ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
No, I'm a stupid economic denialist so you'll have to explain to me your viewpoint in detail.
For example, they could pay less in cryptocurrency. There are other items on the list.
And if the price hasn't gone down in 10, 20, or 30 years still?
I'm not sure what your question is. We're not 10, 20, or 30 years after the hypothetical change in the price of fake child porn. Can you rephrase the question?
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I mean not really since there's a reasonable price minimum here based on production costs/expected value based on legal risk
Is this to say that you think that the supply of child porn is nearly perfectly elastic?
Modern lolicon was introduced around the 80s
We are discussing a hypothetical change in policy toward lolicon that has not happened yet. We're not talking about the past price history, which would be an empirical question.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I'm not sure price elasticity is the most appropriate lens through which to the view the issue (as you don't have nearly enough of a sample size in points of fluctuation in the price imposed by policy here).
Can you name any other good that lacks sufficient sample size?
The most direct thing to say is that its highly illegal nature creates a de facto high price/cost floor for producers and consumers.
Why should I interpret a de facto high cost floor for producers as anything other than a nearly perfectly elastic supply curve?
how they should behave (and haven't behaved) as substitute goods?
You have empirical data showing that they haven't behaved as substitute goods?
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
And I think that kind of proves my point. How would you describe the "price elasticity" of pirated movies?
You're not scoping the good correctly. The good is "movies". And there are a variety of ways that good is transacted. The production of movies still follows a supply curve. Furthermore, this is not an example of a good that has insufficient sample size.
I have empirical data showing that they haven't behaved as substitute goods
Show me your data.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Okay so the best way to scope a good is to eliminate essential context?
No. It's to do the same thing that academic economists do for pirated movies, since that was the example you gave. They don't suddenly think that supply curves don't real.
No reduction in illegality (at least in the US, but that's obviously the subject of our analysis or at least a fine one) of real CP from when the initial laws passed as far as I can tell
That is not data which supports your claim. Your claim was that you have empirical data that they don't act as substitute goods (particularly, WRT the validity of using supply/demand curves).
Can you find me any evidence of any reduction in the costs you mentioned?
I'm talking about a hypothetical that hasn't happened yet. Ergo, I have no claimed to have any empirical data on the question. You claimed that you did in fact have empirical data for something that you thought was relevant. It's apparent that you don't.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Also you're telling me that no economist has ever analyzed specifically pirated movies, not just movies in general?
I even provided a link for you, dude.
my claim in full, not your snippet, was
Still not supported by any provided data.
I'm talking about a hypothetical that hasn't happened yet.
But why hasn't it happened yet?
Public choice theory probably holds the answer to why fake child porn is still illegal.
Like, I don't get what you're not understanding. The question is what would happen if, hypothetically, there was a change to the law that made a substitute (fake child porn) less costly (by making it legal). That hasn't happened yet. (The making it legal bit. You know, the premise bit.) What the hell are you on about not having happened yet?
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Section 1466A of Title 18, United States Code, makes it illegal for any person to knowingly produce, distribute, receive, or possess with intent to transfer or distribute visual representations, such as drawings, cartoons, or paintings that appear to depict minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct and are deemed obscene.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
In three of these cases the perpetrator either had a prior criminal record, or was also involved with real-life child pornography which contributed to the charges.
This thread is basically becoming unreadable/unusable, which kind of sucks, because we're finally getting back to economics: apparently, these things can also be complements. It's a shame we're not going to get some good econometrics for how strong these various effects are. As I said before, it's probably silly to think that we can flood the market with cheap prescription opioids and not end up with problem users; it's probably also silly to think that we can flood the market with cheap fake child porn and not end up with problem users.
Elevate your life from the back squat life to the front squat life. It moves the main load in your back up to your mid back and reduces your chance of injury (if you get into a bad position, instead of feeling like you can tough through it and hurting yourself, you literally can't help but drop the weight). Embrace the Squat-Hinge Continuum from this article at Stronger By Science and realize that the variations don't matter that much unless you're planning on competing on a particular movement. Grab one from the squat end (front squats are safest) and one from the hinge end (whichever you prefer; good mornings are ones that most people end up most susceptible to injury, so perhaps avoid), and you'll be fine.
Only downsides are that you'll need to work on wrist flexibility (it'll probably hurt your wrists when you start; it'll go away) and that you'll have to take the ego hit and drop the weight ~25% (but you can always compute a fake 'back squat equivalent' when you're inevitably wanting to compare yourself to some other bro in your own silly head (no one else cares)). The other downside is that you'll start looking at all the Oly lifters out there and be constantly tempted to want to learn how to start throwing the weight above your head.
