naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
Posts don't appear until approved. Though apparently by linking it you did make it available for people kind of?
Anyway, I've approved the post now. It's technically culture war outside the culture war thread, but also you've framed it as a megathread and those are often allowed with culture war rules applied. On reflection I supposed this constitutes something of a loophole if we allow just anyone to post a "megathread" but so long as it doesn't get abused I, at least, am unlikely to do anything about it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
Apropo, I was recently helping clean-out/de-clutter my mom's basement and came across a Rubbermaid tote full of my old ExoSquad and Dino-Rider toys which we're fixing up and repurposing into Christmas gifts for the eldest. I expect there's probably some collector somewhere cringing at the thought but come on... Kid's already big mecha fan, and actually has a pretty good track record of taking care of his toys.
What a fun Christmas gift! Fasa v. Playmates Toys was actually one of the first IP cases to catch my interest (you may remember how that ended); the Robotech/ExoSquad crossover toys (especially, the Veritech Fighter) occupy a really interesting place at the intersection of fandom and licensing.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
Edit: holy crap, for the record, at time of writing I didn't know that @naraburns had already made effectively the same comment down thread.
By the mouth of two or three witnesses every word shall be established.
Also how am I only just now realizing that Nara Burns was/is an ExoSquad reference?
Presumably you just haven't looked at my profile page or avatar in the last... 12 months? Prior to that, well, it is relatively obscure despite the cameos in 2018's Ready Player One (where both Marsh's Aerial Attack and Weston's Field Repair E-Frames make brief appearances).
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
As a small follow-up, I found this article interesting. Even though all justices on the Colorado Supreme Court were appointed by Democrats, three dissented in this case.
The four Colorado Supreme Court justices who ruled Trump ineligible for the White House under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot all attended Ivy League institutions or otherwise a top-ranked elite law school on the East Coast for law school.
The three dissenting justices, meanwhile, all graduated from the University of Denver's law school...
The "cognitive elite" strikes again!
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
I don't disagree, but it's not obvious to me that the Court needs to reach the First Amendment question, which sometimes (though certainly not always) means that they won't. The First Amendment question is substantial to the question of insurrection, and however this ultimately plays out I would expect SCOTUS to prefer a procedural holding over a substantive one. So I expect the Fourteenth Amendment to play a more decisive role than the First--but you may be right!
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
Parties are private organizations, though. They can just disregard the Colorado primary in deciding which candidate to back in the general election, can't they?
It's an interesting question! It depends on what you mean by "back," and also on how each state handles the primary process. I'm not familiar with Colorado's primary election laws so I don't have a direct answer for you, but in general states do not assemble their general election ballots based on what political parties want, but based on how relevant procedure (including primary elections) dictates.
For example, even if, say, Ron DeSantis won the Republican primaries generally, and the Party decided to back him, he could in theory still be excluded from some state ballots for, say, failing to get the right paperwork filed on time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton, 514 U.S. 779 (1995) ruled that states can't add additional qualifications for Senators and Representatives. The same rules should apply to Presidential elections.
I doubt this simply because Article I gives Congress a say in the election of Senators and Representatives. Article II doesn't. But you may be right.
And Colorado is pretending that Trump is disqualified by the 14th Amendment, not exercising its discretion to exclude whoever they want.
They're definitely saying this now, but they're saying that Trump's Fourteenth Amendment disqualification can be litigated (very broadly, see this comment) under the state's election laws. This creates a fact/law question (leading to the Fourteenth Amendment problems I tagged but should have pondered at greater length) that SCOTUS seems likely to want to avoid, but... hard to say. It would be interesting to know how far the Colorado court is willing to go to keep Trump off the ballot, but depending on how quickly SCOTUS remands (assuming they do), we may get to find out.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
Yeah, looking at this after sleeping on it, I'm less satisfied with my analysis than I was. In addition to being a pragmatist, Roberts has a tendency to aim for narrow, technical rulings, and if he can remand this in a way that (as you say) "punts on the ugly questions" I could see him pushing for that route. I agree that US Term Limits is a bad fit simply because we're in the wrong Article with this case. But the fact/law distinction on the question of insurrection potentially tees up the Court to either do Trump or his opponents a huge rhetorical favor, no matter the legal result.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
However, if the case is decided based entirely on a state court’s interpretation of the federal constitution, can’t the Supreme Court tell them their interpretation of the federal constitution is wrong and remand the case?
Yeah, this is correct, I should probably have waited to post until after I'd gotten some sleep.
