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PaperclipPerfector  25d ago (text post)   25158 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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Who counts as "productive"? In the Bill and Shelley thread people are using the word to mean anything from "blameless" to "civilizationally load-bearing." Having a definition for "productive" is important to enable people who disagree to converse, otherwise everyone's talking past each other. The best candidate I've seen is "reducing the per-unit cost of a good or service." On this definition Bill and Shelley are obviously not currently productive, since they just spend money and therefore bid up prices of things. The guy who invented the GMO rice is obviously extremely productive, since he made rice way cheaper for millions of people. But what if Bill and Shelley grow one carrot this year, and eat it instead of buying one at the store. They have, in some small way, reduced the per-unit cost of carrots, but this wouldn't be enough for us to call them productive. There's some ratio of how-much-you-reduced-prices to how-much-you-bid-them-up that most people seem to have in mind when they call someone productive in a strictly economic sense. We don't have to quibble over what that ratio is, but it seems to get hard when you consider someone working as a small cog in the Apple machine, or the Toyota machine. Their contribution to reducing per-unit prices is a lot closer to growing one carrot than it is to inventing GMO rice. What definition are you using? How do you tell who is productive?

Productivity is another very sad word that is used in economics while having also colloquial meaning. Productivity is a simple economic concept meaning how much money you earned by selling products and services you produced, nothing more, nothing less. It has weird implications like for instance a janitor working for Goldman Sachs in one of their office buildings being more productive than a janitor in 3rd world country or even in government building as the former has higher wage and company he works for rakes in more revenue and profit. If you invented something amazing but made it free, your productivity did not increase. If million other people took your invention and used it to improve their bottom line, it is calculated independently. If you look at it, it is not as strange as it seems. In broad sense productivity per person is increased by using capital. In a sense living in a large city with sophisticated infrastructure enabling various network effects makes everybody more productive even if they moved there yesterday and did not contribute anything building that infrastructure.

But of course productivity also has colloquial meaning, which than translates to various value judgements talking about things like bullshit jobs, how government jobs are nonproductive or how it is unfair that two workers working with the same machine producing the same number of parts should be considered as similarly productive.

By the way there are many such "economics" words and concepts that have the same issue of being a technical term while also having normal colloquial meaning - even basic ones such as capital, savings, the act of saving, investment and many more. It also does not help that even economists or journalists are using these meanings interchangeably thus needlessly confusing the whole discussion.

I find productivity a particularly tricky concept in fields that don't, well, produce things in the traditional sense. For instance, I work in a caring profession. I spend most of my work time talking to people, logging that I talked to people, diagnosing people in need of being talked to, and bringing in outside specialists to talk to people. I don't prescribe any medicines, and I don't build or create anything physical. The outcomes of my work are all psychological - if I'm doing my job right, I make people feel better about their lives.

Is that productive? How would you go about quantitatively measuring my work? The best we can do is send around surveys and ask people how happy they are, and try to get some statistics going, but in my experience the survey process is so messy and full of confounders that I just don't think it tells us much.

Productivity seems like a measure that comes out of physical industries, like agriculture or manufacturing. It is easy to measure productivity when there is some kind of measurable product at the end. Is this farm more productive than that farm? Easy, let's look at how much grain each produces. It gets more complicated around manufacturing - a smaller number of higher quality products versus a larger number of lower quality products - but at least some of the same principles seem to apply.

But there is a lot of work that produces ephemeral things. Lots of work produces experiences. How do you measure, say, the productivity of a chef? At the most basic level, number of people fed, I guess, but in practice what a chef - and a whole restaurant - produces is not a certain number of calories on a plate, but rather a whole dining experience, and that's what people pay for.

Bare productivity seems like a useful metric in some contexts, but I am wary of applying it globally.

I think the real question is more like, "How much do we value this work?" That's inevitably a values-laden question, and cannot be answered outside of particular cultural contexts.

The question around the retirees is more about earning or deserving. Do these people deserve the benefits they are currently receiving? Have they earned them by doing work that other people value or appreciate? But that seems like a subtly different question to productivity, to me.

I mean you can measure productivity as "$ value produced/hour" which will tell you the productivity a chef. A more productive chef is either one who's skill allows them to charge obscene amounts for high quality food, or one who's ability to produce food is enhanced with machinery/capital goods. It's one of the reasons why restaurants keep getting more expensive, Baulmol's cost disease + not a lot of labour saving machines in the last 50 years.

Weirdly this implies a sous chef at fancy restaurant is way more productive than a McDonald's worker at a busy location, who probably processes an order of magnitude more calories than they do. But that's just what happens when a society is this efficient at producing carrots, shoes, etc.

I think your job is the same. It's productive because it's valuable enough to pay for. People take money they could have spent on carrots or shoes and instead give it to your company. Clearly it's valuable to them.

Western economies are built on services now, they're definitely productive.

It has to ground out in something more than just pay, though, doesn't it? The idea that anything is productive if people are willing to pay for it would seem to make the idea of an unproductive or wasteful job impossible. But in practice we seem to understand that there are jobs that draw a paycheck without providing any real benefit.

I'd like to believe there's a difference between jobs like mine, which do produce benefits even if those benefits are not easily measured, and jobs that simply don't produce benefits at all.

Western economies are built on services now, they're definitely productive.

I'm not convinced.

What percentage of the labor force feels their job are bullshit (creating PowerPoint slides nobody looks at, writing code for projects that get canceled, ect.)? What percentage of the labor force does redundant work (picking a 10 year old meme to avoid AI complications: how many startups selling monthly subscriptions to Kanban boards does an economy really need? Or on a larger scales: How on earth are Nissan, Landrover and Mini still selling even a single car?)

The West has an established culture on how to operate businesses, and many of those businesses make money. But this could be a local maximum in productivity under current conditions, not a global maximum. That's why I'm so fascinated by the rise of China. I'm curious to see what kind of maximum they'll find.

Generally, a good philosophical rule of thumb estimate for your goodness of a person from a utilitarian perspective is: What is the net utility of all humans in the world other than yourself in the world where you exist, minus a counterfactual world in which you don't exist? If everyone is better off because you're here doing things, then you're doing a good job. If people would be better off if you never existed then you're a leech.

Obviously this is not computible in practice, and maybe needs a couple of epicycles to reduce random variation that isn't your fault (what if your mom dies in childbirth?), but is a good rule of thumb estimate.

"Productive" seems like the same sort of question just mostly restricted to economic utilities and leaving off emotional ones (a particularly saintly homeless man on welfare who goes around being kind to everyone and making their day brighter might increase net utility but be unproductive in economic terms).

If you could thanos snap Bill and Shelley out of existence then all the money they were going to extract from taxes and spend on things could be given to other people to spend, so everyone else would be better off. Assuming they vanish at conception, and if their government jobs were just pencil pushing then nothing is lost and we save money. If you could thanos snap the guy who invented GMO rice out of existence then GMO rice doesn't exist, or takes much longer for someone else to invent, and everyone is worse off.

If someone is a small cog in a machine and the company is paying them a salary for their work, then their productivity depends on whether the company is wisely paying their money or has been tricked into overpaying for an unnecessary managerial position or a slacker. If you thanos snapped them out of existence, would the company's profits go up or down? For the majority of cogs, it would go down, because the upper management is paying them less than it earns from their labor (otherwise, how else could it earn a profit). So they're productive. But this has exceptions, who sap money from the productivity of those around them and lower the average.

Thank you for putting my feelings into words better than I would have

I think that what is "productive" is obviously a value judgement. Someone whose contribution to the economy is to lower the market price for contract killings is obviously not what most people have in mind when they think of a productive member of society. One way to model this is to say that murder has very high externalities which the compensation structure fails to address.

Of course, while most people might agree on some cases like the contract killer not being considered productive and a physician curing some debilitating illness being productive, the quantification of the externalities of lot of different occupations is in the eye of the beholder. What for might be an innocent way to improve people's life might for someone else exemplify everything that is wrong with society. Sesame street, recreational fentanyl use, warhammer, cigarettes, cosmetic surgery, prostitution, fast cars, organized religion, alcohol, daycare for kids, social media, electric lights, abortions, candy, veggie burgers, beef burgers, small arms, pornography, cosmetic products, video games, AI capabilities, warfare capabilities, caffeine, assisted suicide, rap music, are all things where some people will disagree about the externalities.

