quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I completely agree.
I would add that having defensive alliances between nuclear and non-nuclear states is a great boon to non-proliferation. Being in NATO is very much preferable from owning a few nukes, but if NATO membership was not an option for former east block states (like Poland, whose past experience with Russia/USSR would make them wary), then these states might have started pursuing nuclear weapons after the fall of the USSR.
However, the Ukraine war also shows that nukes are not the "I win" button. Instead, the button is labeled "Fuck you, fuck me, fuck everyone". Threatening to press it outside the most existential crisis of a regime is not credible, for the most part. (The death star gambit, to blow up whichever polity annoyed you most from time to time pour encourager les autres might or might not work.)
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Israël
TIL that Israel does Metal umlauts.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I would argue that the exact population does not matter that much, often. If Afghanistan had twice the population (and area), the US would still have conquered them, and if they had only half their population and area, the Taliban would still have taken over again once the US moved out.
Obviously, the order of magnitude matters, as in "Is the population count similar to Belgium, Germany or China?"
Then there is the area to consider. I would have guessed that Iran was about the same size as Afghanistan, and I would have been off -- they are 2.5 times as large. This does not bode well for any invader who wants to engage in nation-building.
I would add that Iran is also supplying Russia with drones. Now Russia is obviously not the prime military adversary that it was some decades ago, but the fact that they find Iranian drones useful against Western equipment -- and the fact Iran produces enough to sell them to Russia -- clearly indicates (just as the space program does), that this is not a country full of goat-herders.
There is an example of an easy mode regime change target. A theocratic polity with only 2M people in less than 400 square kilometers, whose weapons industry is very much on a DIY level. That example is the Gaza strip. If Trump wants to prove that he is better at nation building that GWB was, this is where he might want to start.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
You raise excellent points.
I would add that in two millennia of Christianity, the amount of blessing that the Christians bestow on Israel (e.g. the Jewish diaspora) seems pretty limited, on the level of "unlike pagans, we will suffer you to live on our lands as second class citizens (until we turn extra faithful and kick you out or murder you as a warm-up exercise for a crusade)".
I think one thing which might have changed this attitude is Christian Zionism:
Christian Zionism is a political and religious ideology that, in a Christian context, espouses the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land. Likewise, it holds that the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 was in accordance with biblical prophecies transmitted through the Old Testament: that the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Levant—the eschatological "Gathering of Israel"—is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
I am by no means an expert on Christian prophecy -- my knowledge of that link was mostly due to horror movies and alt-history novels -- neither of which are known to be super reliable, but it seems that a significant fraction of the evangelicals believe that the second coming (optionally followed by the end of the world, seals breaking and all?) will happen Really Soon Now, and that the Jews being in control of the holy lands is a prerequisite to that for some reason.
More pragmatically, Christians have long cared about the holy lands, which was generally what the Crusades were fought about. From a modern Christian point of view, Israel controlling Bethlehem and Jerusalem is tolerable -- Christian pilgrims are allowed and generally not hassled too much. If the ayatollah regime took over Israel, that would likely change for the worse.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think that my argument, which was clearly meant to highlight the absurdity of treating potential persons the same as actual persons, rhymes with beliefs of the pro-natalist crowd (which you hold for other reasons than wanting to maximize future persons). One man's modus tollens being another man's modus ponens and all that.
Let me rephrase my argument a bit. Our premise is that baby-killing is wrong because it denies the existence of a future person. As far as that reason is concerned, anything else which denies the existence of a future person should be just as wrong.
Take the perspective of a healthy female person, which turns out to be a bottleneck for making new homo sapiens persons. When she optimizes for the number of persons produced during her fertile life span, she can probably get pregnant 15 times or so, and given medical advances in treating underweight newborns I would assume that having twins each time (not hard to do with IVF) might give the highest expected value of babies which will live to personhood age, perhaps 28 kids or so.
So while both the conservative natalist and the future-persons-maximizer agree that a woman who decides not to have kids for personal reasons is wrong, their assessment of a woman who marries at age 25 and then proceeds to have six children would be very different. I am assuming that from a conservative perspective, that woman would be a role model. The future persons-maximizer would still consider her rather horrible. She wasted her first fertile decade, for one thing. "So you just did the equivalent of murdering 22 potential persons instead of 28. Do you want a medal for that?"
The utopia of the future-persons-maximizer is the repugnant conclusion, a world so overcrowded with human persons (and their babies) that their lives are barely worth living.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Sure. Here is Practical Ethics (That PDF is kinda terrible, but it appears that libgen is down.).
