fuckduck9000
1mo ago
If - big if - I write a AAQC, will you stop increasing the bans and go back to warnings?
fuckduck9000
1mo ago
Inexorably, the bans get longer and longer. Shouldn’t I get a reset somewhere, I’ve paid my debts to mottiety.
The gradual automatic escalation is stupid, site's getting unusable for me now. Will the garden improve after I leave, weed-puller?
fuckduck9000
1mo ago
Why do you call the japanese scouting efforts 'fucking stupid'(area of sweden etc) when you later note that they perfectly localized the enemy that day.
fuckduck9000
1mo ago
Not much of a signal, assassination is a pretty egalitarian weapon. The main difference is not the power differential imo, it’s that putin’s enemies don’t wan’t him dead as much as he wants them dead. I’m sure Prig could have organized something, but he chose to rely on the warm-heartedness of putin instead.
Prig, you, hillbilly and me, we all first have to recognize that the dictator might kill us easily, and it will help him – is that worship, or respect, of power?
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
With no IC engines, no electricity, no pesticides, no modern crops and techniques and a general iron-age toolset at best, we would in fact most likely all be starving if we didn't work the land. That's my understanding, at least. Is yours different?
We'd also be starving if we worked the land. Not starving is not about working the land, it's about all those things produced by people who don't work the land.
What evidence is this statement based on? What tools then existing and proven would make up for, say, a 30% reduction in agricultural labor?
Take trade, for example. No need to work the land if you can trade clothes or swords for more polish or egyptian grain than you could ever have produced. And the mere presence of that transport capacity makes famine less likely.
Do you think the highly urbanized low countries were the ones starving when famine struck ? This would be what your theory straightforwardly predicts.
If these people moved to the cities and generated wealth as you allege, wouldn't that make the bosses' positions better? Why wouldn't they want that to happen? Why wouldn't they think that would happen?
The difference is the benefit doesn’t accrue to them, it accrues to society. 5000 dollars in my pocket has quite a bit more weight than a million for the state.
As always, they were stupid and self-interested. If they honestly believed they were altruistically trying to stave off starvation, they could simply have agreed to the raises. But they wanted to maximize their own surplus at the cost of the peasants, and took away their leverage by force.
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
According to that simple math, we should all be starving because we don’t work the land. If the salaries were higher in the cities, so was productivity. In simple terms, they more than made up for the loss of their farming work by producing tools, trading for better crops etc, which allowed the farmers to support them, and enriched society in the process.
Or maybe I'm wrong and they totally did it just to be dicks.
They didn’t do it to be dicks, but because it was in their interest, like a boss who refuses a raise. The difference being, that boss wouldn’t take ‘fuck you, then. I’m off’ for a legal answer.
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
You’re not debating this in a fair manner imo, you’re throwing gotchas from the ether. You can’t ask him to endlessly redefine his terms and appeal to a vague philosophic consensus without making your own attackable case. Is your point 'it's complicated'? For the record I take the sam harris position. See how that helps you understand from where my criticism is coming from, as well as give you a chance to land a few blows of your own?
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
Would you please, 30 comments down, tell him what you believe?
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
By what mechanism then, are aliens prevented from taking over institutiona?
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
Because greedy selfish sociopaths rise to the top even quicker without meritocracy. Shouldn’t the developing world, Africa, India, South america, be counted as institutiona? You seem to think hereditary positions and nepotism protects societies against intelligent sociopaths, but I don’t see the real world reflecting that. Also the analogy ignores the gains from giving more qualified aliens important jobs, the main justification for meritocracy.
Are you trying to butter up your audience, dude? Is it campaigning season for nobility seats already? Your motte-approved opinions, appreciation for wholesome americana, and humble family beginnings are besides the point. No configuration of these parameters would justify that privilege.
You say you want to recognize luck and ‘a sense of duty’(applause), but your method is to recognize blood instead of merit, both subject to luck. Luck is tangential to your argument. If luck was our primary concern, we should forget blood and merit, and draw lots for membership in the ruling class.
The angry journalist at vice also believes he is helping society by supporting opposite causes to your own. In his defense, his self-interest is hidden, he doesn’t nakedly request aristocratic status for his prosocial efforts.
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
Obviously baseline intelligence in positions of power is necessary for the successful functioning of society. But how much? Must they be the most intelligent people from all the land, or can they merely be quite intelligent people who also have other things about them that should be valued in a ruling class?
Why would we grant an exception and compromise the efficiency of the system at all ? I don’t recognize the supposed higher value or altruism of your class. Even if some individuals in that group had those traits, we wouldn’t reward entire bloodlines. In theory, you’re making an argument about ‘personality’ versus ‘IQ’, but what you actually propose is blood versus everything else, because hereditary classes are not subject to any assessment of their worth to society, whether personality or IQ.
I can understand why most people would want their (high) status to be unalterable, but this being a zero-sum game, their interest diverges heavily from everyone else’s. This is little more than pining for the sweet life of the aristocrat who never has to justify himself.
