Felagund
1mo ago
My read was that chrisprattalpharaptr was essentially trying to push for conversing politely, and tyre_inflator's main point was that the conversation that happens here is useless.
So one seems closer to me to needing mod action than the other, given the standards of this place.
Felagund
4mo ago
In a scenario where there is not surplus labor, employees are paid more and (perhaps) prices increase.
Sure.
The price increase is spread equally to everyone,
Maybe? Depends on the industries most impacted. I'll grant it.
yet the “surplus resources” (the money that would ordinarily go to the top) are all given to the employees and not the top.
Wait, you're missing several factors here. If I understand what you're saying, your model is that more employees->wages down->employers pocket the difference. But what's left out is that often that money will go to hire more workers, to scale up the production, or the extra labor lets more firms do things. Competition should drive profits down towards zero, as firms have to drop their prices, so "the top" doesn't actually really benefit much. (And a large amount of low skill labor I would think would go into competitive industries).
The end result is that the people with the most amount of money have to pay more, which is a great result
No. The goal should not be to have people pay more. That's a loss. We want prosperity. Elon Musk or whoever taking a loss doesn't help you out.
The lower and middle class also have to pay more, too, but this counterbalanced with their increased pay and quality of life. In the end, they benefit the most.
Why do you think increased quality of life, given that you mention increased costs in the same sentence, with no attempt to compare the sizes of the effects?
If my business sells coconuts off the highway, I greatly benefit if I can pay my coconut sellers slave wages. What if there are fewer people willing to sling my coconuts off the highway? I simply need to pay them more to work for me, no questions asked, because if I don’t I lose all my money, but if I do I still make money.
Well, I'd need to raise wages to get more workers to sell more coconuts up until the point where the cost of raising everyone's wages outweighs the benefit of the extra coconuts sold. It's not exactly all or nothing, but what you're saying is roughly right.
That part is obvious, but your take would suggest that I would attempt to make the same amount of profit by simply pricing my coconuts higher.
Not exactly. It's actually supply and demand. Fewer workers means I can sell fewer coconuts, which means I can raise the cost because I don't need to try to sell to quite as many people—I don't need to appeal to the ones previously on the edge.
What actually happens is that I might try to sell my coconuts for more money, will probably fail, and ultimately will have to just give more money to my employees. Oh well, I will have to sell four of my six vacation homes.
I guess I'm not exactly seeing why the selling of vacation homes is necessary, nor why that's a good thing.
In America there is a huge number of businesses that generate enormous absurd profits which have this same ceiling. An obvious one is Amazon, and another obvious one is Starbucks.
You do realize that Amazon's only able to be so profitable by being enormously useful, right? There are some predatory practices here or there (see some of their pricing policies, in relation to other vendors), but on the whole, they're very good for you, the consumer?
There is a point at which people will refuse to shop online if the prices are too high.
Or, they'll buy from other vendors online or whatever. But yes, Amazon and its sellers do have to set prices at ranges that people will buy them at.
Sorry Bezos, you’ll have to sell your half a billion dollar yacht.
Do you think Amazon and Bezos have merged finances?
Starbucks is milking the consumer dry with their overpriced drinks, but they honestly cannot price them at $14 a drink.
Supply and demand. If the price is to high, switch to alternatives, or don't buy (and people do, whether other stores, or prepared at home). Starbucks will only raise prices for as long as they think that the product of the customers at the higher price times the change in price is more than the product of the lower price times the additional customers. (Sorry, that's probably hard to read. It's the difference between two different rectangles on a demand curve. But I don't have a way to represent to you the diagram.)
It’s people who have a pseudo(?) monopoly and/or have amassed such industry/marketing knowledge that competition is effectively impossible, and they’re making absurd profits when we can just make take and give it to the middle class simply by decreasing the wage pool.
This makes more sense for the Amazon example than the Starbucks example, because Amazon's a lot harder to compete with than Starbucks.
