coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
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The war in Ukraine is strong evidence that manpower will continue to matter in war.
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There is a longterm dysgenic effect with 2 kids per household, because the way human fertility is designed to work is that ~8 births occur and perhaps 1 or 2 of the healthiest go on to have 8-12 births themselves. A norm of 2 births is a norm of decreasing health over generations until the problems become apocalyptic.
- In America, even without mass immigration, you have the high fertility of the ultra Orthodox Jews. So unless you want a future without music or art or equality or indigenous Europeans it’s a good idea to incentivize births. Eg 200k in New York, doubling every 20 years means hundreds of millions within 200 years. And they already wield an absurd amount of political power in New York
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I was reading about the evolutionary approaches to understanding depression. The “psychic pain hypothesis” and “incentive hypothesis” seem compelling to me. Does anyone have any takes on this or know what the current consensus is (among the smarter academics)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_approaches_to_depression
I am interested in whether depression conflicts with the general truth that animals are reward-motivated. After all, depression is unpleasant, so why would any human be depressed when they can obtain more pleasure being non-depressed? But then it also occurred to me that depression may be the consequence of a hyper-fixation on overly-specific pleasures. If someone is obsessed with the idea of becoming a top chef, then the failure to obtain this position can result in “depression” (a lack of pleasure-motivation because the overly-specific goal is unreachable). So we can continue to say that humans are reward-motivated, and then we would just qualify that humans are also liable to fixate on overly-specific rewards. But has this been evidenced by studies — humans who have varied pursuits and a broad sense of identity are resilient to depression?
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
For a practical discussion on the effect of wage depreciation on the lower and lower middle class, I fail to see a substantive difference between “these people signed up to work because they live in extreme poverty and so will labor for almost nothing”, and “these people genuinely work for nothing but room and board and food.” In both cases it is horrible for domestic workers who do not and cannot live like a Honduran who sends home remittance payments. Calling it pseudo slavery is no less manipulative than the economists’ misuse of the terms “efficiency”, “free market”, “low costs”, etc.
We can only hope one day the Indians become trained enough that we can completely replace our domestic economists with Indian-born workers. This would be highly efficient.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
It does not appear that foreign workers are big source of Japan’s agricultural workforce: https://fas.usda.gov/data/japan-foreign-farm-labors-role-growing-japan
In the past 10 years, the percentage of foreign farm workers as a share of the total agricultural population has increased fourfold from 0.5 percent to two percent
Just half a percent of the agricultural population in 2010.
https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a06003/
Only 25k “guest workers” out of 1.5 million total agricultural workers, so 1.5%. This number is increasing though, coincidentally as the Japanese feel poorer and poorer…
It seriously looks like the native lower-classes of wealthy countries cannot be convinced to do these kinds of jobs
We can convince them to spend 12 years in brutal school/residency to stab utensils in human flesh for 16 hour periods at a time, for nothing but money and respect. I promise you we can convince them to pick fruit — forestry workers have some of the highest life satisfaction and doctors perhaps the lowest.
I also looked and it seems that American born employees account for a little over 60% of slaughterhouse workers
https://www.epi.org/blog/meat-and-poultry-worker-demographics/
In Iceland a lot of the butchers come from Sweden: https://www.icelandreview.com/news/hundreds-foreigners-work-slaughterhouses/#:~:text=Foreign%2Dborn%20workers%20are%20now,further%20away%2C%20even%20New%20Zealand.
not even pseudo slave labor
It’s not slave labor, and it’s also not “not genuine” slave labor? That’s what pseudo means. The simplified point is that, just like slave labor is great for the wealthy employers but bad for the non-slave wage competitor, so is it bad when you import a class of people who are practically economic serfs within a given industry: no hope of ever obtaining a better position because of the language barrier / citizenship barrier / possibly no degree at all even in Mexico/Honduras/etc.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Who does that in Japan? Who does it in Iceland (well they don’t have fruit, but slaughter houses apply)? Millions would be happy to do these jobs once the pay rises, just like you have dudes doing underwater welding. And the pay will rise in the absence of a pseudo slave labor class.
