RedRegard
6mo ago
the vast majority of obesity is caused by neglecting fork-put-downs and overeating. You, unless you have a severe medical condition, are capable of simply not eating at every opportunity
This seems more interested in figuring out where to allocate blame, or castigating people for not being virtuous enough, than concrete results. If you’re a government charged with increasing citizen health then you will get results by doing things like limiting the amount of hunger-inducing additives, sugar, empty carbs in mass market food products, removing junk food vending machines from school hallways and other public spaces, etc. Also, culture and behaviour doesn’t generate spontaneously. Policy choices in the past shaped human behaviours of today. There’s a conspiracy run by corporations focused on manipulating people into being degenerate hedonists.
RedRegard
6mo ago
In the Iraq War documents, incident reports of the US army detail the deaths of 100k Iraqis at the hands of their own forces, of which about two thirds are civilian. These deaths, further, go above what other attempts at documenting war deaths reported, and they provide the most conservative estimate as they only include deaths drawn up in incident reports (i.e. if a helicopter launched a missile at a building and killed a bunch of people, this wouldn't find its way into incident reports, which are based on individual soldier reports of their interactions with the Iraqi public, nor would deaths caused by the chaos and privations of occupation), which are also likely to be biased by the soldiers reporting them.
The lessons learned from this I would say apply to the Israeli military operations. There is likely to be a far greater actual number of deaths than what's reported, as well as a huge number of civilian deaths relative to combatant, perhaps in the area of 2:1 at best, in all likelihood far worse.
RedRegard
6mo ago
He works for libertarian think tanks, so you should think of him as ‘a propagandist for rich people’. The arguments are just spins for increasing immigration, which benefits his employers by providing them with cheaper labor.
RedRegard
7mo ago
Their kids will only be in school for twelve years, while they'll be working for about four or more decades in all probability, so you need to factor that into your hypothetical. I don't know if all things equal out in favor of them producing positive value, but I do know that it's tricky calculating such things and that your own calculations have so far neglected crucial points.
Also I don't think your numbers for the cost of schooling are correct. I thought there was an article on the original SSC saying the annual cost per student is 10k or something.
RedRegard
6mo ago
Germany would have formed a European empire if America didn’t halt the final progression of balance of power politics. Near-to-midterm utility would have probably been maximized but whose to tell the far term prognosis based on the butterfly effect.
RedRegard
7mo ago
If you focus on Korea particularly those might seem like likely causes, but every capitalist country is suffering low birth rates and it's always concentrated in those urban centers that are the centers of economic growth. Capitalism is what suppresses birth rates by optimizing for short-term wealth accretion over other values. Women are incentivized to work rather than reproduce, and both sexes are incentivized to engage in hedonist consumerism, while meanwhile social factors conducive to fecundity, like having grandparents who expected grandchildren, gradually fade away like a strange dream.
RedRegard
7mo ago
You have to account for all the surplus value they generate that gets captured by their employers, landlords, and uncompetitive or exploitative local industries like food.
RedRegard
1yr ago
There's a problem with your Darwinian reasoning - and it has economic resonance, such that I recall David Friedman once writing about it - which is that a single man's contribution towards victory in a line battle is so minuscule as to make no difference in the battle's result, and so would neither make for a powerful behavioral incentive, nor for a powerful influence on his ability to reproduce. Instead, it would be his compatriots' group effort that would make the difference, thus suggesting the possibility of group selection being a thing, although I think there are broader arguments (with a mathematical basis?) for why group selection isn't likely to be a thing, either.
I think there is some Darwinian selection going on here, but it works more like this: the cost of being a coward isn't that your tribe gets slaughtered in battle, it's that your social reputation gets ruined and your fellow tribesmen shun you.
So men are selected on the basis of whether they integrate into their tribes properly, courage being a particularly valued trait, but also conformity - whatever gets you there. Courage is perhaps more of a manifestation of behavioral traits than a trait that is selected for by itself, or perhaps it is both. In any case, I think it's more likely to be intra-tribal social selection that drives gene selection in this case than inter-tribal warfare.
RedRegard
10mo ago
Despite the ultra-abundant color you added to your screed, aren't you simply preaching to the choir? This basically comes down to usual pro-eugenics stance, the merits of which are well known. To strongman the opposition, I would say that your solution is probably impractical as there are only so many immigrants a country can take in at once, due to issues of providing adequate housing and scaling up healthcare and such, and also only so many immigrants of 'good worth' who are willing to immigrate, especially in scenarios where housing is hugely insufficient and they must pay hefty premiums on their first home. Also, there are likely to be hidden disadvantages to ultra-diverse societies that mirror the current disadvantage you are noting with regard to the British riots; see the BLM riots, Paris riots, and so forth that have occurred in high diverse areas. So it is unlikely that the issue of 'underclass' rioting will go away if only partial eugenic solutions you are proposing are implemented. Furthermore, ethnic division might remain persistent owing to probable ethnogenesis events caused by intermingling. In order to succeed in the goal of reducing the underclass, even greater eugenic efforts would be required, ones that could be scaled up to an extreme degree, and the ethnic aspects you find disagreeable are probably ineradicable and largely based on narcissism.
