cjet79

cjet79 2d ago

I'm someone that generally sees the two parties as pretty close to each other in actual policy positions. Even if they loudly scream about how different they are.

Not my random opinion. It's what is predicted by public choice economics for a first past the post / two-party system. The party with the median voter wins, so that is where party behavior trends towards.

Lots of people here like to complain about the Democrats being in favor of open borders, but as someone who is actually in favor of open borders I mostly see the Democrats as ok with the current immigration situation, but not interested in opening up things any further.

If you think we have open borders right now .. I think we disagree on too much of base reality and we won't get very far talking with each other.

All of that to say, I would not be surprised if the bill looks semi strict on immigration but basically lacks any real teeth.

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cjet79 4d ago

I watched Tires on Netflix.

Its a short series. about 2 hours total, 6 ~20 minute episodes.

I enjoyed it. No, that's not quite right. I enjoy an ice cream flavor like chocolate. But I don't root for chocolate. I wouldn't be excited to encounter someone in an ice cream shop that bought chocolate ice cream. I'm rooting for Tires. I'm rooting for Shane Gillis. I'm rooting for an auto service shop to make just barely enough money to be profitable.

The series was funny. It had heart. It understood and portrayed blue collar work in a way that Hollywood can never replicate.

I started writing this thinking I'd have a lot more to say. I guess I don't. Watch it. I liked it a lot. If you like it as much as I do, I think you are the kind of person I could have a beer with and we'd get along.

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cjet79 1d ago

I was thinking Netflix picked it up for a second season because it was probably dirt cheap. They basically need a random car shop, maybe a second one for Stavros occasionally calling in remotely to film his lines.

Actor and writer salaries, only one of which is even close to a major star, and he isn't gonna tank it with high salary expectations cuz it's partly his passion project.

I watched the show and wrote the review while I was pretty drunk. I was smiling and lightly chuckling. It wasn't as laugh out loud funny as other comedy stuff I've watched. But I really did get a sense of liking the characters and wanting to root for them. Not just cuz I know Shane's SNL cancellation. It was the same sense I got rooting for the characters in the office when they thought their branch might be closed.

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cjet79 7d ago

Inclusion has a weird status in culture, because its opposite is not always seen as a bad thing.

Diversity : Homogeneity :: Equity : Unequal :: Inclusion : Exclusive

Exclusivity is still a widely accepted marketing and branding decision. Media networks love to brag about exclusive events, where only they get to show something. Hollywood in general loves exclusive events where only the biggest stars can attend. Clubs brag about their exclusive requirements. High end brands love to use cost as a way to exclude the riff raff and readily imply that only the rich and discerning can afford to choose their brand.

I do wonder if exclusion has enough staying power to survive scrutiny by the culture. I am 90% sure it will stay around. Marketers will just have to very carefully tiptoe around who is being excluded, and the rules on who it is ok to exclude will likely shift randomly depending on the whims of internet mobs.

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cjet79 20d ago

Government Programs Should Have Legible Budgets

This kind of rule may come across as obvious, pointless, or doomed depending on your perspective.

There is an impulse among many to see a problem in society and turn to government for a solution. I strongly disagree with this impulse. But I also think that these people and myself could come to terms on some shared "rules of engagement".

To start we should agree on some basic things:

There is an unlimited number of things people might want to "fix" about our society, but a limited amount of resources to spend fixing such things.
There should be a way to determine how many resources we want to spend fixing a particular problem.
Paying to fix the problems should be done in a fair and above board way. (i.e. reverse lotteries where you randomly get fucked over are bad).

There are many devils in the little details, but what these three basic things suggest is that there should be: A set way of collecting taxes. A budget using those taxes that pays out to various social causes. The determination of that budget can be debated upon in some agreed way (maybe by electing representatives to a 'congress'). And that all social programs must go through this set of procedures.

To address the criticisms:

"This is pointless we already do things this way."

Sometimes governments do it this way, sometimes they don't.

