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MathWizard

Good things are good

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joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC 

				
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MathWizard


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Good things are good

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Quality Contributions Report for April 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If you look, it got more upvotes than the post it was responding to, so most likely people who saw with it agreed but didn't have anything of their own to add in response.


I don't know about everyone else, but I don't dig into the responses on every top level post, only ones I find interesting.  And often miss responses if they happen after I've already read the top level post, as I usually don't go back and find new responses.  So that's why I missed this one, because I do read every top level post, but I didn't care about this one.


I also more frequently respond to people I disagree with than people I agree with, because people I agree with already said half of my thoughts.  So that's a bias towards non-response which was probably relevant here given how insightful your post was.


So I guess as a followup here:


Is there a solution?  I think we'd both agree that this scenario is generally bad for society if businesses capture all of the gains, because that screws over the customers.  Economic surplus is created by the economic trade between producers and customers, and thus both are partially responsible for it, so both deserve some of the surplus.  Not necessarily exactly 50-50, but some reasonable fraction.  So if producers capture 99% of surplus by near-perfect price discrimination and leave just a tiny scrap of surplus to customers to push them over the edge of indifference, then customers are being deprived of surplus that is rightfully theirs.


On the other hand, price discrimination is often more economically efficient than a flat rate.


Suppose we have 10 consumers who value a good with utility 1,2,3...10.  And a producer who can produce the good with cost 2.


1: With a flat price for all customers, the producer maximizes profits by setting their price at 7 - ε, in which case they sell to 4 consumers.  The total surplus is 26, of which 20 - 4ε is captured by the producer and 6+4ε is captured by consumers.


2: With perfect knowledge and price discrimination, the producer sells to each person with value greater than 2, at a cost ε less than their valuation.  They sell to 8 consumers, the total surplus is 36, 36-8ε is captured by the producer, and 8ε is captured by consumers.


So even though the consumers are better off in the flat price scenario, the total economic surplus created with price discrimination is higher.  If we could somehow detect these scenarios and redistribute the surplus back to the consumers in a way that didn't distort the economic incentives of the producers or consumers, the price discrimination scenario is better.  I will note that there's also a third scenario with comparable surplus:


3:  If the producer is altruistic/non-profit, they can set a flat price equal to 2+ε, they sell to 8 people, the total surplus is 36, but now 36-8ε is captured by consumers and 8ε is captured by the producer.


So if the balance of power tips too far in either direction, one of the groups will snatch all of the surplus.  I think a fair equilibrium would maximize surplus while splitting the distribution somewhere in the middle.  Not necessarily 50-50, but somewhere in the ballpark.  But how do you do that here?  Taxes and explicit forms of redistribution usually distort incentives, but maybe there's something clever I'm not aware of?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 6, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


One in a thousand find a gamer girl. But at the cost quite often of having hundreds of women see anime and gaming in the bio and deciding to not engage.




This is the point. It's not that for each random woman who sees your profile you roll a random die and there's a 99% chance you lose her interest. It's that for each woman when she was born and grew up life rolled a random die and there's a 99% chance that she became the kind of person who would lose interest in a man who likes anime and video games. If you want to date a woman who hates anime and videogames then I suppose you might consider scaring her off to be a bad thing, but if you want to find that gamer girl then the normie woman is an obstacle. A waste of your time. Instead of spending hours, days, years of your life sending messages and spending time with women who would have been scared off by videogames and anime but you kept by playing it cool, you could instead scare them all off and then the only people left are the gamer girls.


You don't have time to date 1000 women. If you're some super hot gigachad I suppose you could if you go on a brand new date every day for three years without breaks or repeats. But realistically, that's way too many. But if you scare 99% of them off (and not randomly, you're scaring the worst 99% off) you DO have time to message and date the remaining 10 until you find the perfect one in a thousand.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I hesitate to be the cold calculating math guy but.... no wait, I can't help myself, I am that guy: 80 people isn't actually that many. I mean, obviously every death is a tragedy for themselves and the people who knew them. But when you zoom out to the perspective of a country of 300 million people, it's tiny.


80 deaths * 80 QALYS lost * 365 * 24 * 60 = 11 QALMS (Quality adjusted life minutes). That is, on average preventing a catastrophe of this magnitude is worth 11 minutes of life averaged over everybody in the country. If your proposed solutions of "don't let kids be kids anymore", "take time doing flood preparedness drills" and "spend lots of money damming every river everywhere" costs more than 11 minutes per person in terms of actual time and lessened enjoyment and life lived, then it won't be worth it. (though if you can get costs lower than that it is worth it).