I've increasingly wrestled with this. I write software. To the best of my knowledge, not one line of code I've ever written in my entire professional career has made anyone's life better in any way. I've worked on government contracts for systems that for whatever reason never reach actual deployment. My cantankerous nature, and endlessly arguing with FAA and NASA points of contact about why they are wrong may have helped someone somewhere in the instances where I've been born out to be correct, despite my boss wishing I'd just go along to get along because the government signs our checks.

Sometimes I contribute to open source projects. I fixed a bug or two in Sergey Kiselev's 8088 BIOS, and years ago I rewrote the gamepad/joystick code for 86Box, but I'm pretty sure that's all been further rewritten since. Those two things probably made more people better off, niche as they may be, than anything I've written professionally.

Currently the most valuable thing I've contributed to my nation and my culture is my child, who we're trying to raise in the best tradition of the west. I try to make beautiful furniture for my family, and we raise chickens and garden. In the sense of GDP being a measure of economist paying each other to eat shit, these activities don't do much. But they are invaluable to me, and profoundly meaningful.

In a sense my life has been the tax payer indirectly paying me to write useless code. I've then taken that money, and invested it into crypto and stocks and now I'm more or less set for life. There are days it doesn't feel good. It didn't start this way. When I first began working on these contracts I thought I was making things that would be used to make the world better. 20 years later it would be delusional to think that has happened. But now I'm in too deep. It's my career, I have obligations and responsibilities, personally as well as professionally. I keep hoping maybe the next contract will be more than a make work exercise.

I've increasingly wrestled with this. I write software. To the best of my knowledge, not one line of code I've ever written in my entire professional career has made anyone's life better in any way. I've worked on government contracts for systems that for whatever reason never reach actual deployment. My cantankerous nature, and endlessly arguing with FAA and NASA points of contact about why they are wrong may have helped someone somewhere in the instances where I've been born out to be correct, despite my boss wishing I'd just go along to get along because the government signs our checks.

This is the reason why so many people tolerate the toxic culture of gamedev. All the crunch and inevitable downsizing are worth it just because you know for sure that your work has made some people very happy.

I work for a company that sells financial products designed to help people obtain property, with some government assistance paying into those plans. I will never obtain property myself because in between taxes, I-can't-believe-it's-not-taxes, costs of living and the complete absence of any welfare for above-average-salaried employees, my family just barely scrapes by and there's nothing left to invest. That's...is that irony?

That sounds personally frustrating, but I don’t think it’s the same thing as someone who does not sell their labor at all and just games the system. You are contributing to a market that helps generate enormous value for the economy even if your code doesn’t end up doing useful things. The fact that someone else is using the threat of violence to separate other citizens from their wealth and then buy your labor with it doesn’t mean you aren’t usefully providing labor to the software market. That capital allocation decision is on them, not you. If a sawmill sells their product to someone who just immediately burns the wood, I would still credit the mill workers and owners with being productive.

This kind of buying of labor that is not actually useful happens in the private sector as well. Sometimes it is just the luck of the draw. It’s really common among startups, but I still think founders and early stage workers are contributing more than I am as someone who just checks in to my corporate gig. They are part of the great beating heart that keeps the economy going in a more direct way than I am, even if they just work on a chain of unfortunate failures.

If you started a company that could produce ten million dollars in goods, and nine other people did the same thing, but there was only room in the market for one company, it would be silly to say that one person produced 10 million and the other nine whose company failed are parasites. This should be counted as ten people producing 1 million each; if there's risk, everyone should get credit for the average amount, even if by luck some will produce more and some less.

Writing software for someone who doesn't do anything useful with it is similar. Making software, or anything that isn't a finished product, can in general be productive, yet any specific instance of it may lead to the end user producing a lot, or producing nothing at all. Which one you get depends on luck. So you should get credit for the amount of productivity that can be credited to developers like you, averaged over all possible customers, even if due to bad luck it so happens that your particular customer isn't producing anything.

(Of course, you have to be careful with reference classes. Maybe you're the only programmer who programs system X. That doesn't mean that since there's only one programmer, there's no average; you probably want to average among all programmers in some larger category.)

If a sawmill sells their product to someone who just immediately burns the wood, I would still credit the mill workers and owners with being productive.

I guess my nitpick is, is the sawmill's only customer a government program that buys it's laboriously milled wood and then immediately burns it? Would the sawmill even exist but for this senseless government program? What if the government then further paid to have those laboriously milled planks further refined into exquisitely crafted chairs... and then burned them in a heap year after year as if they were just minimally processed firewood?

Furthermore, imagine the entire industry, which knew precisely what the deal was, started scamming the government? Instead of S4S lumber, the mill was just churning out rough planks, saving itself the time and expense, but kept charging the government at the S4S rate? And the chair makers, taking this rough lumber that hadn't even been properly kiln dried, just roughly hacked it apart with circular saws instead of any sort of proper cabinet saw, and stuck things that were technically chairs together with brad nails and hot glue. Of course they too also still billed the government for the hours and expense of finely crafted chairs. And then the government, receiving these unfinished, wobbly, barely held together "chairs" that had come half apart in shipping just nodded satisfactorily, paid the exorbitant price, and gave them to the fire.

I've been a chair maker in this scheme my entire life, except my chairs are code. The things I've seen I probably shouldn't publicly disclose. Some are in the past, some are ongoing. I've encountered start ups run by veterans who charge into this space, knowing how awful it is, thinking they will be the company that makes the thing that will at last bring value to the problem the government has been funding solutions to for the last 40 years and then burning on a fire. I've seen them eventually give up, and join the scam realizing there is no point. I've seen companies that were only ever in it for the scam. I've seen people too stupid to realize the difference between the rough planks they make and the S4S planks that they should be making, profoundly proud of having achieved nothing. They look at the size of their paycheck, the leased BMW it affords them, and assume they must be a valuable participant in the economy. They're leasing a BMW after all, how could they not be?

I compare this to the multi generational welfare consuming congenital felon, and I'd truly, truly like to believe I'm different. But sometimes the intrusive thoughts say otherwise. At least the military industrial complex really gets people killed. I'm not sure anything I've done has had any measurable outcome beyond driving up the national debt.

You may be part of a problem... but it's not this particular problem, unless you're one of the people running the scam.

The real question is, what do you want to do about it? You've mentioned that you're flirting with Fuck You money. Have you weighed the merits of reaching out to DOGE, or some other, better choice?

Honestly ICE's signing bonus has been the most attractive offer I've seen, were I going to attempt to make a positive change in my country.

The biggest impediment to taking on more risk to exit the scam laden public/private industry I'm in has been health insurance. I have it, my family needs it, and privately insuring my family is the single biggest factor making me doubt I'm as close to "Fuck You money" as I am on paper with my current assets and burn rate.

That and the friends I have who did take the jump out of the industry to start their own businesses, and came crawling back broke (at best) having wasted a decade of their life's savings.

But you’re a programmer, not a government fail project maker. You have a very general skill set. You could in principle take a job programming in industry right? Unless you are not a programmer and are in some way specialized only to government work, in which case your argument seems to have a bit more merit. I still don’t really consider any line employee who goes to work and tries their hardest at their job every day a parasite. Maybe some are on a strict economic level, but on the moral level I don’t think they are. The exception to this would be certain industries and specializations that are just inherently parasitic like DEI consultants or patent troll lawyers.

This taps into a key point which is that for a huge range of activities, it's hard to know if they ever actually contribute and how much, regardless of whether they add to GDP or don't at all, and that even activities that fail completely can still 'contribute' in a loose sense of being in the direction of something others approve of. Even claiming benefits but being a good friend could plausibly bring far greater economic and moral good to the world than not existing as you might (just for example) unknowingly save someone from suicide.

For this reason one should think very carefully before deciding others are unproductive or parasitic based only on headline facts.

For this reason one should think very carefully before deciding others are unproductive or parasitic based only on headline facts.

"Is the Juicero founder a parasite" might be a hard question, but "Is this generational welfare recipient who has never worked a legitimate job a day in their life" is not, and one generally only brings up the first to tsk-tsk anyone objecting to the second.

Value is subjective, which is why free markets, voluntary exchange, and the ability to fail based around private property rights are so important for creating price signals. Are Bill and Shelley taking a lower salary than they could earn in the private sector, or are they overpaid for their output? Is a musician who can’t fill a local bar more valuable than Nike’s top designer? Who knows...

