ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
18hr 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
20hr 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
3d 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
4d 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
7d 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
7d 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
8d 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
9d 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
10d 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.
ThenElection
13d ago
The stakes are low, actually: inevitability means that your individual choices aren't going to do anything to shift the arc of history. This is liberating, in a way, as you can focus on protecting your own humanity (and, with much more difficulty, your children's) instead of having moral responsibility to try to save the world.
ThenElection
15d ago
Spectacular wealth and corrupt hedonism. The masses of people in their state-provided goonboxes, with a small elite caste engaging in their own particular kind of debasement except with spectacular wealth, with an AI zookeeper watching over us all. And, in an accelerationist sense, I think it's inevitable, unless the AI decides to put us out of our misery.
ThenElection
15d ago
I agree that those communities are kind of counterexamples. The reason for "kind of" is that they didn't emerge through any intentional action or planning, and attempts to replicate them through a plan have all failed AFAICT. Any attempt in contemporary times to recreate their success will end up co-opted and corrupted. They're more historic relics that occupy niches that so far have been resilient to capitalism.
Though, perhaps they'll survive and out reproduce us all, and capitalism can be retried on a more resilient culture.
ThenElection
15d ago
I am not at all a socialist or any other -ist, btw; my comment was meant as descriptive, not polemical.
to what extent you think culture and local community degeneration are responsible?
Entirely responsible; all of capitalisms' ill-effects are mediated through how it hollows out culture and local communities. Capitalism delivers massive material improvements to society through whatever ways its able to find to deliver those improvements. One way that's been very effective is by mining and hollowing out local communities, customs, traditions; turning the sacred profane. Socialism and various other -isms have their own issues: capitalism's genius is in allowing its participants to make that trade (of community for self-interest) in the most effective way possible.
My solution, or, the idea for it, has always been that local first communities work to support the stragglers and that things like family formation and, especially, extended family mutual reinforcement would do a good job of evening out the rough edges of capitalism for all who aren't repetitively highly anti-social (i.e. criminals and drug abusers).
It's a romantic vision, and probably the best option we have on an individual basis. But I don't believe it can amount to much, collectively; capitalism is too good at harnessing our energies to its own ends.
I'm not sure Dinergoth is a useful category, outside of designating an aesthetic. There's a broader issue--the listlessness and demoralization of youth--and the Dinergoth is a good example of affliction by it. But it's shared across pretty much every youth subculture. Hustler, incel, NEET, based tradcath, femcel, influencers. To the extent any of them are political, it's an identity-defining gesture. Even antifa is just a bunch of young men wanting to break shit for an adrenaline rush.
A more provocative take: what is the cause? "Capitalism." Or, more precisely, capitalism as implemented on actual humans. Humans are wildy disparate in their capabilities and intelligences, and capitalism, by flattening the world in its relentless pursuit of legibility and information, has identified the weak and dumb and deterritorialized them from the structures that once protected them. When they previously would have found refuge in burrows or bramble, now they're easy prey on the open savannah. And a caste of strivers are the predators here, who bloodlessly condemn millions to a debased state with new, maladaptive structures that are more easy to exploit and are delivered over technology that was supposed to liberate us.
Gen Z and, to an extent, millennials are just the leading edge of it. They won't ever snap out of it, because they don't even know of any other way to live.
ThenElection
17d ago
us new world peasants won't pay the King's Tax
We do, though. In 2024, US tech companies paid more in fines alone (€3.8 billion) than the income tax revenue of the entire European tech sector (€3.2 billion).
ThenElection
28d ago
Yeah, it's not realistic to think labor costs would literally go to zero. Did some research and public transit labor and associated costs in the US are likely around 50B annually; for comparison, Alphabet's workforce is around 100B (though of course the vast majority aren't working on AVs).
LIDARs are expensive, but probably a lower proportion of the cost of the vehicle for a bus than for a regular car (even if buses require more sensors).
ThenElection
28d ago
If
the rule you followedall the training and experience brought you to this, of what use was all that training?
When something bad happens, it allows the organization responsible to say, "well, we have a training program in place, so we did our due diligence and are not responsible." See also diversity and sexual harassment training sessions. At worst the organizational fix is to just hire a new set of training consultants to revise the training program.
ThenElection
28d ago
Something like 2/3 of operating costs of public transit in the USA is labor costs. If you can replace most of those with AVs, you can get more bus routes, without any radical assumptions or requirements for the broader transit system.
ThenElection
28d ago
My suspicion is that the issue is less about how an actual, well-constructed UBI would be corrupted/abused (as you say, it's difficult), but in that most actual "UBI" programs wouldn't be an actual, well-constructed UBI. In practice, it wouldn't be rolled out universally (even if universality was a genuine aspiration), and that would allow for politicians to pick and choose the constituencies that benefit. And so you get the government creating a "UBI" targeting black pregnant trans artists.
ThenElection
28d ago
Citation needed for inflammatory claim
Sure.
https://sftransitriders.org/on-mayor-luries-plan-to-allow-waymo-on-market-street/
ThenElection
28d ago
One of the weird things about American politics is that "public transit advocates" have a hate-on for autonomous vehicles. This is despite the fact that AVs would allow running far more bus routes, more cheaply, than today.
I can't decide if this is because public transit advocacy today is mostly about an aesthetic aversion to cars and roads, or if it's because coalitional politics demands that public transit advocacy simultaneously look to protect make work union jobs.
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.
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