On page 85 (pdf page: 98), Singer argues that people mean different things when they say human being. One meaning is
It is possible to give 'human being' a precise meaning. We can use it as equivalent to 'member of the species Homo sapiens'. The other is There is another use of the term 'human', one proposed by Joseph Fletcher, a Protestant theologian and a prolific writer on ethical issues. Fletcher has compiled a list of what he calls 'indicators of humanhood' that includes the following: self-awareness, self-control, a sense of the future, a sense of the past,the capacity to relate to others, concern for others, communication, and curiosity.
Then he goes (p.87):
For the first sense, the biological sense, I shall simply use the cumbersome but precise expression 'member of the species Homo sapiens' while for the second sense I shall use the term 'person'.
In the following pages, he goes on about why being a person makes a difference for involuntary killing.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
The problem with protecting the potential of personhood is that it starts even before conception.
If two people (of suitable fertility and biological sexes) have PIV sex, then in the ancestral environment, this has some probability of setting a chain in motion which will result in the creation of a person -- a being with the cognitive capabilities typical of a human. If instead they use some form of birth control, this will drastically lower that probability, so from the point of preventing a person to come into existence, it will be fractionally as bad as abortion or infanticide. (Being anti-birth control is still a position some people hold, but it is mostly more about being anti-sex.)
But we do not even have to stop there, because people having PIV sex does not just happen randomly. If birth control is bad because it prevents the creation of persons, then so is not asking out people on a date. (This is now very contrary to the RCC, which views abstinence as praiseworthy.)
The person too busy with Warhammer to date, the person who uses birth control, the person having abortions whenever she gets pregnant and the person who just murders her babies are all preventing new persons from coming into existence despite there being a potential if they made different choices.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think that you will find that "to ask" is frequently used in situations where it is clear that non-compliance with the demand will have adverse consequences. For example, if someone makes a fuss in a restaurant, they might be asked to leave. If they then refuse to leave, that is not the end of the story, instead, the restaurant will typically escalate to more coercive measures.
I do not think life in prison is a reasonable maximum sentence here, though. I am sure the judicial system can come up with disincentives which are less severe than "we lock you up forever" and more severe than "we politely asked".
For example, the punishment should be a lot more lenient than if someone killed the fetus against the will of the pregnant woman (to avoid having to pay child support or for inheritance reasons or whatever).
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Corporations, in my view, should just be big dumb money-makers.
Spoken like a sophomore year self-proclaimed capitalist.
Depending on the circumstances, an entity whose purpose it is to make money can act in ways which make society better or worse. Thus, they have to be aligned to the values of society through laws and regulations. For example, protection rackets are highly profitable, but we judge them net negative and thus they are forbidden, with enough penalties to turn the EV negative hopefully. Likewise for environmental or workplace safety regulations.
But regulations are always either overbearing or incomplete. The solution here is that people can also treat corporations as entities capable of moral behavior, which is a fiction which is also commonly applied to other people with great success. When Google had the motto "don't be evil", this was an implicit acknowledgement that corporations can be seen as moral entities.
This framework allows us, when we learn that a corporation has just invested into hunting street urchins in Somalia for their organs to not shrug and go "well EvilCorp's sole purpose is to make money, so there is nothing to complain about". Instead, we can go "EvilCorp is clearly evil, and I will not do business with them". Collectively, this affects their bottom line (depending on how consumer-facing they are), and serves to deter some unethical behavior.
Then there is the consideration that multiple companies competing with each other is not the ground state in the absence of regulations. The ground state instead are monopolies and regulatory capture. For things which will change the bottom line of one person by plus one million $ and change the bottom line of a million people by minus one dollar, it is clear that the one person (or corporation or special interest association) will put a lot more effort into lobbying than the million people.
I think that takes like "corporations are the real unaligned ASIs" are obviously stupid, because corporations are not superintelligent. But it is certainly a good idea to keep in mind that unless you are their sole shareholder, the corporation has fundamentally different goals than you have.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think that "a person who is in the US despite having no legal basis for being there" is as much a non-central example of a criminal as MLK is.
If the Trump administration only deported non-citizens without a residence after they had served a prison sentence -- i.e. the kind of people who are central examples of the criminal category -- I think most people would be okay with that (not the wokes, though).
