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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30400 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Last week there was a discussion regarding restricting the right of released robbers to vote. In a related reporting, Aotearoa (New Zealand) Supreme Court has discovered that 16 and 17 year olds not being allowed to vote is discriminatory.

The reasoning relies on the fact that Aotearoa's Human Rights Act 1993 prohibits making a distinction based on age between people over 16. From this one could assume that, unlike in the US, the age of majority in Aotearoa is 16, with voting a seemingly overlooked exception. A helpful website contains counterexamples to this thesis as many other rights are also denied to 16 year old Aotearrans.

While today "18" is a common age under which rights are restricted, and its commonality is used to justify it, any deviation from it, undermines it. Age of consent being 16 in Europe (and Aotearoa), alcohol requiring being 21 to purchase it in the US and now voting age being lowered to 16 in Aotearoa, etc increase the uncertainty and invite debate. Debate into why exactly is voting allowed to those that it presently is and denied to the remainder. Attempts are made to search for the principles underlying this discernement usually find no satifactory answer.

What exactly do all law abiding (even this qualifier isn't universal among US states) American citizens over 18, young and old, rich or poor, smart and dumb have; but which no non-citizen or child posseses?

What’s with the Aotearoa affectation?

It's anti-White hate speech meant to erase White New Zealander's claims of a homeland. It is a linguistic pre-cursor to genocidal dispossession.

That is a partisan and inflammatory assertion and needs more evidence to back it up.

This comment has drawn an impressive 14 reports for antagonism/boo-outgroup/inflammatory claims.

I'm reasonably confident that Westerly's question was a troll. So for starters, please don't feed the trolls.

But also, you should know that accusing someone of pre-genocide is going to be taken as inflammatory, so if you're going to do that, you really must bring evidence. Insisting on referring to New Zealand as "Aotearoa" does seem like it could be subtly consensus-building--is the Romanized pronunciation of a Maori name for a land mass really interchangable with the name of the nation state, unquestionably called "New Zealand," that implemented the legislative Act in question? Do New Zealanders use these words interchangably? Or do any of their legal documents do so? I don't know much about New Zealand, so there are all sorts of ways you could have made your point that might have served to impart information or insight.

In the future, please do that instead.

EDIT: @cjet79 beat me to it, but I admit it is often helpful to accidentally see that the mod team is in fact on the same page about this stuff!

Thank you for your constructive feedback.

This comment has drawn an impressive 14 reports for antagonism/boo-outgroup/inflammatory claims.

Wow! That is impressive. Can you give a sense of where this is relative to some of your top-reported posts? Can you provide a ranking?

Can you give a sense of where this is relative to some of your top-reported posts?

Most reported posts only get a single report (and often generate no moderator activity--some people just use reporting as a super-downvote, and we ignore them). A genuinely bad post will tend to get 3-5 reports. A post that is both bad and expresses an unpopular view can easily garner 10+ reports even in a slow week. I think the highest I've ever seen is... maybe 22 reports?

Can you provide a ranking?

It's definitely not in the top ten. It might well be in the top 100, though.

more Maori would far rather a stop to most immigration than a name change when speaking English

You're correct that surveys have shown that Māori are more opposed to immigration than most New Zealanders. I'd be surprised to learn of significant Māori opposition to a name change to Aotearoa, though, given that the name change is advocated in a petition from Te Pati Māori.

There's a long tradition of Māori activism in favour of using Māori place names. I see some of the greatest passion when it comes to names for mountains in particular, whether we're talking Maungawhau/Mt Eden (small hill in Auckland) or Taranaki (beautiful isolated volcanic peak, formerly also Mt Egmont, but no longer). This makes sense, given that Māori identity declarations generally start with the mountain you belong to. Contrary to what you have implied, there is often fierce opposition, among Māori activists, for using English place names when speaking English. The land is an important part of Māori culture, as are the names given to the land.

I'm not fussed either way on Aotearoa, but who says "Aotearoans"?! Kiwis or riot!

Yeah I'd like to hear @Syo explain his reasoning.

As with the COVID stuff, NZ used for testing out ultra-left policies. There aren't any right-wing parties to vote for anyway, so who cares.

Well, historically, in the US the voting age was lowered to 18 during the Vietnam War, when 18-year-olds were being drafted, yet could not vote for the officials deciding whether to wage the war at all.

More broadly, it might be helpful to contemplate how the US Supreme Court addresses issues of discrimination. All laws discriminate somehow, whether they say "18-year-olds can't buy alcohol" or "felons can't own guns" or "no trucks allowed in tunnel." How to distinguish between discriminatory laws that are permitted and discriminatory laws that are not? Well, for laws which discriminate based on some criteria (eg, race) or which deprive someone of a fundamental right (eg, voting), laws are OK only if they are necessary to achieve a compelling govt interest. OTOH, run of the mill laws which don't involve such groups, or fundamental rights (no trucks in tunnel) are OK if they are somehow rationally related to a legitimate govt objective. And then there are some in-between categories (eg: gender discrimination) that have to meet an intermediate test.

This is not to say that the Court is correct in its conclusion, but its approach does seem to me to make sense, because it considers relevant factors such as the weight of the govt interest involved, the weight of the private interest involved, and the nature of the classification being made by the government, i.e., whether it is one which arouses suspicion of an invidious purpose.

What exactly do all law abiding (even this qualifier isn't universal among US states) American citizens over 18, young and old, rich or poor, smart and dumb have; but which no non-citizen or child posseses?

Nothing, age is just a heuristic. This applies to other age-restricted activities, too, like alcohol consumption or sex. Whatever age requirement you set, there will be people who meet it but are still not mature enough, and people who are mature enough but don't meet it. An age requirement is imperfect, but it's usually good enough. Conducting a detailed psychological assessment of every potential voter (or alcohol drinker or sex haver) is infeasible and is open to abuse.

Voting rights for citizens and non-citizens are a separate question.

With regards to age, @Tarnstellung said it best—there isn’t a universal law, it’s just very practical to have a bright line. The specific placement of that line doesn’t really matter. After all, everyone started out on one side of it, and everyone will end up on the other. That sort of transience makes the point somewhat moot.

Citizenship, on the other hand, represents a certain investment in the state. This is a (weak) proxy for shared values, but more importantly, it’s skin in the game. There’s next to no reason for a post-Soviet peasant to vote in the best interests of the US; ask him again five years of continuous residence and learning English.

There’s next to no reason for a post-Soviet peasant to vote in the best interests of the US; ask him again five years of continuous residence and learning English.

Is he capable of being arrested before those five years are up? Is he required to pay taxes?

Everyone has skin in the game.

Yes and yes.

I get to fall back on the “bright line” argument here. In the absence of an obvious test for sufficient investment in the state, picking a five-year criterion seems alright. Plus—this is discrimination based on choices, unlike age or race. That makes it kosher.

I think it's fair to say "an immigrant has skin in the game, but we're not letting him vote anyway until he becomes a citizen". But this is one of those cases where you need to get the reason right. Because I've seriously seen "he doesn't have skin in the game" used to justify not having citizens vote.

Any person in the entire world probably has some stake in what the US does, if nothing else at least in our foreign policy and immigration laws. You have to draw the line somewhere

You have to have age related brightlines for a wide variety of tasks, voting is one of those tasks. And personally, I don’t care if that brightline is 16 or 18 or 21. It doesn’t really matter- they’re all roughly as good as each other.

People who are pro-reducing the voting age seem to think it will solve the problem of "young people don't turn out to vote but old people do, so the people who get elected are those who are slanted towards issues old people think important".

If 18-20 year olds can't get off their backsides and go vote, why do you think 16 year olds will be enthused about it? If they do go vote, it will be because their parents dragged them along to the polling stations and told them who to vote for.

What exactly do all law abiding (even this qualifier isn't universal among US states) American citizens over 18, young and old, rich or poor, smart and dumb have; but which no non-citizen or child posseses?

Ignoring the non-sequitor and entirely separate issue of citizenship, one answer is legal independence from their parents. If you give children the right to vote, the majority of them are just going to vote for whoever their parents tell them to. This is not universal, some rebellious teenagers will stray and choose the other party, but most will not. Even if they vote in secret, they could be pressured and interrogated by bad-faith parents afterwards and punished if the parent believes they voted incorrectly. Children do not have the freedom or authority to decide when they go to bed, how can they be expected to run the country?

Additionally, age is the only fair and equal way of addressing intelligence while still weighting the vote of all people approximately equally over the course of their lives. That is, it would be nice if smarter and more mature people voted while less intelligent people did not. But if you implement IQ tests or something comparable as requirements to vote then some people would be permanently disenfranchized, reducing their ability to have their voices and concerns weighed appropriately by politicians (especially when IQ correlates with other traits and demographics), and massively decreasing their loyalty to the nation. But everyone ages, so if you disenfranchize children, they eventually become adults and get to vote just like everyone else. Every person has an equal amount of time not voting before they get old enough and then vote, so nobody is unfairly treated. The only people who never get to vote are people who die before they turn 18, which is a tragedy we already attempt to prevent for other reasons. As such, we accomplish part of the goal of preventing unintelligent votes, with very few of the moral or practical costs that a more restrictive policy would entail.

I am curious, in such arguments, whether you refer to Gf or Gc as the relevant factor in determining whether somebody ought to run the country?

In the context of voters deciding who to vote for, Gc is probably the most relevant, though Gf may play a smaller but nontrivial role. You need knowledge of stuff like what problems does society face that are amenable to political solutions? Which solutions are viable or not, what similar circumstances have been faced historically, what solutions were tried then and what were the results? Which promises that politicians make are plausible and which are blatantly unrealistic? When one politician promises criminal justice reform to protect oppressed people from police and the other attacks counters that this is soft on crime and will increase murder rates, Gc is going to be more useful for comparing the truth value of each side. It doesn't really matter if the voter has high Gf can think up a clever and creative solution to the problem that addresses both issues, because they're not the one running for office and the politicians aren't going to listen to them. It might help a little, but it will help less than Gc. And Gc is also more likely to increase with age as someone goes through the education system and their brain matures, so it correlates more strongly with age.

Again, I wouldn't advocate an actual hard test for Gc as a requirement to vote, since that permanently disenfranchizes people who fall below it. But a mostly fair system which correlates with Gc is preferential to a fair system which doesn't.

If you give children the right to vote, the majority of them are just going to vote for whoever their parents tell them to.

What justification do you have for believing this? An 18-year old's vote is going to be heavily left-leaning pretty much no matter where you go in the democratic world, but you think the 16-year old vote would instead track the 45-year old demographic? Why?

Because the 5 year old would (and usually should) do what their parents tell them to, and 16 year olds are somewhere in between 5 and 18. It's a continuum, and there has to be a cutoff somewhere (unless you think 5 year olds should vote too). The distinction between 18 and 16 isn't much different from the one from 16 to 14, or 14 to 12, etc. It has to be somewhere.

More importantly, as I state, 16 year olds are not legally independent from their parents. I'm not just relying on the argument that 16 year olds are simpletons who do whatever they're told like 5 year olds do, but also that the relationship is inherently coercive. It is relatively easy for a parent to apply soft punishments to their kid that sway their behavior while falling short of legal child abuse or any feasible law against parents punishing their children for their voting choices. And while the majority of parents would not do this, especially if it were illegal, some would. And if one political tribe were more likely to do this it would give that side a direct reward for doing so, influencing politics in favor of people who are better at manipulating their children. It's not that I'm afraid children forming actual political opinions will tend to agree with their parents, it's that children will vote how their parents want without actually following their own political opinions (or even forming genuine ones in the first place).

If we were to simultaneously lower the age of majority and the age of voting to 16, I wouldn't take issue with the voting component of this change, though I would have qualms about the age of majority changing. That is, the minimum age of voting should be equal to the age where children get legal independence from their parents, regardless of where that limit is, because that's when they simultaneously gain the freedom to make their own decisions with significantly less coercion, and (at least in theory) become productive members of society who participate in it directly instead of through their parents. I think I'd be in favor of exceptions where minors who are legally emancipated from their parents and taking care of themselves (rather than being wards of the state in a shelter or foster home or something) can vote. But not kids with parents: their parents can vote and act to uphold their interests politically, just as they uphold their interests in other areas.

I like this post, but I'd like to also note that legal independence is only a component of this; given extended childhoods and more young adults living with their parents and so on, we honestly can't use this as the Only True Standard for legal propriety(?). I've seen, for example, trans adults stuck at home with lower-income families whose parents are pretty much the polar opposite of them politically, having to conceal their voting records and other non-political activities, trapped either for want of their own home or to ensure their parents are still taken care of.

So, this is to say that legal independence is a good measure (and as you allude to, we determine voting age from age of majority/adulthood, which we in turn derive from a mixture of vague socio-cultural ideas and neurobiological evidence), but if you're really concerned about the "parents coercing their kids" angle, turning 18 doesn't magically free the new voter from social pressure.

It's not magic, it doesn't fulfill the task perfectly, but again, the cutoff has to be somewhere. Having a predefined, unambiguous, and fair method for the cutoff is better than tests which might correlate better with some things but open up others to accusations of or actual corruption and bias that unfairly disenfranchises some groups more than others. So having a single age at which people get to vote is a good method to accomplish this, and among all of the ages, 18 seems like the logical choice. If we somehow came up with a reasonable measure for social coercion on someone's vote, and averaged it over people at each age, there would be a discontinuous jump around the 18th birthday, maybe slightly afterwards when people leave home for college. It would not be absolute, it might even show that the jump would even be smaller than the total increase summed through ages 12 to 16, but age 18 would have the highest derivative on average because of the legal rights it represents. An 18 year old might still live with their parents and face social coercion, or they might not, and if the coercion gets too bad they can leave. A 16 year old is legally stuck with very few exceptions.

Because few 16 year olds are going to be interested in politics or politically aware. They may be interested in causes but when it comes to voting in the local election for Tweedledum versus Tweedledee, neither of whom has a strong position on "save the planet from climate change" or "should I have to be in by eleven on a school night when Susie can stay out until one?", then they won't see any very strong reason to pick "white person same age as my parents over other white person same age as my parents".

