wlxd
4mo ago
What would help is if you actually articulated how exactly national ID cards give government more power over you, relative to status quo. You claim this, but this is far from obvious to me.
First, that isn't something the federal government is allowed to do per the Constitution.
As much as I sympathize with this point of view, Mr Filburn, given the legal developments over last 100 years, I can scarcely think that national ID cards is the most advantageous location to pick this battle.
Second, I don't want even the states accelerating the panopticon by incorporating all our biometrics into it.
What is meaningfully changed in your life by state learning your biometrics? What kind of realistic nightmare scenarios are prevented by preventing Feds from issuing national biometric IDs? I really cannot think of any.
I don't know what benefits you have in mind, but I can't think of any which are not dwarfed by that massive cost.
Improving elections integrity, for one thing.
Anyway, I really disagree that there is massive cost here, and I think you are not doing a good job articulating it. Consider, for example, other countries that do have national ID systems on top of very comprehensive census registries. This covers almost the entire Europe, for example. To the extent these countries are controlling panopticons (which, to be sure, they to a large extent are when compared to US), I cannot think of any aspects of that panopticon that would be meaningfully relaxed by making their population registries less comprehensive, or their ID systems less centralized. I’d be happy to hear concrete counterexamples, if you can think of any.
wlxd
4mo ago
That scarcely seem to me like something to worry about. We already need IDs for many normal activities. Having those issued on federal level would not change much, and in fact would probably be an improvement for reasons like Voter ID.
wlxd
4mo ago
Why would you hate it? The only downside I can conceive are trivial relative to benefits.
wlxd
4mo ago
And yet 4years later apparently nobody cares anymore. Either the cost was highly inflated, or Texas is just such a beast that it shrugs off things like that.
wlxd
4mo ago
Well, yes, if the US didn’t care about Taiwan’s independence, or strategic presence in the Pacific, then yeah, Guam would be useless. However, for better or worse, it does, and so Guam is a valuable asset. In any case, your comment about official US Taiwan policy is completely irrelevant to the issue.
wlxd
4mo ago
How is this relevant in any way? Of course that is what the official policy has to be. At the same time, Taiwan invasion is the number one strategic concern of DoD, ahead of Russian war in Ukraine. Talk to anyone with DoD relationship, in either public or private sector.
wlxd
5mo ago
If you don’t have any credit history, you have good credit, not bad credit. I have arrived in US with no credit history at all, and at no point my credit score was below 700.
wlxd
5mo ago
surely it makes sense to do away with the ineffective government programmes first, not the coolest federal programme in history
This is extremely weak, because we can do away with both at the same time. If that guy can name some programs you think are less effective than PEPFAR, let him do it, and we will cancel those in addition to cancelling PEPFAR.
International coordination would itself be a coordination problem?
No. Coordination problem is when individual action is mostly ineffective, and it’s only when everyone agrees on something, you get a benefit. Here, half of spend gets you half of benefit, so you don’t need to get all the countries to agree and coordinate, just make the case for them, and whoever wants to pitch in will be able to.
The absence of other countries having an equivalent program isn't a strong argument that we shouldn't maintain the original.
If you think so, you are very far removed from how normal people think. Why do you think cafes make sure tip jars are made of transparent material, and make sure there is always some change inside?
wlxd
5mo ago
This is wrong. Helicopter was communicating with tower. Tower was transmitting on VHF, and helicopter on UHF. There is no recording of helicopter yet because we only VHF ones now. Within a couple of days/weeks we’ll have recording including heli pilot responses.
wlxd
5mo ago
I doubt that, mostly because I don’t believe that the promiscuous party boy gays that use condoms use them 100% of the time.
wlxd
5mo ago
If you do literally nothing, the gays and drug addicts will just die from AIDS. I really don’t understand what’s so complicated about it. It’s not even like they have no way of avoiding the fate: all they need to do is to stop rawdogging random guys and stop sharing needles. It’s really not complicated.
wlxd
5mo ago
AIDS and Malaria cannot “just make a jump”. AIDS only is a thing in western world thanks to gays and drug addicts. Without them, we’d, uhm, flatten the curve by now (in fact, it would probably never become a thing in the first place, it only became a thing thanks to gay Canadian flight attendant who really liked to fuck random guys in places he flew into).
