cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
1yr ago
How do people feel about white space in web design?
There has been this ongoing trend of massive amounts of white space, where it's basically a single sentence per screen. I find the experience awful on desktop. But only mildly annoying on mobile.
I'm also trying to find professional web design blogs or posts that point out how annoying this trend is. Instead all designers seem to have nothing but nice things to say about white space. Rather than making me think I'm wrong for going against all designers I instead just think the whole profession is wrong.
cjet79
2yr ago
As a youth interested in sci-fi and fantasy, Transhumanism always sounded so cool. I can't help but feel that now that it is actually happening, people have made it so lame.
Some of it must be a definition problem. The "trans" part can mean two things: Transition or Transcend. The modern lexicon seems to always have it meaning Transition. You transition from one standard human role to another standard human role. This to me is the lame form of transhumanism. The cool form of transhumanism would have that baby being born in a medical pod. You are railing against role players, actors, fakes. Hollywood seems to have permeated all of society, where the best thing people can do is just play a different role. So boring. I wish you had the real transhumanism to be angry about.
Pod babies, semi-immortal brains in vats, machine enhanced human bodies (more than just a couple of medically necessary interventions like pace-makers), nervous systems transfers, rampant human cloning, etc. None of it exists, none of it is even that close to existing. Transcendent humanism seems deader than ever. Where I once had a hope for it to come about, I'm now more certain than ever that the future belongs to the machines. Not even machines simulating human brains, or building an afterlife for biologically dead humans. Just boring machines running algorithms.
Unless AI turns out to be a real bust, none of this will matter, because biology is just too slow. I tell you this as someone who doesn't see some versions of the "borg" as a bad outcome: the borg ain't happening. There are a couple larpers out there, but they'll all either be dead or swept into the zoo exhibit with the rest of us before any cool Transhumanism comes to pass.
cjet79
1yr ago
I think it is becoming pretty obvious that homelessness is a national problem that can no longer be addressed at a local level.
If any one municipality gets the solution to homelessness "correct" their reward for doing so is to be flooded by homeless people from other areas. This doesn't require maliciousness on anyone's part. Imagine city A has the correct solution, and city B just lets them die in the streets. If you are a doctor in city B with a homeless patient, your best advice to them might be to tell them to get a bus ticket to city A. And that doctor would be right to continue sending patients from city B to city A until the conditions in both cities was equal. Or if you are just a semi-aware homeless person, you'd do the move yourself.
If you are just a random person in one of these cities, and all you care about is just not having homelessness. Then being closer to city B is the best option. Its cheaper and will cause the homeless to flee or be taken away by people in the system that care. Any additional amount of draconian rules or cruelty towards homelessness will move your city closer to B. If your job has you living in city A and taking care of homeless people, then you are probably correct to be a little pissed off at the people in city B advocating cruelty or draconian rules in their city. They are just foisting their problem off onto you.
Once you realize its a national problem the approaches that make sense change quite a bit.
There are lots of ways to address it. The government can build the ghettos. That has been done many times in the past. The federal government could offer subsidies to state and local entities that provide beds to homelessness. I think that would at least fit with our existing federal system of governance. The government can build prisons / mental institutions / etc.
Addressing the problem at the national level will not look pretty. It will almost certainly look ugly. Because homeless people have lives that are objectively shitty right now. Even if you are improve their lives significantly you aren't likely to get out of "objectively bad life to live" and into "objectively good life to live". So you'll have the government running a program where a bunch of people seemingly live terrible lives on the government dime, and it will definitely look like the government is causing them to live these terrible lives.
There are a few paths I can envision that lead to 'national government addresses homelessness':
- Some existing government org or agency decides to make it their responsibility. I don't see this as very likely. Maybe someone will get suckered into it, but no savvy politician would willingly choose for it to happen. Again, this will be an ugly program that wins you nothing but national condemnation.
- The treatment of homeless people gets much much worse. The number of homeless people continues to expand anyways. The calculus on helping these people will eventually shift. But I think it will get very bad before the calculus shifts. Think of every downtown city being worse than Kensington in Philly. And a few cities having violent riots where people hunt down and kill the homeless.
- The issue grows worse, but people and political organizations make a big push to have it addressed at the national level. Some well-meaning but ultimately stupid politicians spearhead the effort and put their names on it. Their names get dragged through the mud for the results, but it gets the ball rolling on a federal bureaucracy.
I'm really looking for a good FPS. Preferably single player, and I'll accept multiplayer PvE, but if it's PvP it's gotta be perfect.