(Parting shots: Split squats are also fantastic, especially for some sports, but the extra stability of going bilateral helps you get to the loads you probably want. Don't be afraid to learn to use a belt.)
EDIT: Can get to more refined advice with measurements of your mobility. It took me a long time to learn that my sports resulted in me really lacking mobility in internal hip rotation and needing this sooooo good. Yoga can definitely help, but I find that the most common yoga programs do miss some directions that can be important, depending on your particular needs.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
"Problem users" can take a few forms, but the most damaging form is those who find that real child porn is a complement for them. The effects could include things like causing enough people to think, "This isn't a real problem," that we have silly ideas percolating in academia which normalize sexual attraction being primarily oriented toward kids/fake kids.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
This podcast on congestion pricing was really good. Good in the way that it clarified some unique aspects of the problem in my mind that I hadn't previously understood. Primarily, one issue is that there is no mechanism for the money acquired from the people willing to pay to access to road to end up compensating the people who choose not to use the road because of the price. For many other goods, this isn't as big of an issue. If there is a shortage of apples, it's good to allocate them to the people most willing to pay, but the other folks don't feel as much like they just lose out entirely. There are probably plenty of folks willing to bring a plethora of oranges to the market, and while they're not the same, I mean, eh?
Whereas, having more roads is valuable to people. So if the default solution is "just add a congestion price; that'll fix the problem; don't need more roads; screw the people who can't afford it", it's going to be tough. Those people still really want roads and access to them. They probably can't just go buy a close substitute. Their only real hope is to lobby the government to build more roads, but if the accepted solution is "just add a congestion price; that'll fix the problem", then it'll be more difficult to actually accomplish that (after all, the 'problem' was 'solved' by the congestion price!).
The hypothetical ideal would be if we could magically take the money gained from congestion pricing and give it to the marginal consumers who will now choose to not drive because of the price. That would provide them some compensation for their loss that could replace the hopelessness of wanting to lobby for more roads, which would greatly ease the tension/discontent (it would make the political fights over building/not building new road capacity less contentious, because there would be less of a cliff in loss-of-value), while still allocating road usage as efficiently as possible. Unfortunately, IIRC, the podcast basically left this point with, "...and we have no idea how to actually implement something like this," and I agree. Simply slapping a congestion price on it might be the least bad solution that we've currently tried/figured out, but the nuance here leaves room for hope that we can devise something better.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I'm 100% on board with not screwing with the price signal in an effort to try to redistribute wealth (if you've ever listened to EconTalk, you should be convinced of that), but this isn't that.
The core observation is that when I sell a scarce good, say an apple, to you, I'm giving something up - the ability to use the apple. But what I'm getting in return for giving that up is money. That's what makes it an exchange.
In this case, that two-sided thing isn't happening. The people who are giving up the ability to use a scare resource are not getting something in exchange for it. It's weird, because the process is being mediated by a gov't who gets to 1) set the quantity of roads, and 2) set the one-sided price for them. So, it's simply not an actual exchange that follows the normal principles.
Instead, the people who are giving up their ability to use the roads view it as purely an imposition of government choice to force them off the roads, with no benefits (only pure costs) coming their way. Does it need to be the specific dollars that are collected by the congestion tax? Not necessarily. But further fundamental theorizing needs to happen to figure out how to structure the system so that all parties are properly incentivized to desire that the gov't build the efficient number of roads and charges an efficient price for it. Without these incentives done properly, we've already botched the price signal's ability to regulate the number of roads/price for them (it becomes a matter of pure political power), without even having the motive of trying to redistribute wealth! We're already causing the very problem that you're now desperately trying to avoid!
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
biology
There is no scientific basis for the claim that biological determinism of sexual attraction is true. Even my old queer theory prof (probably one of the most likely people, categorized by occupation, to support your political goals) said that she was agnostic on biological determinism.
There may be a spectrum between video games and opioids on the nature/nurture spectrum, but we have pretty much jack for good evidence on where anything is or how the spectrums are structured. I could sit here and propose a hundred plausible reasons why existing data on one looks different than existing data on others, but we wouldn't have the ability in this thread to devise/execute the necessary follow-on experiments to tease out any real answers.
To that end, I'm simply going to assert that I find it unlikely that we're going to flood the market with cheap fake child porn without having the result be some increase in the number of problem users. If you disagree, this is probably just a fundamental disagreement that is the crux, and which neither of us is going to have a chance of providing suitable data for convincing the other.
That said, if the cost of a substitute good is decreased, the price of a good will also decrease.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
They aren't giving up the ability to use the roads any more than you'd be giving up the right to eat an apple by not purchasing the apple.