Western states want to maintain a high ratio of working-age population to retirees and that definitely will help to achieve certain goals. Even if the immigrants are destined for low-wage roles, that means that hiring care workers won't be as expensive (higher labor supply equals lower wages) and current levels of care can be maintained. Another common reason was to address the ostensible post covid labor shortages that business interests in many Western countries were arguing for. And yet a third is that many of these countries feel it's in their strategic interests to make their populations as large as possible, which I've seen French, Canadian, and American establishments explicitly endorse. In reality, I think the first two explanations are serving a few powerful interest groups at the expense of general welfare and future prosperity, and that the third explanation is misled as it's not overall population that matters but high value HBD, but this isn't taken into account by the establishment probably because it serves other purposes to deny. There's also a dark fourth reason, which is that elite interests converge on diverse populations as they are easy to divide and conquer and thus dominate. We do live in an era of anti-competitive corporate consolidation, top-bracket tax cuts, corporate welfare, and persistent privatization of inappropriate industries despite gross failures, whilst the broader populace bickers primarily over matters of racial prestige, so if the elites indeed orchestrated this they've done a good job...
RedRegard
7mo ago
What does this have to do with property rights and free enterprise?
It’s caused by market forces and corporate influences rather than planning.
Even government propaganda is capitalism now?
Yes, as the governments in question are ideologically capitalist and are operating under a capitalist paradigm, some of which even entails the blurring of boundaries between private and public spheres with revolving door politics, regulatory capture, and the importance of plutocratic funds in running modern political campaigns, among other things.
RedRegard
7mo ago
No we wouldn't expect that to necessarily be the case, since it's possible for more than one economic system to suppress birthrates, and also Western capitalism was suppressed historically through greater levels of unionization and government regulation. But in any case, fertility rates in the Soviet period were in fact higher than the post-Soviet period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#Historical_fertility_rates
RedRegard
7mo ago
Yeah, i suppose if you're living somewhere with high inefficiency and waste the numbers will be extremely negative for all but the upper echelons of society. My model of modern society is that much of its value is produced by machines (capital) which only require skeleton crews of mechanics and engineers to maintain, and that asides from those specialists and the capitalists who own the machines, most other people are superfluous. On the other hand, democracy provides a brutish sort of power to those superfluous people, and thus they are able to extract value beyond what their economic potential would otherwise command. So the attempt to internally partition countries along these class lines could be seen as a class warfare attempt to undermine democracy.
RedRegard
1yr ago
It's in peoples' rational self-interest to stand up for victims because being a victim could happen to anyone and the costs for the victim are often greater than the benefits for the abuser. Same reason why torture is usually outlawed the moment democracy is implemented: the benefits of torture are small, the costs great, so people outlaw it as they themselves don't think the costs of foregoing torture outweigh the benefits of never having to be a potential recipient of it.
That this reasoning sometimes errs is because the analysis of who constitutes a victim/abuser is, like all other democratic analyses, based on outward optics and scant information. It's the satellite view of a conflict and so misses all of the nitty-gritty. So only a rough approximation of the matter is made. The roles, only vaguely educed.
And there are also perverse incentives that the average human holds. There's the Harrison Bergeron impulse on the part of the mediocre multitude to hold down and discredit the talented few. Retarded, violent populations are not as maligned as they perhaps should be following utilitarian calculations, as the average citizen to some extent identifies with them or else narcissistically considers themselves to be a savior. So populations like the Palestinians earn protected status, while their haughty superiors are brought low, but it all follows from the base self-interest of the demos, those muddled idiots who wish to protect themselves...
RedRegard
1yr ago
Sounds like you need a long-term eugenic environment to cost-efficiently correct this. The social matrix that enables this behavior is itself founded on genetics. To fix a country you must fix its people.
RedRegard
7mo ago
Areas of the world that are more enmeshed in capitalism versus less. Examples would be New York versus Oklahoma, Singapore versus Malaysia, or your local upper-middle class neighbourhood versus lower class.
