BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.
User ID: 628
So, in other Aella news, she's channelling the spirit of Hanania with this poll:
Suppose you have a 13 year old child dying of a terminal illness, and their final wish is to lose their virginity before they die. Is it ethical for the Make A Wish Foundation to hire them a prostitute?
Options are (with their current percentages):
- yes, any prostitute (10.7%)
- yes, only child prostitute (3.9%)
- yes, only adult prostitute (9.8%)
- no (75.6%)
Of course Aella with her reach manages to get normies to see her posts and the replies are wild that such a person could even exist, some choice replies:
Bro how do you niggas even think of shit like this
What if you were executed at gitmo that would be so crazy
Is this "chick" a pedo? (poll, results are 56.5% yes, 21.7% no, 21.7% "show me the results")
Again I ask, what is wrong with you and why do you keep showing up on my timeline?
While the poll itself may be interesting, what I find most interesting of all are the responses from the normies (there are responses that look objectively at the situation and say stuff like "no, if anyone is going to hire prostitutes it should be the parents, not the make a wish foundation", but they all tend to have stuff like "e/acc" in their usernames so they aren't your average randos). These tend to be extremely negative, but not negative in a "I know what I hate and this is it" form but rather a "first encounter with a terrible eldrich abomination you want to see destroyed but are confused at how could it even exist" sort of way. It does not feel like pure hate, but rather a hate that is born of fear, true xenophobia in its original meaning of the word. Nevertheless it is still a form of hate and you can quite easily see the vitriol directed towards Aella, merely for posting this poll.
My worry here though is that as technology advances and a sliver of people with disproportionate cultural cachet adopt belief systems like those of Aella and decouple from the low sophistication ways of thinking common in most westerners along with completely different cultures entering the west and taking root the current indigenous westerners will find their belief and value systems squeezed on both sides, from above by the likes of people who think like Aella does (nothing wrong with how she thinks, in fact I support it) along with from below by the value systems of recent migrants (who still care about stuff like honour and shame etc.).
While this may be a difficult time for the squeezed westereners themselves (I have little sympathy though, these very same people expect migrants to deal with a far bigger and more rapid cultural shock and blame them if they migrants take steps to mitigate this impact), I am more concerned about potential increased societal scale strife as people lash out from being put in a world that they no longer understand (see the "what if you were executed at gitmo" response above, I for one am glad this person has no power and hope it stays this way).
Naturally I have no doubt that any reified violence by the disaffected would be put down with the same prejudice we use for terrorist attacks these days, but it would still not be a good time for social harmony and that has widespread social impacts beyond a small handful of people cracking and going on a rampage where they kill a few people before bring brought down themselves.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1yr ago
Anybody Here? ...
Nobody? ...
Well, alright then:
A large study from all of Sweden has found that increasing people's incomes randomly (actually, increasing their wealth, but you can convert wealth to income via an interest rate very easily) does not reduce their criminality. The authors find that via a cross sectional model, people with higher incomes are less likely to commit crimes (this just compares rich people to poors and sees rich people are less criminal), while when they switch to a "shock" model where people who won what is effectively a lottery don't see reduced criminality in either themselves or their children. This is a pretty big blow for the "poor people are more criminal because they don't have money for their basic needs" theory.
Original study here: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31962/w31962.pdf
Marginal Revolution post discussing this here (also reproduced below, post has an additional graph at the end on the link): https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/12/why-do-wealthier-people-commit-less-crime.html
It’s well known that people with lower incomes commit more crime. Call this the cross-sectional result. But why? One set of explanations suggests that it’s precisely the lack of financial resources that causes crime. Crudely put, maybe poorer people commit crime to get money. Or, poorer people face greater strains–anger, frustration, resentment–which leads them to lash out or poorer people live in communities that are less integrated and well-policed or poorer people have access to worse medical care or education and so forth and that leads to more crime. These theories all imply that giving people money will reduce their crime rate.
A different set of theories suggests that the negative correlation between income and crime (more income, less crime) is not causal but is caused by a third variable correlated with both income and crime. For example, higher IQ or greater conscientiousness could increase income while also reducing crime. These theories imply that giving people money will not reduce their crime rate.
The two theories can be distinguished by an experiment that randomly allocates money. In a remarkable paper, Cesarini, Lindqvist, Ostling and Schroder report on the results of just such an experiment in Sweden.
Cesarini et al. look at Swedes who win the lottery and they compare their subsequent crime rates to similar non-winners. The basic result is that, if anything, there is a slight increase in crime from winning the lottery but more importantly the authors can statistically reject that the bulk of the cross-sectional result is causal. In other words, since randomly increasing a person’s income does not reduce their crime rate, the first set of theories are falsified.
A couple of notes. First, you might object that lottery players are not a random sample. A substantial part of Cesarini et al.’s lottery data, however, comes from prize linked savings accounts, savings accounts that pay big prizes in return for lower interest payments. Prize linked savings accounts are common in Sweden and about 50% of Swedes have a PLS account. Thus, lottery players in Sweden look quite representative of the population. Second, Cesarini et al. have data on some 280 thousand lottery winners and they have the universe of criminal convictions; that is any conviction of an individual aged 15 or higher from 1975-2017. Wow! Third, a few people might object that the correlation we observe is between convictions and income and perhaps convictions don’t reflect actual crime. I don’t think that is plausible for a variety of reasons but the authors also find no statistically significant evidence that wealth reduces the probability one is suspect in a crime investigation (god bless the Swedes for extreme data collection). Fourth, the analysis was preregistered and corrections are made for multiple hypothesis testing. I do worry somewhat that the lottery winnings, most of which are on the order of 20k or less are not large enough and I wish the authors had said more about their size relative to cross sectional differences. Overall, however, this looks to be a very credible paper.
In their most important result, shown below, Cesarini et al. convert lottery wins to equivalent permanent income shocks (using a 2% interest rate over 20 years) to causally estimate the effect of permanent income shocks on crime (solid squares below) and they compare with the cross-sectional results for lottery players in their sample (circle) or similar people in Sweden (triangle). The cross-sectional results are all negative and different from zero. The causal lottery results are mostly positive, but none reject zero. In other words, randomly increasing people’s income does not reduce their crime rate. Thus, the negative correlation between income and crime must be due to a third variable. As the authors summarize rather modestly:
Although our results should not be casually extrapolated to other countries or segments of the population, Sweden is not distinguished by particularly low crime rates relative to comparable countries, and the crime rate in our sample of lottery players is only slightly lower than in the Swedish population at large. Additionally, there is a strong, negative cross-sectional relationship between crime and income, both in our sample of Swedish lottery players and in our representative sample. Our results therefore challenge the view that the relationship between crime and economic status reflects a causal effect of financial resources on adult offending.
After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed on the Stalinallee
Which stated that the people
Had squandered the confidence of the government
And could only win it back
By redoubled work. Would it not in that case
Be simpler for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
The ongoing riots in the UK and the senseless destruction they have caused remind me of Bertold Brecht's famous poem he wrote in response to the 1953 East Germany strikes. While Brecht, himself a communist sympathizer, initially intended his poem to be a satirical polemic about heavy handed work quotas it recently struck me that he might have been more correct than even he had anticipated.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "to dissolve" as "to become dissipated or decomposed". After seeing the behaviour of the rioters right now as well as the rhetoric that has been coming from that class of people over the last few decades one must wonder if the right solution isn't really to dissolve the people. By this I don't mean immersing them in sulphuric acid until dissolution but rather dissipating their population density as a fraction of the whole country until there is no longer enough of a critical proportion of people which can light the fuse so to speak. There's a reason why even though there are far more "natives" in London than Sunderland the violence in the former has been more chickenhearted and more easily put down.
These rioters are generally low human capital people who take out a lot more over the course of their life than they put in. It's not scientists and lawyers you see giving the middle finger to police officers and pushing garbage bins in their general direction. I think it is perfectly fair to say that as a group they are best characterized as failures who have disappointed their betters and what's more don't even think there is anything wrong with their current state and behaviour. They are even confused and disoriented about the flashpoint of the current disorder: unlike what their prejudices told them the person who killed the three girls in Southport was not a fresh off the boat Muslim migrant but rather a black Welsh 17 year old child who had been born in the UK having a schizo moment. The true facts about the stabbing coming out did not placate their desire for an orgy of violence in the least.
Furthermore they live off the tax contributions of people like me and instead of being thankful for what they are given they blame us for making the country worse and want to bleed us even more. I like to quip that if the majority of people want to see a human parasite they would be better served by looking in the mirror instead of the Times Rich List and I think that applies perfectly here.
Another good example of a city that had some riots is Manchester; when the thugs tried their trade there they were met with swift counter protests bigger than what they could muster and were forced to disperse, leading to no public damage. It appears that the violence only really gets out of hand in the minor cities where the concentration of "natives" is too high. To prevent future riots the obvious solution is to reduce this concentration or namely, to dissolve the people.
Whenever there is dissolution there must be a solvent. And what would make the best solvent here? The usual answer provided by the left is something like "integration" where rich and well off people are asked to live amongst the lower classes in the hope that they will have a civilizing effect on the poors. Normally this is done by mandating the building of housing intended for poor people very close to housing occupied by the well off. While this may work at preventing tantrums from being thrown in the first place it won't do very much to quell them if they happen: a bunch of effete button pushers (Note: I count myself as among this group) doesn't put the fear of God into anyone. They would never have the guts to go up to the rioters and do this (choice moment: the rioter responding with 2 fingers when asked how many brain cells he has).
Instead the best solvent you can get is someone who will also stand up to debauchery when it rears its ugly head: migrants who are unafraid of giving it just as good as they get (see above video). And what's more, unlike the low tier "natives" who Great Britain is saddled with because they were born here the non-natives are all people who were either themselves selected by the UK as being positive for the country or descendants of such people which means they still have a portion of the net positive genetics (I'm ignoring refugees here because they make up a very small proportion of total migrants and something tells me the rioters of today wouldn't be happy if illegal migration stopped but legal migration continued at the same levels as today).
