cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
4mo ago
I had a very different experience working the India portion of tech company a few years back. Our company was considered an outlier though, and many other companies were often asking us "how do you get the India office to work so well for you".
From what I know, the secrets of success were actually very straightforward, but doing them is difficult.
The history:
The company started with a standard "outsourcing" by hiring a company in India to provide them with support workers. They quickly ran into quality issues. Anytime they found a good worker or support staff through this company, that worker would then go on to get a better job elsewhere. And the intermediary company often just made it difficult to keep using the same support staff.
The company decided this wasn't sustainable and didn't make sense. They opened up their own office in India, sent over a trusted Indian executive, and tasked that exec with building a functioning India office. A decade later those efforts seemed clearly successful. Their own stated reasons for success:
- A focus on hiring and retaining good talent. India has a large labor pool. Even if US immigration has a good filtering mechanism, its still going to leave plenty of conscientious and smart Indians back in India. Find those people, pay them well, and try to keep them.
- Mirrored offices. Meaning that the India office has a full company structure equalish to the main US office. Finance, HR, Legal, Support, Development, Sales, etc. There is something intangible about having access to the full support system of a corporate environment. Companies in the US have a specific structure often because that structure works and produces good results. It seems a little insane to think you can reproduce that success in another country by gutting the entire support structure.
- Inter office travel and connections. The executives in both America and India made it a point to have regular visits to the other office. Also managers and even low level workers could make the trip too. They created an infrastructure to support inter office travel, and it was low marginal cost to let low level employees use that same infrastructure. So I got to take a trip to the India office just 2 years into my career as a software developer. I had a driver, an apartment, a maid, a cook, and a phone all given to me. A 6 week trip, I was paid a per-diem, and given free meals, and given PTO for the travel hours. The real value from the company's perspective is that I stopped disliking my Indian coworkers as much. I understood more of the frictions they had interacting with the US office, and I found better ways to work around it.
They have a world-class support team at that company. American customers would call in and ask to speak to the India support team members sometimes. They had talented developers that managed to get visas through us and then go on to work at a FAANG company. They had quality engineers in India that were respected bloggers and thought leaders on quality engineering.
I feel like I'm selling an ad about the company. They talked this stuff up while I was there, but it was my first job and I just thought 'whatever, gotta talk yourself up, right?'. But no, it took me some more life experience to realize they were actually impressive and unique.
Its possible to have a good company in India, but I think there is going to be a real problem if you are just doing it as a random cost saving measure and not putting much thought into how it should be done.
cjet79
1yr ago
I work for an organization that uses shutterstock. That is absolutely a tradeoff worth taking. We use a dozen or so images a day, so spending 1 minute on an image instead of 10 minutes changes it from a part time job, to just a small additional task. The person's salary that gathers these images is in a mediumish salary range. But it would still be worth it to us if we were paying this person minimum wage.
Shutterstock only needs to save an hour of time of a minimum wage employee once a month to be worth it. It saves us thousands of dollars, its easily worth it. Until someone creates a giant library of free AI art with clear image rights then shutterstock will continue to be worth it.
The good retellings
My earliest memory of a story retelling was that of Chex Quest. A Doom clone made for kids. With the cereal brand "Chex" replacing most of the blood, demons, and foul language with cereal motifs. Looking back on things it seems like a joke, how the hell did that thing even exist? I know there is a legit story behind the game, but I honestly don't want to read it. It is more fascinating to imagine how such a game could be created.
There is definitely something very cute and sweet about retelling adult themed stories for kids. I chuckle every time my young daughters belt out the lyrics to "Rich men north of richmond", and instead of saying "Your dollar ain't shit" they say "your doll er aint chic". That wasn't a reinterpretation I suggest or pushed on them, just what they seemed to have heard.
I also find cleverly disguised adult themes in children's media rather entertaining. The jokes in pixar movies that go over the heads of every kid, but they still laugh as they see their parents suddenly entertained and laughing along with the cartoon.
The Bad Retellings
There is however a hamfisted political messaging that sometimes gets shoved into stories. I find it bad, even when I agree with the message. I'm libertarian, and many of my fellow travelers treat Ayn Rand's books as holy text. I've instead always been highly turned off by some of her books. The short ones like Anthem were great. The long 60 page diatribe in one of the other ones is just ... gross.
The best political literature always seems to be written by the opposition (these are vague recollections, some or all of them might be wrong):
- Starship Troopers, a defense of a Fascist military dicatorship, written by Heinlein, who was closer to a libertarian by most accounts.
- Shakespear's plays nominally supported the king and monarchy of England, but other have pointed out the subtle and sometimes not so subtle critiques.
- Anthem, Ayn Rand's best book IMO, basically just assumed the communists had won, and depicted the shit society that would result.
- Terry Pratchett's discworld. I assume Sir Terry Pratchett didn't believe in the efficacy of a dictatorship run by a psychopathic assassin, but damn did he make that system look good.
- Bioshock. From what I remember of developer commentary they are generally pretty average liberal sentiments. They actually wrote a great libertarianish character. I think in the followups they continued to write some great politicalish commentary.
- Animal Farm, where the communist author turned off everyone from communism.
- Ender's Game, where the Catholic religious author has a religious awakening in the character that goes off to speak at funerals. While the secular psychopath older brother ends up ruling the world.
I've written a bit of fiction on my own before, and I kinda get it. I felt I was at my best when a story just came to me from the muses. I let it flow onto the page, and it took me in unexpected directions. I was at my worst when I had some ideas of how things SHOULD work, and I tried to shove them in and make a point.
