourche Parish school bus at the end of the day, a classmate was showing one of them to a friend.
“That’s when I got angry,” the eighth grader recalled at her discipline hearing.
Fed up, she attacked a boy on the bus, inviting others to join her. She was kicked out of Sixth Ward Middle School for more than 10 weeks and sent to an alternative school. She said the boy whom she and her friends suspected of creating the images wasn’t sent to that alternative school with her. The 13-year-old girl’s attorneys allege he avoided school discipline altogether.
When the sheriff’s department looked into the case, they took the opposite actions. They charged two of the boys who’d been accused of sharing explicit images — and not the girl.
It turns out that finding apps that advertise this kind of functionality is not hard. In fact, part of the reason I bring this up is it seems this capability is integrated into one of the largest AIs: Grok. There's been some controversy on X over the last couple days after Grok allegedly generated pornographic images of a couple minor girls. Additionally the bot's "media" tab was disabled, allegedly due to the discovery lots of people were using the bot to make pornographic edits of other people's pictures. Though the media tab is gone I did not find it very hard to get Grok to link me its own posts with these kinds of edits.
There is, I think understandably, a lot of controversy going around about this. It's not that it was previously impossible to make this kind of content but the fidelity and availability was much more limited and certainly required more technical skill. Being something you can do without even leaving your favorite social media app seems like something of a game changer.
Frankly I am unsure where to go with this as a policy matter. Should someone be liable for this? Criminal or civil? Who? Just the generating user? The tool that does the generating? As a general matter I have some intuitions about AI conduct being tortious but difficulty locating who should be liable.
There is a simple and straightforward way, common in our society, to induce people to commit their time to doing X instead of Y: pay them more. If you think the marginal women having another kid is more beneficial to society than whatever else she would be doing with her time then society should be willing to put its money where its mouth is. This circles back to your point about economics, though in a rather different way. Women's work outside the home is, by market standards, much more valuable today than it was 30 years ago. The opportunity cost to women of having children is correspondingly higher. As Vox pointed out back in 2018, women suffer a large and persistent decrease in earnings (that men don't) after having children. Women delay having children due to a desire to secure financial stability for doing so. This leads to them overall having fewer children, due to age-related difficulties with pregnancy. If you want more women to have children, pay them for the imputed loss in lifetime earnings.
I should probably just link Parenting as a public good.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
10hr ago
Next, wanting to enjoy the prosperity of a post WW2 America (that they, the boomers, totally earned on their own and didn't inherit from the Greatest Generation) voted for Social Security, Medicare/caid, and home mortgage subsidy. This created a massive debt burden that they would never pay because their children and grandchildren will.
I'm a little confused by this section. The Social Security Act was passed in 1935, a full decade before the first boomers were born. Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965, when the oldest boomers would have been around 19.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
My impression from what I've read is that women tend to have more intimate platonic friendships than men do and so a lot of these kinds of emotional needs are fulfilled by those relationships. Whereas men tend to get those needs fulfilled from a romantic partner.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
That Dataset actually only goes up to the 1990ish birth cohort. Check Page 43 of the PDF
Sure. It's asking about whether someone was married by age 45 so it is necessarily limited to people who are age 45 or older (birth year 1980 or earlier).
Any shifts that emerged in the past 10-15 years are probably not reflected here.
And the last 10-15 years are when the most drastic shifts have happened.
I'm curious about the precise claim here. For ~40 years between 1985 and the present the fraction of college educated women married by age 45 looks pretty stable around 71% (+/- a couple percent) while the fraction of non-college educated women married by 45 underwent a steady collapse from around 71% to 52%. Is the claim that in 10-20 years, when the current cohort is 45, these numbers will have reversed? There will have been a climb in the fraction of non-college educated women who are married? A decline in the fraction of college educated women who are married? Did going to college become a net-negative for women's marriage prospects just in the last 10-15 years?
The longer a student is in college — the least likely they are to get married, study says
The less likely they are to be married in the 25-34 age range. If people are unlikely to get married while in college then being in college means delaying marriage, potentially out of this age window.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
The irony for women is that going to college tends to reduce their appeal as mates (not a given, but they tend to make choices that lead there) while making their expectations for a mate go higher.