They seek power and so ought, quite rationally, to be denied it or at least to be handed it very, very slowly.
I don’t think you can be absolved of this sin either.
These include mild sociopathy, lack of gratitude,
What gratitude? I thought you were here to serve the common folk. Hereditary ruling classes do not feel any obligation towards their lessers – like you, they expect adulation.
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
You’re missing the forest for the trees. Intelligence is like scientific research, Bletchley park is another manhattan project. From their poor scientific production the japanese could and should have inferred an intelligence deficit in every battle.
Japan rolled a dice stacked against them and lost, they thought they had no other choice but to go in at Pearl Harbour or otherwise they'd certainly get crushed.
Option A: vacate a few overseas territories. Option B: vacate all overseas territory, lose all industrial capacity, country under occupation, lose three million people . They went with option B, naturally.
Those militarists never have a choice, do they? They charge towards their own destruction like a mindless beast every time. Only the US has the ability to make choices.
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
Imo you’re retreating deeper and deeper into more far-fetched explanations and unknowable information. There is no reason why a tradesman or urban worker would be poorer than a peasant, it doesn’t match our experience, and he could always go back to farming. One of the quotes says the food situation was even worse in the 17th century than in the 18th, which matches with the unprecedented pop growth in the 18th. In light of this hunger equilibrium, I think it is absurd to discuss the “lower tax burden” they “enjoyed”. If it was higher they would have likely starved to death, like a fucked up Laffer’s curve.
The article also mentions, and calculates from, 290 days of work/y. So I don’t understand at all why you believe medieval peasants lead these easy lives. I can always bulverize about romanticizing the past and medievalists’ need to redeem their chosen field of study etc, but it’s not getting me any closer to understanding your perspective.
Can you give me one of those qualitative accounts/anecdotes, because from my perspective the weight of hard evidence is overwhelming. Maybe you have some skeletons that show how well-fed they were, anything. Although the skeleton guys tend to celebrate the bucolic charm of a different age, and attack peasants as underfed and overworked.
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
Wiki's got similar, though slightly more favourable for the ancien regime worker, prices :
Daily wage around 1750-1780: 1.3 livre;
Cost of 1 kg of bread in Paris in 1782: 0.2586 livre;
Cost of 1 kg of bread in Paris in December 2013: €2.58.
Still, if they usually ate bread (and they must have, at least before the introduction of the potato), they were close to starving. (1.3 * 200 * 2200 / 0.2586) / 364 = 6076. It seems very hard to feed, shelter and clothe a family for 6000 kcal of bread per day all-in. No wonder kids had to work. And if economists are to be believed, they were already twice as rich per capita as in the middle ages, so I don’t think the medieval comparison, when they were actually serfs, helps your argument.
I was calculating it before, but I had trouble believing it: they were indeed starving, constantly. This article did essentially the same math.
Two and a half pounds of bread is 3,000 calories, almost exactly the average physiological minimum per head in a family of five. One can assess at one year out of four in the 18th century, and at one year out of five in the 17th, the number of years when this ration was reached. The average deficit for the other years can be evaluated, as we see, at a fraction as high as two-thirds of the needs.
The situation of the average man in the traditional period of mankind, i.e. before 1800, can therefore be summed up as follows: the purchasing power of the working classes depended essentially on the atmospheric situation ; the standard of living per head and per day of a working-class family fluctuating from a maximum of less than two and a half pounds of wheat in the best years, to an extremely low minimum, but which, in the middle of the 18th century, still often lowered below a pound of bread.
I should have figured it out earlier, with Henry IV and the sunday chicken he promised his subjects. Of course, they’d starve if they bought meat. I guess modern man is so insulated from such base concerns he has trouble grasping the concept of hunger.
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
Il semble que ces prix aient été ceux pratiqués pendant à peu près tout le XVIIIeme siècle. (2 lines below, traduction for readers: 'It seems that these prices were those practiced for almost the whole of the 18th century.')
Now I can't guarantee that monsieur de riedmatten in Paris 1944 didn't have an agenda, but that's what he says anyway, if you don't have anything better.
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
If they could take valuable targets, they wouldn’t have needed to attack midway.
Firstly, it was not until the end of the war, nearly 3 years after Midway, that the Mk. 14 torpedo became "reliable".
I got November 43, less than two years. Even with the malfunctioning torpedoes and slow gearing-up the japanese merchant fleet was down 25% from the start in 1943. 1944 would be the biggest year ever for anti-shipping before they ran out of targets.
I think his risk was justified as it would ultimately put the Japanese on the defense going forward.
Why is that good? They were already spent, they should have been left free to overextend further into the jungle before the hammer came down. The last thing the US should want at this point would be to get the japanese to switch to their “fortify and make them pay for every inch” strategy. Perhaps if americans had waited until supremacy to engage instead of sending every ship into battle right off the line, the whiplash would have broken the japanese, while minimizing casualties and any japanese chance of winning a limited war in the process.