there isn't a scenario where meat and fruits and vegetables prices rise lower than the wages of the american poor and working class [rises]
Sure there is. All of the increase in payment to “food companies” due to the rise in food prices is going to the lower class employee base (who need the money more), yet this increase in payment is paid for by everyone (lower-to-highest classes), meaning you necessarily see a transfer of wealth from upper to lower class; and on top of this, the increased cost of food for the wealthy makes prices more salient, leading to more cost-saving consumer practices which winds up enforcing more competition among food-related businesses.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
You can confiscate the wealth of illegal aliens to fund sending them back. You can implement work ID laws that incentivize migrants to take a ticket back to the US. You can trawl social media etc to find the communities comprised of mostly illegal migrants. You can fine businesses who use illegal labor.
Food prices would only increase as a proportion of income for the already wealthy; the lower class will now find significantly more demand for their labor and can pick and choose which businesses to work for to maximize their quality of life. (We saw this happen with the peasants after the black plague in Europe; fewer peasants = more demand for their labor = a natural wealth redistribution from the wealthy to the poor). They would make more money than the price of food increases. The eradication of remittance payments means more funds in US economy. Would be enormously beneficial for the lower and middle class and really only hurt the very wealthy white collar workers who are far removed from the economic competition of lower/middle class.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
The gist (as much as I can remember) was that Ukraine is destined to lose, and that the conflict was the result of Western-backed influence in Maidan / the failure to declare no NATO membership. But yeah, anything seriously critical of Ukraine is going to be labeled “propaganda coming out of Moscow”, and this in no way justifies harassing and possibly killing an ideologue and reporter.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Gonzalo Lira was the biggest journalist covering the war from an anti-Ukrainian perspective for the first few months. I saw him everywhere and watched his content. The idea that he doesn’t deserve a Wikipedia page is crazy. He was also threatened with death early on by Ukrainian military operatives, which coincided with his long stretch of not posting.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
When you are recalling a past event, do you imagine the transpired events as a series of still images of as “clips” of videos? Or as something else?
When people who can’t imagine things vividly in their mind’s eye are recalling something from the past, what exactly are they recalling? Words?
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I am familiar with the text. Which part of it are you using in the implied disagreement? Unless I am misreading the sarcasm.
It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.
Notice how immediately after telling them to eat the flesh to obtain eternal life, he clarifies that the flesh is no use and that it is spirit which gives life, and that the words spoken are spirit. That’s not words spoken in this discourse exclusively, that’s all the words that Christ speaks, hence why the apostles say “you have the words of eternal life” and not “you have the flesh and blood of eternal life”. (Cf “God is spirit and must be worshipped in spirit”.) In my comment I mention how Jesus specifically sets up an association between bread and the word of God during the temptation. For what purpose would Jesus say “eat this flesh for eternal life”, and then in explaining the saying, say “the flesh is no help, the spirit gives life”? This would be nonsensical and contradictory from a strict literalist. But instead there’s a point that he is getting at. Throughout the epistles, “the spirit” is contrasted with two things: the letter and the flesh. Eg the letter kills and the spirit gives life, the flesh avails nothing, etc. That’s because spirit is meaning and significance and understanding; flesh and “letter” are the external appearances of what actually matters which should not be actual spiritual focus.
I don’t think there’s any “innate understanding of psychology”; it’s not as if there weren’t priests and centers of learning in the ancient world. But if you’re a strict literalist I would ask how you interpret such passages as “I come in the sign of Jonah” and “just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up”.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
It can have multiple dimensions to it, being both 100% true and also 100% symbolic, just like Christ is 100% Man and 100% God (it’s a mystery, duh).
I like to think how this worked for the early church: by requiring the believers to believe it is truly the flesh of a man, you are forcing them to commit to a shared social taboo (cannibalism), which works as a strong signal of commitment to the brotherhood and also as an emotionally-powerful way to bond together. It’s noteworthy that cannibalism is a charge against the early Christians, not because they ate the flesh of any man besides Christ, but likely because they refused to deny the charge in reference to this mysterious but real body of Christ. You can make a parallel to early metalhead culture where the bands would have grotesque names and the shirts had grotesque imagery; it creates a strong tight knit affiliation specifically against popular norms. If I recall some Buddhists did something similar but I’m too lazy to look. Another thing you’re doing is testing the initiate’s faith, whether they can see physical bread yet truly believe it is physical flesh, and whether they love God enough to engage in the taboo. So the “literalism” serves a neat psychological purpose. If I had a church I would over-emphasize the cannibalism dimension, maybe even styling the bread as flesh and the wine as blood.
Symbolically it’s rich. For one, breaking bread was the way social connections were formed in the ancient world, shared meals. So Christ is the shared central bond of the community. Bread is the staple crop that contained all necessary nutrients. (When Christ says “man cannot live on bread alone, but every word of God”, he is counterintuitively alluding to the fact that man can physically live on bread alone, and then creating an association between Word and Bread which the discerning reader ought to notice). So bread was had by everyone, signaling the commonality of God to every man. That the bread is eaten is a metaphor for the sacrifice of Christ (which nourishes), and thus becomes a standard for the community sort of like in the book the Giving Tree. There’s an interesting juxtaposition between Christ’s cannibalism where he allows himself to be eaten, and the cannibalism charge against the Pharisees, who “devour widows” — theirs is a cannibalism of self-gain against the poorest members. Blood in the ancient world was considered a kind of life force and elixir, so associating Christ’s blood with wine is also telling, saying that Christ’s life force is conviviality and mirth (the effects of alcohol). And then of course it relates to the miracle of the loaves and (mysteriously) the parables on farming…
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Seems they wanted easy access to an historically important ritual bath that belonged to a different building
Also led to this truly hilarious tweet: https://twitter.com/RichardStrocher/status/1744599741265256803
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
You need to make the public understand how chronic stresses add up and lead to obesity, cancer, etc. Someone soliciting 500 people at an intersection is someone giving 500 people needless stress. The negative consequences of this are not canceled out by the benefit to the homeless man. Same with a park — a person should be able to walk in one rare beautiful piece of nature without seeing sprawled junk and disheveled tents. The benefit of this stress-free nature exposure is, ironically, protective against the possibility of developing homelessness in the future.
Anyway I would write something like, “we have noticed an uptick in minor trauma and stress responses among our residents, including women and lower income minorities. We have traced this stress response to the individuals who are soliciting money to stressed drivers trying to watch for incoming traffic; this is not just distracting, but it reminds many residents of their own lack of financial stability. In order to safeguard our most at-risk residents from further stress, we are going to make soliciting for money in public illegal. We instead ask everyone to donate to a town-wide fund for our poorest residents. The town will match dollar per every $400 donation. We are also going to ensure that our parks are free from unnecessary stressors.”
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
The State, namely Congress, prevents federal agents from raiding state marijuana dispensaries: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/837011#?form=fpf. If the State were to treat marijuana as it does other illicit drugs, it would continue to raid marijuana dispensaries and not specifically pass an exclusion for only marijuana dispensaries. “Why not Congress make legal??” is not a serious retort because an explicit legalization involves unwanted political ramifications from voters, whereas allowing people to smoke marijuana in “legalized” states does not (note that these two are different things: “the State” can implicitly permit marijuana usage through policy without making it legal).
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Anything can be dismissed out of hand if we don’t think thoroughly. The feds have turned a blind eye on state marijuana activities for a long time now, and the interests of the state can change over time — norms in 1937 are not the norms of 2020, right?
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Always found it interesting that the studies on marijuana use focus on health and not whether the person is being as productive, forming memories of positive experiences, or engaging in a social community. i know a dozen people who used marijuana and then had to stop because it essentially drained their vital life force — they stopped doing anything worthwhile and stopped being motivated toward things. With tobacco it’s the opposite — it’s unhealthy, but no one’s ever been like “this tobacco is really ruining my creativity and preventing me from bonding with friends”. Perhaps the state cares more about a docile population that is not costly for medical services?
