netstack
Texas is freedom land
No bio...
User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
29d ago
Oh, hey. A short post, deleted as soon as anyone pushes back at all. Where have I seen this before?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
29d ago
It was a comment by @lancbyw719n, a month-old account with four comments to his name.
Presumably this is the same guy who shows up, posts a few leading questions about race relations or immigration, never responds to comments, and then deletes all his posts. I don't know why he keeps coming back.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
29d ago
Does it encourage productivity? More than an existing background of competition, that is. I'm trying to think of toy scenarios.
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Case 1: You make widgets for $6 labor and $6 materials. You invest in a technology which doubles the productivity of that labor. Now you can make your widgets for $3 labor and $6 materials. Going from $12 to $9 is a 25% savings in your total costs.
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Case 2: You make widgets for $1 labor and $11 materials. You invest in the same technology. Going from $12 to $11.5 only improves your costs by like 4%, since labor costs were so small already.
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Case 3: You make widgets for $6 + $6 until the government comes in and forces you to spend $12 on labor. Now the same technology cuts your cost from $18 to $12, or 33%! Therefore, by making labor more expensive, the government has increased the benefit of investing.
Except...Your final cost with the technology is still $12. You've invested just to get back to where you would otherwise have been. Even if the government relaxes its edict, that just snaps you back to the first case. This is fine if the government has some strategic interest in adopting that technology--like with onshoring, or green new deal, or even corn subsidies--but I'm not convinced on the economic case.
if we (hypothetically) replaced all citizens with cheaper immigrants
Yes, if I was afraid of losing my job, getting the cheapest widgets would be a poor consolation prize. But that doesn't mean subsidizing me makes my labor more productive. It means that I'm asking to trade off some efficiency for other values, like security.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
29d ago
Man. I feel like you're hitting a giant blindspot here.
Maybe you're right in saying that, with the appropriate definitional games, one can peel materialism like a banana. But isn't there merit to the framework which is hardest to peel?
The Christian framework comes apart at the slightest interaction with evidential standards. This has lead countless mystics and gurus to spin off their own heresies which try and rehabilitate it. Gold tablets, ESP, Arianism, whatever. None of them do any better than "consensus materialism."
Or maybe I'm misreading you entirely and tilting at windmills. Sorry.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
28d ago
Just finished Stormlight and really enjoyed it. Yes, people will point out stylistic/prose issues, and they'll be absolutely right. But Wind and Truth succeeded as the plate-spinning, world-expanding, every-new-detail-an-entire-sequel-hook kind of book I was looking for.
For something completely different, I'm alternating back to Annals of the Former World, a set of geology essays. I mentioned the first one last year, but apparently never commented on the next two, so here we go:
In Suspect Terrain was a hit piece on plate tectonics. Great premise, slightly confusing execution, because it was really more like a series of reasonable objections to people in the "new theory" hype cycle. I can't tell if that means the main character was stating the obvious, or if she really was a visionary who was vindicated in the next 40 years of textbooks. The coolest part was that, yes, plate tectonics was new in the 50s and 60s. I always kind of assumed it was settled in the 1800s like so much fossil and timeline stuff.
Rising from the Plains, though, was amazing. It's a history of one family stretching back to the westward expansion into Wyoming. At the same time, it's a narrative of how the Laramie and Medicine Bow mountains got where they are today. Outrageous cowboy anecdotes share pages with the solemn march of Deep Time. Part of the charm was having to keep a map open to cross-reference. I highly recommend this one.
Anyway, the next essay up is Assembling California. So far he seems to be coming at the region from both the western fault lines and the eastern Sierra Nevada. As always, the prose has been delightful. Here's hoping it keeps up.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
28d ago
I can thank Neal for the blessing and the curse of knowing about Van Eck phreaking.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
28d ago
That doesn’t seem right.
Missouri, Arkansas and Texas were colonized by Southerners and embraced slavery with both hands. California was also colonized by plenty of Southerners, at least if you count Missourians, but today is one of our least “culturally Southern” states.
When Kansas’s slavery was deferred to popular vote, political interests in the U.S. encouraged their supporters to go tip the scales. For abolitionists, this meant recruiting New Englanders, not disaffected Southerners. Proslavery interests, as usual, relied on Southerners, even those who didn’t hold their own slaves.
Outside of those states, the bulk of settlement occurred after slavery was abolished.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
27d ago
I would bet dollars to donuts that no SC justice is actually below average IQ, even among lawyers or judges. Maybe appellate courts, but I don’t think the bar is actually that high.