In fact a more reasonable word for these migrants would be "elects", since they are the chosen. Each and every single legal migrant in the UK has been collectively chosen as being worthy of being allowed into the country. They should be accorded the respect such an honour deserves instead of being told that they don't belong here. In fact the reason so many of them were chosen in the first place is because the "natives" have continued to disappoint the real decision makers day in day out for the last however many decades where importing so many migrants was the only choice left to keep a stable state going: firstly refusing to take care of older family members and foisting them onto the state and then refusing to have enough children if they're net contributors/having too many children if they aren't net contributors. Any attempt to talk sense to these people about how a welfare state with sub replacement birth rates and no migration is unsustainable was (and is) met with fingers in ears and "na-na-na can't hear you". Is it any surprise that with such a badly behaved lower class the elites decided to do away with them like you do with a bad employee and get someone new?
And we shouldn't forget that many of the migrants had far worse starting conditions than the gentlemen throwing bricks but through industry and positive sum contributions to human flourishing have managed to make something of themselves, only to be looked at enviously by the people who previously have been appropriating the wealth of the successful and now want to get even more at the elects' expense.
So yes, the elite class in the Western world has taken Bertold Brecht's words to heart. When confronted with unruly and disruptive lower classes it really is simpler for them to dissolve the people and elect another. I for one am looking forward to the consummation of this process; we'll probably end up with fewer riots at least.
I have seen the AGI, and it is Gemini 2.5 Pro
If you go and look at Metaculus you’ll see that regardless of the recent breakthroughs like VEO3 and OpenAI’s “Ghiblification” (probably the first AI image system where accusing the outputs of being “slop” makes the accuser look unreasonable rather than denigrates the picture itself) all the “when AGI?” benchmarks have been uncharacteristically stubborn. The question asking about “weak” AGI has gone nowhere for two weeks months while the median prediction on the question about full AGI has receded three years from 2031 to 2034.
It looks like Scott’s AGI 2027 push has failed to convince the markets. For the informed person, AGI is coming “soon” but isn’t imminent. However I think that actually AGI is already here, is freely available to anyone with an internet connection and is called Gemini 2.5 Pro.
For those of us not in the know, at the moment you can access Gemini 2.5 Pro for free with no limits on Google’s AI studio right here: https://aistudio.google.com/prompts/new_chat ; yep, you heard that right, the literal best text model in the world according to the lmarena.ai leaderboard is available for free with no limits and plenty of customisation options too. They’re planning on connecting AI studio access to an API key soon so go and try it out for free right now while you can. No need to overpay for ChatGPT pro when you can use AI studio, and it’s a lot lot better than the Gemini you get via the dedicated app/webpage.
Our story begins a few days ago when I was expecting delivery of a bunch of antique chinese hand scroll paintings I had purchased. Following standard Chinese tradition where collectors would add their own personal seal in red ink to the work and seeing as these scrolls already had a bunch of other seal glyphs I wanted to add my own mark too. The only issue was that I didn’t have one.
This led to a rabbit hole where I spent a good portion of my Saturday learning about the different types of Chinese writing all the way from oracle bone script to modern simplified script and the different types of stones from which seal were made. Eventually after hours of research I decided I wanted a seal made from Shoushan stone written in Zhuànshū script. That was the easy part.
The real difficulty came in translating my name into Chinese. I, with a distinctly non Chinese name, don’t have an easy way to translate the sounds of my name into Chinese characters, which is made all the harder by the fact that pretty much all Chinese syllables end in a vowel (learning this involved even more background reading) even though my name has non-vowel ending syllables. Furthermore, as a mere mortal and not a Son of Heaven with a grand imperial seal, decorum dictated that my personal mark be only 4 characters and around 2cm*2cm, enough to be present but not prominent on the scroll.
All this led to further constraints on the characters to be put on my seal, they couldn’t be so complex that carving them on a small seal would be impossible, and yet I needed to get my name and surname as accurately onto it as possible. Naturally this involved a lot of trial and error and I think I tried over 100 different combinations before coming up with something that sort of (but not completely) worked.
There was one syllable for which I could not find any good Chinese match and after trying and rejecting about a dozen different choices I threw my hands up and decided to consult Gemini. It thought for about 15 seconds and immediately gave me an answer that was superior to literally everything I had tried before phonetically, however unfortunately was too complex for a small seal (it wouldn’t render on the website I was buying the seal from).
I told Gemini about my problem and hey ho, 15 seconds later another character, this time graphically much simpler but sounding (to my non-Chinese ears) exactly the same was present and this actually rendered properly. The trial and error system I was using didn’t even have this particular character as an option so no wonder I hadn’t found it. It also of its own volition asked me whether I wanted to give it my full name so it could give me characters for that. I obliged and, yes, its output mostly matched what I had but was even better for one of the other syllables.
I was honestly very impressed. This was no mean feat because it wasn’t just translating my name into Chinese characters but rather translating it into precisely 4 characters that are typographically simple enough to carve onto a small seal, and with just a few seconds of thought it had managed to do something that had taken me many hours of research with external aids and its answer was better than what I had come up with myself.
All this had involved quite a bit of back and forth with the model so out of curiosity at seeing how good it was at complex multi step tasks given in a single instruction I opened up a fresh chat and gave it 2-3 lines explaining my situation (need seal for marking artworks in my collection). Now I’m an AI believer so I thought it would be good enough to solve the problem, which it absolutely did (as well as giving me lots of good unprompted advice on the type of script and stone to use, which matched my earlier research) but it also pointed out that by tradition only the artist themselves mark the work with their full name, while collectors usually include the letter 藏 meaning “collection”.
It told me that it would be a Faux Pas to mark the artworks with just my name as that might imply I was the creator. Instead it gave me a 4 letter seal ending in 藏 where the first three letters sounded like my name. This was something that I hadn’t clocked at all in my hours of background reading and the absolute last thing I would ever want is to look like an uncultured swine poseur when showing the scrolls to someone who could actually read Chinese.
In the end the simple high level instruction to the AI gave me better final results than either me on my own or even me trying to guide the AI… It also prevented a potential big faux pas that I could have gone my whole life without realizing.
It reminded me of the old maxim that when you’re stuck on a task and contacting a SysAdmin you should tell them what your overall goal is rather than asking for a solution to the exact thing you’re stuck on because often there’s a better way to solve your big problem you’ve overlooked. In much the same way, the AI of 2025 has become good enough that you should just tell it your problem rather than ask for help when you get stuck.
Now yes, impressive performance on a single task doesn’t make AGI, that requires a bit more. However its excellent performance on the multilingual constrained translation task and general versatility across the tasks I’ve been using it for for the last few weeks (It’s now my AI of choice) means I see it as a full peer to the computer in Star Trek etc. It’s also completely multimodal these days, meaning I can (and have) just input random PDFs etc. or give it links to Youtube videos and it’ll process them no different to how a human would (but much faster). Funny how of all the futuristic tech in the Star Trek world, this is what humanity actually develops first…
Just last week I’d been talking to a guy who was preparing to sit the Oxford All Souls fellowship exam. These are a highly gruelling set of exams that All Souls College Oxford uses to elect two fellows each year out of a field of around 150. The candidates are normally humanities students who are nearing the end of their PhD/recently graduated. You can see examples of the questions e.g. the History students get asked here.
However the most unique and storied part of the fellowship exam (now sadly gone) was the single word essay. For this, candidates were given a card with a single word on it and then they had three hours to write “not more than six sides of paper” in response to that prompt. What better way to try out Gemini than give it a single word and see how well it is able to respond to it? Besides, back in 2023 Nathan Robinson (or Current Affairs fame) tried doing something very similar with ChatGPT on the questions from the general paper and it gave basically the worst answers in the world so we have something to compare with and marvel at how much tech has advanced in two short years.
In a reply to this post I’m pasting the exact prompt I used and the exact, unedited answer Gemini gave. Other than cranking up the temperature to 2 no other changes from the default settings were made. This is a one-shot answer so it’s not like I’m getting it to write multiple answers and selecting the best one, it’s literally the first output. I don’t know whether the answer is good enough to get Gemini 2.5 Pro elected All Souls Fellow, but it most certainly is a damn sight better than the essay I would have written, which is not something that could be said about the 2023 ChatGPT answers in the link above. It also passes for human written across all the major “AI detectors”. You should see the words and judge for yourself. Perhaps even compare this post, written by me, with the output of the AI and honestly ask yourself which you prefer?
Overall Gemini 2.5 Pro is an amazing writer and able to handle input and output no different to how a human would. The only thing missing is a corporeal presence but other than that if you showed what we have out there today to someone in the year 2005 they would absolutely agree that it is an Artificial General Intelligence under any reasonable definition of AGI. It’s only because of all the goalpost moving over the last few years that people have slowly become desensitized to chatbots that pass the Turing test.
So what can’t these systems do today? Well, for one they can’t faithfully imitate the BurdensomeCount™ style. I fed Gemini 2.5 Pro a copy of every single comment I’ve ever made here and gave it the title of this post, then asked it to generate the rest of the text. I think I did this over 10 times and not a single one of those times did the result pass the rigorous QC process I apply to all writing published under the BurdensomeCount™ name (the highest standards are maintained and only the best output is deemed worthy for your eyes, dear reader). Once or twice there were some interesting rhetorical flourishes I might integrate into future posts but no paragraph (or larger) sized structures fit to print as is. I guess I am safe from the AI yet.
In a way all this reminds me of the difference between competition coding and real life coding. At the moment the top systems are all able to hit benchmarks like “30th best coder in the world” etc. without too much difficulty but they are still nowhere near autonomous for the sorts of tasks a typical programmer works with on a daily basis managing large codebases etc.. Sure, when it comes to bite sized chunks of writing the AI is hard to beat, but when you start talking about a voice and a style built up over years of experience and refinement, well, that is lacking…
In the end, this last limitation might be the most humanizing thing about it. While Gemini 2.5 Pro can operate as an expert Sinologist, a cultural advisor, and a budding humanities scholar, it cannot yet capture a soul. It can generate text, but not a persona forged from a lifetime of experience. But to hold this against its claim to AGI is to miss the forest for one unique tree. Its failure to be me does not detract from its staggering ability to be almost everything else I need it to be. The 'general' in AGI was never about encompassing every niche human talent, but about a broad, powerful capability to reason, learn, and solve novel problems across domains—a test it passed when it saved me from a cultural faux pas I didn't even know I was about to make. My style, for now, remains my own, but this feels less like a bastion of human exceptionalism and more like a quaint footnote in the story of the powerful, alien mind that is already here, waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
Look upon them, and weep.
