GBRK
21d ago
The philosophical justification for patents is that they allow the genius of a new idea to capture the benefits of their contribution to society, thereby encouraging them to be geniuses. Except-- that almost never actually happens! The people actually responsible for the ideas that lead to vaccines, or to AI advancements, or to new machines, typically only capture a tiny fraction of the value they generate anyway. The rest goes to stockholders and to upper management. And while that parasitical class tries to present themselves as necessary to the genius' ultimate success, you should view that with the same skepticism as if an FDA regulator claimed to be responsible for the creation of some new cure or treatment. Maybe they're contributing something-- but the primary reason they exist is because of a distortionary, monopolistic government intervention. So the default assumption should be that they're worthless rentseekers-- extracting value from consumes and producers through their artificial control of resources that aren't naturally excludable.
Companies might stop investing-- but that's fine, because companies are full of unproductive middlemen. But if people want something done, then they'll invest. Have more faith in the free market! Can you seriously not think of a single financial instrument that might be used to fund research by purely self-interested parties? I can easily imagine something like a "transferrable kickstarter" system, where I put seed money into a research-production concern that's building something I'm interested in, and in return they guarantee me the right to buy a certain quantity of the product early, which gives me access to a potential for arbitrage. Sure, another person might start their own concern, intending to steal the advancement and produce it themselves... but then I get the thing I want even faster, and they have to risk their own money on a product that might not work out, against an unknown number of competitors that want to do the same thing.
And in practice, we already see so many companies funding open research, and posting the results publicly. If it benefits a company to invent something new, they will-- and if their competitors are interested in the same thing, then they're likely to contribute, rather than copy-and-fork, because that gives them the ability to determine the course of the initial development.
GBRK
21d ago
You're right that I don't exactly have a high opinion of chinese IP protections. Though honestly-- it's not like I'm currently respecting chinese (or japanese, or korean) IPs either... R.I.P kissanime. But As /u/HalloweenSnarry guessed, I want to do away with any fig leaf, any pretense that IP law matters. It's a consummate waste for us all to be jumping through hoops, when increasingly it won't even be humans coming up with new ideas-- it'll be AIs, running on illegaly acquired training data.
The ONLY exception I'd make is for trademarks. I would actually protest against, as you called it, "Chinese Batman." The right to advertise a work as "Batman" should be restricted to original inventor, and their heirs-- a sort of maker's mark, used to guarantee authenticity. In contrast /u/HereAndGone mentioned the use of IP inside another property, and I'm fine with that.
GBRK
21d ago
There is entertainment that appeals to a large number of people, and there is entertainment that is designed to be mainstream. Post-IP law, the former kind of entertainment will persist, but there will be no point in creating the latter kind except in the form of excludable physical objects and in-person events.
Just think about it:
No more soulless, toyetic cartoons. No more lowest-common-denominator reality television. No more hyper-generic romantasy novels getting polished tiktok campaigns.
These properties only exist because they can be marketed-- because they're the type of cultural product that let middlemen extract the most wealth. Without them taking up a huge chunk of our cultural vigor, more earnest works will have the space they need to thrive. Or not thrive, as the case may be-- but that's fine, because that's natural selection.
Without any protections it seems like success will be defined even more by name recognition and marketing skills rather than genuine creative talent.
My experience with fanfiction (and fanart) proves this wrong. Fanfiction authors have sub-zero protections against "theft." And yet, authors are constantly appearing and making a mark as a direct result of their creative talent. And by establishing their bonafines for quality, they can even start making money themselves off of patreon. Name recognition and marketing will matter, yes, but just think about the incentives-- your goal isn't to sell your last work, it's to sell your next.
Frankly, you have insufficient faith in the free market. It's trivial to think up business models and financial instruments that could pool money from interested readers to generate new texts. Even if every current creative immediately goes out of business, people will still demand entertainment! The market will find some way to make the transaction happen.
GBRK
22d ago
China's pledge to stop respecting American IP-- and in particular copyright for hollywood movies-- is possibly the only silver lining of this tarrif business. The american entertainment industry is a juggernaut, but that comes at the cost of making sanitized slop consumable by the maximum possible audience. On the liberal end of the table, no one is willing to make movies that really push the boundaries of sex and culture-norm violation (gay people holding hands is the tamest shit ever), and on the conservative end of the table we similarly don't have anyone willing to push the boundaries of violence and jingoism. Plus, completely giving up on IP law is the first step in actually re-industrializing the united states. The whole point of IP law is to create monopolies, and monopolies are intrinsically inefficient-- so the western world's respect for IP law is a massive albatross around our neck. In a world without IP law the only thing we lose is the class of parasitic middlemen that can make a living on the bullshit legal fiction that ideas are an asset.
