Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
#209, #StandUpLocust
User ID: 2418
Your body always is “your body,” right up to the point in involves someone else’s body. Just as your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. This is the first time I’ve come across someone equating pregnancy to slavery, but it’s surely interesting. And this is what I was getting at earlier:
… It always struck me as disingenuous how the blue tribe seems to get collective amnesia and forget how to be literate when it comes to the matter or abortion…
Not saying to belong to the in-group, but the logic sure does seem to get pretty fuzzy whenever the topic is brought up. Words lose their meanings so fast to its advocates, probably because it’s the only way they can square this circle.
Contrary to your last point, the reason either of us are benefiting at all entirely comes from the moral wealth of my side of aisle, I’d argue. The reason someone doesn’t have the right to come along and end my life without retribution comes from the self-worth and dignity of each person. Which is also why I’m against abortion.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
3hr ago
You brought up the point about organ donation. You’re not engaging in “organ donation” in the normal process of pregnancy. “Your body” is no longer “your body,” at the point it involves the life and death of someone else. That’s the entire point.
I chose to take a risk. Much like when I decided to smoke a cigarette. Just because the lung cancer became a sentient clump of cells doesn't entitled it to my body or preventing me from attempting to get rid of it.
Precisely. You chose the risk. And now you live with the consequences of said risk.
Let me quickly go tell my boss he needs to pay me a bajillion dollars because I am "fighting for my existence"
You realize fighting was in quotation marks, right?
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
4hr ago
Of course a baby doesn’t display agency, because it ‘can’t’. Therein lies the problem.
… even if the passenger in my car accident I caused was in needed an organ donation from me. I still have the bodily autonomy to say no.
The baby didn’t stake an original claim on your body. You’re the one who chose to commit the act. What it’s “fighting” for is on behalf of its own existence.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
5hr ago
Yeah, not everyone having sex “intends” to get pregnant. But the passenger in the vehicle doesn’t intend on winding up in a clinic with a medical certificate attached to his/her name either.
It’s a way of trying to dismantle the notion that actions have consequences and to the extent one ever becomes separable from the other, there’s a moral obligation to make it so. I also never consented to being compelled to live in the same country as said Tumblr moron. Does that give me a right to knock them out, euthanize them when they’re unconscious and give away their organs?
In the case of the latter, there’s a concept in civil law called “duty of care,” that is taught to doctors in medical school. Doctors have a duty of care to their patients such that, if patients knew that at any point in a medical facility they could be knocked out and euthanized, they would never go there and therefore the utility function of hospitals would be destroyed. In the former it creates ethical conflicts between a doctor’s commitment to protecting life when it’s between the fetus and a patient; especially when it doesn’t explicitly involve the health of the mother.
The assumption that babies simply appear from the ether has weirded me out since I noticed the framing. You weren't kidnapped by a music lover and forced to give life support to another human (unless you were, in which case I support the right to abortion in cases of rape). "Where babies come from" has well-understood causality. If you sign up for baby-making, then you can't act shocked when you make a baby.
I’m split on the use of contraception, which obviously makes me a sinner as a Catholic, but I’m against abortion. It always struck me as disingenuous how the blue tribe seems to get collective amnesia and forget how to be literate when it comes to the matter or abortion. Yet they’ll run news coverage on the Mars rover pinpointing the location of a bacterium and declare to the world they’ve found “life” on another planet. The notion that a right to have sex isn’t a right to get pregnant is a fallacious argument when biology itself happens to disagree with you because, oh I don’t know people actually ‘get’ pregnant by doing it.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
5hr ago
… The power to tax and regulate is the power to destroy...
You saw that happen with dispensaries in California after weed became legal. Once the state went in on the industry it started over regulating the hell out of the market such that some resellers were left scratching their heads and wondering if they should go back to the underground market for dealing since it was less burdensome and more profitable.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
5hr ago
Is it hypocrisy to realize some values require compromises to achieve others? Robin Hanson wrote a good book years ago that I think did an excellent job in explaining what really motivates our outward value displays and the stories we love to tell about ourselves; and more specifically just how completely out of register it often is with the truth.
There are ways of being consistent and ways of not being consistent. Human beings tend to flout their values however when they feel they’re powerful enough to do so and believe there’s no blowback to getting away with it.
Even theologically, deontological ethics reduces to consequentialist ones. You can’t go up to someone and say “You’re going to Hell if you don’t X, Y, or Z.” If that person has no desire to avoid Hell, that argument will have no effect on them; it’s essentially meaningless. In every day life, people fear reprisal for not sufficiently conforming to the prevailing values and attitudes. When you see cracks bleed through the value systems are the seams, IMO it’s less about individuals being corrupted by some influence. You’re seeing their real values of naked self-interest at work trying to quickly snatch something for the present moment.
Sounds ominous but really isn’t. My family is an interesting group of people who come from very disparate backgrounds and more or less melded into a common culture, along with the culture of where I grew up. Our extended family is huge and lives all across the country; including relatives who know me but that I’ve never met who live outside the country. And we were always a fairly close knit group of people. Family isn’t important to most Americans but it’s enormously important to us. That said, my parents were two ‘completely’ different people. I used to think they had absolutely no business getting together and don’t know how they stayed married all their lives.