So unless their parents are going to the polls, and drag Junior along, there's not much likelihood Junior will bother to vote of their own accord. And if Junior is all "Ugh, I hate this, why are you making me do it?", then it's just as likely they'll vote for whomever their parents said "Oh for heaven's sake, just put X beside John Johnson's name" in order to get this done fast so they can go back to doing stuff they enjoy and care about.

See the quote from that deleted Sequoia article about Sam Bankman-Fried:

One of SBF’s formative moments came at age 12, when he was weighing arguments, pro and con, around the abortion debate. A rights-based theorist might argue that there aren’t really any discontinuous differences as a fetus becomes a child (and thus fetus murder is essentially child murder). The utilitarian argument compares the consequences of each. The loss of an actual child’s life—a life in which a great deal of parental and societal resources have been invested—is much more consequential than the loss of a potential life, in utero. And thus, to a utilitarian, abortion looks more like birth control than like murder. SBF’s application of utilitarianism helped him resolve some nagging doubts he had about the ethics of abortion. It made him comfortable being pro-choice—as his friends, family, and peers were. He saw the essential rightness of his philosophical faith.

Yes, wasn't it so coincidental that he managed to come all on his own to the same conclusion on the same topic as the view everyone else around him held, including his parents who had brought him up to hold those views? "His parents raised him and his siblings utilitarian—in the same way one might be brought up Unitarian—amid dinner-table debates about the greatest good for the greatest number."

Do you really imagine if 16 year old Sam was going to vote in a local or national election, he'd vote for a different candidate than the Democrat his parents were going to vote for?

Do you really imagine if 16 year old Sam was going to vote in a local or national election, he'd vote for a different candidate than the Democrat his parents were going to vote for?

I imagine most 16-year olds would vote Democrat because they're in roughly the same environments as 18-year olds and would therefore vote similarly. The fact that their environments encourage voting Democrat and not Republican is ultimately downstream of the Democrats being more effective at messaging to young people. That's just politics.

I'm not really sold on lowering the voting age, mind you, as the same-age-for-everything idea is very appealing. But I'm completely unconvinced by this idea that 16-year olds in particular would just ape after their parents and completely disregard all the other pressures around them.

International Culture War: Seven European World Cup captains ditch One Love arm band under FIFA pressure

So basically: European countries decide on a face-saving, performative gesture while still going to the Qatar World Cup, despite it being a more repressive, anti-LGBT country.

Then, when they actually get to Qatar, FIFA - I guess to stay on the right side of Qatar and any future traditionalist cultures that want to bid for a World Cup- pulls the rug out from under them and starts threatening sporting sanctions if they do wear a "one love" arm band, turning it into an actually meaningful symbol of defiance if they do wear it.

They don't though, they fold.

"As national federations, we can’t put our players in a position where they could face sporting sanctions including bookings, so we have asked the captains not to attempt to wear the armbands in FIFA World Cup games."

I guess I shouldn't be shocked; they folded when they went so why not fold again? But I am a bit surprised that they weren't even allowed this irrelevant gesture, and by how far FIFA is apparently going to help its patrons.

Well, this is the sort of thing we should expect from an exchange in culture (which everyone keeps telling us will enrich us). What did they expect? That it would always go one way and globalization meant that everyone would inevitably fold to all Western moral presumptions? It's a highway, not a one-way street. Moneyed Third-Worlders will push back to maintain their ways.

Meanwhile, in actual meaningful gestures:

https://twitter.com/borzou/status/1594678318397362176?

Iran national football club stand mournfully and refuse to sing national anthem of clerical regime during first match against England at World Cup 2022 in act of protest against Khamenei henchmen’s violence

Huge risk for these guys. Regime has issued arrest warrants for football legends who have spoken out against it, and has arrested famous actresses just for appearing without hijab in public. How will they be treated when they return to Tehran to a heroes welcome at the airport?

I wasn’t familiar with the term “booking,” but the specific penalty sanction was a yellow card at the start of the match, actively damaging the team’s chances at the beginning. It’s like if the NFL had started throwing Unsportsmanlike Conduct at Kaepernick at the beginning of each game.

Wales said the countries involved had been prepared to pay fines that would normally apply to breaches of kit regulations, but sporting sanctions had been a step too far.

Taking this at face value, there was an understanding that FIFA would use off-field punishments so long as the players weren’t affecting gameplay, and the teams only folded when FIFA escalated. Of course, they’d make this statement whether or not they expected such an outcome. I don’t know how consistent FIFA has been about penalties sporting sanctions.

[this is what] we should expect from an exchange in culture (which everyone keeps telling us will enrich us). What did they expect?

Consensus-building aside, I’m an American. That is more or less exactly what I expect. Western Europe just doesn’t have our level of cultural pressure to get away with it.

Generally, with regards to Football, the term 'penalty' is reserved for a foul made inside the 'penalty area' which would result in a 'penalty kick' being given. If you say a player was 'given a penalty' you are saying that the player was rewarded a penalty kick for being fouled inside the opposition's penalty area.

In general, the term used when not referring to a penalty kick is 'penalized'. I.e., the player was penalized with a yellow for a foul.

Thanks. Fixed.

I wouldn't read too much CW into this. Most sports leagues have uniform rules that result in penalties if they're ignored. The NFL was notorious for a while for fining players for writing messages on their cleats or even wearing unauthorized hats at press conferences. And very little of this was political; Alex Smith got fined for wearing a San Francisco Giants hat. While the NFL probably went too far, it's understandable that sports leagues want to regulate how players dress. They're called uniforms for a reason, and it's easy to see how lax enforcement could lead to ridiculous outcomes where every player is wearing some kind of flair.

I don't mind the NFL exerting control over player uniforms, but found it irksome they extended that control to player dress during post game press conferences. I always liked how far Chad 'OchoCinco' Johnson went to troll them about the uniform rules (he legally changed his name to be able to put his spanish numerals on his jersey after getting fined for a related joke). One of the better trolls in the NFL.

In football there is leeway on dress.

Yes, you can't paint anything you like or take off your shirt without sanction but many countries have had modified shirts and uniforms with special logos for certain events. In fact: another recent culture war dustup was a Muslim player refusing to wear a modified, LGBT-friendly shirt in France.

FIFA is almost certainly doing this to mollify Qatar, not some principled opposition to allowing the slippery slope via a "OneLove" armband that they could have simply said no one could wear months ago.

EDIT: Case in point: Belgium forced to change away kit for World Cup after Fifa demand one word ["Love"] is removed from their shirt. These kit designs are decided way in advance. If FIFA had a problem with it for violating strict messaging guidelines, why did it go this far? Why wait till now to do something?

I didn’t realize it at first, but this went beyond fines to yellow cards. That makes it strictly more aggressive than anything the NFL has done for uniform violations. Allegedly, it’s not what the clubs expected, either:

Wales said the countries involved had been prepared to pay fines that would normally apply to breaches of kit regulations, but sporting sanctions had been a step too far.

Qatar probably insisted on it. If I were in their shoes I too would adopt a zero tolerance policy due to "Offer an inch, they take a mile" propensity of the left.

Maybe I'm late to the party on this but I found the pan-African Nationalist colors to be the most striking feature of the flag. If they wanted that kind of symbolism why not go for something Indian, given how many of the slave laborers are from there.

Presumably because this is just imported American culture war so the relevant oppressed group is U.S. blacks. Same for all the bizarre BLM protests in countries like Ireland.

There are a lot of novel bad things that are happening in America right now, ranging from inconvenient to life altering. The things I've been hearing about from my social circle include major tech layoffs, inflation, and increased serious illness due to diseases like RSV and flu hitting people in unexpectedly strong ways. My general response to this has been, "well maybe next time, we shouldn't shut down the entire world due to a relatively non-dangerous disease like coronavirus." Basically, I'm implying that there's a line of causation from COVID lockdowns of a few years ago to the economy now failing, and to people's immune systems now failing, etc. Do you think this is a fair response to take? To be honest, there's probably a lot of other factors at play as well that I'm not accounting for in that analysis, due to my unfamiliarity. These factors may include foreign issues, like Russia's invasion of Ukraine, leading to increased energy prices, etc.

I personally think it’s fair, but then again, I’ve watched it happen in realtime. I can’t imagine what people who’ve only watched one side of the news have gone through.

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Those are the lines that have been going through my head about this bout of inflation. I was surprised it took more than a year for the problem to assert itself, but the Gods of the Copybook Headings, as Kipling says, are both slow and inexorable.

Yes. Incredibly fair. Especially economic gains which were essentially illusory inflated 2020 ones which people are now endlessly crying about giving back to the market.

Admittedly I work in Crypto-adjacent fields and the amount of people who seem to feel that 2020/1 was pure inborn skill and that 2022 is somehow totally unanticipated..

We're also barely touching the tip of the iceberg of the lockdown fallout. Education disrupted, cultural shifts and all for... what, exactly

Everything can be summed up with “we live in an immoral nation”. H1bs lead to reduced salaries and later tech layoffs. Poor food quality and poor education on nutrition and two-parent working households lead to ill health later on. Etc etc. Even without COVID lockdowns we would be getting worse in all measures of real life qualify

That doesn't sound like a crazy position to me. I think the lockdowns are a proximate cause, e.g. the inflationary policies of covid-aid funds weren't necessary without lockdowns. The tech-sector wouldn't have been able to become over-valued so quickly if it weren't for everyone staying home.

On the other hand, we don't have a lot of good data for what would have happened if we hadn't done lockdowns. Places who did fewer lockdowns still have to deal with the overvaluation of tech, global supply chain issues and cost of housing increases. So we can't really blame these issues on the marginal lockdown. (Although I'd be curious to see how if places that didn't lock down have better flu/RSV situations)

I'm not even sure who we can blame for lockdowns. Places like Sweden who avoided mandated lockdowns still saw large segments of their economies "shut down". Are ordinary people to blame? There's also very little variance in the responses from different countries/institutions, which suggests 'elite culture' bears responsibility.

And then of course, there's the virus itself. It's easy to say the world could have reacted better, but it's hard to imagine we could brush off covid as a bad flu season. It's difficult to avoid both a large number of deaths and borrowing from the future.

One of the reasons why lockdowns perform poorly in data measuring lockdown vs no lockdown seems to be that people largely restricted their own behaviour such that you had many people voluntarily locking down. This can be seen in graphs showing collapses in things like restaurant visits before any lockdowns are introduced.

So there's definitely a question of whether no lockdowns wouldn't have seen many negative economic impacts anyway. And, as you mentioned with places like Sweden, we live in a globalized world. Supply chain impacts from other countries locking down - especially china - would still have hit if some nations decided not to follow lockdown orthodoxy.

People voluntary locking down is a very strong argument against mandatory lockdowns. There was no need for police fining people jogging in park when the same result can be achieved voluntary, letting people themselves to decide what is more important for them.

However, the governments should have decided to leave certain services running, for example, schools.

The last thing – idea about difficulty to avoid large numbers of deaths completely ignores that covid risk was strongly age stratified. Some governments still ignores that by pushing vaccination to young children who all already have had covid.

don't get me wrong, I think lockdowns are almost certainly the greatest government disaster outside of war, but I don't think the economic arguments against them do much when compared to life years lost vs life years saved and the moral argument against arbitrary restrictions on freedom.

Fair enough.

Ironically “showering people with money” was very successful monetary policy in the situation where there was no political will to avoid lockdowns. It certainly lessened economic impact. We still got inflation later but I still prefer inflation to recession whatever the cause.

Sweden is relatively small country that depends on global connections and trade. Things that happened in Europe affected it regardless of their own policies. The same applies to inflation.

Yes, I mentioned that not doing lockdowns when everyone else is doing one would still result in many of the similar consequences.

That said, Swedes' private behaviour is also partially responsible for some of these consequences. Even without lockdowns, many Swedes stayed home, didn't go to restaurants, moved into a bigger house to comfortably WFH. The Swedish government also had distributed relief transfer payments. All of this contributes to inflation.

And then of course, there's the virus itself. It's easy to say the world could have reacted better, but it's hard to imagine we could brush off covid as a bad flu season. It's difficult to avoid both a large number of deaths and borrowing from the future.

But the majority of the people killed by the virus were negative GDP, so the first-order effect of the virus should have been to improve the economy.

Also likely massive wealth-transfer effects as the elderly moved on inheritances.

If you are making a causal claim, at the very least you need to 1) demonstrate that the phenomenon that you are purporting to explain is actually happening; and 2) there is a plausible mechanism whereby the factor you propose caused said phenomenon would have a causal effect. But you don't seem to do a great job at either.

First, you say that "novel bad things are happening," but of the three you mention, one of them (tech layoffs) is hardly novel, and re another (increased serious illness) you present no actual evidence that it is actually occurring.

Re the causal mechanisms, it is not obvious how lockdowns that ended a year ago would cause tech layoffs now, nor why other areas of the economy would be experiencing labor shortages, rather than imposing layoffs. Re serious illness, again, it is not at all obvious why lockdowns would cause increased serious illness.

Even re inflation, you don't even make the effort to show that areas which did not impose lockdowns, or imposed only brief or minor ones, are experiencing low inflation. For example, Sweden isn't

First, you say that "novel bad things are happening," but of the three you mention, one of them (tech layoffs) is hardly novel, and re another (increased serious illness) you present no actual evidence that it is actually occurring.

I think you'd have to be living under a rock to not be have been hit in the face constantly with evidence of either of these things over the past month. Google it if you haven't.

it is not obvious how lockdowns that ended a year ago would cause tech layoffs now, nor why other areas of the economy would be experiencing labor shortages, rather than imposing layoffs

f3zinker does a great job of explaining it in his reply.

Re serious illness, again, it is not at all obvious why lockdowns would cause increased serious illness.

That seems like the most obvious thing of all. People were sheltered from all illnesses for years. I know I couldn't talk with any pro-lockdown people without them telling me how great it was that they never get sick anymore over the past few years. Now that society's basically fully opened again, their immune systems are getting walloped by common sicknesses.