Recently @2rafa responded to a jannied comment of mine on Reddit saying that within 80 years, my homeland and her homeland would still exist and have roughly a similar character to what they currently do but England would not, as its people and its traditions slowly get replaced by les peuples outremers. The original character of the towns and cities of the UK would slowly be gnawed at and eaten away while the institutions, traditions and social fabric dissolve in the alkahest of multiculturalism. She mentioned that it isn't surprising that the native population would fight against it as this replacement basically severs the link between the them and the future.
I agree with that sentiment and I absolutely agree the original character of what made Great Britain truly Great has been lost. But this loss didn't happen thirty or forty or whenever the immigrants started to come in big numbers years ago, rather it happened in the aftermath of the Second World War when the UK dropped its long standing traditions of Classical Liberalism, "an Englishman's home is his castle" and the Anglo developed system of limited government, preferring to go for the expansive and nannying welfare state model instead.
There is a saying that tradition is like a legacy codebase, half of it is deprecated stuff you can get rid of safely while half of it is absolutely mission critical to the project functioning and it's very difficult to tell exactly which bit is which. The UK had over the centuries since the enlightenment created both a social and legal system based on individual rights centred on liberty and freedom and built on a bedrock of Christian values where it was expected that the government would minimise it's interference with what you do with your personal property and take steps to ensure other people also couldn't interfere with it. Charity and helping the less fortunate was very strongly encouraged and the Christian values indoctrinated in everyone since birth meant that lots of people with the means to do so gave away a large portion of their income/wealth to the needy, but crucially it wasn't forced onto anyone. Indeed income tax was first introduced as a temporary measure to fund the British armed forces during the Napoleonic Wars, an existential threat to the country and most definitely not the "lets use it to pay the rent of those who don't have the skills to earn enough to stay in London otherwise" racket that's going on at the moment.
This system generally functioned extremely well, but like all systems there were edge cases where it failed. In a severely misguided attempt since the end of WWII (and continuing until the present day!) successive governments tinkered with this system and slowly removed the things that made the system work (e.g. The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 which gave locals extreme levels of say into what you could build on your own property and is the prime culprit for the UK's current housing crisis), while if anything amplifying the things which were peripheral at best originally and now have become burdens upon society (e.g. how poor people renting in London effectively have the right to get to stay in of one of the only two alpha++ cities in the world and the taxpayer will fund their rent if they can't afford it themselves).
At the point the immigrants started arriving "Great" Britain was already in the process of dying. The things that made it great were being removed slowly the the British themselves. Plus new fads that were counterproductive like the destruction of the nuclear family were being adopted wholesale. It was only a small matter of time before things degenerated to the point where it was necessary to either import immigrants to make up for the collapsing birth rate or accept extreme economic pain for the vast majority of people. Britain choose to do the former. Indeed as Kipling warned a good thirty years in advance:
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
What remains of the original culture of the UK are not the things that made it great. Much like how a cadaver (initially at least) still looks like the person when they were alive but has lost that divine spark that made it more than just a heap of flesh and bones what we have at the moment is little more than a poor caricature of what the Great Thinkers of the Enlightenment envisaged the perfect society to be like. It is an ersatz, cargo cult imitation where things as fundamental as the right against double jeopardy are no longer respected (see the Criminal Justice Act 2003).
Now admittedly the specific cases behind why this right was abolished were quite clearly where a guilty person had been acquitted but was clearly guilty after new DNA evidence was discovered and so their retrial led to justice being delivered (and equally, the family of Emmett Till were denied justice due to the Fifth Amendment which protects against double jeopardy in the US) but at the same time this change showed that another fundamental enlightenment ideal, that "you should not create laws based upon a few specific examples, but rather upon general principles" was no longer respected.
As such, the rot had already set in on the inside well before immigrants started coming over in large numbers and changing the outward, visible character and appearance of British society. Hence what they are now replacing is not a culture with hundreds of years of history, but a thoroughly modern creation that for most of its existence has had mass inward migration. This bastardised culture is not worthy of the protection that should have been granted to Enlightenment Liberalism, but unfortunately that is dead and has been long buried, and no amount of effort will ever bring it back. Indeed as a crude mockery of what I consider to be the best societal system discovered yet by man I would prefer if it disappeared as soon as possible. I see modern British culture as belonging to the same class of objects as smallpox and polio - something to be eradicated post haste - rather than that of the Giant Panda and the Snow Leopard - valuable diversity that should be protected by humanity and nourished.
Just yesterday ethnicity estimates for the 2021 UK census were revealed. As expected the percentage of the UK that is white British fell from around 81% to 75% since 2021. Given the continuing high migration that this country is now basically reliant on - the recent budget depended on very high levels of inward migration to be balanced, lower migration than expected in the next few years will create a short term fiscal black hole that will be very painful to British society, see what happened when Truss and Kwarteng tried to borrow with abandon- and the higher birthrate of immigrants it is practically a given that the Replacement is going to happen come hell or high water. British culture and the country character will continue to change over the coming generations and it will be best for the natives themselves if they just go with the flow rather than trying to fight an inevitability.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
2yr ago
On giving parents votes for their children
One idea that people here have mentioned a couple of times has been to give parents a vote for each underage child they have. The more I think about it, the better this proposal seems, and not only just that, but almost everyone, no matter where they are on the political spectrum should find something in it they support.
Firstly on the logistics front this is very simple to implement. We already have a database of who is the legal parent of who, and whether or not they are emancipated from their parents. Every non-emancipated child's parents get a ballot paper in a different colour to the standard one (say a green ballot paper vs white for adults) which is worth half of a normal vote. So overall both parents of a child get half an extra vote that they can use to vote as they wish. Then we can just count the votes after the election, giving 1/2 weighting to the green ballots. If you have 4 children you are legally the parent of (and responsible for), then you get 1 white and 4 green ballots every election, totally to 3 full votes. Any emancipated children get their full vote, as they are already considered adults for many other things.
This method removes the argument that children shouldn't get a vote because they aren't well developed enough to choose themselves what they want. We already trust parents to act in their child's best interest for many things, asking parents to vote for them as well isn't much of a stretch beyond this. It also rewards parents for sticking with their children and raising them well, as you only get to vote on their behalf if you accept responsibility for them.
The consequences of such a policy would be very positive. Firstly the greater political power handed to parents over non-parents would lead to policies favouring those with children, which would help increase the abysmal birth rates of many western countries as having a child becomes more beneficial/less of a burden. Parents are generally considered as having more stake in the long term future of society too, so giving greater political power to them would shift society towards more long term thinking too, which is sorely lacking at the moment.
Parents tend to be more conservative than childless people, controlling for all the usual factors. Giving them extra voting power would almost certainly shift the Overton window rightwards. Expect to see greater focus on tackling crime, nicer neighbourhoods and better schools if such a policy comes to pass.
At the moment the age of the median voter is significantly higher than the average age of the population as whole. This leads to greater emphasis being placed on the concerns of the old disproportionately, see for example the UK where attacking the entitlements of the old (pensions, high house prices etc.) is effectively a no-go area, as whichever party does this is certain to take a drubbing at the next election. Giving children the vote via their parents would fix this issue, the age of the median voter (controlled for vote power) would come down a fair bit, thus shifting political focus away from the concerns of the old towards the concerns of those of childbearing age.
Equally at the moment in many western countries due to demographic differences in age cohorts minorities have significantly less voting power than you would expect given their share of the population. This is due to minorities being disproportionately minors (pun not intended) who don't get the vote. Thus current political focus is disproportionately focused on placating whites. Such a change would hand more power to minorities in the country allowing them to push for policies that are best for themselves and their children, rather than just what white progressives say are best for themselves and their children. Doing this basically just pushes the voting demographics of a country forward by 18 years, it's going to happen anyways, might as well just accept it now even if you are white.
And children themselves probably benefit the most from such a policy. Parents generally put great emphasis on giving the best possible start to their children, and many already vote accordingly to what they believe is going to be best for them. Amplifying their voices relative to the childless will probably lead to these children entering a world more suited for them when they reach adulthood than presently.
Basically no matter whether you are conservative or liberal, white or a minority, young or old, giving votes to the parents of children is a policy that has something to offer you.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1yr ago
A genuine question I have for the people who don't like immigrants here: In your ideal world what would you have the immigrants who come to the west do when they get here?
I've heard people complain about immigrants drawing welfare when they don't work; I've noted all the complaints about immigrants driving down pay and making the job market more competitive when they work normal people jobs and I've sure as hell seen all the attacks launched upon them when they come and take over the very top of society to rule the natives beneath them.
So my question very simply is: given that immigrants aren't going to stop coming any time soon, what should they be doing that will make them acceptable in your eyes?
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
2yr ago
Trump is useless. The Red Tribe will deserve everything they get (and more) if they give him the republican nomination that he is very likely to go on to lose the general with, leading to 4 more years of wokism from above. Perhaps even a Supreme Court seat; Thomas is getting old.
They say that if you can't teach people something with words, the rod usually suffices, and trump supporters deserve the rod, delivered harshly and mercilessly, if they go on to support such an absolute low class, useless, bumbling idiot over the actually competent Ron DeSantis.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
7mo ago
There is no good reason to ever watch or read anything made after 2012 and doubly so after 2016. There's enough great material to last you a lifetime from before then.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1yr ago
In which case maybe the Americans should get a taste of reality and come back down to earth. Billions of people around the world would kill to be in a situation where they are an American citizen making $16 an hour and owing $100k. If these complainers had any special talents then maybe they would have a point but these people tend to be bog standard "generic human units" with nothing going for them at all.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1yr ago
The best thing Israel could do for the Palestinian people is to straight up occupy Gaza and the West Bank and declare them to be parts of Israel and their inhabitants citizens. Then punish the attackers as common violent criminals.
Also this really doesn't look good for Mossad. I expected better from them...