Google says annual flood deaths in the U.S. are ~125, so ballpark this number is approximately right, you'd have to prevent this many deaths at that cost ratio consistently every year (and you'd actually have to reduce it by that much, across the entire country, not just Summer Camps).


I think we should let kids be kids, and we should sometimes consider the inherent risks acceptable. People die, it's a thing that happens. And it's bad that it happens, but if we don't have magic finger snapping powers that make it not happen for free, then we have to consider the costs and tradeoffs. And the thing nobody wants to admit is that, mathematically, there MUST be a point where the costs are no longer worth it. You can make arguments about where that point is, but the argument has to start with the assumption that there is such a point.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I’m unpersuaded by the typical religious argument that life is so sacred we cannot take it. We do take it, all the time, in war and executions.




How do people keep ignoring the actual argument?  Killing good people is bad, killing bad people is good. This has been more or less the justification for war and executions from religious and non-religious people alike for thousands of years. And within the past 40 years the majority of people not only stopped believing it, but completely and utterly forgot that this is what other people believe. Just because some people believe in a constant function: "killing people is always bad", does not mean everyone who disagrees with them believes its pure negation: "killing people is always good." There's a ton of room for nuance.


Given that the vast majority of potential euthanasia recipients are "good people" according to most sane definitions, ie they are not mass murderers or foreign soldiers that represent an existential threat to the life and liberty of your nation, any belief system that believes "killing good people is bad" and doesn't make exceptions for the will of the person will think that killing them is bad. Sophistication is not hypocrisy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Outlaw Non-competes: Non-compete agreements distort labor markets and should be banned at the federal level.




I'm surprised to see this one in here alongside all the others.  On the one hand, I agree that on the first-order a non-compete will distort labor markets, but on the other hand an absence of non-compete distorts incentives for training, trade secrets, and customer sharing.  A company doesn't want to hire someone, spend time and resources teach them all the best techniques for doing a job effectively, and then have that person immediately leave and take all that training somewhere else or strike out on their own.  Similarly, a company doesn't want to give someone a bunch of infrastructure and marketing and accumulate a bunch of clients and then spin off into a private business, carrying those clients with them.


Now, I don't think we have an obligation to do things just because they make companies happy, not at all.  But the incentive structure means that if companies can't curtail these behaviors via non-competes they will curtail them in other ways.  Companies will guard their secrets more carefully, will shuffle customers around so they can't get too attached to any one employee, and do other inefficient things that create economic friction.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm mostly agnostic on HBD (though I lean pro) precisely because I don't believe the world would look all that differently if it went one way or another.  My  is that the majority of issues in poor minority groups are caused by culture: a lack of respect for education, marriage, rule of law, and unselfish cooperation with each other, and that these cultural elements are self-perpetuating and economically crippling.  While innate intelligence does play some role in influencing whether a person will abandon or change these cultural elements, it's a minor role.  People with a genetic predisposition for high IQ but a bad culture frequently end up in bad outcomes because they fail to learn or care about learning and never rise to their true potential.  Similarly, low IQ people with a good culture often become productive workers and good people and beneficial to their community because they work hard and care about people.  IQ plays some role, but culture plays a much larger role.


Society is filled with selfish intelligent people and kind unintelligent people of all races.  But they tend to come in clusters, as culture perpetuates these traits separately from genetics (though still tending to run in families), so you see disproportionate amounts of selfishness and other negative cultural traits among certain races.  Heritabile =/= Genetic, and the distinction is important because culture can change, while genes can't.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Pretty much all legitimate justifications for racism rely on inaccurate proxies for other things we actually care about.  I think you can make arguments in favor of using it in the absence of better knowledge, but once more direct signals have been acquired the race no longer serves a useful purpose.


Since I am white and was raised by white parents among mostly other white people, I can reasonably expect that the average white person is more likely to be similar to me than the average black person.  We'll be more likely to have similar cultural knowledge, values, habits, etc.  But my black neighbor who I actually know and happens to be a christian pastor has way more in common with me than the average white Californian.


In the past race was a very strong proxy for nationality, culture, and loyalty.  In modern times it is a weak signal unless you live in a predominantly monoethnic country.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 21, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm planning to propose to my girlfriend soon, and am looking for advice on the engagement ring.  I'm planning on going with a placeholder for the actual proposal and getting the real ring afterwards so that we can pick something out together that lines up with her preferences.  But I'd like some ideas and general knowledge to bring to the table.