Some stories written in the modern day just feel like all those authorial instincts and all the inspiration from the muse just got shoved to the side. They had a point to make dammit, and they weren't gonna let a good story get in the way of making the point. Sigh whatever, they ignore the muses at their own peril. No one will like or care about their stories in the future. Some idiot genius that learns to listen to those whispers of the muse will beat them 9 times out of 10 in the long run.
Harry Potter Legacy, the ugly storytelling
I recently beat Harry Potter legacy. Lots of good story telling in most of it. But it had a low point. A trans bartender. There was a disconnect between the face I was seeing and the voice I was hearing. I thought maybe it was some kind of audio mistake at first. Why did this female looking character sound like a dude with a throat problem? Ah, they had to hamfistedly clear it up later, "I use to be wizard, [other character] still recognized me after i became a witch".
Look, this is a freaking magic world. Polyjuice potions can completely imitate someone else, voice included. So whatever magic she/he figured out to change their appearance couldn't also target their voice? Seems dumb.
Also it had the traditional problem that once came with female superheros. They can do no wrong, and they are strong and powerful. She is the only one to stand up to a powerful evil wizard and the evil wizard just ... backs down and lets it go. Unlike every other time that particular evil wizard has encountered a problem. I'm sorry, what? A bar owner is a powerful and scary enough wizard to scare away one of the main villains of the game, while the entire Hogwarts staff, and government of magical England is just kind of an afterthought that the evil wizard isn't worried about at all?
Dumb. The scene should have been rewritten. Trans person shouldn't have confronted evil wizard, they should have hid the player character, and shamelessly lied to evil wizard. After the evil wizard leaves, trans person should have suggested the player character lay low. That would be in line with the behavior of someone that spent most of their life hiding a deep dark secret, and then decided that their highest calling in a magic world was to own a bar. The wasted story and unrealized character growth disgusts me far more than the hamfisted "trans people are great" political messaging.
The comment below is reposted from here.
I understand people think I'm a troll, but I'm not, just lazy by this forums standards I guess. If I were to describe my politics, I'm a reluctant liberal.
I want to genuinely engage with this forum on topics like this without being seen as a bad faith actor, but I really am not smart enough to offer rebuttals like others here. I just know white nationalism is wrong but I'd like to see other smarter people here provide arguments for why.
I reposted this comment to spur discussion. I'm not a white nationalist, but I'm also not smart enough to offer a rebuttal and I'd like users here, who are a lot smarter, to point out blind spots in white nationalist arguments. The comment in question presents white nationalism as benign and free association as harmless, but that strikes me as wrong. My engagement with places like American Renaissance, which is probably on the lighter side of white nationalism, suggests that white nationalists base their beliefs on a kind of crude, visceral hatred of non-whites, especially black people.
Why do discussions of white nationalism always feel the need to explicitly mention rejecting violence? It implies this is the drive that animates them, a hatred of strangers. Literal xenophobia, which conjures up images of racial superiority or a drive to subjugate others.
Most white nationalists view themselves as reluctant realists. They are in most cases pattern recognizers, not the racist stereotypes the Left love to promote. They look at mixed societies and conclude different people with different evolutionary paths have inherited different physical and mental traits. This makes living together difficult for all parties.
Some of those traits mesh well with European societies (the high IQs and restraint of East Asians), and some do not (ethnicities with significantly poorer self control and shorter time horizons). As multicultural societies mature we observe these traits are persistent. Third generation Chinese are still restrained and clever; other groups can live in Western nations for centuries and continue to behave like their distant cousins on another continent no matter what we do with education and quotas.
Whites also look at examples of what a diverse population endures, from Brazil and America to natural experiments in artificially reversing emergent power structures. In Rhodesia and South Africa a tiny number of whites ran systems for a black-majority nation, with all the apartheid and related phenomenon most find distasteful. Even the king of the Zulus laments what blacks have wrought in South Africa, although this cannot be reported in the Western press. His comments about the Bantu are actively ignored and are more explicitly racist than anything whites ever say.
Much "white nationalism" is based on one simple observation - they are coming here; we are not going there. It is their job to assimilate not our job to agonize over the failure of them to do so.
Even more important, when the imperial era came to an end those who were there left when asked. India, the African nations and others cleared out their Europeans. Jamaica was handed over wholesale to the former slaves. The Haitians acquired their country in a manner more violent than even the liberals claim whites to be today. In modern terms all these nations rejected multiculturalism which they viewed as unnatural.
We are being held to standards no one else cares about and that even seeps in to articles like this, with the need to reassure everyone else our concerns about losing our cultures and territory are seen as an aberration. We have to guard against those questioning the status quo and explicitly reassure people violence must be rejected which plants a seed that curiosity about this subject is dangerous.
Finally, white nationalists look at the cultural tropes in the nations people are leaving to come to our nations. Pakistan and Arab countries do not tolerate foreigners emigrating to their countries. Pakistan have just expelled 1.7m Afghans, most Sunni muslims with similar social mores to Pakistanis, because they are "prone to criminality and terrorism." No hand wringing, no agonizing over "Pakistani nationalism." They couldn't assimilate despite Pakistan's best efforts so they were sent packing.
Nobody in Pakistan emphasizes only a tiny proportion of Afghans misbehave. Some of them do and the Pakistanis refuse to expend resources filtering through their population to find the bad ones. They had their chance and the safety of the natives trumps everything.
I get the need to be neutral, to be decent. But a big drive for people seeking out the data and the hard facts is this constant framing of homogeneity as being unusual or distasteful despite the fact 90 percent of the world's population views it as normal.