C19 - Catchall term to refer to all covid mitigating restrictions such as lockdowns, capacity limits, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, money printing, eviction freezes, etc. Not the disease itself, Which specific item should be contextually obvious.

There are a lot of novel bad things that are happening in America right now

  1. America is relatively shielded from the C19 fallout relative to the world. So you are actually limiting the strength of your argument by limiting it to the US. There are certain very very bad things [1,2] happening in the third world that is certain beyond a shadow of a doubt is caused by C19.

  2. Your list is far far from exhaustive. And all of it becomes really dizzying when they confound a few times over and you get into nth order effects.

major tech layoffs

Quite obviously very related to C19.

Tech companies got much more traffic as people spent their sTimMiEs and could only shop online; and as a result hired a whole load of excess staff that they now have to fire as the money printing can't go on forever and said money printing induced inflation mitigation measures are put on by the fed.

inflation

Obvious.

I'm not going to make an technical economic argument because there are many people who can do it much better than me.

But much like the The First Law of Thermodynamics and Newtons Third Law; There Ain't No Such a Thing as Free Lunch. Closing businesses, closing factories, closing ports, all of it has a price, a rather steep one. You can cushion the punch in the gut of doing that for a long time, but there is no escaping the punch in the gut. The longer you cushion it, the harder you get hit.

I am absolutely bamboozled at anyone who questions this notion at all. The Economy is the creation/exchange of goods and services, not abstract numbers on a monitor, you have less of those going around, it doesn't matter what the numbers say. Seriously anyone who doesn't understand that shouldn't be allowed to talk about economics ever.

Also ridiculous amounts of wealth transfer can make the aggregates look good. But the AUC will be less.

Will the left ever talk about C19 being class warfare? I'll not hold my breath.

people's immune systems now failing

This is the hardest one to find a causal link for but I wouldn't discount it at all. My priors are much aligned with this being true than not.

And the mechanism for that doesn't have to be rocket science.

Bad health -> Bad immune system

Ofcourse staying at home and watching movies all day or months on end, working from home, not getting any sunlight, only eating dogshit you ordered off delivery apps, drinking more, is not good for health.

And that is discounting physiopsychological effects!

like Russia's invasion of Ukraine

I think the Ukraine war really was one of the best things that happened to The Establishment in a long time. It can act as a scapegoat for a plurality if not majority of the bad things caused by C19.

The fact that some of the bad things are a result of C19 is not even within the public consciousness.

It's always the supply chains or this things price going up or that things factory closing, when you dig into okay "why did that happen?"; It almost inevitably leads back to C19.

Immunity debt is a possibility but needs more studies.

We don't need to prove that public health interventions caused harm. Those who decided to implement them had to prove that they are safe and effective, just like we do with medicines.

A lot of inflation in Europe is not related to Ukraine. Maybe prices for energy could be explained by war in Ukraine but food is very questionable. Even if the price of grains is determined by global market prices, their impact on total food should not be that much.

Considering Ukraine and Russia are both massive food exporters I think the war could very easily explain surging food prices. A sharp drop in supply could send ripples through the global market.

No, most of the food in Latvia is not imported from Ukraine/Russia. Only very few products are actually imported from there.

Price shocks on a global market will still effect local consumer prices. If the supply of wheat goes down 10% you'll see prices rise across the board as countries and businesses globally bid up the price for a now scarcer resource. Latvian farmers can now sell their goods abroad for a premium to plug a RussoUkranian sized hole in the market, so Latvian locals still end feeling the pinch.

Very doubtful. The bus rides didn't increase when petrol prices increased considerably. Just because grain is more expensive now, doesn't mean that pizza prices should increase by 50% or so.

Some goods and services are more elastic price wise than others, but I think a fairly massive war between two countries that combined account for 25% of global wheat exports could explain most of the sticker shock in the food sector.

Yes, but it is not 25% of total global wheat production either. And in the EU agriculture is subsidised, and the prices farmers get hasn't changed much.

Ukraine played the role but I suspect that the usual reasons for inflation (like free money, supply chain disruptions etc.) played even greater role.

Modern food productivity is largely a byproduct of natural gas derived nitrogen fertilizers (which were heavily exported by Russia and Ukraine and who both exported a significant proportion of the natural gas used by Europe to make their own fertilizers. Since the Ukrainian War started, natural gas prices meant that European fertilizer manufacturers shut down their plants which raised costs and prices even in places that didn't buy Russian wheat or fertilizer directly (their cheap fertilizer came from Russian gas).

As I mentioned above, the electricity prices has quadrupled in Latvian and yet the price for whole range of energy dependant services haven't increased significantly yet. I don't that gas price accounts for 50% of, let's say, of the price of milk. I have been offered such narratives bud do the calculations work out? By my rough, very approximate estimate, they don't. I am not an expert in this and might be wrong but I suspect that this narrative is not correct either.

Immunity debt is a possibility but needs more studies.

The whole COVID debacle illustrated pretty profoundly how much public health academica is a circlejerk of people who called for lockdowns then marking their own homework. Honestly the way that the period has killed a lot of trust in science & politicans will be one of the bigger legacies.

My personal experience with my relatives and friends is that people who died from covid were already on the verge of death (very frail, in really bad health, in most cases bedridden) and their deaths didn't surprise anyone. Now that pandemic has ended I wonder if those with better access to global data have evaluated if my experience is true globally? Of course, there will always be exceptions but generally speaking I think that excluding this vulnerable population, not many people died or suffered severe consequences from covid.

I base my assumption from the fact that we know that risk from covid was greatly stratified by age. Statistics show that some younger people also died but we don't know very well what was their health status. Even listing of all comorbidities is not very helpful because the health of people can be different. People with diabetes can be very healthy and can be in very poor health, the same applies to people with different heart diseases. Hypertension may be nothing in one person, and it may be causing heart failure in another.

Anecdotal data is not very helpful. We really need to evaluate this aspect because there was so much fear and paranoia that a lot of purported data is not trustable. Probably, those with access to this level of granularity (like NHS in the UK) do not want to do this type of research because the outcomes can be politically unpalatable, i.e., it would show that it really was the case that most people who died from covid would have been dead a few months later in any case. It was sad for them to die but it was inevitable outcome that didn't deserve damaging the lives of children and all of us.

From my reading of the literature:

Most comorbidities don't amount to much compared to just age + being male. There's no way to give a young person enough comorbidities to make them at high risk as an old person without also making them instantly die from their comorbidities. You'd need to be a quintuple amputee with stage 11 cancer and multiple organ failure. Governments incorrectly communicated the risk of comorbidities and never rescinded this communication (and also never properly communicated the sheer impact age has), resulting in plenty of 20 year olds with asthma thinking they're more likely to die than their grandparents.

Chance of dying from OG covid correlates pretty much 1:1 with your chance of dying in the next year once you are over 30. Below 30, this pattern doesn't hold, as teens and 20-somethings have a bump of risk of dying from suicide/violence/vehicles and under-5s have infant mortality effects despite being unaffected by covid.

The average age of covid deaths, and life expectancy tables, come together to yield a result that the average person who died from covid probably had 7 years left to live. Eyeball-tier adjustments for how the average person who dies of covid is frailer than the average person of the same age probably reduces this to ~4 years. This doesn't sound good for lockdowns as it means, in a circumstance where as much as 1% of the population die from covid, that's still only two weeks lost per person. Does not bode well for stealing multiple months away with lockdowns.

However, our counting system for covid deaths introduces all kinds of oddities, because the more ill you are, the greater the chance of you incidentally dying shortly after catching covid even if covid plays no role in it. There's a double whammy when you add in nosocomial infections. In the UK, there have been periods where it is likely that as many as 50% of recorded deaths are incidental, simply as a by-product of the number of positive tests * the chance of dying in any random 28 day period.

High level court officials were giving completely misleading data about how many kids have been hospitalized due to covid and how many of them died from covid. I cannot simply trust any officially published data now. I will need several confirmatory sources with good methodology and tested by rigorous review process.

I work at the pharmacy. Some children we dispense medicines to are wheelchair bound. In fact, they have severe disabilities, including mental disabilities. In vulgar language such a child is sometimes called “a vegetable”. People talk like that although I am conscious that some people will consider that it is very disrespectful to use such a word. In any case, one of them died from covid. It is sad but I am sure the parents saw his death from covid as mercy. He had no chance of fulfilling life and was only suffering every hour of his existence.

Elon Musk refused to reinstate Alex Jones on twitter because he was using child tragedies for personal gain. I agree with this decision. But I think that many people were using those rare child deaths from covid to spread fear and push their narratives. Their actions are abominable similar to Alex Jones'.

They're doing dull, rote work that often amounts to little more than taking someone else's code or architecture and adapting it very slightly to fit a specific new situation.

Come to think of it, why did computer programming stop being the "women's work" it originated as? Because that... actually kind of fits the description of secretaries and computers (as in, the job title), but in practice (in 2022, but it was true in 2010 to a large extent too) it's a little different than that. And I can kind of see it with more imperative "only do this thing" FORTRAN and, later, Excel-as-programming language, but it's weird that it doesn't apply to software as a whole (though MS' Power Apps platform might have something to say about that).

I think that it might be worth looking at the tooling and tools; I believe that software and developers are just uniquely bad at writing good documentation and it's to the point where you actually have to do heavier analysis to get anything done any more.

Maybe having to dig hard to get anything done in all these damn frameworks was job security after all?

My understanding is that "computer programming" as we think of it today was never women's work. What the Buzzfeed articles called programming was more like taking a program written by a man and transcribing it on to punch cards, similar to how a secretary would take dictation in shorthand and then type it up.

That job was called "keypunch operator" and as far as I know was never considered "programming".

Freemcflurry might have the right of it.

Or the field may have been so niche that expertise was randomly distributed. Hopper was certainly doing “real” programming and probably had a staff of card-sorting interns.

This is also compatible with a theory that women got pushed out as soon as the field became prestigious/expensive enough to attract a larger talent pool of men.

Come to think of it, why did computer programming stop being the "women's work" it originated as?

Frankly, programming now is far more complicated than it used to be for developers. There are far more moving parts and our expectations of what an engineer has to know and do continue to expand at an insane pace.

Some of that is because of what we expect out of applications, others are self-inflicted wounds by bad software architects.

Consider what someone would consider a simple CRUD application that one day would be maintained with:

dull, rote work that often amounts to little more than taking someone else's code or architecture and adapting it very slightly to fit a specific new situation

That app will still have:

  • A Database using a language used nowhere else in the application, with its own infrastructure and design

  • A middle tier using a language used nowhere else in the application, with its own infrastructure and design. It must account for security, access to the database, and working with various clients (usually the front end).

  • The middle tier may itself integrate with other applications, and each of them use a specific security model. It has to translate information from the model used in those external apps into its own (and then sometimes back out)

  • A front end using language used nowhere else in the application. It too must account for security and access to the middle tier. It utilizes a dizzying collection of packages (along with the worst package manager in the industry) and has to translate information from the middle tier into its own models. It has to handle user input, control-flow logic for users, and routing.

  • All of this will be managed and deployed with an ALM tool and pushed out to the cloud (if you're lucky). There's a whole 'nother set of security concerns here, the idea of environment progression, tracking work and generating release notes, running tests, and provisioning infrastructure as code itself in YET ANOTHER language used nowhere else in the application.

There are ways to simplify all this - for instance, you could in theory use a single language across an application, though that has serious downsides too.

And of course setting all this up is a solid order of magnitude harder than updating it.

But a typical bug is going to cross-cut against every one of these components. Compare that with writing an accounting program that performs an equation on a couple of numbers that are sent as input into the system, which is mostly what legacy computing was when women were equally represented. You could write out an entire program on a sheet of paper if you were doing it in english. Not the case at all with modern development.

Knowing the languages is the very easiest part, IMO. Getting to know which parts of your application interface with which other ones and which external services how exactly and how the entire CI pipeline works, that's what seems to get more complicated by the day.

There are ways to simplify all this - for instance, you could in theory use a single language across an application, though that has serious downsides too.

Well, it would also help if the only language to be used in this manner wasn't fucking JavaScript, and it would also help if there was market space for any competitor to Microsoft, since they're to my knowledge the only ones who actually seem to try to unify stuff (and when they don't, they just buy the companies that sell and do hostile takeovers on the ones that don't; press F for Borland). Of course, that costs money and there's always that Embrace-Extend-Extinguish thing going on... which will almost certainly haunt that company for the rest of its days.

Meanwhile, the software development community at large would rather just sit there and suffer with (comparatively) sub-par tooling; it's telling that people brag about their favorite development environment being a shitty 1970s text editor in a way unique among tradespeople (like an electrician choosing to do knot-and-tube wiring for a new install).

It's a weird trade to be in, for sure.

Wellll re: Microsoft in theory you can build a full stack app almost entirely in C# with Blazor and Entity Framework :)

Which I would know if I was a disgusting .NET - loving peasant.

Which of course I'm not.

I used to think software dev tools were bad until I started interacting what an average mechanical or electrical engineer have to deal with. We are simply too spoiled with free open access to an incredible array of tools and like to bitch whenever something is slightly subpar.

Come to think of it, why did computer programming stop being the "women's work" it originated as?

In essence, it never was. That's a just-so story spread by tech SJWs and their predecessors, mostly based on the ENIAC programmers and one article by Grace Hopper which was trying to encourage women to become programmers. The ENIAC programmers were women mostly because it was built during WWII when (young) men were in short supply. As of 1960 (first figures I can find), only 31% of "Computer Specialists" (there was no further breakdown) were female. (And yes, that's higher than programmers today)

I'd bet that "computer specialists" includes computer operators who just typed things in and didn't program.

"Computer Specialists" was later broken down into "Computer Programmers" and "Computer Systems Analysts" (and the very small "not otherwise specified" category), neither of which would just be typing; there were other categories for that. It's possible there was some misclassification, of course, but I doubt it was all that significant. There were ~13,000 computer specialists in 1960, 31% of which were women. By 1970 (I have no intermediate data) there were 258,000, 20% of which were women. In 1990 35% of the 974,000 in the equivalent occupations (according to me, anyway) are women, and that's the absolute peak; we see a nadir of 22.5% in 2009 and it's been stuck around 24% since then.