However, the framing of "political opponents" by the parent poster is as misleading as "criminals" in most cases. The median deportee entered the US without any visa. I would consider this a purely civil matter. If an administration decides not to maximally enforce immigration law against them, that is not letting criminals roam free. However, if another administration then maximally enforces immigration law and deports them, that is also not bad per se.
But just as there have been cases where Trump has deported people after they served a criminal sentence for homicide, there have also been a few high-profile cases where his administration revoked the visa status of political opponents -- which turned them into illegals -- and then deported them. The latter is bad and they should feel bad.
However, this only applies to Trump opponents without a US passport, which means that most of Trump's domestic opposition is safe from that.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Now, I am pro-choice and also one of these much hated Singerians who think that babies do not have more of an intrinsic right to life than other mammals of similar cognitive capabilities.
However, I also recognize that society really values babies, to the point where having surplus babies which nobody can be arsed to take care of is not a thing in the Western world. Thus babies have a large instrumental value.
I think if you have a fetus gestated to the point where it is viable outside the womb, with a skull and everything, then there is no way to get rid of it without giving birth to it or some surgical intervention. Killing it will not change the fact. Thus, it seems reasonable that society would ask a woman that she does not kill her pregnancy at this point.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Taiwan is in a position where they can easily bottle up Chinese naval traffic from getting into the South China Sea, and yeet missiles into strategic military and economic targets in the Chinese mainland.
Taiwan would have to be really suicidal to do that. At the end of the day, Mainland China can bring missiles into range a lot more easily than the US can transport them to Taiwan.
I think that the more serious long term threat for the CCP is that Taiwan is a state which has Chinese culture and is not under their control. A successful, capitalist, proof-of-concept minimal version of China could really be a thorn in their side during an economic downturn. If it was just some expats in the West, that would be much easier to downplay. If it was really a distinct nationality, like Koreans, that would also be easier to tolerate.
But a world in which the pinnacle of technological progress, the most advanced microchips in the world, are produced by Chinese but the Chinese who produce them are not actually from the PRC but the descendants of the side which lost the civil war and retreated to Taiwan must be really painful for the CCP narrative.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
See acoup on strategic airpower.
In general, strategic bombing can mean different things:
- bombing your enemies production centers
- bombing your enemies population to demoralize them
- (nowadays) bombing the enemies leadership to destabilize the country
The first one works somewhat, but historically not very well. It is debatable if better intelligence today might mean that it is more effective today.
Terror bombing, besides being a crime against humanity, is actively counterproductive. It actively strengthens the bond between the government and the civilians who feel that they are all in it together. It worked like that for the Brits and the Nazis. Arguably, a very similar effect could be observed after 9/11 in the US. Ordinary Americans who were leaning Democrat or dovish found themselves supporting Bush's hawkish adventures. (Coming to think of it, rocket attacks might also explain why the Israeli population is voting for right wing parties supporting goals far beyond what is considered normal in other Western countries.)
Targeting the leadership seems like a less bad option. But here the strategic effect is obviously quite limited. The US blew up a lot of weddings in drone strikes in an effort to curb the Taliban. It did little to prevent their rapid rise back to power the minute they left. And the IDF has bombing the shit out of Hamas, accepting high civilian casualties to take out their commanders. So far, this has not caused Hamas to fall apart. In an environment where IDF bombs have deprived most Gazans of homes and extended family members, and where the families of Hamas members are the ones whose food supply is secure, Hamas does not have a recruiting problem.
I will say that targeting the leadership worked better against Hezbollah. The pager bombing allowed them to take out a lot of the mid level management without Gaza-level collateral damage.
The power of the Iranian regime ultimately comes from the military and revolutionary guards. Sure, murdering a general or politician here and there might make it harder for the regime to pursue their objectives, but at the end of the day it is not enough to force a regime change.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
But if we don't care about occupying but are happy to just kneecap them if they try to build a nuke, or a missile stockpile, or bioweapons, there ain't much they can do but sponsor low level terrorism against our civilians.
It is not clear to me at all that Israeli conventional airstrikes will be able to permanently keep either the conventional or nuclear weapons program of Iran in check. For example, Russia likes to use Iranian military drones in Ukraine, so that is already one big power which might support them in their capabilities to produce conventional weapons despite your efforts to kneecap them. China probably sees Iran as an important counterweight to US-leaning regional powers like Israel or Saudi Arabia.
