Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
No bio...
User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
It is! I suspect so. I recall the original link I had to the article on their blog went dead some time ago but I found the link to the substack via an EA forum post.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Population level studies show no evidence of any increase in cancer incidence as a result of exposure, though SV40 has been extensively studied. A thirty-five year followup found no excess of the cancers commonly associated with SV40.
Emphasis on "potentially" I guess.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
But we do have the tools to fix our problems, if we are determined and committed. There's no law of the universe that says cancer remains forever. If we're wise and efficient, we could cure it. Mole rats live without cancer, it's not impossible.
Not directly related to your post but this part made me think of one of my favorite blog posts (about small pox eradication): 500 million but not a single one more.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
But will this stop the bleeding among people who are pro-Abortion? Do they trust Trump to pursue a limited compromise?
Re-phrased slightly: Will people who are pro-abortion trust the guy who appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe? I'm thinking the answer is no.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I have read some philosophy of science so I have some familiarity with this debate and related ones.
I think I would not affirm that science has no hope of uncovering natural laws, mostly due to my own uncertainty about the matter. I'll readily grant that it's unlikely any current scientific theories describe underlying reality (as opposed to being a useful model) but it's not clear to me that must be the case always and forever. The reason I used the hedges I did was to convey that same uncertainty.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
As a car consumer: sounds great! I've been thinking about trading mine in for a while now. Excited to see what's on offer. Hell, GM already sells a truck I'd like to buy, but only in China. Maybe Chinese competition can get them to bring it over here?
Why should I, and every other car buyer, pay more money for cars so that Mary Barra can keep pulling down $30M/year?
My response is that we have no objective reason whatsoever to believe the scientific method is worked in hindsight -- not for the purpose of discovering universal laws of nature, anyway! I will grant that we have had pretty good luck with science-based engineering in the tiny little spec of the universe observable to us. I will even grant that this justifies the continued use of engineering for practical purposes with relative confidence -- under the laws of statistics, so long as, say, one anomaly per hundred thousand hours of use is an acceptable risk.
From my perspective, and I suspect the perspective of most people who care about the scientific method, this gives the whole game away. Sure, the things we call the "laws of nature" may not be the true causal description of the universe at some level. What matters is that the universe acts as if they were universally true, as best we can tell. Sufficiently so that we can use them as a basis for intervention in reality and accurately predict the results in advance. Crucially any refinements to these laws will need to explain all the same observations that the laws they are replacing did. This has happened with scientific theories before. Newtonian mechanics was supplanted with various relativistic mechanics explanations for objects that are very large, or very small, or very fast. To put it another way:
Ah, again this is the result of a confusion. The laws of the universe are not like the laws of man - they do not dictate to nature what it should or should not do. The so-called "laws of nature" are descriptive only. If what we did "violated" the laws of nature, we would not call that action free from the laws - we would merely say that our laws were not correct, and try to modify them to match this new behavior. So you see, one cannot even speak of "violating the laws of nature", for those laws are simply whatever occurs.
Scientific laws are not the source code of the universe, they're just formalizations of observed relationships.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I think it would be helpful to clarify by what you mean by paying "5 more percentage points". The current Social Security tax is 12.4%, half paid by the employer and half by the employee. Are you proposing increasing the tax to 13.02%, to 17.4%, or to 22.4%? Certainly this matters.
My understanding is the 5 percentage points refers to the total rate, so it would be the 17.4% number.
But as messed up as Social Security is, Medicare is worse. It's tough to find good recent stats, but here's what Wikipedia says: "Households that retired in 2013 paid only 13 to 41 percent of the benefit dollars they are expected to receive". So I guess we'll have to raise Medicare taxes by 150-670% to cover that too. (This assumes that each person pays only for their own benefits. In reality, they will have to pay more as each generation is smaller than the last).
Sure, but there are other ways to tame Medicare spending than "double taxes" or "abolish it." A big reason why Medicare spending grows so rapidly is because US healthcare spending in general is growing rapidly and Medicare covers a population (old people) that tend to be much sicker than average. We could tweak the retirement age, or Medicare coverage, or allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices (as they now can), or raise taxes, or some combination of all these things.
But even if we fixed those problems, we still have to deal with the fact that the rest of the budget is not balanced either. There's another tax raise. Not to mention the myriad local and state taxes that will have to be increased as well.
Endlessly raising taxes on productive members of society to pay for unproductive members of society might "solve" the problem for some definition of solve. But it leads to a country that is much poorer and more miserable. As the demands on the productive members of society grow, the temptation to drop out will grow apace, leaving even fewer workers taxed much more highly. As tax rates increase above 50%, as is now possible in New York City and California, future increases will lead to less revenue, not more.