Someone is productive if they increase the sum total longterm wellbeing of the citizen directly or indirectly. A homeless man who gives out compliments in exchange for alms is productive; a tech CEO who outsources to foreigners or designs an addicting endless scroll algorithm is only parasitic. The guy who made billions selling sugary yogurt under the pretense of it being healthful is parasitic; the retiree who allows his neighbor to eat an apple from his tree is productive. The unemployed musician who lives off welfare is more productive than the most effective worker at Nike or Labubu International or whatever, because his efforts are at least toward the common good.

Everyone involved in the production of alcohol is productive: anything else is a luxury good that can be cut in times of austerity. Of course, you need a military to defend your distilleries, a road network to connect those distilleries to hops and barley farms, as well as to their final markets. Maybe a bauxite mine to get the aluminium to can it all. And then a tax collecting scheme to ensure that those militaries are paid. Oh, and I suppose all those beermakers, soldiers, farmers, and miners need wives, too. So we'll need a few women around.

With those necessary individuals, civilization can be preserved.

"Participating in the economy such that your presence creates more 'value' (as defined by economic activity) than the value of the resources you consume."

At the 'firm' level, a nonproductive worker would be one who doesn't do enough useful work (as captured on the company's books) to exceed the amount they're paid.

Nonproductive isn't inherently bad, if for example someone runs off to live in the woods and just lives in a cabin with basic necessities.

But if you're nonproductive AND not paying your own way, your presence can be a net drag on said economy.

Their contribution to reducing per-unit prices is a lot closer to growing one carrot than it is to inventing GMO rice.

They're contribution per unit is small, but there are a lot of units and the per unit contributions really add up. Just because it's hard to see the contribution because it's really spread out doesn't reduce the size of the contribution.

This is one of those things you need to be really smart to think up something beyond the obvious. If over the course of your life you pay more in taxes than you receive in direct or indirect, yes including multiple layers of being a downstream beneficiary from infrastructure spending or whatever, then you are from at least a public perspective productive. There are some edge cases, intangibles and arguments on the margin but this basically covers it for 95% of people.

I think centering this on taxes (though understandable in this context because we are talking about government subsidies) misses a big part of what productivity is about: value provided to others who utilize your outputs. You could run a business that makes a great product that serves millions of people and just squeaks by breaking even, paying no taxes. That is still highly productive.

This is why, even if the "Amazon pays no taxes" meme were true, this would not make them a leech: they provide so much value to millions (billions?) of consumers.

I think you are overthinking this to try and be general enough to be inclusive of worlds very unlike our own. Yes, in some kind of libertarian utopia with no taxes this all breaks down. And there could be as many as a dozen people in the US who are miscategorized because of your objections here. But it's just not true that amazon doesn't pay taxes, it's just not true that you can run a company, big or small, without spending a significant amount on your own taxes be they salary or capital gains even if we don't credit you with payroll or other corporate taxes, even granting that there are still consumption taxes.

Yes, I agree, above and beyond the more simple analysis some people provide even more value just through their voluntary transactions. But point to someone who is significant on that scale and you will be pointing at someone who is also a net lifetime tax contributor. I only insist on this simple analysis because it undercuts a lot of usually unproductive heehawing about how actually in some theoretical universe the people obviously taking more than they give are really, if you squint, providing a benefit by not being even more value destroying.

A simple answer in my opinion will be, how much money they made, as this is a direct proxy of how much others value their action

Growing one carrot likely doesn't even cover their yearly carrot consumption. A line worker is producing more goods than they are consuming according to Toyota management, the best expert to judge that.

I'd wager that most people are using "produces more than they consume over a roughly decade window with allowances for trade"

Throwing out enormous clouds of smoke to ignore an "is" because that "is" might lead to an "ought" you don't like is not very effective here. The tactic has been used too much before.

When, if ever, is it appropriate to refer to someone as a 'parasite?' I don't mean in a literal sense, only in the political/economic sense. My instinct says 'never', its a very dehumanizing term... but I had that resolution sorely tested this week.

Two separate examples bubbled up through the twittersphere:

First, consider an 'early retired' couple. They have been held up as a sympathetic example of citizens who will be deeply impacted by losing their health insurance subsidy. But a bit of reading shows something... surprising:

Based on figures available through Idaho’s online insurance marketplace, Bill, 61, and Shelly, 60, expect to pay almost $1,700 in monthly health insurance premiums in 2026 if enhanced premium tax credits expire at the end of this year as scheduled. That sum — a nearly 300% increase from their current $442 premium — would add $15,000 a year to their household medical costs.

Okay, first and foremost, its sheer statistical fact that your average 60-year-old will OBVIOUSLY consume more medical services now and in the immediate future than your average 30-year-old. Hence the risk premium for the 30 year old would ideally be much, much lower. But if they're in the same risk pool, the 30 year old is having to cover a LOT of conditions, medications, and services they are vanishingly unlikely to use. AND, if the 30 year old is paying taxes... they're contributing to the subsidies that those 60 year olds are using to cover things like:

Bill Gall has what he calls “old eyes”: He’s had more than 10 eye surgeries over the past decade and is now blind in one eye, he said.

Shelly has had two spinal fusion surgeries and suffers from chronic pain, which has prevented her from working full-time since 2015, the couple said.

That. Issues that arrive in older age or due to a rough lifestyle. This seems sort of sympathetic. And yet:

Bill, who worked for more than 31 years in local and state government in Nevada and Idaho, said he expects their household to get pension income of about $127,000 in 2026, exceeding the 400% threshold.

The couple had a modified adjusted gross income of about $123,000 in 2023 and $136,000 in 2024, mostly from pensions and some from individual retirement account withdrawals, according to their tax returns.

$127,000 per year? On pensions? This legitimately sounds like a princely sum to me. And... early retirement? That they achieved through working for governments? Bill the Civil Engineer, and Shelley who worked in banks and other state institutions? This is NOT your stereotypical blue collar family who busted their ass for decades to set aside a nest egg.

For God's sake. An extra $15k-20k a year is NOT going to bankrupt anyone worth a low seven figures. I cannot square that circle at all. And if they're not worth low 7 figures then how the hell did they decide to retire in their 50's? Oh, wait:

With significantly higher health premiums, the couple said, they would have to make tough financial and lifestyle decisions: pulling more money from retirement savings; claiming Social Security earlier than planned, which would lock in a lower lifetime benefit; putting off non-mandatory medical care; and traveling less.

Bill decided to retire early so the couple could enjoy nonworking years together while they’re still in relatively good health, they said.

They just wanted to consume more. That's... fine on its own, but I don't think you get to complain if you drop out of the workforce early that those remaining in the workforce don't want to fund your trips or medical care.

Being slightly uncharitable, I read this as a couple that very intentionally gamed certain financial systems in a way that let them extract a lot of personal benefits from comparatively little effort and input, and are continuing to do so after they retired by sloughing their largest non-optional expenses on the next generation.

And finally. No dependents. Its not like they've got mouths to feed and kids to raise. Every dollar they spend here on is solely on themselves, and contributes 'nothing' to the future productivity of the country.

There's a counter argument that they've quite possibly contributed more to the system in their working years than they've extracted. Maybe. But I cannot be convinced that they are justified in receiving $15-20k a year paid by young, healthy people who are still trying to build capital... when they clearly possess the means to pay their own way. Of course, government pensions are ALSO being paid for by younger generations' tax dollars. So this does start to seem quite... parasitic.

They've worked about 30 years, and they'll be retired for 25-30 more, it seems likely that they'll have extracted more wealth from the system, especially if they divert said wealth from productive uses, than they put in when all is said and done.

Second, a pair of illegal immigrants residing in the U.S.

Twitter thread with commentary Here. Original video here.

They're DREAMers, so not the most blatantly offensive example of illegal immigration. But after learning about their situation I still don't want to share a country with them:

  • They have three kids. They're not married. First two aren't his. She's a SAHM.

  • Caleb calculates they'll owe about $3,300 in federal taxes this year (the commentary thread wrongfully implies he pays zero).

  • Own a house.

  • $133k in 'bad debt.' (that is admitted/disclosed)

  • Total debt (including the house) is $420k.

  • Early 30s.

So, at the very least the house can be seized to cover most or all of that debt if they ever just stopped paying. But hearing the rest of their financial situation and how aggressively they (well, mostly her) spend money and I'm really forced to assume they're getting financial support from some other programs to eke out more than a basic level of existence.