GBRK
22d ago
As a member of the top 10%, I want to note that it's extremely feasible to have cross-border shopping trips for expensive items where relevant. Especially if your job involves international travel. If I wanted lululemon, for example, nothing would stop me from getting it, and I still wouldn't pay tariffs. Actually, it would be a better status symbol than ever before as these luxuries would become less affordable for the middle class while remaining the same cost for me.
GBRK
22d ago
I see these rants about instituting a muscular system of top-down control over the american economy and culture and think--
Have you considered communism?
No, seriously. What you are proposing is just globohomo minus the globo and the homo. And I don't mean that as a joke-- you are speaking to the exact same complaints that motivate the world's marxists and socialists. In particular, I could imagine the words "incompetence is tolerated, failure is rewarded, and sloth is celebrated," being a pointed critique of capitalists out of another person's mouth.
I don't say this as a rebuttal of your comment, exactly-- because there isn't much to rebut. Your line-level proposals are mostly things I like, and I firmly believe that the vast majority of all humans would prefer for things to get better rather than worse. But in response to proposals about how we should all push toward a particular unifying cultural norm, I'm always thinking... well, why doesn't the speaker just capitulate first? And the answer is always that their individual ideological quibbles really are more important to them (and everyone else) than linking arms with their ideological opponents.
GBRK
23d ago
Were I a (post-elementary) teacher , I would give every single student an A, and let anyone who wanted to goof off all year do so. Meanwhile, I'd offer in-class tutoring, and offer study materials and optional homework to any student that actually wanted to learn. Out of an (overpacked) 30 kid english class, I think I'd get 2-5 kids with an actual, serious interest in writing and another 15-25 willing to discuss the occasional book and study exactly what they need to learn for standardized tests. The rest of the kids were a lost cause from the start. Credential inflation is a race to the bottom and there no sense wasting everyone's time trying to win it.
...well that's the power fantasy I have, at least. In practice you and I would be bound by whatever the school administration and the district parents wanted, actual learning outcomes be damned.
GBRK
26d ago
I haven't played as many 4Xes (in particular I haven't played any Paradox games),
That would explain why you're completely wrong about strategy games. Paradox (and other indie publishers) continue to push the boundaries of what a strategy game can be. Victoria 3, for example, attempts to simulate literally the entirely population of earth over its timespan-- down to their professions, wealth, culture, religion, and political preferences.
GBRK
26d ago
The bump is small because part of the market is betting that these tarrifs will be reversed, either immediately or following some face-saving negotiation. Obviously it's not very smart to bet against the wisdom of the market, but depending on your local and personal conditions it can be wise to engage in some risk-hedging. For example, There's a pretty decent chance I'll either lose my job in the next two months thanks to contracting stuff, or keep the job and buy a house, so I'm sitting on a fair amount of liquid cash so I can respond to either eventuality.
GBRK
27d ago
I wouldn't call him a "political liability"-- I'd call him the "fall man." Associating elon with the cuts means that as soon as elon is gone low-information voters will think the cuts have "stopped" and will forgive trump (and the republican party) as a consequence. Elon's role is to absorb the reputational hit for carrying out what the republicans already wanted to do.
Non-exhaustively...
I believe in some neoliberal stuff (Open borders, free trade, georgism) some libertarian stuff (end social security, repeal all intellectual property law except for trademarks, all drugs should be legal over-the-counter if you're 18+) some socdem stuff (a public option for healthcare, though I would also accept M4A), some paleoconservative stuff (the catholic church is exactly correct, and while I wouldn't want to end freedom of conscience I WOULD remove the separation between church and state if I thought it would go in my favor... Which, eventually, it will, because we are destined by God to succeed), and I'm fairly sympathetic to neoconservatives., though more in theory rather than in practice. (Some cultures ARE better than others, and as the country with one of the best cultures in the world, it's america's duty to spread that culture. Assimilating immigrants is the best way to do that, but I wouldn't strictly rule out conquest as a foreign policy tool. Though... most actually proposed conquests are just a terrible idea on humanitarian and practical grounds. We're not going to improve canada by invading it.)
GBRK
30d ago
Truly these are my people; they too are lovers of slow, cautious change".