The Americans with Disabilities Act does not follow these rules. Private individuals are given the ability to sue other private individuals to provide accommodations for them. The threat of getting sued also encourages a lot of preemptive work on the part of companies. How much does all of this suing and preemptive work cost? No one knows. How much will it cost you to provide for people with disabilities? Maybe a standard amount. Maybe you'll be one of the unlucky ones that gets sued in a new novel interpretation of the law and you'll win a reverse lottery.

How much do you think it is worth it to help disabled people in this country? It seems like a valid political question, but right now the American Government is basically on a blind autopilot path. It cannot know how much is spent. It cannot control how much is spent. And it cannot work out more lucrative and appealing deals for edge cases.

A little while ago (maybe a decade) some university (maybe MIT) decided to put all of their classes online for digital consumption, for free. Sometime later they were forced to take down the entire archive, because they were not subtitled, and a deaf person could not access them. The deaf person wanted them all subtitled. Subtitling a free online resource would have been too expensive and not worth it. So they were instead just removed for everyone. This is the kind of problem that a competent government middleman can solve:

[In the alternative universe where the ADA creates a government middleman agency for solving disability issues.] Each deaf person is allotted $5,000 a year to solve for their disability. They can choose to spend this on hearing implants, or on paying towards having some work transcribed. If enough deaf people want a thing transcribed it gets done. No business owner or non-profit is suddenly held hostage. No single person or entity is stuck paying enormous costs. Things aren't removed from public consumption just because a disabled person can't access it. We know how much is spent on deaf people per year. Medical companies that want to solve or fix a disability have a clear customer market for potential solutions.

This is doomed people would rather have the costs hidden and less obvious.

As I said above, sometimes the government does follow the good set of rules. I'd consider an agency like NASA a good example. The American people give some vague indications of how important they think space science and exploration is to their elected representatives. Those elected representatives can talk with the scientists, engineers, and managers at NASA to determine if maybe there are some important research projects that the general public doesn't know about but might want if they did know about it. NASA's budget is paid through taxes and is a clear line item on the federal budget. For the last two decades NASA has been about 0.5% of the federal budget. Which sounds vaguely correct to me in proportion to how much Americans care about funding Space related stuff.

The cynical reason why I believe that programs have hidden or "laundered" costs is that I don't believe voters would be actually willing to fund them if the true costs were obvious. If a party has a temporary political victory the best the best way to leverage it is through hidden and laundered costs. Pass a medicare act that doesn't really change the rules until you are out of office. Pass a civil rights act with murky enforcement that can be slowly ratcheted up every year.

Despite politicians doing this pretty often, I don't think it is what voters actually want. There is a huge amount of frustration from people over these sorts of policies. Hanania's book the Origins of Woke kind of blew up one of these issues recently. But they are all going to become problems, because when you remove the funding control from government there is no funding control. There is no countervailing force to push down the costs of these various programs. And the only way to get rid of them is often just destroy them altogether. So while people might have supported the ADA if it was 1% of the budget, they might start getting pissed at the program when it balloons up to 10% of the budget and a bunch of reverse lottery sob stories start showing up in the news. And suddenly instead of 10% or even 1% of the budget, you get 0% for your cause and no one trusts you with a 1% allotment cuz they will all remember the horror days of 10%. I don't know how likely a full reversal to 0% is for any of these policies. But that seems to be whats on the table as far as alternatives go.

There is also an ongoing legal weakness to many of these policies. Now that the supreme court is mostly conservative it could start invalidating different laundered cost schemes that have been liberal policy staples for decades. Affirmative action has taken a hit. Paid housing for the homeless might get hit next.

Conclusion

In general I think we should be suspicious of any public program that tries to hide its costs, or launder those costs onto private actors. Anything that expands the scope of things that one individual can sue another for is laundering costs. If you want a social program done or accomplished, you need to be willing to raise taxes and pay for it. If voters can't stomach raising taxes to pay for a particular social program, then too bad! Nothing is free. Start comparing the costs and fighting for them in the agreed upon battlefield.