Believing the blank slate mantra and then observing something quite different is hard to make sense of. In primitive societies we would see something like the violent xenophobe reaction Western nations worry about. In European societies we see the opposite, with people very reluctantly concluding this may be going wrong. Lets find out, lets test, lets look around and see where culture mixing has actually worked and try that. Then we discover it doesn't seem to work anywhere. Even worse we find out almost no one thinks it makes sense. China is for the Chinese and India is for the Indians.
We all know the use of white nationalism is a euphemism for white supremacist or violent thugs who hate people that look different. The need to remind us of this potential for violence retards the genuine discussions we desperately need to try to make this all work or to abandon it completely.
User jewdefender has been banned. Discussing with other mods right now.
A few of us have high certainty that they are a troll of some sort. We just haven't been willing to ban, because it is not 100% certainty.
But they are also single issue posting and copy and pasted a comment from elsewhere to originally pass off as their own writing.
Edit: mod consensus is that this will stay as a permaban
Edit2: adding comment quote for posterity
cjet79
1yr ago
I'm not a fan of large social engineering projects, and wasn't one of the people advocating for fertility stuff.
The problem will eventually work itself out. The higher fertility places and cultures will become more dominant. It will just happen on timelines that are too long for people to care about. Probably at least two or three generations 40-60 years.
The scenario you bring up reminded me of something ... people like to start by fixing problems at a societal level. They want the federal government to just step in and wave a magic wand to fix things. But if you are forced to actually solve a problem, this is a backwards way of thinking about things. Instead of thinking at the national level, people should be thinking at the personal and local level. "What would make me have more kids?" and then "What would make my close family and neighbors have more kids?"
Me and my wife have good jobs so I don't really find myself money constrained when thinking about having more kids. We are actively trying to have more kids right now. (which will be number three, but earlier in my life I thought about having four kids, and now I don't think I can do it). I feel kid constrained because of time, stress, and space constraints. The two kids I do have I feel like they require a ton of effort, it feels impossible to just get everything done that needs to get done. The time spent hanging out with my kids is often one of the best times to get a bunch of important tasks done.
I tend to feel more stressed, because there is a local expectation of closely watching your kid. There is a playground right behind my house. I'd be able to see my kids from my house if they went to this playground. I think my parents might have just let me wander off and go play at the playground when I was my kids age, but I feel like if I did that for my kids it would be frowned upon.
Our house is a decent size, but we'd like to expand it if we were having more kids. We can't expand it due to regulatory constraints. We might be able to get around these regulatory constraints, but it will take time and stress (areas where I already feel resource constrained).
When I look around at my family and neighbors, the main additional constraint is medical (some of them have trouble having kids).
Its not that money isn't a true constraint for anyone, its just kinda lower on the list. And maybe if we had enough money some of the other constraints could be handled. I've considered hiring a personal assistant to deal with more of my life problems, but my wife hates that idea.
For me, and maybe some of my family and neighbors, we would be having more kids if the following things happened:
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Reduced local regulatory constraints on housing expansion.
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More communal child care opportunities. (things like birthday parties are great, my kids can get in some social time, and so can I). Its a pain for someone to host these, but everyone else usually enjoys coming along.
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More relaxed social attitudes, aka allow free range kids.
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Less bullshit bureaucratic things I have to deal with. Car stuff, taxes, and recently the city changed all our street addresses (cuz the old ones were racist or something). Those are annoyances that I wouldn't choose to deal with. But there are also things I choose to deal with that feel like they are made more difficult because of regulatory crap. I am trying to become a wedding officiant for my sister's wedding, trying to get banquet license for a recreational event, trying to setup doctors appointments for myself, trying to apply to some private schools for my daughters, etc. This is just the current stuff that is on my mind, but it feels like I've had a list of things just as long for the last few years even though I keep knocking things off the list every month.
The last one is the real kicker for me. Each one thing is usually no big deal on its own, but there are these constant bureaucratic bullshit things added on top of them that make each item take longer. And the kind of impulse people have that says "the federal government should do a thing to solve some societal issue" is exactly why I think that list of bureaucratic bullshit keeps growing. Everyone always thinks their one issue is so important, and they always think that any minor costs imposed by imposing their top down solution are very minimal. But the shit adds up. I can only imagine the nightmare that a national kids registry might choose to impose. How long before they start tying your kid benefits to other crap they care about. Oh, you can't get your child tax credit unless they have x doctor visits a year, because we need to actually make sure your kid is being taken care of. Submit the reports made by your daycare, or the child visitation officer who comes to inspect your home.
If there is one big societal problem that I want the federal government to fix then it is this one: people having the desire to fix big societal problems all at once via the federal government. I want a federal agency that makes it their goal to determine how much time the average American spends on bureaucracy, and when that number gets too high they have the power to go around axing bureaucratic requirements at other agencies. You think your issue is so important? Too bad, we are gutting your "save everyone at once at the federal level" program that requires hours of every American's time.
That is my little pipe dream. Just writing this should have been a stress reliever. But I feel more stressed now, I could have spent these moments of coffee fueled productivity to slog through another government form. And now I am one day closer to multiple deadlines hanging over my head.
cjet79
2mo ago
I went to George Mason Econ, still live nearby, and had lots of interactions with various parts of the university over the years.
The common online reputation of George Mason is basically totally wrong. People see it as a libertarian bastion of economic and legal research. That is basically just a portion of the economics college and the graduate law department. Its a tiny minority of the university. A very online and very prominent minority that most people know about, but if you are actually on campus or working there its very different. The density of libertarian students was pretty awesome when I went there, but it is still only like 5-10% of them. The Campus Democrats and even Campus Republican organizations were still much larger.