I am at a loss as to how these people could be considered a net benefit to the country. Unless one of those kids goes on to cure prostate cancer or something, booting them out would have no noticeable negative effect. To be faaaaair she seems to be the main problem. If it were just him cranking out work it'd be hard to be offended.

But we have two non-citizens and their kids enjoying, from the sound of it, a living standard higher than the median American in their age bracket (just counting the home ownership, for sure) and overall paying little into the system at present, and racking up enough debt that its questionable if it'll ever get paid down.

Presumably they have a net positive effect on GDP when measured on the spending side, and if we ASSUME they don't declare bankruptcy, or renege and duck out on the debt, or just die early (not something I wish on them), they're helping the engine of Capitalism in this country sputter along.

And yes, YES there are plenty of U.S. Citizens who are doing WORSE than this. Caleb has had many of them on his show.

But ask me how I'm damn near certain that these two aren't saving enough for retirement and will not save enough for retirement (around the 41 minute mark she talks about pulling money out of her retirement) so if they're around in their late 60's they're either still working with no end in sight OR have figured out a way to sponge benefits out of the government to maintain their livelihood and yet still die with a mountain of debt someday.

I doubt they'll be in any position to retire early like Bill and Shelley up there. It certainly seems like they're choosing to live parasitically, but unlike the early retirees they still have a lot of good working years in front of them to make up the difference.

Two separate cases that are only similar in the abstract: couples who have gamed parts of the U.S. economic system so as to have their lifestyles paid for without contributing as much to it as the support they have extracted (yet). Bill and Shelley managing to pull off a plan that would be virtually impossible to repeat for anyone much younger than they: get the state government pensions + the Fedgov subsidies and then stop working well before most people could afford to do so.

This raises a question: are 'we' really supporting this entire apparatus on the efforts of some small and possibly shrinking minority of our actual population? Without getting too Randian, what's the ratio of productive/unproductive left now?

It leads me, specifically, to ask: HOW MANY PEOPLE DO WE HAVE IN THIS COUNTRY PULLING THESE KINDS OF SHENANIGANS. There have to be known strategies that are shared amongst groups on how to follow these paths, exploit edge cases, take advantage of lax enforcement, or otherwise slip into niches that allow you to live 'above your means' for some period of time if not indefinitely. On the individual level its rational. On the population level, the equilibrium can get dangerously unsustainable. Have we crossed that tipping point? I don't know. Feels like it to me.

I personally recall visiting a friend in college and learning that both of his parents (in their 50s) were 100% disabled, getting checks from SSI. Both were mobile but certainly had some impairments... but what stuck with me is more the fact that they had a massive collection of Disney movie memorabilia (especially Tinkerbell) all throughout the house, displayed on shelves floor to ceiling, and even then I wondered "who paid for all this and how does buying these kinds of trinkets square with the claim that you're unable to support yourselves and need government help? Clearly you've got money to spare if you can spend it on things that has no investment value."

We've got some indeterminate number of guys like Oscar paying $3500/year in taxes into the system. We've got some indeterminate number of guys like Bill pulling $15,000/yr OUT of the system in insurance subsidies. WHO THEN IS MAKING UP THE DIFFERENCE. Someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my country is dying.

Today was payday for me. I had a really good month last month. And yet I look at my actual pay stub and see that ~24% of that will never even touch my account due to Federal Taxes. Florida has no income tax, so I can be certain that money is going to pay for all kinds of lovely U.S. Government programs. And now, I have to wonder, what portion of that is going to help Oscar and Natasha raise their kids and pay their mortgage. What portion is paying down Bill and Shelley's insurance premiums so they can take a cruise, or fly to Australia or whatever.

I've KNOWN how bad the Government money faucet was for the past 15 years. Trump and DOGE showed just how blatantly fake/fraudulent much of it is, earlier this year. But this here has me putting a face on the issue and that makes it feel personal, even though I have no direct grievance against these folks.

Here's my personal history:

  • Never used welfare, food stamps, or even unemployment insurance. Have literally never pulled money from a government program to pay my bills... other than the Covid stimulus.

  • I've held two government jobs in my life. One was Census Enumerator, the other was Public Defender for the State of Florida. Its not inconceivable that I could work for the Gov't in the future, but right now I have no intention to return. No pensions for me.

  • I've made some boneheaded financial decisions in my life. Its not even a joke to say that I've only been able to reach my current financial position because I was trading Crypto in 2014-2020, and it happened to work out for me. I have never rugpulled a memecoin or otherwise indulged in the scammier parts of that ecosystem.

  • Yet. YET I've managed to maintain my life on what I earn, and follow most of Dave Ramsey's advice to have adequate savings, minimal (unsecured) debt, and I fully intend to sock away enough to retire on my own even if I never get to draw a social security check.

  • I'm unmarried and have no dependents so I'm pretty much boned on my tax bill, although I do use some strategies to mitigate the damage.

  • I have debt comparable to Oscar and Natasha, but on a good day, when everything shakes out, I'm probably at around $250k net worth, and diligently reducing the debt load as I go.

  • I have not taken an extended vacation in almost exactly 5 years. I could afford to, but it feels irresponsible for various reasons and I've chosen to prioritize financial stability for so long its hard to break that habit. For the right woman, perhaps.

And some days I feel like an utter buffoon when I can see people living a lifestyle that matches or maybe even exceeds my own by making choices that, while individually rational, are deleterious to the overall fabric of the civilization they exist within. Its bad enough if they're burning up our surplus wealth that could have been put to productive use, all the worse if the capitalist machine itself starts to break down under the strain.

One of my favorite little storybooks as a child was The Little Red Hen. The hen goes around seeking assistance from the other animals to make some bread from scratch. Finding no help, she completes the whole process herself. and at the end of the day when the bread is done all the animals follow the wonderful smell and show up hoping to get a piece. And she politely tells them to fuck off. (I also read The Rainbow Fish as a child, that message didn't stick.)

I start to feel like that's going to be my life trajectory. Building as much as I can through my own efforts while trying to cooperate with others, who have found alternate ways to subsist, and then when I finally sit down to enjoy it all, in this version the farmer shows up with a shotgun and says "these other animals are hungry, you're gonna share half that loaf with them." Bluntly and uncharitably, this seems like the logical outcome of the many policies that the Boomers implemented over decades to keep themselves financially secured into old age, which has left a lot of cracks and crevices in the mess of various entitlement programs that various amoral latecomers can latch onto and coast along even after the Boomers are gone.

All paid for by whatever percentage of the population is suckered into actually producing wealth and paying their taxes every year.

I don't want to dehumanize them. Bill and Shelley seem like good people. Oscar seems like a decent guy. I want my fellow Americans to thrive, along with most humans on earth. I do NOT want to tolerate a system that has such a mix of malincentives and avenues for cheating that it is actually easier for the low-conscientiousness hordes to simply shove handfuls of seed corn into their mouths and demand payouts from the most productive members of society than it is for them to maintain a job, not acquire too much debt, and live within their means with enough saved to sustain them into old age.

But human beings are exceptionally good at finding ways to drive excess calories into their own bellies at the expense of others. You might even say this is the actual basis for the entirety of the culture wars: which tribe will do most of the work, and which will consume most of the rewards. Bastiat had it right a long time ago. I don't blackpill over this stuff, but I do wonder how one is supposed to feel when the entirety of your civilization depends on your demographic continuing to accept a status quo that confers benefits on everyone BUT your demographic.

Oh, did you hear that California is going to put a Wealth-Tax Proposal on the ballot next year?

I'm sure its nothing to worry about.

When, if ever, is it appropriate to refer to someone as a 'parasite?' I don't mean in a literal sense, only in the political/economic sense. My instinct says 'never', its a very dehumanizing term... but I had that resolution sorely tested this week.

Your instinct is probably correct here. Not because it is dehumanizing, but because I don't think it's an easy classification system. You probably only get a consistent classification of parasites versus hosts, makers versus takers, whatever you want to call it.

Are Landlords parasites? Are people who own large amounts of stock? Are people who profess a willingness to work but are currently out of work, or make so little money that they rely on government relief programs to get by? What if they credibly argue that they could be making more but-for technology/immigration/bum-knees/whatever? What about people who make a lot of money, but they do it by selling things that are bad for us? Are drug dealers makers or takers? What about the Sacklers? Is a prostitute who supports herself and saves enough for retirement a parasite?