I feel like I addressed this somewhat (on the federal level) with my point about Clinton-era tax rates. Were those really so horrible? Were the 90's so much more poorer and more miserable than today due to taxes? You cite the labor force participation rate as of 2000, but federal tax rates were much higher then than they are now! Apparently it didn't have that much of a depressing effect!
My general point is there are a zillion things we could do and almost certainly would do if the alternative was economic collapse.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I'm not sure why another country is necessary for this comparison. It's not like the Civil Rights Act is some long-defunct law under which no one actually brings suit. To the best of my understanding the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, various Department of Justice entities, and private plaintiffs all still bring suit under it and win. This suggests that, by the terms of the law, racial discrimination is happening in America today. Surely there are some people on the margin who would discriminate if it was legal but won't discriminate if it isn't. This seems at least empirically true. The amount of racial discrimination today is almost surely lower now than it was before the Civil Rights Act.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Surely the obvious answer is to raise taxes. According to some projections from CBO data if we had the same tax rates we did under Clinton debt to GDP would be 60% and falling. Were tax rates in the 90's really so awful?
According to the CBO itself we could also raise payroll taxes by 4.9 percentage points, which would keep Social Security paying 100% through 2096. Even if we take no action Social Security will be able to pay out around 77% of benefits through 2096 and ~65% of benefits indefinitely.
As of now total Unfunded liabilities stand at 213 trillion dollars, $633,000 per US Citizen (Man woman, and newborn babe)… These are all dollars the US has promised to pay to someone somewhere at some point: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Federal pensions, VA Benefits, etc. And cannot in any politically feasible way restructure or get out of.
I feel like the "at some point" is pretty key here. Is this money we have to spend in the next year? 10 years? 100 years? Because the feasibility of doing so is very different depending on the relevant time horizon. Obviously the US couldn't pay that over the next year, but it almost certainly could over the next 100. Comparing it to the present number of citizens only makes sense if those are the total pool of citizens who are going to have to pay for it, but they obviously aren't if the relevant time horizon is a century or more.
Scaremongering about the US national debt or unfunded liabilities or whatever basically requires you to conceptualize the issue as Big Scary Number That Must Be Paid Off Soon. When you actually look at analysis of the fixes required to resolve these issues, and the time horizon relevant for their calculation, they become much less scary. Of course, "everyone pays five percentage points more in payroll tax" sounds a lot less scary than "AMERICAN ECONOMIC COLLAPSE IS IMMINENT."
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I don't really think that article is applicable here. In Scott's case he's arguing about using made up numbers in the absence of data, not in favor of using whatever data was available. It's easy to imagine ways that data biased in ways you may not know can lead you away from the truth.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
So, does your question reduce to something like "why do people disagree about how society should be ordered?" The answer is probably some unsatisfying mix of historically contingent facts.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
To a first approximation there is a culture war because different groups of people have different ideas about how society and government ought to be ordered and these ideas are often mutually incompatible. Disagreements about these questions are often acrimonious because they are moral questions about justice and fairness. This can turn disagreements about these issues into a perception that other people are immoral or evil for their position on the issue in question. Each tribe hates the other for approximately symmetrical reasons having to do with believing that the way the other side wants to order society is bad (for different definitions of bad).
3) Why does the blue tribe hate the red tribe?
To concretize my first paragraph a bit you can read the deluge (1, 2, 3) of stories of women with life-threatening pregnancy complications being denied abortions because they weren't life threatening enough. I think the legislatures that inflicted these conditions on these women are evil.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I know it's a popular narrative that fentanyl is mostly being brought by illegals across our porous border, but it's mostly not true. Most fentanyl, by a wide margin, is smuggled into the US by citizens across ports of entry. This makes obvious logistical sense. A US citizen driving a vehicle across the border is both much less likely to be searched and can transport far more drugs per trip than someone hoofing it with a backpack across miles of desert and river and mountain.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
It would be interesting to see a weed regulatory scheme for THC (or CBD etc)% similar to how alcohol has a regulatory regime (beer/wine/liquor) that roughly tracks ABV.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I think there's an important confounding factor for both political orientation and marriage: age. One is more likely to be married the older one is and the rule of politics used to be that the older one was the more conservative one was. There is some evidence that for Millenials this trend has reversed. That Millenials are actually getting more liberal, or staying about as liberal, as they get older. Given the relation between age, political orientation, and marriage I don't think it's too surprising to see a reversal of the historical association between age and political orientation manifest as a reversal of the historical orientation between marriage and political orientation.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
It would seem to be fraudulent and perhaps illegal to tell them who to vote for/pressure them who to vote for while they are preparing/in the act of voting. That is an identical act as campaigning at the election site but sort of worse because many times it also removed their ability to vote independently with a secret ballot. With the sex skews in voting now that can add up.