My problems with most shooters these days is very hard to define. Some of them have a floaty characteristic where all the guns feel like laser pointers that magically kill things. Some of them are boring because enemies are bullet sponges (and somehow game designers don't know that this ruins the whole point of shooters?) Many games just lack a soul, and it's hard to even say what's wrong with them.
I've been playing starship troopers and I really enjoy it as a shooter. There are lots of enemies, situational awareness matters, positioning matters, twitch skills switching between targets matters, and the shooting feels weighty when your powerful rifles can stun an enemy bug.
I just tried hell divers today and was very disappointed. It's not a shooter. It's a grenade throwing game with sidearms to get you in to grenade throwing positions. Most of the "grenades" are not called grenades they are called ordinance and are explained by you having a floating artillery ship in orbit. But you call in all this ordinance by throwing a tracking beacon with a countdown timer. And throwing the beacons is exactly the same as throwing grenades. The progression is all about unlocking grenades/ordinance.
It's frustrating to see the relative popularity of the two games. Starship troopers will probably be dead before it gets out of early access. Hell divers might get game of the year.
Edit: thanks for all the many suggestions. It has allowed me to figure out what I'm actually interested in. Which is longer range engagements. I describe it in another comment, but the 0-15 meter engagement distance of most shooters turns me off. To me that is just a melee game masquerading as a shooter.
cjet79
2yr ago
When did you start pursuing women?
I started basically as soon as puberty hit, when I was about 12. It was another 5 years before I had sex.
Having sex at 17 isn't so bad, certainly felt like forever at the time. It was another 5 years and two girlfriends later before I could reliably have sex with new women after just a few dates. It was about a year of me being a bit of a manwhore before I met my now wife and settled down.
It took me about ten years and usually 40+ hours a week of dedicated practice to get good at it. I broke 6 figures in pay at a job faster than I broke into chadhood (and a very mediocre chadhood too, I've had only 20-30 sexual partners, but I was always a little more interested in long term relationships than just sex).
Being able to have sex with willing women is the most difficult thing most men will accomplish in their lives. And I think most of them have only managed it by sheer dogged determination.
And this is fine. Because on the other side of this endeavor is women, and they have at steak the most difficult thing most women will ever do: raise a kid.
Yes birth control exists, but it hasn't sunk into our evolutionarily thickened skulls. And why should it? Raising a kid is still at stake in the modern world. A woman wasting three years dating a loser might mean some prime fertility years are lost.
Improvement is the only option. The progress won't be fast, and it probably won't even be slow. It will be glacial. Circumstances and luck will always play a role, and the best you will ever do is to tilt luck in your favor. At best you might raise a 1% chance to a 5% chance. So instead of striking out 99 times you only strike out 19.
I'm running out of good advice to give to young men, and coming back to the one thing that I think made me successful: I was relentlessly horny and wanted nothing more than willing sex with attractive women. It was only once I got there that my fog finally cleared from my mind. I realized i wanted more (and needed more) after i obtained the goal.
cjet79
7d ago
Government rules are enforced through violence and kidnapping.
Libertarianism poses a simple question for any would be government bans: is the thing you are trying to ban worth killing and imprisoning people to reduce that thing?
For many libertarians there are things that definitely meet that criteria. Murder, kidnapping, serious bodily assault, etc.
They phrase it in the post as "who are you to ban that thing, why should we listen to you?" But really it is "who are you to say we get to kill people just because you think something is bad?"
There are a lot of things that are bad but less bad than killing and kidnapping people. And it sometimes feels like everyone is just playing signalling games when they say the government should ban something but can't affirmatively answer "yes it is worth killing people and imprisoning them in order to ban this thing" Meanwhile it feels like libertarians are one of the few groups acknowledging the on the ground enforcement costs of government actions.
cjet79
10mo ago
I have always felt that roads should exclusively be for motorized vehicles. And sidewalks should exclusively be for human powered means of locomotion (including cycles).
The benefits are:
- Sidewalk infrastructure is already pretty ubiquitous and does not require new investments or changes to traffic patterns.
- Crashes between cyclists and pedestrians are at slower speeds and less likely to result in deaths.
- Roadways are made safer. Drivers can expect other motorized vehicles and nothing else.
The common complaints I hear and my rejoinders:
- Sidewalks are not as comfortable to ride on. - tough luck, or suggest changes to sidewalks to make them better for you.
- Cyclists and pedestrians would get into accidents. - the accidents would not be as bad as cyclists and vehicles
- Pedestrians are slow and annoying to deal with for cyclists. - this mirrors the complaint that drivers have against cyclists. It is universally annoying to deal with much slower entities in a travel situation. Cars : Road Cyclists :: Sidewalk Cyclists : Pedestrians.