But remember, why is Amazon hard to compete with? In part, because of anti-competitive practices, but also in part by being really good for the consumer, in ways that you need huge, costly, scale to match. Amazon is skimming value, but it's value that they've created, that their competitors can't keep up with.
Nevertheless, you're right that in this case, you could presumably cut into Amazon's profits without any huge consequences, unless there's some factor I'm missing.
But keep in mind! If we kill/forcibly retire/cause never to have been born/outlaw a bunch of workers, Amazon can afford to maintain it's workers, but all the other companies that can't afford to do so now have to cut back on their workers, and scale back on what they're doing. And so you just increased Amazon's market share, because they, due to having more breathing room due to being more profitable, can handle the increased austerity when other firms cannot.
Forgive me if there are any errors in that analysis. My last detailed interaction with economics was only a basic principles of microeconomics course a few years ago, so I imagine there must be some.
Felagund
4mo ago
All of the “economic efficiency” is just going to go to the very wealthy
No? Do you think that labor in general only helps the very wealthy? Does your job only help the very wealthy? At the very least, it helps you and everyone you buy anything from, not even considering whatever benefits whatever youedo accomplishes. Likewise, immigrants help themselves, help everyone they buy things from, and help those who they work those, and help those who buy from those whom they work for, by increasing supply, and so driving down the price. Is this bad for those currently in the niche that those people are in? Quite possibly, as long as it's disproportionately there, to an extent that it exceeds the benefits of the immigration. But everyone else benefits, at least.
Your companies will actually be lobbying the government to increase health and fertility.
Aren't you arguing that having more workers is bad?
Essentially zero of this is a product of Biden being elected. You picked Floyd, which was during Trump's term, and a bunch of things that are generally not action by the federal government.
Like, there's plenty to complain about Biden for (e.g. student loans!), but stick to what he's actually done? Or explicitly say that the problem is the missed opportunities for the right to crack down on these things, in which case the problem is not so much that the democrats are (mostly) in power, but that the republicans aren't?
Felagund
2mo ago
I don't think it's something to be worried about if someone lets a family member fill out their ballot for them. Maybe it's illegal, but when you're saying that an election is fraudulent, and what you mean is "some people illegally let their spouses fill out their ballot for them," that's not what it sounds like you were saying, and it's not what people care about.
Felagund
3mo ago
"But they didn't, is the thing"
I really don't get your model of the government. The reason Trump got a bunch of justices is because three justices died. He got lucky. The reason other Republicans did not appoint three justices is because they did not have enough justices die. I don't get what you think any other Republican should have done, or how you think pre-Trump Republicans failed us.
Trump deserves no credit for Ginsburg, Scalia, and Kennedy dying. That was never about him, that was about them being old.
Trump's also fairly pro-choice for a Republican, so Dobbs is a weird thing to list as an achievement of his for that reason.
Felagund
9mo ago
But the president isn't spending money in this case. He's just not collecting money back. Those are different. Moreover, Biden v. Nebraska wasn't ruled upon on constitutional grounds, and the affirmative action case involved Harvard, a private actor, where the Constitution only applied because of Title VI (and further, the probably incorrect precedent that the phrase in Title VI is just supposed to be a summary of the equal protection clause)
Felagund
1mo ago
The causes of the obesity epidemic are also worth considering. From reading slime mold time mold, it seems pretty clear to me that there should be more emphasis on the importance of your body being properly calibrated towards whatever your proper weight is, and we should be more aware of what is causing them so much more frequently to diverge.
Of course, willpower also can suffice, should the first fail; that just becomes progressively harder to make oneself do the more they are misaligned.
Felagund
2mo ago
What was problematic about the Arizona 2022 election?
My overall impression was that the Republicans just ran a slate of terrible candidates and lost. (By a very close margin, in the case of Hamadeh.)
Felagund
2mo ago
I just looked it up again, I'd forgotten about that. It looks like it was problems with toner printing too light before it was fixed, and they were still able to vote, just their ballots were counted separately or something? I'd imagine that would cause some people not to vote, especially with it hitting social media, which yeah, could well have meant that Hamadeh would have won.
Why would you assume that it was interference rather than just an error, though? I'd thought that in those districts the voting was mostly administered by republicans?
Felagund
2mo ago
and I admit at having ongoing puzzlement as to why 2020 stolen election claims retain so much cachet among republican voters and officials.
Yeah, it's a mix of things. I think the main way people end up believing it is due to deep amounts of distrust in mainstream sources and in the political system, combined with a lack of skepticism and maybe some motivated reasoning towards appealing propaganda. When you have Trump promoting this, it gets followers. Combine that with some purported evidence (I think there was some graph of a bunch of new votes added at once in some state), and people think that they're right.
At least, that's the way it comes across to me, when talking about ordinary voters. I'd assume there's some of that for politicians, etc., but that there's more of that for the sake of the political benefit. I remember that being a thing in the lead-up to the 2022 election, of people being more likely to consider/endorse the theory in the hope of gathering support from Trump and so winning the primary.
Felagund
8mo ago
simply because the earlier amendments require things like trials and forbid self incrimination.
They argue that if it conflicts with other portions of the constitution, it satisfies or supersedes them. I think they still think there are processes for dealing with these things and challenging actions of this sort, it just doesn't have to start with a conviction.
I can’t imagine that Trump or his supporters aren’t going to fight pretty hard against anyone refusing to put Trump on the ballot.
Certainly, as they should.
It’s definitely against the spirit of free elections to refuse to put a declared candidate who meets the qualifications in state law on the ballot.
Sure. But it might be what the constitution requires, if they authors are right on this. Keep in mind also that the constitution is "the supreme law of the land."
Without a conviction, and one that’s specifically mentioned in the constitution as disqualification for office, they’d have a very strong case.
This is another basis for disqualification from office.
Felagund
9mo ago
Okay, it has lower sourcing standards than is normal. Sure. Based on that, I can totally believe that there are many people who are in there who shouldn't be. But that still doesn't address how unreliable it is, which was what @faul_sname was trying to do.
My hypothesis is that this isn't a scientific source, it's not a database of murder victims. It's a post-2000s propaganda campaign meant to fill the gap in the physical and documentary record with a crowd-sourcing approach of uncritically collecting testimonies and names 60 years after the fact.
That's not an answer. You gave a non-answer before, and you just did so again. I don't get it. All you have to say is "I think a bunch of the purported people never existed (either mistakenly or deliberately)" or "a bunch are still around, they just never checked their data, and they probably left subsequent records" or "a bunch are still around, they just didn't leave records in places we can find them" or "they died around that time, but from other causes."
Our standard for asserting that people were probably murdered doesn't have to be that we actually witnessed it, or dug up graves that are definitively there. A whole lot of people vanishing is itself evidence. (It is not, of course, evidence for the method of their death, and does allow for their deaths being incidental rather than intentional—e.g. if they all died from being overworked, that would still explain the "people vanished.")
To be clear, I don't actually myself know how extensive genealogical databases (for example) are, but you haven't actually attempted to answer the question that faul_sname was posing to you. My complaint isn't so much that I'm sure he's right on this, because I don't have the time to figure out how best to verify and assess that. But he clearly put in some effort as to seeing whether the database results were consistent with what they were described as, out of a random sample they seemed to be, and you have not been willing to give any account of your own about what we should find if we tried to investigate the people in the database, nor what actually happened. Once again, the reason that I bring this up is not because I think there's no way you could prove him wrong. It's that he provided evidence and effort to an extent that, if you could not respond to it, it seemed fair to say that you got shredded, as Amadan so delicately put it, made it pretty clear what sorts of things would be relevant responses and what he was actually arguing, and you didn't respond in a way that addressed his arguments, even when repeated more emphatically. That felt like it was a relevant example, and it still feels so.
Felagund
28d ago
Why not have one billion Americans (I haven't read it yet myself)? We are nowhere near constraints on space right now; the United States is on the low end for population density. There's so much space to grow.
Sure actively lowering the population would make me question your motives, but if people just prefer cruise ships and video games to reproducing, why do you want to stop them? Why not just have kids of your own who get to inherit a cleaner, more open world with beaches that aren't packed with strangers?
The world will not be more idyllic following a population collapse. Even more of the economy than now will be spent on supporting old people. If this hits worldwide, then we could well have an economic decline everywhere, as division of labor and economies of scale worsen. Especially because developed countries are the ones where birthrates are falling the most, we could see us unable to maintain modern standards of living, and much less innovation. Which might lead to more use of dirtier power and so not the "cleaner, more open world" you describe. And more garbage, as things designed for more people fall into disuse.
People do not think Detroit is better because its population has fallen.
But further, even supposing you're right and those are the options, do you really think that cruise ships and video games are a better life than raising a family?
Felagund
1mo ago
To be clear, I was not asserting that their lithium thesis was correct; the concerns you listed seem quite serious.
I was just asserting that there's more to the story of the rising rates of obesity than "everyone has less willpower than they used to"—that many are calibrated worse, for whatever reason that may be, and so weight gain is fairly common, and we should probably try harder to figure out what exactly is going on.
Felagund
2mo ago
Yeah. This was pretty expected because many states counted mail ballots last, which would be leaning Democrat because Republicans were discouraging mail in voting, but it might not feel that way to many voters.
Felagund
3mo ago
The passage isn't about the Lord's Supper. You had people like Cajetan (the preeminent Thomist, maybe ever, though Thomas himself did not agree) acknowledge this (Four Lutheran Errors, 1531. Six years earlier he thought that it was about the Eucharist, but he changed his mind.).
I have an enormous email chain that I was a part of, where I laid a lot of this out, if you like.
Some of the major points:
John 6:35 sets up a correspondence between believing in him and feeding on him as the bread of life. You can see this repeated when you compare verses 40 or 46 and verse 53, or 47 and 54, and more similar comparisons. It makes sense, then, to interpret this passage as referring to his feeding us through faith, and many throughout church history have recognized as much.
The manna comparison leads to some difficulties when connected with 1 Corinthians 10: he seems to be pushing there manna as sufficiently equivalent to the sacraments, which demands interpretation in light of the distinction to be found in John 6, namely that, I don't think he's talking about sacraments in John 6, but something stronger still.
Following that point, the language of John 6 is too strong, saying that anyone who eats of it has eternal life (in the present), and will live forever (unlike the fathers, who ate manna, who, note, many of them are living forever). See also how in verse 39, there's the reference that no one would be lost. Now, that isn't strictly said there referring to the Eucharist, but given the parallels of language, and the guarantee of resurrection in verse 54, that seems not unreasonable to carry over. But many who partake of the Eucharist do not have eternal life (e.g. those who partake unworthily), and many of those do not end up in heaven.
I'm sure there were other arguments I've made at some point or another. John 6:63 need to be dealt with, for example, but I haven't looked at that adequately to know what I make of it.
I see you in another comment mention that the church believed this for 1500 years. That is somewhat of an exaggeration. There were earlier precedents of disagreement on the matter of the eucharist. Berengar of Tours is famous, Ratramnus of Corbie was earlier, and the resurfacing of his writings played were influential in the English reformation, quite possibly John Scotus Eriugena, and Augustine himself seems not to believed in the real presence, exactly, either (and Calvin thought he was following Augustine).
I literally argued that we can treat them as a separate population in a useful manner. Are you going to address that, instead of merely asserting it?
Or is your complaint that there's no clear lines, and only a spectrum? I see no reason why that should change our ability to talk about it.
Nor is there any reason why only having one feature in common should mean that we can't look at things with respect to that feature. (and, of course, it's not quite the one feature in common—everything that correlates with poverty will be something they are statistically more likely to have as well, and vice versa)
It's obvious why people born on the Fourth of July is useless: it has no correlation with genetics, and it causes no persistent groups. Socioeconomic class is not like that. Yes, there is class mobility, and intermarriage, but statistically, people are more likely to stay somewhere around where they started, relatively speaking. Of course, this varies from individual to individual, but there's no reason for it not to be useful on a population level.