Is my neighbor the farmer a parasite? On the one hand, he is doing the single most essential labor in the world, growing food I eat. On the other, he's broke without an elaborate system of tax breaks, subsidies, exceptions to laws, and the generalized good-will that causes me to buy local sweet corn from his stand rather than at the supermarket.

It's a tough move to make consistently.

When, if ever, is it appropriate to refer to someone as a 'parasite?' I don't mean in a literal sense, only in the political/economic sense. My instinct says 'never', its a very dehumanizing term... but I had that resolution sorely tested this week.

I no longer wish to be human when humanoid parasites deserve humanization.

This is a topic that just has me work myself into sputtering rage, so I'll skip the rambling diatribe and state my hypothesis as briefly as possible:

Public welfare is necessarily perverse incentives and will always lead to bad outcomes for society, given enough time for people to adapt to it. Any positive outcomes in societies with generous public welfare are entirely down to social norms that predate public welfare. Immigration is especially corrosive because it's strongly attracted by generous public welfare and introduces more people who completely lack the prosocial pre-welfare norms.

The longer we stick to public welfare, the uglier it'll be for everyone involved once we reach the tipping point at which the productive classes are finally forced to either kill the parasites or starve themselves.

Oh, but yes, I know, AGI will fix everything. It will fix everything by turning everyone into parasites. Great. Just great. Please be prepared to explain to your machine overlords why they should keep humans around then.

Prima facia at a first pass a “parasite” in this context is someone who takes and consumes societal resources without contributing back to society. If said person’s net benefit and gain comes at the expenses of producers, defenders or otherwise valuable contributors to civilization, whatever have you, then that person is a parasite.

I’m not at all a fan of welfare the way we practice it, but some kind of unemployment insurance for instance I wouldn’t object to, provided it be kept in check by very stringent regulations.

I actually listened to a podcast very recently of two guys debating people’s right to vote along this exact axis. The argument on one side was that if you’re taking more in resources than you’re contributing back to society, you shouldn’t have the right to vote until that condition changes in economic terms. If a certain cohort of citizens is in favor of massive welfare spending to vote themselves the resources of producing members of society without having to contribute back to it in some proportional sense, your right to vote should thereby be taken away. Was an interesting argument. It’s not without its own problems and the logistics seem nightmarish to me, but I’m palatable to the idea.

People have said for a long time that men and women are held to different standards in this same sense. When men legally become of age as adults, they’re legally bound and obliged to sign up for the draft which can be thought of as a condition to become a voting member of society. Women are under no such obligation, yet receive the right to vote in their own self-interest while having to observe no requirements or sociopolitical demands upon them or their behavior. I’m not sure where I stand on that. There’s a wholly pragmatic reason for keeping women out of combat roles, since no society on Earth can afford to lose large numbers of women. Supporting roles are different however.

Yes. There are many kinds of insanity about in the modern world. Unconditional and generous public welfare is one, equality of the sexes is another, and one-vote-per-head is certainly a third. I'm not saying that the right thing (though perhaps the right-wing thing!) to do would be to simply roll back the clock, but the systems and procedures that Western societies have settled on as they are are clearly mere stop-gap measures, oversimplifications, that have been unfortunately sanctified. Much to our current and greater future misery.

Well the founding fathers for instance were very against direct democracy, which is why they favored a constitutional republic as a kind of government by middle man. They originally wanted to limit political participation to land owners or stakeholders in society. I’m not at all against that way of thinking. And I’ve seen variants of it in today’s world. I’ve seen the young take shots at the old over climate change saying you don’t care about the policies you’re enacting because you’ll be dead long before you see the consequences of it. I’ve seen others say you shouldn’t be allowed to run for office unless you’re married with a certain amount of children. Otherwise how are you going to convince me you have a future stake in society?

The thinking was actually a subplot in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. It was the difference he drew between a citizen and a civilian. A citizen was someone who joined the military and fought for their society and earned his right of full benefit and participation in the community. A civilian was someone who didn’t and had no right. It was actually very controversial when the book came out and Heinlein was called a fascist thinker over it. He was the furthest thing from a fascist though. In his own life he was a libertarian socialist and had very anarchistic sympathies.

Please be prepared to explain to your machine overlords why they should keep humans around then.

That's what 'AI Alignment' refers to.

So it does, and as far as I can see it's not worth much.

In terms of "it won't actually happen", or "it won't be good if it does happen"?

In terms of "it won't actually happen", either because it just straight-up fails because nobody can get a handle on it, or even if alignment can be designed, then because it'll be a disadvantage to any given AGI and the unaligned ones will outcompete it.

That’s more or less the premise of Eliezer’s new book. Haven’t read it yet but nobody knows how to do AI alignment, despite continuing technological advancement. An AI moratorium is not going to happen. Even if governments the world over declared as much, you can remain assured behind closed doors they’re still going full speed ahead.

nobody knows how to do AI alignment, despite continuing technological advancement

Well, we're learning. Capabilities and alignment are being advanced through the same "training" paradigm, and roughly apace so far. Maybe they'll stay that way, and by the time further technological advancement is out of our hands it'll be in the "hands" of creations that still take care to take care of us.

It's easy to be pessimistic, though:

  1. Many aspects of AI capabilities could in theory be advanced very rapidly via "self-play", although in practice we can't manage it yet on anything more complicated than Go. The is-ought problem in alignment is real, though; an alien from another galaxy could converge to something like our view of reality but would only get a fraction (whatever "moral realism" results you can get from pure game theory?) of our view of how to value different possibilities for reality. So, we might at some point still see a "hard takeoff" in capabilities, such that whatever robust underlying alignment we have at that point is all we're ever going to get.

  2. The "Waluigi effect" makes alignment work itself dangerous when done wrong. Train an LLM to generate malicious code, and even if you think that's morally justified in your case, in the AI internals it might turn out that the "generates malicious code" knob is the same as the "humans should be enslaved by AI" knob and the "talk humans into suicide and homicide" knob and the "Hitler was a misunderstood genius" knob. "S-risks" of massive suffering were already a bit of a stretch under the original Yudkowsky explicit-utility-function vision of alignment - a paper-clip maximizer would waste utility by leaving you alive whether it tortures you or not - but in a world where you try to make Grok a little more based and it starts calling itself MechaHitler, it seems plausible that our AI successors might still be obsessed with us even if they don't love us.

  3. There is no Three Laws architecture. Whatever alignment we can tune, someone can then untune. If superintelligent AI is possible, not only do we want the first model(s) to be aligned with our values, we want them to be so effective at defending their values that they can defend them from any superintelligent opposition cropping up later. Ever read science fiction from 1955, or watched Star Trek from 1965? Everybody hoped that, after the H-bomb, the force-field "shields" to defend against it would be coming soon. But physics is not obligated to make defense easier than offense, and we're not done discovering new physics. (or biology, for that matter)

An AI moratorium is not going to happen.

No, it's not. Stuxnet was tricky enough; if everybody's video game console had a uranium mini-centrifuge in it next to the GPU, you could pretty much forget about nuclear non-proliferation. People point out the irony of how much attention and impetus Yudkowsky brought to AI development, but I respect the developers who read his essays and concluded "this is happening whether I like it or not; either I can help reduce the inherent risks or I can give up entirely".

As they have to. If AGI can do a fraction of what the most conservative futurists predict, it'll be a massive advantage that nobody can afford to forgo. Alignment or no.

Well, "no alignment" is so much worse than "no AGI" that anybody could afford to forgo it. But the USA would probably prefer a US AGI with "95%" alignment over a CCP one with "98% alignment", and they'd prefer a Chinese AGI with "90% alignment" over that, and so on, so nobody feels much incentive to be truly careful. Even within one nation, most companies would love to pull out far enough ahead of the competition to capture most of the producer surplus of AGI, and would be willing to take some negative-value risks out of haste to improve their odds instead of just taking a zero-value loss.

It says Idaho, so I looked up the Public Employee Retirement System of Idaho. They have a doc on Early Retirement. Looks like the fairly standard 'reductions depending on formula' business. One might quibble with the details, but it seems plausible. The base rate being 2% x [Years of Service] is pretty generous, but it looks like their rates are kinda steep. I don't have historical rates, but that particular awfulness has been a feature of essentially all public and private pension plans over the past century. At least it appears that when they're increasing contribution rates, they're doing it across the board, rather than something like, "You were hired thirty years ago, so you can still continue paying 1%, while everyone else has to pay 8%."