If you read the decision, the Colorado Supreme Court is not basing its case entirely on the federal constitution, but rather saying that Colorado statutory law provides a judicial remedy for voters seeking to remove a disqualified candidate from the ballot, and further that they are removing Trump from the ballot in holding that Trump is so disqualified. But there are two prongs to that--a question of fact, and a question of law. On the question of law, SCOTUS isn't going to hold that insurrection doesn't disqualify, but they could (even though supposedly appellate courts don't like to revisit findings of fact, they often do) hold that Trump has not actually been proven guilty of insurrection (the Due Process/Fourteenth Amendment question I mentioned but didn't elaborate upon).
The question then becomes, how far is the Colorado court willing to go, on remand, to keep Trump off the ballot anyway--but as others have pointed out, by then the issue may be moot.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
I do agree States get to run their elections but in this case the State Court is citing constitutional law to remove him.
Yeah, in morning's light I'm thinking about the difference between the law of disqualification versus the factual question of insurrection. SCOTUS isn't going to rule that insurrection isn't disqualifying, but if they do rule that (e.g.) insurrection requires some kind of criminal conviction then on remand Colorado will need to find a different excuse. But in a way that turns into a gift for Trump, who would then get to walk around saying "the media lies, SCOTUS itself cleared me of insurrection," which... well, I don't know. It would be nice if the Republican Party would just toss him out in the primaries, then this would all be moot, but that seems less and less likely to happen.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
Sorry, it would have been more precise to say "if Colorado's legislature says Trump can't be on the ballot, provided they haven't done anything unconstitutional in the process (e.g. racial discrimination or whatever)..."
In morning's light I am less satisfied with the rest of my analysis, though. The legal question of insurrection (and whether and how it may be disqualifying) is at least plausibly separable from the factual question of insurrection, though. So it will be interesting to see what happens.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
If states reign supreme, what’s to stop any state from stripping literally all of their political adversaries from their ballots?
I have heard many people argue that the current two-party system of "Republicrats" is already doing precisely that. Have you ever tried to run for public office? It's not always and everywhere completely insane, but certainly it can be a time-consuming and expensive process. Party machines grease the skids for you, so legislation is typically written with those machines in mind. But that means, if you are a political adversary of the dominant parties, then the laws on the books are overwhelmingly likely to work against you.
Fortunately, in many places Republicans and Democrats exist in small enough numbers that unaffiliated voters can occasionally drive legislation that places limits on the excesses of partisans seeking to strip their adversaries of electability. This is the most likely practical result: states that go overboard in stripping adversaries will face an angry uprising from independent voters. But in places with entrenched one-party rule, this is less likely to pose a meaningful threat.
More expansively: the main thing preventing this from happening in the past has just been good old-fashioned civic virtue. But the news media, education systems, etc. have been beating the "burn it all down" drum long enough that many, maybe most Americans now think that destroying their opponents is more important than finding a way to coexist with them.
If you put a gun to my head, I'd bet that this is overturned, or stayed until moot.
The ruling is absurd, but the Constitution is pretty clear that states get to decide how their elections are run, including their national elections. The only Constitutional caveats are that Congress can weigh in on Article I elections (legislators), and that the states must be structured in a republican way (i.e. representative democracy). Here are the (partial) instructions for Article II elections:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
If Colorado's legislature (or its sometimes-mouthpiece, the state court) says Trump can't be on the ballot, then Trump can't be on the ballot, and from a Constitutional standpoint, that's the end of the story. One Constitutional way out I see here is maybe a Fourteenth Amendment complaint of some kind, but the conservatives on the court are likely to be leery of that, and the progressives on the court will simply refuse to rule in Trump's favor no matter how much they may need to torture logic to get there.
My primary hesitation is Chief Justice Roberts. He is a pragmatist to the core, and may just oppose the chaos that would result: a likely domino-effect of progressive states using this ruling to (definitely) eliminate Trump from their ballots and (possibly in the future) even eliminate conservative candidates through bog-standard abuse of process. I could see Roberts relying on "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government" from the Constitution with precisely the intent of preventing political chaos, but in doing so he would do pretty direct harm to the plain language governing Article II elections.