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I was thinking last week about this section, which I read as a “baptism by fire”. It’s nestled between these two passages about punishment:
the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know, and will cut him in pieces and put him with the unfaithful
Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division
The way I interpreted this (if I can opine) is by first eradicating literalism. Baptism does not mean submerging in water, its broader meaning is immersion. A Greek study shows that it’s also using for changing the whole color of a cloth by dying, or in cooking recipes for fundamentally changing the nature of a food item through immersion in some other liquid. There is the immersion by water of John’s baptism for forgiveness, and then there’s the immersion by fire (the opposite of water). And what is this fire? Complete and utter pain and punishment — the opposite of forgiveness — as hinted by the Christ’s anticipation of his passion:
how great is my distress until it is accomplished
This word “accomplished” or finished or completed often refers to the Crucifixion, as for instance in John immediately before he says “it is finished”. (Consider also that Father divided/against Son is certainly one way of seeing the Crucifixion depending on your theology).
This interpretation allows us to now understand the other “baptisms” mentioned. The baptism by the Holy Spirit (immersion into it), and the baptism in the name of the Lord (immersion in knowing and identifying with Christ). These coincidentally line up with the four ancient elements: water, fire, air (spirit, same word used in koine Greek), and earth (God made man as if from clay is common metaphor). However, this has led me to some unorthodox theology, that for instance Jesus does not call us to be baptized by water but to be baptized into his Being. Hence the “john the Baptist baptized with water, but I baptize with the Holy Spirit”
so the goal of pious Christians is to be as a candle
To be a “burnt offering”!
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Is there anything very good for human health that does not trace its benefit to the “ancestral” human environment? Eg, heat and cold stress clearly relate back to original human environmental conditions; fasting; walking
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
It’s only disproven if you discount all the complexity of the question. Southern Europe had an influx of conquering Muslim genes and Jewish genes, whereas Northern Europe did not. And while we don’t know a ton about Norse Paganism, the figure of Odin shows interesting overlap in emphasizing the idea of self-sacrifice for social benefit, which is actually not common to all religions (as an example it’s absent in the figure of Muhammad). Rather than seeing Christianity as wholly distinct from every other religion, we should just consider the underlying social technologies of the religion and how they influence sexual selection — couldn’t Odinism have some but not all of the benefit of Christianity? I also wouldn’t deny that there are independent variables from geography (cold winter theory).
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
You would need to account for the infusion of genes into eg Sicilians (8%+) due to the Muslim conquests, and then also account for whatever the Northern Europeans were doing with their own religion prior to Christianity. Always found it interesting that Odin is also a figure who sacrifices himself on a tree to benefit the world: “I know that I hung on that windy Tree nine whole days and nights, stabbed with a spear, offered to Odin, myself to my own self given, high on that Tree of which none have heard from what roots it rises to heaven. None refreshed me ever with food or drink, I peered right down in the deep; crying aloud I lifted the Runes, then back I fell from there.”
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
“Meritocracy” in a ruthlessly capitalist country can easily incentivize sociopathy (or at least an efficiency of mind that discounts actual moral feelings to a degree reminiscent of sociopathy). Let’s say I want a job at Google. Any evolved instinct to care for others or to experience guilt about moral choices (getting answers from a previous student; is working at Google even moral?) takes up cognitive space that could be allotted to my repetitive studies and task-list completion. It’s trivially easy for a sociopath-ish student to understand that he needs to pretend to have moral feelings and to do the requisite extra-curricular to signal this; these are small barriers in the pursuit of self-gain. Once he is a manager or CEO and running our nation’s search engine and algorithms, he’s not going to magically experience moral compunction about the consequences of what he’s doing. He was never trained in that, he was selected for having the least of that, and he may not even have it in him. Anyway: Google job secured, mates secured.
This is different than the selection in effect within a devoutly Christian society, as was common in European history (back when everyone genuinely believed the religion). Acting Christlike and having Christ-ian moral feelings were genuine sexual section factors on their own, and were also factors in being selected for high positions. (You also had interesting things like the practical wisdom of the society being clothed in Christian language, easily accessed to those who believe but less accessible to sociopaths). Obviously it was far from perfect as a social technology, but I think that this likely led to an increase in prosocial gene proliferation. People weren’t chiefly judged on their widget production but on their faith (capacity for moral and social feelings) and their imitation of the singular moral paragon.
What I mean by all this is that it’s entirely possible Europeans have higher prosocial genes due to 1400 years of evolutionary selection, that this is pro-civilizational, but that our current “widget meritocracy” is ultimately anti-civilizational because it rewards self gain through widget production which (because cognition is zero sum) necessarily punishes those with substantive moral feelings.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Replying to myself, but a tangential topic to look at would be whether the religion in a given civilization promoted prosociality the most or whether it promoted memory the most. There are religions where collecting information guaranteed greater chance of resources, mates, and offspring (Islam (the Hafiz), Judaism (The Rab)). In Christian Europe, the religiously informed priesthood generally did not have children, being celibate.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
In order to establish whether there are ethnic category differences in civilizational potential, we would need to measure the propensity to feel guilt rather than shame, the extent to which different groups instinctively feel the sharp pain of empathy when considering another’s suffering, the extent to which there is a natural domesticated interest in making others’ happy, and perhaps the extent to which emotions and trustfulness can be read on their face. No amount of checks and balances can actually stop a society filled with the sociopathic/“gunners” from corrupting institutions (we see them do this today as is (I am from New Jersey)), so BAP’s hypothesis is not invalid, just unevidenced.
The interplay between racial genes and morality has actually been studied recently, but I haven’t taken the time to delve in:
https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/pdf/doi/10.4324/9781003281566-7
https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/pdf/doi/10.4324/9781003281566-8
I don’t find it impossible or even improbable that different groups would have different levels of prosocial tendency (obedience, guilt, interest in the feelings of others). I’ve seen the role of genetics at play in my dogs who have vastly different characters despite only diverging 1000-2000 years ago. And frankly I also think this discussion is pretty important. Which doctor would I rather have, the intelligent one who uses all their cognitive energy for self-gain, or the less intelligent one who has a permanent cognitive reserve dedicated to checking his own moral behavior? The former is going to prescribe me unnecessary pills, not actually be interested in healing me, and may scam my insurance by sending me off to cousin doctors when it’s not necessary. The latter will take a little bit longer, but more efficiently arrive at the actual purpose of his social role.
Every estimate I have even seen shows an Hasidic doubling every 20-22 years. From 2006 to today. In Israel the Haredi double every 16 years. I have never seen anything even vaguely hinting at the population not doubling that quickly. Do you have a source for why it’s fraught or were you just saying that? It’s actually surprisingly easy to do a head count on how much the ultra orthodox are increasing.
We have much evidence that this will not be the case. Both Amish and Hasidim have high retainment rates of 85-95% which have not slowed due to any technological advance, and I recall reading that the Amish have a higher retainment now than in the 60s. The ultra-orthodox in America are centered in literally the most culturally diverse and dense part of the country, NYC and neighboring towns, and this has not stopped their increase.
Youre right that the Amish threat can be ignored — at most they will be a large peasant class with little political or financial power, and their way of life conflicts with urban living. But this is not so for the ultra orthodox. The way the community works is that the wealthy landlords and financiers etc disperse their funds to the poorer members who spend their time studying Talmud etc. There’s no shortage of wealthy ultra orthodox doing this. And they are also expanding their influence in shipping, I recall reading that 15% of all Amazon fulfillment in the US is done by ultra orthodox. So there’s no conceivable economic hindrance to their growth minus perhaps an anti-Hasidic boycott movement which I suppose is not out of the question in the future.
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