ulyssessword
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User ID: 308
ulyssessword
9mo ago
I am not sure that anyone actually believes this.
Really? I think it's the most common position.
I'm not confident about the hows and whys of that, but my guess is that people just don't think about the topic, or at least they don't think of that pair of stances at the same time using the same framework.
ulyssessword
9mo ago
@ZorbaTHut What's the status of The Vault?
ulyssessword
9mo ago
the way these articles all manage to omit, imo, the most important detail suggests that the journalists are idiots and/or they believe their readers are idiots.
I'm finding that more and more often since I first noticed it with Carolyn Strom. TL;DR: A bunch of news stories came out about a nurse charged with professional misconduct after she posted critical comments to her personal Facebook page. While that timeline is factually accurate, the media neglected to mention that the charges were primarily based on her subsequent actions, which were to put the Minister of Health on blast on Twitter.
More recently, the radio was covering emojis as signatures, but (unlike the article I linked) didn't mention that it was sent in response to the contract they had been discussing. They headed off on a weird tangent of which emoji would be the best for signing a mortgage, how it breaks down by age, etc. They never even alluded that texting "Yes, I agree" is a textbook example of a "signature" for that purpose, and instead warned people about being tricked into legally-binding contracts through malicious misinterpretation.
ulyssessword
9mo ago
Automod posted the Culture War Roundup thread on the subreddit.
ulyssessword
9mo ago
even with a perfunctory "I used to believe other stuff" passing reference.
That seems utterly banal? "I have held these exact opinions for as long as I've had conscious thought" is much more remarkable and would actually be deserving of a mention IMO.
ulyssessword
9mo ago
I do of course think that being intelligent enough to change your mind is a good thing, but I think that it is an even better thing to have been right from the beginning.
From a moral point of view? Of course. You have 20 more years on the side of the angels.
From a writer's point of view? I'm not so sure. For a local example, see Resident Contrarian's post on having a middle-class income:
You’d think that the ability to [write a post like this] would be universal among people who haven’t been poor at all since they have more time at decent pay-rates than anyone else, but you’d be at least partially wrong. They know what it’s like to have money, but it’s all very usual; the stuff about it that’s weird or different skids off of their awareness without biting like a dull file on hardened steel. It’s not their fault - it’s just normal.
Similarly, you know what it's like to be a classical liberal, but (presumably) it's just normal.
ulyssessword
9mo ago
This website might be useful. Unfortunately, most of the detailed data is hidden behind a fee. Here is their page on St. Louis crime by neighbourhood.
This news story is suspiciously short on numbers, but it does have one:
The six homicides in 2020 in this county of 108,000 were a record, as were the 51 statewide, according to state crime analysts.)
which places that rural area just under the national average of 6.5/100k.
ulyssessword
9mo ago
CDC Wonder database
Good call. does this link work for everyone else? It's a sorted list of homicide victimization rates by county, and it sure seems to be more scattered than I would have thought. There are a few rural counties up near the top, but I don't have the geographical knowledge to actually analyze the data in a timely manner.
ulyssessword
9mo ago
My solution is simple: If a set of people wants to apply for a set of jobs, then they can go right ahead. The company can hire them, negotiate, or refuse just like for individual hires.
This creates a couple of complications, but nothing insurmountable. If your partner is fired/laid off, do you get unemployment benefits as you search for a new city? Conversely, is divorce a valid reason to lay off the spouse (without triggering fired-without-cause penalties)? Should the bus factor be calculated based on groups or on individuals?
With that in mind:
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Yes, it's okay. The university is free to refuse if he isn't worth three (or more) salaries.
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Yes, it's okay. She can apply for 1.5 jobs if she wants to.
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Yes, it's okay, and it's also nepotism.
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Yes, it's okay until she starts lying. From a business perspective there's nothing better about a sexual relationship, so there's no incentive to lie either.
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Yes, it's okay. The university is free to refuse if he isn't worth three salaries.
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Yes, it's okay, but I foresee a divorce. It also places her judgment and character into question.
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Yes, it's okay but it shouldn't have any power at the negotiating table.
ulyssessword
9mo ago
I'm wary of Chinese robber-ing...
