ControlsFreak
No bio...
User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
a big fan of Julian Assange
Man, this is a great cultural example of how suddenly the perspective changed, and the extent of that change. As I've said here before, the entire narrative has changed. It used to be that "information wants to be free". It used to be that "sunlight is the best disinfectant". It used to be that these things held the rich and the powerful to account. Then, the rich and powerful of The Party was the ox which got gored. Now, information wants to be mal-information. The sun must be blotted out. Most of all, the suddenness of this transformation must not be recognized. The suddenness of this transformation is the justification which must still underlie all of Trump-Russia, which underlies why Trump is not just a political actor we disagree with; he is a foreign operative sent to subvert our democracy. Of course this narrative dissolves when you notice the suddenness of this transformation; therefore, the suddenness of this transformation cannot be noticed, and these things must be memoryholed.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I think it's just a blend of the two things. Think again about telephone service circa 19XX, with some low value for XX. Telecoms have some reasonable expectation for the needs of most businesses, maybe tens to low hundreds of numbers. Then, some company like Sears changes the way they do business, shoots to the moon, and suddenly needs thousands of lines. You could imagine that the telecoms previously had written their regular endpoint user costs without even having the possibility of this use case in mind.
I can't find it now, but I recall seeing a picture of outdoor telephone lines in what I think was a European city back in the day, at like a central location. It was the most gawd-awful mess of just absolute spaghetti, worse than any "bad cable management in a server room" pic you've ever seen. But that was just, like, how they did things at that time. But now imagine Sears shows up and says, "We want to locate a call center in this city, and we need like thousands of lines, yo." The telecom might phrase it in terms of, "Yeahhhhh, we're going to need a new 'tier' in our list of regular endpoint user costs," or they might phrase it in terms of, "Dude, we simply need to completely redo our core infrastructure, because we can't scale to what you want with the way we've been doing things." It's probably some blend of the two, and they pretty much need to just negotiate it out. Hopefully, there's competition between possible providers and the telecom company isn't running their own business to compete against Sears, so that the result can plausibly be just a regular competitive negotiation. What I have less patience for is a company like Sears running to the newspapers and screaming about how horribly unfair it is that the telecom company won't just go to millions/billions of dollars of effort for free to accommodate their massive need.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Why are you so certain that human intelligence (at least in bulk) is not "predicting the next word in a sequence"?
Because we reason about concepts. Predicting the next word in a sequence is only the output filter that attempts to make said sequence intelligible to our interlocutor so that she may also reason about concepts in similar fashion. We're not perfect at it, but we're oriented toward something different.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
One-sided billing went out when uni-directional communication went out
Let's start our story with the physical precursor to all this digital stuff - mail. Party A pays a company to transport Item X to Party B. (Or, at least the agreement is to transport it to a location believed to be Party B.) The exchange of money agreed upon between Party A and the company may have depended on how large Item X was or the distance it needed to travel. Bulk/bundled pricing could be possible. In any event, for this story, Party B does not pay the company anything. If the company turned around and said to Party B, "Actually, I got yo' shit; pay me more if you want it," that would be double billing and without checking, probably illegal (unless, of course, in certain scenarios where Party A's agreement specified that Party B would be providing some compensation; COD does exist).
One might mistakenly view one's relationship with a package service as, "I pay you for your service, and the charges apparently include the amount that I send out as well as unlimited reception of goods." Perhaps this misunderstanding could be amplified by having a bulk/bundled billing, say, you pay an $Y "service fee" that includes being able to send out up to Z letters per month or something. "I pay you plenty and don't always send out the maximal amount I'm allowed; clearly, the extra must cover things like how much it costs for me to receive stuff." But this is clearly misleading and wrong.
Sears used to sell a ton of stuff via mail-order. This sort of thinking could result in folks concluding, "Yo, we the people already pay the mail service, like $Y/month! That clearly compensates them for both sending and receiving! The companies shouldn't have to pay them more! That would be double billing!" And while the companies shouldn't have to pay more to receive the letters that contain your orders, they sure as hell are going to have to pay them more to mail you back a fridge.
Intermediate conclusion: if the only things that ever traversed the internet were UDP packets, perhaps a sensible pricing scheme could be devised that only charged one of the sender/receiver. (I kind of kid, because you could still plausibly charge each side for just the packets they send for other types of connections.)