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cjet79 13d ago

For top level posts in the culture war roundup there needs to be more effort and content.

In general I suggest three things for a decent start at a top level post:

Context. What are you talking about. Helpful to have links or quotes, but not always necessary. "There have been a slew of campus protests about the Israel war lately. They were the worst at [this university] (link to news story)."
Interpretation and analysis. Add some of your own interpretation and analysis to these events. "The protests seem to have been treated a bit differently from other protests in recent memory, like the BLM. Police have been called up to break up some of the protests. Donors have threatened to remove funding from universities. Etc"
Opinion. "The protests seem pointless. Israel has not changed its policies at all."

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cjet79 13d ago

@somedude @WhiningCoil @Stellula

Tagging all of you due to confusion about the low effort posting.

This is an example of a short post that meets the requirements: https://www.themotte.org/post/1002/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/212011?context=8#context

Context:

So a bit of a time ago there was a discussion here about the gender war, demographic implosion and political male-female divide in South Korea. rokmonster stated that "Seoul is the only city worth living in [there]" as self-evident fact, apparently.

Analysis:

As someone who knows little about Korea, I find this puzzling. Aren't there other large cities there?

Opinion / jumping off point for discussion

I'm sure there are. Are they really that bad? And if yes, what is "that"?

7 sentences, 73 words, 425 characters. That does not seem very long to me. It does not seem like a 40k word essay. It does not seem like a wall of text.

Will we continue to have this discussion again and again every month? It does not make our job easier when you spread inaccurate interpretations of the rules, especially overly hostile interpretations that would scare people off from posting.

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cjet79 10d ago

If we discover advanced alien civilizations existing doesn't that actually lessen the evidence for the Dark Forest theory? Something like massive infrared indicators imply that they are not hiding. Dark Forest theory implies hostile and hidden. @hydroacetylene

If this is a valid way of spotting alien civilizations. I think it becomes very important to look at groupings of stars. A cluster of 100 stars all having this indicator right next to each other suggests an expanding and potentially grabby aliens. If its just 100 stars spaced out randomly in the galaxy then that maybe implies that expansion and colonization is not something anyone has bothered with. If there are 100 stars with this indicator that are sort of close to each other but not exactly next to each other then it might imply islands of habitability (explained in this video). I also think if the candidates are randomly dispersed it also means its more likely that this explained by a natural phenomenon (like planets crashing and causing a debris cloud).

I believe propellant-less propulsion is possible and just not widely explored enough. The physics limitation is that you just need something to push or pull on that isn't the craft itself. We know of forces already that do this. Gravity and electromagnetism. Maybe we'll find other forces that do this. Maybe we will find something else to push on in space.

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cjet79 13d ago

Come on man. There is no goddamned way that anyone posting here is unaware of the core of the story.

There are other good reasons to ask for context:

To avoid talking about nothingburgers. Sometimes people have weird news feeds and they get small incidents show up on their feed.
For future readers. We do keep a list of old quality posts. The reader of a post is not just the people here this week.
For additional depth and discussion. For example, if they had linked Brown University they could have started a discussion about divestment.

Yeah, they did that - it's right there!

Yeah they sort of did, which is why I half parroted their words.

Some of you seem to very much live in the culture war. You are very aware of what is going on and the latest news. And you also seem to want to replicate that newsfeed here?

I'll admit I just don't get it. If I didn't read this website I'd probably be unaware of a large portion of the culture war. I am not certain I would have known about the campus protests if I had not read about it here on TheMotte. I specifically need the context. I basically live under a rock. I hangout with my family and my neighbors, and we talk about local stuff mostly.

At the same time I don't want a scrolling doomlist of every item in the culture war. That is what twitter and mainstream news outlets are for. I don't visit those websites because I don't want the scrolling doomlist of every item in the culture war. If there is something novel and interesting to be discussed about a particular item, sure, lets have that conversation.

