netstack
Texas is freedom land
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User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11d ago
I was going to make fun of that as spherical-cow thinking by a guy who had never seen naval service, but T-Paine actually had a slightly more complete plan.
Some method might be fallen on to keep up a naval force in time of peace, if we should not judge it necessary to support a constant navy. If premiums were to be given to merchants to build and employ in their service ships mounted with 20, 30, 40 or 50 guns (the premiums to be in proportion to the loss of bulk to the merchant) fifty or sixty of those ships, with a few guard-ships on constant duty, would keep up a sufficient navy, and that without burthening ourselves with the evil so loudly complained of in England, of suffering their fleets in time of peace to lie rotting in the docks.
It’s still kind of like paying truckers if they include at least one anti-tank weapon. America would have a heck of a time getting either to stand up against a serious military.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11d ago
I was pretty sure it meant right to deny things to black people.
To be clear, I find this particular punt outrageous and unfair. But I don’t think “states’ rights” has been a particularly principled objection since Andrew Jackson, if ever.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11d ago
We ask that top-level comments have more meat on the bone.
Since we’ve asked you specifically about this in the last couple months, one day ban.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
15d ago
More effort and less…sneering? Mockery? Than this, please.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
18d ago
I’m sure he’s seen the discussion. I know I have. And yet I don’t share your conclusion either. It’s not because I hate Trump, but because I really do believe his administration is more flagrantly corrupt than Biden’s, Obama’s, or the DNC.
I wish you would give a specific comparison on insider trading or nepotism or something. How many politicians are given personal 747s?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
18d ago
you should already have investigated the claims against the previous administration, and you would have had no choice but to conclude that it at least looks fishy, and therefore you would have investigated it
I feel like I’m having a stroke.
If I’m reading you right, though, I think you’re jumping the gun. How do you know Ben doesn’t have a “bulletproof argument” for whatever it is you’ve got in mind?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
19d ago
If you define “as many as they can get away with” as “whatever they’re doing right now,” you’re just assuming the conclusion.
Surely Israel could drop a few more bombs without losing its core supporters. Or blockade a little more tightly. Or cut negotiations shorter.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
23d ago
We ask that top-level posts have a little more substance. Who is this? What’s it got to do with the price of tea in China?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
23d ago
Post about specific groups, not general groups, whenever possible.
Calling out the general category of government employees does not clear that bar.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
23d ago
So what was the idea driving Tesla Guy?
feels a bit like trying to make sense of insanity
Pretty much, yeah. I think suicide bombers nearly always are, and have been, nuts. If there’s a trend, I don’t see it.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
26d ago
On one hand, you’ve got a (former?) Trump enthusiast who blew himself up in front of a Trump property. On the other, a self-proclaimed misandrist and nihilist who went 0-1 against a bunch of babies. There’s a common thread here and it isn’t intellectualism.
Hell, they wouldn't even call it terrorism, when George Floyd extremists went around lighting things on fire in protest of a vibe.
Were they wrong? I think most riots belong in a different category from hostage situations, hijackings, and bombings.
many attacks on universities I regard as quite warranted
Please tell me you mean political attacks rather than terrorist ones.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
30d ago
That stat doesn’t say anything about the five year trick. Or about Poles. Wait, it’s not even limited to migrants! This is like using the African-American unemployment rate to say that black immigrants are actually planning to quit. That’s not true for the U.S. and I would like to see better data for the U.K.
But let’s assume that 10.7% of Pakistani migrants are in fact arriving, cleaning bedpans for five years, then quitting to live off the King’s largesse. Why aren’t native-born Brits doing the same thing? To me, that suggests it’s not actually a good deal for anyone raised to expect a first-world standard of living. That’s exactly the kind of arbitrage @MadMonzer is talking about.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
30d ago
Most people don’t do everything “in order to work.” They work in order to live here, or raise their kids, or buy that new car, or whatever. What makes migration special?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
30d ago
Inflammatory claims require evidence. Drive-by insults at entire categories count.