How does this square with the fact that there's an almost 20 point marriage gap in favor of college educated women? College educated women are worse mates and have higher expectations, but are much more likely to be married? Most of the decline in marriage rates over the last 50 years has been among non-college educated women. Non-college-educated women have seen marriage rates decline from 79% to 52% while college educated women have seen marriage rates decline from 78% to 71%. Empirically, college helps women get married.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
I think people tend to talk about (1) because they perceive (accurately) that it is where the change has been in the last several decades regarding relationship formation. I'm not aware of any data indicating that "desirable" men are less willing to commit today compared to, say, 20 years ago but there is some data showing women are less interested in getting married over that period. Additionally it's a little unclear to me how large the pool of "desirable but unwilling to commit" men even is. Are there a large fraction of men out there who women want to marry but do not themselves want to marry? That's not clear to me. I can think of some high profile anecdotes but not sure how generalizable that is.
On (1) my pet theory is that women's expectations for marriage and relationships have evolved along with their economic development in ways that men's expectations have not really caught up with. If your pitch, as a man, is that you are going to be an economic provider that is probably much more effective as a pitch in 1982 (when men's average wage was 50% higher than women's average wage) than it is in 2025 (when men's average wage is ~18% higher than women's average wage). Among young people (aged 25-34) that gap is even smaller (35% advantage for men in 1982 vs 5% today). Add to this that it seems women are more comfortable being single than men are and a drop off in relationship formation is not that hard to explain.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3d ago
I wonder if maybe you'd end up with highly specialized committees. How much of the bureaucratic/topical expertise currently embedded in executive rule making agencies could make it back into Congress if the House had 11k members? Although that expertise would probably not be optimally distributed, since it still relies on actually winning elections.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3d ago
I am under the impression this is already largely how the House functions, with committees. And particular committees (Rules comes to mind) being much more influential on general business than others.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3d ago
I am sure we would end up with some kind of electronic solution, but it's still something that would have to be built. Congress currently has electronic voting for bills but that currently has a rather limited number of options (Yes/No/Abstain). Currently any Representative-elect can say basically any name as their choice for Speaker of the House. I don't think it needs to be anyone nominated in advance nor even any Representative-elect. Do you just give everyone a text box and hope ~5k people all type the correct name together? Do you constrain options in the voting system? Interesting to think how those discussions might play out.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3d ago
Trying to imagine the sheer logistics of this. A roll call vote like the vote for Speaker would (assuming each vote takes 5s) take ~16 hrs to conduct.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3d ago
It is pretty funny to read the history of the development of Chinese pronouns in the CNN article alongside the Wikipedia page for singular they in English. So Chinese had a gender-neutral single pronoun. That pronoun evolved into a specifically male pronoun, as was the English fashion of using the generic "he", and so required the development of an equivalent female pronoun. Now Chinese is in the position of re-inventing a singular gender-neutral pronoun, again following an English fashion for referring to non-binary people.
It is not specifically in the form of an app but these kinds of symbolic incentives for voting already exist? Stuff like I Voted stickers and campaign buttons have been popular in the United States for decades. My own state (which has primarily mail-in elections) even offers downloadable stickers to put on your social media. I'm fairly sure, though I haven't done it myself, political campaigns hand out similar things for volunteering and so on. Is it supposed to be the app-based part specifically that's innovative? Or some different verbiage that's more motivating? Maybe tying it all together as a unified progression? I wonder if at some point you run into state laws restricting the giving of a thing of value in exchange for some of these activities.
Unrelatedly, a bunch of his ideas about how to operate a hard party to take power are just straight up illegal in the US today. Political Parties Are Illegal in the United States describes many of them. If your plan requires you to first takeover a substantial fraction of state governments to change their election laws so you can have the political party to take over the state, I don't think your plan is very good! People have thought before about making the kind of party Moldbug envisions. It turns out we used to have them and they kind of sucked so we largely made them illegal.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
10d ago
I suspect Kavanaugh's objection is largely procedural. He wants the President to use the right words in the declaration nationalizing the guard. The obvious angle might be to adopt the dissent's line that the legal prohibition on deploying the Army is itself the source of the inability to execute the laws using regular forces and therefore he needs to federalize the guard.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
10d ago
How about that Supreme Court? For those not following this saga, there's been an emergency application pending at SCOTUS for some weeks regarding Trump's attempt to federalize and deploy the Illinois National Guard in support of various federal immigration enforcement initiatives in the state, primarily around Chicago. The federalization and deployment was enjoined by the District court. On appeal to Seventh Circuit they lifted the injunction as to the federalization but left the deployment part intact. The government then appealed to SOCTUS to stay the injunction on deployment. Today, in a 6-3 decision, SCOTUS denies that stay.
