ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
17d ago
Twitter bots need freedom, too.
ThenElection
18d ago
I think he and Musk are joking.
90s era Nick Land is spectacular, in all senses. And he's probably the most important philosopher-poet for the AI era. Meltdown:
http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm
Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.
Sidestepping the question of whether tax refunds that refund more than you paid in can be considered morally a tax cut...
EBT at most gives a few thousand dollars a year. It's true that the most of recipients are net negative in revenue, but there are still sundry taxes they do pay: sales tax, taxes on social security benefits, payroll, taxes on unemployment benefits, gas taxes, etc. We have a lot of taxes. You can dig through those and find enough they do pay so that you can refund them for food purchases without dropping into negative for taxes paid.
It would be a somewhat silly accounting game and wouldn't change how decidedly net negative they are in revenue. The trick here is in leaving out the really big redistributionist things (e.g. education, healthcare) and not counting it against their tax contributions.
Going back to actual net revenue, I can see the argument that it's impossible for anyone who's negative net revenue to receive a tax cut. But this has the side effect of meaning it's impossible for the large majority of Americans to receive a tax cut, because most are negative net revenue, both annually and over their lifespan. On an annual basis, the guy I originally mentioned above getting tens of thousands of value in property tax deferral is almost certainly net negative (though over his lifespan he's probably net positive so far).
ThenElection
18d ago
There are clever ways you could make EBT structured as a tax cut instead of spending as well. I don't think that would make it any less objectionable to the people who object to it.
To your more abstract point, the government is an institution like any other, and it will extract value from the economy to sustain its own existence. As part of my negotiating with its power, I want it to do what it does in as fair and transparent a way as possible, in a way that minimally distorts the economy or incentivizes putting effort and planning into schemes to take advantage of it.
ThenElection
18d ago
We could just dump it in the water supply. No need for the authoritarianism; there's the precedent of fluoridation for polluting our precious bodily fluids. Just have to make sure sodas also have it in them.
ThenElection
19d ago
Any kind of subsidy or redistribution will have some kind of waste built in from people exploiting it. I just can't get too worked up about EBT: sure, it isn't 100% efficient, but a substantial portion of it does reach people who need it.
Another California program: property tax deferral for the needy. If you own your house but have an income below ~60k, you can defer property taxes indefinitely, as a loan at a simple (not compound!) rate of 5%. One one-time coworker has engineered his income and assets (multi million dollar Roths FTW) so he no longer has to pay property tax through this program; this ends up amounting to something like 20k in benefits per year (that's after subtracting the accrued debt). That's a lot more scamming of the system than someone buying shitty mushroom snacks on EBT.
My main objection to the people in your example is the obesity and the festering sores. But, that's what poverty looks like in the US today. If you want to avoid it, shop at better grocery stores than the bargain market.
Left-wing politics more generally, including increased wealth redistribution.
Curious about the anti-D response here: in the 60s and 70s, the USA strikes me as clearly more decadent than the USSR, while the USSR was much more left wing. Are those statements accurate? And yet in the USSR case, bad economics trumped any edge in resistance to decadence. How does someone reconcile this tension?
ThenElection
21d ago
Getting the media on your side is part of competence. Given the existing environment, I get the appeal of throwing your hands up and saying it's impossible. But the Trump administration doesn't put in even a minimal attempt to work the mainstream media, seeing no value in it compared to building a parallel system.
ThenElection
23d ago
Robin Hanson's gentle silent rape would be the least of the examples shoved at me about how this wasn't a real crime at all.
It's a disgusting betrayal of trust, and the guy was clearly a creep along all dimensions, but what good is it trying to persuade the unpersuadable that this was wrong?
<high decoupler hat>
Hanson isn't saying that rape of this form shouldn't be a crime or isn't wrong. His argument is better characterized as this is wrong and a crime, but so is cuckolding, in the sense of forcing a man to raise another man's child without his informed consent.
</high decoupler hat>
Hanson almost certainly has no objections to Pelicot and his fellow rapists being punished as he is, or even significantly more.
ThenElection
25d ago
Is the main mode here busybody teacher makes a report because she doesn't like some way a child is being raised, or hyper-cautious institutional representative makes a report because they don't want to be caught up in a lawsuit or turn up on the local news?
ThenElection
25d ago
The biggest change has been in coding and software engineering capabilities. Around December, models and harnesses reached an inflection point: before, they could do small tasks, but it was very easy to find yourself spending as much time guiding or coaching them as you would have spent coding it yourself. That is no longer the case.
Personally, in the past month I've probably committed 3x the code as I did in the past, while actually writing maybe 10% as much as I did before. I'm somewhat ahead of the curve, even within my very AI-forward company and team, but for years I've felt "AI will put me out of a job in 5 years"; this is the first time that expected career longevity has actually decreased. I've got an agent working on a ticket right now.
We also have seen advances in math, video, cost per token, etc., but the software inflection point is driving the current vibe shift.
ThenElection
26d ago
I can imagine a kind of internal logic that overlaps heavily with "men bad, women good" ideas. Anyone can change their identity and pronouns at will, but by choosing to do something heinous, they have switched their identity to male.
As an intuition pump, would people be more likely to "misgender" a MtF or a FtM mass shooter?
ThenElection
28d ago
It is more or less the same, but (with proper massaging) might be framed in a more popular way than direct taxation of the childless. E.g. make future cost of living adjustments apply only to parents.
ThenElection
28d ago
Just have most of someone's FICA be earmarked to their parents. It shifts the framing from punitive to a benefit. More or less eliminate Social Security for people who don't have kids (maybe give them a couple hundred of dollars a month or so); if you don't have kids, you have more opportunity to earn income anyway, so you don't have an excuse not to have saved for retirement.
Somewhere on the Motte we were having a discussion about male vs female life expectancies (IIRC motivated by the UN declaring men dying 5 years earlier than women "equality"), and the decrease in the gap comes in much earlier than billionaires. I think it was, once you get into the top decile, the gap drops to below two years.
It's much more accurate to say, if you're poor, don't be a man, than it is to say if you're rich, don't be a woman, unless your interest in life expectancy is just in having a big gap. Every step up the income ladder for both sexes increases life expectancy; it just does so much more for men.
It's not some biological law that all men die younger than women do.
It is, somewhat. Across the animal kingdom, the heterozygotic sex (XY, ZW) nearly always has a shorter average lifespan than the homozygotic sex (XX, ZZ).
You are comparing yourself to AI at its present capabilities (or the capabilities it has that have already diffused to your interest and skills). Give it some time.
I do manage to be cautiously optimistic, though, at least for my individual future. I have no illusions that I'll be able to provide any economic value in 5 years, and I'm fine with that. And I'm excited for many of the same reasons you are: knowledge is so much easier to find and learn than three years ago, and I'll have decades to learn things about the world that no human knows today. The only question is how to protect myself from futures where we evolve into a two class society of the high and the low.
As an aside, I've had very positive responses from typesetting my resume with LaTeX. You've got to be applying to the types of places where the people reviewing your resume are likely to know it on sight, but it's a positive signal (irrational as it is, I've noticed that when I'm interviewing people even I give more benefit of the doubt to good typesetters). And it would be much easier to pack in a bunch of hidden buzzwords or the full list of technologies you've worked with, for the benefit of automated systems that prefilter.
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