I'm less acquainted with any federal election statutes that may apply, but prima facie I would bet cautiously against this being overturned--on grounds that Roberts, as an establishment man, may find his distaste for Trump encouraging him to affirm the strength of Article II. This would be a victory for establishment Republicans as well as a victory for Trump haters. But I can imagine Roberts imagining the electoral chaos of an affirmation, because that result would make the 2000 and 2020 elections look tame by comparison; faced with such a vision, he could very well flinch. So I would expect Trump's team to work that angle hard--assuming there are any competent lawyers remaining who are still willing to represent him.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
You've got eight comments in the mod queue and all of them are ban-worthy. Looking over your brief history here, this appears to be a troll account. Banned.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
Real pathways to raise fertility:
- Return or move closer to actual patriarchy
- Mass cloning/AI/eternal youth technical fix
- Return to devout religiosity as with Mormons of old and certain Jewish sects
I quite enjoyed this recent piece from the vice president for economic and social-policy studies at The Cato Institute, Alex Nowrasteh. Specifically this bit:
He asked what I’d do to increase fertility if that were the only outcome I cared about. After clarifying that I don’t support this policy, I said that I’d massively increase marginal tax rates on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity cost of having children.
Even the Mormons are falling below replacement rate, though for all I know that is due to secularization. A "return to patriarchy" could work if it specifically limits women's opportunities, but part of Nowrasteh's point seems to be that with the luxury of ubiquitous electronic entertainment, even excluding women from the workforce would likely be insufficient to push the opportunity cost balance back toward fecundity.
Nowrasteh's proposal is deregulation to reduce the cost of raising children, but in my experience children are already pretty affordable--at least until they get to college! Rather, the benefits of having children are often poorly communicated or even perhaps outside the Overton window, and when they are understood those benefits still take decades to really come to fruition. Having a close-knit family is an extremely effective risk-mitigation strategy on numerous fronts, but it takes a lot of work to build such a thing, and it takes a lot of cultural input to get people believing it's even possible.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
There are of course a million angles on this, but the one that just got me was the "Republicans pounce" headline from NBC:
Forget the sense of defilement (in the old "despoil their temples" sense of defilement), the sense of entitlement on display (both in the video's creation and in the staffer's "I dindu nuffin" and "I play the gay card" and "I'm gonna sue" responses), how this impacts stereotypes of gay men as oversexed wantons, comparisons to the consequences of the January 6 2021 "riots," jokes about whose chair that was and what she's going to do about it...
Forget all that. Somehow, the headline is Republicans pounce. I don't know how something can be so simultaneously brazen and banal, but there it is. Totally unapologetic partisan propaganda from a major news network, just the most painfully obvious and insanely unprofessional bullshit approach to burying the lede, and I know they do this all the time but come on. We've got full-on video of gay sex in a Senate hearing room and these so-called "journalists" can't see it as anything but an opportunity to run interference for the Democrats?
I'm a big fan of the Free Press, in the old "fourth estate" sense. But I'm not sure there are any legacy media outlets left that aren't simply Democratic political action committees that murdered the First Amendment and now prance about wearing its desiccated skin, cultural wolves in political sheep's clothing.
That's the part that caught my interest: how did the rationalist community, with its obsession with establishing better epistemics than those around it, wind up writing, embracing, and spreading a callout article with shoddy fact-checking?
People occasionally ask whether the ratsphere is just reinventing the wheel of philosophy (my response then). I suspect that EA is similarly reinventing the wheel of non-profit profiteering.
This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, but so far all I have to show for it is a scattered mess of loosely-connected (as though by yarn and pushpins) thoughts. Some of them are even a bit Marxist--we live in a material world, we all have to eat, and if you aren't already independently wealthy then your only options for going on living are to grind, or to grift (or some combination of the two). And the Internet has a way of dragging more and more of us into the same bucket of crabs. AI is interesting stuff, but 99% of the people writing and talking about it are just airing views. MIT's recent AI policy briefs do not contribute any technical work to the advancement of AI, and do not express any substantive philosophical insight; all I see there is moralizing buzzwords and wishful thinking. But it is moralizing buzzwords and wishful thinking from top researchers at a top institution discussing a hot issue, which is how time and money and attention are allocated these days.
So for every one person doing the hard work of advancing AI technology, there seem to be at least a hundred grasping hands reaching out in hopes of being the one who gets to actually call the shots, or barring that at least catches some windfall "crumbs" along the way. For every Scott Alexander donating a damn kidney to strangers in hopes of making the world an ever-so-slightly better place to live, there are a hundred "effective altruists" who see a chance to collect a salary by bouncing between expenses-paid feel-good conferences at fancy hotels instead of leveraging their liberal arts degree as a barista. And I say that as someone with several liberal arts degrees, who works in academia where we are constantly under pressure to grift for grants.
