cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
5d ago
Conversation is a skill and it requires a great deal of practice. I don't think most people ever get good at it. Top 10 percentile get good at it in their twenties. Top 25 percentile get good in their mind 30s. Most of the rest never get good.
I'd say my own performance is spotty at best.
cjet79
5d ago
I get that there is a legal difference, but the line is very thin when it is an Obama administration team proposing a massive bill to Congress and pushing it through so fast that barely anyone had time to read and understand it.
If Congress is going to rubber stamp anything the president puts in front of them (with maybe just a few pork barrel spending concessions added in) then it's not very different from going around Congress altogether.
I'm not saying this is ok. I'd prefer it if Congress would do their fucking job. But the imperial presidency has been a growing concern for decades at this point (or a even a century). I don't feel entirely comfortable blaming it on one party or even one particular president. If I had to I'd probably put the blame on 9/11 over reaction and George Bush. Obama was partly elected by people claiming he would reign in this sort of thing. Instead he just changed the flavor.
I just see this as less of a bright line has been crossed and more of a continuing escalation. I don't know where I'd put the bright line. If you'd asked me a century ago to place a bright line I'm sure FDR would have crossed it first. If you'd asked me anytime in the last three decades I'm sure that line would have been crossed about a decade later.
cjet79
5d ago
And? As you said Obama didn't create any brand new taxes, but he arguably did. And by arguably I don't just mean there is one loose interpretation where he might have done that. I mean it went before the supreme Court and it was a hotly contested issue by multiple states signing on to that case.
cjet79
6d ago
Obama did some stuff along the same lines, but he didn't invent new taxes wholesale.
That was the exact issue that got Obamacare in front of the supreme Court. Individual mandate to buy insurance was a new type of tax or a very old one that hasn't been used in a while (a head tax).
cjet79
6d ago
I'm somewhat tempted to blame venture capital.
Many of these web companies grew into what they are while catering to the whims of VC funds. Which usually meant massive and rapid growth to get as many users as possible. Which is not a bad strategy when you have less than millions of users. But at some point in the millions of users you need to convert to monetization of those user's. But that is typically when the firm goes public and loses all guidance from the VC. Or worst of all is stuck with founding leadership that was optimized for the "acquire users at all costs" schtick.
I'm now wondering if it's a software investment problem in general. AAA games seem to follow a similar dumb logic. Endless cloning and copying of the hatest hit, barely any differentiation among the top products.
cjet79
6d ago
I think I said it before, probably YEARS ago, but if Twitch had made a serious effort to stick to its core model of "person records and broadcasts themselves as they play a video game on their computer" they'd be having an easier time avoiding scandal.
Seems to be a core problem of the internet. Reddit also had an opportunity to become the default discussion forum / comment section for everything on the internet. But they instead wanted to chase instagram and tiktok and came out with a UI that both destroyed their old model and failed to bring anything new to the doomscroll model. They've chased every internet fad and failed every time. Now a gaming chat service (discord) is stuck being one of the default discussion and comment sections for the internet. Which its bad at, but at least it isn't fighting that role like reddit has been since its inception.
cjet79
10d ago
Regulation is often a barrier to entry rather than a full on industry killer. Big incumbent companies like barriers to entry. I think tobacco industry is fine with current levels of regulation.
Pharma companies political control doesn't show up as easily because they just do heavy ad spend on all the news networks.
I think there are heavy limitations to the AIPAC strategy and I laid them out down thread. I don't think it's as much of a killer strategy as Scott implies.
cjet79
10d ago
Ya realized that last night and didn't care. Now it's morning and I kinda care again.
cjet79
11d ago
You aren't too far from me, if you ever want to try a fun sport come down to the northern Virginia area and play some underwater hockey with me.
cjet79
11d ago
I think the AIPAC method and big money spending in general has some big limitations:
- Can't be an existing issue with that divides along party lines. I just don't think any urban democrats are gonna come out in favor of guns no matter how much money you pour into their primary opponents. Same with rural Republicans on abortion. Purity tests are very effective, and that's partly why attack ads work in the first place. But someone that truly and openly fails a purity test is gonna have a lot of barriers to winning within either party machine.
- It generally can't be something most Americans care deeply about. Or else a backlash group will form and try to negate all your progress. The Koch brothers spent decades funding small academic institutions with the goal of having more libertarian scholars in academia. They've partially succeeded but now unKoch my campus exists and the universities have gotten much worse then they were decades ago when the project started. Americans care about universities. Barely anyone cares about AI, or crypto, or foreign countries on the other side of the world.
