whatihear
8d ago
But you’re a programmer, not a government fail project maker. You have a very general skill set. You could in principle take a job programming in industry right? Unless you are not a programmer and are in some way specialized only to government work, in which case your argument seems to have a bit more merit. I still don’t really consider any line employee who goes to work and tries their hardest at their job every day a parasite. Maybe some are on a strict economic level, but on the moral level I don’t think they are. The exception to this would be certain industries and specializations that are just inherently parasitic like DEI consultants or patent troll lawyers.
whatihear
8d ago
That sounds personally frustrating, but I don’t think it’s the same thing as someone who does not sell their labor at all and just games the system. You are contributing to a market that helps generate enormous value for the economy even if your code doesn’t end up doing useful things. The fact that someone else is using the threat of violence to separate other citizens from their wealth and then buy your labor with it doesn’t mean you aren’t usefully providing labor to the software market. That capital allocation decision is on them, not you. If a sawmill sells their product to someone who just immediately burns the wood, I would still credit the mill workers and owners with being productive.
This kind of buying of labor that is not actually useful happens in the private sector as well. Sometimes it is just the luck of the draw. It’s really common among startups, but I still think founders and early stage workers are contributing more than I am as someone who just checks in to my corporate gig. They are part of the great beating heart that keeps the economy going in a more direct way than I am, even if they just work on a chain of unfortunate failures.
whatihear
8d ago
Is it? We run steady deficits that we debt fund, but I’m pretty sure the majority of each annual budget is still paid by taxes.
whatihear
9d ago
It would take a while to switch over, but definitely not on the order of 60 years.
Small states have definitely been tried, such as the American state before income tax, and it went pretty great from a growth perspective. The fact that no one in the modern age runs a tiny state doesn’t mean we can’t analyze it. We can look at the things run privately and the things run by governments and see which ones contribute more to GDP growth. There are basically no profitable government run enterprises. There are vast private industries serving government priorities, but that’s not really positive sum in the same way. All I’m objecting to is the idea that government spending is somehow essential to the economy and that we would all be poorer without it. Obviously switching costs would be significant if it was done suddenly, but it wouldn’t have to be. Besides “what would happen if this went away tomorrow” is the wrong question. We should be thinking about how things would look in steady state.
I’m actually in favor of a tax and spend redistributive state that fields an army. I just think pretending we get gdp growth because of it is silly.
whatihear
9d ago
Net present value of their pension at the current fed funds rate is about 3 million. Stocks and flows of money can be converted back and forth. If you consider the fact that most retirees will aim to draw down their nest egg, we should actually count their equivalent net worth as higher. On top of that they haven’t even started to draw social security. The total value of their government benefits is probably around 5 million when compared with someone seeking to get the same income from their own investments.
whatihear
9d ago
In the short term that’s true, but we’ve run lots of experiments to see if government can allocate capital more efficiently than the market over the last century, and the answer seems pretty clear. Once things had time to shake out, the economy would almost certainly be larger. There are lots of reasons to support government taxing and spending such as cool jets existing or reducing wealth inequality/pasification of the proles, but greater GDP is not one of them.
whatihear
12d ago
Market efficiency generally refers to pricing correctness. I don’t think it has much to do with elasticity of demand or supply.
“If ROI is high then more people will want to buy,” is generally true, but it’s not a priori true. We have to know something about the demand curve as well. Most of the time, it will generate a sellers market and allow sellers to raise prices, but it doesn’t have to happen immediately. In the case of political bribes, the market is intensely opaque and potential buyers might not realize how to make a purchase or may not want to buy for silly reasons like honor. Over the long run I would expect more buyers to clue in, but it wouldn’t surprise me if bribes could remain really high ROI for a long time without changing market conditions much. Certainly I wouldn’t expect it to move as fast as oil futures.
whatihear
12d ago
You are assuming that demand is infinitely elastic. It is quite possible that there are just not many marginal new buyers of potatoes even if they are a great deal. Demand being inelastic would not free the farmers from competition and allow them to raise prices.
whatihear
1mo ago
Tit for tat leading to large diffuse groups wanting to come to the table obviously happens. It’s so common and predictable that we have a term for it: “war weariness”. War weariness is not just leaders deciding to compromise, it’s an attitude shift in the entire population. It takes a lot of time and a lot of pain, but it does happen. Cancel culture may not be high intensity enough to induce war weariness between the right and left, but you can’t dismiss it out of hand.
whatihear
1mo ago
Japan has far fewer economic migrants than other developed countries. That has changed a little recently (and immediately prompted a turn to the right politically). Including them on this list seems unreasonable unless you count having any number of economic migrants at all. There is clearly a difference between what Japan has allowed and what Europe or the United States has allowed.
whatihear
2mo ago
I think they were saying that black activists are to the left as “the good ones” are to the right, not that they are the same group.
whatihear
2mo ago
The three body problems idea that aliens would want to destroy other intelligent civilization because of the potential for explosive technological growth on galactic timescales seems to make a lot of sense as a motive for someone to release death probes targeting less developed species to their immediate neighborhood.
whatihear
2mo ago
I’ve seen it come up with enough regularity on personal drama subs that I think it is not actually that uncommon. Why are you so confident that it is?
Getting into a gunfight with police and traveling across a border with your own child are two wildly different things. The state has a very strong interest in dropping the hammer over the first because not doing so would be giving up it’s monopoly on force.
whatihear
2mo ago
There are some cases where someone can violate a custody agreement in such a way that the courts have very little chance of reversing matters. In particular, people often get away with kidnapping their own children to a different country that either holds a different view of who ought to have custody or refuses to extradite as a general principle. In fact, this even happens between US states (I know of some cases where California has refused to uphold Texas custody agreements related to trans healthcare for the kids for example).