At some point we’re all obliged to move on. I had a serious sit down with some of my younger cousins a few years ago who I’m very close with (they’re more like younger brothers and sisters), after my sibling passed away and told them there will come a time when mom and dad pass away, I will pass away and everyone else around you will become increasingly distant and have their own lives to live. You’ll be standing in a room by yourself, or driving somewhere or doing something and you’ll say to yourself, “… Is that it? Am I supposed to move on as if nothing happened and it’s just another day?… And the answer to that is ‘yes’… Remember the good times we had and don’t forget me. The sun will still rise tomorrow whether you’re prepared for it or not, and you always have to keep moving forward. So don’t anchor your life around me. Maybe we’ll see each other in Heaven and if not it won’t matter, so take comfort in the fact that we’re all going to the same place.”
Recording was something we began a decade or so ago and when one of my cousins, some of my friends I had a 5 hour or so conversation and I’d laughed hard about something we were discussing. I probably laughed harder than I have in my entire life. My face was red. I had uncontrollable tears. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t talk or breathe. And I remember the next day wishing I could relive our discussion because of how great it was. Then I remembered GrapheneOS has a record button in the Dialer app. My VoIP numbers also can auto-record calls in Groundwire or Sipnetic. I told them in advance what I thought about doing and they agreed to it. Since then we’ve discussed everything under the sun. Family politics. Hood politics. Old memories. Trying to organize and plan things which anymore is extremely difficult for us. Religion. Current events. Movies. Everything.
Try it sometime. You may like it. But there are also serious things people have been wanting to know for a long time that my cousins and I have discussed that we think is best to settle and table it for the next generation of our families. What they do with it at that point is up to them. They’ll definitely get a kick out of many of our conversations if they listen to them. There will be plenty of laughs, raised eyebrows, close calls and holy shit moments to keep them entertained. We have thousands and thousands of hours recorded at this point.
Makes sense. IT / administrative work will always dominate corporate office settings.
In the case of infosec, a number of years ago there was an analysis that found a 0% unemployment rate; but there’s also a lot of candidates that can’t find work. It’s a strange industry on the labor side if you don’t understand what’s going on.
Right now there’s an over saturation of analyst positions. Qualified people are looking to get in on the ground level but many of them are unable to get their foot in. What’s very high in demand is the meat for the industry. Threat detection engineers, incident responders, etc. A lot of the veteran, very high pressure roles. These are greatly understaffed at the moment.
… their jobs tend to be cleaning up AD/Entra junk and enforcing role-based access control. Again, nothing glamorous.
A lot of them probably work as L1’s or as juniors. It’s a good position to get into if you can manage the burnout and pressure (especially in an MSSP setting, they’re notorious for that). IAM is also increasingly becoming the frontline for threat actors looking to exploit systems. There’s problems on both the technical side as well as the business. The latter has to constantly prove its value to the executives because they often don’t understand what value you bring to the organization. Depending on who your employer is, your position may also be at risk of being permanently unstable; so it’s a worry people have.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
7hr ago
Everyone wants what they want. Nobody ever wants to pay for it. You end up paying regardless, one way or another; even with Google. Yeah it’s a minor annoyance, but I have no problems paying for Kagi. The benefit I get is much greater than the cost.
Yeah, I’m aware of Mondragon (1, 2). Even Mondragon admits however that once a labor collective gets to a certain size they get spun off from the rest of the cooperative because it becomes unmanageable. There’s a reason vertically arranged hierarchies, whether its labor or sociopolitical are easier to manage when they become more complex than horizontal systems.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
17hr ago
What sector of IT in particular is killing it? Over in infosec they’re doing terrible at the moment. The economy has left the industry to thin out the herd at the moment and jettison what it can. Balance sheets are suffering in a lot of places. Are the entry positions you’re finding localized to a particular type of entry work?
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
19hr ago
So then what problems is the LLM solving in that case? The advantage doesn’t seem to be all that great.
This is somewhat by the by, but I’m curious to know how you’d interpret the failure of the kibbutzim.
On a local level we already have what you’re suggesting in the sense that there’s nothing that prevents a small band of individuals from organizing along a cooperative pathway (obviously, since that’s what we’re talking about). The problem I see is one with scale and how it generalizes to a larger population. Local production and distribution doesn’t produce an economic surplus that the broader mass of humanity outside the cooperative can benefit from on any large scale. Now technically that’s an imperfect example because some cooperatives do produce a profit but that in turn gets distributed among the workers, there is no capitalist or investor that reaps up the overall net profit to the exclusion of the workers.
I get what it is you’re hypothesizing but it just strikes me as a way for extremely dysfunctional labor to get by without keeping up their end of the work. It doesn’t seem to me to provide a solution that ‘fixes’ the problem.