The relevant statute here is 10 USC 12406(3) which provides, in relevant part:
Whenever—
(3) the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States;
the President may call into Federal service members and units of the National Guard of any State in such numbers as he considers necessary to ... execute those laws.
At SCOTUS the question of interest is the meaning of "regular forces" in the statute. In particular, does "regular forces" include civilian law enforcement (FBI, ICE, CBP, etc)? Or does it mean the regular military (Army, Navy, etc)? SCOTUS today gives the latter answer. Six justices rule that "regular forces" means the regular forces of the United States Military. Inability to execute the laws of the United States with the civilian law enforcement apparatus is not sufficient to federalize the National Guard to assist with that purpose. The opinion and dissent break down in some interesting ways.
First, there is an apparent five justice majority (Roberts, Barrett, Kagan, Sotomayor, Jackson) who sign on to the majority opinion and do not write separately. Note that majority opinion also goes further then I mentioned above and seems to say that any presidential declaration that the laws could not be enforced with the "regular forces" requires a situation in which those forces could be deployed. This heavily limits the situations where it would seem to be applicable since there are a lot of restrictions on the use of the United States military for civilian law enforcement purposes.
Second, Justice Kavanaugh writes separately to also deny the stay. His primary objection is that the President has not made the correct kind of declaration. He has declared that he cannot execute the laws with civilian law enforcement but not that he can't with the military. It seems in Kavanaugh's view the only thing that needs to change is the President needs to make the correct declaration. He does not otherwise join the majority opinion about restrictions on that declaration and offers a hypothetical that makes me think he disagrees with it.
Thirdly, Justice Alito and Justice Thomas dissent from pretty much every aspect of the majority opinion. In their view the issue of the meaning of "regular forces" was not properly preserved on appeal. Even if it were it includes civilian law enforcement. Even if it didn't a legal disability (like the Posse Comitatus Act) would satisfy the requirement that the President is "unable" to execute the laws.
Finally, Justice Gorsuch writes in dissent. He focuses in on the procedural issue in the Alito/Thomas dissent and says he would grant the stay on that basis. He otherwise recognizes the questions discussed by the majority as difficult ones and would rather address them in another procedural posture.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
13d ago
I'm seeing some reports (ex: here) that files in the initial dump that contain unredacted pictures of Trump with Epstein are being removed. Just incredible. The picture itself (as best I can tell) is not even particularly incriminating. It looks to me like it's a copy of this picture of Trump, Melania, Epstein, and Maxwell posing together, under some other photos in a desk drawer. Perhaps the image was taken down for unrelated reasons but I'm seeing a lot of speculation that it's because Trump was in the picture, in whatever capacity.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
14d ago
It's a little interesting to contrast this with my perception of Chen's attitude. He clearly was dedicated to making sure software that used to work would continue to work for users. It is basically never the software users fault that the program they bought did things wrong. On the other hand, he has palpable contempt for the developers of user-mode software that took a dependency on some undefined or non-contractual behavior and created these compatibility constraints. Ex: Application compatibility layers are there for the customer, not for the program
Some time ago, a customer asked this curious question (paraphrased, as always):
Hi, we have a program that was originally designed for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, but we found that it runs into difficulties on Windows Vista. We’ve found that if we set the program into Windows XP compatibility mode, then the program runs fine on Windows Vista. What changes do we need to make to our installer so that when the user runs it on Windows Vista, it automatically runs in Windows XP compatibility mode?
Don’t touch that knob; the knob is there for the customer, not for the program. And it’s there to clean up after your mistakes, not to let you hide behind them.
It’s like saying, “I normally toss my garbage on the sidewalk in front of the pet store, and every morning, when they open up, somebody sweeps up the garbage and tosses it into the trash. But the pet store isn’t open on Sundays, so on Sundays, the garbage just sits there. How can I get the pet store to open on Sundays, too?”
The correct thing to do is to figure out what your program is doing wrong and fix it. You can use the Application Compatibility Toolkit to see all of the fixes that go into the Windows XP compatibility layer, then apply them one at a time until you find the one that gets your program running again. For example, if you find that your program runs fine once you apply the VersionLie shim, then go and fix your program’s operating system version checks.