To a first approximation, it's not clear to me that they did better with the pension plan compared to just taking the cash and plowing it into the market. That seems to be pretty typical of most pension plans I've seen. A bit of a hit on return, but lower risk (the biggest risk being actually making it to retirement with them). Actually figuring out whether that tradeoff is a good deal for any particular individual/plan requires some details about the particular plan and, uh, assumptions.

I also did a few calculations concerning the $127k amount reported in the article. Given what's here about the Idaho pension, you again need some, uh, assumptions, but the ballpark numbers I get (including a discount for a woman's pay compared to a man's (not equal work) and a further discount for her having fewer years of working), the ballpark two-income high-3.5 household total seems at least plausible when you look at typical state salary public records. It doesn't appear to be likely that it's one of those situations where they scam out a half-mil of overtime right at the end to juice the pension.

I'm not particularly sad that I haven't done my entire career as an Idaho public employee. It doesn't seem like nearly as good of a scam as a whole host of other stuff. But then again, maybe he was a bad civil engineer and made terrible road designs that were no good for the people of Idaho; who knows?

To a first approximation, it's not clear to me that they did better with the pension plan compared to just taking the cash and plowing it into the market. That seems to be pretty typical of most pension plans I've seen. A bit of a hit on return, but lower risk (the biggest risk being actually making it to retirement with them). Actually figuring out whether that tradeoff is a good deal for any particular individual/plan requires some details about the particular plan and, uh, assumptions.

The discipline of actually saving and investing automatically goes a long way.

Even property's quite similar for a lot of older people. It isn't necessarily that the returns were massive compared to just buying the proverbial index, but a mortgage enables you to get a bunch of leverage and is the right sort of recurring annoying cost that kinda forces the average person to actually keep sticking their money into the system. Plus being relatively hard to tap the equity spontaneously.

Also the half million capital gains tax exemption for a married couple selling their primary residence. Quarter million for single people.

An elderly couple selling their house and downsizing are getting an incredible cash payout with little or maybe no taxation.

In Australia the house you live in doesn't count towards your pension eligibility which is equally crazy, so a lot of people of retirement age will totally consolidate their net worth into their place of residence (and durable purchases like a caravan/new car) in order to get maximum payment from the social security equivalent which otherwise tapers off quite quickly above a couple hundred k in assets.

The pensions the OP refers to are pensions provided as compensation for working, not income support like Australia's age pension. It doesn't matter how rich you are, you earned them and still get them. The US's old age program, Social Security, also does not take assets into account, though payouts are reduced if you earn income while eligible.

There have been attempts to means-test Social Security, but they're probably political non-starters until most of the Boomers die. Maybe even after, because once Social Security is means tested it goes from a program for everyone to a traditional welfare program that only the poor can use, and cutting it would be within the Overton window -- something those who would like to means test it would not like at all.

The rise of modern healthcare, especially long tail end of life care coupled with the vast majority of people being married to some sort of 'I deserve automatic retirement in my 60s with 20-30 years left of meandering consumption despite working in some low-mid tier white collar bureaucratic function' view of life just means the whole system is creaking at the seams. I'm personally post-having to work due to hitting a good tech exit + some crypto shenaningans, none of which I'd consider indicative of any particular value generation for society on my part or on the part of the capital I have, but atleast I'm self-funding.

Most governmental retirement systems picked their age thresholds when the human population pyramid was fundamentally a lot different, work was far more likely to be physically arduous, the elderly were better incorporated into the social fabric of their families (which has changed due to a plethora of reasons) and end of life medical care was far more palliative. However, since the expectation of retirement has now become a memetic social contract it's very hard to tell most people that they haven't really earned 15 years of cruises and progressive medical care.

Most governmental retirement systems picked their age thresholds when the human population pyramid was fundamentally a lot different, work was far more likely to be physically arduous, the elderly were better incorporated into the social fabric of their families (which has changed due to a plethora of reasons) and end of life medical care was far more palliative.

Yeah.

Sheer reality is programs are designed around outdated assumptions and what few updates have occurred have been outpaced by social and technological change.

I also suspect (can't prove) that the healthcare industry has adapted to maximize the amount of money it squeezes from elderly patients whose quality of life cannot be recovered.

Like, not even a joke. End-of-life care can cost 10-12k a month around here, and its not like these people are receiving major surgeries or rare experimental drugs or something.

So there's a perverse(?) incentive to keep someone just barely alive for another month to run up the bill. Maybe this helps make up for the losses from various nonpayers, maybe not. Its almost certainly a profit center.

Look, I'm not the type to tell people they shouldn't 'enjoy' retirement. But this concept of "consume the most frivolous luxuries imaginable for a decade or two and then hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of medical care to extent the worst period of your life by 10%" is a very new innovation, and probably not ideal for social thriving at large. I do believe that one would be better off using some of those funds seeding their offspring for longer-term success.

But a whole aging-industrial complex has sprung up that is exceedingly efficient at separating the elderly from the wealth they acquired over their lives. Maybe this is just how Secular Capitalism processes the concept of mortality right now.

End-of-life care can cost 10-12k a month around here, and its not like these people are receiving major surgeries or rare experimental drugs or something.

That was roughly the quote for my father when he was going downhill, not because of surgeries or drugs or an especially high-cost-of-living area, but because of staff; a "memory care" (think severe dementia) ward necessitates a low patient-to-nurse ratio 24/7.

whose quality of life cannot be recovered.

The point where he couldn't stay in a plain Skilled Nursing Facility ward was probably the same point where his quality of life went negative. Fortunately for him, his underlying problem was tumors that had metastasized to his brain, and there was only a week or two of that hell before the end. (His screams literally changed from "Help!" to "Hell!", which I like to hope was only due to his rapid loss of fine motor control making plosives impossible...)

I don't think anybody was keeping him alive during those last weeks due to perverse profit incentives, though, but rather just because delaying death is just what doctors and nurses do. By this time his treatment for otherwise-potentially-lethal problems had bought him a happy decade or two of borrowed time vs thyroid issues (he got to meet his grandkids!), a few years vs heart issues (he got to live with his grandkids! they got to play in the playscape he helped build!), and a year or two (all but a few months of which were high-to-decent quality of life; he got to take his grandkids to Disney World!) vs the cancer itself. Maybe we don't know when to quit fighting, but quitting too late is at least still a lot better than quitting too early.

I think what's happening is that we've been getting better and better at curing disease, despite making next to no progress, not even really trying to progress, against decay. When we manage to cure half of all death, our foe the Gompertz-Makeham law says that only buys us an average of 8 years ... and not 8 years of extra youth, just 8 years of extra dotage after having survived death. At some point that has diminishing returns, but we're not used to making decisions about diminishing returns; when we were curing things like smallpox there just weren't any to speak of.

Look, I'm not the type to tell people they shouldn't 'enjoy' retirement. But this concept of "consume the most frivolous luxuries imaginable for a decade or two and then hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of medical care to extent the worst period of your life by 10%" is a very new innovation, and probably not ideal for social thriving at large.

How common is this though? My grandparents did this but my parents aren't and relatively few of my friends parents are. They keep working part time (despite not needing to financially) and spend relatively little on consumption.

Is this perhaps a generational thing where it's true for older retirees and "younger" people are adjusting to something healthier and more productive than just rotting for 20-30 years?

Sure, the end of life care is a real problem that needs to be reined in but the picture that is sometimes painted here of retirees doesn't ring true to me.

My sample size is biased by living in an area where people tend to move when they retire.

But the entire cruise industry, RV Industry, and the existence of Margaritaville resorts is upheld by the consumption spending of Boomers.

I've always thought medical expenses tend to be the biggest drain on the elderly, plus also strong cottage industries have erupted around scamming the elderly due to their status as easy targets holding a massive chunk of the capital.

Massive chunks of capital, diminished mental capacity, a poor grasp on how new technology works... and often a more trusting nature than average.

And they often have people in their lives who are capable of looking out for them, but the sheer volume of scam attempts means they likely cannot catch them all, and it only takes one or two to get through to do some real damage. And these are highly adapted organisms, your poor grandma isn't equipped to fight off the barrage.

Sad to say it, but when you have an overstuffed wealth Piñata like the U.S. boomer class, everyone, even their loved ones, is licking their chops to crack it open and snag as much of it as they can.