I unironically say this (well, things to this effect) all the time. Despite having individually quite radical policy prescriptions, I still call myself a "centrist." Not because I am in the exact center of the overton window, but because I the people I affiliate myself with are more defined by their pragmatist actions rather than their ideological ends. I have much more in common with a fascist running on a platform of orderly public transit scheduling, and anarchists peacefully protesting for more bike lanes, than with conservatives and liberals that engage in performative hysteria online without actually making any attempt to change anything. It's a matter of ingroup/outgroup genetics. Everyone wants good things instead of bad things, but only a particular type of people want to perform iterated, gradual tests paired with introspective reflection to figure out if the actions they're taking are actually effective at moving them toward what they believe is good.
Actually, this specific phenomenon is what's currently china-pilling me. Seeing tourist videos about china, I'm more and more convinced that I'd actually like the chinese people a lot if I went there in person-- even if ideologically and geopolitically I'm never going to be anything but strongly opposed to them.
Polling and survey data suggests that Latinos are even more sympathetic to white identitarianism than whites are.
Never ask an online neonazi about what race their girlfriend is... or what continent their mitochondrial DNA comes from.
I'm not racist, but, men with amerindian mtDNA and an indo-european y-haplogroup (specifically the R haplotype) are objectively the most advanced genetic hybrids humanity has ever seen. ;)
GBRK
1mo ago
My main problem with joining the commonwealth isn't that we'd have to accept a monarch, it's that we'd have to accept the wrong monarch. There are NAPOLEONS on US soil! And they've already served our country with distinction. Why should we settle for the inferior house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha ?
GBRK
1mo ago
I haven't heard about any overabundance of Indian illegal immigrants-- I'd wager they're legal (at least, relatively speaking) working on student visas or brought over as dependents/relatives of indians that went from h1bs to green cards.
Big businesses pay for illegal immigrants, but my understanding is that it's indirect-- they'll hire a contractor that uses illegal labor rather than hiring them directly.
GBRK
1mo ago
You're failing to represent the full case for argument #5.
- People are emotionally primed to associate particular styles with particular positive or negative things. If you see something in a tudor style you probably think of a wealthy old neighborhood or a european tourist trap-- both of which would be pleasant places to exist in regardless of what architectural style they were built in. If we built all our prisons, hospitals, and corporate offices in the same style it would take a bit of the shine off of it.
- Old styles haven't stayed static-- they've been constantly improved on. The apartment complex I live in probably would have looked like a set of hideous industrial buildings when they were built in the first half of the 20th century. But since then, they've been decorated and improved in a variety of little ways-- decorative green window shutters, trees that have grown to maturity, tasteful black railings on staircases, etc. All of those things were technically possible to do when the property was first built, but it took time for people to understand how best to work with that style and incorporate the most effective decorative elements. We're not just seeing the prettiest old buildings, we're seeing the prettiest versions of old buildings.
GBRK
1mo ago
Yep. I have plenty of reasons to hate trump but wanting to annex canada isn't one of them. The actual process by which he is attempting to impose sovereignty is just a complete failure though, and in fact is doing more to bolster canadian seperatism than ever before.
A smarter operator woould have gone with divide-and-conquering, treating the various canadian provinces as being separate entities and levying tarriffs on a province- y province level to negotiate with their premiers specifically, bypassing the canadian national government. The only way forwardis to convince people that they're Albertans, ontarioans, new brunswickans, etc. before they're canadian, so that eventually they might see it in the best interest of their province to leave canada and join the united states.
It wouldn't happen during trump's presidency though, and I'm pretty sure he's old and jaded enough to no longer have long-term goals.
GBRK
1mo ago
But regardless of that, the X in ten that happen to be proficient workers is not worth the hollowing out of the native labour force.
Unemployment was tiny (at least through biden's presidency) and labor productivity keeps going up. The empirical data is not on your side.
We could see by simply looking at immigrants already here that they are 'inferior' to certain native populations.
The kind and degree of inferiority matters a lot. I've been arguing the whole time that the degree is small and the kind has no real evidence of being genetic.
You said they would 'disappear into the void'. That's not happening. They are advocating for themselves based on identity grievance politics. Stop trying to pivot out of your arguments.
Okay so then they're doing totally fine? Then they have nothing to complain about! You can't have it both ways. Either these communities are threatened or they're not.
In the most polite way possible: I did not ask nor do I care about what your pocket theory for why California sucks. The point of contention related to how urban liberals are the lowest fertility demographic in the world. You said that their culture is 'strong' and here to stay. In reality liberals are on the fastest track to self replacement of all the demographics.
There is growing evidence to suggest that cities are not quite the “fertility traps” that they are made out to be – at least not in the developed world. In Social Vulnerability in European Cities: The Role of Local Welfare in Times of Crisis (2014), researchers Costanzo Ranci, Taco Brandsen and Stefania Sabatinelli found that, after a long period of fertility decline, many European cities have experienced “unequal but definite growth” in the number of births in the years between 2000 and 2009. In almost all of the cities studied, fertility was higher
There's also a really interesting-- albeit fuzzy-- chart on page 8 you might want to check out.