Sometimes, one example is enough. I don't think that example is (it could've been a bored cop, and asking questions without a warrant isn't illegal), but the ones downthread are.
Think of what was required for the 11 arrests for football tweeting:
- (optional) There is a background level of public support which makes this popular,
- Politicians pass a law that affects it,
- (optional) There is specific outrage and/or reporting by the public
- Police investigate it and make arrests
- The news reports on it, and doesn't include any significant backlash.
- (forthcoming??) They are tried, convicted, and punished.
ulyssessword
9mo ago
Let's use a refinery as an example. Ideally, the refinery would be owned by the collective of everyone who works there. The decisions would be made by an individual elected by majority vote every few years.
Imagine I work at ExxonMobil. Someone runs for election with the platform "retire now!". They gain control, sell the $206B in net assets, and give each of the 62300 employees a $3.3 million lump of cash.
Why wouldn't that happen to every company with low labor requirements? Would you just add a few million useless jobs to bring the shares down below retirement levels (actually, below time-to-find-a-new-job levels)? Require a buy-in from all new employees?
ulyssessword
9mo ago
One trigger I've noticed recently is blatant logical or physical errors.
- In a radio broadcast about Canada's proposed sustainable electricity regulations, the reporter stated that prices would likely increase but the harm to consumers could be mitigated by switching to more electricity-intensive alternatives like heat pumps (instead of furnaces) and electric cars (instead of IC cars). That's the exact opposite of mitigating it. They then repeated the error: The changes will make the grid be less reliable, but that's okay because we will depend on it for more services.
- In this article, the first point on the first claim is utter bullshit. It claims that air conditioning heats up cities by moving heat from buildings to the environment. That's technically true, but A) a city's airspace is much bigger than the volume of all of its buildings, and even a light wind provides a large amount of ventilation, and B) the heat transfer happens once per year, not as an ongoing effect. All of the heat that an AC is removing from a building had to leak in through its insulation first.
Is it a shit test? Do they think they can actually get away with it? Or (worst of all) are they honest and making a mistake? I don't know, but it's another mail in the coffin for their reputation.
ulyssessword
9mo ago
I wonder, why not have a news source that is just primary sources?
I've done that through https://www.canada.ca/en/news/web-feeds.html.
You get utterly boring articles like this when the journalists don't spice it up by highlighting the most salient parts of the most interesting events.
ulyssessword
9mo ago
I think what the first author meant was that the increase in prices would be compensated by the potential savings from using electric cars
There would be even bigger savings if the price of electricity didn't go up, though. Also, they didn't mention "more economical" or anything like that, they mentioned "powered by the grid". If that's what they meant, then they should have at least alluded to it.
As for AC, technically it is true - any AC would waste energy as heat (thermodynamics commands us so) and thus, inevitably, heat up the city
The process's waste heat isn't heat from homes, though. It's brand-new heat that is generated within the machine.
Even if I agreed with the factual contents of your comment, it wouldn't substantially change my mind. It would change it from "blatant logical or physical errors" to "blatantly deceptive presentations of logical or physical systems", which is hardly any better.
ulyssessword
9mo ago
In a Socialized economy, you'd all go to the town council to convince them that the plant would be a net positive for the town. The council would hold a vote of the entire town. If the vote passed, the town would fund your plant...
...
Since everyone shares in the profits of the plant...
Does everyone share in the losses as well? How good is the town's judgment?
If it's bad, do the residents become destitute after they spend their efforts on a doomed venture? If not, who is bailing them out?
If it's great, can they leverage it beyond their own borders? Would they even care to put in the effort if the benefits go to other people?
Also, that seems incredibly unstable or else totalitarian.
Imagine that someone wants to start a new business, and applies to the town. The town declines, so they decide to go it alone (Maybe it's capital-light like a sole-proprietorship hairdresser run from home. Maybe they can get money from elsewhere.) Does the town take the profits as if they had invested? If they don't, they'll be pushed into irrelevance unless they are the best judges of value in the entire market. If they do, they're hardly better than common thieves.
ulyssessword
9mo ago
in most places I've lived, the chance of earning any profit from your tax revenue is effectively zero
The solution seems incredibly simple: Don't tax away that money.