I think if the political will of cyclists had been spent on just making sidewalks legal for them then everyone would be much better off.
cjet79
1yr ago
Can you conceive a scenario where unrestricted immigration could lead to severe problems?
Yes, I can also conceive and witness problems caused by unregulated relationships. Does it change my position? Not really an inch on either issue.
cjet79
8mo ago
I just said the other day I was feeling lukewarm on Trump. But now I'm feeling different. I thought the podcast was awful. Couldn't make it past ten minutes. I might have to try again now that people say the first hour was rough.
It was Trump rambling at its worst. Rogan asks about winning the race in 2016, and next thing I know Trump is talking about how Lincoln was melancholy instead of depressed, cuz his kid died.
Sometimes I feel I would love Trump if it weren't for Trump.
cjet79
1yr 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.
cjet79
1yr ago
Has anyone here said anything positive about you doing the hock?
I am asking because if you die and they trace your online history to here, I want to be able to say that we unanimously said it was a stupid idea.
Autistic guys can slay. Get good at standup comedy instead. Some of the best comics in the business are at least a little autistic. They just focused their autistic powers on getting laughs, and their inability to pick up on social cues was an advantage cuz they could do horribly offensive jokes.
cjet79
1yr ago
Please don't post bare links with minimal commentary.
I know there are lots of times when there is breaking news and we want to see what other motters think about it. But please resist the temptation to just link dump a story. Think about what you want to discuss then post it.
cjet79
2yr ago
Wow, few things:
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Paragraphs help most writing by breaking it up into readable chunks. I'm not saying this will help here, but it does seem like the most easily addressable aspect of this ... thing?
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I'm not sure why you think you are liberal. Do you just like the way the word sounds? I can't figure it out. You are at most a "progressive" but I don't want to insult all progressives by lumping them in with you. I think you fit in best with communists / maoists / stalinists / etc. They share your belief in "everything will be great once I kill all the people on the right that disagree with me".
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Its always possible that you are a troll, and that is what some people will think here. I've become a big believer in a variant of Poe's law: doesn't matter how crazy it sounds there is someone out there that believes it. I'll treat the views you espouse seriously, even if the actual person writing them doesn't see them as serious.
cjet79
3mo ago
Sublight drive is a Star wars fan fiction. I started reading this based on a recommendation from either here or /r/rational. If it was here, thank you to whomever recommended it. Very enjoyable.
A person from earth is reincarnated in the star wars universe, and they are a ship captain with the separatists during the clone wars. The mc has some basic knowledge of star wars.
There is no boring lead up. It jumps right into the space opera action.
The characters are smart and facing very tough problems. But they are also not all perfectly intelligent. For example Jedi generals are often skilled in the force and have advantages that they use well, but they can often be outsmarted by other characters in fleet battles.
cjet79
10mo ago
Vidya thread
Im back to playing Starship Troopers. Still thoroughly enjoy the game. Only downside is low player counts. One of the recent additions that has made a dramatic atmospheric improvance is that corpses do not automatically despawn. And corpses can be climbed over. So you end up with situations like in the movies when stacks of bugs outside of the walls form a smooth ramp up to your poor troopers. Flamethrowers are more important for cleanup now.
cjet79
1yr ago
I'm usually tempted to stick to the direct question prompt or not say anything at all. But I'm going slightly off topic because I feel like MadMonzer gave a really good response. I'd like to pick your brain on socialism.
I'm libertarian. Your belief set is wild to me. Not the populist beliefs. I disagree with you that those beliefs are uncommon, but maybe that is because they are my polar opposite so I notice them more often, just like you think there are a bunch of libertarians everywhere. Its the socialist beliefs that I find wild.
I just can't ever see economic transactions as very evil, and to me most corporations are just lots of economic transactions scaled up massively. Meanwhile I find acts/threats of violence abhorrent, and see government as just scaling that up massively.
The "exploitation" narrative has never made sense to me. I'm selling labor, the corporations are buying it. Often times many different corporations are buying the labor. That price of labor is cheaper when lots of people are selling it. Just like products are cheaper for me when lots of corporations are selling them.
So that leads me to some questions:
- What is evil about corporations?
- What is your basic theory of exploitation? Or how does a corporation exploit its workers?