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1yr ago
Pointwise vs Uniform "badness"
Note: This post assumes the axiom that some people are better than others, and that we can to some degree of accuracy say whether someone is a net contributor to the world or not.
Often when it is pointed out that people who are in group X are a net negative to society (e.g. low paid cleaners who consume a lot more in benefits and general wear and tear on public goods like roads than they put in) others are quick to point out that actually these people are the lifeblood of the country and if they suddenly disappeared the country would collapse within a week (e.g. truck drivers refuse to work, thereby causing collapse as food doesn't get to where it needs to be etc.). This is then followed by the conclusion that therefore these people are not bad for society but rather good for it, and so we shouldn't complain about them at all.
I am completely convinced that they are correct that the country would indeed collapse in short order if truck drivers went on strike, cleaners stopped working etc. However this fact is a statement about the group as a whole, instead of individual members of it. For example: If a factory needs 5 people to work the machines but union regulations require them to hire 25 people instead of 5 then yes, each and every single member of the group of "workers" is a parasite sucking on the teat of the group of people who are "factory owners", even though the "factory owners" need the group "workers". In this case it is not the individuals who are indispensable to society, but rather the group as a whole, and the example above shows, it's possible for the group to be a net positive while every single individual in it is a net negative.
Of course not all groups of people are like this. The group of people who are criminals is a net negative to society full stop (restrict criminals to those who commit non-state sanctioned violence+thieves if your worried about how exactly criminal is defined). The individual members of this group are a net negative to society and the whole group is a net negative too. This is probably why "criminals bad" is a much less controversial statement compared to "street cleaners bad" even though someone who earns enough to be a net contributor plus does some light burglary on the side is probably much less of a drain on public welfare.
To be clear here: the people who are members of a net positive category but themselves are net negative are still those who society would be better off without on the margins. And since all economic decisions are made on the margin it is perfectly valid to say that ceteris paribus the world as a whole would be better off without them in expectation.
I think it makes sense to distinguish these two types of a group being bad for society. Firstly we have pointwise badness as an individual which we define as a person who is on their own a net negative to society ceteris paribus holding everything else the same (i.e. we remove them and just them from society and ask if the result if better or worse in expectation). From this we can define pointwise badness for groups where a group is given this label if most of its members are pointwise bad as individuals (note: here we depart from the mathematical definition, every group has it's saints, I'm sure there are some net positive criminals so we don't require every single member of the group to be a net negative).
As examples the group of Criminals are pointwise bad for society, equally street cleaners are pointwise bad for society because they are easily replaceable and consume more than they output.
Then you have uniform badness, which is when the group as a whole is a negative influence on the world and if we could somehow Thanos snap every single member of it away the rest of society would be better off. Criminals are uniformly bad for the world, while street cleaners, truck drivers and steel mill workers are not. Note that uniform badness sort of implies pointwise badness in the real world (not exactly: a group with 10 good people but 1 Literally Hitler is uniformly bad for the world, while it wouldn't be pointwise bad, the Literally Hitler is pointwise bad as an individual, but none of the others are) much more than pointwise badness implies uniform badness.
There are lots of pointwise bad groups but much much fewer uniformly bad groups. Generally when people are talking about how members of a group are bad, especially when they want something to be done they're talking about pointwise badness rather than uniform badness.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1yr ago
It’s not just that horniness is embarrassing. The level of cringe was much greater that, say, merely catching your friend picking someone up at the bar for a one-night stand. The idea that you watch porn instead of actually getting laid makes you - in the eyes of much of society - a loser.
Tangentially related but this paragraph reminded me of a passage from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity:
If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once. But, of course, when people say, “Sex is nothing to be ashamed of,” they may mean “the state into which the sexual instinct has now got is nothing to be ashamed of.”
If they mean that, I think they are wrong. I think it is everything to be ashamed of. There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.
Applying sub-Dunbar thinking to super-Dunbar level problems
One common pattern of argument you often see from people who have not been doing too well in life is that they often blame rich/powerful interests for why they have not been successful, or alternatively why a certain social institution does not seem to work in the best interests of all of society. Their thinking is that to fix the problem, all we need to do is bring these rich/powerful people to heel. The problem according to such people is that fundamentally these small interest groups are disproportionately sucking up value from society and to fix this, they need to be punished.
The quintessential example I can think of is the problem with rising rents here in the UK. Rents have been going up faster than wages due to decades of underbuilding and general NIMBYism. Things are not quite as bad as say Ireland or Berlin (thankfully we've managed to not fall for the populist poison apple of rent control) but they're still becoming quite the issue with ordinary couples in London spending close to 40% of their take home pay on just shelter.
Recent regulations putting additional burden on landlords and making it harder for them to generate a profit (e.g. energy rating requirements and the removal of mortgage interest deduction from taxes) have led to them selling, further reducing supply more than demand goes down (renters who buy tend to buy bigger than what they were renting, thus reducing the total amount of supply in aggregate, e.g. a couple living in a 1 bed rented apartment may buy a 2 bed one, thereby reducing rental demand by 1 room but supply by 2 rooms, leading to a net loss of 1 room) which then pushes up prices even further.
This has gotten to the point where there are now over 20 prospective tenants competing over each property, which naturally leads to people having to bid over the landlord's asking price/paying months of rent in advance/submitting references if they want to actually get the place for themselves. This has lead to cries that landlords are "exploiting" poor tenants who have nowhere else to go and that they are capital-B Bad People who society needs to give a stern scolding to so that they go back to acting in pro-social ways.
If you were to point out that the current situation is in part caused by society making it harder to be a profitable landlord and that the correct remedy is to make things easier for landlords to make a profit (the real correct remedy is to build more, but good luck doing that in NIMBYland) that standard refrain is that the landlords are already doing far better on average than their tenants, so why should society do even more to help them out? Indeed, they say, we should be playing the world's smallest violin for such hard done up landlords who have hundreds of thousands of pounds to their name. No, what is happening here is that Landlords are capturing a disproportionately high percentage of the fruits of the labour of ordinary tenants (true, compared to historical values), and the solution is to do something that prevents so much of the hard earned money of your average Joe ending up in their hands, ergo Rent Control.
This type of thinking is something that actually works pretty well when we're dealing with small groups of up to 250ish not very technologically advanced people you couldn't just easily get up and leave for a different one like those humans spent most of their evolutionary history in. In such a group it is very well possible to use social shaming and exclusion to ensure a more balanced distribution of resources instead of having a few people hog it all. The lack of advanced technology means that there are no large economies of scale to the group as a whole (and thus eventually you) from having resources concentrated in a few hotspots rather than being more widely spread out. Thus in a small, sub Dunbar's number sized group, ostracism and gossip about how someone is behaving selfishly is the correct course of action to take for the betterment of everyone.
Unfortunately it fails catastrophically when applied to our modern society. It doesn't matter one bit that landlords are richer than tenants for why the current rental market in the UK is as bad as it is. Every single property could be owned by Elon Musk, right now the richest man in the world, and if he was selling off his portfolio because it was no longer profitable the situation would be just as bleak for renters (no more, no less) as it is right now with many disparate landlords independently coming to the same conclusion. Equally they could all be owned by a mutual fund investing the life savings of the poorest half of the planet and if that fund was leaving the rental market due to poor returns it would cause rents to rise just as much as they are doing now. The outcomes for the tenants are the exact same in each of the three cases.
The idea of shaming and making life harder for the people who are disproportionately capturing the economic surplus in an area to shame them into being more altruistic and thus improve outcomes for all of society just does not work in environments where people have a lot more freedom of association than you would get in a typical pre-industrial society. As we see in the example above, that can often be quite counterproductive.
The correct way to fix the issue in our large, super-Dunbar sized societies is the mirror opposite of the sub-Dunbar solution, namely we need to make it easier for landlords to make a profit so they enter the market (hopefully through building new units, but even switching a house form owner-occupied to "for rent" helps relieve the pressure on rents) and increase supply. The correct metric to look at here if you care about the tenants doing well is not how badly the landlords are doing, of the difference in how much value the landlords get vs the tenants from renting out their units, but quite simply "how much value are the tenants getting for what they pay" with zero reference to the sum total welfare of the landlords. And the way to increase tenant welfare? Increase rental supply in the area that people want to rent so there is competition amongst landlords and tenants are able to command more market power than the mere morsel they have today.
Another example of where sub-Dunbar level thinking fails in modern society can be seen in funding for technological advancement. Modern research and development has large capital costs, which requires large pockets of concentrated capital to progress. In a smallish society of 250 people where nobody can really get away from the others, if one of the members has a large windfall it makes total sense for the members of the society to want its fruits to be spread out for their own benefit.
Imagine a world where 250 people each have $2,000, but one person suddenly wins a lottery worth $1,000,000,000 (and gets access to goods worth that much, so it's not like the extra cash causes massive demand pull inflation). As a non lottery-winner, it is in your interest to agitate for the money to be distributed equally amongst everyone, giving everyone $4,000,000 rather than letting the winner keep it, even if they protest that they intend to use the money to fund the development of a drug which will add a year onto everyone's life expectancy (most people will take $4M over 1 QALY). Plus, if your society is not technologically advanced, the chances of that drug being successfully developed in the first place are extremely low, even if all the money is spent finding it. It makes complete sense to redistribute the money, the lottery winner will be pretty unhappy about it, but who cares about 1 person vs 249 and anyways that person's survival is strongly tied to the group's success, and he can't just take his money and run elsewhere.
On the other hand if instead of 250 people, your society has modern day technology and consists of 1 billion people each having $60,000 and someone comes into $1,000,000,000 and promises to develop a +1 QALY drug, it makes total sense to let them keep the money. Even if you took it all and redistributed it amongst everyone that's only $1 per person, which is worth a lot less than an extra QALY (compare to the small society case where everyone got $4M instead). Also the existence of modern technology makes it more likely they'll be able to find and manufacture the drug in the first place.