Most of the university is your traditional state school. If anything, its a little more diverse than most state schools, because of where it is located. The Language department is still mostly as crazy as any other school. But instead of having to go anywhere to protest things, they just step next door and make trouble for conservative or libertarian econ speakers that they don't like.
The Econ department and Law departments mostly survive because they have semi-independent funding form the rest of the university. There have been multiple attempts by other departments and the university in general to impose certain hiring restrictions, or to cut off those parts of the university. Those attempts have all failed, but they were still made. The "UnKoch my campus" organization has been in an ongoing battle with GMU Econ for over a decade at this point.
So basically it is entirely unsurprising that GMU would introduce some kind of woke required course. Or it is as surprising as any random State School introducing this sort of thing.
cjet79
9d 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.
cjet79
6mo ago
Wikipedia will soon eat its own in a purity spiral.
People always remember that the left takes over organizations, but they forget what happens afterwards. They become the victims of their own successful take over. The information isn't as good. The place isn't as fun. A group of people that live off of being victims must find an oppressor.
Scott Alexander already had to go through a minor version of this with the NYT article. The article talked to an admin of wikipedia that had things to say about Scott Alexander, the NYT repeated those allegations, that wikipedia admin then went and edited the article about Scott to effectively cite himself saying things about Scott.
They barely turned it over when this bullshit became known within the wiki community. And the admin that did it? No punishments, no loss of admin status, not even a slap on the wrist as far as I know.
Scott is a heterodox leftist for the online world. But he is still very much a leftist in the real world compared to real voters. He is to the left of about 90-99% of the country on most issues.
They'll keep purging until it starts falling apart, and then they'll beg for and likely receive government funding to stay afloat.
cjet79
8mo ago
If I lived in the 1700s, I would probably be a libertarian. Technology hadn't advancad as far, and resources were more scarce, so if almost everyone didn't work hard for long hours, then everyone would starve, and a capitalist economy seems like a decent enough way to incentivize that.
I'm glad that we can agree incentives are necessary to some degree. I think I'd disagree on the amount of free floating wealth that is actually available today.
It's difficult for me to say that today. Take my previous job for example. I have to work 40-50 hours per week just to not be homeless, while my boss's boss has to work, on average, about 1 hour per week. He's not particularly intelligent or productive; the only reason he doesn't have to work as much as I do is that he was born rich and I wasn't. He didn't gain this wealth through hard work or taking risks, he gained it because his father was wealthy, who gained it because his father was weathy, who gained it because one of his ancestors found a silver mine under his property by accendent. I don't believe that he has a right to have double the free time that I do for the rest of his life while I don't just because he's from a weathly family.
I think wealth inheritance often appears unfair when viewed from the children's generation, but fair when viewed from the parents generation. The inevitability of it also becomes obvious when viewed from the parents generation. If you survive to your old age and have a bunch of kids you love, and you are rich and well off, wouldn't you want to spend some of that money to make the people you love more comfortable? To have someone else then come in and say "no, thats not fair that your kid gets a nice life, they must work and suffer like everyone else". I might feel like "why did I bother to earn all that wealth then?". Preventing generational wealth transfers seems largely impossible without just completely destroying the concept of private wealth. I can't tell if you are fine with destroying the concept of private wealth, if you are then I'd like some idea of who is supposed to own things instead. And by ownerhsip I mean final or majority say in how an asset is used.
Additionally, our company turns a substantial profit. I receive a very small proportion of that profit, and he receives 10 times that, despite the fact that his individual productivity is drastically lower than mine.
Does your boss have an ownership stake? He is being paid for that investment money, not for his productivity.
Think of it this way, there are three things you can do with wealth:
- Consume it. Food / vacation / travel / experiences / etc.
- Preserve it. Keep something that tends to hold its value over long time periods. Previous metal / art / land / etc.
- Invest it. Create a business that generates more wealth.
Ultimately most people want to consume wealth. Even preserving it is just is a way to delay consumption. Consuming wealth is also the least risky thing to do. You've done the thing, its over, its gone. It is rare that anyone can steal your past consumption of wealth. Preserving it for later consumption carries some risk. Someone might steal your stuff, or the thing you were holding lost its value for some reason. Maybe too many people were using it to store wealth, and not enough were actually valuing the thing being stored (these are called asset bubbles).
The most risky thing they can do is invest it. There is always a chance that a business will fail, or just that it will fail to return a bunch of profits. You might as well have consumed the wealth rather than investing it.
This is why there is a price to capital, and why you pay the investors. The more investors there are, the less you have to pay them. The more likely the investors are to lose their money, the more you have to pay them.
I don't believe that he has a right to more of the profits than I do, when I am more productive than he is.
I'm assuming your boss has some form of ownership stake. He is getting paid for that ownership stake, and the risks associated.
The irony is that the main thing preventing workers from just cutting out the middle man and refusing to give the owners their cut is that the state would side with the owners of the means of production, violently if necessary.
No, there is actually nothing preventing the workers from owning the business. This is fully legal in the US, and quite a few socialists I have spoken to love to point out various examples of worker owned cooperatives. You are not allowed to steal something you didn't create. This goes back to what I discussed earlier, the various owners of the company chose to invest rather than consuming the wealth. Had they known their investment would just get stolen, obviously they would have just consumed it instead. This is both an implicit and explicit (legally codified) relationship that business owners have in most countries. The government says "we will not just steal all of your investment" and the currently wealthy people either believe them and invest, or they don't believe them and just consume or preserve their wealth. You basically want to reneg on that agreement and change the terms in a way that benefits yourself at their expense.
I could, in theory, quit and go to a different job, but that, in all likelihood, would be exactly the same situation. I could start my own competing business, but I would be unlikely to ever be able to compete with my former employer, as they own the means of production, and have an economy of scale, and I would never be able to afford that.