Malaria is not a disease that spreads from person to person, and we cannot have malaria become a thing in US, because we already stopped it being a thing. We used to have malaria in US, and we destroyed the conditions that allowed malaria to exist. We can’t have malaria now without recreating this condition, which, given the land use patterns, is highly unlikely.
wlxd
5mo ago
Yes, the letters on a screen won’t stop you, but the cease and desist letter and lawsuit for damages will. I’m sure you realize that.
As for the partnership idea, this is an obvious non-starter. No competitor would ever want that. What would they even get out of it that would make up for the downsides?
wlxd
5mo ago
You can’t do that. The Terms of Service of all of these services would not allow for such aggregation.
wlxd
5mo ago
Beyond that, what factors would you include?
I explained it in the next sentence after wondering if you’re not trying to pull a fast one. Are you sure you aren’t?
Prison statistics in my country do not go that far back, unfortunately. The oldest statistics are only from 2000, but the cost per prisoner is almost the exact same when you account for inflation.
OK, where is it? I’m having a hard time believing that your costs are an order of magnitude higher than everyone else’s.
Beyond prison conditions, I would guess other factors like guard salary and construction are almost certainly higher as well (based on things in the rest of the country).
A typical inmate to officer ration in US prison is somewhere between 5 and 12. Let’s take the lowest figure. You spend $75k on correctional officer salary (actually your country almost certainly spends much less than that), which is $15k per prisoner. You’re left with $135k per prisoner per year. What could possibly cost that much?
wlxd
5mo ago
In my country it costs about $150000 per year to keep someone in prison.
So spend less on that, it’s not hard. There is no reason it has to cost this much. I can guarantee you that 70 years ago, it didn’t cost (inflation adjusted) $150k. I strongly suspect that the main reason it does is because pro-criminal activists demand certain things that jack up the cost, and then use that to argue that prisons are too expensive.
Can you explain?
I explained in next sentence: comparing prison cost to damage of a single theft that resulted in the conviction is clearly wrong and misleading.
wlxd
5mo ago
I should be more clear: harsher punishment is not a deterent. Getting caught and punished generally is a deterent. Increasing a sentence is not.
Yeah, I can believe that increasing a sentence from 5 to 20 years might not have a huge effect on people who commit the kinds of crimes that get you 5 years in prison, but I don't see it as relevant. First, it's good for the victims to inflict more retribution on criminals, and second, as the ACX article you mention clearly shows, it would prevent a lot of future crime too.
Cost and benefit is in terms of society as whole.
Yes, and the cost of crime in American society is tremendous. It's so high, in fact, that it would be extremely hard for government spending on crime prevention to come even close to it. We actually spend trivial amounts of money on law enforcement and justice system.
I think you would agree that punishment clearly has diminishing returns after a certain point. Locking someone up for minor theft for 20 years costs more money than the theft is worth.
There are diminishing returns, but whether they exceed the cost in your 20 years for minor theft example is far from obvious. In fact, the way you phrase it, comparing the cost of imprisonment to just the direct cost of the theft, suggests that you either don't understand the arguments being made, or are trying to pull a fast one. You also need to include in the benefits column things like crime prevented by incapacitating for 20 years the kind of a person who'd engage in petty theft even when it risks 20 years in jail. That kind of a person is highly likely to cause enough violence, property damage, and cost to the system to make up for the 20 years of imprisonment.
wlxd
5mo ago
I acknowledge the human need to feel better about wrongs, but I think it can do more harm than good in a society of many.
Harm to whom, exactly? Good to whom, exactly? Think about it: you're putting avoiding harm to the criminal above the well-being of his victim.
There is little evidence to show that punishment acts as a deterent for crime in our current society.
I see people say things like that, and, frankly, I find it mind-boggling.
First, this is so contrary to all human instincts and experience, that it would take some extraordinary evidence to compel me to take it seriously. Somehow, my children are deterred from committing "crime" against me by threat of punishment. I am deterred from committing crime by the threat of punishment -- for example, I feel extreme urge to smack the shit out of the street hobos that aggressively accost me, and the main reason I don't is because I know that the law will protect the menacing hobos and destroy me for it. I can come up with more examples like that.
Given that I, and many people I know are deterred by threat of punishment, the only way punishment could not act as a deterrent is if encouraged some people to commit crime. I don't believe this is plausible.
Second, this statement, even if it was true (which it is not), it is cleverly crafted to distract from the main argument for punishment as we practice it: it doesn't need to act as a deterrent in order to do the job you want it to do, which is to prevent future crime. Indeed, all it needs to do is to incapacitate the criminal, and it does so tremendously. Criminals who are in jail cannot victimize people outside of jail, and dead criminals are even less capable of victimizing anyone. This means that executing criminals is a good way to prevent crime, even if literally nobody is deterred from committing crime by the threat of capital punishment.
If the solution creates a bigger problem, (...)
I think you forgot to mention what problem is created by retribution. The only one I can think of is suffering of the criminal, which I see as a benefit, not a negative.
Or a step further: if retribution is a solution but there is a solution with better outcomes that does not involve retribution, the latter is better.
This is just a tautology: a better solution is better.
I think the greatest pitfall of retribution in a large society (versus a small one, where it makes a lot more sense) is that the moving parts are no longer in sync. You can see this with public shamings that target relatively innocent people with great impunity and consequence.
Few cases involve any publicity. In most cases, nobody cares about people close to victim and to the perpetrator. These form a small society.
wlxd
5mo ago
You are correct about the first three, and wrong about the fourth (renaming obviously works, failed attempts are exceptions, not the rule). But so what? My enemies keep doing it. How do you propose to get them to stop it? Tit for tat is the only strategy I can think of that has any chance of success. Got any better ideas? Unless you do, I support renaming, and I think Trump should keep doing it.
wlxd
5mo ago
In fact, I think it is a flaw because it causes people to act in ways that are less utilitarian/net good.
the exact course of action that should happen for the greatest benefit
Yeah, that’s the enlightened liberal framework I was talking about. Most people (fortunately) do not subscribe to utilitarianism, but nonetheless this is the dominant framework for the discussion, along with some specific assumptions, like granting substantially similar value to utils received by the perpetrator and the victim.
wlxd
5mo ago
There is one more benefit of punitive justice: satisfaction for the victim. If you suffer, or people you care about suffer, it is satisfying to see the perpetrator of suffering to suffer in return. It’s a restitution of sorts.
You don’t see this argument being made though, even though this is extremely obvious and natural to most people (you can find millions of examples on X of people, both on left and right, full of glee from people being punished by criminal system), because it is obviously invalid in the enlightened liberal framework under which the discussion is happening.
wlxd
5mo ago
non-condensing gas water heater ban are worse.
Wow I haven’t heard of it, so happy I got a non-condensing water heater and furnace this year. Condensing version would cost me extra $4000+ for more to need to make completely new exhaust ducting. Going from 80% to 95% would save me something like $200 a year, so it’ll take 30+ years for the investment to beat bonds, even if you assume gas prices going up steadily.
wlxd
5mo ago
Thai or Eastern Europe standards
There is an enormous chasm between Thai and Eastern Europe. The latter are catching up with the west very fast, the lag is only 10 years. In Poland, for example, the purchasing power today is similar to that of Brits in 2018. The purchasing power of Thais is more like Britain in the 90s.
This argument proves too much. It’s not an argument specifically against federal ID cards, but against any and all ID cards, including state issued ones. Given that none of this is a problem with state issued IDs, I don’t find this vision very likely.
More options
Context Copy link