Indeed here is a case where even the famous Egalitarian philosopher John Rawls would have been in favour of the inequality, as his difference principle permits inequalities where their existence is beneficial to the worst off in society as it is here: for a non winner $60,000 + new drug is a better world than $60,001 but no new drug (a crowdfunding effort to raise money to publicly develop the drug isn't going to raise an extra $1 billion if everyone in society has $60,001 vs $60,000; you really need to have the concentration of wealth in the hands of an actor who's willing to embark on this project). The correct course of action for everyone in the super-Dunbar sized society is to let the lottery winner keep his money, the exact opposite of what they should do in the sub-Dunbar sized society.
Given all this, why is it still the case that many people in our modern world are big proponents of sub-Dunbar level thinking? After all, they would all agree with you that we are quite technologically advanced and no longer live in small societies where you can know everyone else who has a significant influence on your life. For most of human history, sub-Dunbar type thinking would have yielded better results for you and yours instead of the opposite, so it sort of makes sense why deep down we default to it so much, but equally for most of human history violence was extremely common and today we're by far the most peaceful we've ever been as a species.
I would say that this aberration is due to a pernicious effect of modern communications technology. We humans have an availability heuristic where we categorize how common something is in the world based on how often we see it. This works quite well when we're deciding between whether there are more yellow berries or red berries in a valley when the last few times we went foraging we saw around twice as many red berries than yellow ones, but it works a lot less well when modern communications deliberately amplifies rare events (after all, you're a lot more likely to hear "man bites dog" on the news than "dog bites man", despite the latter being much more frequent - ironically this is not true at the moment here in the UK due to the XL Bully dogs rampaging around, but the general idea is valid).
As a result of this amplification, modern day humans who are bombarded with media stories of the rich and powerful think deep down in their subconscious that such people are a lot more common than they actually are, and even worse, that such people are in the same 250ish Dunbar "tribe" as themselves (because the frequent updates about such people make one think these are genuine interactions between them and ourselves), in which case it makes complete sense for why they default to their instinctual, limbic thought process and feel that the way to make the modern world a better place for everyone is very similar to the ways that made life better for antediluvian man.
I hate the antichrist!
Modern technology is in dire need of modern solutions
Our story starts a few days ago when I changed the IP address of the VPN I use to connect to my BurdensomeCount accounts and identity. This is a fairly regular thing I do for Opsec reasons. I also scramble the MAC address of my devices every once in a while, same reason. Normally this is all fine and dandy except that last time I decided to do both of these things together. Looking back this was a very bad idea indeed. While minor minutae of misfortunes I've had to face in my daily life aren't worth making a mottepost on my struggles over those pained few hours, if only for didactic reasons about the current state of modern large technology companies and the decay of the anonymous free internet, are well worth writing about.
On Saturday I tried to log into my discord account for a voice game of Blood on the Clocktower (on a server that originally sprung up from The Motte so populated by smart people, it's quite a fun way to spend an afternoon if you have nothing better to do). After inputting my email address and password and solving the captcha- these days they're using one with a picture containing multiple objects, all but one of which are in pairs, so like 2 trucks in the image, 2 lions in the image, one rabbit and you have to click on the unpaired object to pass- Discord did the whole "new login location detected, please check your email address" thing, all well and expected because of my VPN reset.
At this point I went to Gmail to log in. Email address, check; Password, check; no issues here. Since I was using a new IP and MAC Gmail asked for an extra security check before they let me in: they wanted a mobile phone number to send me a 6 digit code. This was the first sign that something was wrong: I didn't even have a mobile phone associated to this account so why was Gmail asking for a phone number? Like seriously, why do you need me to associate a phone number before you let me into my own account? I tried to see if there was a way around this but apparently not, Google wanted a phone number or it was no dice for me.
Obviously I didn't want to provide my registered phone number linked to me in real life but fortunately I have a burner phone. I gave Gmail one of my burner numbers and got the code from Google. Note that since I didn't have any associated phone numbers with the account anyone could have used literally any phone they had lying around for this so it's not like this was providing any real security benefit to my account against intruders, it was all a charade for Google to get its hand on a phone number. I was medium annoyed at this but I had a voice game to play so let it slide. I got my six digit code and put it in, only to be told:
Google couldn’t verify this account belongs to you. Try again later or use Account Recovery for help.
No shit you couldn't verify this account belongs to me when I don't even have a phone number associated with the account? What possible reason related to identity verification could you have to ask me for a phone number in the first place?
It was off to Account Recovery for me. Google again wanted my email address and password, which I provided. I also had some security questions registered to my account that I knew the answers to but Google didn't even bother asking me about them, instead taking me straight to:
You didn’t provide enough info for Google to be sure that this account is really yours. Google asks for this info to keep your account secure.
If possible, when signing in: Use a device where you’ve signed in before Use a familiar Wi-Fi network, such as at home or work
and leaving me at a complete blank wall. My only reaction at this point was WTF?? Locking people out of their accounts when they've forgotten their ID details is one thing, but doing it to someone who remembers literally every single piece of identity information associated with their account is a whole new level of bastardry. Do no evil indeed.
All this meant I needed a new Discord account, which meant a new disposable email account as well, and I needed it fast, the games were starting in less than half an hour. I wasn't gonna create another Gmail account after their recent treatment so I went to what I thought was the provider most open to anonymous accounts and least likely to pull another Google on me: Protonmail.
Fortunately making a new account with Protonmail was fast and without issue. I took this new email and tried to use it to create a Discord account. Discord though was much less nice. Firstly it wanted all the standard details: username, email, date of birth (1st Jan 1984 in case anyone is curious) and password. Before making the account it wanted me to verify I was human: it was time for another captcha but that wasn't enough to sate Eris, she also wanted me to verify my phone number to create an account, which as usual I didn't want to provide for Opsec reasons.
At this point I was already feeling some burnout so tabbed over to other stuff for a few minuets. When I came back it was to the landing page Discord has for all new accounts where they tell you about how they are a worse IRC clone and try to upsell you into buying Nitro (but hey, at least it's still better than Slack). Thinking I had lucked through somehow and wouldn't need to go through the whole phone number charade and was home safe I closed these popups but instead of the expected stuff I was presented with the login screen again. It looked like I had timed out instead on the previous screen and would need to login again into the new account.
No matter, at least I was getting somewhere. I put in my new email and password and hit "Log in", only to be rewarded with "Wait! Are you human?". It was captcha time again. I got my burner phone ready and clicked on the rabbit, just about having had it with Discord. Time was ticking, the game was about to start soon and I didn't want to miss out on the first round.
Your Account has been disabled
Fuck me with a pointed stick. Why has this account been disabled when it's never been properly logged into ever in the first place? What possible reason could you have for disabling the account? No phone number? In that case why not just ask for one instead of nixing the account straight up? I hadn't got the time to seethe here so I went straight back to the account creation screen. Since the previous attempt had failed to create a working account I tried to create another one only to be told "Email is already registered", but not before going through another round of captchas.
Great, because I had the temerity to switch over to another tab for a few minutes you've now basically made it impossible to use my email address with discord forever. Normally at this point I'd have gone outside and touched grass to cool off a bit but there wasn't any time for that right now. I immediately went back to Protonmail and created a new account then returned to Discord signing up for another shiny new account with my shiny new email. One more captcha later I was back to the "verify your phone number page". This time I had my burner in hand and gave Eris my number post haste prior to her fickle nature banishing me again only to be met with another "Wait! Are you human?" before she'd send me the six digit code needed to gain access to her inner valuables.
I got the code and typed the digits in one by one, then hit enter. My reward for this was, yep, you guessed it, another captcha. These newfangled automatic registration bots must be getting really good now at inserting themselves directly into the middle of the process given that you need to verify your humanity basically every other click.
Even this was not enough to satisfy her, she wanted me to verify my email as well before letting me in. I clicked on the button to send a verification email only to be presented with yet another captcha. This was too much, I was one sliver away from going full REEEEEE now: Verification can was supposed to be a meme you guys, not an accurate description of reality! Nevertheless I kept my composure, clicked on the rabbit and waited for the fated email to arrive.
Instead of the signup email from Discord I was expecting I got one from Protonmail instead:
Dear User,
Thank you for your interest in our service.
Our system has flagged third-party service registration emails shortly after your account creation, which goes against the intended use of our service and may indicate disposable account usage.
We've implemented these measures to enhance the overall reputation of Proton Mail. This helps protect our domain and prevents the risk of our IP being banned by third-party services, which could affect service availability for all users.
Currently, your account has some limitations, restricting its use for registering on third-party services.
To remove these limitations, you will need to add a verified recovery email address or phone number, or consider upgrading your account.
Learn more about how to verify your account recovery methods here: https://proton.me/support/set-account-recovery-methods.
Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.
Best regards,
The Proton Anti-Abuse Team
WTF???????? The fact that you knew this was a registration email from Discord implies that you have scanned my email. I thought one of the unique selling points of Protonmail was that you were so privacy focused to the point that everything was encrypted and if governments served you a warrant you wouldn't ever have any info about your customer's emails beyond their encrypted inbox you couldn't do anything about. Scanning their emails is about the biggest breach of trust possible here. And it turns out you aren't just doing it when your hand is forced by the government (understandable) but willingly to make some extra pieces of lucre.
What's even the point of Protonmail then if you're going to be just as bad as the big providers when it comes to privacy but also provide a paltry amount of free storage compared to what they give, and we haven't even started talking about how you gimp new accounts or your sketchy and misleading advertising (they say new free accounts get 1GB storage but it's actually only 500MB by default with the rest requiring you to set up autoforwarding from your gmail account to use their UI and also download their app; oh and to create a sense of FOMO you only have 15 days to do this or you're forever stuck at 500MB).
I remember the days when you used to have two passwords for protonmail, one to download your encrypted mailbox from the site and then the other to decrypt the mailbox locally on your own machine. Oh how you people have fallen. I used to be highly supportive of them in the past but after seeing this I would't piss on them if their servers were on fire.
And of course by now Discord had timed out again and my fledgling account had been disabled. I would have to start the process from the beginning and go through the captcha gauntlet one more time. I was legit malding now, why did they have to make it so fucking hard to create a usable discord account? I was close to giving up by now, no clocktower game was worth this much strife.