What do you want here exactly? Do you want this to just be a twitter clone (but with indents!) where we write a few sentences to performatively crap on our outgroup? I don't see the point.

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cjet79 8d ago

I'm part of a heritage/ancestry organization. Descendants of some people that came to the US in the 1620's. I'm mainly a member cuz my mother and grandfather cared about it a bunch and bought lifetime memberships for their kids. I have helped them with some website stuff a few times.

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cjet79 13d ago

[2]: Yes cjet as you say every single time anybody complains about this topic there is no length requirement. And yet: yes there is.

Does the NBA have a height requirement? It doesn't but also it does. They have a good at basketball requirement, and height helps a lot. Likewise, we have a 'decent post' requirement and length helps, but I think it helps less than height does in the NBA.

If you held my feet to the fire I could give you a minimum length requirement: three sentences. I just don't often say it, because its not really about the length its about the content. And three sentences doesn't mean you have satisfied the requirements. Its just impossible to have enough content in less than three sentences, and I don't want people pointing to this and saying "hey I wrote three sentences like you asked". Which someone will do, and I will laugh along with them and give them a temp ban for being so funny.

All you need: Context of the thing. Interpretation and analysis of the thing. An opinion on the thing. A very good concise writer could do that in three sentences. It wouldn't be a very good or interesting top level post but it would satisfy my personal "low effort" rule. Five sentences would be safer. One context sentence and then an average of two sentences for the analysis and opinion parts.

If you don't want all three of those parts then about ten sentences is good enough. But these posts tend to get dinged for other problems. An opinion only rant tends to run afoul of boo-outgroup and waging the culture war.

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cjet79 7d ago

Xbox exclusive, Netflix exclusive, exclusive interview with a person, etc. plenty of exclusive type language used for mass products.

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cjet79 20d ago

I worked in accessibility stuff for front end web development. So my experience is limited. But the horror stories were numerous of companies that got sued successfully for some ridiculous ADA website violations. (things like not having alt text for images). https://www.levelaccess.com/blog/title-iii-lawsuits-10-big-companies-sued-over-website-accessibility/

The Act is not specific when it comes to the web (there are web standards for accessibility, but they aren't mentioned or referenced by the law). I assume like most acts it probably has some intense specificity in some areas for the sake of some special interest groups that were paying close attention, and then serious lapses in specificity for all other areas. Leading to the inevitable outcome of random courts throughout the country trying to decide what the legislators meant (or alternatively, what they wanted the legislators to mean).

The courts are a good place for dispute resolution but they are a terrible place for rule-making. The difference is important and vital in this context. A court is always getting a tiny subset of cases around a particular rule delivered to them. Higher courts are often getting the cases that the current rule covers worst. The people who are well served by a particular rule never see the inside of a courtroom. Courts thus end up making rules that serve to fix a tiny minority of edge cases, without having to really consider what said rules might do for the main use cases. Are legislature has become dysfunctional and slow enough that courts have been forced into a rule-making role.

Courts are also intentionally limited in scope. They are to address the current problem in front of them. Not to seek out the ultimate cause and work out a better overall solution. This is great for problems like murder where the final act is very meaningful and important, but all the things that lead up to it are probably more trivial and varied. For something like "why dont you have good alt text on your web images" the final act is kind of meaningless and all the reasons leading up to why that alt next needs to be there matter a lot more.

The problem space in the world is also not conveniently broken up in ways we would like. Sometimes it is cheaper for businesses to solve an issue. Sometimes it is cheaper if all of the people suffering from a problem solve the issue. Take nearsightedness as a simple example. One way to solve it would be to require that all text is much larger and thus more readable at a distance. The other way to solve it is to have people with nearsightedness wear glasses. The ADA often forces a one size fits all solution to these problems, businesses must solve the problem, end of story. It would be a lot cheaper if all screen reader tech was just way better and could read even crappy websites. But instead we have crappy screen reader tech and any website that doesn't go out of its way to be accessible ends up being unreadable to screen readers. Even traditional problems like ramps for wheelchairs might have had a cheaper solution, like just having a few strong men lift the chair up a few steps. Or if robotic technology advanced enough just giving the disabled better wheelchairs that can walk them up and down stairs.