Eventually, the huge bidding up of labor prices that led to current high software dev pay will collapse amid layoffs, and devs will (mostly) go back to being skilled technical workers paid as other skilled technical workers in other disciplines are.

Wishing ain't going to make it so. I'm sure you'd like it if finance could reclaim the elite salaries all to themselves again, but this sort of pullback happened in software in 2008 as well (and 2001, though the cause was different) and things just started growing again.

I think you're taking a really narrow view of the average tech worker. Most software engineers don't work for the silicon valley companies and I haven't actually noticed this supposed tech job apocalypse. My department and the departments of all the tech workers in my social circle seem to be expanding. My job is not speculative, I create software that directly and immediately helps my coworkers make the company more money. I think this is actually probably true for the vast majority of tech workers. You just hear more from these big speculative projects than the guy making boring loan management software. And with many people still having trouble navigating an email client and the next generation broadly not understanding file systems at all us well compensated midwit software engineers aren't goin anywhere.

Basically, I'm implying that there's a line of causation from COVID lockdowns of a few years ago to the economy now failing, and to people's immune systems now failing, etc. Do you think this is a fair response to take?

This is certainly something you could argue, but you have to, you know, actually argue it? Like, why should anyone take this hypothesis seriously unless you present evidence and, ideally, address some likely counter-arguments? For example, if COVID is an issue, why now, and why such a big emphasis on tech? The economy did go through a rocky period, but then seemed to recover; what about the pandemic response, which as far as I can tell has been basically non-existent for almost a year, is impacting the economy now? Some individual tech companies are dealing with specific poor decisions (Metaverse) some of which could be roughly tied to the pandemic/response (Stripe--but even in this case, the mistake seems to have been assuming they would keep their pandemic-related growth up after the pandemic ended), but what this has to do with the rest of the economy isn't clear yet.

Similarly, regularly recurring viruses like flu already vary in intensity from year to year. Is the difference between now and 2019 within normal variation? And what side effects could there have been? I assume your hypothesis here is something like "people's immune systems were weakened against flu because most people avoided exposure during lockdowns. But A) we might have driven 1 strain extinct and B) this hypothesis might mean that extra cases this year are just cases from last flu season that have been delayed (see also https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/diseasonality).

Intuitively, it would appear to me that in the hierarchy of needs, a large chunk of the tech sector essentially falls into the highest bucket - entertainment, self realization and pursuit of curiosity. I would imagine that, as an economy suffers stress, we would see industries failing in a top-down manner, where the most abstract industries that are the furthest removed from immediate basic needs feel the burn first.

Is there any prior art establishing whether or not big tech is such an industry?

I don't know, but it seems relatively easy to search for. Maybe ask on /r/badeconomics. However, while a lot of what tech companies produce is not a necessity, it also has low marginal cost. Many websites, like facebook, reddit, twitter, etc. are free to use. More active entertainment like spotify, hulu, netflix, Steam, Blizzard games, etc. are also either free to play or require a cheap monthly subscription. If you're unemployed, they're probably substantially cheaper per hour than going to a sports bar, movie theater, etc. Especially if you have lots of free time, you're going to be looking for low-cost ways to kill time. What will happen is that companies dependent on advertising will see a drop in revenue, but in terms of magnitude it should resemble the rest of the economy and in terms of timing it will depend on whether their advertisers see the recession coming or not.

It’s because you are taking so much of it for so granted that the only tech products you realise are the ones explicitly providing entertainment to you. What was the last time you looked at, say a water bottle and thought about the CAD software used to design it, embedded and PLC softwares running on the production machines, ERP systems used by companies producing and distributing it, navigation and tracking systems on board the ship bringing it from China, messaging apps used to communicate between manufacturers and importers, payment systems etc etc.

When people talk about big tech failing my first thoughts are Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and Apple. Not exactly companies designing industrial manufacturing / CAD software.

Just looking at your list:

Google has so many crucial infrastructure products that it is difficult to imagine a modern company without it. Gmail, Maps, Drive, Docs, Meet, Translate, Search, Android, Ads, Analytics are just the ones that almost any business will be using daily.

Amazon is essentially a logistics company with a large tech arm. AWS is also the single most important piece of web infrastructure at this point and drives most of Amazon's profits.

Apple's products are not "crucial" for businesses, but there is a reason iPhones and MacBooks are preferred so often as company devices by places that can afford them. They are amazing for design/development/regular office work.

Facebook itself is probably not that important but they own WhatsApp and outside of the US WhatsApp is what people think when you talk about sending a message. I have witnessed the workings of a food import business between China and Peru for example and almost entire business dealings happened through WhatsApp with Google Translated English.

Netflix.. yeah okay. But it has barely 10k employees so it is more on the same league as Twitter.

To be honest, I'm shocked at how little C19 changed the world.

In March-April 2020, if you asked me, I thought that the gym and movie theater industries would be dead, the restaurant and bar industry permanently crippled, retail permanently shifted online, New York city as I've known it since Bloomberg would see rents crater and yuppies flee to be replaced by something lower rent and very new and different, a postmodern Warriors. I thought forcing people to abandon their habits of going out for three months would change those habits, that people with new home gyms would cancel gym memberships; that once people stopped going out to bars they wouldn't start up again.

Virtually none of that has come true. Gyms and restaurants are crowded, movie theaters are continuing a more or less orderly retreat along the same lines as 2019, there are more and better bars around me than there were in 2019, and NYC hums right along. Violence and crime is up a little in NYC, but not enough to change the basic makeup of the city, which is what I saw coming.

Even weirder, responses to COVID seem to be irrelevant, no one cares what you did or thought at the time. China has neither gained significant prestige by not having 1mm+ citizens die, nor lost it locking down in perpetuity. Neither has the USA suffered as a result of a Megadeth among its citizens, and Russia's and the EUs wounds seem unrelated. Desantis and Trump took very different responses in 2020, it seems to be a non issue in their upcoming showdown. Despite it being this earth shattering event ne plus ultra, it's irrelevant.

Put another way, the news in January 2023 seems like it would be more legible to someone who fell asleep in August 2019 than the news from summer 2020 would have been to our short term rip van winkle.

the restaurant and bar industry permanently crippled

I mean, I'm seeing severely curtailed restaurant and bar hours by me still. Nothing's open until the legally mandated closing time anymore.

I think we're all experiencing the effects of a bottleneck on restaurants/bars. Things (obviously) started with a pre-covid supply and demand of restaurants/bars at some equilibrium, and then Covid started and the demand fell through the floor when lockdowns prevented customers going to restaurants. No customers caused the establishments already on the brink of financial trouble to collapse, the number of bars/restaurants open after Covid decreased. If there's the same amount of market demand (or even higher) than there was pre-pandemic, all of the restaurants/bars will be packed with customers, but because there's fewer restaurants open, the market found its equilibrium just at a higher price point.

I think there's been some cultural impacts. Weirdly dating culture essentially getting shepherded onto the apps has proven stickier than people'd expect, but yeah as a whole the whole thing's been a bit of a nothingburger. Probably pointing towards it being hysteria.

Even a mass elderly die-off likely'd have been shrugged off after a year or two, in the hypothetical worst case scenarios.

How Colleges and Sports-Betting Companies ‘Caesarized’ Campus Life

The online gambling deals have helped athletic departments recoup some of the revenue they lost during the pandemic. The partnerships bring in extra funds that schools can use to sign marquee coaches and build winning sports teams. Mr. Haller, Michigan State’s athletic director, said in a news release at the time of the Caesars deal that it would provide “significant resources to support the growing needs of each of our varsity programs.”

The partnerships raise questions, however, about whether promoting gambling on campus — especially to people who are at an age when they are vulnerable to developing gambling disorders — fits the mission of higher education.

Some aspects of the deals also appear to violate the gambling industry’s own rules against marketing to underage people. The “Responsible Marketing Code” published by the American Gaming Association, the umbrella group for the industry, says sports betting should not be advertised on college campuses.

promoting gambling to 18 year olds is the latest way in which college sports are distorting the goal of college. at uc boulder, the school gets $30 every time someone downloads an app and makes a bet. the faculty managed to ensure that this money went to the right causes, though:

“We came up with the idea that the money from the referral bonus could actually go toward diversity and inclusion and equity efforts at the university, in particular because a lot of the money in athletics are made from underrepresented minorities,” Mr. Hornstein said. A spokesman for the university’s chancellor, Philip DiStefano, confirmed that some of the money will be used to expand mental health and diversity initiatives.

I recently had to take a road trip to Oklahoma. I live in one of the strictest states in the country for pot; Oklahoma has extremely loose regs on medical marijuana.

Now, I should say up front- I don’t care about people smoking pot on their couch, but I want nothing to do with it, don’t like it or want to be around it or even be reminded overmuch it exists, but you do you.

And, well, seeing the billboards for medical marijuana(prescription guaranteed!) or obviously non medical marijuana for prescription holders made me rethink my ‘this stuff should be legal so we can tax it and spend the money on roads instead of having the black market spend it on murdering children in Mexico’. Strip clubs are now the only Vice that’s allowed to be a Vice in dark corners; you have to drag everything else out into the public view and make us aware of it. And all this in rural Oklahoma.

It’s funny, because the OK government used to be soooooo upset about marijuana that it kept suing Colorado. Pay no mind to the enormous casino next to the Red River; it’s Chickasaw, so it’s fine. Random pop-up gambling at gas stations, they’re cool too. But keep that devil’s lettuce out of here.

At least opioid abuse is still impolite.

I've actually found sort of the opposite to be true. I'm a mountain biker, and a paddler, and a skier, and in the outdoor community here in Western PA (where even medical only became legal fairly recently) marijuana use is pretty rampant. I've been going to Colorado semi-regularly since 2019, though, and while it's fully legal there, there's a lot less evidence of it. You occasionally see dispensaries, but in mingling with all sorts of skiers and MTBers the subject only came up once, and that was when I hooked up with a girl who said she couldn't smoke weed because she was in the Navy and did shrooms instead. Other than that the main vice I noticed was craft beer, in that on mountaintops and overlooks and cool spots in the woods that would be smoke spots in PA were just guys drinking beer.

Think the problem is that 'social barriers' are now permeable enough that one can't accept something without, in effect, tacitly approving that it become ubiquitous.

You can pretty much ONLY have either a blanket ban, heavily enforced, or ads everywhere and run into it constantly on the streets.

I'm overstating it, but yeah, once something crosses the barrier into social 'acceptability' it tends to jump to straight-up social approval. I contemplate this a lot.

It can go the other way, see tobacco cigarettes.

Hm. Now I’ve got to give that some thought.

My knee jerk reaction is—surely it’s been this way since the 80s, at least. But pre color TV? Pre radio? Perhaps not.

I don’t think atomic communitarianism would be possible without modern+ technology, but that is also the most powerful universalizing force. One can more easily tolerate what one can’t see...

That's basically what I'm saying. Vegas used to be just some place you could go to gamble, then leave and come back home and never be faced with a slot machine or card table. Oh they'd try to convince you to come back, but "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" was actually a mostly true slogan.

So there was a solid separation between real life ('normal') and the fantasy life that Vegas promised.

Now, Vegas will pretty much come to you, where-ever you are.

I don't know if that's necessarily the case. In Pennsylvania, at least, the social acceptability of gambling far preceded it's legality. In the early 2000s the campaign to legalize gambling was largely predicated on the fact that the casinos in West Virginia were full of PA residents, as evidenced by the number of PA plates in the parking lots. From there it was a long, gradual slide as states tried to outdo each other. First it was going to be limited to slots but WV legalized table games ahead of PA's approval so PA had to go ahead and add table games. They were supposed to limit licenses to one per region (with special rules for racetracks) to prevent it from becoming like WV where there are "hotspots" all over the place. Then these rules were gradually relaxed to allow more smaller casinos, and small game of chance licenses for bars. It's still not as bad as WV, but with online gaming and the emergence of sports books it's hard to tell PA from any other state that allows gambling and isn't Nevada.

I don’t know that that’s actually true. Strip clubs, for example, are not particularly socially approved despite being common enough and not ultrastigmatized.

Give it another twenty years. Stripping is already portrayed as female empowerment in the media, falling under the umbrella of sex work, which is gradually shifting into mainstream acceptability.

Are you confusing stripping with pole dancing? I'd like to see evidence that it's the former and not just the latter, which has caught on as its own hobby/psuedo-sport that is largely divorced from the sex-work context.

I don't have much to add here except to say that this has been a very shocking/amusing development. I use instagram, and the amount of my female friends who just casually post pole dancing videos in revealing underwear is completely weirding me out. I'm not complaining of course, I'm simply bewildered. Just a few years ago I would find it unthinkable.

And the 9s/10s that get into modeling also appear to have this culture of getting naked at every opportunity. Not with a pornographic intent, it's always 'artistic' to some extent.

Nah, drugs are always worse because of the other negative externalities aside from emptying your pocketbook.

I do hate that nothing is culturally taboo anymore. Everything has to be either explicitly codified by law or impossible to criticize. Anarcho-tyranny is the inevitable consequence of soft barriers being removed. Everything will be illegal, nothing will be equally enforced.

I do hate that nothing is culturally taboo anymore

Uhh, there are certain ideas that if stated in public will still get you pilloried, but are not directly punished by law.

I do think we've gone too far in the direction of preventing people from restricting the types of persons and businesses and behaviors they tolerate in their local area.

That is, I think a given township should be allowed to pass laws that prevent strip clubs, gay bars, abortion clinics, and/or marijuana dispensaries from operating openly in their jurisdictions. And the only justification they should need is "we find such things unhealthy and corrosive to social fabric and would prefer not to live near them."

But that statement I just made might be one of those taboo ideas that would cause outrage merely for speaking it in certain people's earshot.

I am honestly amazed with how quickly the 'vice' of gambling has seemingly become accepted as a mainstream practice with virtually no pushback from the either main political party, even the one that would presumably see gambling as exploitation of vulnerable populations (I'll let you decide which one that is!).