In your scenario, whence my right to eat the apple in the first place? It doesn't even make sense to talk about "giving up" a right that never existed.
Should the apple industry be taxed so that the proceeds can be specifically distributed to people who have chosen not to purchase apples?
No. The apple industry is giving up their use of apples in favor of money, so their incentives are properly aligned.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Might I introduce you to my friend Mr. Darwin?
Mr. Darwin absolutely was not the final word on the nature/nurture debate. Like, at all.
I will absolutely have to question your intellectual faculties if you took this class voluntarily.
It was right at the very beginning of when some of the principles of wokeism were starting to become more widespread (before the word "woke" existed to describe it). I couldn't quite figure out what the hell was going on with the ideas that were starting to be 'out there' and thought that maybe I could go find some core motte that made some sense. Spoiler: I did not.
If a legally registered site full of free lolicon being more popular than some of the most well-known porn brands in the world isn't the market being flooded, then what is?
You may be right that the market is already flooded. The market was flooded with prescription opioids long before it became commonly understood that we were causing a problem. "There are two ways you go broke: very slowly, then all of a sudden." Frankly, this paragraph is related to the last one. Wokeism was long-brewing, and even when it started leaking it was "just a weird group of losers in a small number of universities". Someone like you could have pointed to data on violent video games and sworn up and down that such a thing couldn't possibly sweep the world in such a fashion. I was early to the game of realizing that wokeism was a problem, late to the game of realizing that opioid prescriptions were a problem (was a 'normie' on that topic, not paying any attention to it, really), and maybe I'm just on the early side on this one.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
If the State decided tomorrow to impose mandatory searches of your person and effects as a condition of using the search-priced highway, whence your right to use a search-priced highway without paying the search price?
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I suppose it probably made more sense for me to actually just continue, but it felt like a nice moment in the conversation to pause and hear a response. Your joke would have been well-timed in-person; it is much-appreciated!
In any event, to continue on to my point, if you used to have the right to use the highway without paying the search price, and now they impose a search price on use of the highway, I think one is perfectly entitled to claim that they have 'lost' a right, and that this loss has come without any compensation. In fact, imposing the search/congestion price is a loss for the people who choose to pay the price, too! The difference is that they valued the use more than the price.
So, where should compensation go? I imagine one might impulsively argue that we should somehow compensate the people who pay the congestion price, because of their loss. I'm not really sure about that. I don't think that we should necessarily just go around compensating everyone for their loss in response to every government policy.
Instead, I think there are two factors that I think should drive our thinking for how we build a framework to do this well. First, there is in a real sense a transfer of benefit from the people who choose to stay home to the people who choose to drive. As you said yourself, "Highways reach a congestion inflection point where each additional car results in less throughput (fewer people-miles delivered per hour) and that's a classical tragedy of the commons." That person who chooses to stay home provides actual value to the person who chooses to drive, in the form of a reduced travel time. Purely theoretically, some amount of the congestion tax paid provides value to the user just in terms of the road, itself, while some amount of the congestion tax paid provides value to the user in terms of causing others to not drive, saving them time. Ideally, we could figure out how to actually price "not driving", but trying that directly may run into the same problems as other "offset strategies". I'm really not proposing a specific solution here; just observing that there is a tension/problem yet to be solved.
The second factor, as I mentioned above, is that we should try to devise a scheme that ultimately incentivizes both an efficient number of roads being built and an efficient price being charged. Frankly, I'm not sure we're doing very well even on the latter, but one-sided congestion pricing is absolutely trashing the likelihood that we can ever accomplish the former. I really don't even have much of an "ideal" here... just that I think we have more work to do than just slapping made-up prices on things and calling it good.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
How do you have an iterative process of fitness-based selection involving sexual reproduction without at least some inherent sexual preference?
Sure, lots of people have some level of inherit somethings, but we have approximately zero clue how it really works. We can't bootstrap from, "People might have an evolution-influenced desire to command resources, because having access to resources aided fitness," all the way to, "Kleptomania is biologically-determined." (It might be! I don't know! Neither do you!)
Nobody swore up and down that they weren't going to sweep the world. People swore up and down that they weren't going to significantly alter people's inherent preferences and incentives in regards to engaging in real violence
Sorry, I wasn't very clear. I was imagining a hypothetical conversation where a hypothetical person was trying to claim that the excesses of wokeism weren't going to sweep the nation. They could have made reference to violent video games. I don't think that those two things stand/fall together; I don't think violent video games/sexual orientation stand/fall together, either. All these things could end up on weird and different parts of the nature/nurture curve.
You can get addicted to opioids without knowing the word "opioid".
You can probably get addicted to sex with children or child porn without knowing the words.