There are lots of rich people. They don't all get along, or even like each other. If you are short on capital there are such things as loans and investment. If your current company is also underpaying workers then you could eat their lunch by offering wage increases to their employees and stealing their talent. Very few businesses are permanently entrenched in the US, and many that are have done so through government edicts and support. There is a huge amount of turnover in the S&P 500 decade to decade.
If starting a business and potentially losing lots of money to your competitors sounds scary and risky, then realize that is what your current company's investors already went through. That is why they are earning outsized profits. Its a survivor bias. You meet the rich gamblers in Vegas because they can afford to stay around, all the poor sops who lost it all are dead or gone. By definition you work at the business that made it. Not at the business that failed. I obviously have no clue how much risk is involved, you haven't told me anything about the industry. What I do know is that there are rarely million dollar bills lying around on the sidewalk. The business you work in is likely within normal parameters for returns on risk, capital investment returns, and share of money paid to labor.
Also, the rise of technology has led the average worker's productivity to skyrocket over the last few decades. Logically, this should lead to them being able to work drastically fewer hours for the same pay, but in reality, the average work week is the same it was 40 years ago, and average pay is about the same with respect to inflation. As automation gets better and better, it should ideally lead to a society where we have to work less and less, and have more free time, but this is not the case for most people. Since our system is set up such that most people can only support themselves by working 40-50 hours per week, automation becomes a threat to out jobs rather than a benefit, because our system only gives people value insofar as they benefit the people who own the means of production.
My career has generally been one where I work less and get paid roughly the same amount. I'm in web programming. I know its not the same for everyone. But I've also known plenty of people that don't work in the type of industries where productivity is drastically increasing.
There is also another thing to consider. I've talked so far about investors/owners in a business. You've talked about the workers. But we haven't talked much about the consumers. They exist and they have their own set of options. The price of the vast majority of goods and services have gone down over the last few decades. The huge exceptions to this are healthcare, education, and housing. They are each all their own massive topic, so I won't be getting into them.
Personally, I believe the (usually local, sometimes state/province, and occasionally federal) government should control many industries, and private industry should be limited to industries that are difficult to put an objective value on, like entertainment. The purpose of this would be to ensure that workers should receive the value of their labor with minimal amounts given to management. Anyone should be able to start a government-owned businesses to allow some choices for consumers while still guaranteeing workers the value of their labor.
I think in practice you'd find a lot of industries have degrees of subjective value involved. Communist countries have routinely run into these problems. What do you tell the iron nail factory to produce, and how do you know they are doing a good job? There was one point where they were judged based on how many nails they produced, so there were many tiny nails produced and not enough large ones. Then the metric was changed to weight of nails produced, and they just produced very large heavy nails. And nails as a product have been around for millenia they are one of the simplest products.
And do you not think management does anything? Have you never had a lazy co-worker who doesn't get much done? If you haven't then you've had amazing management and you should be singing their praises. More likely, you've had a lazy co-worker, and you were annoyed with management for not firing this person. But firing people is very unpleasant. Are you willing to punish a lazy worker that isn't doing their part? And if 'management' has the power to fire people, how do you know they won't just fire the people they dislike, rather than the unproductive ones?
Usually the answer to all of these questions is that you have to tie management's incentives to team productivity. So that if there is a lazy or unproductive worker the manager suffers from having that worker on the team. If all the people on the team are great then it should look like management is not doing anything. Management is sort of like the IT industry of economic systems. Everyone notices when they are doing badly, and everyone complains they are doing nothing when things run smoothly.
Additionally, I believe that the state should ensure that all their citizens receive the essentials, including a place to live, electric/water/internet, safe transportation around their town/city, and high-protein food.
I am not highly against a welfare state. I just don't think we are really at the point to provide it. At best we can provide it to a small minority of people. Possibly most people that live in a first world nation. I would rather see us continue on the wealth creation process until welfare is affordable to everyone in the world, not just those born in the correct country. Welfare states tend to want to close their borders to foreigners, and one of the best welfare programs that exists is capitalism. It is unrivaled at raising the living standard for large groups of people. You yourself admitted it was great to have capitalism in the 18th century, but I'd like to point out that most of the world doesn't have much better living standards than what was available in 18th century Britain.
The engine of capitalism is chugging along and doing great things. And it pulled you and those around you out of poverty, and now you want to turn it off because the engine is loud and annoying. But there are lots of other people still waiting to be pulled out. I think it would be wrong to shut it off now. Once the poorest in the world can complain that they have to work 40 hours a week just to afford their home, food, and entertainment I might be willing to discuss shutting off the engine.
cjet79
5mo ago
This is similar to people using the term "NPCs" to describe others. I've never liked or ascribed to that terminology. The feeling you describe is not totally unfamiliar to me, but it isn't quite right for me. You describe feeling like you are a part of the tribe, and suddenly realizing you are not. I never felt entirely comfortable with the idea that I was in the tribe in the first place. I slowly had it confirmed over the years that "yes, your feelings are correct, we don't want you in the tribe". There wasn't a grand illusion that broke, I was just always sitting in the far wings of the theater where I could see the flatness of the background facade that looked so beautiful from the center seats.
