georgioz
16hr ago
I like Matt Walsh take on this. Some people believe that AI has very significant apocalypse potential, thus AI executives are literally building a bomb about to kill us all. And the response? "Ah, you are silly! AI executives only spread fake doomsday propaganda trying to scare the population in order to get competitive advantage, power and money."
And this is supposed to be "there is nothing to worry about, just move along, nothing to see here" argument? It is horrible either way.
Humans form into self-integrated societies that have net-positive moral utility.
Humans do not agree what is "net-positive moral utility". For instance I think about it from of Christian virtue ethics, not in form of utility.
Rights dependent on subjective or arbitrary thresholds have historically had enormous potential for abuse.
Right is a legal fiction, basically a strongly worded law. From where I stand, right was always the other side of duty. As soon as people renege on said duty, rights stops existing. We see it again and again. Right to privacy of correspondence is in article 12 of Universal Human Rights. It basically stopped existing after decades old creeping process of governments spying on said correspondence, people do not feel duty to resist it so the right stops existing, and not enough people care.
For a functioning, high-performance society, we must have it be generally the case that people believe rights, including life, will generally be upheld
Even skipping what "high-performance society" even means as it by itself is value and thus morality laden statement, rights as was said are social constructs. If enough people think that sacrificing hearts to the blood good or that tears of newborn children are perfectly fine price to pay for greater good, then such thing will be enshrined as a law. Maybe even a right - people have right to live their free lives enabled by tears of newborn children. What is life of a child in face of all the other things that are valued in society, children will be sacrificed to the Moloch of these rights. All of the aforementioned things be it surrogacy or euthanasia are also argued in terms of rights: right to family life, right to bodily autonomy or whatnot. In the end the rights have to be evaluated by somebody if they clash, they can be amended or suspended as during COVID. Nothing will happen if right is stepped upon or changed: no smiting, nothing will physically shatter.
In the end we live in a society that we live in, we have laws based on values and ethical system accepted through culture in the society, which are in turn informed by theology of decision makers and general population in their day to day activity. This world is the result of that.
georgioz
2d ago
Sperm donors create their own unique problems in terms of potential incest or spreading of rare diseases and whatnot. However this Chinese case is different - he literally has 100+ children inside his compound with hired staff etc. You can see it in the photo. I have never seen anything like that, however it was the first thing that was obvious to me as soon as I learned about how the surrogacy works.
georgioz
2d ago
The situation in Yemen is very interesting. Currently Houthis govern the population of around 28 million people out of 43 million total population of Yemen. and their standing army is around 350 000 people with around 30k of hardcore elite troops. Just as a comparison, at the time of US retreat the Taliban only had around 70,000 warriors with another 200,000 in various militias and reserve forces. However Houthis are much better equipped - they posses artillery, air defense, ballistic missiles as well as around 100 tanks as well as drones from quadcopters to Iranian Samad-3 despite decade long warfare against Saudis and USA.
If you read the comments on the substack post, he even acknowledges that he knows he'll lose business over this. So here's a case where someone who is supposedly an "effective altruist" is making a decision to help one convicted felon in order to damage his company's future, likely permanently. I know that the only thing I'm going to remember out of this is "Oh, Manifund? Those are the retards that hired Caroline Ellison".
It is not as if EA has any coherent definition of morality. Morality is whatever is convenient for utils. "Ellison is smart and she will do more good than bad eventually" is all that is needed for an argument. I really mean it, there is no stable grounding, no deontological laws or even heuristics that would inform you on what action to take inside EA. It is all about if you can produce some good sounding 20 page parable about baby eating aliens, thus making your decision correct and moral.
I am not surprised, it just confirms the quokka meme for EA and broader rationalist movement. By the way I will use this opportunity to remark on "surprising" development of free malaria nets so much pushed for by EA. Apparently these nets are used by natives for fishing, but given the small diameter of the mesh size, it catches everything - including baby fish. The whole project contributes toward destroying whole ecosystems in Africa, exacerbating the food security in whole regions. I am sure there will be another rationalist "solution" to this problem thus adding on to previous catastrophe. Also I'd love to see how this impacts the util calculation of the whole program and if it potentially turns saints into villains retrospectively - at least for now.
Add this HR decision to whole battery of stupid and naive decisions made so far.
That it's unclear whether the problem can really be resolved with sufficiently strong contractual terms. I'm slightly more inclined to accept the premise that surrogacy in general opens up a Pandora's box of ethical problems.
I considered making this as a top post, but I can use it here as another example from Pandora's box of surrogacy problems. Apparently there is a Chinese billionaire and video game executive named Xu Bo, who has over 100 children through US based surrogacy programs.
I guess my imaginary example of weird millionaire cult leader filling his ranch with hundreds of children from surrogacy - that I used before in these hypotheticals - was not imaginative enough. Now there is also the foreign aspect twist due to intersection of jus soli citizenship laws, where foreign billionaires and possibly state actors can breed US citizens Soldiers abroad and make cults in safe jurisdiction. The reality has always some ways to surprise.
Yet another "unintended" consequence of completely surrendering the culture and law over to Queer Studies weirdos, who specifically pushed for surrogacy as a "family equality" tool for access to motherhood by queer people degenerates. And now after these ideas were imposed by activists on the ground, we can all adopt surprised Pikachu face, that the society has to rummage through debris of yet another norm "abolished" by these lunatics specifically engaged in crusade against "heteronormativity", so we now live in their world of country-wide mental asylum constructed for the most abominable degenerates of all kinds, not only the queer ones.
