Obsidian
1yr ago
I need the same speech but spoken by a hotter guy so I can send it to my girlfriend.
(On second thought I'm going to speak these words to her myself instead of outsourcing my masculinity)
Obsidian
1yr ago
Social policing only works to the extent the polity is culturally homogeneous. CS is fucked.
Obsidian
1yr ago
Obsidian
1yr ago
gotta tax the rich to give more to the poor so the poor don't revolt
Powerful hyperstition. If there were ever a step decrease in welfare, would that be taken as the signal to break shit?
A late reply to @urquan on assisted suicide
A close family friend has Lou Gehrig's Disease. She cannot drink without choking, she cannot move through space without falling, she cannot manipulate objects. Her life is miserable, and every day that goes by she loses further capacities.
Her options are something as follow:
-
Enlist the help of someone, potentially the state, to kill her within the next few weeks;
-
Tough it out until the line on the graph for "care necessary to life" crosses the line for "care available from friends and family and oupatient caretakers", and allow herself to die of neglect - I'm guessing by suffocation, once her diaphragm stops working - within more or less the same timeline as the previous;
-
Engage with the medical system, which will do its very best to keep her going, until even the best medical technology our public system can buy cannot keep her blood flowing, probably before Christmas this year, and she expires after spending her last few weeks highly medicated in a sterile white prison.
I understand what your Christian ethics say in general, as you have beautifully laid them out for us. But in the specifics, in full contact with reality, if this were you or your mother or your close family friend, what would you say or do? Where would your heart be?
Obsidian
2yr ago
I've been circling this idea of a "government bank account", for allocating resources to government services in an equitable way.
The idea goes, just because services are government-administered doesn't mean they aren't subject to scarcity. And the disconnect between user and payer means that people use services with no regard to cost, and providers operate with no regard to quality. If only we could subject this to market dynamics!
The libertarian runs with this and says that all services should be paid for in cash (and removed from the aegis of the government, for good measure). But then people are shut out of public life, compounding inequality and misery over generational time scales.
If we're not going to entirely jettison the idea of a welfare state (which I would rather not; alle Menschen werden Brüdern and what not), then I would suggest a second currency, one which accrues regardless of work or merit, and which legally cannot be traded away.
This puts to the people some interesting questions. Would you rather go to work via the toll road, or heat your home hotter? Would you rather cash a welfare check, or receive end-of-life care?^1
The parallels to the Chinese social credit system are elucidating: whereas they've turned their whole society into a prolonged exam (they love taking exams), I'm proposing an exercise in private property x inalienable rights.
This also opens up more palatable avenues wrt congestion pricing, private/public competition, etc. Probably does interesting things to the meta of democracy but I haven't thought that part through.
^1 Yes, we Québécois receive electricity and healthcare as government services. To be frank, I don't know why you'd do it any other way.
Obsidian
1yr ago
I can't parse half of the stuff in this comment but I'd love to hear you go on at length about it. Have you thought of going on The Bailey?
Obsidian
2yr ago
Very happy to see you here. This series is one of my favorite fixtures of this space.
Obsidian
11mo ago
If you read Homer somewhat more attentively
I want to stick a fork in the outlet here: famous writings such as Odysseus are probably best understood to depict not how things were, but how things were modeled, saying more about an ancient collective aspirational conception of self than as how we'd parse their society if we were alongside them.
Obsidian
2yr ago
I fucking love olives. I would eat them all the time if they weren't so expensive.
Kalamata olives, olives stuffed with garlic or pimento, olive bread, olives in greek salad... holy shit dude
Obsidian
1yr ago
About to go on a one-month "digital declutter" in the style of Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism. 6/10 book, worth reading if you're suffering from screen addiction. Dovetails well with Matthew Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head.
Obsidian
1yr ago
Quebec would fit in nicely as yet another ethnic/language minority in the US
Historically the rent and lifestyle would have been good enough that we'd have been immediately flooded with Americans, destroying the local culture.
As it is, Rest-of-Canadians have been doing this all by themselves.
Obsidian
1yr ago
The effect is so strong that at some point pictures of single young white urban men in advertising have become gay-coded. Usually if I see such an ad on my commute it's trying to sell me PrEP.
Obsidian
2yr ago
I predict that this is a false dichotomy, and that AI is going to lead to a reorganization of American political coalitions such that the red and blue tribes will not exist in recognizable form. There will be schisms, alliances of convenience, and especially the rise of currently non-existent or occluded political interest groups.
Obsidian
2yr ago
The only thing I'd push back against here is early specialization. The edifice of human knowledge is becoming very dense, and you need deep knowledge and experience in a constellation of neighbouring fields if you are to merely catch up with the state of the art in one field, much less make valuable original contributions.
This is exactly the upbringing I've wished I'd had. No one asked for context, but let me grudgepost a little:
Everyone agreed I was gifted, and then did nothing to act on that. I wasted ten years of my early life, in full conscience of the fact, waiting for the autonomy and resources needed to push myself.
I hit thirty this year. There's something special about that number: it cut through any internal narratives I may have had about stuff I want to do later. Well, good morning and happy birthday, we are later, later is today! You are on the downslope now, your cognitive and physical capacities are going to get monotonically worse until the day you expire. You're not going to have any more free time or energy or drive than you do right now. This Is Your Life, this is your cruising speed, get what you want out of it now or forever hold your peace.
I've experienced this as a second childhood.
After a difficult first go-around, the primary enterprise of my adult life has been to surround myself with people who are capable, trustworthy, who will invest in me and who are worthy of investing in. And boy have I lucked out. I enter this phase of my life surrounded by brothers, and quite a few sisters, who elevate me and whom I can help elevate.
And though I am paying it forward already in some measure, I hope to go further, through the same kind of life journey that Hoel describes.
What you call raising a genius, to me seems to be merely honouring a child for who and what he is. Through this, even a phenotypically unexceptional child can be made exceptional by bringing him to recognize his own worth, and understanding the kinds of expectations it is reasonable to have of himself. Part and parcel of this is integration in a rich, multigenerational social, physical and intellectual life.
I like the Orthodox imagery of saints coifed in gold leaf halos. Surround yourself with gold-coifed men and women. Raise each other up, and your children as well.
Obsidian
1yr ago
Started the Bible (TOB translation). Integral Notes version.
It's a very busy text. I slightly regret not going with the Essential Notes version.
I tried starting Thomas Cook's 1728 translation of Hesiod's Theogony, picked at random. I'm having the opposite problem here; I'm failing to contextualize anything.
Obsidian
1yr ago
As an independentist, what you're saying is true but irrelevant. People are fully economically illiterate, there is nothing close to a popular consciousness that we'd hurt from missing those transfers. We expect short-term economic injury from the turmoil, but that's pretty much it.
Obsidian
1yr ago
The devs quit way too early on that one. The learning curve is all over the place, and the horror effect lasts maybe one hour. Shame, it's such a cool game.
Obsidian
2yr ago
I went to choir for the first time last night. Seriously one of the most elevating experiences I've had in the past ten years.
It compares favorably to psychedelics: same category of experience, but lower commitment and more materially meaningful.
Back when I entertained the idea of staying in the US for good, I bootstrapped myself to a passable credit score using a Chase secured credit card. Took a few months but everything else fell out of there.
Generational disadvantages in credit scores are downstream from generational disadvantages in executive function and time preference.
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