Enter telephones. Telephones are inherently a two-way communication medium. Suppose I want to talk to Bob down the street. I could go run my own telephone line directly connecting us, then use it for free, but I'm probably going to instead pay a company to hook me up to their centralized telephone service, so that I can talk to lots of different people. Bob is also likely to do the same. Now, when I call Bob, is it "double billing", because we both paid for such service? Probably not. There are special cases here, of course. Say, what if it's an especially expensive call to make (long distance/international)? It could get complicated, because there might be multiple companies involved, and they might be trying different pricing schemes. Maybe the telecom company in my country lets me receive international calls for free, but charges to initate them; maybe the telecom company in Bob's country charges either way. I remember exactly these sorts of things happening in the early days of cell phones and just having to plan out, "Hey, you should call me instead," or like, "We were talking on a call that you started, but now that it's 7pm, we should hang up and I should call you, because it'll be cheaper."
In any event, in a telephone network, you might have nodes which primarily receive or primarily send, and these things might affect how much it costs to build the infrastructure/run the network. You should expect that companies will try out different pricing schemes. With telephony, Sears can now take orders via telephone. "Customers" would pay Sears for products. "Customers" would pay the phone company for phone service. Would it have been a stable system for Sears to go to the phone company and say, "Yeah, dude, the 'customers' pay you for phone service. Set us up a connection with 1,000 lines for free, otherwise it's 'double billing'." Then the next year, Sears' sales go up, and they come back, "Make it 10,000. Free. Don't care how much trouble you have to go to. Actually, ya know what? Christmas time is busy; make it 50,000, just in case. Make sure it's free or we'll sic the press on you."
"Company" and "customer" are not categories that attach to packets on the internet.
So, I'm calling Bob down the street. What about? Who knows. The telephone company can't listen in without a wiretap warrant; they don't know. Maybe Bob set up a little business, and I'm buying something from him. Maybe the thing I'm buying is actually being sent to me via the telephone conversation we're having (I give him a credit card number over the phone, and he like, tells me his stock picks or something). At what point does Bob get to go to the telephone company and say, "Yo! This here a 'company', not a 'customer'! The 'customers' pay you so that we can talk. FREE!" (Nevermind that Bob is an asshole that is actually just a customer of Jane's Stock Tips that he repackages and sells for more money. The telephone company can't know this either, because again, no wiretap warrant.)
Bob makes enough money off his shitty stock picking business that he decides to buy a ranch in the middle of nowhere, like he's always dreamed of. He contacts the telephone company, "Yeah, hi! I'm gonna need you to go ahead and run like fifteen telephone lines a few hundred miles out to my little compound. Business is booming, and I have the whole family answering calls and giving stock tips. I have a big family. So, if you could just go ahead and do that on Saturday, that'd be great. Thanks! ....oh, and remember... FREE!"
Would this system be stable and sane? I think already it appears not quite sane. How about stable? In this system, there appears to be a hell of a great incentive to gain the 'company' label. I might look like a customer at first glance, but I'm going to start up just enough of a business, host just enough content in my house (send just enough stock tips of my own out on the phone). I'm a "business" now. Can I go to the ISP/phone company and say, "Yo dawg, I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, maaaaan. FREE." What is the minimal level of business/hosting that I need to do to qualify? Can everyone on the block attain this minimal level? We'll all do it, and we'll all stop paying. Who pays now?
The internet is just a bunch of endpoints
A variety of big companies help connect up those endpoints, forming a massive morass in the middle of everything. Endpoints get charged by the company that helps them get into that morass. (Companies which set up that morass negotiate with each other to price traffic between their respective networks when they traffic to each other.) Endpoints get charged according to how much traffic they want to get in to and out of said morass. Large, heavily-used endpoints probably pay a lot. Small, slightly-used endpoints probably pay a little.
While packets don't come with a "company" or "customer" label, in reality, telephone companies and ISPs do have "business class" service. It costs more, not less. It recognizes that there may be differences in service needs. Individuals might be happy with cheaper service that doesn't come with the fifteen lines that Bob needs or better guarantees like that at least ten of them need to be functional 100% of the time. The usage demands of individuals can often be rounded off to "within some small bucket", and bulk/bundled prices can be easier for everyone than metering out every call/packet. Bob's business needs more than this small bucket, and he's going to pay more. Sears needs even more, and they're probably going to pay even more. Neither of them can be like, "Yo, the 'customers' already pay you; FREE."