Seems like for the longest time sports betting was this shady thing you could only do via bookies in Vegas, then seemingly overnight there were DraftKings ads EVERYWHERE.

I'd add on to that all the hype around the Powerball and Poker championships these days.

Oh, add in that Gambling sponsorships and livestreams were becoming so ubiquitous that Twitch had to ban them. Fucking KIDS being advertised at here.

Can't forget that the EU is trying to reign in video game lootboxes, which also have become insanely common. Again. Kids.

ESPECIALLY when you put all this against the backdrop of the Crypto market being called out as just one big complicated casino.

Well, guys, if you're absolutely fine with college students taking on debt to bet on sports teams, you really can't complain if they're taking on debt to bet on magic internet dollars with Shiba Inus or fancy jpegs of apathetic monkeys. The complaint really seems to be that you're not getting a cut of the action.

And, finally, you've got the CFTC refusing to approve prediction markets for elections, for completely opaque reasons. Plenty of approved markets for literal natural disasters but something as important as an election vote count? NOPE.

All in all, a very confusing environment regarding what is gambling and what isn't gambling, and which types of gambling are legitimate and accepted and which are, I guess, sneered at and relegated to seedier venues.

There's been Powerball hype when the jackpot got big for ages, I remember it back in the 90s. So I wouldn't read too much into that one at least. But overall I think your point is reasonable.

You are correct, on the other hand, the jackpots keep growing in size.

https://www.lottoexposed.com/jackpots-graph-lottery-widget/

Because it became easy to do. If your phone dispensed cocaine we'd probably see a lot more addiction to that as well.

If your phone dispensed cocaine we'd probably see a lot more addiction to that as well.

Uh, how do you think most people buy cocaine these days? Carrier pigeon?

Surely AI would never lie to me!

"Siri, please call an Uber, I need a getaway driver."

The comment about raiding drug dealers sounding really fun reminds me of how Yes Man described everything in Fallout New Vegas.

In the sense you can use your smartphone to buy cocaine from someone else, yes, but you still need that someone else - you can gamble directly on your smartphone. Buying cocaine has gotten easier but everything has gotten easier. What matters is that some things have gotten easier than others. Going to the cinema is easier - but relative to watching movies at home, it has gotten harder. Getting an airline ticket to go to Las Vegas has gotten easier - but relative to playing the monkey jpg and dog coin market, it has gotten harder.

Yes, the length of the feedback loop is incredibly relevant.

But just like being able to order 100 different varieties of fast food for delivery via your phone probably makes it harder to resist and contributes to obesity, the fact that you don't have to head down to a crappy part of town and exchange cash in a back alley is likely making drug addictions easier to feed.

So yes, 'because it became easy to do,' but that's the rub. There is literally NO behavior, vice or not, that is not easier to indulge now. If you live in the West, that is.

Right, but there are 24 hours in the day. You cannot increase all behaviors - if people are spending more time gambling, they're spending less time doing something else.

I assure you it is possible to consume drugs, gamble. And spend copious amounts of money all at the same time.

Last time I went to the casinos they has attendants who you could pay to give you massage while you played.

So yes, 'because it became easy to do,' but that's the rub. There is literally NO behavior, vice or not, that is not easier to indulge now. If you live in the West, that is.

Violence is the vice we have lost. A hundred and fifty years ago, a man with my resources would have had no problem seeing a public execution live at home or abroad. I don't think I could now without getting deep into weird travel destinations.

In my dad's generation, if I went out to a bar I would have no problem getting into a fistfight, and while it would have been distasteful for a man in my position to get into a bar fight, it would not have been seen as disqualifying. I wouldn't lose my licenses, no one would say I was per-se a bad person, etc. Today, someone would probably tell my wife to leave because I'm a "violent man." I might go to jail, the mutual combat exception has been gutted.

I guess the counter would be something like violent video games or violent movies, but I don't think fighting digitally is quite the same vibe.

a man with my resources would have had no problem seeing a public execution live at home or abroad. I don't think I could now without getting deep into weird travel destinations.

/r/narcofootage has some absolutely gruesome stuff out of Mexico every so often.

It would be terribly ill-advised, but if you were willing to travel down there you might be able to arrange something.

https://reynolds-news.com/2020/10/04/executed-via-guillotine-an-eye-witness-account/

In the 19th century a good bourgeois could spend a spring afternoon going to see a guillotine execution, then go on with his tour of France. He could tell all his friends about it at home, the way I might describe an art exhibition or a religious ceremony I witnessed abroad, a curiosity.

Today I'd have to go try to make contact with a cartel, somehow, without myself inevitably getting scammed or murdered, and if I ever mentioned it to anyone at home it would disqualify me as a normal bourgeois.

Much like the op comment talked about how sports gambling went from "knowing a shady bookey at a bar down by the river, never mention it in polite society" to "I use the draftkings app on my phone with my wife, and own their stock." Watching a live execution has gone the other way entirely.

sports betting

To be fair, i don't think betting should be considered gambling at all.

The outcomes are not random. You can predict them if your model is good enough. It is playing with money but the core sentiment among is practitioners is either putting their money where their mouth is or trying to come up with the best model for something with an artificial risk/reward mechanism. With your eyes squinted enough you can make the case that trading certain financial contracts are no different.

Basically I do think there is some overlap in the demographic that pours their life savings down the roulette table and those who bet it all on a team. But that overlap is small.

Anything is gambling if your model is poor enough.

And entities like DraftKings are only profitable if people's models are poor enough that they'll take some illl-advised bets.

The only thing that really separates casino games from financial markets are the fact that casinos control the rules so the house always wins whilst in the financial markets in theory this isn't the case.

Which does make the financial markets even wilder than casinos since in the casino you (probably) won't see the roulette wheel spontaneously explode and kill like six people, and the games aren't tied together in such a way that the entire system melts down if one game is compromised.

Does the book actually risk much in a typical sports betting operation? I thought the whole point of floating odds prior to the event was to make as much of the betting effectively pari mutual as possible. If the house always wins because they get 10% of the bet, that's a lot more like the position the exchanges take in financial markets.

Parimutuel only really gets used for horses these days, and even that's being eroded as fixed odds gets switched on. I've worked in the industry for a variety of different operators, in different roles, and generally the book's bankroll is so absurdly deep compared to the individual bettor that there's no significant sweats on day-to-day betting.

There's been some cases such as Mayweather-McGregor where there was an infinite supply of McGregor bets at large prices where a hypothetical win would have been very bad for the industry, but that's atypical. Trump-Biden was also another one of those down here in Australia where books had a sufficient potential liability on Trump they were literally encouraging arbitrage.

books had a sufficient potential liability on Trump they were literally encouraging arbitrage

What does "encouraging arbitrage" mean here?

I assume that means "scoop up the other bet for stupid cheap and potentially get a stupid-high return," but I'm only more familiar with the typical economics definition of "arbitrage."

I'm not even familiar with that. Only know it in terms of settlements, e.g. company v. union under third party (the arbiter). Guessing it's "price arbitrage" meaning profiting off price discrepancies. But not sure how it relates to betting under the circumstances OP described, maybe it's the same thing.

Certain operators had a 8-figure liability on Trump so they pushed their price on Biden high enough that users could lock-in a small guaranteed profit by betting Biden with them and Trump on competitors.

Eh.

You're assuming a fair marketplace. Bookies happily throw out/massively cut the betsizes of anybody who's even somewhat likely to win, and unless you're just rorting promos (which is actually pretty easy and free money as long as they last), sports betting markets are pretty damned efficient.

In a perfect world where bookies had to take 'sharp' action, I think this'd be a fairer take, but then again sharp action is so rare that most people aren't even cognizant that limiting is a thing.

ESPECIALLY when you put all this against the backdrop of the Crypto market being called out as just one big complicated casino.

Bring evidence in proportion to the inflammatory nature of your comments. crypto contains multitudes.

Gambling for children is the new frontier.

With much of the gambling market having sat at relative stagnation compared to the explosion of other recreational markets through various internet activity, we are finally seeing a proper proliferation of gambling. From kids buying lootboxes through ingame apps, which sits at a similar place as kids buying Pokemon cards. Which, differing from Pokemon cards, devolves into straight up gambling through third party websites. Where there is no definitional difference between third party websites that facilitate the gambling of various video game tokens and actual online slot casinos that accept direct money deposits. You have an entire arc where you can go from child to adult and develop a compulsive gambling addiction.

This is then compounded through video game streaming culture where people are gambling away 'fake' money to promote gambling facilities. Where, through affiliations with streaming sites and gambling sites, they receive money from every aspect of their activity. Be that persons who watch and give money to the stream, or kickbacks from the gambling website for each person that signs up through their affiliate link. The fakeness of the endeavor then reaches glorious heights when sometimes the streamer owns a part in the gambling website they are gambling on and receive better odds at winning. Giving them a perfect opportunity to advertise just have much fun 'can' be had. Outside of that there is also always the incentive for the streamers and gambling facility owners to do dealings under the table.

This isn't some dark corner of the internet, or some little known website run out of Malta where you can play online versions of slot machines at a slightly higher RTP. These are the biggest mainstream titles in one of the biggest entertainment industries in the world. These are made to be addictive to children. Specifically engineered by our fine class of programmers and designers to get them to spend money. To get them hooked on gambling.

I mean, could you imagine, when you were a kid, your parents buying you a toy that came equipped with a functional slot machine? Where you could take a 20 dollar bill, put it into the machine, and potentially receive a new toy? What if, instead of being saddled with the reality of having to make a new toy, the company that owns the toy can just print out a card that you want? But that still costs some money. What if the company can just conjure up a pixel that it displays on a screen? Completely divorced from the burdens of traditional money based gambling, these fantastic designers, psychologists and programmers can create a gambling environment where the only worry is how to most effectively direct children and teenagers into a cycle of gambling addiction.

I mean, could you imagine, when you were a kid, your parents buying you a toy that came equipped with a functional slot machine?

Yes, except they never used REAL money.

I had a little handheld Yachtzee game that was really fun to play, but it wasn't hooked up to the internet (which was in it's infancy) and thus it couldn't take credit card info or cryptocurrency.

Oh, one Christmas we got a gift that was a just, in fact, a toy slot machine.. Ages 8 and up! Seriously!

Also, video game arcades had plenty of games that were vaguely disguised gambling machines.

Chuck-E-Cheese was just a mini-Vegas for children, in that respect.

Oh Lord, Pokemon Cards. Spend money on a sealed pack of printed paper, but MAYBE one of them would have some shiny foil on it! Same concept.

Where you could take a 20 dollar bill, put it into the machine, and potentially receive a new toy?

Claw machines, basically. Though they usually robbed you one quarter at a time.

I guess we had different experiences growing up. My mom and dad were very adamant that all of this arcade nonsense was just to steal your money and would never give me any if I asked to go play the machines.

Other than that, I don't follow your point.

I'm saying gambling has been a common thing for a while, but both tech and social permissiveness is leading to it being integrated almost everywhere and it can take your money in large amounts now.

Chuck-E-Cheese had been largely games of skill, rather than games of chance.

I was at a Chuck-E-Cheese last month for a children's party, it was still mostly games of skill though there was prize wheel, every spot 'won' something.

You alluded to this in your last paragraph, but I want to stress that Gacha games have penetrated the Western market and are here to stay barring legislative changes. If you aren't familiar with the term, it refers to a type of game that requires players to roll some kind of slot machine to unlock items or characters that they use to play the game. The games are almost always free and allow progression with ingame currency that can be unlocked with time, but the credit card allows for much faster progression and the games are designed to get you to pay. This is often done by throttling progression once a player has invested time but not money. Some games are "better" than others with regards to this, but playing them is on some level adversarial as the developers wage psychological warfare against you in an attempt to get more of your money.

The main incentive to spend money is to unlock new characters. Many Gachas are built off existing IPs with lots of characters and a built-in fanbase, like Fire Emblem or Fate. Newer characters are typically mechanically better to encourage a treadmill of spending and unlocking, but I would say power is probably only half the reason people will try to whale (Gacha term for spending a lot of money) for a character. A large part of the draw is feeding on the emotional attachment a player has to a specific character, whether through waifuism or some other draw. This is also the reason so much Gacha art is highly sexualized.

If you haven't heard of Genshin Impact, it is a Chinese Gacha game with stunningly gorgeous visuals, music, and character designs. To say it is huge is an understatement. It has generated almost 4 billion in revenue on mobile platforms alone since its release in late 2020 — keep in mind this is not including numbers for Playstation or PC. Beyond the money, it's hard to overstate how big this game is right now. It boasts about 60 million+ active monthly players, and the player demographics are also not what one might immediately assume for the genre. In the West, 45% of the players are women, and many of them are young.

Anecdotally, at the last few conventions I've attended, I would say about half the teens and 20-somethings were dressed up as characters from the game, with the next-most popular IP being Demon Slayer. Trends come and go obviously; 10 years ago those same people would be painting their skin gray and wearing orange horns. But it's worth mentioning to illustrate the game's relevance. It's probably China's first true cultural export in the modern age. It also puts to shame the deliberate ugliness in many of our local cultural products.

It's worth talking about Genshin because the game is both an outlier and a portent of things to come. The Gacha genre has a (deserved) reputation for being cheap, tacky cash-ins of existing IPs with little artistic vision or compelling gameplay. Genshin Impact is none of those things. It is clearly a labor of love and has inspired huge swaths of people to get into its story and world, create art and fanworks, and dress up as the characters. In terms of artistic vision, it really puts most of the Western AAA scene to shame. And other companies will be taking notes.

The format is here to stay, and you will see more of the design principles exported to more Western games, whose developers are hungry for new ways to monetize. The Western AAA market has been aggressively pushing monetization for years in the form of money-based upgrades, cosmetic lootboxes,and season passes (the current dominant scheme). Why let your customer pay $60 once if you're going to go through the trouble of developing a game? Why do that when you can make so much more money? The troubled release of Cyberpunk 2077 was likely the last gasp of the old ways for AAA. Games as a live service and money-based progression are here to stay.