My understanding is that natural diamonds have their prices massively inflated by diamond cartels, propaganda, and literal slavery, so am planning to avoid them.  I'm not opposed to going with a synthetic diamond, since they're better and cheaper, but maybe the prices are still artificially high due to the propaganda of diamonds overall?  I'm not really sure.


Her favorite color is yellow, so I'm thinking a silver ring with a yellow gemstone (diamond or other gem), but there's a bunch of different types of gems even restricting to yellow, and I want one that's going to last long and look fancy without deteriorating over time.  My natural inclination is to be a cheapskate about everything, so I want to make sure I'm not just doing mental gymnastics to justify cheaping out on something with significant emotional value.  Neither of us are especially social people so aren't super concerned with how other people would perceive buying a non-diamond ring, but it probably matters a little bit.  Ideally I would like to get something that is simultaneously cheaper and more meaningful and more impressive looking than a diamond.  What are my best options and tradeoffs to consider?  Also, are we better off shopping around at local jewelers so we can see stuff in person, or they all scams including the non-diamond gems such that there is a significantly better quality/price ratio online?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But you could make a similar argument that a human brain is a derivative work of its training data.  Obviously there are huge differences, but are those differences relevant to the core argument?  A neural net takes a bunch of stuff it's seen before and then combines ideas and concepts from them in a new form.  A human takes a bunch of stuff they've seen before and then combines ideas and concepts from them in a new form.  Copyright laws typically allow for borrowing concepts and ideas from other things as long as the new work is transformative and different enough that it isn't just a blatant ripoff.  Otherwise you couldn't even have such a thing as a "genre", which all share a bunch of features that they copy from each other.


So it seems to me that, if a neural net creates content which is substantially different from any of its inputs, then it isn't copying them in a legal sense or moral sense, beyond that which a normal human creator who had seen the same training data and been inspired by them would be copying them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Georgist land value taxes are probably the best possible solution, and it is kind of annoying to constantly see people constantly being oblivious to them and conflating landlords with "the rich" as if capitalists who create products that people can consensually choose whether to buy or ignore are the same thing as landlords who hold not-homelessness hostage from everyone born without a huge amount of money to buy into the Ponzi scheme of land ownership.


A fair start to life is one in which everyone starts from zero, with nothing but the support of their parents and an equal share of the land and the bounty of nature.  One in which you can go out into the land and use it to feed yourself and clothe yourself and build more and better things, and trade with others doing the same.  In so far as land privitization of land has deprived everyone from the ability to do this, it is only fair and just that they be compensated for the value of the land.  Not by giving them some vaguely defined "wealth redistribution" of arbitrary source or amount from "people who we think ought to help them", but by directly taxing the land equal to the value it provides as "rent", and distributing it to people either in the form of UBI and/or cuts to other taxes (or a combination of both).  Anyone with less than an average amount of land should be paid by people with an above average amount of land (weighted by the land values).  And if that's not enough to feed and clothe them, then they can work to make up the difference.  But it will at least establish a baseline that removes the exploitation of landlords while not punishing capitalists who actually create value and inhibiting them from continuing to create value.  (Also, reducing income taxes will significantly help employment rates and wages)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Maybe kids are great qualitatively but they are certainly low status.




This seems like a solvable problem: make having kids higher status.  You can't just unilaterally declare something to be high status by dictatorial fiat, but there are things you can do to push in that direction, or even more easily, stop pushing in the opposite direction.  I think this one of my main complaints against the Blue Tribe, and all this stuff about the destruction of the family unit, is that they seem to be deliberately lowering the status of children and families.  There's a qualitative difference between removing oppressive structures that force people into certain lifestyles, and actively disparaging those lifestyles and mocking people who like them.


Nobody should be forced to be a stay at home parent and raise seven children, but if somebody chooses that lifestyle then we should celebrate them as a strong person and a valuable contributor to society.  Not mock them as backwards and oppressed and quaint.  Everyone who mocks and disparages traditional families and cultures lowers the effective status of those lifestyles and makes other people less likely to choose them.  People shouldn't be forced between a high status job versus a low status family, they should be able to have a high status family, provided they actually do a competent job of raising kids.  But traditional families are yesterdays fashion, and red-coded which makes them automatically distasteful to the blue tribe.  Families didn't used to be low status, but in the process of destroying gender roles our society has completely and utterly ignored the collateral damage, resulting in the current situation.  Victory at any costs indeed.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
A good rule of thumb to predict a pro-life person's opinion on something is to mentally replace the fetus with a 1 week old (post birth) baby. Or, if you don't think babies should have rights either, maybe a two or three year old. That is the logical implication of believing fetuses are people.