This general story makes sense, and lots of academic ink has been spilled on "two-sided markets" with different features along these lines. In some cases, there may be benefits to providers; in some cases, there are some things we can do to reduce concerns. In the basic story, things mostly work out okay given some measure of competition. Of course, the basic story doesn't preclude the possibility that anti-competitive behavior could arise or that such behavior should be dealt with. Below, people describe Comcast as vertically-integrating their own streaming service and behaving anti-competitively toward Netflix; that particular anti-competitive behavior can and should be dealt with, but the solution is not some weird distinction between 'customers' and 'companies', where 'companies' can magically demand FREE no matter what their demands are.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
The incident is commonly reported to mean "people will treat any
Whence "any"? You just made that shit up all on your own.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I think I explained poorly. Consider the statement, "Agent A takes Action B to remedy Ill C, potentially also causing Effect D."
In one case, A = Government, B = Lockdown, C = COVID, D = Economic Damage.
In a second case, A = Protesters, B = Protest, C = Economic Damage, D = Lesser Economic Damage.
In a third case, A = Government, B = Declaration of Emergency, C = Lesser Economic Damage, D = Degradation of Civil Liberties.
The side effect of the second case is absolutely de minimis compared to the side effects of the first and third, yet the minimal side effect coming out of the second case is meant to justify a vastly worse thing in the third case. The requirement is that the former/latter cases must be acknowledged as Righteous and Good, while the middle case must be condemned as Hitler and Satan and Racist and....
One can reasonable agree/disagree between the first two based on the relative understanding of the situation, particularly the severity of COVID. But to take the required stances on the first two and then claim that the latter is Righteous and Good is hypocrisy. If such small amounts of economic damage are that important to declare an emergency and suspend civil liberties, then perhaps much worse economic damage is a sufficient impetus to make a little bit of protesting not Hitler and Satan and Racist and....
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I wrote:
After the fee, a person could reasonably believe, 'Well, they set the fee at a rate that appropriately compensates them for the trouble, so as long as it's worth it to me to pay the fee, everyone wins.'
What do you think is "misreported"?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
You seem to be implying that the exact same strictures should exist on government action and on private action.
To be clear, I am not. Especially not as a legal matter. As a public perception matter, their justification shows immense hypocrisy.
Completely separate from that is the legal matter of "serious violence", which is horribly ill-supported in this document, to the crazy extent of stochastic pre-crime.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
The entire problem of the student loan program is built on the twin perverse incentives of the loans being non-dischargeable and guaranteed by the government.
Plus, states often restrict supply. I have one collaborator at a smaller public uni that is trying to add another PhD program, but the bigger public unis in the state have been able to throw up all sorts of barriers, forcing them to try to show that there is sufficient "need" for such a program (which is essentially impossible to do); really, they're just preventing competition in self-interested fashion. "Best I can do is subsidize demand and restrict supply," is the meme that keeps on giving.
Double plus is that universities are basically the only industry in which the government basically mandates that they're able to nearly perfectly price discriminate, allowing them to capture the vast majority of the surplus. Can you imagine literally any other industry in which the federal government says, "Well, in order to engage in this commerce, individuals need to provide extremely detailed personal and family financial information to the supplier, so that the supplier can optimally tailor an individual price as close as possible to the individual's willingness to pay"? For literally any other industry, this would be absolutely unthinkable... an obscene corruption scandal.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I don't think that you can be as misleading as you want as long as you are literally true. I think that there is nothing in what I've said that is "misreporting" the result. I very clearly stated:
parents apparently valued not being rude (in the prior regime) more than paying the fee (in the current regime) more than picking up their kids on time
Which is 100% consistent with the comment above. The value they got from paying the fee and picking their kids up late was more than the value they got from picking their kids up on time. If you jack the fee up (as the commenter suggested), this would change at some point (different points for different consumers). There is nothing misreported here. What do you think is misreported?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Different things are different, yes. But on the core question of whether they require planning/delaying/spacing/whatever, I think they're similar. At least, because I had thought that you were basically just resting something on the "ability" to plan/delay, as though such ability implied something about functionality/dysfunctionality of a family relationship. Dependapotamus isn't just a slave to her passions in the moment; she's not going home with broke-ass dude from the bar. She's capable of planning her strategy out according to the rules of the game she thinks she's playing.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I mean, it's not even actually legally important, because the test was about "serious violence", not about some level of economic damage. It's just that this particular report jumps back to this measure of economic damage multiple times as if it's some form of evidence of "violence". It's a total red herring in the report that just detracts from its credibility.
does not imply that the government can't take any action that might cause a problem similar to that one
I don't think I claimed this. Instead, it's just peak hypocrisy. Government does action A, which causes damage B. People protest A, and their protest causes damage epsilon*B, with epsilon<1. Now, suddenly, anything that causes damage on the level of epsilon*B is an emergency suitable to suspend civil liberties. By that reasoning, action A, itself, should have created an emergency that was suitable to suspend the civil liberties of the politicians, for they had caused far greater damage.