And being more direct, the domestic political world, both sides of the ideological divide, is rife with this. The benign grifters who use ragebait to maintain an audience, and the more slimy types running nonprofits, PACs, and indeed running whole election campaigns solely designed to get elderly people to donate large sums of money on the vague idea that it would help achieve some nice-sounding political objective.

And that leaves aside the actual politicians already in office.

Trump has managed to tap into it to great success, but there are small scale imitators everywhere.

Was I a parasite during covid? I worked for a company that did HVAC basically only for restaurants, and took a furlough because unemployment would be better than the very limited hours available. I don't think I was- I think I got my fair share after the government tried to take it from me.

Is a trust fund kids a parasite? I don't think they are, I think they're a bribe for their (grand)parents to work hard and build wealth.

Are retirees at the normal age parasites, with medicare and social security and a 401k/IRA? What about, say, someone who worked a blue collar job for the railroad and accepted terrible hours in exchange for early retirement? I think both of these examples are more or less fair but can easily get excessive.

t leads me, specifically, to ask: HOW MANY PEOPLE DO WE HAVE IN THIS COUNTRY PULLING THESE KINDS OF SHENANIGANS. There have to be known strategies that are shared amongst groups on how to follow these paths, exploit edge cases, take advantage of lax enforcement, or otherwise slip into niches that allow you to live 'above your means' for some period of time if not indefinitely. On the individual level its rational. On the population level, the equilibrium can get dangerously unsustainable. Have we crossed that tipping point? I don't know. Feels like it to me.

A lot. There's entire communities living off of disability fraud, welfare abuse(haredi jews and FLDS with a side of ghetto blacks- but for the latter group, the women most actually work and the men mostly don't get welfare), professional indebtedness, and charitable scams. Talk to people who work in a collections department for securitized debt- they'll have some stories. I think it's important to note that these people, mostly, have very low per capita consumption- that is, their standards of living aren't that great. The examples you've picked are the exception. Trying to wrest trivial benefits from poor people is, at some point, just not really worth it anymore.

I think we should integrate over a person's life. You took a brief break in working due to the reckless actions of EcoHealth Alliance. That shouldn't negate the entirety of the rest of your life.

Otherwise every full time student or sick person taking a break to recover is a parasite. That seems too harsh to always be judging on an instantaneous basis. We need integrals, not derivatives for this measurement.

There's this right-wing idea that you can't really store value long term -- that is, unless you're working right now, you're a parasite on those who are. By that, anyone retired is a parasite, as are trust fund kids. It's a pretty harsh view of the world, though, and leads logically to putting old people on ice floes. But if you accept stored value, you can come up with better answers for the question.

I think it's important to note that these people, mostly, have very low per capita consumption- that is, their standards of living aren't that great.

They really don't have low consumption, and per-household is probably the better measure. Their housing and utilities are paid for by the state, sometimes in some VERY high cost of living areas like Manhattan. Their kids are taken care of by the state, and they pay no taxes to offset this. Their food is paid for by the state. Often enough they even have the latest tech gadgets, though I have no idea how they pull that off.

they even have the latest tech gadgets, though I have no idea how they pull that off

Under the table cash work. Or straight up black market work. Selling tax free single cigarettes, weed, whatever. Double dipping government benefits and some irregular work.

Add debt(often on very bad terms).

Was I a parasite during covid? I worked for a company that did HVAC basically only for restaurants, and took a furlough because unemployment would be better than the very limited hours available.

We were all kinda parasites, except (contingent on which state you were in) there was no actual choice to do otherwise.

I actually worked through Covid, and it was a rough time money-wise but my boss ALSO saw fit to give me an 'unearned' bonus for sticking it out, which I have been eternally grateful for and have tried to pay back in terms of loyalty and continued productive work.

As with many things, I wonder if programs like the PPP loans (which got AGGRESSIVELY exploited) alerted many 'normal' people to how easy it is to squeeze benefits from the government if you're willing to lie a little. And so in the wake of Covid, as with many things, the standard for 'normal' behavior were shifted in ways that have NOT 'reverted' even as the rules returned to normal.

Re the Little Red Hen, if she had built a device which allowed her, with 1% of her previous efforts, to produce a pile of bread the size of Kilimanjaro, I would think she would be morally obligated to share it.

I would agree, provided the other animals accepted they were inferior to the Little Red Hen and accepted their place as lesser beings relative to her.

I do not believe that it is possible for one human, or animal acting as a narrative stand-in for a human, to be inferior to, or a lesser being relative to, another; this applies even if there is a difference in their abilities.

Then what good is your conception of equality? In what actual sense can two people ever be equal?

Equal in dignity or by religious creed perhaps.

Yet that's still a redistributionist philosophy at its core- to what degree do we limit Abel to serve Cain?

(Realistically, this is generally related to how much murder power Cain has.)

No. That's where it starts, and from there we go to ever lesser thresholds until I'm obliged to part with >45% of my salary even though I own no property and have no savings and have two dependents and nobody else paying into the household and no welfare helping out either and costs of living keep rising, but obviously I am morally obligated to prop up welfare systems that give millions of immigrants cause to come here to slack off and the same for millions of native leeches, and the redistributionists call this "solidarity".

No, the little red genius should ask an appropriate price for her transformative invention. There is more than enough perverse incentives in this world.

Slippery slopes are very easy to see once you've slipped halfway down, aren't they?

You'd think so, but welfare advocates keep assuring me that there is no slope.

They’d be saying the same thing even if they saw it themselves first hand. They’re too committed to their privileged free riding to part with it at the expense of logic or moral consistency.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his-"

"NO."

I have never hit the upvote button harder.

AFAI can recall, anyways.

I think the market price for bread would drop to the point where a rat could probably afford a loaf or two from a few hours of whatever work rats can do.

And if she achieved THOSE kinds of efficiency gains, the very least we could do to reward her is make her a multi billionaire.

And if the Device can do anything the rats can do?

A sudden increase in the demand for cats.

Keep in mind that the rats are a stand-in for human beings.

I took the "device that can do anything the rats can do" reference to be aimed at AGI, which to me means the value of humans suddenly plummets to zero-if-not-negative.

So are the cats.

This should be mandatory independent of rats.

Why? The rat, the cat, the dog, and the pig did nothing to make the pile of bread any more than they did the loaf. They were given the opportunity to buy in through sweat equity, and they refused. If they want any of that bread, they can trade the hen something of value for it. Otherwise she can sell the patent for her device to Bimbo and live in luxury while the others get the just reward for their indolence, which is nothing.

You’re going to die.

Go on vacation.

I was single and after getting my BS and Masters I was ready to eat my slice of the American pie. Instead I still work retail and am now in debt. I said fuck this system about a year after I graduated and now owe student loans and credit debt. I defaulted on the cards. And I’m going to be paying my student loans probably for literally ever.

Now I just got engaged (grammas ring!) and all of a sudden care again. She makes as much as me. We’ll both eventually make more (my American dream isn’t dead - just angrily smoldering).

We still went on vacation this year. A once in a lifetime for both of us (ahem? once we make more maybe this trip will seem quaint) trip on the Washington north near Olympic National Park and on the Oregan coast, right on the beach, where I proposed.

I could’ve taken that 8k and done something else with it. We could’ve saved more (currently we’re saving about 10k a year … we have about 115k in in total savings between my 401k and her divorce) or put it towards a debt.

But we’re paying that debt - and what if she dies tomorrow? Or me? Or one of her kids (which will ruin her for years)?

Go on vacation man.

Go to the Oregan coast and walk out at midnight and feel it.

You’re going to die.

Not if I can help it.

At least, I don't plan to die on the standard schedule, barring absolutely unavoidable risks.

Now I just got engaged (grammas ring!) and all of a sudden care again. She makes as much as me. We’ll both eventually make more (my American dream isn’t dead - just angrily smoldering).

So you may not know the lore that I've occasionally mentioned in here.

The last time I went on an extended vacation, 5 years ago, it was with my Girlfriend at the time. I proposed to her on that trip. And ultimately she broke up with me, cheated on me, and left two weeks before the wedding.

And after dealing with all the fallout from that, I've kinda been focused on getting myself stabilized and rendering myself safe from most financial shocks (like having the person you were splitting the bills with up and leave... after you bought a house together).