So it goes. It's a shame that a game like Genshin Impact can seemingly only be made nowadays using these monetization practices. I have a disposition towards addiction, and my way of managing it is to not allow predatory temptations to enter my environment. Having to treat an increasing number of video games the way I treat alcohol is certainly interesting. There's an argument that modern development costs are so high that you need to fund games this way, but I don't see how that sausage is made so I can only speculate whether this is true or not. For games with ultramodern graphics, this may be the case, but if you're willing to look past that, the AA and Indie game scene is much less myopic. Our local Rimworld dev-turned fearless leader can attest to this.

A large part of the draw is feeding on the emotional attachment a player has to a specific character, whether through waifuism or some other draw. This is also the reason so much Gacha art is highly sexualized.

This is where these things actually start to scare me, as they're combining multiple pleasurable stimuli into a reward and using intermittent reinforcement to leverage whatever particular addictive tendency the user has to get them to keep playing and spending money. You like cute girls? You like huge breasts? You like emotional vulnerability? Or just like to see number go up? We guarantee there's a superstimulus tailored for YOU in here!

If they were able to occasionally dispense a sweet, tasty snack as a reward then they'd be about one step shy of just having a button that directly releases dopamine in the subject's brain.

Now...

Add in the capability to use AI to generate infinite lewd/sexualized images specified to the individual user's tastes.

Yep. That's why the only winning move is to not play, IMO. Willpower is a finite resource, while entire industries of highly-paid optimizers are working full-time to break it with their products. Limiting your vectors of exposure is the best way to live a life free of negative drains, but this is becoming increasingly difficult as more and more things become gamified services. This involves more than just Gacha, but that industry is where it's really easy to see the psychological tricks laid bare.

That's why the only winning move is to not play, IMO. Limiting your vectors of exposure is the best way to live a life free of negative drains.

This is the solution I'm adopting, to be sure. There's a huge 'Camels Nose in the Tent' element, however.

This really slammed home for me approximately 1 year ago when I went and played Blackjack at a casino for the first time.

I was 'smart' in that I placed a hard limit on the amount of money I was willing to bet, total, and when I won that amount I immediately 'banked' it so I couldn't actually lose money anymore. Of course, they have ATMs INSIDE the Casino so you don't have to be limited to merely the cash on hand.

At one point I was up, I think, by like $5,000. I ended the session up by about $400.

And for weeks afterwards I couldn't completely shake the desire to go back and keep playing. Thankfully it would have been a couple hours drive and so it wasn't something I could just easily do on a whim.

But holy cow just a couple hours of play gave me such a rush that I was still thinking about it weeks after the fact. Something I had never actually done for the vast majority of my life. I don't even think losing my virginity had that kind of mental staying power.

Yeah, we live in a world where everything is attempting to exploit your psychology and the proliferation of convenient ways to spend money means there's virtually no friction to slow your descent into any particular hole of addiction.

I could wax/rant on the topic of how easy it is to put money INTO various systems but the said systems are very reluctant to send money back, but on the topic of gambling in particular I think we're going down a very, very dangerous path if we don't erect more serious barriers to entry. I don't know how to achieve that, however.

The phenomenon you're describing is basically just Beginner's Luck. As ridiculous as it sounds, Beginners Luck is real. Think about it—say you've never gambled before but go to the casino when one of your friends suggests it would make a fun night out. And say you spend the entire evening slowly losing $400. You're probably going to think that gambling is the stupidest thing on earth and the next time your friends want to hang out you'll probably suggest going bowling instead. This isn't to say you're never going to gamble again, but since your first experience with it was a hard slap in the face you're probably going to be more circumspect about the whole enterprise. Now suppose on the other hand that your first experience is similar to the one you described. Now gambling seems like an easy, thrilling way to make money. Sure, you eventually lost a ton, but you know what it's like to be up 5 grand and that it's possible, in a non-theoretical way, to earn a month's salary in a matter of hours. Now you've got a dragon to chase.

I think we're going down a very, very dangerous path if we don't erect more serious barriers to entry. I don't know how to achieve that, however.

I think a good first step would be limiting gambling to actual casinos or other physical places. I know that for actual degenerate gamblers this probably won't make much of a difference, but there's something particularly scummy about being able to play slot machines any time, anywhere. The closest casino to me is 20–25 minutes away from my house, and if I wanted to gamble I'd at least have to find time to make the drive down there. It seems fundamentally different than being able to just lie in bed and play slots.

Sure, you eventually lost a ton, but you know what it's like to be up 5 grand and that it's possible, in a non-theoretical way, to earn a month's salary in a matter of hours. Now you've got a dragon to chase.

Bingo.

There was a point at which I realized that I was placing bets on individual hands that was larger than the whole amount I had budgeted for playing. And it was fun. Feeling like a relative high roller, fantasizing about winning enough to, well if not quit my job take a really long, fancy vacation. All while knowing on a fundamental level that I'm playing a game where the odds are deliberately stacked against me so that it isn't rational to expect it to happen. On the other hand, there's probably a few versions of me in different timeline branches who got extremely lucky and were quite happy with the outcome.

I should also point out that I took a brief break between sessions, and when I came back to the table, that's when I lost most of my position, just a string of "bad luck" that contrasted strongly to the winning streak I had been on. So yeah, 'beginners luck' would be the right way to categorize that. And everything about the process is designed to make you feel like you're special and the winning will never end.

I think a good first step would be limiting gambling to actual casinos or other physical places.

I agree... but this sounds impossible to enforce without levels of draconian control of the internet that I am far less comfortable with.

The point I've alluded to is how easy/frictionless it is to transfer money into basically any entity these days.

Perhaps a comparable law could be that in order to play any kind of games that get categorized as 'gambling' you have to physically deposit money with the entity running the game. That is, you must withdraw the amount from your account as cash, physically hold it and carry it to a location, and physically hand it over, vs. simply entering an account number or swiping a card.

This would be almost as good as strictly limiting it to physical locations. And then enforcement can take place at the payment processor level, which STILL has concerns over draconian control, but doesn't require direct surveillance of all users.

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Zorba at least had some involvement in Rimworld, no idea to what extent. But he did have an excellent story about the psychology of game design from his work on the game. I wish I had the link, but alas I don't.

This?

Not what I was thinking of, though that is interesting (I don't think I read it before). Basically the story I remember Zorba telling was this:

At one point in the development of Rimworld, sun lamps were on 24h a day despite the fact that plants can't actually grow at night. That annoyed players, who felt it was silly for the game to charge them power around the clock for sun lamps that weren't even having an effect for half the day. But what the players didn't know, is that was a deliberate design decision - sun lamps were intended to suck down power as a cost for how useful it is to be able to grow plants inside a mountain or whatever. So, in the end, they wound up making sun lamps shut off at night but doubled the power cost during the day. Same game result (arguably even more punishing for the player since they needed to have higher peak power), and the players were much happier with it.

Reminds me of the WoW example. In the beginning of world of warcraft there was a system to penalize people who played too often and incentivize logging off. After gaining a certain amount of experience in a session you'd get a 50% experience penalty. Players hated it and rebelled. Blizzard's response was to half player experience but give a "rested" bonus doubling player experience for the a certain amount of a experience. Essentially the same system. Players loved it.

Yeah, that's another great example of the same phenomenon. If memory serves that came up in whatever thread Zorba shared the Rimworld story, as well.

Ah, yeah, that was pretty good. Link is at here.

Yeah, that's the one. Thanks for the link!

45% of Genshin players are women? It's a very pretty game but that's a lot!

Is that why all the men are so feminine? Take Venti, Kaeya or Aether - not exactly pillars of masculinity. Their names don't even sound too manly. Venti is something you'd buy at Starbucks. Most look like they could pass as women. I know China has an artistic preference towards feminine-looking males with long hair in their fantasy scenarios but it's still a bit suspicious. A big part of the male fanbase is enticed by the pretty women - see Genshin's prevalence on danbooru. Maybe the women like the pretty boys?

https://genshin-impact.fandom.com/wiki/Character/List

It's probably China's first true cultural export in the modern age.

I dunno if I'd say that (wouldn't The Three-Body Problem count?); even within just the realm of Chinese gacha games specifically, Girls' Frontline and Arknights came first. Definitely the biggest, though.

Azur Lane was Chinese too, right? Not the most prestigious cultural export, but they conquered the USS Iowa when the Japanese couldn't.

Huh, I thought Kantai Collection (the Japanese ship-girl game) had the biggest claim (or at least the first) to ship-girl-ing the Iowa, but I guess Azur Lane went a step further. But yes, AL also came before.

which sits at a similar place as kids buying Pokemon cards.

Just as a note, as an elder millennial when we actually cared about the cards themselves, we didn't just buy packs - we went to the secondary market at giant nerd swap-meets or online and just got the individual cards we wanted. It was actually a salutary early example on how prices fluctuate with popularity and trend (e.g. card prices could vary wildly week to week based on tournament results and the currently-prevalent game meta) and in balancing cost vs desire.

The existence of the secondary market makes cracking packs more like gambling. You pay $4 for a pack that might have a market value of $1 or $100.

Yes, but insofar as the kids are interested in playing the game, it makes the gambling much less relevant because now you can just go get the card you want.

The part that makes it a bit more like gambling is that you can't just run off photocopies of the cards and just use the ones you want without paying for them. In official tourneys anyway.

I don't see the gambling. Card X now costs $4, and Card Y now costs $5, and Card Z now costs $10. No need to gamble for them at all; you pick the ones you want and buy them in the quantity you want for set prices.

Unless nintendo changed things dramatically with print on demand or something, you can only pick those cards because they're the payout to someone gambling on the purchase price of the packs.

But why are you forced to put money into the Pokémon "ecosystem" at all?

You might see the point in that you can ABSOLUTELY play casino games at home for "free" using play money.

Which isn't, then, real gambling.

If you go to a casino/Pokémon tournament, they force you to play with real chips/cards.

Which reinforces the part of the scheme that makes them money.

Buying singles on the secondary market does allow someone to play the game without gambling themselves. But in order for that secondary market to exist, someone has to gamble. The company only sells packs.

You don't need a secondary market for that. Even if the cards only have collectible or play value, it's still gambling. You pay money for the chance to get what you want.

It's always weird when people excuse gambling schemes targeted at kids by pointing at Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh! booster packs: Those were never okay either.

Gambling for children is the new frontier.

Hardly. Not only have people been gambling forever, but children have been gambling forever. Or at least since Roman times. Moral panics about it are nothing new either.

You might as well say moral panics about pornography are nothing new and point me to some concerned mothers group from 1000 BC worrying about a suggestively shaped rock as if that has anything to do with modern trends of porn consumption and their effects.

I relation to the internet, yes, it is a new frontier. I don't know what you would allow to qualify as being a new frontier but to me the explosion of these markets is very new. Back when I was younger there were two places to gamble, sports betting, which was heavily regulated, and a single state regulated slot machine hall. Needless to say, it was only the most dedicated who managed to rack up large losses. Fast forward to today, I know 4 people personally who have each lost, in total, more than half a years' worth of wages or more through betting tokens for some video game.

Maybe you live in Las Vegas and this is nothing new under the sun for you, but this didn't exist where I live until in recent years.

Also, targeted advertisements and brazen promotion of gambling to minors has been officially condoned by corporations like Valve through official Esports partnerships and API access. It has never been easier to develop a gambling addiction as a child.

I think the point there is about the locus of control; kids throwing dice among one another is one thing, but kids putting in their parents' CC info for Fortnite V-Bucks is another thing entirely.

Forgive student loans so we can give them more loans to gamble on college sports teams so they need a new loan. With sufficiently altruistic accounting, we can feedback loop GDP to infinity, pay ourselves a few trillion (pocket change compared to infinity!) while lecturing the plebes that they only think food and gas cost unpayable abstract numbers because they're bigots.

I want to say this is how Economics 2.0 worked in Accelerando, but I don't think Stross was cynical enough to flesh out the details.

With what?

Twitch streamers are paid on the order of up to 10M/month to stream gambling, apparently - adin ross 40M/month (that's gotta be too high, but the eth transaction is there, so at least 10M/some period), trainwreckstv 360M total (gotta be too high too right?), mizkif offered but declined 10M/year for 15h/month. That money's coming from the viewers, obviously. At least HFT creates liquidity!

I can't believe you didn't mention Trainwreckstv, quite possibly the face of Twitch gambling.

I edited it in before you posted this! All secondhand knowledge from twitter though, idk much about twitch. I tried watching twitch a week ago, try to stay vaguely aware of different popular forms of media, and every stream I clicked on was just idle chatter, whether over a video game or just a video stream, don't get it tbh.

For me, I like to channel-hop and I don't mind coming into something in medias res; if I end up on someone else's page from a raid or something and I'm interested in what they're currently doing, I'll probably stick around and follow. It's the stream after that one where you can see what someone's really about.

I work in the industry and the whole thing is absurd.

Honestly unit economics on actually converting somebody from a non-gambler to a gambler are pretty awful in terms of cost per acquisition versus what a 'fresh' gambler will contribute. Takes a few years to mature.

But unlimited VC funds + not acknowledging a severe Pareto principle + growth metrics being all the rage have led to some very stupid decision making in the space of gambling market. All likely ends in tears, harder regulation and hiked tax rates.

Yeah, makes sense that this is just VC money exploring a possibly new market/trying to establish a dominant position.

Plus, in theory if you get the streamer addicted, you can probably pay them less and less and they'll still play your games on stream.

Plus, in theory if you get the streamer addicted, you can probably pay them less and less and they'll still play your games on stream.

Having negotiated some of these deals, generally they're being paid an absolutely obscene amount of cash but have a minimum turnover requirement/additional payments for hitting certain hourlies.