Not being able to do official segregation has basically made the American urban lifestyle very expensive and even more expensive if you have kids. You can’t just buy a cheap house and send your kids to public schools because of the demographics. Which forces you to either live in an expensive suburb or use private schools. This also means you largely can’t be poor in your nice community because your community refuses to have low costs of living options because that would allow the more criminally inclined people to move in.
I think this is not such a novel idea. The acceptance of car culture in USA was to large part driven by the fact that owning a car or two was middle class signifier and defensive measure. I think Europeans will eventually learn the same - if your rich neighborhood is one subway station away from crime ridden hellhole, you will have that spilled into your subway station and from there into the neighborhood. In that sense being cut off from public transit is the logical thing to require. We already see the same pattern in European cities, where natives flee to the surrounding towns and villages.
It's no secret that the Republican party under MAGA really likes conspiracies. They let you substitute wishcasting for evidence. Kirk pushed a lot of conspiracy theories from big ones like [The 2020 election was stolen] to [Aghanistan's collapse was engineered to import D voters] to [J6 was instigated by the FBI/Antifa/BLM]. He also pushed smaller ones that are closer to simple misinformation, like implying the Covid vaccine makes you blind and paralyzed. But for Kirk, all of these conspiracies were instrumental. They all pointed in the same direction: helping the Republican party, or more specifically Trump.
This is incredible use of equivocation of the word "conspiracy". I can name twenty such "conspiracies" that are not even talked about as such on the left. Ranging from overarching theological ones such as that all men consciously and unconsciously conspired to create the mystical "system" of patriarchy to oppress all women to a very specific conspiracies promoted by academia such as that Republicans want to create uninformed voters who will get them in power.
I am not doing this in some tu quoque ad hominem. But telling that some large voting bloc of tens of millions of people believes "conspiracies" is like saying that water is wet. For instance I can say that the death of George Floyd was the hallmark of conspiracy lunatics taking over the public discourse in 2020. If tomorrow some crazy person killed Kamala Harris, you can immediately assign conspiracy theories to her, her supporters, her detractors and everybody in between. It is useless category in such a broad definition.
Candace Owens opened her show the day after Kirk's memorial by mocking Erica Kirk and claiming Charlie had been "betrayed" by someone within the TPUSA, either Jewish donors or Erika Kirk herself because golly gee, didn't Charlie's wife seem a little too enthused about going on camera after his death?
In context of above "conspiracies", maybe you are aware that for instance former Young Turks progressive Anna Kasparian is highly supportive of Owens theories. She endorses Owens, Carlson and is fully behind them. So by that metric I can say that It is no secret that DNC under progressives really like conspiracies. Including that of Kirk murder. Now some people say it is a cynical ploy by leftist operatives to split the vote and demoralize Republican voters for the upcoming elections. But that is exactly the point, it by itself is a "conspiracy theory", and yet another potential thing for you to list as such. It is all an incredible mess.
IME homeschooling is fairly middle class-
Of course it is, as I argued above it is because it is worse from the both systems. You still pay taxes for public schools but opt out for every single benefit starting from free lunch to free babysitting basically. For lower middle class or poor there is no real choice, they either put their children into public schools or lose half of their dual income including taxes that is there to support the necessities.
The proposal is there to at least partially offset this. How insane it is to have $20k taxpayer money per year to educate 6-10 year old children on basic things, while the school system fails to teach them anything. You can pay $10k to parents, have them organize pods and the rest and check if the results are at least comparable to public schools. Government saves half the costs on taxes and children stay with their mothers and pods.
By the way there is also another alternative for more business savvy people. Just fund one of the famous "learing centers". Rake in money from public funding, give parents some kickback and just profit not only from "education" but also from free lunches and the rest of it. That is the no-brainer arbitrage of the current insane system. People are up in arms and disgusted when they find such a fraudulent schemes by Somalis or other communities in Minnesota who do that under veneer of leftist blind eye policy. But this is literally what is right now happening in the public school system such as New York: just huge money siphoning scheme where teachers, teacher pensioners and various contractors extract money while not teaching kids reading or math and not even giving any kickback to parents. That is the true travesty.
You are arguing the current situation. If you are a family with two or three children, the cost is $24k-$96k per year for schooling for a taxpayer just for K-12 system. You are forced to work, but one parent is working entirely to pay just the official schooling costs. If you decided to homeschool, now you have worst of the both worlds: you pay taxes and you forego one income in the family. Of course only some people can afford it, mostly driven how terrible the school is. Moving children out of that system makes homeschooling more advantageous on the margin, which actually saves taxpayer money.
Of course there is more in it. If you have stay at home mum, you save on other costs such as cooking and delivery, cleaning plus the person can still do some gig or part-time work, especially via unofficial channels such as bartering. On top of that you have other advantages: my wife researched discounts, she researched obscure government dotation schemes not even related to kids. It takes time and effort to do that and in fact saved us a lot of money. The whole system is incredibly perverse.
Why? People in USA literally have second amendment right and it is curtailed by many, many stipulations but yet everybody pretends or even firmly believes that the right exists. Why you cannot have right to bodily autonomy except suicide? You already have many such stipulations, for instance your right to bodily autonomy and many other rights are suspended if you are in prison. There is right to bodily autonomy except certain mandatory vaccinations etc. What is another stipulation changing?
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