Eventually I had to go to Microsoft and create an Outlook email to be able to create a functioning Discord account. I had just about given up and didn't expect much from them but surprisingly the process with them was completely smooth. All those capchas by the end though had me channelling my inner Elmer Fudd and I was just about ready to kill that damn rabbit. I noticed quite wryly that in the year 2024 AD Microsoft, that old bogeyman of the 90s, was somehow more OK with completely anonymous accounts than services which a few short years ago were loudly trumpeting how pro-anonymity they were.
But even now I was not home safe. I may finally have had a working Discord account but still needed an invite to the BOTC server because surprise surprise my last link had expired. Even though we're an open fun server that's happy to welcome pretty much anyone from rdrama/themotte in 2022 Discord got rid of permanent non-expiring invitation links unless the owner designates it as a "community server" which means giving Discord full rights to scan all content as well as getting it listed on a public directory on the discord website (not a good thing for us, the server's culture risks getting run over). This means we are forced to rely on invite links that expire every seven days...
This change by Discord making user experience worse sounds completely nonsensical until you realize that Discord wants to compete with other established social media sites like Twitter. That means they're trying to incentivise people to spend as much time as possible on their site and pushing community servers that people can self discover is one way of doing it (same reason they switched to fixed usernames). These incentives also have a side effect of Discord cannibalizing other smaller discussion sites like drama where Aevann who runs rdrama.net now hardblocks links to them because they very noticeably siphon off conversations and people; I can't say this policy is wrong either, something like it is probably necessary for the long term health of the site.
In the end I ended up messaging multiple different people I knew to be on the server and very obliquely asking them for an invite link (because I didn't want my messages to get filtered), hoping one of them would respond so I could join my game. Fortunately @everyone saw my message and I was able to join the game, but not before he got his drama account temp shadowbanned for falling afoul of the Discord filter. After wandering the modern technological desert I had eventually made it to the promised land, but not without half a headache and an intense burning hatred inside of me for the way these big companies operate...
On ruling well as a substitute for morality
Moulay Ismail ibn Sharif was an Alawite King of Morocco who ruled from 1672 to 1727. As a minor son of the first king of the Alawite dynasty and with his mother being a black slave, he only managed to ascend to power due to a fortuitous series of events where two of his higher ranking half brothers took the throne in succession, quarreling against each other until one of them was killed by forces of the other, and then the other died in a horse accident during a campaign a few years later. Even then, he only really got his hands on power because he managed to make it to Fez and proclaim himself Sultan before any of the other people who could conceivably lay a claim to the throne managed to do it.
As you would expect, his reign started out with a very divided Morocco. A rival claimant to the throne rushed to Marrakesh and had himself proclaimed Sultan. Moulay Ismail had to defeat him multiple times over many years because like a goblin, as soon as the Sultan’s forces went to a city to subdue his revolt he would disappear from there and reappear soon after in a different city where he would agitate the nobles there to rebel against the sultan.
Eventually Moulay Ismail managed to subjugate all the pretenders and unify Morocco as a single state under him as the undisputed king. This led to a period of relative stability where the median inhabitants of the empire could by and large go about their lives in peace. His army reforms also led to the creation of the first professional Moroccan Army, the Black Guards, who owed their loyalty directly to the Moroccan state (and by extension to Moulay Ismail) rather than being a collection of fighters from disparate tribes.
He also invested heavily in building structures, creating over 75 forts over his reign all over Morocco. Not only this, he was also a great lover of nature and created a multitude of gardens in the deserts of western north Africa. He basically built the city of Meknes as a new capital for Morocco, raising it from a few derelict villages to such a splendor that it is now recognised as one of the four Imperial Cities of Morocco. To this day his constructions are some of the most noteworthy landmarks any tourist could visit in the country.
And not just this, but what man can overlook his personal harem of over 500 women, through which he sired over 800 confirmed children, putting him as the second most prolific confirmed father throughout all of history, seconded only by Genghis Khan. He was also quite active in the diplomatic arena, sending letters and ambassadors as far as Great Britain to the court of James II, at one point extorting him to convert to Islam for his own spiritual benefit.
His reign is by and large seen as a golden age for Morocco. He brought order and security to the empire, and his reign was described by the historian Ahmad ibn Khalid al-Nasiri as:
“The evildoers and troublemakers no longer knew where to shelter, where to seek refuge: no land wanted to bear them, no sky would cover them.”
He was often compared to his contemporary, Louis XIV of France with whom he had an alliance and was considered to be the Moroccan Sun King (at one point he even tried to get married to one of the illegitimate daughters of Louis XIV). He had grown Morocco to its largest size ever and not only this, the empire’s economy was also doing well. His rule was a high water mark for Morocco: after his death his multitude of sons had another big power struggle which had the dubious distinction of having a single person, Moulay Abdallah, become Sultan on six separate occasions.
Regardless, it is clear that an ordinary citizen of Morocco would have had a far better life during the reign of Moulay Ismail than either the time before his Sultanate or after it. A comparison can be made here to the Three Kingdoms period of Imperial China between the Han and Jin dynasties when due to strife and extensive bloody competition between small warring polities China lost half of its population in merely 60 years. In many ways the reign of Moulay Ismail was the inverse of this, Morocco thrived and flourished during his almost 60 years on the throne.
One might wonder why such an accomplished king and ruler is so unknown these days, why the name of Moulay Ismail is not mentioned more widely in discourse. Even amongst the well read who know something about the history of Africa the name “Moulay Ismail” is not likely to raise too many eyebrows in recognition. This is because despite all the general prosperity and welfare generated by his half century rule over Morocco, his behavior in his personal life and dealings was very much the opposite, indeed Moulay Ismail is better known to people these days as Ismail the bloodthirsty.
His atrocities were myriad, his actions so extreme that even his contemporaries of the 17th century questioned them. A french captive described his appearance as thus:
He is a vigorous man, well-built, quite tall but rather slender... his face is a clear brown colour, rather long, and its features are all quite well-formed. He has a long beard that is slightly forked. His expression, which seems quite soft, is not a sign of his humanity - on the contrary, he is very cruel...
Estimates vary, but point to him having killed or ordered the deaths of over 50,000 people during his reign (not including losses in battle). He was exceptionally cruel to his personal slaves. One of his favorite pastimes when out riding was to pull out his sword as he was climbing his horse and decapitate the slave who was holding the stirrup. Why? Because he could. Ismail the bloodthirsty needed no other reason.
He was also extremely jealous in guarding the women of his harem. Each of them had their own eunuch to guard her from straying. For a man, merely looking at one of his concubines carried the death penalty and it was common for men to throw themselves face first upon the ground with their eyes down to prevent any accusations from the king, which he was very liberal in brandishing, truth be damned. Once he had one of his viziers executed because a storm hit his traveling army and caused large losses, even though the vizier had zero control over it.
It wasn’t like he behaved any better towards the women of his harem either. Any one even suspected of being unfaithful to him was sentenced to, you guessed it, death. In this case the Sultan himself would strangle the unfortunate woman, or if he wanted to be extra cruel, first cut off the breasts and remove the teeth of his victim. And his method of acquiring these women in the first place was not particularly nice either, one of his conditions to make peace with a tribe he had defeated was that he would be given a daughter of the tribe’s chief for himself.
Even blood kinship did not limit his personal depravity. He had multiple of his own sons killed, perhaps most famously Moulay Mohammed al-Alim who was once the Sultan’s favourite son, but was convinced by another one of his wives to revolt as she wanted her own son to be heir to the throne. When Moulay Mohammed was captured his father ordered one of his executioners to cut an arm and a leg off in punishment. The executioner refused to spill royal blood and Moulay Ismail had to get a backup executioner to do the deed. Moulay Mohammed died of his injuries two days later.
Afterwards Moulay Ismail had both of the executioners killed as well, the first one for refusing to obey the Sultan’s orders, and the second one for spilling royal blood… I needn’t go on with further examples of Moulay Ismail’s personal depravity, although there is a lot I’m leaving out (the reason his proposed marriage with the daughter of Louis XIV did not work out was because the French feared for how she would be treated by him if she went to Morocco).
The point of the matter is, despite how immoral and nasty a person or group may be themselves, it is still possible for them to be a net good for the world on a consequential level, and this possibility only goes up the more power they have. A nasty but competent weak person will not influence wider society at all, all they will do is make life worse for those close to them. A nasty but competent powerful person has the ability to enforce order and stability throughout society, and the positive knock on effects of this can very easily outweigh all the bad stuff they get up to In their personal life.
The nastiness doesn’t have to be restricted to your personal life either, Moulay Ismail treated his Christian slaves extremely cruelly, but as long as the damage your nastiness causes is less than the benefits you provide through your competence, and there is no believable alternative that would be plausibly better, it is best for the world if you are the person/group in charge.
Note the necessity of the plausibility of the alternatives being better. The multitude of different factions competing for the Sultanship before/after Moulay Ismail all believed that they would be better for the country than any one else, but because none of them were able to convince enough nobles etc. enough to consolidate power, there was a lot of strife and the country as a whole suffered. It could even very well be true that a certain claimant to the throne after Moulay Ismail would have been a better ruler had he been given the chance, but because he could not convince wider society of this, the end result was that people were worse off.
There was a comment here a few weeks ago which mentioned that on societal scales, there is no difference between stupid and evil. I think that not only is this true, but even more, you can be so much more competent compared to the alternative (as Moulay Ismail was compared to the lawlessness that was prevalent either side of his reign) that from a consequentialist point of view it is far better for you to be running things than the alternative, your outbursts of evil notwithstanding.
Connecting this to more topical matters: Israel is obviously a morally questionable but technologically/socially superior power compared to the Arabs of the middle east. Even when they aren’t busy killing each other in internecine conflicts (see Saudi Arabia vs Yemen etc.), the are hardly able to create technologically advanced societies where humanity can flourish unless they were blessed by nature with huge oil wealth right under their feet. You can compare e.g. the UAE vs Tunisia, both are similar sized states with very similar cultures, the only big difference is that the former has oil and the latter doesn’t.
The way to see whether Israel is good or bad for the Arabs is not to compare the quality of life led by your average Israeli Jew vs your average Israeli Arab, but to compare the quality of life of an Israeli Arab vs a non-Israeli Arab. Sure, Israel treats it’s Arab citizens as second class citizens compared to the Jews, but this absolutely does not necessarily mean that the Arabs of Israel are worse off than they would be in the counterfactual.