The court was allowing a government action to go ahead
I mean, not really. This isn't a court. They aren't allowing an action to go ahead. The action was already done and over. This is just an ass-covering commission to say, "If we stretch suuuuuuuuper hard and bend every test in a way that is maximally favorable to the government, allowing things like heckler's vetos and stochastic pre-crime, mayyyyyyyybe that stuff the government did in the past miiiiiight have been okay."
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Thanks! I have what I need to know about your position.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
vs
Explain "vs". What is the core conceptual difference, in your mind?
similar to those in any developed nation
[citation needed], as the kids say these days.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
My wife also occasionally mentions a girl she went to school with who at this point has like 4-5 kids (I can't remember how many), each with a different baby daddy. "She finds some guy who is about to make a bunch of money working in the oil industry, convinces him that she loves him, and that lasts just as long as it takes for her to have another kid."
By her account, this woman is able to plan/delay in order to meet the requirements of the 'program' that she is pursuing. That doesn't imply that these are the types of behaviors we really want to promote as a society.
But in any event, the spacing/repetition to go several years with minimal working isn't, itself, an example of an atrocious consequence. It's just an example of how people will make adjustments to just barely meet the requirements, and we may or may not end up liking the results.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
on the whole I'd say it is paying people who have had children, not "paid to have kids."
This is a textbook example of a distinction without a difference. The whole premise of the original comment was the oodles of conversations here about using financial incentives, given to people who have had children, in order to nudge people in general to have more kids. Do you just think that, as a matter of first principles, this theory of incentivization doesn't actually conceptually link? This would be a novel challenge to the prevailing view around here, and you should really flesh it out. Preferably in a long-form top comment rather than buried here. I think lots of folks here would be interested in subscribing to your newsletter hearing your theory.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Whether they're being "paid to have kids" is a claim that is not reflected in the legislation
So wait, you don't get
a maximum annual benefit of $6,833 per child to help with the cost of raising a family.
$6,833 per year ($569.41 per month) for each eligible child under the age of 6
$5,765 per year ($480.41 per month) for each eligible child aged 6 to 17
?? I thought you had a citation and everything!
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
the use of the Act has been subject to judicial review, as well as a really detailed formal inquiry by a judge of the Ontario Court of Appeal.
Have you read the document? Do you have a frame of reference by which to judge the document? Say, have you read IG reports in the US following potential scandals? This report is an utter whitewash, by any reasonable standard. I mean, the amount of times they hold on to
“ongoing economic losses of 0.1 – 0.2% of gross domestic product for every week the blockades continue,"
as if the COVID restrictions weren't causing multiples of that. The pains they go through to say, "We're not a court; it's not really our job to say whether it's legal or not." The frankly ridiculous straining to try to claim "concerns" of "serious violence" (the latter being what the test required; the former being the barest shred of what they had).
"There was also a risk of violence arising from counter protests."
A pure heckler's veto. Egads, this document is enough to make me tear my remaining hair out! Wait... that would be serious violence! EMERGENCY! Your bank account is now frozen.
"CSIS and ITAC had also advised of the risk that a lone wolf actor, inspired by the IMVE elements at the protests, might conduct an attack against soft targets such as opposition groups or members of the public, and that lone wolf actors are very difficult to detect and predict."
Not pre-crime. Not stochastic terrorism. The fact that we can mouth the words "stochastic terrorism" and then decry the fact that we can't identify pre-crime is sufficient to declare "serious violence" and an emergency in Canada.
Make no mistake, random ass-comments on the internet are a sufficient "threat of serious violence" in Canada to suspend civil liberties even further than they had already gone just because of COVID. Of course, this is only the case if such a thing is in the interest of The Party; it will not be suitable for any opposition. One day, you may find yourself opposing The Party on some issue. You might think that it's minor, that reasonable minds might disagree. You might even join a little happy protest; you and your people have a long history of gaining political victories by mostly peaceful protest. But they will find every single disconnected shred of stochastic possible danger in the entire panopticon, and not a single one of your rights will be vindicated, given the 'emergency' that you present.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
misreported
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I don't think those two interpretations are at odds. Like I had said, "parents apparently valued not being rude (in the prior regime) more than paying the fee (in the current regime) more than picking up their kids on time". Such a relation can be changed by jacking up the amount of the fee, past the amount of value parents get from picking up their kids late. That's not really the important one of the two relations. The important one of the two relations is the one that involves the cultural value - that people didn't pick their kids up late when the monetary cost was $0. Attempting to signal that picking up kids late is bad, but doing so poorly and actually signalling that picking up kids late isn't nearly as bad as you thought it was actually does change the culture around picking up your kids.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Define "cost of living". I'm pretty confident wife's sister's husband doesn't make as much as that random source says is necessary to live. Are you saying that if Canada wasn't paying them to have children, they'd be dead? Boy is that a substantial monetary incentive to have children....
