ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
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User ID: 1098
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
25d ago
I would appreciate an in-depth defense of this claim. I'm a big proponent of following the law as it is, but working to change bad laws. If changing the law requires violating it then I would have to rethink my stance.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1mo ago
Freedom of speech is a mistake theory idea. You won't get conflict theorists to accept it, because it doesn't' advance their goals. The only way to convert people to mistake theorists and get them to adopt freedom of speech as a shared principle with you is to get together with them on the same team against a larger common enemy. As long as they consider you a rival/threat/enemy, they'll treat your words as enemy soldiers.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1mo ago
I don't think you can separate the things that were grandfathered in from the current good state we find ourselves in. Alcohol is useful for proving trustworthiness within a group. We might never have gotten out of small-scale tribalism without its influence. Guns were a necessary tool for breaking the old social order of kings and nobility. The countries where guns are rare have at least a vibe that no one could ever upset the established order. In America there are times when states, and even smaller groups, defy the federal government using force. The threat of such defiance limits the extent to which the establishment boot can stomp on human faces before it is stopped by force.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2mo ago
In the US it's a current event: T-Mobile claimed selling location data without consent is legal—judges disagree. One might be able to opt out.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2mo ago
I'm very skeptical, on Hansonian grounds.
MBTI (or you could say more generally, "Jungian typology") is a language for talking about internal phenomenological experience; it's not a tool for making behavioral predictions
I'm skeptical that there's a rigorous way to show a difference between really experiencing something vs. claiming to experience it for the evolutionary advantage.
MBTI makes additional predictions about Fe and Fi being correlated with other (rather specific) psychological and personality traits, instead of simply treating it as an isolated and free-floating random variable.
What are those predictions? And how are they validated or falsified? If not by behavior, then what? I would expect that any correlation with other psychological and personality traits would fall out of the analysis that produced OCEAN.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2mo ago
Why use MBTI when OCEAN is available and makes better predictions? And how is the Fi/Fe dichotomy different from just Agreeableness?
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
3mo ago
Not OP but his reputation was destroyed, and for someone like him what does he have left?
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
4mo ago
The "can't remember the name of their medication" test is a frustratingly close mirror to the Obama administration's 'fiduciary' test, which was quite broadly applied to people whose sole sin was having difficultly dealing with a checkbook.
Could you give some more context on what this is, for those unfamiliar? All I can find is a rule about financial professionals having to act in their clients' best interests.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
4mo ago
- Yes
- Yes
- No, mainly because speed limits are inappropriately low in most cases.
- Left lane is for passing only, but cutting drivers off and tailgating are wrong too.
- No, it's not okay to break the law. However, see 7.
- No, everyone follows the same rules.
- There should be a new law on merging: if another vehicle ahead is signaling to change into your lane, you must slow down to let them in. This would encourage drivers to use the whole roadway instead of lining up a mile back to get into a specific lane. In most cases this would lead to more efficient use of road space, and it would make driving a lot less stressful for people who are not assertive. It's painful to ride with a driver who has no guts and can't assertively merge.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
4mo ago
Cars should abide by the "Gentleman's Agreement" to stick around 300hp, and anything larger than that should be heavily taxed. 300hp is plenty to have a quick mid size sedan, a very fast small car, or a reasonably drivable large SUV/pickup truck. Capping horsepower on most cars would encourage people who want to drive fast sporty cars to buy small cars, and discourage people from driving giant SUVs and pickup trucks they can't handle too fast.
This is a great idea. Another idea along these lines is to have a momentum limit so that any individual vehicle is limited in how much damage it can do to another. Lighter vehicles could go faster and heavier vehicles would be limited to a lower speed. Speed limits could be raised in many cases if there was a momentum limit.
Scaling liability with momentum would help too, by increasing insurance premiums for large dangerous vehicles.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
4mo ago
AP is reporting on it now: Israel attacks Iran’s capital with explosions booming across Tehran
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
4mo ago
Those things are all bad in the same way that prostitution is, just less so. I'd add to the list: giving resources without even getting sex (simping), consumption of pornography, and divorce are all degenerate forms of relationships that in the ideal would be marriage.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
4mo ago
It seems like you don't like cycling.
there's no need for this medium speed, low-safety, exhausting means of transport
How about
- Getting some default amount of exercise every day just from running errands and commuting. This is mainly a benefit to the cyclist, but in countries with more socialized medicine, it's a public good too.
- Saving money. For people who live in denser areas, much of the cost of a car is the capital expense and fixed maintenance.
- Saving time. For short trips in dense areas where it's hard to park, a bike beats driving.