In that kind of circumstance, and if the ex is horrifically abusing the child, it may in fact be reasonable to pull the trigger on violating the order. Your argument is that people don’t get away with kidnapping, so they shouldn’t do it even in extreme outlier cases, but people do in fact get away with kidnapping pretty commonly when borders get in the way.
whatihear
3mo ago
Yeah that makes sense in light of the broken bones and cartilage. Apparently those injuries can happen in older individuals from hanging, but I can’t imagine he had much space to get a good drop if he did hang himself, so it still seems pretty suspicious to me.
whatihear
3mo ago
You said “a soldier” so I assumed you had some tool in mind that would allow one person to reliably strangle a victim. It does seem plausible that a crushed trachea could keep the air supply cut off after an attacker walks away, though in this case if he was killed he would have been hung afterwards which would have maintained pressure on the blood vessels as well.
Honestly for a single attacker the best tool might have been a taser to subdue him and then they could have just strangled him with the sheets since they have the stage the hanging anyway.
whatihear
3mo ago
What equipment would allow you to kill someone in seconds leaving only the marks left on Epstein? How many seconds are we talking? Getting a garrote on a resisting victim is not trivial unless you have the element of surprise, and strangulation takes a while to set in. Even after someone goes out they are not dead immediately. Whether by blood or air choke, it takes seconds to put someone out but much longer to kill.
whatihear
3mo ago
A lot of drug dealers are fronted their supply because they don’t have the cash to buy it directly. They pay for it when they get their next re-up. This is how businesses in basically every other category work, so it shouldn’t be surprising. Street peddlers in their third world also borrow their merchandise. Retail stores borrow to buy merchandise. It would be weird if drugs was the one line of business where no one used debt financing. It’s just a more competitive economic structure so it will outcompete people buying up front.
Think about it from the perspective of a cartel boss. You have 1000 kilos of coke to move. You could either distribute 5 kilos at a time to the 5 guys who can afford to pay up front and take forever to move your stuff, or you could front the product to dozens, and move it way quicker. The second obviously makes more money quicker. The fact that you’ll have to break some legs from time to time is just some overhead.
whatihear
4mo ago
This is wrong for two reasons:
- Genetic determinism does not require a deterministic universe. At this point, I don't think many people who are aware of quantum mechanics think we live in a deterministic universe, and it is totally reasonable to believe in genetic determinism WRT intelligence anyway. While intelligence can be measured, it can't be measured down to the planck length. There's a level of precision that's just impossible to achieve, and so long as genetics determine intelligence closely enough, it's fine if the biological processes are a little fuzzy because of quantum uncertainty or whatever your preferred source of non-determinism is.
- A non-material universe is orthogonal to its materiality. There is no reason that non-material objects need to be non-deterministic. For a great example of this, consider the various "hard magic" systems in fantasy books that have clear and well defined rules for magic, but contain obviously non-material objects like souls.
To be honest, I don't much care for the term "genetic determinism" in this context. I have yet to encounter a serious IQ hereditarian who believes that the environment plays no role. In my experience the debate is between hard core blank slateists, who deny the impact of genetics at all because they understand that it would wreck the foundation of much of their worldview, and hereditarians who think that there is a mix of genetic and environmental factors. "Genetic determinism" is generally leveled as a slur against hereditarians because it's pretty silly to think that genes are the only thing that matters and that your exposure to lots of words and symbols as a kid has zero impact. Can you point to someone making a "strong argument for heritability" that really says things are 100% genetic?
whatihear
4mo ago
It’s not though. A universe containing non physical things could very easily contain organisms with wholly genetically determined intelligence. They just don’t have anything to do with one another.
Imagine a purely material universe with species A that is intelligent and has its intelligence completely determined by genetics. Now imagine that one day in that universe species B evolves and has souls (just an example of non physical things, it could be anything you like that is non physical). Nothing has changed for species A, they are still genetically determined.
whatihear
4mo ago
I don’t think that’s true at all. There are plenty of materialists who think things are environmentally determined. This is liberal blank slateism in a nutshell. The opposite of genetic determinism is environmentalism in almost all debates on intelligence. This is actually the first time that I’ve encountered someone saying that variations in intelligence originate from something non-physical like the grace of God (this seems like what you are saying, but maybe you mean something else, it does seem like an odd thing for God to do to me).
whatihear
4mo ago
Yeah totally agree. Before I believed in god, I was a superveniance functionalist (now I’m confused). I think qualia are just one more superveniant thing in that frame.
A lot of people who are not materialists and also don’t believe in god cite qualia as the reason why, so I was trying to make the case in a way that would appeal to those people. It was sloppy and I regret the error, since I don’t actually think that makes sense.
whatihear
4mo ago
materialism / genetic determinism
What do these have to do with one another? Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia. There is no reason that god could not have created a world in which genetic determinism is true.
It seems like you want to associate these things because you want to strike a blow against materialism, but it’s just unrelated.
Elements of the right have always wanted to be more openly antisemitic, and that’s been building steadily on the edgier corners of the internet for years now. Though Gaza isn’t a primary motivation for right antisemites, I do think it is closely related to why right antisemitism is bursting out into the open in a bigger way now. Previously, if the right allowed their antisemites any air they were handing the left a massive stick to clobber them with. Now, the hypocrisy of the left accusing the right of antisemitism would be too rich after the last few years of anti-Zionism from the left that quite frequently spills over into outright antisemitism. So even though right antisemites don’t give a shit about Gaza, it is very helpful for them because it provides a permission structure to come out into the open.
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