If the whole town is insane enough to spend the entire town's budget on a single venture, sure, but there's not much point in discussing economics if we can't assume at least semi-rational actors.
I was assuming they could still use normal financial strategies like loans, and would therefore be exposed to risk in excess of their investment. Regardless, the same effect could happen if they ended up with a net liability instead of an asset (like an environmentally-damaged site that required cleanup).
If they're financing everything with cash-on-hand, then how could they ever get anything done? Here's a small, true (slightly altered for privacy) story: A factory in my hometown shut down, and some local people banded together and bought it. If it had been purchased with cash split evenly by all the town's residents, it would be $10k each.
that was a textbook-perfect opportunity for your proposed system, but I don't see how it could happen. Is the town sitting on a $10 million war chest in case something interesting comes up? Do they levy a special tax and hope that everyone has savings? We know that they aren't going to outside lenders because that would expose the town to excess risk.
ulyssessword
9mo ago
most people didn't have time for games
We all have time to participate here, so none of us have a super-constrained schedule.
ulyssessword
9mo ago
I've played Cultist Simulator, and it's great. It fills a niche I didn't even know existed.
There are a lot of games (and other stories) that present something mysterious and ask you to find the answers. Cultist Simulator is part of the rare breed that makes you find the questions first. Some of the (gameplay-related) questions I discovered quite late are:
- Are the different lore types (moth, lantern, forge, etc.)
sorted, or unsorted ? - Do the available rewards from
dreaming in Mansus change based on your choices? - How about
challenges in expeditions ?
The friend who recommended CS to me shared a screenshot of his recent playthrough, and he still hasn't asked that first question, and therefore can't take advantage of what the answer reveals.
ulyssessword
8mo ago
The National Post is one of Canada's two major national newspapers (along with the Globe and Mail). This doesn't count as "expert knowledge" in my mind, and would go a long way towards determining its reliability (whatever answer you end up with).
The poor conditions in their home communities were also the fault of the Canadian government, so relative rates aren't a very convincing argument.
EDIT: Nevermind, I've fallen for the narrative. Death rates at residential schools reached acceptable mortality rates by 1949 (Source Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials (PDF), p17, from this website).
(As a sidenote, my thought process was "Why the downvotes? Motteposters are usually smarter than that. I'll show them with FACTS and LOGIC." lol.)
They don't match up with the existing documentation.
At the Kamloops school that started everything, there were 215 GPR hits but only 51 recognized deaths (I don't know if there are known graves for a total of 51+215 = 266 suspected total deaths, or if it was 215 - 51 = 164 suspected undocumented deaths.)
If there truly was a 70-80% under-reporting rate, it would indicate severe problems with the Truth and Reconciliation processes.
ulyssessword
8mo ago
You don't think that the conditions on reserves are the responsibility of the Federal government, or you don't think that they were bad, or what?
How familiar are you with Canadian history?
ulyssessword
8mo ago
Multiple spoilers on one line are broken.
If you have
ulyssessword
8mo ago
I do feel the need to defend the honor of my profession here given you have spoken about how we might just get the boot because Gpt can automate us away.. Color me this. Who do you think people are turning to to make things with GPT? I might even put "Prompt Engineer" in my LinkedIn bio soon.
I mostly agree with you, but I could also see software engineers going the way of the draftsmen: There used to be a huge sector that focused entirely on taking an engineer's ideas, and turning them into drawings on paper so they could be handed out to the clients. Then Computer Aided Drafting (CAD) software came about, productivity skyrocketed, and the demand for drawings rose modestly. Now there's a small sector focused on drafting, and some fraction engineers do their own drafting in the design stage.
Let's use your example of 40-60x increases in productivity, and imagine that competition keeps salaries at their current level. What if demand for software products only increases by 1000% due to the reduced job prices? The field could shrink to one fifth the size and still meet demand.
I always put a second requirement on HBD: there is significant heritibility of socially important traits, and the distribution of those traits is significantly uneven. IMO, if someone believes that notable genetic differences only happen at the level of the family, then they don't believe in HBD.
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