Would you have sympathy for a mother who killed her 1 week old baby because her husband committed suicide? Would that sympathy extend far enough to excuse the act?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 2, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Who is the best, most sane, and intelligent, centrist or left-leaning commentator/podcaster you can recommend for me to listen to? I'm a bit worried that as the Motte trends further rightward that I'm in too much of a filter bubble, and most of the stuff I naturally listen to is right-leaning, because the stuff that's explicitly leftist is braindead and infuriating. I don't want someone ranting about how Trump is Hitler, I want people good, calm, and reasoned defenses for their positions that I don't already agree with so I can understand their position and maybe find some insights that I previously dismissed as braindead because I only heard the stupid version of it before. I used to like Sargon of Akkad for this, because he was in a nice centrist zone: left on some issues but right on others, but every year he drifts further right and I don't think he serves this purpose anymore.


I like to listen to people talk about stuff while I'm playing casual games that don't take up too much brain power or require audio themselves, so multi-hour broadcasts with a lot of backlog are ideal. I do read things sometimes, obviously since I'm here, but I'm mostly looking for audio right now.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've heard this "liberalism doesn't work" idea before, but never really been convinced by it. Equality of opportunity doesn't need to be taken so literally that you toss it all away when one person is born with 1 IQ point less than another. Treat people equally before the law, and generally socially and culturally. Treat people according to the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Most of the "counterarguments" I've heard are that if people are born with different talent or even just different inherited wealth from their parents then this doesn't work because they don't really have equality of opportunity, but... so what? If people are born with different circumstances then equality of opportunity doesn't inevitably lead to equality of outcome and that's okay. Set up a society in which everyone has an opportunity to thrive and carve out a happy healthy life for themselves, and let them sort themselves out. Maybe the 70 IQ person have a small apartment and a job at a fast food place while the 130 IQ person lives in a fancy manor and works at Google. Let them. I don't see how liberalism or the enlightenment prevent this. Instead, it is the regression from this ideal that wokeism represents that is the problem. We went from "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions" to "people should be treated according to their own actions" back to "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions". Wokeism is explicitly illiberal, not a failing of liberalism.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There are a class of cellular automata which follow some form of the rule "look at what your neighbors are doing, then copy the state that is most common among them".  There are variations of this: sometimes the copying is probabilistic rather than deterministic so the most common is simply the most likely to be copied. If you attach some game theory or other fitness function you can get an evolutionary system where higher scoring traits are more likely to be copied and you can watch natural selection play out across the model.


What these tend to have in common is that under a broad range of parameters they eventually result in consensus. Even if all of the initial strategies are completely arbitrary, just numbered differently, you still by random chance have one of them end up more prevalent and then it snowballs out of control until it is universal or near-universal.


In the case of language, that would be useful. My point is not that the oldest form of language is the most correct. My point is more that the most common use is the most useful, unless some objective concern such as use efficiency or uniqueness can overcome that. Having minor dialectic enclaves within a language are burdensome and confusing. Therefore, the burden is on all new changes to prove themselves worthy of the cost of breaking consensus. If I lived in Chaucer's time and everyone said "axe", if that was just what that word meant, I would likewise oppose changing it to "ask" for no reason. But if 95% of people say "ask" and 5% of people say "axe" then, unless they've got a really good reason, it is useful to pressure them to conform and bring the language back together instead of splintering it, or trying to convert the remaining 95% their way.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Especially given the pascal's wager type argument going on here.  You don't even need to prove that AI will definitely kill all of humanity.  You don't even need to prove that it's more likely than not.  A 10% chance that 9 billion people die is comparable in magnitude to 900 million people dying (on the first order.  the extinction of humanity as a species is additionally bad on top of that).  You need to


1: Create a plausible picture for how/why AI going wrong might literally destroy all humans, and not just be racist or something.


2: Demonstrate that the probability of this happening is on the order of >1% rather than 0.000001% such that it's worth taking seriously.


3: Explain how these connect explicitly so people realize that the likelihood threshold for caring about it ought to be lower than most other problems.


