site banner
PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   26780 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I was at my local organic co-op today, and I discovered that they have, as is typical of hippy-dippy stores, a reusable bag policy. In this case, every reusable bag I use, up to four total bags, gets me a small discount.

Being the sort of person who posts on the Motte, I immediately thought of gaming this system by putting as few items as possible in each bag. Preferably, I would buy four items, put one item in each bag, walk the bags out to my car, deposit the items in a separate container, then go back inside and repeat the cycle as often as necessary to get everything I want and maximize the discount.

This is, of course, both strictly legal under the store’s very poorly written policy, and also going to get me banned in no time.

But it led me to think of the deeper issue. Many, perhaps all, policies and laws are prone to extreme lawyer-brain galactic thinking like this. Imagine that the store couldn’t just ban me, because I am a member of the store and they can’t just get rid of me, and they must also put in place a policy that is fair to every member of the store. So they start trying to specify the volume of bag that must be filled, the types and sizes of bags that are allowed, minimum item counts in each bag. Soon, cashiers are bogged down in the minutiae of various arcane bag to discount ratios, rather than just scanning items and making pleasant small talk. Everyone is worse off, and the only plausible escape is to eliminate the discount itself, thus taking away a benefit of being a store member and reducing the overall value of that status, causing long-term harm to the store’s “health,” as it were.

Fortunately for my local Hippy Mart, they can still keep a FAFO policy in place for the chronically politically diseased such as myself. Anyways, I was just thinking about this and the contrast with the American legal system, which would be obviously incapable of maintaining such a simple and poorly written policy for longer than a nanosecond or two.

I suspect that the discount is so small that it wouldn't be worth the time for 99%+ of their shoppers.
However, you are correct that, on occasion, businesses don't think their promos through.

My brother was buying an expensive pair of shoes (over $100), when the sales guy pointed to their special of Buy-One-Get-50%-Off-Second. My brother asked if he gets to choose which pair of shoes counted as second, and the sales guy agreed. My brother then asked for the cheapest pair of shoes in the store, which turned out to be women's $10 house slippers. So he bought those first, and then got 50% off for his expensive pair of shoes.

Ironically, the expensive pair of shoes wore out in a year, but my sister-in-law still wears the slippers.

However, you are correct that, on occasion, businesses don't think their promos through.

Sometimes even for permanent ones. An example I ran into yesterday was that the Steinberg Cubase Pro DAW costs 575e to buy. However the combination of their cheapest audio interface (IXO12 at 49e) that comes with the lite version Cubase AI and upgrade from AI to Pro (279e) ends up costing barely over half that and you get an audio interface you can give to a friend. Those deals have been in effect for over a year or longer.

For some reason this reminds me of this joke but inverted. The day they think trough the promotion their sales will plumet.

A young boy enters a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer, "This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you." The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, "Which do you want, son?" The boy takes the quarters and leaves. "What did I tell you?" said the barber. "That kid never learns!" Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream parlor. "Hey, son! May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?" The boy licked his cone and replied: "Because the day I take the dollar the game is over!"

I have never seen a store that didn't make the less expensive item the discounted one in a BOGO sale.

Its a fairly common thing with glasses due to the very large per unit margins for the frames. There might be some restrictions but you can often get a much more expensive item discounted.

I think that in this particular instance, it is simply that the rules as written are bad. If you want to incentivize people avoiding single-use bags, then the following should work out fine:

If you don't require any single use bags, you will get a flat discount for your purchase.

If you don't have enough reusable bags, then we will happily sell you another reusable bag if you want to take advantage of the discount.

As we also want people to shop in bulk, we will increase the reusable-bag discount based on the sticker price (using a strictly monotonic function between sticker price and discounted price, e.g. 1% off per ten dollars sticker price, up to 10%).

The cashier would simply have a line item "all-reusable discount", and the computer would calculate the discount. Sure, you could still have discussions about what counts as a "reusable bag". Is any bag which was not provided by the store for free ok? What if someone buys a roll of garbage bags and then proceeds to use them to transport the groceries? But you would at least no longer be vulnerable to the exploit you describe.