Don't be so quick to dismiss my "pocket theory" out of hand. It's the difference between low-fertility rates being a structural feature of cities vs. something cities have the power to change.
This is a fundamental disagreement we have. I don't see others people children as competition
I've been talking to a lot of anti-immigrant people and to the extent that they've been concerned with demographic replacement that's exactly what "seeing other people's children as competition" means. Certainly, that's the position of the original blog post in question. But if it's not, I'll be charitable and assume that the question of demographics is fundamentally uninteresting to you, and-- assuming that's settled-- only address the question of economics from here on out.
To that extent I think your viewpoint is extremely anti-human and ugly. Aside from it being very different from most Catholics I've interacted with.
To clarify, I'm apathetic on the position of the outgroup having more children. I'm not looking to sterilize outgroup members, or anything-- that would definitely be anti-catholic. But if they just don't want to have children I don't see how I'm disadvantaged. And as I said, I think I'm better than them, and I think my ingroup is better than my outgroup. Even if they have lots of children, I'm still unthreatened. For the benefit of their own souls there are moral laws I would like them to follow that would result in them having more children.... but in proportion to their adherence to those laws and therefore their increases in fertility, they become members of my ingroup, so there's still nothing to worry about.
GBRK
1mo ago
...and that is why the entire US population lives in one contiguous metro area. Or does it? What you initially described was something pretty specific: an entire industry concentrating in one place, benefitting from a unified pool of workers. That effect is real, if IMO not very strong at the relevant margin, and really does require international immigration, because the US alone couldnt produce tech workers for the whole global tech industry without serious quality loss.
I'll concede that all exponential curves eventually turn logistic. Eventually the benefits from urbanization hit barriers from diseconomy of scale, and in many cases the benefits from well-localized industries outweigh the benefits of urbanization. But I think the empirical evidence is that we're nowhere near that point. And as a source, I'd point to the massive free-market demand for urbanization implied by unfulfilled immigration kept under control by legislative fiat.
GBRK
1mo ago
Tarriffs are bad.
Tarriffs are bad because they are a particularly inefficient sort of tax. Retaliatory tariffs are bad because they're tariffs.
But--
To the extent that it is pigouvian-- to the extent that it promotes industries that have positive externalities (like, e.g., the defense industry, or the propaganda media industry) Industrial policy may be good. The efficient way to do it is probably some mix of Land Value Tax and subsidies though. That and getting rid of intellectual property law. That part is really important. I ride an electric unicyle, and segway has all the important patents for that... but chinese companies are doing all the innovation, because segway has no american competition to drive it and also because it can't just yank everyone else's good ideas and use it for itself.
Let our industries buy and copy whatever they need to get their supply chain to work, and then subsidize american consumers buying domestic products in proportion to how much of the value of that product accrued domestically and in proportion to the externalities generated by the industries in question. (Sort of like a reverse VAT tax, funded via LVT. Except industries that cause a lot of local pollution don't recieve subsidies, because we want bolivia polluting itself, instead of having to mine our own lithium.)
GBRK
1mo ago
A 100% increase in foreign construction workers driving down pay whilst doing sub par work that needs to be repaired in two years
My family routinely works with the same pair of illegal immigrant contractors and they always do great work. The idea that immigrants do poor work is just cope from people who can't compete.
Immigrants not being representative of their native population is irrelevant to the point.
The original article tries to argue that immigrants are inferior to natives by using statistics from the immigrants' home nations. But I'm pointing out that those statistics are worthless to evaluate immigrants because immigrants are a non-representative sample. Regardless of what the average IQ for sub-saharan africans is... your average sub-saharan african immigrant is likely to be much smarter than that, and potentially smarter even than the average member of the native USian population.
Except that's not what happens. As demonstrated by identity grievance politics.
Except that is what happens, as demonstrated by identity grievance politics! All this anti-immigrant, protectionism nonsense is as much grievance politics as affirmative action. You want to force pluralistic urban areas into giving you money for labor and goods despite the fact that you can't compete on your own merits.
Urban liberals are either dead end economic units with no children, or in their late 30's trying to move away from the city to find a better life for their children. Red tribers in America have identified the threat. They don't want those kinds of people in their neighborhoods since their policies and beliefs create places that are terrible to live in. It's less fear of supremacy, and more fear of a plague.
The policies and beliefs that make California suck are Nimbyism and Prop 8. Anti-immigration, protectionist whining is just more of the same.
an economic theory that necessitates demographic collapse is a bad thing.
And this is the part of your argument that I understand perhaps the least. I'm catholic. I have two sets of grandparents that were both unusually fecund. I think my family's beliefs and culture are useful and worth preserving-- and across the generations, and the many branches of my family, I see that they generally are.
So why would I want other people to have children? That's just competition. I think liberals are obviously stupid for not encouraging pro-fertility norms, and I think conservatives are obviously stupid for not encouraging liberal anti-fertility norms. If you actually believe someone comes from a weak, maladaptive culture... you should be celebrating! At "worst," they'll be converted to your culture. At best, you can exploit them without risk to further your own aims.
GBRK
1mo ago
But not subtracting it is an overestimate, unless you think most people produce value equal to double their wage.
That's fair. As I said-- I understood your point about the double counting, but I don't think we have an object-level disagreement. Let's replace the [ΔGDP PPP + ΔAvg. Wages] with a [value of services directly provided by immigrants to natives + inflation avoided - compensation native workers fail to receive because immigrants did their jobs for them] term. It's harder to quantify that exactly-- but I think we can both agree that it's almost certainly highly correlated with ΔGDP PPP. We might have to disagree on the last term if you think it's negative though. I think "avoided compensation" rounds out to ~0 after taking into account the increased demand for services immigrants require and the fact that in an immigrant-heavy economy native workers are still advantaged when it comes to management and high-skill roles even if skills are exactly the same.
Density is for the most part a political decision. More immigrants dont make cities denser, they produce more city at that same density.
Its a weak effect, but if you grow a city at constant density, the average length of trips to similar destinations will increase.
There are political decisions that intentionally restrict density-- nimby zoning laws, for example, but they're ineffective at totally preventing density. My city has recently been growing, and as a result I'm seeing empty lots get built up into 4-over-1 apartment buildings. That doesn't just mean more residents, and more traffic-- it means more businesses being supported in the same amount of space.
Look-- do you actually live in a city? Not a suburb-- and actual city? Because it sounds like your experience is just completely at odds with mine.
That is a centralisation effect, but a different one than you talked about before, with different margins, and much less bearing on immigration.
Not really. There's no fundamental difference between types of immigration, whether the borders being crosses are municipal, state, or national. People aggregate into similar spots for all the same reasons the world over.
GBRK
1mo ago
If we are allowing ourselves to 'reason' so far beyond the bounds of data, we can just look at these nations today and see the effect of these sort of economic policies on aggregate. All western countries are in a downswing. The cost of living is prohibitive, and the culture needed to keep the public open to immigration is functionally suicidal. The economic system that drives this is obviously dysfunctional and needs to be dismantled.
"Beyond the bounds of data"!? We have all the data we need! GDP PPP per capita keeps going up! You just don't like the data because it disagrees with you. The western world keeps getting richer-- and immigrant-friendly nations get richer, faster.
You're worried about some sort of cultural decay-- which is probably fair enough. I don't know what culture you're part of, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear about it failing. But there's a reason pluralistic liberal urbanites love immigration, and want it to stay. Our culture is resiliant, and growing, and has the right complex of beliefs and behaviors necessary to benefit economically. I can't blame you for being threatened by us, because you absolutely should be. But I can blame you for pretending like restricting immigration is somehow for our own good. It's the same condescending bullshit as when one of our elites tells a ruralite that all they need to participate in the modern economy is a retraining program. Obviously, the only thing that would help ruralite culture survive is the complete collapse of globalized society-- and since that's impossible because we make it impossible-- all they have left is the ability to rage at the machine.
To that extent no further discussion is needed. If the genetically superior immigrants were who they claim to be, on aggregate, they should be able to make their own societies that far surpass the west. They don't because they can't. Thats the end for the immigration debate.
Did you read nothing I wrote? I'm not saying there are no differences between populations-- I'm saying that immigrants are not a representative sample from their native population.
But in point of fact, yes, forcing immigrants to stay in their home countries would improve them. That's why I'm against it! I don't want other countries to catch up. Just like I wouldn't want to force young people to stay in their rural towns. Let me drain the brains! I want all the backwoods towns and backward states to collapse into the void left by the absence of all their best, most motivated people.
All told, this was an excellent exercise in letting the markets price my risks. Since the initial announcement, I haven't bought or sold stocks-- because I'm saving up for some personal risks, but also because there's no sense panicking when the market isn't. SPY is down about ~15% from the peak rn, which sucks, but it's "economic contraction" territory rather than "economic disaster" territory.
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