- Combining all three. Even if cycling takes longer and doesn't save much money, the fact that it's combining exercise, travel, relaxation, and thrift makes it pretty good use of time for a lot of people.
- Reducing traffic. Where I live, due to traffic it takes about as long to commute 20 miles by bike as by car. Believe it or not most of the time a cyclist is on the road they are not in conflict with any cars; they're using shoulders or bike paths. A car on the freeway is taking up that much extra space the whole time.
This is all completely orthogonal to whether cyclists obey traffic laws. I'm all for ticketing cyclists and making their movements more legible to the law. I think this would go a long way towards cycling becoming more normalized so that people can have discussions based on tradeoffs rather than emotions.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
4mo ago
I knew what video this was before I clicked on it. It's a classic.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
7mo ago
I'll miss your commentary but I support this choice. Good luck with your project, and please succeed or fail quickly so you can get back here sooner.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
7mo ago
I took this opportunity to do some media bias comparisons on how this story is being reported. There's a combination of editorializing, credulous repetition of claims without explicitly editorializing, and some neutral reporting (Kudos to Global Legal Post which was the best on this). I found no Right-leaning sources reporting on this story. This is typical of news that has partisan slant: most of the bias shows up in what stories get reported, not how they're reported.
GroundNews summary and news source comparison: Skadden Associate Resigns Over Big Law's Tepid Response to Trump Pressure
Business Insider, considered "leans Left", quotes the associate extensively without skepticism, but doesn't editorialize in the article itself:
She asked her colleagues to sign an open letter from law firm associates condemning Trump's "all-out attack aimed at dismantling rule-of-law norms."
Law.com, considered Center, editorializes a bit:
Rachel Cohen, the third-year finance associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom who'd been one of the rare voices in Big Law to attach her name to criticism of firms' quiescence in the face of an unprecedented assault from the Trump administration, had a sharp reaction to the deal Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton & Garrison negotiated with the president on Thursday.
And Above the Law unabashedly editorializes:
One brave Biglaw associate has quite frankly had enough of this, and she’s once again sounding off — not just before her firm, but before the entire legal profession — to make clear just how important it is not to bow down before the Trump administration.
Other sources I found through Web search:
- Mother Jones (Left)
- Global Legal Post) (appears Center and quite helpfully includes context like
Democrat-leaning Paul Weiss) - PBS (Lean Left according to GroundNews) has an interview with the associate. The summary uses the phrase "latest in a series" and the interviewer doesn't challenge wild statements like
I think that my concern is that the coup that is ongoing will be done. - New Republic (Left)
- AOL (Lean Left)
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
8mo ago
The 14th just says you can't have people who are subjects but not citizens. If you want to make someone a subject then they're a citizen.
A concrete test sounds like the kind of thing for which a law is required. We have some of those, describing the process through which a non-citizen can become naturalized as a citizen. It seems obvious to me that an immigrant, legal or otherwise, is not a subject of the U.S. until they are granted that status through the law. But this is the whole debate. To other people it will seem obvious that someone is a subject unless the law explicitly says otherwise.
The way people immigrate has changed over the last two hundred years, and the 14th Amendment wasn't written to disambiguate modern questions. Congress could answer them if it dared. In the absence of legislation, it seems reasonable for the President to direct the government using his interpretation of the amendment.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
8mo ago
Being a subject of a state is different from being subject to its laws. The purpose of the 14th was to make it clear that former slaves were citizens. In this context "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means something more like "a subject of the government thereof", in the same way one might be a subject of one's King. It expresses a subject-sovereign relationship.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
8mo ago
Yet they ignore the fact that analysts have produced a great deal of research and economic analysis arguing that such policies are good for Americans.
The economic analysis I've seen (please share if you have counter-examples) looks only at impact on GDP or on American wages and prices. It ignores the fact that nationalists have a stake in their nation, and immigrants dilute and weaken that stake. Allowing immigrants is analogous to selling some shares in a corporation. If immigration is 3% per year, Americans are losing 3% of their stake in their country to foreigners every year. If the immigrants are like-minded (for civic nationalists) or co-ethnic (for ethno-nationalists) then it's not such a big deal; it's basically recruiting allies. But if the immigrants are opposed to Americans' culture or are of a different ethnicity then immigration is a hostile takeover.
You can’t be a nationalist and also stick to the facts, since even though most Americans are nationalists, few would think that 1% of the federal budget going abroad is worth worrying about.