Meanwhile in Germany, the thin plastic bags for loose fruits and vegetables are free, but every other bag will cost you. Nor will most supermarkets sell you shitty single-use plastic bags. Your options are to either spend half a Euro on a shitty paper bag which will probably fail if you fill it up, or pay a Euro (or two?) for a robust reusable plastic bag. I own perhaps eight of the latter and they can be reused for dozens of shopping trips easily.

Removing the discount for not having enough reuseable bags is a bad system. First, you are still saving the store money/reducing waste by bringing your own bag, so there is not a good financial/environmental reason. Second, this creates an incentive for buyers to limit the size pf their purchases to the bags they brought, which means more trips (bad environmentally) and smaller orders (bad financially).

The per bag system is basically fine. People hate the penalty of having to buy bags, so inplementing this without a legal mandate is very risky for the business. The amount of people who would spend the time to maximize the per bag discount is very very small, and the loss from this is also very small.

Do you get an even bigger discount if you hold them in your arms using no bags at all? I'm guessing not, but I feel like you should since that's even more environmentally friendly than the reusable bags.

I feel like the "type of person who is happy to use a reusable bag and make small talk with the cashier" and "type of person who rules-lawyers these policies to save a few cents" are just fundamentally different types of people who will never understand each other.

As I said recently, rules-lawyering is one of the main reasons why any functioning society needs to allow for 'spirit of the law' interpretations. Strict textualism just gets you extremely dumb stuff like this, where you redefine the whole neighborhood as a collective private house so you don't have to follow the rules of the sabbath; both shameless and clearly against the spirit of the whole thing, the adult equivalent of signing a contract and going a tiny bit outside the box or making a spelling mistake or getting the date wrong because that means you didn't actually sign it HAHA, suckers, it's not valid!!

In a wider way, this is a bigger problem with the modern justice system. A hundred years ago, a lot of low-level justice was dispensed by police directly. Some youths being annoying just got the shit beaten out of them with truncheons, and they learned their lesson. Today the cops aren't allowed to do that any more, and the justice system is incapable of anything like that kind of rapid, effective lesson.

As I said recently, rules-lawyering is one of the main reasons why any functioning society needs to allow for 'spirit of the law' interpretations.

If you want to have those, you need trustworthy interpreters. We don't have those. They'll do crap like give you shit for your cheeseburger when you know damn well none of the dairy cows were in any way, shape, or form the mothers of the beef cattle. And anyway they're cattle, not goats.

where you redefine the whole neighborhood as a collective private house so you don't have to follow the rules of the sabbath; both shameless and clearly against the spirit of the whole thing

But was "you can't flip a light switch" really against the spirit of Shabbat? Or carrying an object from one particularly subjectively defined area to another, for that matter.

signing a contract and going a tiny bit outside the box or making a spelling mistake or getting the date wrong because that means you didn't actually sign it HAHA, suckers, it's not valid!!

This is a "scrivener's error". "I spelled my middle name wrong on page 3, so I exempt myself from our agreement" isn't allowed.

Strict textualism just gets you extremely dumb stuff like this, where you redefine the whole neighborhood as a collective private house so you don't have to follow the rules of the sabbath

I wonder if there is some merit to the absurd rules-lawyering that you see in Orthodox Judaism. Clearly, sticking a wire around Brooklyn doesn't make it a 'household' but I can see a more 'spirit of the law' ethos moving the borders of the rules one stage at a time until you're at Reform Judaism and nobody believes in God any more.

Something similar is the reason why in many modern democracies we use shitty FPTP instead of enlightened Approval Voting. The story is that back in ancient Greece they voted by placing stones in jars so when their democracies tried to do Approval voting some unscrupulous voters would put all their pebbles in the jar of their favourite candidate instead of putting no more than one in each. This being the time before cheap paper the only real solution they had was to give each voter only 1 pebble, and hey shitty FPTP was born...

Any decent store just has to accept that a small subset of customers are going to go hardcore and maximize value. They just have to make sure they can eat the losses and not end up making a Hoover Free Flights promotion.

When I shop at the local Safeway-Albertsons land it's not unusual to get over 50% savings over list price, and when going to McDonalds as a family we each need to order separately so we can all get a daily deal.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats