MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
10hr ago
People died.
Shaming is an appropriate response to things like shouting racial slurs, or cheating on your partner, or being a coward and backing down from a domestic violence abuser who is not immediately threatening anyone's life.
He has been punished with the ultimate shaming; beyond tar and feathers and scarlet letters.
No. This was mild. Tar and feathers causes massive physical trauma and can result in death. Scarlet letters require you to physically carry it around with you and everyone who sees you knows what it means and what you did. Anyone who doesn't watch the news isn't going to recognize this guy on sight. If he moves to another town then a year from now no one he meets on the street will recognize him. This was a medium sized shaming. In sheer total number of people who hate him now sure it outweighs anything anyone would have experienced a hundred years ago, because the news is so widespread. But in relative terms, the percentage of people he meets in his daily life who will even recognize him is probably less than 10%.
More importantly, shaming can't undo what he did, and clearly it can't pre-emptively disincentivize it. People died here. People died because the police were cowards instead of heroes, and taking the place of the real heroes who could have been there if people had known there was an absence. If these individuals did not exist, or refused to apply to the job, then someone else could have taken their place and saved lives.
I'm not a legal expert, I'm not concerned with the pedantic details about what the law literally says their obligations are in the specific jurisdiction this took place in, but what it should be. The police should be legally required to do their jobs, and their jobs should legally require them to intervene in this sort of situation, and police who enable this sort of mass shooting should face criminal penalties for failing to stop it. If what they did is not technically against the law then the laws should be changed, and then all the cowards can stop larping as police officers because they're be afraid of getting in trouble, and make room for people willing to do the job and save lives.
If the only consequence is shame then cowards are going to keep being police officers, cross their fingers, and hope and hoping they don't ever encounter a shooting. Departments are going to keep poorly training people, because they won't face legal consequences either. If we want this to not happen again (because it's happened before too) there needs to be consequences.
MathWizard
Good things are good
22hr ago
I disagree. I think a police officer has a duty to not be a coward. When you accept that job, that role, you promise to do the right thing and stand up to evil in exchange for money and prestige and being put on a schedule filled with people who have made that promise. So that when an emergency happens, we have people who we can count on to stand up and be the hero because they have made that promise. That's what you've been being paid for all this time. You are the insurance and the emergency is happened and now you have to pay up. It is your obligation. You don't get to claim to not be a coward in order to pass a job interview and then get paid for months and months not putting your life at risk only to back out as soon as your life is at risk.
I'm not sure that I would have the courage to put my life at risk to stop a shooter or other criminal. So I'm not a police officer. They're not paying me to do the job that I'm not doing. And it's not just about the money, it's about the slot. We need people who can stand up to criminals, and if there aren't enough we go to further lengths and recruit more and pay more until we can hire enough of them. If you make a promise to stand up to criminals and then don't, you are taking up a slot that someone else could have filled. When they called the police and four officers arrived at the scene, they could have called four brave officers instead of cowards, if we as a society had done a better job of screening and training and there weren't any coward police officers because it disqualified them from the job.
It's fraud, dereliction of duty, to take up the position that requires you to not be a coward. I don't think it's criminal for just a random person to be a coward. It's criminal to voluntarily take up a legal duty and then renege on it after the fact.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
Especially if you don't try to ban all advertising, which is really pretty absurd
That's specifically what I'm arguing against here. I'm not saying the problem of advertising is completely hopeless and impossible to regulate, my point is that a complete ban is doomed to failure because it will either be too lax on things you intend to block OR too strict on things you don't.
Incentives are like the water pressure in a set of pipes, or a river. If you block off some of the outlets and leave others unblocked then the water will flow down the direction that you left unblocked. If you block of every outlet the pressure will build until it finds an outlet and burst/overflow in some unforseen place. When a lot of people really really really want something, oftentimes even if you don't want them to have that it's often useful and/or necessary to let them have some version of it if only to release the pressure in a more manageable way. You have to do that by being clever, not by being blunt and heavyhanded.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3d ago
I'm deeply suspicious of the censorship and its effects on signalling. When you have an authoritarian police state that will punish you for complaining, smart people learn not to complain. When your credit score is higher the more positive posts you have about the government on social media, people will post positive things on social media.