There's no reason to require millenia-old groups to be able to talk about human genetics. All that matters are group differences derived in part from genotypes.
Felagund
3mo ago
More than one, which is why "poor people" doesn't work as a relevant group.
This seems silly? What exactly is lost by treating "poor people" as a relevant group? I guess I don't see the relevant differences.
It would be quite surprising if they were the same along all traits as elites, because of factors like those originally pointed out by @FiveHourMarathon: there is obviously selection going on as people find their positions in society, and assortative mating will help those clusters to be distinct. I see no reason not to look at additional, smaller, clusters beyond race.
Our default assumption should be that it is partially genetic, since that seems true of a great many things about human differences.
It's fine to compare groups even if they interbreed, as long as it's not an even mixing between them—statistical differences should be preserved (for how long depends on how strong the selection and interbreeding is).
Felagund
8mo ago
They, generally speaking, don't think it repeals them, because it's not imposing any criminal penalties, just a qualification for office, and isn't a law, but a constitutional provision.
That said, if we ignored that, we can all agree that it applied ex post facto, that is, to the members of the Confederate cause, so at least in that respect it can conflict with the spirit of other parts of the constitution. The enacters at the time also thought it would be equivalent to a bill of attainder.
Felagund
8d ago
There shouldn't be able to be an innate "simple desire to become a woman," unless you think we come with innate, from the womb, knowledge of what the two genders are. At some point we figure out what genders are, and such desires would only make sense at that point.
Of course, at that point, we could have innate tendencies that predispose us to manifest certain desires or identities.
Felagund
22d ago
You say the motte is more 'right-aligned'. It is, likely. From the perspective of most left-aligned posters that wander in, because they're used to a radically different debate environment, populated by posters with similar opinions, where their perspective is rarely challenged, and where ideas in opposition to their own are rarely presented in a cogent fashion(and when they are, there's no guarantee it will remain).
This is an understatement.
Themotte is clearly right-leaning, it is not just that it's right-leaning compared to reddit or something. Posts of similar quality will get more upvotes if they're right-leaning, and the median comment is right-leaning.
(And lest you think I'm one of the left wing posters, as you described it, I assure you, I'm not.)
Felagund
1mo ago
It means that you're willing to accept than group differences might just actually be due to individual merit, not discrimination, which means we don't have to try to toss out our whole meritocratic system every time we see a disparity.
That's what it offers. An actual, colorblind, meritocratic system.
Am I convinced that we're able to get there? The path seems hard; people won't like to hear it. But that's the dream.
Felagund
2mo ago
I don't see why people should get away with being rude or antagonistic without getting the same in kind
Given the ratio, you're inevitably going to draw more reports, so this is a bad game for you to play.
I'd recommend rather to just try to defend your positions/show yourself right sufficiently clearly. (Yeah, that's hard when people don't want to listen to you.)
I sometimes feel like I'm too confrontational, and I'm definitely less confrontational than average (where average is defined by the possibly highly biased measure of what I notice).
You're correct that my interactions with Arjin are often suboptimal on both sides, but they reply to so many of my comments in ways that seem confrontational or ridiculous, how long am i supposed to just ignore them?
Maybe point out the lack of civility, and then respond more levelheadedly? But you're often fairly levelheaded anyway, from what I've seen. (I'll gesture back at the comment about what I notice.)
This feels to me a like a sort of post I don't like seeing others make. It's criticizing our common outgroup (generally speaking), progressives, and is kind of just irritated. It doesn't provide too much more value or insight than "hey, bad thing happened over there." I agree with it, of course, being its author, but I want to do better. Any thoughts about how I could talk about the same topic, while holding the same view, in a better way? Or is the answer just find other things to bring up?
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