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cjet79 11d ago

I see mostly women joggers though.

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cjet79 1mo ago

I think the line between status / conduct is pretty clear. It just seems that some people want an expansion of the meaning of "status" so that certain types of conduct are protected.

I don't have the same legal brain as the justices. When I see that attempt at expansion it doesn't make me think that more things should have the protection of status, it makes me think "status" shouldn't have protection in the first place.

To a determinist everything is just someone's status. Their current status along the pre-determined timeline that is their life.

This exchange particularly frustrated me:

JUSTICE KAGAN: -- I'll tell you the truth, Ms. Kapur. I think that this is -- this is a super-hard policy problem for all municipalities. And if you were to come in here and you were to say, you know, we need certain protections to keep our streets safe and we can't have, you know, people sleeping anyplace that they want and we can't have, you know, tent cities cropping up, I mean, that would create one set of issues.

That is exactly what municipalities wish they could do. "Just tell us what laws we are allowed to write that allow us to clean up our streets?!" That is not how the Supreme Court works though. Municipalities instead have to play a game where they write laws that maybe might work, and then the worst versions of those laws get challenged somewhere else with case details picked by people that hate those kinds of laws. Then it spends half a decade in court and then some asshole justice lectures them about how 'they should have just come here honestly trying to address the problem'. Meanwhile the justices and everyone involved will spend a bunch of time going over past court decisions on this topic, the same court decisions that nearly everyone agrees were decided badly.

This is insanity.

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cjet79 13d ago

@Primaprimaprima is correct. Write about a paragraph of original thought and you are fine.

I wrote this up thread:

In general I suggest three things for a decent start at a top level post:

Context. What are you talking about. Helpful to have links or quotes, but not always necessary. "There have been a slew of campus protests about the Israel war lately. They were the worst at [this university] (link to news story)."

Interpretation and analysis. Add some of your own interpretation and analysis to these events. "The protests seem to have been treated a bit differently from other protests in recent memory, like the BLM. Police have been called up to break up some of the protests. Donors have threatened to remove funding from universities. Etc"

Opinion. "The protests seem pointless. Israel has not changed its policies at all."

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cjet79 1mo ago

Their funding is very confusing.

They get very little direct money from the government. But they license out their content to a bunch of small and tiny radio stations that wouldn't exist at all without government money and grants.

So whenever the topic of funding comes up they get sort of talk out of both sides of their mouth . They'll say "we are mostly supported by donations", but then also say that if you cut government funding they'd have to drastically reduce their programming.

I suppose they could both be true if the donations are mostly for a few very popular radio programs.

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cjet79 12d ago

Definitely could have had some better word choice there. "filled" seems to replace "infested" just fine.

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cjet79 7d ago

Not meant to be a ringing endorsement, just an honest assessment.

If you want a ringing endorsement from me check out Ar'kendrithyst or Mother of Learning.

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cjet79 8d ago

Its one of those stories where the flaws don't bother me too much or they are actually kind of a positive.

I'd consider Runesmith kinda mediocre, but its also held my attention much longer than other stories.

I think the author is very good at creating interesting worlds/settings, decent at desperate and action packed combat scenes, and good at a steady sense of progression for the main character.

The grammar and word choice and editing leave a great deal to be desired. I think the author uses voice to text, because there are sometimes words that sort of sound correct if you are speaking out loud, but are totally the wrong word choice. If you are an editing stickler this story is a hard pass. I am mostly not a stickler for tight editing. As long as I can mostly understand it then I'm fine. Though repeated bad explanations like in translated novels will wear me down into frustration eventually.