Pressure, sure. But none of the Rasmussen questions asked anyone if they had pressured or been pressured by anyone. My wife and I often fill out our ballots together. Sometimes debating about ballot propositions or candidates and things. Sometimes I've read the guide and she hasn't and doesn't want to so she just asks me for my opinion, which I give. Do I do something fraudulent and perhaps illegal in such a circumstance?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I mean, yea. Lots of libertarians are also anti-welfare state. Following from similar principles of government incompetence.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I've always thought libertarian support for open borders was a pretty natural extension of their skepticism of government generally. The government is incompetent to run businesses. The government is incompetent to run society. But the government is competent to decide who should be allowed to enter a certain geographic area and under what conditions? Seems implausible.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I intended my explanations to be illustrative, not comprehensive. I agree the numbers seem intuitively implausible but my uncertainty is high given the lack of information about the people surveyed.
I do think there was a lot of fraud with regards to people sharing answers and helping with a ballot.
What do you mean by "sharing answers" here? Is it voter fraud for person A to tell person B how they voted?
It’s illegal to campaign at the poll booth in person so I assume that is also illegal when voting at home. And if it’s not illegal I would still call that fraud.
It's illegal for a campaign representative to stand around a poling place and try and influence voters to vote for their candidate. It is obviously not illegal (and not fraud) for person A to try to convince person B to vote for some candidate in the privacy of their home.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
That Rasmussen survey is crap. Basically all of the described conduct can be legal depending on jurisdiction. Maybe you think it's all colloquially fraud, but that does not make it illegal. Just using my own state as an example:
17% of mail-in voters admit that in 2020 they voted in a state where they are “no longer a permanent resident”
That's totally legal in my state. If you are a US citizen living abroad and maintain a residence in Washington state you're allowed to continue voting at that residence. Or even if you live more permanently in another state but have not registered to vote in that state, you can continue voting at your Washington residence.
21% of mail-in voters admitted that they filled out a ballot for a friend or family member
This is legal in many jurisdictions, including mine, when the voter in question has a disability. From the AARP guide for Washington state:
Voting with a disability
When voting by mail, voters with disabilities can request assistance filling in their ballot from a person of their choice or by contacting their county elections office. Voters are required to sign the ballot envelope, but if the voter can’t sign the envelope, they may make a mark, such as an “X,” and have two witnesses sign the envelope.
When voting in person, those who need assistance filling in their ballot can receive help from either two election officials or a person of their choice. Each polling place is equipped with an accessible voting system. Get more information at the secretary of state’s website.
This also goes to the next Rasmussen question about signing a ballot for a friend or family member. Rasmussen makes it sound nefarious by combining "with or without" their permission but that distinction is pretty important! With permission it can be totally legal.
8% of likely voters say they were offered “pay” or a “reward” for voting in 2020
Again the equivocation between "pay" and a "reward." If someone offers you a sticker for voting, is that a "reward?" Would it be "fraud?" Note also that it is being offered for voting, not for any particular candidate.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I think one thing missing from the clothes discussion is that real disposable income has exploded over the covered period. So much so that the 2% people are spending in 2023 is more in real dollars than the 10% in 1901. Americans spend more real dollars on clothes now than they did in 1901, it's just a smaller fraction of income because income has grown even faster than clothing expenditures.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
IANAL but I also don't think much of the complaint. It does a good job avoiding the issue many social media lawsuits have where they sue based on the content third parties have posted. However the algorithmic delivery of content is, as far as I'm aware, protected first amendment activity. Nowhere does the complaint identify what first amendment exception the described conduct falls into, or even mention the fact that it may be protected.
Another oddity that strikes me as a laymen is the way the causes of action and prayer for relief are phrased. The causes of action are "NEW YORK PUBLIC NUISANCE", "NEW YORK NEGLIGENCE", and "NEW YORK GROSS NEGLIGENCE." The first paragraph in the prayer for relief also reads:
Entering an Order that the conduct alleged herein constitutes a public nuisance under New York law;
Are state courts often called upon to apply the standards of other states? Is this a totally normal thing I'm reading too much into? Seems odd. I would think the relevant standard in California court would be California public nuisance/negligence/gross negligence.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Admittedly most of my experience with dedicated sports fans was around a decade or so ago. I do not watch it much myself nor do most of my friends. I absorb its happenings via some combination of social media and family osmosis. It's possible things have shifted since then, although I'm skeptical.
Personally, I question if the "normies are surprisingly OK with all of this" is really true or a product of astroturfing.
Insofar as "all of this" refers to the specific examples in the OP, I think it is organic. Beyond that I would need more specification to have an informed opinion.
Sure, big is the target population here? My impression is this only works for people who think (1) Roe was too permissive on abortion and (2) many Republican proposals are too strict. Not sure how many people that describes.
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