Fundamentally the only way this would ever be determined is just to get the system enacted and try it out. I could be wrong, so could do. I just have a very hard time seeing it working given my empirical views about human nature.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
20hr ago
You’ll still need clerical workers to supervise the LLM’s or something analogous to that. I’ll never be sold on the great transformative possibilities of them due to the mathematical impossibility of resolving the hallucination problem. How are you going to trust that it correctly read that Congressional omnibus bill?
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
20hr ago
How is AI upending the profession in your case? Are there interesting avenues undergrads can pursue that have an opportunity to reinvigorate the profession in some sense? Or is it all fairly mundane?
Of course they won’t have any friends. Their first loyalty is to their class interests as business executives. Thats the dynamic that puts them into a position of being able to exercise social power in the first place. Without said wealth backing them, they have no policies or playground in society to experiment with. All they can do is pay lip service.
Their class interests are defined along their wealth. These people aren’t ideological subjects in the sense that Islam still dominates the consciousness of the Iranian elite. They are still obedient along with the rest of the population. Tech CEO’s here throw their money around treating society like it’s their personal plaything to mess with. Some are dangerous ideologues no doubt, but you saw just how frail that was when so many of them did a 180 after Trump returned for a second term.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
20hr ago
In the case of finance I’d agree with you. Finance is best put to use when it’s made the servant of the industrial sector.
But don’t at all underestimate the depth and range of importance digital services has in the economy. Just because it’s more intangible and abstracted away from concrete, physical and more visible productive labor doesn’t mean it’s less important.
Since you have kids, those thoughts are normal and endemic to every parent. I’d be less concerned about “the future,” widely thought of. There’s no real way you can personally impact that. Think about what you and them want for “their future,” and build toward it. I have the opposite problem. I have things people want to my name, but I have no children of my own to bequeath them to. So I’ve had to become very selective when I put together my trust but if anything happens to me, at least all the most important items will already come with names attached to them, along with the reasons why.
Another thing me and a number of my cousins started doing several years ago were recording all of our conversations together. On my laptop I have a massive archive or recorded phone calls, each one, hours long, between me and various family members and friends. My father, aunts, uncles, cousins, sibling, etc. Someone will eventually have to come along and do all the hard work of categorizing everything. It’s all unstructured and follows no organization but my rule is none of it is ever to be released to our families (immediate or extended) until we’ve all passed away + 25 years. There will be questions people will definitely be wanting answers to, and they will get them in due time. Hopefully it’ll be something important for our futures.
They work well in certain sizes, around the small to mid range of things. I’m very skeptical of ideas of “workers self-management” and the like that the anarchists and syndicalists of old loved to extol. I sometimes wonder if those people have ever actually had a job and dealt with the ensuing frustration of those who simply ‘don’t work’. If we lived out said ideals on a global scale we wouldn’t have a workers paradise.
I mean shit, when I was in high school and the teachers put us all into random groups and we couldn’t select our friends, I was always the guy doing all the work while the other kids sat around doing jack shit. That’s fine with me. But if I’m doing 90% of the work, all of you guys are getting F’s due to your lack of contribution. You’d better be shining my shoes and serving me lunch everyday and hope I put your name on the project. If we had this program on a national level, you’d have half the planet die of starvation and unable to wipe their own ass.
Second that. When I lost my calico, Sweet Baby Esther Goldstein, I was devastated and depressed for weeks. Her passing was inexplicable. One day she just stopped eating. I noticed she was losing weight, but nothing was found to be wrong with her just before her passing. She was found in the bathroom where she had passed away. She was up there in age though and she was very well taken care of by me all the days we were together. Hope I get to see her in Heaven.
I’m odd as a Catholic in that the liturgy itself never beguiled me very much, but I’ve never attended a service of any variety that generates these kinds of experiences for the attendees. Christianity was always an intellectual compact I had with the religion and its one I never found fully convincing but I love and enjoy the trappings of the ideology and the fact that I grew up in it. Even atheism wouldn’t cause me to fully abandon the religion. I always enjoyed watching movies like The Seventh Seal that explored the difficulties of believers.
One of the benefits of it over say Islam, is that the Bible wasn’t as tightly written as the Qur’an is. Therefore you can be more unconstrained in your interpretive schemes to reconcile things. In the Qur’an on the other hand, the fact that Allah can’t do fractions and that it’s caused lots of Muslims to apostatize has made some of its verses very difficult for scholars to reinterpret. So difficult in fact that medieval theologians had to invent a whole system just to make it work. When Islam dies it dies ‘hard’. The advantage Christianity has is its durability as a concept to last through the ages.
When a written document is given to any group of people, it’s much more complex than the superficial readings of a text that you get at the first pass. Some people think US Constitution allows people the right to own slaves and others think it doesn’t allow women the right to vote. If you just read the historical casebooks that have foreshadowed amendments to our understanding of the founders intent, certain interpretations of our founding document have fallen out of favor because of how inconsistent they are with the modern world. This is by no means a problem unique to religion. Science can falsify all kinds of theological assumptions and philosophical premise's, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I think you’re going to find it very difficult to circumscribe the ontology of personhood in such a way that wouldn’t arbitrarily involve marking out large swathes of people for the same kind of treatment you would a fetus.
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