Everyone thinks about WWI for generals sending men to their deaths for useless dirt, but the case is equally strong for WWII pacific. Given how it ended, any soldier who lost his life in guadalcanal and most of those grinds was wasted. But the brass needed a ‘fair fight’ over one neat island or other for those little stars to mean something. Hard to brag about winning the battle of the philippine sea or an even more lopsided battle in a wargame.
Do you think it was luck that german and japanese codes were broken? Just one of the myriad of easily predictable weaknesses the axis leaders had to ignore before embarking on their doomed adventure.
When the US makes a “heavy-handed” demand that Japan leave China, it is not merely a question of the morality, of whose right it is to occupy the country. The real question is whose will is backed by superior might. And clearly, the japanese miscalculated. They were as wrong as one can be, and even they knew it. Surprised Drmanhattan didn’t give that yamamoto quote: ‘“In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain, I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.”
One can talk of the memory tsushima, of the luck of the dive bombers (forgetting all the things that did go wrong), of the parallel operations, of the crippled aircraft carriers that didn’t get swapped, but really, the whole war was stupid and decided before it began. If it wasn’t midway, it would have been another, even more dominating one. I think nimitz was crazy to give battle at merely better than even odds. Why give them the ‘decisive battle’ they want for some useless bait like midway, literally the only way they could possibly eke out a limited win, when the alternative is far more punishing for them? Just sit back, strangle shipping with ironed out sub torpedoes, fight purely training & PR battles until every battle odds estimate reads north of 95%. The fabian strategy doesn’t require weakness.
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
I got this random list of prices (page 8 of the pdf). http://www.numdam.org/item/JSFS_1944__85__7_0.pdf
Which lists prices in francs in 1788, and also says daily salary is 1 franc. So I naturally assumed 1 livre = 1 franc, which is sometimes ("Le terme perdura en tant que synonyme de la livre ") claimed. But if you know more, please share.
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
Or the women who died as infants. Actually, what we're seeing with the matrilineal versus patrileneal lines diversity ratio could also happen if victors killed everyone in the clan, men and women. All it requires is that women occasionally marry out, and are then considered part of the other patrilineal clan (common enough, see new name of the bride), thereby preserving their line after the massacre of their cousins.
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
They are released into the magical forest where they build tree houses and sing songs forever.
At that time the monthly salary of a mason in Paris is at a little less than a livre.
daily, you mean.
The real question is how many days in a year does he need to work to feed himself? Let’s say he only consumes bread. One kilo of bread was 0.3 francs. So they both need, and ancien regime worker gets as his entire salary, say 200 working days times 3.33 kilos = 666 kilos of bread a year. Cheap bread’s 3 euros/kilo, so modern counterpart needs 2000 euros to live all year, or about a working month. Clothing and butter are even cheaper comparatively.
Edit: that’s... very little bread, actually. Hard to believe they were this close to starving. A kg bread is 2200 kcal, so he gets 3800 calories per day (not just working day) to feed his family. And nothing else. No meat, no clothes, no rent, no entertainment. I guess they must have eaten potatoes, which cost only 0.02 francs per kilo. That’s 10 tons of potatoes yearly salary, or 19 000 kcal per day. That’s more like it, now they can afford clothes and the poule au pot on sunday.
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
Where does it make that claim? He specifically says the it is not the product of extreme polygamy and sexual inequality Hoffmeister presents.
Let’s say you have 10 patrilineal clans. They have children normally, then on generation 5, clan 1 wipes out the men and takes the women, in clan 2. Then on generation 10, clans 3,4, and clan 5 wipes out clan 6, 7. The diversity ratio between mitochondrial dna and Y-chromosome is now 2:1 compared to the beginning. And on it goes, increasing the ratio through generations, but everyone's having children.
Because patrilineal social organisation sorts males into groups with identical or closely related Y-chromosomes, wars and feuds between such groups, even if it leads to a low level of group extinction per generation, strongly depresses diversity over 60 generations (~1500 years). Put differently, entire branches of the Y-chromosomal genetic tree may become extinct when social groups go extinct. Up to twentyfold reductions in diversity are possible with very little or no change in male population size over 60 generations.
This is the 17:1 diversity ratio that is often touted. It's 60 generations of filtering, not a 'one man to 17 women' harem.
Regulars get less charity than newbies and private accounts of unknown provenance. This isn’t me flaunting the rules or refusing to recognize your autoritah, we’re talking about effectively banning me for stuff new accounts would barely get warned for , slowly but indelibly added up over years of participation like a kafkaian nightmare.
Imo over that timescale the good washes out the bad. (if there is any. Basically, to answer your question, I’m an innocent man, victim of circumstance, accused by appearance)
For example here, rafa’s the most resilient person on the motte, completely unfazed by antagonism, if what I said even counts. The way I see it, you’re defending people who don’t need defending, enforcing borderline rules for the hell of it.
Anyway, I got your meaning, I should write that QC so I’ll get the benefits, implicitly.
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