Don't go trying to argue that AI will definitely kill all of humanity, even if you believe it, because that's a much harder position to argue and unnecessarily strong.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Unusually expensive land is created by externalities of labor and capital.  If a bunch of people build businesses and and apartments and stuff in a certain place, it will cause the land value of surrounding areas to rise.  People working jobs and engaging in productive behaviors capture some of the value themselves, give some of the value to their customers, and have some of it diffuse into nearby land as rents.  Except in the rare case where one person owns all of the land in an area, this added rent value is captured by a different person than those who rightfully created it.


Therefore, the workers wages are already being stolen.  Well, not exactly stolen, it's not as if surrounding land owners are deliberately taking it from them.  It's automatically taken by the nature of economics, that's how externalities work.  Taxing it and then giving it back to the surrounding community actually gives the workers more of their own value.


At the very least, even if you're some radical libertarian who believes literally all taxes are theft, you should at least recognize land value taxes as the least bad tax for economic reasons of land values being inelastic, and thus a potential compromise given that you're never going to convince the majority of the population to shut down the entire government.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Are there any good centrist or right-wing think tanks in the U.S. that are respectable, principled, and might have interest in hiring a mathematical modeler that I could apply for jobs at?


For context, I have a PhD in math, I specialize in game theory and mathematical modeling.  I also have some experience with disease modeling, though not Covid specifically.  I am currently nearing the end of a postdoc research position at a University, and a few published papers and several drafts I'm still working on.  Over time I've felt less comfortable in academia as everything shifts less and all diversity stuff keeps getting worse.  It hasn't affected me directly much (though you can never tell when you don't hear back from a job application whether being a straight white male was the cause or not), but it's kind of uncomfortable, and some topics that I'm interested in I'm afraid to actually go into because the papers might be rendered unpublishable.  And just in general I feel the papers I publish don't actually matter all that much, and I suspect something more applied like this might feel more meaningful.


I'm still applying for some jobs at universities, but also industry jobs and am wondering if maybe a right wing think tank would be a good opportunity.  Given the left's capture of the Universities, this maybe implies there's a shortage of right-wing academics and I'd have a better shot of getting in?  But that's probably less true in math.  And I definitely don't want to work for some propaganda machine that just hacks studies together to conclude whatever they already believe is true.  I think that the left sometimes has legitimate points that are worth considering, and ideally would like to be able to make good scientific papers and mathematical models that give insight to people on both the left and right, and can potentially make the right stronger and smarter.


Bonus points for places that allow working remotely or are near the East Coast so I don't have to move very far, but at this point I'll take what I can get.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Has anyone at all been unbanned yet?  The most principled thing to do would be to create a formal, objective process for deciding who gets unbanned, and then the Trump decision logically follows from that process.  Therefore, Musk wouldn't actually know the answer until the process has been determined.  And maybe the Trump question is a big enough deal that it would bias the decision of how the process would work (maybe carving out exceptions to make it go one way or another), or maybe it doesn't.  I expect that most reasonable processes would end up unbanning Trump, but I guess it depends on the criteria (maybe potential unbanees need to jump through some hoops to demonstrate the unjustness of their ban, and Trump doesn't feel like going through that).


I have no idea of Musk is actually going to do things that way.  But if he is then there's like a 90% chance that Trump gets unbanned, but it isn't guranteed one way or another, so of course Musk can't commit to an answer yet.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That's merely the distinction between why they think it's wrong in the first place, not the harm reduction variable.


That is, a general form of the "Harm Reduction" argument says that if thing A is bad because it leads to bad outcomes, then a decriminalized harm reduction environment where it can be done more safely with fewer negative outcomes is good because, although the thing is still bad, it's less bad here and they were going to do it anyway.


The tradeoff is that you are implicitly endorsing the behavior in exchange for this harm reduction. This argument doesn't really depend on the type of harm involved. If someone is being non-consensually harmed by DV, and this is extra bad, then the harm reduction is even more good, and the implicit endorsement and incentives are more bad, and presumably these are proportional so it should still be worthwhile or not for the same reasons as with drug use.


I suppose you could try to make specific mathematical arguments about the tradeoff values where harm reduction facilities for DV would be less effective at reducing harm and more legitimizing to DV such that the net effect would flip signs for this but not for drugs, but we've never tried it before, nobody has that data, and nobody who advocates for harm reduction for drugs seems to do any math or acknowledge tradeoffs in the first place.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This overtime proposal is interesting since it only rewards people who are already working more than 40 hours a week.