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Elite status are things in which money alone is insufficient, like academic prestige, top college admissions, etc. As soon as a price tag is put on something, suddenly it becomes more commonplace
Marketing BS had a good article on this recently and how "paying for status" has led to interesting dynamics in a few different markets that had explicit "status" markers.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Thank you for providing the citation. That is a substantial amount of money, especially for a couple that is otherwise living off of one entry-level income. Shit, in other conversations where we're talking about UBI, that's not that far off from the line at which a... let's go with "not insubstantial" (heh) percentage of folks said they'd be willing to quit their jobs and just live off of UBI. And that's just for two kids.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Russ Roberts talks about how inserting money into things can change the culture around said thing. The example he often goes to is that of day care centers. Some day care centers had a problem with parents picking up their children late (i.e., they were supposed to be all picked up by 6pm or whatever so that the center could close at that time). In order to try to fix the problem, they implemented a late pickup fee. People follow incentives and will then do a better job of picking up their children, right? Whelp, the result was that the number of late pickups went up.
Prior to the fee, parents had a cultural incentive to try to pick up their kids on time. 'I would feel bad if I was late and the workers at the center had to stay later than planned.' After the fee, a person could reasonably believe, 'Well, they set the fee at a rate that appropriately compensates them for the trouble, so as long as it's worth it to me to pay the fee, everyone wins.' And so the culture around how people viewed their choices changed; parents apparently valued not being rude (in the prior regime) more than paying the fee (in the current regime) more than picking up their kids on time... and so late pickups went up.
There have been a lot of discussions lately about financial incentives to have kids. I'd like to finally share an experience I had recently with my wife. We were on a trip in the southern US, and we happened to be out at a restaurant for breakfast on a Sunday morning. The place was pretty busy, and there were a lot of families there with little children. These kids were pretty much all quite well-behaved, and the families seemed pretty happy.
...the sight of this was apparently a crying experience for my wife. Parents actually like their kids?! They're all able to enjoy a nice breakfast out and have just an all-around pleasant morning?! What even is this world?!
You see, my wife immigrated from Canada, where they pretty straightforwardly pay people for having children. The payments are relatively substantial. Her sister is a prime example. Sister doesn't work; sister's husband works a pretty low-paying entry-level job, without a whole lot of hope in sight for significant advances anytime soon; sister and her husband already have two children, will probably be having more. Wife basically thinks that sister is just an example of a phenomenon that she thinks is common in her home country - people basically treating their kids as sources of income.
When I told wife about Hungary's schemes that have been talked about here, she immediately started thinking about how people would game it, how they'd make choices to just barely satisfy the governmental requirements, and how it would change the culture around how people view these choices. She also has gobs of experience with how employees game out the parental leave time and unemployment and so on, so she knows the way these games will be played (she's already confident that many people make choices of how to space out their kids based on how much leave you get, then how many hours you need to work again before you become eligible for another huge chunk of parental leave; you can string along several years of barely working at all if you do it right). "So, around 28-29, every woman will be figuring out when the best time is to hit up a sperm bank, given their job situation and ensuring a high probability of it working prior to 30."
I'm not going to confidently predict that there is going to be some particular unintended consequence (e.g., maybe people who might have otherwise had more than one kid just have their "gov't mandated, sperm bank one", they hate the thing, and overall fertility declines). But hot damn am I sure that there will be some unintended consequences to the culture around having kids if people go to some of the extremes of the financial incentives talked about here. Like, yes, injecting money will produce incentives that will change behavior. Will the resulting behavior be something that we like? Ohhhhh boy. We're in for a wild ride. Mostly, I'm sort of just amazed that this group generally leans right and would be incredibly quick to point out the possibility of unintended consequences for vast social engineering schemes proposed by the left, but is relatively uncritical about possible unintended consequences for vast social engineering schemes proposed to increase fertility.
Is truth a defense to being suppressed on Twitter/Facebook/Google/YouTube/NYT/WaPo/AllTheOutletsThatPeopleUse? To being universally derided as mis/dis/mal-information? Truth may eventually prevent some actors from having to pay legal costs (and others might be liars), but in the meantime, why do you think Twitter/Facebook/Google/YouTube/NYT/WaPo/AllTheOutletsThatPeopleUse aren'te trying that approach?
More options
Context Copy link