eudemonist
11mo ago
Let's keep in mind the context here--the examples given of rightist/right wing policies are tough-on-crime things like Three Strikes. Whether that's "right wing government" or not is not really relevant: it's a less-progressive stance than the alternative at the time.
eudemonist
1yr ago
When neither the proponents nor the opponents of the bill claim it's a proper tax
I'm not sure if you're making a distinction with "proper" tax, but opponents, heck even Democrats, definitely claimed it was a tax, and it was a live enough question to get addressed in a one-on-one (sorry, it's an amp link):
STEPHANOPOULOS: That may be, but it's still a tax increase.
OBAMA: No. that's not true, George. the -- for us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase....
STEPHANOPOULOS: But it may be fair, it may be good public policy...
OBAMA: No, but -- but, George, you -- you can't just make up that language and decide that that's called a tax increase.
STEPHANOPOULOS: I -- I don't think I'm making it up. Merriam Webster's Dictionary: Tax -- "a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes."
OBAMA: George, the fact that you looked up Merriam's Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you're stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn't have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition. I mean what...
eudemonist
1yr ago
But in those cases, I've parked somewhere, or broken my contract with the library--there is a punishable action.
The Corner, but more particularly, The Wire, which is the fully flourished version. Without overstatement, one of the best television shows ever made.
EDIT: Looks like The Corner is on YouTube, free. https://youtube.com/watch?v=iMJMOoW8y6o
eudemonist
1yr ago
Very generally speaking, Conservatism is based in risk avoidance: the core conflict is basically a risk/reward evaluation of courses of action, weighing potential benefits of further societal optimization against potential dangers of disrupting a currently-mostly-functional complex dynamic system. It seems like such a thing might well have genetic components.
Individualism vs. Collectivism also seems as though it could well be genetically influenced: different species are gregarious to different extents, and that almost certainly interplays with genetics. Williams syndrome in humans is a clear display of genetic changes to sociability and desire for the presence of others.
Besides, if we accept that genetics affect I.Q., well then obviously--the genes that give the low IQs are the liberal genes, duh! (jkjk don't hurt me)
eudemonist
1yr ago
However, guys who are mainly driven by wanting validation and/or intimacy can sometimes encounter the problem that they want validation for being themselves as they are now, they want intimacy for being as they are now.
I want to take a screwdriver
Mutilate my face
Find a beautiful woman
Make her love me for what I am
Then say I don't need it and walk away
- Hank Rollins
eudemonist
1yr ago
- Inflation is defined as an increase in the general price level.
I think you get off to a bad start here. Changes to prices are not necessarily a result of inflation/deflation, but rather a change in the relative availability of Dollars vs Goods. An increase/decrease in the availability of dollars (inflation) affects prices, but so does a lot of other stuff that isn't inflation.
If, for example, there's a drought and the grain harvest is half of what it usually would be (moving the Supply Curve for grain to the left), grain (and thereby bread, beer, beer, and fuel prices) rise, that's not really inflation per se; conversely, if a new process comes about which enables greater production at the same cost, prices will fall without deflation occurring as competitors
By the same token, if we write in a 0 after the numbers on all our accounts so that everyone has ten times as many dollars, prices will rise without any change in the actual cost of producing a bushel of wheat. THIS is inflation.
Consider the case where the fed wants to create deflation:
There really is no such case as regards actual deflation. As you mentioned, it mostly relates to the velocity of money: if my money will be worth more tomorrow, I have incentive to hold it instead of spend or invest it. Shoving it under my mattress incurs zero risk and zero costs, and makes me MORE WEALTHY tomorrow, without having done anything or accepted any risk. (Imagine the whole country does this, and the money supply shrinks as the Fed lowers the money supply--has anybody actually gotten any wealthier, or created any value, by holding cash? Nah.) If someone can make money with no effort and no risk, they're gonna, because that simply doesn't happen in nature. So everybody waits and demand falls even further because nobody is buying. This is a problem. And we haven't even talked about lending or international trade...
It's a truism of life that all things decay, and that you can't get somethin' for nothin'. In a deflationary environment, my money grows by sticking it under a mattress, a zero-risk zero-cost "getting something". If ya don't "work", ya don't "eat"--doesn't matter if you're a bee, a tree, a human, or a dollar.