Policies like this always take too static/naive of a world view. You imagine how people currently behave, and  This rewards people who are "working" more than 40 hours a week after all of the employers and employees update their behavior to exploit the new system. Instead of offering a 40 hour week at $20 an hour, companies can offer $10 an hour for 40 hours and then with 10 $30/hour "overtime hours" of make-work to make up the difference. Maybe they'll have people be "on call" so it counts as overtime but doesn't actually add work.


And then the salaried people will all want to be "hourly" so they can get two thirds of their pay count as "overtime". Your $80k/yr Secretary and your $300k/yr chief engineer are going to become hourly employees whose total yearly pay just happens to coincidentally always adds up to approximately $80k and $300k respectively, but technically half of it is overtime. A lot of the more highly paid people already work more than 40 hours per week anyway, so it wouldn't be too hard for the business to fudge the values around and count their pay as overtime. And for the people who don't, again I'm sure the business could just make make-work for them to technically count as overtime, while shuffling the numbers around to keep their total pay the same, or even less, since if the employee is paying less taxes their effective pay is higher even at a lower nominal value. And that's why the companies would go through the effort of doing this.  Why pay $60k for an employee when you can pay $50k to one who gets to evade taxes via loopholes?


I get the sentiment of wanting to pay blue collar workers more in a way that doesn't enable welfare leeches. But this isn't the way to do it without some serious modifications to fix the incentive structure.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 28, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What gardening plants/projects/techniques have high value per effort? Now that I'm married and we have our own place I actually have control over a garden rather than helping with my parents as I did growing up. I'm fairly picky about what foods I like to eat, but there's still a wide range within that, and my wife is less picky, so we have a vegetable garden with a bunch of stuff. We also recently got a variety of berry bushes we are trying to go, and I'm experimenting with growing potatoes in cloth bags. So right now we have a bunch of different plants and I don't especially know any of the details about which ones like what conditions or what makes the difference between a mediocre yield and a good yield. We put down mulch to help block weeds, and a wire fence to keep out critters, but aside from that, what are things I can do that are especially beneficial relative to their effort and cost? Also, which plants give disproportionately high value relative to their effort to grow? For context, I am in the northeast U.S. with a relatively unshaded yard, at least where the garden is, and partially clay-ish soil.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What's the best way for me to upgrade to Windows 11?


I've had my current computer running Windows 8.1 for about 10 years.  When Windows 10 came out a bunch of people complained about it and I was happy with what I had so I never upgraded.  And no longer being forced to update my computer suddenly and without my permission was really convenient.  I've upgraded the actual physical computer itself multiple times, basically ship of Theseusing out parts as they wore out or just got outdated such that at this point I don't think a single component is the same as it was 10 years ago, but when the hard drive got upgraded I cloned it over so I had continuity of experience, and it stayed on Windows 8.1.  So most of the actual computer parts right now are two years old and mid to high end, but some are older and cheaper.


Gradually though, the amount of videogames that I can't play because they don't work on Windows 8.1 has increased and become rather inconvenient, so it's probably time to switch.  Unfortunately, the time period where I can do that for free has long passed, presumably because they don't want people digging up old decrepit computers in order to recycle the windows keys.  And some... nautical attempts at downloading and manually upgrading didn't work, I'm not entirely sure why, but I eventually gave up.


My computer skills are kind of mishmash hacked together by necessity.  I did build my own computer myself, but only with a lot of googling, advice from my brother, and suffering.  I would very much prefer not to have to learn more command line registry nonsense, but can probably follow step by step instructions if I have to.  So I think my best bet is to just buy a new hard drive with Windows 11 installed on it, but I'm not sure.  I don't actually want a new computer, I want my computer, but able to play modern games.  I would like to keep continuity of experience as much as possible, including if possible all my files and folders, their positions on the desktop, my hundreds of Firefox tabs that I use in lieu of bookmarks.  What's the best route for me to take to get my computer upgraded with as little difficulty as possible?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the implication was that the "solution" actually solved their homelessness (ie housing them, finding them jobs, treating their mental illnesses) rather than solving the issue of them being unpleasant for locals, like kicking them out or throwing them in jail.  It's not a real solution if you simply push them off to be someone else's problem, then you're just in a prisoner's dilemma where everyone does that to each other.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				confessions of a femcel: why i'm a 24 year old female virgin.
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Back in the day, fathers and brothers would take it upon themselves to defend the woman's honor.  If a man slept with a woman under false pretenses of a long-term relationship and then just abandoned her, they would beat the crap out of him, ostracize him, and possibly even kill him.


We can't do that in modern society and, while the rule of law is useful and helps protect people from threats of violence for less significant offenses, I think something was lost here.