Your questions at the end imply a certain yearning to return to the comforting embrace of the beautiful illusion. And you noticed that people still under the illusion got mad at your for pointing out things that might break the illusion for them. Your yearning to return seems to validate their anger. I have no illusion to return to. I'd burn down the illusion if I thought I could.
cjet79
10mo ago
I was always surprised and a little confused that the "bat soup" theory was labelled the non-racist theory.
cjet79
1yr ago
Partial Mod-Hat: If I had seen this first it would have been at least a one day ban. Intentionally violating a rule and not being punished for it makes the rule meaningless. I would have preferred to make an example of a post like this, rather than just allowing it with a light warning. For anyone thinking of pulling this in the future, please take note that OP's lack of a ban is from Luck rather than official policy. End of partial mod-hat
Thoughts on some things:
The Crime of living under an Administrative State
The underlying "crime" seems dumb. It is a result of an overactive administrative state. Its exactly the type of reason why overactive administrative states are evil. There are hundreds of thousands of rules, and a single mistake is enough justification to wage a legal war. Two mistakes in close enough proximity can get mashed together to more than double the consequences. The question we should ask is, can someone pay off their mistress to keep quiet? If yes, end of story. If no, then Hollywood watch out. All the complaints about how the money might have been mislabeled are administrative state bullshit. Why should I need to label how my money (or my businesses' money) is spent for the administrative state? If Trump had labelled the expense "payoff to stormy Daniels" do we have any expectation that the administrative state would be happy, and wouldn't do something like conveniently "leaking" that detail to the press?
John Edwards, Campaign Finance
One of the "rebuttals" to this administrative state unfairness, is that the unfairness was pointed the other direction a decade ago. John Edwards got in trouble for using donations to cover up an affair. Here is the problem, Campaign Finance laws are blatantly unconstitutional. They clearly violate the First Amendment. Campaign finance survives the court system because judges are smart enough to realize that those laws are in place to give legitimacy to the US government. And the actual job of every judge is to hold up the legitimacy of the government, ruling on court cases is merely their means of accomplishing that goal. Campaign finance laws are also always doomed to failure. You can't take money out of politics when politics is so wrapped up in the economy. Anyways, a decade ago when the Obama administration was still getting its legs under itself, parts of the administrative state were still controlled by Neo-Con types. Its not a surprise they used some lawfare to go after a Democratic politician. People here either seem to have short memories, or they've lived shorter lives than me. The post-9/11 period of government, up until about 2010 was absolutely filled with shady things being done by the government that seemed to benefit the Neo-Con agenda. In the exact same way that the opposite is happening today.
State vs State Lawfare
The DeSantis refusal to assist in arrest is interesting. It speaks to a coming problem facing the American legal system. If it hasn't happened already, it soon will happen that there things that are crimes in one state, and in other states NOT doing that thing will be a crime. Trans issues for kids are already splitting that way. The NY attorney is currently going after Trump. Meanwhile Missouri and some other states are going after Fauci. I happen to hate Fauci, and I'm cheering on Missouri, but I'm part of the 'problem' of expanding lawfare. States with entrenched political interests can afford to wage lawfare on the national stage against their political opponents. No one else really has the resources to wage lawfare on the national stage, which Elites probably saw as a feature rather than a bug.
There are also cases of states weaponizing the constitution against the federal government. It might have been Missouri as well, but they passed a law a while back saying that it was Illegal for any state law enforcement agents to enforce unconstitutional federal gun bans. There were a lot of details to the law that made it look like it was basically a setup for a perfect legal challenge against a federal gun law. Coincidentally gun laws have not been getting passed as often lately, so I guess this law hasn't been tripped up yet.
There are "sanctuary" cities. Of various types of sanctuary. Initially for immigration. Now other things that cities don't want to enforce just aren't enforced.
The next Civil (court) War
It is worth thinking about what the end state of all this lawfare will look like. I don't think it actually leads to a hot war with bullets flying. Most of the court cases and topics end up being so dumb and boring that people can barely grab onto what is happening. Instead I think it ends in gridlock. Federal and State courts clogged with cases of lawfare that drag on for many many years. The Supreme Court unable to break the gridlock, because they are a part of the lawfare as well, and their reputation as non-partisan has been damaged too badly. Bureaucratic agencies unable to enforce any of their edicts on suddenly unwilling and uncooperative states. A president would have to call in the troops to start enforcing federal bureaucratic mandates, otherwise state LE just plays a game of arrest and release of any bureaucrats that step on their territory. But even the troops aren't too effective ... after all the issue is going to go to a local court with a local judge presiding, and a favorable local jury of peers.
The way out
Courts have a letter of the law vs spirit of the law problem. We have tried a system of enforcing the letter of the law for the past century. I think it ends in the gridlock scenario outlined above. Laws aren't mathematical enough to all coexist nice and peacefully with one another. There are conflicts, discrepancies, and gaping holes all over. The court system has been papering over those problems for as long as they can. But everyone is starting to see the problems. Trump, as always, is just a catalyst. No one has even bothered asking what spirit of the law Trump has broken. They went straight to finding the tiny letters that he might have broken.
I think the way out will require a great reset of court systems. Possibly with everyone getting their own AI lawyers. Or possibly a system that doesn't require any lawyers. Courts will need to re-establish themselves as bastions of fairness and justice. Rather than just as battlefield locations for lawfare. The longer the period of gridlock or legal failure, the more likely it will be that "Courts" come out looking/feeling/being named something completely different. Courts will have to focus on spirit of the law. Where people that don't violate a single law might still get prosecuted, because they so obviously violated the spirit. Or where people that broke a million tiny elements of the law get off completely free, because they weren't doing anything that actually violated the purpose of the laws.
cjet79
17d ago
I recently saw an item in my newfeed about The American Exchange Project:
To connect our divided country, the American Exchange Project sends high school seniors on a free, week-long trip to a hometown very different from their own.
There was some positive feedback in the news article I read. I found it a bit surprising just how much the rural/urban divide has grown. I've often lived between the two areas with my schools often having kids living in high density housing along with kids raising barn animals. My parents preferred living rurally, but still had to live close to cities to find jobs.