- (as others have asked) What is your preferred alternative? (I'm familiar with many different flavors of socialism/communism, so you don't have to describe the whole thing unless you want to. Just pointing to a category is good enough for me.)
cjet79
10mo ago
Scott posted Lukianoff And Defining Cancel Culture. He takes one of the given definitions of cancel culture and tries to see how it applies to edge cases, and whether it makes sense as a definition. I thought the comments on the slatestarcodex reddit thread were pretty good. I tried to post a synthesis of the ideas I got while reading the comments:
Cancel culture is speaking about and coordinating your disassociation with a person.
You have the right to not associate with people. You should feel free to exercise that right when you personally notice them doing something you don't like.
To avoid being a part of cancel culture:
- If you choose to disassociate with someone you should not try and get others to pile on as well.
- If someone else notices a reason to disassociate with someone and tells you, then you should ignore that, or possibly try to mentally dismiss it like it is bad evidence presented to a court.
- Spread these two things as politeness norms, and resist attempts to undo them.
Supplemental section.
Applying these to Scott's examples:
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A1-A6 are not cancel culture. The actor is taking personal steps to change their association with someone they don't like.
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A7-A12 are cancel culture. The actor is trying to coordinate and spread their disassociation with someone.
The other ones are a bit more complex.
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B1-B2 The university admin isn't really the prime source of "cancel culture" in this example. It is the newspaper that is trying to publish a juicy story. I think the university admin is fine to resist as much as they feel comfortable resisting, but is not obligated to resist at all. The newspaper is bad, and you should cancel your subscription from that newspaper (and only tell the newspaper why you are cancelling).
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B3-B5 It is cancel culture to write the article and focus it on the grad student or any particular person as the problem. If you are able to anonymize the grad student and others involved then it is not very cancel culture. If others then dig deeper and de-anonymize the grad student, they are cancel culture. If you wish to be part of the anti-cancel-culture alliance, probably don't write it at all. If you just wish to follow politeness norms anonymize the people involved to the best of your ability. If you want to be a part of cancel culture make the article entirely about the grad student.
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C1 The New York Times was doing cancel culture against Scott. His friends did cancel culture against the New York Times. Scott in his articles about the situation did not encourage cancel culture. Tit-for-tat strategy can be good for getting people to not do things. But it needs to be handled carefully. Retaliate for specific instances against exact people. Do not retaliate for general attacks by generally attacking the other direction.
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C2 Scott can personally cancel his subscription and never associate with the Atlantic again. That is not cancel culture. Telling us about it is cancel culture.
cjet79
30d ago
The deaths to pedestrians from cyclists seems like a bad statistic for either side to bring up, and a bad statistic in general.
- Cars are obviously more deadly on a per incident basis. I can't imagine a pedestrian surviving if I hit them regular speed in a car. I can't imagine a pedestrian dying if I hit them regular speed on a bike.
- Bike incidents are likely to be high, they share more spaces with pedestrians. Cars and pedestrians rarely overlap, they tend to intersect.
- The per mile deadliness makes bikes actually sound really deadly given how non deadly they seem. But that statistic is thrown off by high miles travelled by cars and low by bikes.
I think the risk to pedestrians seems minimal and bikes should just fully share the sidewalk with pedestrians. Bikes hitting people is most likely to ruin both people's day, but cars hitting bikes is most likely to ruin someone's life.
Every cyclist I've ever suggested this to hates it, and I think it's just because they don't like going as slow as you sometimes need to go on a sidewalk to be safe. But it is often what they are asking drivers to do: go slowly for the cyclists safety on the road. Which is when it turns into a whole political question. No one likes going slower than they can, so who has to suffer the indignity drivers or cyclists?
The answer seems obvious in my head, but I know I identify with drivers more (despite riding a bike around the neighborhood pretty often)
cjet79
4mo ago
I knew I shouldn't have included the lifeboat one. Its a terrible immigration metaphor. Our "lifeboat" is an entire freaking continent. So its more like some guy washing up on the beach from a ship wreck and then saying "don't let anyone else come ashore".
But also part of the point is not what he is saying, but how he is saying it. "we can't let anyone else on". Like when did "we" become a "we".
And since were doing credentials: My family has lived within an hour of here longer than europeans have been to america.
I assume you don't live in America? In that case I say "go for it" whatever immigration policy floats your boat. I don't think most countries have a strong enough culture to assimilate immigrants. American culture dominates the world, so most of them come halfway pre-assimilated. And America is generally rich enough to have economic opportunity for them.
cjet79
1yr ago
Not sure how much this will really matter. I feel like as long as I have been paying attention to elections there have been screwups by the major parties that should have had them disqualified from major state ballots. Every time ... nothing happens. They are still on the ballot on election day.