There was an observation made by Scott on one of his old posts that the best place to be an Arab in the Middle East outside of the oil rich states was Israel. Regardless of the lack of rights afforded to Israeli Arabs compared to their Jewish counterparts, the level of ambient prosperity in Israel is so so high compared to non Oil-Rich Arab states that the quality of life enjoyed by as Israeli Arab is higher than the Arabs unfortunate enough to be born elsewhere in the middle east.
Note that is argument is general, it doesn’t apply to just the neighbours of Israel (for which you can claim that the consequences of Israeli actions have damaged those states so much that their citizens now live a much worse life not due to any faults of their own, but rather those of Israel), but to all of the non Oil-Rich Middle East. It is certainly better to be an Israeli Arab compared to a Tunisian Arab and you can’t say that the current situation of Tunisia can largely be blamed onto Israel.
Now someone may counter by saying that it doesn’t matter how much material prosperity you may have if you don’t have political rights and “freedom”, defined in some nebulous way that aligns with how westerners think of it. Except that empirically, people behave in the complete opposite way, gladly sacrificing those things for higher prosperity.
For instance, you can make a strong argument that the average hetero man back in my home country has a lot more “freedom” than if he were to go to, say the UK (freedom to own and shoot guns, freedom to drive without having to follow a huge amount of safety regulations and low speed limits, freedom to develop his property as he wishes, freedom from an onerous tax burden, freedom to buy most medicines by just showing up at the pharmacy and asking for them instead of needing to waste a GP’s and his own time, freedom to hire servants at a mutually agreeable wage instead of minimum wage regulations getting in your way etc.). I feel this personally too, when I go back home to visit my extended family compared to the life I live in the UK. However the difference in the sheer amount of “stuff” a person can buy in the UK vs back home is big enough to create a pool of millions of people who would love nothing more than to give up all this freedom just so they can go and live in the west and be able to buy more things, while there is minimal demand for my co-ethnics in the west to go back home and enjoy all this extra freedom.
You also see this on the other end of the spectrum. Amongst business professionals expat postings that come with higher salaries/fringe benefits in exchange for being sent to a different country where you have zero political rights and are always at the risk of being expelled from the land because your visa renewal was refused are generally highly prized rather than being seen as a trap to avoid. If “political representation” and “right to choose those who lead you” were really all that valuable these professionals wouldn’t be jumping over each other to get these postings where you get paid 75% more and are given two return tickets back home each year to leave your homeland in live amongst foreigners who probably don’t even speak the same language as you.
Another demonstration of the low value of a representative vote to choose what the future will look like vs getting more material prosperity can be seen in the share prices of public companies that issue multiple classes of stock. Often there is a B class of shares that are exactly the same as the standard A class of shares when it comes to dividends and portion of ownership of the company’s assets, except that the B class shares don’t get a vote. The value of a vote can then be computed by comparing the price difference between the two classes of shares.
Yesterday the Alphabet Class A share (which gets voting rights) closed at 138.06, while the Class C share (which is equivalent to the class A share but does not get voting rights) closed at 139.20 . So actually the share with voting rights was selling for ~1% less than the share without voting rights (this is a quirk of the system caused by a short term supply/demand imbalance, normally the shares are within a few cents of each other). This goes to show how much a vote is actually worth, namely very very little compared to using the extra money in buying cheaper shares to buy more of them and get a better return on your capital (in Google’s case the founders have a majority of voting power so you can sort of explain why a vote you can buy isn’t worth anything, but even for companies where this is not the case, voting stock tends to be valued within a few cents of the equivalent non-voting stock).
Putting it all together it’s quite clear, both from the high level outside view, as well as the empirical evidence of where people choose to go if they are allowed to, that even though the rulers of a society may not be deontologically acting in particularly nice ways, and that there is a subgroup which is doing worse than they would otherwise be doing if the rulers would “just change their behavior” and allow them more say in how the place is run, the choice in reality is often not “nasty” rulers vs “nice” rulers, but rather “nasty” rulers vs even nastier alternative, and in that case the net change in sum total welfare of those “oppressed” by these rulers may well be more positive than every other plausible world, and so the “nasty” rulers are good for humanity as a whole and should be seen as such.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1yr ago
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n. - Lucifer, Paradise Lost.
Some people here have said that it is just and right for the Palestinian people to continue to fight to the death against their Israeli "Oppressors", even though under most reasonable cases they would be better off if they just accepted the Israelis as their superiors and started living like your median Israeli Arab. Certainly the Israeli Arabs are doing decently, with their being no large scale oppression against them, even though Israel has far more control over them than it does with the Palestinians (which is not what you'd expect from a state that hated them, you'd expect a positive correlation between how much power a state has over a person and how much it oppresses them).
The mindless lashing out by Hamas two weeks ago initially made me think they were extremely stupid, given that compared to them Israel was basically a sleeping beast, which they provoked into waking up and retaliating by kicking it. However I refuse to believe that Hamas leadership can altogether be this idiotic (with a population of 2 million people, even if your average IQ is 90 you can easily fill out your top ranks with IQ 130+ people), surely they knew that what they were doing had zero hope of bringing down the Zionists and all it would do is kill the Palestinian cause for decades since their only hope is to win the "sentiment of the rest of the world" war until Israel is pressured into making concessions. Murdering/pillaging civilians, then posting videos online celebrating what you did is absolutely not the way to go about it.
The more I reflect on why they would ever do what they did, the more convinced I am that the actions of Hamas and those who prefer to fight to the death rather than accept life under the Israelis are, in a word, simply Satanic. Note that the Palestinians have no good plan for how they would materially improve the lives of their citizens if Israel sudden disappeared in the blink of an eye beyond going in an feeding off the surplus left behind. Their plan for prosperity is: 1. Get rid of Israel. 2. Things magically get better and everyone is happy. They don't even bother to try and demonstrate that they are serious about improving life for the common man, there are no "political party manifestos" of what Hamas would do to improve lives if suddenly they got everything they say they want. They are just interested in fighting the stronger power in the area and deposing them so they can be the strong power instead. At the very least they could come up with a serious and convincing plan of how the Levant would be better off and what they would do to make people's lives better if/when they win their struggle. They have no positive vision, end of story.
Just as Milton's Lucifer preferred to rule over ashes rather than live a subservient life under God, these terrorists prefer to force the Palestinians to live out a life in terrible conditions with them at the head rather than accept the comparative Heaven on Earth experienced by Israeli Arabs. Such actions are literally Satanic, as was understood by humans hundreds of years ago, and yet, even today there is a very large contingent of the world that supports those who get their political inspiration from the Prince of Darkness. The mind boggles.
Yeah, BAP just seems to be crying about more effecient and higher fit humans taking their rightful place near the top of the western hierarchy. It's literally no different to the usual complaints black people have about whites. BAPs laments come from the same place as those ones (namely envy) and should be discarded. The only difference is that unlike whites who for some reason listen to the unfounded complaints of blacks, we're not going to listen to the ones of whites. You set up this system, and now we're beating you at your own game!
Also this Indian Bronson dude (first time I am hearing of him) has a profile picture of a dude holding up a gun with no trigger discipline. That on its own makes me negatively predisposed to him, people have died because others couldn't keep their index fingers straight. It's something which needs to be shamed and removed from society.
Without black people, the success of modern day America would not have been possible
Downthread there is a comment from @RandomRanger where he talks about how high income blacks are still just as criminal as low income whites, using this to argue that we shouldn't treat poor people of all races the same and that the negative effects of the black population today are so bad that putting them in the USA leads to social dysfunction as bad as that in modern day Russia.
It's quite heavily implied that blacks are a problem and their presence leads to a worse USA compared to a hypothetical counterfactual where they weren't there. I don't think this is quite right, I actually think an even stronger argument can be made for the exact opposite belief, namely that it is a direct consequence of having so many blacks that the USA is as advanced and developed as it is today and that a USA which never had them would be one where everyone (including whites) was much poorer today.
The argument itself is simple. Today the USA is much richer than other peer countries in Europe etc. because it has and has had for a long time significantly lower taxes and a much weaker redistributive welfare state compared to places like Sweden and the UK. This comparative lack of "democratic socialism" and a much lighter touch of the government on private enterprise has paid off in spades for the US which has gone from being only slightly more prosperous than the UK/France/Germany etc. to being significantly more so over the last few decades.
One perfectly valid question to ask is why did the USA not follow in the same footsteps as Europe when it came to implementing a very high tax and spend redistributive economy, which consequently lead to it becoming significantly richer per capita as the virtuous cycle paid off. My answer is simple: the US had too many black people for this sort of redistribution to be palatable to the ruling white classes. Hence the US escaped the economic havoc and destruction (compared to the counterfactual) such policies lead to in the long term and was able to grow and expand unshackled which eventually lead to everyone's living standards improving massively. Indeed as the tastes of the ruling class have changed and become more accepting of the sorts of behaviours displayed by low class black Americans so too have we heard louder and louder calls to redirect more and more money to the poor from those who might do something useful with it.
By now it's very well established empirically (just look at Europe) that when white people as a class get governmental power and there aren't too many lower class people around who have a very dissimilar modus vivendi that your average high status white would find disagreeable to fund they introduce "democratic socialism" and start taxing people/companies/transactions (discouraging innovation and hard work) and use the money to set up a welfare state (discouraging innovation and hard work). This predictably leads to less innovation and growth, which leads to large scale economic welfare loss for the population as a whole. The final result of this is that everyone ends up poorer and worse off, little different from the purported negative impact blacks have of the population as a whole.
Just like how blacks (as a class) have a direct negative impact on societal welfare through their elevated crime rate etc. wherever they are, whites (as a class) have a direct negative impact on societal welfare through their very high propensity to introduce "democratic socialism" wherever they are. Now of course there are lots of whites that don't think this way and are honest to goodness capitalists, but equally lots of blacks never steal or otherwise commit crimes. Just like the existance of such blacks doesn't mean blacks as a class don't cause large scale social damage through elevated crime incidences, the existance of such whites doesn't mean whites as a class don't cause large scale social damage through promoting bad economic policy.