I've been on two exchange programs myself. One as a middle/high schooler going to Europe with Student Ambassadors (a now dead org). And the second as more of a work exchange trip going to the company's India office. There is something undeniably effective about just having very different people sit down and talk/interact with each other in a non-violent setting. Not that I really disliked either set of people before visiting them, but I felt I definitely understood them better afterwards. There are coincidences of living, and the things you see living in an area. They just sorta seep into your conscious. My young middle school self noticed that Europe generally did not give a crap about topless women. Tits galore on billboards and beaches in Spain. Europe was also pretty open with alcohol, and the 15 year old in the German family I stayed with openly told her parents about the drinking party she was going to. They had to remind her that I wasn't allowed to go, and American drinking ages had to be explained. Bunch of things I noticed in India as well, main one was just the sheer volume of people.
Had a shower thought today about how some people (like Joe Rogan) thought Covid would bring us closer together as we worked to solve and fight a collective problems. I think we maybe mostly agree that did not happen. I'm starting to think that covid was the opposite kind of problem we need. To get that kind of problem solving, humanity coming together juice, I think more people need to be offline, meeting in person, and ignoring things happening too far away from them.
Staring at the sun today. Watching the eclipse today, reminded me about solar flares. I'd predict that a widespread solar flare that knocked out communication networks would probably leave us all a little happier than Covid. It would probably be very bad for some people, but we'd know less about those people.
cjet79
1mo ago
As of this time @HlynkaCG has been permabanned. I'm posting this message at the top of the thread, because its not really for Hlynka, its for the community to know. There were a few different posts I could have chosen in the modqueue, and many of them were too buried to be visible. The mod team has given him repeated warnings and bans. And I personally reached out to him last ban to warn him that a permaban was likely coming if this behavior continued.
I mostly do not feel this is a good thing, but it is a necessary thing. Hlynka had quite a few quality contributions, and I don't think I was alone in appreciating his often unique (for themotte) perspective. But he repeatedly did it in a way that just wasn't acceptable for the rules around here.
I would like people to have a few takeaways:
- No one on this forum is infinitely excused of bad behavior. Having quality contributions and providing a unique viewpoint might get you some additional leeway, but our patience isn't unlimited.
- The mods do read and participate here. We know when someone is starting to abuse that leeway. We know when there is frustration about it.
- We do try to be deliberate and slow about things. It can feel real shitty when a cabal of people meet in secret to discuss your punishment and they decide permanent banishment is the solution. For longtime users that have put in the time and effort to be a part of the community here we don't lightly jump to permanent bans as a solution.
Please keep any discussion civil.
cjet79
2mo ago
I don't think announcing the release of a covid vaccine days after the election was in any way illegal. It was probably enough to sway the election.
I don't think implying to major social media networks that the Hunter Biden laptop story was fake was illegal. It was probably enough to sway the election.
I don't think investigating Trump for nearly 3 years for collusion with Russia that ultimately turned out to be nothing was illegal. It was probably enough to sway the election.
I don't think freaking out over covid and insisting that the country completely shutdown and tank the economy was illegal. It was probably enough to sway the election.
None of these things were illegal, but they were all very very dirty and despicable. If they had just done one of them I might chalk it up to coincidence. But all of them happened, and other people can probably list their own examples. With so many events I strongly doubt they were all coincidences. I also say this as someone who never has and never would vote for Trump. I usually get sick of election politics about a year before the election. But I fully get why people have the unwavering sense that the election was stolen, while not having a single shred of "evidence" that applies to a court case.
cjet79
7mo ago
Though this is a quote, I believe that it is so precisely said that it is worth posting on the top level.
Incorrect. Don't do this.
cjet79
10mo ago
I think if pride just meant LGB then there wouldn't be much backlash during pride month.
Gay men and lesbian women seem largely accepted by society, and I don't know of many recent controversies surrounding them.
The TQ part of the alphabet seems to be the lightning rod lately. The Ts mess with long established gender dynamics, more than LGBs ever did. The Qs often seem like they are faking for diversity points or engage in levels of ridiculousness that is hard to take seriously, for example there are popular videos out there of people identifying as birds and goblins. There is a real question of how much I have to buy into some strangers' fantasies and fetishes.
Importantly, as a matter of sheer numbers the TQ part is also a very small section of LGBTQ.
This makes me wonder if some kind of split is coming. LGBs can either continue allying with TQs and risk some society wide backlash. Or they can jettison the political hot potatoes and go fully mainstream tomorrow. I suspect democratic politicians in swing districts will be doing this, and so will large multi-national companies.
cjet79
9mo ago
1 day ban.
Please take a look around at other top level posts. There is an expected minimum level of effort.
Edit- increasing ban to ten days. You have been warned and banned before for this exact thing.
cjet79
1yr 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
Would be funny if games just started saying we have x number of trans characters, without any need to identify them, or even think about it ever in the development process. Free controversy/advertising without effort.
cjet79
1yr ago
I am married now and don't really do the whole dating thing. But I am still on the lookout for new friends, and although friendship is lower stake, politics does seem to matter a little more with friends than it used to.
The underlying problem is that people seem to inhabit entirely different worlds nowadays depending on their politics. Your social media bubble and news diet can make your perception of the world completely different from that of your neighbors. The news stories you know about, the 'must watch' shows, the latest international incidents, etc. Its just hard to culturally connect with someone that has nothing in common with me. I am politically libertarian, and I was never gonna agree with their politics in the first place, but I have at least learned how to handle political disagreements in a friendly way. I don't know how to handle disagreements about reality itself.