So far, Iran has for the very most part only sponsored deadly terror against Israel, not the West in general (Bin Laden was Saudi, after all). As someone who was around in the early 2000s, let me assure you that what was ultimately an act of "low level terrorism against our civilians" managed to shape US politics for the better part of a decade and let to the West going on a wild goose chase.
Now, if your model of the Ayatollah regime is that the probability of them nuking Israel within hours of gaining the ability to do so is close to one, and that they are willing to sacrifice most of their population centers to the inevitable Israeli retaliation, then yes, trying anything to keep them from getting nukes might be worth the costs.
Or your model of the Ayatollah regime might be that while they are rabid antisemites who are serious about destroying Israel, they are also hypocrites in that despite their public statements, they would not like their children to become martyrs. Then bombing the shit out of them to delay them from acquiring nukes might be actively counterproductive in that once they have nukes, they are much more likely to use them.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
IC’s main selling point is that it’s compatible with a scientific mindset.
In that it makes no falsifiable predictions?
Thanks to the degree that Jesus was charismatic and the degree to which his followers admired him, they created and/or realized an imaginal being called Christ
If I say that this sounds like "The Lord" and Christ are just memes (in Dawkin's sense -- culturally transmitted idea complexes which inhabit humans as hosts and spread through them, mutate and compete against each other), then I am probably misrepresenting IC. After all, a world view which would say that Christ is fundamentally only a more culturally entrenched entity of the same type as Julius Caesar, Sherlock Holmes, or Donald Duck would probably not call itself a form of Christianity.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Counterpoint: The US already has nuclear adversaries. If the threat of nuclear retaliation works to deter Putin (who owns the world's largest nuke stockpile), it should also suffice to deter Iran. They might be religious nutjobs, but not total religious nutjobs, like Hamas. They will not consider the glassing of all their population centers as a price worth paying to nuke New York.
Nukes work great to prevent you from being invaded or bombed, but they are not the win button for any conflict. Putin has a ton of nukes, and yet this only meant that NATO would not join the fight directly (which, to be sure, is a big deal). He did not try to nuke cities until Ukraine surrenders.
Iran has had a nuclear weapons program since 1989. In 2015, the JCPA was negotiated between Iran and the Obama administration as well as China, Russia and Europe. It limited to the amount of nuclear material Iran was allowed to produce in exchange for sanction relief. While Israel (itself a noted expert on nuclear proliferation, I might add) claimed non-compliance, the IAEA claimed compliance in 2018, when Trump decided to quit the JCPA (possibly because it was an Obama deal) and impose sanctions on Iran. Since then, the gas centrifuges have been running.
Bombing the facilities and murdering their scientists can slow their program, but is unlikely to stop it. Sure, you kick the can down the road for another year, but you also normalize bombing sovereign countries, which is likely not a good lesson to teach a soon to be nuclear power.
If you do not want Iran to have nukes, then you need an invasion and regime change. I would like to point out that about the only one to benefit from recent US-led invasions in the Muslim world was the military industrial complex. The conquest of the Taliban was undone in a heartbeat as soon as the US withdrew, and the US invasion of Iraq prepared the ground for daesh. I for one would prefer not to find out what kind of religious crazies a US-led nation building project in Iran would inevitably give rise to.
I do not contest that Iran is very anti-Israel. Basically any group which prides itself on murdering Jews is supported by them. As someone who thinks Israel has a right to exist (though no right to the West Banks), I do not like this one bit. But at the end of the day, this is Israel's problem, not the problem of the US. Israel certainly has the ability to nuke Tehran, which should hopefully stop Iran from nuking Tel Aviv.
I am also not a fan of the current Israeli government, which basically encourages illegal settlements in the West Bank because they do not feel any pressure not to maximally piss off the Arabs, as they can be sure that the US will have their back if any large backslash happens. Them getting into a cold war with Iran might not be the worst thing in the world, there.
For what it is worth, compared to Sunni countries, Iran has not shown a lot of inclination to commit terrorist acts outside the Middle East. Bin Laden was famously a Saudi national with Saudi funding. Al-Qaeda and Daesh were Sunni extremist projects. This would bode well for the larger world in face of a nuclear Iran.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
a revolution overthrowing a US-backed monarchy,
That is certainly one way to put it.
The gist of the matter is that in 1941, Iran was a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament (not a very well working one, though). Then in 1951 their prime minister voted to nationalize British oil interests, so the US and the Brits backed a military coup in 1953, after which the shah regime became your typical tinpot dictatorship. Then in 1979, the ayatollah overthrew the shah with a lot of popular support, and Iran has been a theocracy ever since.