The current system IS prejudiced, but the prejudice is toward people who pay their debts on time. This correlates to wealthiness, but isn't necessarily causative. Paying small amounts on time gives one preference when borrowing larger amounts, and leveraging larger amounts is how people get wealthy.
eudemonist
1yr ago
Is it not the case that, once we start moving towards those distant objects (in say a colony ship), the expansion behind us compensates for a growing portion of that total expansion? It's my understanding that there IS an inflection point as you describe, but we haven't reached it yet.
Perhaps "Save the Universe" is the ultimate point of the simulation we built ourselves. Seems fitting.
eudemonist
1yr ago
Anybody got links to good gene analyses of the two original strains of C19 that were found in Wuhan, L and S? I can find very few references, and it seems to me that having mutated into two distinct human-transmissible strains before a single sufferer was identified would be pretty long odds. It wasn't til almost a year later we started seeing Alpha variants.
Seems the two initial strains would have TONS of papers written about them, no?
eudemonist
4mo ago
No law is perfect to the letter. The spirit of the rules would certainly prohibit backhanded insinuations via second helpings just as it prevents backhanded compliments--in fact I'd argue that clause does cover such a situation in letter, but that is debatable. Nonetheless, calling someone fat isn't okay just because you don't use the word fat.
eudemonist
11mo ago
Please give the Urban Pioneers a spin: https://youtube.com/watch?v=exykZ5Cfuso
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_md8hhW9khqUen3RVFkurQfLJO01d2CQoI
eudemonist
1yr ago
Would you agree that borrowing a library book is a type of contract one enters into with the library?
eudemonist
1yr ago
Yeah, I agree with everything you've said here. "Multiple genes could likely prejudice toward ideologies" is a better way to put it than "liberal gene", with the relative strength of that prejudice tough to decouple.
eudemonist
1yr ago
The Corner
You've seen the shows?
eudemonist
1yr ago
I agree, and would suggest an ever better question might be "does a husband have more moral status than a wife?", given his scriptural position of head of household. The relationships are, in my mind, very similar between animal husbandry and familial husbandry.
eudemonist
1yr ago
Oh dang, I just now saw this, in the October Quality Contributions thread! As the interrogator in the initial conversation, thank you for posting this. That's one hell of a follow-up, hah! This kinda stuff interests me quite a bit, but I know very little, so I very much appreciate your patience and thoroughness with this reply! Would you mind horribly if I impose on your grey matter some more? Having read this response, I think my original question was poorly put. It was based on something vaguely remembered from a throwaway conversation somewhen that made sense to me but I didn't fully grok, regarding the interplay of reference frames.
The Hubble constant indicates that the rate of recession increases as distance between the observer and the object in question increases, right? In practice thus far, all observations/measurements are made from Earth (or at least Earth-local) frames, so it seems everything outside our local frame is expanding away from us, with M81 expanding away at 238 km/s from Earth given its current distance of ~12 megaparsecs. So if we travel in that direction at 239 km/s, the rate of expansion between it and us begins to slow down, because we're a bit closer, yah? And that property scales all the way up to lightspeed: as long as we go a little faster than current expansion, we can get there. Which means we have a few thousand years to develop 99.7/c travel without unrecoverably losing much, if any, of the observable universe. (of course those atom lives matter too, but we may simply not be able to save them all)
It's possible I was thinking the Hubble constant was non-linear, which would seem to create some weirdness with multiple observers, but I'm honestly not sure. Either way, thanks again for this comment--I've been reading cosmophysics all day, lol.
eudemonist
4mo ago
Interesting take. Nonetheless, we should acknowledge that the letter of the law prohibits implied insults, does it not? One such insult is illustrated, but it seems obvious there are innumerable forms such an insult could take. So we are left with two propositions: either the clause applies to all such implications, or it applies specifically and only to compliments given directly to an individual directly and exempts other forms of breach not specifically mentioned. The latter would support your premise of "secretly evil", I suppose, but it makes me wonder why outlaw backhanded compliments in one specific use case, and not outlaw, for example, complimenting the horse fatty rides riding for its perseverance? Is it that complimenting the mount is less obvious somehow? I think not. Thus I'm forced to believe implied insults, of whatever form, are prohibited by the letter of the law.