What. That's a non-sequitur. To draw a crude analogy, if thieves are stealing your stuff at a rate of only 1% of your income every year, then security is not worth worrying about. Or if you only waste 1% of your time sitting in traffic or standing in line at the post office, then it's not worth making roads or post offices more efficient. Hanania has made a bad argument here.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
8mo ago
For HSV-2 in the U.S., the rate varies a lot by race, from 3.8% for Asian to 34.6% (!) for black.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
9mo ago
I'm not going to read an AI-generated post. But I did ask an AI to summarize it in a few sentences, so I get the gist. Maybe next time just post your thoughts so others don't have to do this extra round-trip through an AI.
These are my unfiltered thoughts on the object-level issue:
It's not Communism. It's opaque and centralized but historical Communist systems are not unique in those respects.
The credit scoring system is a result of many conflicting interests who all place constraints on how businesses make decisions. Consider what would happen if a business used their own method for evaluating credit risk:
- They might accidentally use a forbidden input, such as race, or a proxy for one, such as zip code. This exposes the business to substantial legal risk. Figuring out the set of inputs that are both predictive and allowed takes a lot of specialized knowledge of the laws in the jurisdiction in which the business operates. This is expensive. It's cheaper to outsource this work and risk to specialized companies.
- They might make a mistake in predicting credit risk. To take your example, the fact that a customer has a history of on-time rent payments doesn't necessarily mean they're low enough risk for what the business is evaluating them for. If it's for a new rental agreement, maybe the customer's income has disappeared recently. If it's for a credit card, maybe paying rent doesn't predict paying off credit cards. Using a specialized company for evaluating risk ensures that the weaknesses of the score are at least well-known and understood.
- If they try to make the process more transparent, they might make a mistake with privacy and PII. The opacity of the current system allows credit bureaus to launder private information into a less-private score that's still useful to businesses.
- Also if they try to make the process more transparent, they open themselves up to gaming.
The real question is, what is the alternative, and does it live within the constraints we've placed on how businesses make decisions?
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
10mo ago
With modern technology, the biological parent doesn't have to bear her own children. As a society we can use surrogacy to avoid the worst tradeoffs.
The root of the problem is that high-value people should be rewarded for creating biological children, because most of their high value is genetic. But no one of any status in society is willing to publicize the science and build consensus around genetics being real. If we could solve this problem then everything else becomes easy.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
10mo ago
I don't know anyone in real life who is both pro life and anti those other things. I know people who are pro life and also believe in helping the poor and immigrants. I know people who are anti immigrant but fine with abortion. That these people happen to be part of the same coalition is due to the relative strength of their convictions on the different issues. Pro life are VERY pro life and weak on the other issues. Etc.
You could make a similar criticism of the pastor's position along the same lines. "You can advocate for bringing in criminals and low class immigrants and taxing the wealthy because you live far away from the lower classes and don't have to worry about crime, you work in a nepotistic industry that takes decades to assimilate into so you're not threatened by immigrant labor, and you are paid in esteem rather than cash so taxing the rich doesn't affect you. Very convenient that your political positions are both morally correct and don't force you to make any sacrifices in your own life." With a little wordsmithing that would be just as persuasive as what the pastor said.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
11mo ago
This is an interesting analogy and lends itself to more elaboration.
In aviation, there have been autopilots for many years. But always the human pilot is in command, and uses the autopilot as a tool that has to be managed and overseen. Autonomous vehicles, at least in some companies' visions, have no way to control them manually. An airplane pilot enters waypoints into the navigation system to plan out a route; an autonomous car routes itself. The biggest difference is in who is responsible for the vehicle; is it the human operator or the vehicle's manufacturer?
I could see a kind of autonomous vehicle that works more like an airplane autopilot - you wouldn't necessarily need a steering wheel, but if you had control over the different high-level choices in route planning and execution (do I try to make this yellow light? Should I play chicken at this merge or play it safe?) then the human could be considered responsible in a way that a fully autonomous, sit-back-and-relax mode doesn't allow.
I am revolted by the idea of relying on a company akin to an airline for my day-to-day mobility. There are too many failure modes that leave one stuck. What if there's a natural disaster and all the phone networks are down? Or the car company has a de facto local monopoly, but then withdraws from this market or goes out of business? What if the company starts blacklisting customers for things that shouldn't be related to transportation, like their political affiliation or their credit score?
This is a really interesting point. I really like the proposal to require showing after-tax prices. But this means that businesses have to know what the after-tax price actually is for each customer before purchasing, which is much harder and more ambiguous than doing it after purchase. For example, if customers who live in a certain city have to pay an extra tax, how would the business learn this about customers it's showing ads to? Not to mention the much larger number of ad targets than actual customers.
I think one thing that would happen is businesses would show some price based on predicted taxes, and just eat the tax difference if they predicted wrong. Or an even richer industry of fine print would spring up around price displays.
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