But don’t keep throwing garbage on the street.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
14d ago
My hot take is that too many programmers use garbage collection as a crutch. GCs free you from some very specific work having to do with allocating and freeing memory but they are not a "get out of jail free" card for ever thinking about memory management or object lifetime again. Can think of a lot of examples of my own work in C# where people write inefficient code in hot paths without worrying about it because they let the garbage collector clean up after them.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
15d ago
This is getting off topic, but I thoroughly enjoy reading Raymond Chen's blog Old New Thing for the many stories of Windows bugs or implementation details or programmer misuses that later became compatibility constraints. When you upgrade your operating system and your Favorite Program stops working people rarely blame their Favorite Program even if it is the thing that was doing something unsupported!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
15d ago
I don't know. I find this a topic that it's pretty easy to be nuanced about. Different languages attempt to provide different guarantees to the programmer during their operation. To provide those guarantees they have to be able to understand the code and prove the code satisfies those guarantees. Most such languages provide ways to disable checking those guarantees for particular code sections on the assumption that you, the programmer, have information the compiler lacks that things will work without the compiler having to check. If you, the programmer, tell the compiler you know better and then turn out to be wrong I think it's fine to blame the programmer.
I think everyone has, in their mind, a different idea about the extent to which buggy code should be caught by the compiler and these ideas are what inform what side of the blame the programmer/blame the compiler distinction you fall on. As an example: In college a friend and I had to write some networking libraries in C. At the time we didn't use any fancy editors or anything, just good old gedit and gcc. My friend was writing a function that was supposed to perform an arithmetic operation and return the output but every time he ran it he got a different (implausible) result, even with the same inputs. What was happening is that he had accidentally omitted the return statement for his function, so he was getting back some random garbage from memory on every run. Should the C compiler let you declare a function that returns a value and then let you omit the return statement? Is that mistake your fault or the language's fault? Formally doing this is undefined behavior but that does not always mean crash!
Well that's technically not true, they did. It's just that calling .unwrap(), a function which will immediately abort the application on error, counts as "handling" the error. In other words, the path of least resistance is not to actually handle the error, but to crash. I argue that this isn't a better outcome than what would have happened in C, which would also be to crash. Sure, the crash won't be a segfault in Rust, but that doesn't matter if half the Internet dies.
In this case I find the behavior of Option<T>.unwrap() unintuitive, but I am also coming from the perspective of exception-based error handling. As an analogy, C#'s Nullable<T>.Value will throw an exception if the nullable is actually null. That option obviously isn't available in a no-exception world. Maybe the default behavior should be more like the behavior with the try trait such that it returns the error instead of panic? Then let the programmer panic if the value is error, although that introduces another layer of error checking!
This month, a CVE was filed in the Rust part of the Linux kernel, and it turned out to be a memory corruption vulnerability, ironically enough. "But how could this happen?" Rust has these things called unsafe blocks that let you do unsafe memory operations, closer to what you would be allowed to do in C (though granted, I have heard convincing arguments that unsafe Rust is still generally safer than C). So the path of least resistance is not to do things the safest way, but to just surround everything in unsafe if you get tired of fighting the borrow checker.
I'm a little unsure of the criticism here of Rust as a language. Is it that unsafe exists? Presumably all the code that is not in an unsafe block has guarantees that equivalent C code would not. Is that not a benefit? Is the worst case here you wrap all your Rust code in unsafe and then you end up... as good as C?
To be clear, I'm not saying that these incidents alone mean Rust is a bad choice for anything, ever. I'm not saying Cloudflare or Linux shouldn't use Rust. I'm not telling people what they should or shouldn't use. I'm just pointing out the double standards. Rust people can attack C all day using one set of (IMO, entirely justified) standards, but when they are confronted with these incidents, they suddenly switch to another set of standards. Or to put it more clearly, they have a motte and bailey. Motte: "Rust can't prevent shitty programmers from writing shitty code." Bailey: "C is unsafe, because of all the memory unsafe code people have written, and we should rewrite everything in Rust to fix all of it!"
I think there is a more productive discussion here about how language features and guarantees can help protect against writing buggy code and potentially making it easier to review code for bugs. I suppose I think of it by analogy to Typescript and Javascript. All Javascript is valid Typescript but Typescript needs to be compiled to Javascript. That compilation, in my experience, helps avoid whole classes of errors due to the lack of typing in Javascript. Sure you can write Javascript that just doesn't have those errors, and most people do, but Typescript renders them inexpressible. Similarly so for C and (non-unsafe) Rust.
I do not have a good understanding of Hungary's economy so it's hard for me to assess the scale of their interventions relative to the opportunity cost. The exemption from 15% personal income tax seems like it comes the closest to defraying the drop in wages but it only kicks in after 4 children while my impression of the research is that the wage drop kicks in after the first child.
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