There's no social contagion aspect behind the fundamental harms of [opioids] (obviously their spread is influenced by social factors, but again the harms of exposure are still present in the complete absence of those).
It's complicated. If it was utterly impossible for someone who is prescribed opioids to acquire them via other means (or some other such thought experiment), then maybe the harms wouldn't be present? Like, prescription opioids are good (at least at what they're designed to do), and can be used for really good purposes. They don't actually have an inherent badness to them. It's only when the biological meets the social that things seem to inevitably hit the fan. The problem is that we have absolute garbage for understanding how this actually works. We just have a pretty decent idea that the more people who are prescribed more opioids, the more problems we have.
In any event, I'd say we have way way way more understanding of the biological mechanisms surrounding drugs than we do things like sexual preferences. And we still have basically no clue how the relationship really works; we're basically hopeless for sexual preferences beyond something pretty basic like, "If we flood the market with cheap fake child porn, we're probably going to end up with some number of problem users."
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I certainly don't agree in general that people deserve compensation whenever they lose a right.
You don't agree with who? I had said:
I don't think that we should necessarily just go around compensating everyone for their loss in response to every government policy.
I get the sense from most of your comment that by "not going down the rabbit hole", you meant, "I didn't read your comment."
I also disagree that there's any kind of "efficient markets hypothesis" about when roads get built.
Yeah, I didn't claim that, either. I said that we should design incentives to make it more efficient.
the whole topic requires recognition that overcongested highways are a tragedy of the commons
I agree 100%. Duly recognized, and not in contradiction with anything I've said.
That's the source of scarcity of highway space.
I don't understand what the antecedent of "That" is in this sentence. Can you clarify?
If you don't like the distributional consequences of apportioning scarce resources by price, address the consequences with general social safety nets.
Yeah, going back to, "You haven't read my comments." I have reiterated multiple times in the comments that I am not arguing for wealth redistribution or anything that would be otherwise satisfied with general social safety nets. You're arguing against a straw man and not really paying attention to what I've been saying. Good day.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
We can't say, for example, with any degree of certainty that people are inherently attracted to more symmetrical faces in human partners?
I mean, we can look at the data and see that they are attracted. Can we say why? Can we say that it's inherent? Probably not.
Look, when I was taking neuroscience in grad school (aligned with my actual work, unlike the queer theory (which I didn't even take for credit, just sat in on)), I learned about pair bonding and infidelity. There, we have an animal model (different species of voles) and a genetic correlate. Relative to the evidence we have for other human sexual preferences or attraction to symmetrical faces, it was pretty dynamite evidence. Now, was that even remotely enough evidence to actually say that infidelity is entirely (or even "mostly", or even "greater than X%, with X being like, I don't know, >20") biologically inherent? Not at all. Not even close. I don't think you have any clue just how far off we are.
They'd just be sugar pills.
Interestingly, the social use of sugar (and flooding the market with cheap sugar) has had quite harmful effects on plenty of folks.
Now this has to be equivalently proven in regards to people being sexually attracted to or even engaging in sexual conduct with minors.
Actually, it doesn't. My points don't require it. I have dug deep down the rabbit hole of sexual ethics in the past. I've even made arguments on reddit along those lines that other people have labeled 'pro-child sex'.
for the most part you can't socially influence non-suicidal people into jumping off of bridges
We have arrived all the way back to the very first comment I made in this thread: it's extremely common to fail to think on the margin.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
We can't say that it's likely inherent if it's a consistent pattern among divergent cultures, including even isolated tribes that couldn't be affected by any social contagion?
That is a factor in favor of some parts of the nature/nurture spectrum, but is not solely determinate. I've also seen arguments for things like a "gay germ", which is not conclusive by an means in its own domain, but which at least continues to broaden the spectrum of possibilities and ushers caution in believing that such simple metrics are completely determinate.
Almost every culture in human history, including highly divergent ones before they interacted to any significant degree, has had some manner of infidelity taboo.
I wasn't talking about the taboo. I was talking about the behavior.
Does the margin matter?
For the purposes of the question at hand, absolutely. If you'd like to concede the question at hand and then move the goalposts to a new question, please do so explicitly.
I mean, just think about the list I made. For like two seconds. Even try.
If today, hot dogs are one price, then tomorrow, hamburgers get cheaper, what do you think will happen to the price of hot dogs? Economic theory tells us that the price of hot dogs will go down. Why do you think that the price of hot dogs hasn't gone down today, despite it being "economically inevitable" (given the imminent shift in demand)?
The answer is simple: the demand curve today intersects the supply curve at a different point than tomorrow's demand curve does. That is the answer here, as well.
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