In other news, it is a complete mystery why Iran hates the US, when their goal is to bring democracy and economic freedom to the world.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
The distance between California and Texas seems to be at least 500km, and more like perhaps 1500km between the big cities.
An illegal in California can likely not just take a plane from LA to Houston for a weekend of murder, mayhem and pet-eating. (If he can, then the federal government could fix that.) Nor can he likely afford it. Perhaps he can take the bus (which would also be preventable through legislation), or drive there by car. He can certainly hike through Nevada and New Mexico.
The costs of going from CA to Texas are high in terms of time, money and deportation risk. Assuming that Texas is fully cooperating with ICE, the cost of staying any substantial amount of time in Texas are high in terms of deportation risk, likewise.
If I were an illegal, having perhaps paid most of what I own and risked my life to get into the US, and CA was safe and Texas was not, then there would be nothing in Texas which would be worth the risk of deportation. As much as people like to dunk on California, it is likely still a hell of a lot better than whatever country the illegal came from.
If you model illegals as rational actors, then having states which do not enforce immigration law is a great boon to everyone other state, because the net migration will be towards these safe states.
If you model illegals as particles undergoing Brownian motion, then sure, a few will diffuse into Texas. But new illegals will also get in from abroad, so you need to keep up your deportation effort indefinitely either way.
Things would be different if California had the power to let new illegals in, or if immigrants had a generation length of a year, with their population rising exponentially. Or if there was nothing worth stealing in the illegal-friendly zone, but plenty worth stealing in the MAGA-zone 200m over.
I guess an argument can also be made that if the illegals are not deported now, some bleeding heart liberal (like me) will naturalize them in a decade, at which point they can come to Texas and nobody can do anything about it.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
If rampant sexual degeneracy ruins most young people as spouses, the remainder is about as 'free' to behave traditionally as they would be in solitary confinement.
I do not think that the ungendered version of the argument works. In high density areas (where your "sexual degeneracy" is more frequent), it does not matter if 99% of your generation do not qualify as a partner, the remaining 1% is still a decent-sized pool. If Jehova's witnesses can manage to find another JW to marry, then traditionalists should likewise be fine.
Now, I could be wrong and you could be lamenting how hard it is for 20 year old tradwives-to-be to find a virgin man who is making enough money to provide for a family, and how all the men have been "ruined" through either unmarried sex or porn.
Given traditionalist double standards, I think it is more likely that you are lamenting that there is a dearth of virgin women wanting to marry and start a family, and how all the 20 yo's want to go to college, will likely go through multiple boyfriends, perhaps suck a few cocks at parties, experiment with lesbianism or try anal sex, at which point you would consider them ruined.
As someone who himself gets laid less than I would likely have before the sexual revolution, let me say I have about zero sympathies.
All these arguments against the sexual liberation (mostly of women) could as well be made about the liberation of slaves in the US, which removed a lot of liberties previously enjoyed by the plantation owners. White families who had for generations enjoyed stable jobs as overseers were suddenly without employment. Today, a white guy can not hope to find blacks to work on his plantation for housing and basic food even if he promises not to whip or rape them. Instead, he is expected to pay them. The indignity!
I am always skeptical of claiming that we should not give one group the freedom to chose what to do with their lives because it will have downstream indirect effects which will harm other groups. (The exception is when the effects are obvious and heavily infringing that other group's freedoms. For example, legalizing anti-tank weapons would lead to a lot of people being blown up, or legalizing violent rape would unduly infringe on the liberties of the victims.)
We did not stop freeing the slaves because we were unsure on how this would affect the social order in the South or the price of tobacco. We went ahead and dealt with the indirect consequences as they appeared (badly, often).
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
@ControlsFreak: Please take note. Someone managed to report on a current event without spending hours researching the sources or getting a warning/ban for a low effort comment.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I would argue that "it is fine to shoot a few state senators" is far out of the overton window for both MAGA and the woke left.
Political violence can surely further a cause (See the Nazis or Mao, for example), but in the US, the murderers of elected officials will generally strengthen the side of the victim, and end up being condemned rather than celebrated by their own side.
This means that the perpetrators of political violence against elected officials are unlikely to be rational, committed followers of one of the big political camps who are willing to risk their life and freedom to further their cause. Instead, they are more likely to be parts of much smaller fringe movements, crazy, driven by bloodlust, or wanting to achieve eternal infamy through their deeds.