However, if its a third party, and they don't cross every t and dot every i then they get kicked off the ballot in a heartbeat, and the courts will drag their feet on fixing it until the election has passed. The Libertarian party routinely spends a bunch of resources just being on the ballot in all fifty states. And if you have ever paid attention to any of their insider politics or complaints, there is almost always a new state law somewhere that has raised the requirements for third parties to be on the ballots. If there is one thing that republicans and democrats can agree on, it is that they dislike third parties.
cjet79
3mo ago
What's wrong with sight words?
I have a kindergarten age child. I am mostly happy with what she is learning in school, including some new math stuff and sight words.
The main reason I'm happy is that many of the concepts they teach are how I eventually learned to do things. But I learned them on my own after years of struggling to do it the "right" way and not making much progress.
Words like "the" simply don't make sense to "sound it out". In a logical phonetic alphabet, "th" would be a separate letter altogether since it represents a unique sound. So just teach it as a sight word, and memorize what those three letters together mean.
I don't have a specific example in mind with the math stuff, but it seemed similar when I went and looked at new math content. It's often teaching the shorthand that I had to figure out myself. The way they encouraged my generation to figure it out was to literally bury us in math problems. You either figured it out and math became easy, or you were labelled a 'struggling' student with potential ADHD because you didn't want to spend hours a day doing math problems the hard and slow way.
I do agree with your main point that the department of education sucks. I just think you would have seen adoption of some of these new teaching techniques without the department, since some of them are good.
cjet79
1yr ago
very few people want to live in a world where those things are not regulated at all.
Do you mean "not regulated at all" or "not regulated by a federal bureaucracy"? If you mean the first, then yes I think no one really wants to live in that world, but also that is not what is at stake in this SCOTUS decision. The latter statement is what is at stake, and I think many people would want to live in that world if they could actually experience it. I wrote this comment in last week's thread. There are serious and fundamental problems with centralized bureaucracy. The kind of problems that constitutional amendments don't fix.
There are three serious alternative to centralized regulation by a bureaucracy:
- Market regulation. If there is a functioning and competitive market its not clear to me that anything really needs to be done to protect people involved in the market. Companies will have to compete with each other on every margin, including quality, price, and reputation. They will police each other on these things. This will cover nearly all of the minor stuff.
- Court and legal regulation. If there is a functioning common law court system then many of the serious fuckups can also be addressed. Deaths, serious property rights violations, and uses/threats of violence could all be addressed. This will cover nearly all of the major stuff.
- Localized government regulation. This will suffer from many of the same problems as a large centralized bureaucracy that regulates things. But it at least has a pressure valve. If the local regulations become too onerous and annoying, people can leave that jurisdiction.
cjet79
1yr ago
We are for discussion. Start the discussion if you are a top level post.
We are not for breaking news.
If all you have is questions and no real discussion to add consider:
- Maybe the thing is not worth discussing, or doesn't generate any good discussion. If it couldn't generate good discussion for the person bring up, it's less likely to do so for strangers.
- Someone else might have a real discussion starting point. By jumping on the topic too quickly you've forced them to rush out their opinion in order to join the discussion while it lasts.
- The top level post tends to set an example for the posts that follow. Set a good example.
Normally this kind of thing is only a warning or not brought up at all by the other mods. But what's the point of a rule if it is never enforced? Bad luck of the draw getting me as the reviewer of the post. I am not a fan of infinite warnings.
cjet79
7d ago
I specifically said that sometimes libertarians agree it is fine to use violence. Its just that they want a high threshold for deciding when to deploy state violence or collective violence. Your point about corporations turning into states is more relevant to anarchist strains of thought.
They are specifically willing to deploy that violence:
- In defense against random violence by others i.e. to prevent the Hobbesian war of all against all.
- To protect property rights because they don't think most of civilization can function without property rights.
- However they are unwilling to deploy it for social projects.
Point 1 puts them in disagreement with various anarchist strains of thought. Point 2 puts them in disagreement with various modern progressive strains of thought and most marxist/socialist strains. And point 3 puts them in disagreement with just about everyone.
Point 3 is simultaneously why most people dislike libertarian thought, and why most critiques of them suck. Its all just special pleading by each specific author on why their specific social project deserves an exception. "Yes, it is good when libertarians want to oppose the social projects of people I hate, but the idiots don't realize that they need to allow my social project or society will of course collapse". The pattern becomes obvious after reading the same type of critique a few times, but I've had the misfortune of reading the same damn thing over a hundred times.
I think it should have been taken in the spirit of a dark joke. Which sort of matches their aesthetic. But Jack Black is a big star and can't afford to have that kind of baggage.
It is interesting to see cancel culture changing valences once again.
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