The dialogue and social scenes sometimes annoy me. The author likes to create "anime scenes". Where the main character and side characters are doing silly and embarrassing things. The side characters are filled with beautiful women. Its not Harem, but it falls into a side genre that I'm gonna call "Harem Eyes". The MC isn't sleeping with a bunch of people, but the author is definitely undressing all of them with his writing. There are lots of beautiful big breasted women around. Its almost like being set in a harem setting, without the actual harem showing up.

The main character is also mostly rational in their long term approach to problems. They will sometimes make emotional hero-like decisions in the moment. Generally I am not getting frustrated with the main character for being an idiot to drive the plot forward.

Without the MC holding an idiot ball the author seems to have some trouble advancing the plot sometimes. So instead the MC just seems fantastically unlucky. Also because the author often describes mundane events and interesting events with the same amount of leading details you never really know when a bout of bad luck is about to strike the MC. I kinda like that surprise.

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cjet79 18d ago

I always see these reading threads and think y'all read such heavy stuff. I read for fun. Not a serious book in sight.

I just caught up in Markets and Multiverses. A young lady dies. Her soul gets pulled along in a big soul ocean to a galaxy sized ship floating in the soul ocean. The ship is called "the market". Its a place for re-incarnators to stop by and buy powers between reincarnations. But the ship has been taken over and all the reincarnators seem to have been killed, and the enemies are still lurking around. She meets some new people from different worlds who also just got reincarnated. Together they Reincarnate and try to build up their powers.

I'm currently subscribed to patreons for some stories I enjoy. Like Millennial Mage (A Slice of Life, Progression Fantasy) and The Path of Ascension. I recently got to read the end of Ar'Kendrithyst which is one of the longest completed stories ever at 4.39 million words. I'm also caught up on The Stubborn Skill-Grinder In A Time Loop which is the perfect level of trashy dumb progression fantasy for me. I'm waiting for Chaotic Craftsman Worships The Cube and Unintended Cultivator - A Xianxia-inspired Cultivation Novel to build up more of a chapter backlog for me to start reading them again.

I like action, powerful main characters that kick ass, and fantasy worlds that mostly don't resemble our world at all. I prefer stories with low levels of moral ambiguity. Made up fantasy systems and rules are fun. Betrayal is not fun. Horrors of war are not fun. Politics is boring.

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cjet79 1mo ago

This is the kind of problem that crypto currencies were meant to solve.

To elaborate:

Cryptocurrencies are a bit like cash in that transactions are never reversed (I know it can be done, but its mostly not done). This is important when the products might be embarrassing and for digital goods which can't be fully "returned" once you have access.
Cryptocurrencies do not have to actively endorse all the transactions that go through them. If a government doesn't like a transaction going through a traditional payment processor, they can lean on and pressure the people running that payment processor.
Cryptocurrencies can have a degree of anonymity. Bitcoin doesn't have great anonymity, large-scale actors like government can figure out who owns specific wallet addresses. But personal anonymity is pretty easy compared to credit cards. Its not a payment to pornhub on your financial statement, its a payment to wallet [string of characters]. Which is often enough to hide from girlfriends/wives.

I'm not sure if I'm supposed to have sympathy for these websites/users, because the failure of traditional payment processors to handle this sort of thing was recognized and predicted before cryptocurrencies existed. When bitcoin/cryptocurrency was first released/invented it wasn't a bunch of people saying "oh look at this cool toy, we have no idea what its for, but it seems neat!" No, they were specifically saying "yay! we have solved this hard problem of digital payments that has been plaguing us for the last decade on the internet! These are the cool things we will now be able to do: [same list as above plus other things]."

For any kind of business that once needed cash to function: switch to crypto or die a slow death as payment processors leave you.

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cjet79 5d ago

Its a toy selling cartoon. A lot of the architectural and vehicle design decisions look like they were made to be scaled down into tiny model versions. Main example is the giant outdoor slide on the paw patrol tower.