The cliche that always comes to my mind when I weigh these things is, "what would you do, if money were not an issue?" Not in the "what if you had unlimited resources" sense, but like--what would the modal EA-AI acolyte do, if they got their hands on $100 million free and clear? Because I think the true answer for the overwhelming majority of them is something like "buy real estate," not "do more good in the world." And I would not condemn that choice on the merits (I'd do the same!) but people notice that kind of apparent hypocrisy, even if, in the end, we as a society seem basically fine with non-profits like "Black Lives Matter" making some individual persons wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. I can't find the link right now (but I thought it was an AAQC?) but someone here did a Likewise, there was a now-deleted deep dive into the Sound of Freedom guy's nonprofit finances posted here a while back, and he was making a lot of money.
So if you want to dig in, the 2020 return is here and the 2021 is here.
As far as most concerning stuff, there is a pretty large amount of money flowing out to Ballard and his wife. $335,000 of salary to Ballard in 2021 and $113,858 of salary to his wife. These aren't super eye popping numbers, but it is a pretty high amount.
The second thing is that they seem to be hoarding a lot of cash. They have like $80 million cash on hand, and are spending much less than they raise. This isn't inherently an issue if they're trying to build an organization that's self-sustaining, but it does mean as a donor your money is not likely going to actual stuff in the short or medium term.
Speaking of that actual stuff, they don't seem to spend most of what goes out the door on their headline-generating programs. A pretty big chunk of their outflow is just grants to other 501(c)(3)s, which is not something you need to be spending millions in executive compensation for. As best I can figure, in 2021 they did just shy of $11 million of grants to other nonprofits. It's a little tricky to suss out their spending on program expenses versus admin, but they claim for outside the US a total of just shy of $8 million in program expenses.
Legal expenses are also very high (at over 1.5 million). Not sure if they're involved in some expensive litigation or what is going on there. Travel is also really high at 1.9 million, but given the nature of their organization, a good chunk of that is likely programmatic.
Now it looks like, even if maybe he did (?) save some kid(s) from trafficking along the way, it was mostly a grift? Anyway, the point is, stories like this abound.
So it would be more surprising, in the end, if the rationalist community had actually transcended human nature in this case. And by "human nature" I don't even mean greedy and grubbing; I just mean that anyone who isn't already independently wealthy must, to continue existing, find a grind or a grift! As usual, I have no solutions. This particular case is arguably especially meta, given the influence AI seems likely to have on the grind-or-grift options available to future (maybe, near-future) humans. And maybe this particular case is especially demonstrative of hypocrisy, given the explicit opposition of both effective altruism and the ratsphere to precisely the kind of grind-or-grift mentality that dominates every other non-profit world. But playing the game one level higher apparently did not, at least in this case, translate into playing a different game. Perhaps, so long as we are baseline homo sapiens, there is no other game available to us.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
...is that sarcasm?
Nope.
I have to assume you are at least aware that Twitch isn't only for gaming, right?
I was previously unaware.
I know you said you don't watch it, but the idea that Twitch ... is just about gaming is trivially demonstrated as false.
Yep. No one had ever demonstrated that to me.
or even live-streaming in general
I understand that many things are live-streamed, though I basically never watch live-streams outside of oral arguments before appellate courts. But I always thought Twitch was a gaming service. I even have a login through Amazon that I sometimes use to get gaming bonuses, and I never saw anything there that wasn't someone else playing a video game.
I understand that the question is relatively simple to answer, but I'm pointing out that the question itself never even occurred to me. I've never had any reason at all to suppose Twitch was anything but a video game streaming service.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
I felt like this was a surprisingly complex problem when I started reading about it, but your replies (and others) are strengthening that sense dramatically. For want of a less politically-loaded word, "democratization" of technology seems to be taking our species to some pretty weird places already. How much further along this tech tree can we go before Something Breaks?
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
It's not only a gaming platform, that's why.
Thanks--today I learned!
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
This, along with other comments explaining to me that Twitch does more than video game streaming, was very helpful. Thank you!
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
I'm confused. Enough people were showing NSFW material Twitch thought was inappropriate that they reversed course. This seems quite different from your description of humans trying to become "teenage-presenting (cat?)girls."
I'm confused too, I guess.
My comment about Fisherian runaway was related to the AI stuff... like, if lewds are permitted and lewds get clicks, then yeah you're gonna get camgirls but also (I assume) you're going to get camboys using AI filters to present as camgirls for the views. But if that's not what was raising the AI concerns at Twitch then I guess I misunderstood something.
Too antagonistic, don't post like this please.
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