People being outraged that teams were prevented from wearing the OneLove armbands (to show solidarity with LBGTQ rights amid the backdrop of Qatari views on homosexuality) are ignorant, arrogant, and dogmatic. This is part of what other regions of the world mean when they say the west forces our values onto other people. You don't get to go into another region of the world for a sport as global as soccer and then shit on them for not sharing the same views as you. Not everything needs to be about activism. I don't have the stats, but I have to imagine most people are not in favor of gay marriage in the middle east and, as much as i am in favor of gay marriage, you have to respect that. I mean it wasn't even codified legally in the US until fairly recently. If you want to interact with other countries, you have to accept that they see things differently than you and have different values. This strikes me as being a strong instance of 'i am so open minded that i am close minded'.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-21/european-teams-won-t-wear-pro-lgbt-armbands-at-world-cup?cmpid=BBD112122_MKT

They believe they have the mandate of heaven and that's why they win.

The main issue is that FIFA threatened to penalise this with actual bookings, not just fines as per usual for uniform violations. This — like the last minute U-turn on beer sales — seems like a case of FIFA making additional effort to accommodate local norms. And of course it adds further weight to the claim that the tournament shouldn’t have been awarded in the first place to a country whose cultural standards are at odds with those of the leading footballing nations.

Because let’s be honest here — the Arab world is shit at football, as is most of the world outside of Europe and Latin America (though honourable mentions for some West African teams, the USA, South Korea, and Japan). The only way hundreds of millions of fans are going to tune in to watch Qatar play anyone is under the auspices of a FIFA tournament featuring the big teams, all of whom come from nations where homosexuality is legal and by and large culturally accepted. This makes it all the more baffling to me that FIFA would award the tournament to a country which is shit at football, hot as fuck, corrupt as fuck, and whose cultural norms are so at odds with those of football’s heartland. At least, it would be baffling if FIFA weren’t itself one of the most odious and corrupt sporting bodies in the world.

I seem to remember the Qatar drama centering on laughable amounts of graft. Or maybe it was worker conditions for the infrastructure. There were a lot of reasons people complained before any comments about Current Thing.

The point is that it’s an omnishambles, and Qatar’s unsuitability for the tournament is massively overdetermined. It’s not people grasping at straws, it’s people pointing to yet another fucking thing.

Amen.

Because let’s be honest here — the Arab world is shit at football

They are absolutely not shit at funding football, however, which is also an important consideration. Notwithstanding football's self-perception as a game of poverty, it needs massive amounts of money to exist at the scale and in the way it currently does. The oil sheikhdoms have supplied a truly stonking amount of that money (e.g. Man City, PSG, Newcastle, Aston Villa, Sheffield...plus all the Etihad, Emirates, and Qatar Airways sponsorship deals...et. al.) and as such certainly have a stake in the footballing world, even if its not backed up by their national play on the pitch.

That’s true, but if and when sporting bodies kowtow to whoever has the most money and not to the interests of fans, the big players, and the wider footballing community, then they should expect (and deserve) a backlash.

It's a complicated dance, though! Because the arab countries are fans, and fans who are paying much higher "prices" than just the punters at the gate.

The oil sheikhdoms have supplied a truly stonking amount of that money

I'm pretty sure the vast majority of football fans see this as a massive negative. And would argue that the main impact of all of these oil sheik owners has been major transfer fee and wage inflation. There was more than enough money to go around pre-2010

the Arab world is shit at football,

This didn't age well, see recent match between Saudi Arabia and Argentina (yes, yes, N = 1 and all that, but it's funny)...

People being outraged at people being outraged that teams were prevented from doing whatever may or may not be ignorant, but are certainly arrogant and dogmatic.

Going to a foreign country and making impolite statements is rude. It still shouldn’t be suppressed by third parties.

Qatari Muslims ought to be tough enough to handle a dissenting view without their society crumbling. Understanding that they disagree doesn’t be preclude arguing against them—especially not with a token gesture. The fact that FIFA has bent over backwards at the last minute to stifle their speech suggests that this bit of cultural sensitivity is purely financial.

I'm not a Qatari Muslim, but I think I can take a stab at how they'd reply -

"And here it is - the Americans start with shaming as always, implying it is a lack of fortitude which drives us to enforce our beliefs, when it is in fact our fortitude which compels us to do so. You call it a token gesture now because you want to make it look minor, but you know as well as I that it would chink our armour, provide a small gap in the defence of our culture and society through which your CIA can push American cultural values on our youth - and slowly shape us into another den of sin and degradation the way you have done everywhere that doesn't resist. Those currently scoffing at our suspicion of this 'token gesture' would then sing a different tune, one celebrating how they destroyed our culture in the name of 'love' (read perversity). Fifa caved because we will not be moved on this issue, and we will not be moved on this issue because we will not let our culture disappear into the melange of US cultural imperialism. What happened to the Americans who understood this? I'm sure there used to be some, I think they were called democrats?"

You call it a token gesture now because you want to make it look minor, but you know as well as I that it would chink our armour, provide a small gap in the defence of our culture and society through which your CIA can push American cultural values on our youth - and slowly shape us into another den of sin and degradation

There's literally already a conservative meme about this in America:

[Dreher's] Law of Merited Impossibility, which states: “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.”

Qataris get internet too.

Are you refuting my point or supporting it with an alternative but complimentary point? Because it reads like the former, but I don't know what you are refuting.

Oh, I was agreeing.

Qatari Muslims ought to be tough enough to handle a dissenting view without their society crumbling.

Why? Why get punched in the face to prove you're tough? Why tolerate things you consider degeneracy to prove you're tough?

Proving it to who? Other people you consider degenerates (i.e. liberals)?

Qatari Muslims can look to the West and see the fruits of "let's discuss [what is to them] degeneracy". All those conservatives praising themselves on being willing to have tough discussions...what did that do besides open a crack in the door for endless degeneracy [as they see it]?

Even worse: those very same people who were begging for forbearance then turn around and demand fealty. The French government hounded Idrissa Gueye for merely not playing on a day when they mandated pro-LGBT shirts. Not even saying anti-LGBT stuff - he never gave any reason publicly, he just didn't play on that day twice in the same span of years. Just that alone was enough to cause an uproar.

Look at this from an outside perspective and, not only does this sort of "dissenting view" seem to open the door to plenty of things a median Qatari may not like, even worse, you can't even trust the dissenters to be principled and return the favor when they're on top.

That is the real clincher: one could argue that it is honorable to abandon a false set of beliefs. If you cannot trust that your opponents will not suddenly become intolerant themselves, you have no incentive to be "honorable" because they won't abandon their false beliefs if it came to that. (Insofar as it's obvious that the West doesn't ever concern itself with this possibility, it just highlights the fundamental arrogance and imperialism at the root of this discourse, which can't help make it attractive to Qataris)

Why? Why get punched in the face to prove you're tough

Because a shirt or a slogan isn't getting punched in the face? I can read anarchist and nazi literature without getting bruised, and come away smarter, knowing what deep and powerful truths and severe, evil errors both made (no commentary intended on the relative amounts in either direction)

Obviously the context here is america's military, economic, and cultural power, making it not quite the same as a book, but honestly this particular issue is very minor either way.

Qatari Muslims are very well aware that plenty of people disagree with them. And, frankly, the western fixation with insisting on absolutely everyone everywhere agreeing with them is extremely irritating.

I disagree. If you invite the whole world to your country by voluntarily hosting the World Cup, you should expect the world to show up. If you do not want people in your country who do not conform to the rigid social taboos of your culture, you shouldn't host the World Cup.

Wearing an armband is not shitting on anyone's culture or forcing anything on anyone. Being annoyed when your invited guests wear innocuous armbands that are perfectly fine in their culture is rude.

You could write exactly the same comment about the reverse case, where USA is hosting and the Qatari team wears armbands that say "marriage is between a man and a woman". Would you stand by it?

Yes, that would be totally fine with me. I mean, this is TheMotte, would anyone here want to ban something like that? I'm pro armband freedom for everyone everywhere.

Your comment reminds me of the classic https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/08/the-slate-star-codex-political-spectrum-quiz/

Just checking. I think both cases would be bad. The bands are for the sole purpose of pissing the other guy off.

I'm more in the "no goddamn armbands for anyone, anywhere, except maybe one of your players or famous former player or associated with the club has died so black armband as mark of respect" camp.

That's a... very American way of thinking.

I'm European.

Also, OPs argument seems more American to me. "My house, my rules" and similar mindsets are very American and signals that famous rugged individualism. We in the old country are more graceful hosts IMO.

Like you know how brides bans certain colors for the guest clothes, or makes all their bridesmaids wear the same dress? A very American thing IMO.

I'm European.

So... an American vassal?

What do you think this adds to the conversation? At best, it is vapid and obnoxious; at worst, it is actively antagonistic.

And to be clear--you're certainly free to claim that Europe is essentially a vassal state of the United States, particularly in the context of a discussion about cultural hegemony etc. But you have to actually talk about it! It is not sufficient to function as, essentially, a drive-by peanut gallery, making easy jokes in place of effortful discussion. Don't do this.

Like you know how brides bans certain colors for the guest clothes, or makes all their bridesmaids wear the same dress? A very American thing IMO.

Maybe it's American, but even in America that's frowned upon. The first one at least, the second one is given more leeway. But anyone who tries to tell guests what not to wear to a wedding is in instant bridezilla territory.

It's usually not spoken, but theres a pretty well established ban on non brides wearing white to weddings.

Yeah but the bride also isn't demanding people do that, it's simply the general custom.

This is not, I'm afraid, relevant to Fruck's (accurate) judgement.

In my experience Euro tolerance generally demands a baseline of tolerance and respect for the home culture, but within that anything is ok. But if you wandered in to Holland and went "Lol look at those fucking stupid wooden shoes, have you guys even heard of leather?" or France going "Hon hon hon, where's some slimy creatures I can pop in my mouth?" most people would be upset. Islam - particularly Arabic Islam - has seen homophilia as American imperialism for decades.

Yes, it would be rude for a guests in Qatar to walk around in drag and chant "Are there any men here ready to fuck!?". But that's pretty far from wearing an armband with a rainbow on.

You are going into a country which steadfastly refuses to tolerate homosexuality - which considers tolerance of homosexuality a deliberate attempt to diffuse their culture into western homogeneity - and displaying your contempt and disrespect for their culture on every arm.

A rainbow armband is not an expression of contempt and disrespect for Qatari culture. And once again: If Qatar doesn't want any rainbows anywhere, they can just not host the World Cup. Inviting people and then policing details in their dress is rude.

Why are you pretending you think this is about clothing? That it is simply a multicoloured strip of fabric signifying nothing? Or that your issue is their fashion policing being rude? You aren't stripping away ephemera to get down to the essence of the debate, you are stripping away the essence of the debate so you can get down to the ephemera.

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If you do not want people in your country who do not conform to the rigid social taboos of your culture, you shouldn't host the World Cup.

On the contrary, FIFA - owners of the world cup - disagree with you.

Qatar was always clear about what they want - no gays, jews, beer drinkers or other (to them) degeneracy. They asked FIFA for this and FIFA voluntarily gave it to them. They made the rules to visit them quite clear. So really, if you don't agree with the values of Qatar/FIFA, you shouldn't go to the world cup.

An equivalent might be showing up to a global sporting event in the US - say an NBA game - wearing a "1488 SS :swastika:" armband or the Islamic "death to Jews" equivalent. Or perhaps even something utterly innocuous elsewhere in the world, such as the word "nigger". If America and the NBA invited the world, this should be totally cool, right?

(Note that even this forum considers "1488" to be too horrible to allow. I originally started posting here using the handle "bigdickpepe1488" but was told by the mods that I need to change it, hence my current handle.)

I don't see the contradiction. The Qatari government is bad for expecting their guest to conform to their rigid social norms. FIFA is bad for allowing Qatar to host the World Cup. People should not go to the World Cup. Three true statement, no contradiction.

Is the NBA and the USA bad for expecting their guests to conform to rigid American social norms? Or are you merely appealing to American cultural imperialism, "gays good islam bad"?

The progressives see '1488 SS :swastika:' and 'a gay flag' as different! Just as you might see e.g. a US flag vs a shirt with a photo of black trans porn as different. I wouldn't care about any of those shirts if I saw them, but that's not an opinion anyone else holds.

And Qataris see "gay" rainbows and rainbows with a leprechaun and a pot of gold at the end of them as different. If people wanted to wear an armband with the latter on them I don't think there would have been an issue.

There are several Muslim players in the NBA. don't understand you point. (Also, the NBA is a national affair.)

no gays, jews, beer drinkers or other (to them) degeneracy

FIFA did not agree to this. There were many agreements about allowing alcohol, not persecuting gays or public displays of affection, and accommodating Jews. But once it got close enough to the WC that FIFA would look too stupid cancelling it, Qatar simply reneged on all of their promises.

It’s not too horrible to allow. It’s too much of a drive-by.

Consider a public auditorium which nevertheless bans soliciting. If you want to argue something, you’ll have to put in some effort rather than just broadcasting a slogan.

It’s not too horrible to allow. It’s too much of a drive-by.

And yet the mods don't seem to have much problem with my current handle. It's just as much a drive by, but from the opposite direction.

If you want to argue something,

I don't. I just chose the handle because I was amused by the contrast between bigdickpepe1488 and the actual discussions I'm likely to have here (which you can find if you look up the handle, it wasn't deleted).

And yet the mods don't seem to have much problem with my current handle. It's just as much a drive by, but from the opposite direction.

Actually, it's kind of trollish (yes, we get you're being ironic, hah hah, very droll) and I do have a problem with it, but we're not going to reflexively ban every obnoxious handle unless it passes a threshold that can be very precisely defined as "When we've had enough."

Alright, after some mod discussion, we've decided we're going to ask you to change your nickname. Note that you can do this on the Settings page (kinda near the bottom, weirdly) and don't need to make a new account.

We're already seeing some moderate red flags here, and I'd request that you not pick another trolly/obnoxious name. We can and will ban you if this keeps being an issue, so, seriously, knock it off, yo.

I disagree. If you invite the whole world to your country by voluntarily hosting the World Cup, you should expect the world to show up. If you do not want people in your country who do not conform to the rigid social taboos of your culture, you shouldn't host the World Cup.

Does that apply equally to homophobes?