Partisan, yes. Political, obviously. But those are not always correlated against intelligence.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
26d ago
That might create people.
If you only drive sober, use your headlights, and follow all laws, you can still get in a wreck. When that happens, should you be held to the same standard as a reckless drunk driver?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
23d ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22d ago
More effort than this, please.
It’s awfully hard to argue with one-liners.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22d ago
Please elaborate a bit when you’re questioning someone.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22d ago
Some speculate all sorts of things. Please preemptively provide evidence, not speculation.
Goesaert v. Cleary: “Only when the owner of the bar was a sufficiently close relative to the woman bartender, it was argued, could it be guaranteed that such immorality would not be present.” 1948. Overturned in 1976.
Schulz v. Wheaton Glass: it turns out making identical job listings but paying the women’s jobs less actually counts as discrimination. 1970.
US v. Virginia et al.: no, spinning up a second school to allow male/female segregation is not, in fact, separate but equal. 1996.
I find it obvious that second-wave feminism was legitimately fighting oppression. The same is doubly true for racial minorities. There are plenty of reasons why the Civil Rights Act was significant, rather than a formality.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22d ago
Seconding the others’ interest. I want to say I agree with you but I suspect we have pretty different ideas of which movements are the central examples.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22d ago
there has been a palpable increase in the number of questions related to black writers and activists,
Given the trajectory of many, many programs which don’t involve Mr. Jennings, it’s likely not his doing. Correlation, causation. Not that he has any reason to fight it, but if it makes you feel any better, you can probably blame faceless executives and market research.
It’s especially disheartening to know that a man with his depth of knowledge and clearly impressive mental faculties isn’t able to see the nuance around these issues
There’s, uh, a few conclusions that you could take from that.
But I think the set of (knowledgeable & impressive faculties & nuanced opinion & wanting to talk about it & visible) is vanishingly small. Having a complicated, technical opinion on the Current Thing is inversely correlated with wanting to blast that opinion on social media. And with getting an audience when one does so. It’s probably worse when you’re competing for the attention of media executives with their own politics.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22d ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22d ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22d ago
Fighting Hamas is a just war. Reprisals against civilians, on the other hand, are broadly prohibited. Since Hamas has a vested interest in entangling the two, it is very hard for Israel to keep its hands clean.
The strongest criticisms of Israel involve the parts of it which appear profoundly uninterested in doing so. There are more of these than I would like.
Regardless of intent, every dead civilian lets critics pattern-match to My Lai. That’s the kind of event which shaped the antiwar psyche.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22d ago
There is a difference between men fighting one another (Hamas vs. IDF) and men fighting unarmed civilians (Hamas vs. Israelis; IDF vs. random Palestinians).
As much as I would prefer the former, it’s not on the table. Hamas can’t stop hiding behind civilians without getting slaughtered. Israel can’t stop killing civilians without giving Hamas opportunities to slaughter Israelis. Neither side is willing to let it “just be a fight.”
So yes, it’s teetering on the edge of ethnic cleansing. Not because of a psyop to claim righteousness, but because all the remaining options look an awful lot like killing noncombatants and driving them off.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22d ago
Sorry, I meant that in the general case of media selection pressure, not for Ken in particular. It’s just another filter.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22d ago
True, but they don’t help beat the allegations.
It would be much harder to accuse Israel of genocide if they studiously avoided anything that hit the general populace. Water, power, etc.
But of course that would come at some cost in Israeli lives. Understandably not popular in Israel.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
21d ago
I more or less agree, but I was trying to argue against @Mihow and @Primaprimaprima’s complaint about the term “ethnic cleansing.”
If Israel is fighting a just war, then it has a legal war goal which isn’t ethnic cleansing. Therefore activists who insist otherwise are being disingenuous.
If Israel isn’t fighting a just war, though, its war aims might include things like killing all Palestinians. This is verboten in the post-WW2 world. Naturally, Hamas has made it impossible for Israel to fight without killing some noncombatants and, in doing so, casting doubt on its war aims.
My point is that calling it ethnic cleansing isn’t a sign of mindkilled bad-faith partisanship. It is an intended outcome of Hamas’ strategy.
When you move a supply curve with demand held constant, you change price by changing quantity. Less labor for higher prices. This is appealing to the (remaining) workforce. It’s not so great to the customers.
Same as cartelization. Same as tariffs. Like every form of protectionism, it’s the customers who get the bill.
Given that I am a customer, rather than a competing worker, for jobs like construction, I don’t expect to see any benefit from slashing the construction labor supply.
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