I automatically discount any opinions given by people who are paid shills, or are in some way incentivized to exaggerate in a way comparable to this. Literally every Chinese citizen is a shill, therefore I take any apparent public sentiment with a huge grain of salt. If I knew Chinese people in real life I would probably discount their stated opinions significantly less (depending on how well I knew them). But on the internet? I trust nothing. If everything was actually wonderful in China and nobody had complaints then the government wouldn't need to censor complaints. They wouldn't need to censor social media. If everything in China was so wonderful they would be here now telling us about it instead of being kept quarantined away like the North Koreans.
Add to that the sweatshops that produce the Cheap Chinese goods, some anecdotal stories I've heard from North Korean defectors escaping to China and being literally enslaved there, or people stumbling on decomposing bodies from a possible organ farm, and it paints a bleak picture. I expect the average person isn't in abject misery the way they are in North Korea, but there aren't democratic feedbacks to stop that from happening, it's merely the whims of the government.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3d ago
"In the pursuit of great, we failed to do good" -Viktor (Arcane)
China shows the tradeoff between liberty/freedom and authoritarian state capacity. If the government acts in its own interests at all times and does not care about the people whatsoever except as pawns to be managed and leverage for labor, then you can accomplish a lot of things as a government. If were were playing a geopolitical RTS and the citizens were all NPCs managed by a computer, this would be great. If they're real human beings with feelings and lives and utility functions, this is awful.
Every single measure you mention here, including economic success, all have 0 terminal value in my utility function. They have instrumental value only in-so-far as they can be leveraged towards human flourishing and happiness. China could have 10x the GDP per capita of the U.S. and I'd still consider it a failure if that GDP doesn't translate into the well-being of the people actually living there.
I don't think the West is perfect, but at least we try. China's not even trying to be good.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4d ago
It's like when you threaten massive fines for disinformation and everyone bans anything that could even possibly look like something government might consider disinfo.
This is BAD. This is a bad outcome! This is exactly what I'm afraid of. Nobody was allowed to question the Covid vaccine or masking or any sort of government approved narrative on social media because it might possibly be construed as disinformation. The chilling effect caused by ambiguous rules that might or might not be arbitrarily enforced on a whim is bad. The ability for the government to selectively target anyone they dislike for rules that normal people occasionally violate because they're not quite sure where the boundary gives the government an extra cudgel to manipulate people with.
And again, once the boundaries become a little better known this is solved by a little Goodharting to integrate things to be within the boundaries. Ie, Facebook Marketplace is a logical offshoot of Facebook. Stopping them from having, or forcing it to be separate from Facebook would be bad because the networking ability on it is useful for customers. But allowing them to have it would probably also allow them to start selling their own stuff on it. Maybe Amazon makes "Amazon Marketplace", or "Twitchmazon" where Twitch streamers have their own merchandise branded to them just enough that it counts as "their own product" and skirts within your guidelines. Is Pokimane not allowed to have her own cookie company that sells Pokimane cookies? What if Pokimane just happens to be hanging out with some friends (which happen to be filmed because they're all Twitch Streamers) and mentions her own Cookie company? If she is allowed, then you're once again allowing large people to advertise while blocking the little people who don't have a whole team to create advertising and entire companies internally. If that's not allowed then you're restricting the ability for people with cookie companies to even talk about their own product out loud.
But the idea that 'no, you don't know you want this yet' is IMO a lie that advertisers and salesmen tell themselves and deserves very short thrift.