Do the Western countries that win bids for these competitions support the free expression of homophobes and racists en masse in their country during these events?

Obviously the answer I'm angling for is "no". And there may be good reasons for this (some people may just be right and others may just be wrong)

But you can't exactly frame it as tolerance of "the world" when what are likely the world's majority views are not really supported by other hosts.

The obvious answer is yes? When Germany hosted the World Cup in 2006, it would have been perfectly fine for a Qatari to show up with armbands that say "God made marriage between man and women" or something like that.

Let's not be coy and pretend those armbands are "innocuous". They clearly were meant as a political statement and a huge "fuck you" to the conservative culture of Qatar. Now, I don't really value too much the culture of Qatar, so for me saying "fuck you" to them is all in good fun, but let's not pretend it's not what happened - or what was about to happen, until it turned out the power is not on the side of the activists and they got squashed like bugs.

Simple solution: If you are so quick to offense that you cannot tolerate armbands with rainbows, you shouldn't host the World Cup.

Would you say the same for them not tolerating armbands with swastikas, which after all are an Indian symbol of the day and symbolise good luck (plenty of people have swastikas on the front door of their house in India)?

(And no, the standard swastika in Hinduism isn't the mirror image of the Nazi version, that is the sawvastika which represents nights and symbolises the destructive goddess Kali, hence is pretty rarely used).

Yes. If some Indian person wants to have swastikas on their clothing that's perfectly fine. Like, this is basic liberalism: are you surprised by this answer?

why?, it's in their code of ethics the banning of political stunts and respecting the dignity of host countries. Hosting the worldcup isn't to opening the doors to political activism, it's about foot ball.

14 Duty of neutrality

1.

In dealings with government institutions, national and international

organisations, associations and groupings, persons bound by this Code shall,

in addition to observing the basic rules of art. 13, remain politically neutral, in

accordance with the principles and objectives of FIFA, the confederations,

associations, leagues and clubs, and generally act in a manner compatible with

their function and integrity

22 Discrimination and defamation

1.

Persons bound by this Code shall not offend the dignity or integrity of

a country, private person or group of people through contemptuous,

discriminatory or denigratory words or actions on account of race, skin colour,

ethnicity, nationality, social origin, gender, disability, language, religion,

political opinion or any other opinion, wealth, birth or any other status, sexual

orientation or any other reason.

I can see the argument for why clause 14 is applicable. (But precedent would be nice. Where is the line drawn for what is and isn't a political statement?) Per this clause the players should stop wearing armbands. (The Qatari behavior towards the rainbow-clothed fans is still rude.)

Clause 22 is clearly unrelated: rainbow armbands are not contemptuous, discriminatory or denigratory, nor do they offend the dignity or integrity of anyone.

Clause 22 is clearly unrelated: rainbow armbands are not contemptuous, discriminatory or denigratory, nor do they offend the dignity or integrity of anyone.

Showing with those armbands in a country clearly opposed to what they represent is showing contempt for the customs and culture of the host nation, specially when to do that you have to violate art 14 too.

(But precedent would be nice. Where is the line drawn for what is and isn't a political statement?)

I would assume that anything controversial would fall under this umbrella.

Per this clause the players should stop wearing armbands.

Yeah, it would be nice if sports was just about sports, and not just another stage for the activists to pull their stunts.

I'd agree with that with one condition - if the armband-wearing folks start applying the approach "if you are so quick to offense that you cannot tolerate X, you shouldn't Y" to themselves. Somehow, I doubt they'd agree to do that. With the rainbow-armband squad, it always works only to one side - you should tolerate what we do, but we get to demand that you change your behavior if it offends us. They got hoist on their own petard - because it's all about power. They overestimated their power, that's all there is. I'd like to have the rules where it's not about power, but only for real, not pretend that it's not about power when it's convenient, and then lean into the power when it helps getting their way.

Mashallah. Even ignoring the specifics (yes FIFA sucks balls, and their growing a spine against political meddling in the last few days doesn't counter that) the West needs another few dozen similar bitch slaps across the face to realise that much as they like to say it, their values are not "Universal Human Values That All Good Thinking Persons Should Hold" and that billions of people are very pissed off whenever they try to present them as such.

An example: exacting vengeance is far more of a universal human value than allowing public displays of affection. There is a reason getting your revenge on those who have wronged you feels so sweet biologically (I recommend people try it sometime if they've never done it before, it's a fundamental human emotion no different to love, euphoria and the sense of fellowship with your bretheren).

And yet because of Christianity (with it's "vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord") the former is seen by Westerners as bad while because of Protestant Christianity (with it's there is no central authority, you have to decide for yourself if things are good attitude which gave rise to modern Progressivism) the second is seen as being completely fine...

Mashallah. Even ignoring the specifics (yes FIFA sucks balls, and their growing a spine against political meddling in the last few days doesn't counter that) the West needs another few dozen similar bitch slaps across the face to realise that much as they like to say it, their values are not "Universal Human Values That All Good Thinking Persons Should Hold" and that billions of people are very pissed off whenever they try to present them as such.

Oh, my sweet summer child! If this was true, I'd instantly convert to Islam, but I'm afraid the "global governance" ghouls will get their way. My country used to be (well, still is) often portrayed as a primitive backwater, but I recently discovered our Zoomers are more or less in lockstep with their Western counterparts. My bets are it will happen to you too.

Similar experience on my side. I'm from the backwaters as well and the zoomers are much more similar to zoomers in the west than even millenials in their own country.

Is it really growing a spine to do something if-and-only-if your wealthy benefactors express disapproval? This is just folding to the other side of political pressure. I would bet dollars to donuts FIFA will be back to slaps on the wrist once the Cup is in a Western country.

Yup. They'll happily bully Hungary again, or whatever.

The hypocrisy of it all kind of makes the outrage justified, no matter which side of the issue you are on.

my values enforced > your values enforced equally > your values enforced unequally

What if they said no wearing any crosses or anything else indicating religious beliefs? What if they were in China, which I have no doubt would prohibit any pro-Uyghur or pro-Tibet sentiments? What if they were in Russia (assuming Russia ever gets to hold a world event again) which I am sure would prohibit Ukrainian flag armbands?

I agree that we cannot enforce our values on other countries, but fuck countries that host world events and then tell the people of the world what they're allowed to say while there.

Have you seen the ridiculous speech Infantino gave? Apparently he knows what it is like to be a gay disabled migrant worker because he's a ginger (or was, when he still had hair) and was bullied for it as a kid.

It's no secret FIFA is corrupt to the marrow of its bones and cares only about money, and the only reason Qatar got to host the World Cup was that it out-bribed everyone else. I think the PR campaigns about kick racism out of football and LGBT+ rights and BLM kneeling and rainbow laces and all the rest of it is simply performative virtue signalling, and if a Muslim player doesn't want to wear a rainbow jersey for his club match then his rights should be respected too, but this is just pulling away even the fig leaf that FIFA cares. As pointed out, they'd happily bully a Western country about not having a Pride flag waving in every stadium, but Qatar can get away with human rights abuses because money money money.

I do think that Qatar does have the right to say "our country, our rules, no rainbow flags in the stadium" but it's not like FIFA have any actual principles about any of this, and the clubs/teams from Western countries are doing as much PR signalling as they are genuinely caring about the topic.

What if they said no wearing any crosses or anything else indicating religious beliefs?

Then the French government would happily back them up, because laïcité. The most recent fights around this have involved Islam, but it started off applied to Catholicism.

And I'm sure you could find people in America who would enthuse about rainbow flags in the classroom if a teacher wanted to put one up, but would be equally adamant about "no way" if a teacher wanted to wear a visible cross.

I don't GAF about FIFA or the World Cup, honestly, and I know 90% of the LGBT+ stuff is virtue-signaling. I don't expect any integrity from sports organizations, but it's not wrong to call them (and Qatar) out on it.

I am unswayed by the argument that we should respect Qatar culture and their right to exercise their sovereignty over what visiting soccer players wear. I don't think anyone outside Qatar actually cares about these things. But I tire of the pettiness of defending literally anyone and anything just so long as what's being defended is that they're pissing off your outgroup.

You say that as if the only reason anyone is attacking isn't that someone pissed on their ingroup.

Apparently he knows what it is like to be a gay disabled migrant worker because he's a ginger (or was, when he still had hair) and was bullied for it as a kid.

Bullying is serious enough that this is not absurd (aside from the absurdity of being disabled and a migrant worker at the same time; migrant worker jobs are not generally ones that can be done by disabled people.)

I agree that we cannot enforce our values on other countries, but fuck countries that host world events and then tell the people of the world what they're allowed to say while there.

Do you think Holocaust denial laws paused in Germany during the World Cup?

Do you think Holocaust denial laws paused in Germany during the World Cup?

No, but I'd be very surprised to learn that athletes have been wearing Holocaust denial armbands elsewhere.

Presumably, this would be against the FIFA's own rules (just as I'm sure most professional sporting leagues would not allow an athlete to wear a swastika).

Well, now wearing a "love" armband is against FIFA's rules.

I'm sorry, this just seems like a side-step: if someone were to do it, Germany would enforce its norms regardless of cosmopolitanism and "welcoming the world". And, if necessary, they would prevail on FIFA or some other body to help.

Well, now wearing a "love" armband is against FIFA's rules.

Did FIFA actually make it against the rules everywhere, or only for the World Cup in Qatar?

Your gotcha is not clever because you're well aware of the material differences. No one is claiming universal free speech is an entitlement to everyone everywhere or that countries can't impose their own laws on visitors. For example, Qatar also has rules against immodest dress and behavior, and I don't think anyone has argued that World Cup athletes should be allowed to walk around in bikinis or engage in public make-out sessions.

The principle I am arguing is that censorious regimes who want to enforce censorship even to the extent of forbidding athletes to wear political expressions they don't like during world events they are hosting should receive pushback, and the point I am making is that people defending the precious sovereignty of Qatar would normally be in favor of this pushback if the censorship didn't happen to be directed, this time, at their enemies.

Your gotcha is not clever because you're well aware of the material differences. No one is claiming universal free speech is an entitlement to everyone everywhere or that countries can't impose their own laws on visitors. For example, Qatar also has rules against immodest dress and behavior, and I don't think anyone has argued that World Cup athletes should be allowed to walk around in bikinis or engage in public make-out sessions.

What makes you think that Qataris find public immodesty bad but not public advocating for immodesty and immorality?

I mean, I agree that banning public immodesty feels more reasonable to me than banning "OneLove" but then, I swim in the same waters as you do and I don't think I can actually debunk that view without digging into axioms.

The principle I am arguing is that censorious regimes who want to enforce censorship even to the extent of forbidding athletes to wear political expressions they don't like during world events they are hosting should receive pushback, and the point I am making is that people defending the precious sovereignty of Qatar would normally be in favor of this pushback if the censorship didn't happen to be directed, this time, at their enemies.

I personally don't care if people "push back" at Qatar. Seems like there were plenty of avenues to do that more effectively (e.g. boycott) but nobody wanted to sacrifice. Well, here we are.

I've already stated that I have less problem with "Qatar is just wrong and we're right" so long as it's not couched in terms of welcoming the world or whatever.

I just don't think there's any actual universalizable standard of hospitality that can be pulled out from this* . It's just about who has power to determine what's considered "normal" and "reasonable".

* Well...except don't lie and salami-tactic your way into a World Cup. That is the most obvious sin here. It looks different if they announce all this on Day 1.

It actually is against the rules in general. No political or religious speech on the uniforms. The “expected” sanction is apparently a fine, which Wales at least claimed to accept...but they drew the line at yellow cards. Not clear on whether that’s happened before or if this was one of those gentlemen’s agreements where FIFA reserved the right.

I agree with you that FIFA shouldn’t have escalated, especially not on behalf of the host.

All of these examples are unacceptable. This is sport not politics, and the more you make it about one the less it is about the other, thus compromising the whole point of the exercise. Even, ironically, it's political point of bringing people together under a common activity.

Shut up and kick the ball. I don't give a shit what you were told to think about world politics.

Athletes are more than just sports players though. Like you, I'm assuming you're not in charge of creating federal policy, so should I just tell you to shut up and do your job? This ideology is wildly antidemocratic and definitionally authoritarian.

antidemocratic

Of course, democracy is the worst of political regimes.

authoritarian

Of course not, the levels of control enacted by informal propagandists and democrats has always been insanely higher than that of any formal autocracy.

Has it not occurred to you that conscription, an edict which was considered to be one of the most inconceivably tyrannical things a government could ever do, has been enacted, justified and normalized by and for democracy? Shall we look at comparative tax rates perhaps? Size of administrations? Wherever you look but in the realms of ideology, there is no justification to oppose democracy and authoritarianism, they marry themselves at every turn.

I submit to you that you are, in supporting the rule of anyone at large, the extreme authoritarian and that I am merely, in the grand scheme of things, a sensible centrist for wishing the realms of power to remain separate from literally all of society. I'm against totalitarianism, if you will.

Separating out the activism itself, which is pretty dumb, activism only works when it's backed by power, etc - what's wrong in a general sense with "having an issue with the values of other countries", or even "forcing your values on other countries"? E.g. let's say Qatar was instead the babylon bee's caricature of progressives - they banned teams with >40% white people, everyone had to wear a trans flag on their uniforms, etc.

You don't get to go into another region of the world for a sport as global as soccer and then shit on them for not sharing the same views as you

What if the views are important? If Qatar's banning homosexuality is awful, 'giving them shit for imprisoning gay people' is probably fine. Why does it have to be 'respected'? This seems to be an issue with a specific kind of activism, rather than the general principle of 'protesting other countries'. What about protesting migrant worker deaths (which are probably overstated, didn't check). I'm not making an angry moral point here - maybe banning homosexuality is good, that's an orthogonal issue.

It is understated. The 6500 dead workers come from the embassies of 4 countries for the period up to 2021. It is a hard number, not an estimate, and it doesn't include deaths in 2022 and dead workers from other countries.

There's shitting on them and then there's accepting the shit on our face just because something something good guests. The West should not have come to Qatar for that event and let Qatar be worse off for it.


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