Although the question of the spirit of the law seems moot, given the explicit callouts in the text, I'm curious if there are other laws which you believe have a spirit diametrically opposed to their text? If we want people to stop at a given intersection, should we install Yield signs, or no signs? I don't quite understand how this works.
eudemonist
5mo ago
For a partial example, you can look at the Texas electrical grid...
I live just outside Houston, so I don't need to look very far. Unfortunately the Valentine Vortex would absolutely pale in comparison, I'm afraid.
Much overlooked in the interconnect and renewables conversation is the systemic nature of certain failure modes of solar, I feel like. Much like the 2008 financial crisis, where the odds of one mortgage failing were slim, but if it happened no big deal, one wind or solar farm underproducing or going offline is no big deal--but each one that is offline increases the chances of another being offline. If, say, all the solar in Texas suddenly has difficulty producing, it's highly likely that whatever the cause is stretches beyond Texas borders, be it weather pattern disturbances or atmospheric conditions or whatever, which sets up catastrophic and cascading failures. Interconnection advocates discussing the VV often gloss over the fact that neighbor grids didn't have power to spare either.
eudemonist
5mo ago
"Price tag attacks" seem to be a similar herring:
Such vandalism also embraces damaging the property, or injuring members of the Israel Police and the Israel Defense Forces....
The "price tag" concept and violence have been publicly rejected by Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,[21][22] who have demanded that those responsible be brought to justice.
The settler leadership have "fiercely condemned" the price tag policy,[27] and the vast majority of Yesha rabbis have expressed their reservations about it.[28] According to Shin Bet, the vast majority of the settlers also reject such actions.
estimates of the extent of the perpetrator group vary: one figure calculates that from several hundred to about 3,000 people implement the price tag policy,[15] while a recent analysis sets the figure at a few dozen individuals, organized in small close-knit and well-organised cells[16] and backed by a few hundred right-wing activists.
eudemonist
8mo ago
Okay, not missing one then. I suppose I just don't know Hobbes well enough to understand what hole in the discourse you're referring to.
eudemonist
10mo ago
Sure, and many of the early Levittown suburbs were built this way, effectively on a production line. Why did we stop doing it?
We didn't, really. We upgraded a bit to where there are a handful of floor plans and some modularity, but the vast majority of new developments are cookie-cutter repetitions of their neighbors, pre-cut and packaged, to be assembled simply.
eudemonist
11mo ago
I tried that fest and got a 49, pretty well below the bar. I got some points for not using a lot of movie or television quotes in my daily conversation, which I found odd. An online test at Clinical Partners was also pretty sure I'm not autistic. I wonder if it's simply my online persona: I do tend to care about details.
To me, though, details matter: in this case, the detail that
1, Yes, plenty of people claimed it was a tax from the get-go, and
B. Democrats swore up one wall and down the other it wasn't, and the President, ridiculed people for "making up words", then when shown the word in the dictionary ridiculed more instead of addressing the argument.
It was signature, huge legislation passed while wilfully deceiving the American public. I don't see it as an "autistic" or irrelevant detail at all.
the "it's a tax" argument was widely regarded as pretextual at best.
Again I'm gonna have to differ here, and I think the Stephanopoulos interview bears me out. George brought out a dictionary and Obama handwaved away the meaning of "tax", for gosh sake.
was up to my eyeballs in debates (mostly with other lawyers) about this issue at the time and I just never encountered a serious and well-developed claim that the question turned on "it's a tax."
What question, precisely? "Can Congress make people pay this" or "Is a penalty for inaction constitutional"? Because, if it's the latter, your lawyer friends missed the forest for the trees, I'd say.
this is all a weirdly autistic tangent
You know, I seem to be called/implied to be autistic fairly frequently online. Maybe I should get checked or something. Is there a test? To me, if it was important enough for you to use as a point in your post, it's important enough to warrant accuracy, or further exploration if needed. If we retcon the shit out of history, we can't learn much from it.
eudemonist
1yr ago
Would you agree it's an arrangement or agreement or deal between parties? What would you call it?
Beg pardon? I'm missing a reference I believe.
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