95% of the time this is true, but 5% it's not, and that 5% might be disproportionately impactful. Take Uber. Lots of people like Uber. As soon as people found out about Uber they were usually like "that sounds like a good idea". People didn't know they wanted it, because it didn't exist and nothing like it existed, but they did know that they wanted something like that because nobody was happy with Taxi prices or availability.
Uber could not have worked without advertising. The networking effects between drivers and customers do not scale linearly. If you have 1% as many drivers and 1% as many users it's awful because users spend forever waiting to get picked up and drivers spend forever not working and not being paid. It needed to be quickly noticed and adopted or it would have died instantly. A world without advertising is a world where Uber (and all similar rideshare and foodshare apps) that scale nonlinearly would have never been brought to market because they obviously wouldn't have worked. Word of mouth only works on things that people already know about, and if you literally can't advertise anywhere then you can't kickstart that process in the first place.
Or take Ozempic/GLP-1. People didn't know they wanted Ozempic, but people have wanted a weight loss pill that actually works for decades. Advertisements actually did help people here because it's a thing they wanted and looked for and tried and gave up because it didn't exist, and then one day it did exist. The knowledge that the thing they've always wanted but didn't exist suddenly now does exist (in a form they can legally and practically access) is useful knowledge.
Again, I think you're right 95% of the time. And I'm generally in favor of fixing advertising... somehow. But the exceptions exist, and I think a blanket ban is doomed to failure in a way that disproportionately harms smaller and newer people, pushing us even further into the hands of monopolistic megacorps that already exist and everyone already knows about. We need more small businesses and competitors, not fewer.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4d ago
And a music video about Asmongold: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1et1WEvJITY
I've been obsessively binging her content ever since I saw the Amelia one a couple days ago. It's pretty good.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4d ago
But if you make any mistake in your 'safe zone' that's still effectively a loophole. How do you let Coca Cola link you to their shop with a bunch of products and merchandise on their own website (which I expect you intend since it's "opt in") but not allow Amazon to link you to their shop and products during a Twitch stream on their own website? (which I expect you don't intend, because even though you've opted into a Twitch stream you didn't intend to opt into the Amazon store)
Keeping in mind that you can't just take the state of the world as it exists right now this very instant, you have to draw the categories in a way that fundamentally cannot be worked around? If the law says "you can only advertise your own products on your own website" then the Lawyers don't need to do anything, they've already won because you forgot the websites are owned by the same company (and they could just as easily have made them the same website). There's no infraction of the law for the government to enforce because they're not breaking the law, it's just badly written.
How do you make it stronger without accidentally crushing normal people just trying to honestly sell things?
MathWizard
Good things are good
4d ago
Sort of. But if you're constantly tangling people up in the courts over technicalities the way this would you've already failed. If people are breaking the letter of the law and only getting by by the good graces of juries then that's just further incentives for corporations to virtue signal and get entangled in the culture war to make people side with them.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4d ago
There is no way this is feasible to implement in a well-defined way. There are too many incredibly powerful incentives to find loopholes that the only way you'll close them down is by being so strict and draconian that you prohibit regular behavior. You won't be able to tighten the definitions without strangling the life out of them. Just taking what you've defined here, off the top of my head:
-What if party A advertises their own product on their own website without involving "Party B"? If that's not allowed you'll strangle all sorts of regular behavior. But if they are then now you have an incentive for companies to share ownership of streaming websites and create monopolies under one umbrella. Amazon owns Twitch, can they advertise Amazon products on Twitch? Because then everyone selling anything is going to want to use Amazon to list their products so that it can be advertised there. If you try to prohibit that by saying Twitch streamers count as "Party B" because they aren't official Amazon employees then Amazon will hire them as official employees. If you try to prohibit that by saying "Twitch and Amazon marketplace are different websites" then Amazon will merge them and annoyingly integrate them together enough to loophole whatever your law is. If you say "Amazon can't have their employees advertise for them" then nobody can do anything unless they're privately owned and the CEO designs their own website without hiring any employees, which is ridiculous.