Given the sheer number of warnings and bans you've accrued over the last six months, you ought to be aware of this. One week ban, again.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
30d ago
In the interest of avoiding a spiral of "uh-huh"/"nuh-uh"...
More effort than this, please.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
How?
British customs laws were rarely particular in their enforcement. Judges could issue “writs of assistance” compelling bystanders to help with searches. This was an obvious moral hazard, and Americans remained bitter about it for decades. Here’s an article talking about it as part of an argument over probable cause jurisprudence, and here’s explaining how it got into the Bill of Rights.
The pockets rule removes particularity, pitting it directly against the Founding Fathers’ intent. It makes it easier for petty tyrants to impose an inconvenience on anyone they don’t like. That’s a poor choice.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
Good post.
I do think your three questions are a little incomplete.
- Will we keep making consistent AI progress?
- Does sufficient AI progress translate to sufficient general progress?
- Will/can we align sufficiently-progressed AIs so they don’t turn us all into paperclips?
- How will aligned AIs be distributed amongst competing interests?
Even if (1) we stop making progress at 2x human, (2) that progress is limited to domains AI is already decent at, and (3) our new flood of intelligent, inorganic service workers is perfectly aligned…we can still get a wide range of results. My interests are not your interests are not Elon Musk’s interests. Maybe we agree 99% on things like “scarcity is bad,” but we aren’t going to be in lockstep. There has to be a negotiation step where we figure out how much our lead is worth. In a hard takeoff, it’s worth everything. In a softer one, it could buy nothing at all before rivals catch up.
In my opinion, the most likely branches include limited adoption: most competitors rejecting or failing to adopt an effective technology, giving a large advantage to a handful of more risk-tolerant ones. I find this most concerning for defense, a fundamentally conservative industry with some of the worst consequences for competition. The most risk-tolerant governments are not the ones I want to see gaining an edge!
This is kind of the crux of the AI 2027 project Scott shared recently. Not coincidentally, it also claims to have good answers to (1), though I didn’t really dive into their reasoning. I’m curious about your thoughts on Kokotajlo’s scenario.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
I have been keeping an eye out for Vlad Taltos books every time I go to a used bookstore for…years now. Still haven’t found the first one of any subseries.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
Once upon a time, this is what I got out of Wheel of Time. It didn’t matter if the prose was florid or the plotting glacial. The sprawl was the point. I wasn’t reading it to find out what happened in each finale, but to watch the setting evolve, further selling the illusion of another world.
I would argue that this is the ethos behind most of the great fantasy doorstoppers, even the ones like ASOIAF which stumble into the mainstream. “Journey before destination,” hmm?
Buuuuuut I’m not going to pretend that these satisfy your third sentence. For a superior ratio of wit to word count, allow me to make two suggestions.
Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse is an iconic, delightful bit of English absurdity. Every other page offers some combination of words previously unseen in the language. The comedy works both in the short term, via dialogue and gags and ever so many puns, and in the long term, thanks to incredible brick jokes and a fundamentally silly premise. Great fun. The full text is available here, though I thought it benefited from a print copy.
I’ll also recommend Levels of the Game by John McPhee as a more serious sort of cleverness. It’s a synthesis of two biographies and a play-by-play tennis match. Since both players are near the absolute peak of their sport, the physical competition is recast as a psychological one. I can’t do it justice without explaining how little I expected to care about tennis, and how compelling I found it anyway. You can read some (all?) of it here.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
Did “they”?
Post about specific groups or specific people. If you can’t do so without waging the culture war in the fun thread…don’t.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
Which is why I have no objection to that version.
You can be a bit snide, you can complain about melodrama, you can accuse someone of playing the snowflake. Do enough of those at once, and it becomes more important to bring the receipts.
I’m not thrilled about how AT is putting words in your mouth, but this sort of callout helps approximately never.
Be polite or refrain from responding at all. No one will think less of you for it.
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