RedRegard
7mo ago
As the capitalist system develops it alters in character. Some of the current capitalist institutions suppressing birthrates I mean to refer to include: office labor being the norm, extremely high levels of consumerism and luxury being available, various cultural diminishments in the role of community and family in peoples' lives owing in part to automobiles, suburbanization, etc., obesity caused by processed foods and cheap low-nutrient foods, environmental contaminants, etc., government and corporate propaganda systems increasing the prestige of educational and economic attainment while denigrating 'traditional' lifestyle choices. All of these flow in some way from the role of capital both as a general incentive and as a recursive shaper of policy.
RedRegard
6mo ago
The job you described is basically a frivolity, a way for the rich to waste time, a way to skimp on a dishwasher, no one needs to do it. The people who work those jobs are obsolete. Their jobs suck because there’s not enough demand for their supply, so they need to accept bad work conditions for low pay. Improve their conditions and offer better pay and it’s not a dead end job any more, but to do that there’d need to be greater demand, tautologically proving these people and their work aren’t very important.
RedRegard
7mo ago
I mean that it's not indicative of whether people prefer modern life to Amish life, since the 'switch' doesn't happen without a significant cost. The fact that most people don't join Amish communes might simply signify peoples' preference for the familiar, or for environments they've already made significant investments in that they don't want to abandon.
RedRegard
7mo ago
It’s not a choice people make from a position of detachment. People are habituated to their societies by adulthood, so that altering their lifestyles by jumping into a different sort of society would constitute a major cost. Everything they had lived for and adapted to up until that point of change would be gone. And it works both ways, the Amish would be apprehensive about forsaking their native societies as well. Crossing the threshold comes with a hefty toll, and so it doesn’t indicate ‘natural’ predilections.
RedRegard
2yr ago
There are two practical reasons to avoid war crimes:
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They encourage a defect-defect race toward the bottom, as the enemy is encouraged to reciprocate by killing your own soldiers.
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They create bad optics. Given that Ukraine is highly dependent on foreign aid, its public image is important. Tarnishing that image in order to kill small numbers of enemy prisoners and thus jeopardize large amounts of foreign aid seems like a poorly calculated strategy.
So the Halla-aho guy's reasoning seems poor. (Also, killing enemy soldiers is just one of many factors that could advance one's war aims.)
RedRegard
1yr ago
The DEI stuff is built around internet fads, upper-middle-class pretensions/narcissism, and establishment imperatives. The terms left and right are malleable and relative, so it's both left-wing and not-left-wing. In any case, it's very convenient for the knowledge worker class and the giant institutions they serve, as it not only leaves their deeper structures and economic advantages uncontested (while merely arguing for superficial alterations), it also argues for increased power to be given to these people and institutions, as their credentials, HR departments, teams of lawyers and such are put forward as the necessary cures for 'systemic' bigotry or whatever.
What 'true' leftists, which exist only as fully as true rightists, lament is that there aren't strong working-class involvements in this new left, and indeed it lacks much revolutionary spark at all. It's not about solving or changing modern society so much as it's about keeping things in place and expanding the purvue of some of its most powerful factions. I think it deserves to be treated as a process of its own, best understood as a unique development that began around the 1960's, rather than something that matches patterns as broad as 'leftism'. Although, I can see the propagandistic appeal of accusing them of being false leftists, given that the term left enjoys positive valence with many of the people who would benefit from more working class, economically focused initiatives, such that it's a way of signaling to them that they are missing out. It's a matter of brand manipulation rather than objective understanding.
RedRegard
6mo ago
The difference between traditional forms of processing and the modern is that the modern kind is hyper optimized by capitalism, through vast amounts of capital and chemical engineering, for addictiveness and thence profitability. Healthiness could also be optimized for, but unfortunately it’s opaque to most consumers and doesn’t function as a schelling point in any case.
RedRegard
6mo ago
Doesn't really look very good for the general pro-Russian camp that a major ally/prop of Russia would go out ingnomiously like this -
The same happens to America's puppets like South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. If they aren't themselves chased out, the moment they turn their backs it all collapses like a house of cards.
When comparing AI drawing abilities to writing abilities, I think a key difference is that for us as humans drawing slop is harder than writing slop. What I mean by this is that an AI can generate something like a 4K image of aliens with energy swords rendered in a hyper detailed yet ultra generic fashion, and the output is something that only 0.01% of humans have the technical skill to create. But when you ask an AI to write pages and pages of Shakespeare and the results are cliché ridden gibberish, you can only look at it and say that other than in terms of scale, I could’ve easily made this crap, if through some dada-style cut-and-paste technique if nothing else. Essentially putting letters in sequence to form words is easier than drawing entire images, and so when AI generates images, even though they’re just reconstituted from data sets on the basis of predictive software and so involve no actual drawing, they still seem impressive.
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