The spirit of the law is clear, but you can't enforce the spirit of the law. You can only enforce the letter, and anything where a company is allowed to do their own advertising on their own platforms just encourages consolidation and rewards megacorps at the expense of all the small people. I suspect that if you try to add epicycles to close these loopholes then the megacorps will pay thousands of dollars to clever people who will work harder than the 5 minutes I spent here and find cleverer loopholes. Lobbying, free gifts and perks, wink wink nudge nudge, favors traded between supposed rivals, etc. We can't even keep money out of politics, we're not going to keep money out of advertising. Any attempts to do so are inevitably going to be 10% intended benefit and 90% collateral damage.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4d ago
I am absolutely loving the memes coming out of it. Probably my favorite is a fake anime trailer:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_UXmgkAzFDY
Which, although the actual art is AI generated, has clearly been carefully curated and edited with loving care and attention to how anime trailers work.
Also relevantly, people dug into the game files and found alternate endings that aren't in the final game release:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=pgUfNn1CClE
where originally the game tracked what choices you made and then if you picked wrong too much you get the "bad" ending where you and Amelia go out protesting together and get stopped by the police. But apparently they decided that wasn't the message they wanted to send and rediverted you to the "you feel bad about letting your friends down and go to the teacher who pats you on the back and sends you to get re-educated voluntarily" ending.
MathWizard
Good things are good
6d ago
It should be obvious from basic efficient market processes that every measurable category of people the credit card companies can subdivide people into is internally profitable without needing subsidization, otherwise they wouldn't serve those people at those interest rates. The only subsidization occurring is
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People that don't use credit cards subsidize rewards for people with credit cards since stores are charging higher average prices than they would if credit cards weren't so prolific.
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People who have different actual repayment within the same legibility category. Ie, someone with a bad score who ends up in debt, paying a lot of interest, and working their way out of bad credit ends up subsidizing the people with bad scores who end up defaulting on their loans. If the credit card company doesn't know ahead of time which is which, they have to offer interest rates that will enable them to recoup their costs on average across the group. The former ends up paying a lot of interest because the credit card company gave them the same risk profile as the latter.
Now, you could make a claim that XYZ piece of information should be priced in but isn't and thus the market isn't truly efficient. But it's not going to be something as obvious as "rich people" vs "poor people".
The thing about Amelia that doesn't apply to the previous meme is that Amelia originated from the left. The left made a propaganda piece so out of touch and unpersuasive that it made the right seem more appealing rather than less. The left tried to make a cautionary tale warning people to stay away from the dangers of right wing extremism and accidentally made their fantasy instead. This is not the right saying "come join us, we have cute alt girls", this is the left saying "stay away from those dangerous cute right wingers, they'll seduce you and convince you to rebel against the system" and the right saying "wow, that sounds even better than what I was expecting, sign me up!"
Every Amelia post is a troll against the left wing. The left can't meme so badly that they accidentally spawn right wing memes. (Almost) nobody actually thinks Amelia is real. She is a fantasy. But she's a fantasy that the left considers to be a cautionary tale propaganda piece (at least the subset that made the silly game) and put her in there as an antagonist. It's a dismissal of the left wing's warnings and concerns, saying "your worst case scenario is my fantasy". Her purpose is not to actually convince people to join the right to get cute girls but both to troll the left for warning against cute right wing girls, and also celebrate the idea of right wing girls and hopefully inspire more to step up and stand up for what's right while still being cute and alt at the same time.
There ARE girls on the right wing. There are going to be some who decide to cosplay as Amelia to show their support (Calling it now, next ShoeOnHead video has her purple wig at least cameo in reference to this even if it's not the main topic of the video). They're almost certainly not single: girls like that get snapped up immediately by high status men, but they do exist. Maybe if Amelia memes stick around there will be more of them 5 years from now. Maybe not. It is a fantasy after all.
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