(Of course, this also leaves the door open for people being celebrated for other political violence. For example, imgur loves that Luigi guy. And the German RAF had quite a few supporters on the slightly more mainstream student left.)
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
valuing one citizen over a hundred Arabs
One data point is Shalit, for whom Nethanyahu paid with 1027 Arabs in 2011. Of course, this was a terrible decision on Israel's part: releasing 280 terrorists serving life sentences will have expected costs much higher than a single Israeli life. But likely Netanyahu needed a cheap political win at the time or something.
With all the hostages taken on Oct-7, the market value of Israelis has really crumbled to the point where 200 Arabs are exchanged for for four female IDF soldiers.
(Arguably, the most valuable contribution an IDF soldier could ever hope to make to Israel's wars is to suicide when captured. Most soldiers can never hope to personally neutralize 100 enemies, but a captured soldier can prevent 100 enemies from being un-neutralized.)
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
To be fair, during the preparations of Oct-7, Hamas actually passed the Marshmallow test.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
- 1 turn signals: no. Mirror and shoulder check are required, though.
- 2 red lights: fucking yes for motor vehicles, no for bicycles. Driving over a traffic light which just turned red (German humor: "kirschgelb"=cherry yellow) can happen, driving a car past a light which had turned red a while ago is a high crime.
- 3 speed limits: No. Strictly keeping the speed limits is not required. In Germany, going less than 20km/h over the speed limit will typically result in a small fine, but no risk of your driving license.
- 4 driving left: Changing lanes is a maneuver with a non-zero risk. If I am overtaking one truck and can see that 200m ahead, I will have to overtake another truck, I will typically stay on the left. If I see that a car behind me wants to go faster and it is 300m, I will typically switch lanes. The fact than a driver who changes lanes aggressively and is willing to not keep appropriate distances between cars can overtake me on the right lane does not mean that owe them a similar behavior so that they can overtake me on the left lane. People who react to a car in front of them going slow by not keeping a safe distance to that car clearly lack the emotional maturity required for a driving license.
- 5 cutting people off who do not let you in: Only if there is no safer option. If your acceleration strip is ending, and your choices are to cut off a car a bit or slam the brakes to let it pass and then end up with a low speed at the end of the acceleration strip, then make them brake a bit, sure. If the situation is that you are quickly approaching a truck and would have to change lanes to overtake it, just brake.
- 6 braking rules. No. We are already talking about which traffic rules as written are optional.
Any other possible driving scissor statements?
- Bikes need to be passed with a limited relative speed and enough clearance. If you can not safely pass a bike, keep driving behind it.
- The motor of an old car losing a bit of oil is ok.
- Public roads are not race tracks. Drivers should go to the bathroom before they hit the roads to avoid frequently seen racing under pressure.
The respective wages indicate that the market disagrees with you, there. As markets are how Western societies assigns scarce goods (such as labor), and generally are thought to do a non-terrible job of it, this requires further explanation.
I mean, there were certainly lucrative occupations in the past which did not correspond to fulfilling a need for society. An uncontroversial example might be a bank robber. Even the craziest economist will not look at the average income of bank robbers and conclude that given their effective hourly rate, there is a great demand for bank robbers in society.
People with different politics will widely disagree on which professions are in the same parasitic class as the bank robber. An argument could be made for meth cooks, developers of free-to-play Skinner box mobile games, people who make advertisements for tobacco products, ransomware gangs.
Another model would liken your ivy league lawyers and McKinsey consultants to the feather train of a peacock: a weird attractor state where the underlying forces (of evolution or the market) end up spending a lot of surplus resources just for signaling that they had surplus resources to spend. More uncontroversially, this is true for luxury brands like Porsche or Rolex: nobody buys a Rolex because they want to know what time it is.
A related concept is what Yudkowsky calls Inadequate Equilibria. Games (in the game theory sense) can be set up so that the stable outcome will be far away from the Pareto frontier, so that if participants could only coordinate better, everyone could get higher utility. As an example, consider the security dilemma: The states of the world spend trillions on their military-industrial complexes to prevent being invaded and better invade others, but as that is a zero-sum game, they will on average not get anything for that. In theory, the members of the United Nations might coordinate to forgo developing and building new weapon systems and spend the resources on endeavors which are not zero sum, like education (to the degree that it enables people to do more things instead of just competing for finite jobs), human necessities, entertainment, research or the like.
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