Indeed because economic growth is contagious and spreads its boons all over the world, it's not just Americans who would be worse off if there were no blacks and consequently American whites had fallen to their instinctive impulses of taxing the productive to give to the unproductive. A lot of the high living standards around Europe and the rest of the world are due to techonologies that were developed and matured and brought to market due to substantial efffort from Americans safe in the knowledge that they would stand to personally benefit from its successes. Without this engine of growth and productivity in America it is well possible that the developed world in this alternate universe 2024 would still have living standards no higher than our world managed in the 1960s.
Many white nationalists are perfectly at home with noticing the bad consequences of black people as a class on the sum economic welfare of the USA. However they fail to notice the more pernicious but potentially even worse consequences of letting white people with their "lets minimise harm, even if it scuttles the economy" approach run rampant over the country like it would have done had there not been a large class of black people 100 years ago the whites were less happy to redistribute money towards.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1mo ago
The US unironically needs to raise taxes on the rich (I mean actual rich, not those earning large salaries). (Non-land) Wealth taxes are usually bad, but with the global reach of the IRS and their policy to tax worldwide income, there's no reason the US can't easily adopt a policy of taxing worldwide assets without too many bad side effects. This would raise significant money, imagine even a 1% worldwide non-US housing asset yearly tax on all US permanent residents and citizens (temporary residents get a pass because you don't want to discourage smart wealthy people from the rest of the world coming to the US), it would easily fill the black hole.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1yr ago
Oh, absolutely. There was even a big post either here or on /r/SSC where a poster argued quite convincingly that a big part of the reason why there is a modern dating imbalance and women have so much power in the marketplace is precisely because there are too many 18-25 men today compared to even 1980. In 1980 the male:female ratio had equalised by age 20-24: https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/1980/ ; while today the imbalance is still almost as bad as at birth: https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2023/ . Of course this 5% imbalance gives women a very disproportionate amount of power (it's not 5% more power, due to how strong the human male sex drive is, men will jump through a ton of hoops before enough of them drop out so that the market clears).
I can't seem to find the post though, even after a cursory google...
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
2yr ago
The UK's lack of a proper percentage based tax on housing has systematically inflated property values during the last decade
People often mention that UK property is severely overpriced relative to the US (actually the whole developed world) in what you get for your dollar. The same house which in the US might go for $500,000 in a medium sized city would be around £1,000,000 here in a similar location. Indeed this discrepancy has only increased with the low interest rate environment of (most of) the last 15 years.
People attribute this to the British's affinity for bricks and mortar over investing in companies and while I agree that plays a part (see the reverse in the US where the exact same Ryanair share trades at a 30% premium in the US over its European counterpart) I think the discrepancy in pricing can be in large part explained by a lack of a proper property tax.
Unlike the US where middle class people living in average houses in NYC pay $10,000+ a year in property tax, in the UK we have a highly regressive "council tax" system which means a £20M+ mansion in London pays just 3x what a one bed hovel in Blackpool does. This means that the costs of holding UK residential property are effectively nil compared to their US counterparts. Indeed (assuming a 1% yearly property tax rate in the US) we can model a UK property (which pays effectively no tax) as being a US property (which pays 1% tax yearly) plus an asset that generates revenue equal to 1% of the property price.
The 50 year yield of UK gilts at the moment is 3.5%. This means for a £1,000,000 property which would pay £10,000 yearly tax at a 1% rate, we would need to invest £285,000 in gilts to raise this money on a yearly basis. Hence the value of the corresponding US property with a 1% tax would be £1,000,000-£285,000 = £715,000 which doesn't explain the full discrepancy in pricing compared to US property values but does halve the difference.
This model of (UK property) = (US property)+(gilt/treasury generating tax on property) also explains why UK properties went up so much more during the low interest rate environments and are struggling more now given that rates have gone up. When interest rates were low the value of the gilt which generated revenue equal to a 1% tax on the property went up through the roof. Hence UK property prices shot up even though there was little difference in the fundamentals of the brick/mortar or even location (UK performed significantly worse as an economy from 2008-now compared to the US).
Equally now that interest rates are going up, the value of the additional gilt is being significantly reduced. With yields at 2% the value of the gilt itself would be £500,000 while at 3.5% the gilt is £285,000 so the gilt loses 40% of its value, which would correspond to a 20% fall in the value of the whole UK property itself. Just this simple financial model would seem to suggest UK properties prices have yet to fall a fair bit back to their new true value.
On the policy front this is an argument for having a property tax. Low interest rate environments allow growth by making money cheap for businesses to open new ventures etc., however one negative side effect of them is that they lead to rising residential property prices (due to more money floating around which raises asset prices) which can make buying a home difficult for ordinary people. Writing (US property) = (UK property)-(gilt generating tax on property) we see that in an environment with property taxes lowering rates doesn't raise prices anywhere near as much: yes people are willing to pay more for the bricks and mortar/location, but the value of the gilt you are subtracting has also gone up substantially. This helps keep home prices cheap for buyers and allows them to achieve economic prosperity more easily.
*ding* *ding* *ding*
Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, is out. Yep, it's true, absolutely not Fake and Gay. No Gay here, no siree...
Harvard President Claudine Gay will resign Tuesday afternoon, bringing an end to the shortest presidency in the University's history, according to a person with knowledge of the decision.
...
Gay weathered scandal after scandal over her brief tenure, facing national backlash for her administration’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work.
Even the Harvard Crimson, which is about as institutional-woke aligned as you can get pulls no punches in its article. She really seems to have completely fallen from the graces of the powers that be in academia. The plagierism allegations aren't new either, they've been going around for a year at this point, but it looks like they only really started to matter when she put a mark on herself and the sharks smelled blood.
Before that point they were just ignored and the general fishiness around her dates back to the early 2000s. This means that Harvard did not care about the allegations when they were appointing her to the presidency (just 6 months ago, when these allegations were all out there), but only started to care once she became a personal liability to Harvard rather than merely an academic one. Alternatively they did care but their vetting process is so bad something so open and shut as her plagierism passed through undetected. Either way it looks really bad. A pox on Harvard!
On a more cynical note I admit to being personally surprised by this, of all three presidents she was the one I expected the least to get deposed even though Sally Kornbluth, the MIT president came across as by far the most consistent and reasonable person at the hearing (she didn't do that well either, but it wasn't a car crash at least).
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1yr ago
Reading this I wish L the best of luck in making a successful life in the USA. Economic migrants (of all stripes) are one of the few groups for whom their version of the American Dream is still a possibility.
Are you stupid or am I evil?
There is a political quote which says that "the Right thinks the Left is stupid while the Left thinks the Right is evil". Today/yesterday there was a poll floating around rationalist twitter which I think is the best example I've ever seen of this dynamic.
It asks you to choose between two options:
And what happens is that:
- if > 50% of ppl choose blue pill, everyone lives
- if not, red pills live and blue pills die
Now if you think about it for even 30 seconds, it clearly makes sense for everyone to choose Red Pill here: if everyone chooses Red Pill nobody dies, which is the best case scenario from choosing blue, and on top there is no personal risk to yourself of dying. You can even analyse it game theoretically and find that both 100% blue and 100% red are Nash equilibria, but only 100% red is stable, and anyways, choosing red keeps you alive with no personal risk (not present in case you choose blue), so everyone should just choose Red, survive and continue on with their lives. Indeed this poll is equivalent to the following one (posted by Roko):
And what happens is that:
- if you choose the blender, you will die, unless at least 50% of people choose the blender as well, in which case the blender will overload and not work, making you live
- if you do nothing, you live
You would have to be monumentally, incorrigibly stupid to choose the blue pill (walking into the blender) here and we should expect Lizardman's constant level support for blue.
If only our world were really that simple...
The poll can be found here on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lisatomic5/status/1690904441967575040 . Currently there is a 65% majority for choosing the blue pill ::facepalm:: . At least this number is over 50% so nobody is dying. What justification is provided for people choosing Blue over Red? Well, one of the top replies is that "red represents the values of intolerance and fascism". Now this is an extreme example of a reply but even then personally I am stunned that there are a non-negligible proportion of people who actually think in this way. The best response explain what's going on here seems to be this one:
Perhaps expectedly enough, no matter how many Red supporters try to explain to people that choosing Blue is stupid, making the choice really really clear using examples like this:
And yet, large amounts of people still support blue (taking your life vests off to build a raft). The fact that such people get to vote (and make up a majority of at least this twitter poll) is a fucking scary thought. This is why we can't have nice things people!
</rant over>
In more encouraging news rdrama.net also ran this poll here: https://rdrama.net/h/polls/post/196874/are-you-effective-altruist-enough-to . Fortunately people there were sensible enough to vote for Red by a 90-10 margin, which is basically everyone once you discount the ultra-edgy maximally contrarian nodule on the site ("I want to die, so I pick blue") which will always vote to pick the maximally dramatic option (which on the site would be Blue).
I'd be interested in trying this out here on the Motte too, but unfortunately we don't have poll functionality on this site...
&&Blue Pill&&
&&Red Pill&&
EDIT:
For people who say "Blue" is the right choice for pro-social reasons:
Consider a slightly changed version of the poll where instead of choosing for yourself whether you have Red/Blue you are making this choice for a random stranger who's also taking part (and in turn some other random stranger is making the choice for you). In this case it makes sense from a selfish perspective to choose Blue for that random stranger, since there's a chance that the person choosing for you chooses Blue for you as well in which case you'd want 50%+ Blue as you want to live, while from an altruistic perspective it makes sense to choose "Red" for your stranger, since that way you're saving them from potentially dying.
In this case we'd expect everyone to end up choosing Blue if they play rationally, even though the "altruistic" pro-social option is to choose Red. If you still think that everyone should choose Blue then you agree that there are cases where the non-(pro-social) thing is the right thing to do.
If you say that in this case we should each of us now choose Red as that's the socially good option then since people generally value their own life at least as much as the life of a stranger (note: I say "at least as much", not "more" here) you must also agree that it's just as fine for people to choose "Red" in the case where they're deciding for themselves instead of a stranger.
More options
Context Copy link