The pandemic seemed to have made this far worse, with fewer people inhabiting a shared local reality, and instead inhabiting a shared political reality in the online space. But the pandemic also created a filter for shared local reality that I have been enjoying. All the people who aren't very worried about the pandemic tend to be the people out in the world interacting with each other. As long as I am someplace that is fully optional to be in (like a restaurant, and not like a school or grocery store) then I can safely assume I share at least some of my perception of reality with the people around me.
cjet79
3mo ago
This is the only video I could find, and only by adding "Joe Rogan" to my search terms which is apparently an alternate tag for "original video". In the video Alex Jones is telling people to avoid a confrontation with Police, and to march to the other side. He is a hundred or more feet away from the capitol building.
Mostly you can know that Alex Jones had zero involvement, because there is no footage of him having any involvement. If there was anything remotely implicating him it would have been blasted on every news channel. Your vague intuition of "Alex Jones would do something like this" is the exact same intuition as the people that put that intuition there in the first place. If they could have fed it, they would have.
Its also part of my continuing frustration with the state of the world. Common perception has diverged massively. You have the intuition that Alex Jones would do something. I have the intuition that Alex Jones would be set up and blamed for doing that thing while being totally innocent. The evidence for your intuition is easily findable in a bunch of second hand news sources that all vaguely hint in that direction, without ever saying enough to get hit with a slander lawsuit. The evidence for my intuition is buried and nearly impossible to find despite it being something I heard on the most listened to podcast series in the world.
cjet79
4mo ago
[info about the ruling]
You have context.
Mother Jones, NPR, CBS, and Foreign Policy (of all the friggin' places) are running articles breathlessly proclaiming DOOM! for the US tax code, or at least the ability of Democrats to pass wealth tax laws.
You have analysis.
This Forbes article seems to be a pretty good explanation of what's at issue but I'll admit that I'm not well-versed enough in tax law to understand the full ramifications of what a Moore victory would mean for the ability of the federal government to raise revenue. On the other hand, I can't say I'm sad about the idea of a wealth taxes getting a bullet to the head. What am I missing or not considering as I read about this from the various outlets?
You have an opinion and a jumping off point for the discussion.
(Mods, let me know if I need to delete this and repost in Small Questions Sunday.)
Not necessary. From my perspective you have all the important parts required for a top level post. I'm mod tagging my comment just so people have some insight into how I judge top level posts. Having Context, Analysis, and a Jumping off point / Opinion is enough for a top level post. CAJO.
cjet79
7mo ago
Its a party in power thing. Party in power is always pro-war. In the last century there are only a few exceptions of presidents not initiating a conflict of some kind: https://historyguy.com/wars_by_president.htm Nixon is the only two-term president to get that honor.
In 2000 Bush ran on a "humble" foreign policy platform of no nation building. He planned to not continue pursuing the foolish wars and military interventions of the Clinton administration. If this sounds like parody to you, welcome to life in America with a long memory. This is maybe one of the first realignments that you are noticing.
If a republican wins the next election, within a year or so the democrats will be blaming the republicans for how they are handling the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Even if they basically handle it the exact same way.
They were invaded by the 2nd politest mob of the covid era. Politest goes to the canadian trucker convoy.
There was only a single death from violence, and it was a protestor shot by security. I think all the other deaths were via heart attack, including the one security guard that people originally claim was attacked with a fire extinguisher.
Nothing was burned down. No one was run over by a car. There were no large scale medieval weapons fights. The "mob" dispersed when asked to.
There were a few groups of FBI informants that roped in a few retards to plan on doing more stuff. They got caught and heavily prosecuted, the same way every other group like this has been caught and prosecuted. The racial makeup and supposed "motivations" of the retards has changed, but the FBI playbook hasn't.
I normally don't care to comment on Trump stuff, but I don't like the massive gaslighting that it feels like we all went through during 2020.
During the summer of 2020 there were massive riots in the streets. Cars, police stations, and businesses burned to the ground and looted. Large physical confrontations in the streets. People out at the wrong time being beaten to death by mobs. It was helpfully pointed out the time that the protestors themselves didn't carry out these beatings or killings. I'm sure the victims of the violence felt much better in their afterlives knowing that their deaths were only tangentially caused by the lawlessness that the protests created.
The health authorities that had insisted on everyone being locked down and not going outside to even mingle within parks also wrote a blank check to these protestors. They were no longer "super spreader" events, but some weird health carve out where protesting police violence somehow made you immune to spreading covid.
That was the context of the January 6th protest. Some people broke some windows and busted down a door, and then a bunch of others just calmly walked through the capital building like they were on tour and took silly photos like it was a fairground. Meanwhile every news station in the country breathlessly talked about the "violence" of the January 6th protest. The same news stations that were talking about the "peaceful" protests that same summer as buildings burned in the background of the newscast.
"They interrupted an important government function" - someone, hopefully not you
No, they interrupted a ceremony of the state religion. The presidential level of politics isn't a place of law and order, its a place of feelings, perception, and group consensus. At most it caused the equivalent of a rain delay, and it was all still done within a day. There was no plausible way that delaying the ceremonies on January 6th would have impacted who was president for the 2020-2024 term. Even if the ceremony had somehow never happened, Biden would still have become president. Because most of the US government acknowledged him as such.
The January 6th incident has caused the media to invent this weird perception that our government is one delayed ceremony away from being overthrown. As if every top leader in the country is a rules following robot, where if the proper procedures aren't exactly followed then they'll just collapse in a heap and stop functioning. We are supposed to believe this despite mountains of evidence to the contrary ... the explicit rules of the constitution have been broken many times, and the typical reaction, if there is any at all, is a collective shrug.
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