- Even if they don't care about it now, you can't endlessly exploit an issue without making them care about it. For half a century Disney was able to shamelessly and repeatedly lobby to extend copyright with basically zero opposition. Two decades ago people started to notice and complain. A bunch of groups formed, none of them with massive resources. But they grew to the point that Disney finally didn't bother lobbying for another copyright extension.
cjet79
12d ago
The threshhold for a net productive citizen is very low in my mind.
There is a concept in economics called the velocity of money. Basically money doesn't just disappear when it is spent, it usually get reused and spent on other things. Higher velocity things usually cause more spending and re-spending.
cjet79
12d ago
What edgecityred said is good stuff. Also:
Your secondary ID is other people that have not lost their IDs and are willing to make a lot of calls and spend money for you.
Parent / spouse work best since they will have a reason for knowing you and a paper trail that connects you.
Your employer/ HR department if you are traveling for business reasons.
A good friend might help you in some ways that require spending money, but not as much on identity things. Unless you pre-plan giving them documents or access to your private stuff.
If you are traveling outside of your country your embassy can also help you out.
You will need to memorize their numbers or have a way of contacting them in case of an emergency.
cjet79
13d ago
obiter dictum
Wut
a judge's incidental expression of opinion, not essential to the decision and not establishing precedent.
Ah ok.
cjet79
13d ago
This analysis looks wrong to me too, and I think I'd go further than @fmac and say that there are ways to make anyone a net productive citizen. There are probably barriers to accomplishing it, but its theoretically possible.
Adding a homeless / jobless beggar may seem always net negative. But if you can manage to rope in federal funds, or sympathetic donations from other areas you can turn that homeless / jobless beggar into a net bringer of wealth to the town. Or at the other extreme a single billionaire living in a town of ten thousand people. The billionaire basically pays all the taxes of the town. But that tax revenue gives the billionaire enormous leverage over all policy and enforcement. They can get out of just about any legal trouble in the town. They can get any building or new business approved for their friends, or denied for people that they don't like. Those are the theoretical reasons why I think your analysis breaks down.
In practical terms the story of the billionaire is usually more indicative of why towns are happy to add more people. Policy and policy enforcement can be carefully tailored in such a way that tax contributions and government services can be very equally balanced. Wealthy neighborhoods are often full of people who know how to manipulate the levers of local government, and are also full of people that are actively running the local government. Running governments requires human capital, and human capital tends to align with wealth and resources over time. Wealthy neighborhoods get better response times from emergency services, better access to public parks, and those parks are more likely to be kept clean and patrolled by the police. Their roads get repaved and fixed sooner. The schools get more oversight and quality. Successful businesses fill in the commercial space around those neighborhoods. The effects go on and on. The common phrase "you get what you pay for" applies to local government. Its hard to quantify it, but if you live in the different areas it just becomes very noticeable.
One major and obvious problem with your analysis that I saw in the discussion with fmac is that you are way over-counting the cost of schooling for a very simple reason: people aren't in school their entire lives. You need to offset the cost of school based on the number of years of their life that they will be in school. Just like if a road needs to be repaved every three years, you don't count the one time cost of repaving on every year's budget. You divide that spending across the three years. This does method does not even assume any benefits to schooling. To make the math easy lets just say people are only in school for 1/4 of their lives. So if the per student per year cost for a district is $20,000 you should instead think of it as $5,000.
cjet79
14d ago
WWII as the founding myth of the modern regime
I agree this is probably true, but it also strikes me as weird. Because the regime myth up until the 90s was way more about fighting and containing communism. Or just preserving a spot for freedom and individualism in the world.
cjet79
16d ago
@ZorbaTHut looked into it a few hours ago:
odd. it seemed like a memory leak, so I've rebooted it, and it's not coming up. trying to figure out what's up
alright, I think it was just a rapid increase in bot traffic for some reason. I've done some stuff to fight the bots back, and while it's not perfect, it does seem improved
cjet79
17d ago
I'm not conservative so maybe you aren't counting me among the responses you read, but I wouldn't fit in either of those categories.
I think people are allowed to be ugly imperfect beings within private spaces, because we already have a great deal of "public" spaces and the judgement within those public spaces is already very harsh.
Politicians and political actors need to be good about distinguishing between private and public spaces.
The Charlie Kirk situation seems totally different then this one or the Jay Jones one. The outrage there is about leftists making public comments of glee or happiness at the man's death. These aren't leaked conversations, its people posting it widely on social media, or saying it on a TV show.
The Jay Jones situation is comparable. And I think the democratic machine mostly did the correct thing and the republicans should have done it too: just entirely ignore this and pretend it didn't happen.
Which is a norm I'd kindly suggest everyone adopt: ignore all leaked private conversations. At a minimum, know that the leaker or publisher of the leaks is an asshole. The reason I'd suggest this norm is that society with zero privacy in communications is awful for everyone. And incentivizing leaks is going down the road of zero private communications.
cjet79
18d ago
What is your threshold for being convinced? If you don't have one that's fine, that saves me even more time.
cjet79
18d ago
So two adults coordinating a child porn ring is acceptable as long as it's done in private? Might need to walk back your literally nothing claim here.
I italicized "said" for a very specific reason. Plenty of things you can do that are unacceptable behavior. But the doing is the bad part not the saying. And ya you can larp being pedos in your own private time. As long as you don't do it why should I care?
I'm sorry, but if you're in such a world where you genuinely believe that every man jokes this way and anyone who doesn't is just a liar, it says a lot more about you and the people you hang out with in your dark matter world than about men in general.
This "world" I'm living in is also called TheMotte. Every other comment here is agreeing with me. I don't think it is literally every man, but it's close. Similar to the percentage of men that jerk off to porn. Sorry if that is also a revelation to you.
This type of defense is truly incredible just as a concept though. Like it's literally "Yes all men!" but as an endorsement, it comes off as a lack of imagination and theory of mind.
I don't think I'm the one lacking in theory of mind. Everyone here is telling you this is a common experience and your response has basically been 'no way!' how many people would you need to hear it from to believe us? I can find you clips of famous people talking about it, but unless you pre-commit to some threshold that would change your mind I'm sure you'll just find new reasons to dismiss that evidence.
cjet79
18d ago
Ha, ya the military is often the Pinnacle of male bonding rituals. I'm sure any given barracks regularly has the most heinous shit said in it.
cjet79
18d ago
I knew more leftists growing up than righties. They absolutely had these places. One of the most leftist people I knew in highschool was a Jewish guy and he had all of the best Holocaust jokes.
I know fewer super lefties today. But the moderate democrat dads I know are still willing to sling around the wild stuff in private conversations.
cjet79
18d ago
To be clear, is support of Hitler acceptable from politicians and staffers or is it not? If supporting Hitler is acceptable when done in private conversations, then what behavior if any is unacceptable to you?
It is absolutely unacceptable and abhorrent behavior to leak private group chats. See, I have standards!
In my opinion there is literally nothing that can be said between two consenting adults in a private conversation that I would consider unacceptable behavior.
When I was in middle school and highschool kids around me would make dead baby jokes, Holocaust / gas chamber jokes, they'd say all racial slurs, and they'd talk about fucking each other's mothers and sisters.
I think you missed the part above where I said this is lame because of how tame it is. These people are nerds. And the only thing I find lamer is pretending that this is horrible as a way to score political points.
Of course some Republican dude condemned them. As I said above they should resign for failing to distinguish between a private and public space.
You seem really stuck on the Hitler thing. But I clearly was talking in general terms about many different ways we can be terrible human beings.
My assumptions for someone that says they have not experienced this kind of bonding:
- They are female
- They are autistic
- They have no intrusive thoughts
- They are lying
It's fine if you are 1-3. You'll just have to trust me when I say that these conversations take place all the time. I'm 100% certain that you know a man who has had a "say horrible things" conversation within the last month. I'm decently certain (80%) based on your comments that none of these men would be stupid enough to admit it to you, so you'll never know who they are.
cjet79
18d ago
I googled myself in 2009 when I was a senior in highschool and the fourth result that came up was me on a Facebook post saying that a movie was stupid. In a group that I thought was private.
That was when I scrubbed what I could of old posts from Facebook and elsewhere that had my name attached. I started using reddit more instead to comment. But even on reddit I had it in the back of my mind that my username might be linked to my real name at some point.
Something in society has been damaged from everyone living in the panopticon. I don't even know what it is, because it has been this way my entire adult life. I do know that the way most people cope is by making the private spaces as different as they can.
Anyone leaking private space conversations is always the asshole. I try not to change my opinion of the victim of the leak, but that's not always doable.
Stardew Valley is a really great co op game. Lots of collecting. Endless dungeon running. It will probably feel a little easy.
Return to Moria is a survival crafting game that seems like it would be way more fun in co-op. It is heavily focused on mining and looting for gear upgrades. Movement speed is pretty slow compared to other survival games.
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