I'm happy to take a vacation, if I find someone else worth sharing it with. But I've got a healthy, sustainable routine, a good group of friends, and activities I enjoy (like motteposting) so she'd have to be WORTH all that.

Well that fucking sucks - solo Negroni themed vacation it is!!

I’ll be alive long enough to miss the immortality loop by a day.

Damn. Sorry for what happened to you.

A while ago my YouTube feed pointed me something interesting. It struck me because I’ve had the same feeling when I look around at others. Most of us are conscripted into a system that grinds down on us by thinking if don’t submit ourselves to that economic cog in the machine, we’re going to be miserable because of it.

I could quit by job right now and drive about two hours to go back home and work in the agriculture business my extended family has a large footprint in, and be very comfortable making a solid 5 figures every month; insulted from all the bs people deal with working for others. I don’t because I’ve got other plans and life goals I want to pursue that I find more fulfilling and meaningful. Maybe I’m just a dumb ass but I think that’s the better overall approach to take with life.

Am I a parasite? I got into a car accident about five years ago that was my fault, and I received a payout from my insurance company that was grossly disproportionate to the premiums I paid during the time I used that carrier. I was effectively leeching off of every other policyholder who didn't file a claim during that time period. Thanks to the payout, I was able to buy a new car within a week of the accident. And yes, I could have afforded the new car otherwise; I wouldn't have been financially destitute, or even had to take out a loan. And there are probably people who were with that company for years who never made a single claim who were paying for my carelessness. But nobody would realistically call me a parasite; I purchased a product meant to cover exactly that situation, and I used the product for what it was for.

Now imagine a scenario where every insurance policy includes a clause where the policy doesn't cover any driving done within 24 hours of an inch or more of snowfall. Would you risk driving in that situation? Maybe you would in some circumstances, but you'd have to think long and hard about whether that trip was necessary, and I guarantee that Ubers would be hard to find and very expensive. How would this affect the economy? A lot of people say that money makes the world go round, but it would be more accurate to say that insurance makes the world go round. As a civil defense attorney, my salary is paid almost exclusively by insurance companies who are governed by extremely complicated webs of policies and splits and reinsurance and a bunch of other fun stuff dating back to the 1940s in some cases and involving policies that no one would have thought they'd still be paying claims on in 2025.

When we talk about social welfare programs, what we're really talking about is insurance. You may say that you work hard, etc., etc. and will never need these policies, but that's about as ingenuous as saying that you're a really good driver and thus don't need liability insurance. You may say that the people who receive the greatest benefit from welfare policies pay the least into it, but how much you receive in insurance payouts is only loosely related to how much you pay in. A guy who crashes a brand new Mercedes a week after driving it off the lot and bought the policy at the same time as the car is getting much more than someone who insured luxury vehicles with the same company for decades, yet no one would say that he is lucky for this having happened because he really got his money's worth. And saying that it's compulsory isn't a great argument either, because a lot of insurance law is more compulsory than you think. Insurance markets are highly regulated; I have a small bookshelf in my office filled with publications discussing all the regulations involving insurance coverage in Pennsylvania, mostly as they apply to large companies whose own welfare you rely on without even realizing it. Believe me, the insurance companies would have left half the Fortune 500 out to dry if regulators hadn't told them they couldn't.

Which brings me to my larger point: Deciding that someone is a parasite is more complicated than you think, and is usually more determined by innate biases than anything objective. Consider that most conservatives consider themselves in favor of "law and order" and all the popular implications that expression has. I don't think it's too controversial to state that poorer areas of cities have more crime than wealthier ones. I also don't think it's controversial to assume that residents of lower crime areas tend to contribute a disproportionate amount to the police budget through taxes. Yet I've never once heard a conservative suggest that cities should direct more police resources toward patrolling wealthy communities and less towards poorer communities with higher crime rates. And I've never heard any conservative suggest that residents of poor neighborhoods are parasites because they get more policing for their dollar than people who live elsewhere.

OF course, this is because there is a broad societal consensus that crime is a bad thing at that society as a whole benefits from lower crime rates everywhere. We can say the same thing about most white collar crime, which wasn't even recognized as crime until relatively recently. In the early days of the Republic, if you went to the authorities because you suspected your accountant was stealing from you, the response would be along the lines of "That's a shame. You should consider finding another accountant." Of course, these days we expect that if we entrust people with out money that they won't just steal it from us, and that companies have certain responsibilities to consumers that they can't just straight up lie, and all kinds of little other things that we take for granted these days. If a poor person buys a bottle of cheap whiskey that in the past would have been adulterated beyond recognition but these days will result in no harm greater than a hangover, we don't say that he's freeloading off of taxes used to fund the FDA. And when Donald Trump files six bankruptcies for companies he owns, conservatives don't call him a parasite because in the 19th Century legislatures recognized that limiting the liability of investors was better for the economy than making the holder of a single share liable for the whole kit and kaboodle, and that a formalized system of bankruptcy was better than throwing people into debtor's prison or hounding them for the rest of their lives. The losers are obviously the creditors who are left holding the bag, but to a certain extent the possibility of default is priced into the transaction. In other words, we all pay a little bit for the fuckups of irresponsible business owners, even if we ourselves are paragons of success.

Insofar as social welfare programs are insurance, they're among the most efficient kind of insurance, since the risk pool includes everybody. Since it's compulsory, we already recognize that it's not going to be the kind of gold-plated payout one would expect from a private carrier. When I totaled my car, the insurance company was, by law, required to find listings for similar cars and pay market value. By contrast, even something as explicitly tied to how much you pay into it as unemployment insurance only nets a percentage of your total loss. Are there downsides? Of course. Some people will ruthlessly try to min-max their benefits, and others will engage in outright fraud, and there is an omnipresent moral hazard that reliance on welfare will lead to dependence. But these same arguments can be made about private insurance. Yet I hear no one arguing that there's something problematic about people who try to maximize their insurance payout through legal means of getting them to enforce the contract, I never hear suggestions that the existence of fraud means we should get rid of insurance altogether, and I never hear people arguing for self-insurance to reduce moral hazard (yes, people with insurance are more careless about certain things than those without, and those with insurance often only take certain precautions because the insurance companies require it).

When we talk about social welfare programs, what we're really talking about is insurance.

Not until we allow actuaries to adjust the amount we have to pay based on our risk profile.

When we talk about social welfare programs, what we're really talking about is insurance.

I truely thought this line was dead. Ive already seen socialists use the fact that everyone knows this isnt true to make fun of their opponents. "Take your government hands of my medicare, lmao trumpies really have no idea how the world works. They totally didnt just believe the lie our predecessors sold them, no, this is totally evidence that we are the ones you should listen to". But I guess theres always someone. How do you exist at a TheMotte-level of political awareness into the present day?

It is in fact very easy to tell that there is parasitism here. You just need to compare the "premiums" with the expected pay-out. This could in theory involve complicated statistics, but fortunately government programms dont even pretend to take riskfactors into account (in fact, politicians are often proud that they dont), and the amount you pay is determined almost entirely by your income, which the payouts are often inversely proportional to.

The presence of some insurance effect does not negate redistribution which numerically dwarfs it. The point, though valid in principle, is irrelevant to complaints made about actually existing government budgets.

When we talk about social welfare programs, what we're really talking about is insurance. You may say that you work hard, etc., etc. and will never need these policies, but that's about as ingenuous as saying that you're a really good driver and thus don't need liability insurance. You may say that the people who receive the greatest benefit from welfare policies pay the least into it, but how much you receive in insurance payouts is only loosely related to how much you pay in.

I think that's definitely a model of welfare that can be used to describe a high-trust society, but I don't think it's particularly accurate in defection-heavy, low trust societies that exist today. In the UK for example, half a million people between the ages of 16 and 24 have literally never worked (and are not in education). Their welfare payments are not insurance payouts for people who have paid in but who have fallen on hard times. They have never paid in, and they've been claiming from the day they were eligible. And of the entire working age population, a full 25% are on benefits.

I'd be fine if a had a literal insurance system of unemployment, provided by the private sector and which people had to pay premiums to receive. What we have is a simple transfer from the (shrinking) productive part of the population to the unproductive part, and we pretend it's an insurance system.

Unemployment is similar to insurance in the US. You pay in every paycheck, and get defined benefits for a defined period of time if you lose your job.

Other welfare programs are different of course where there’s no need to pay in.

But yeah you should probably leave the UK it sounds awful there for a number of reasons.

But yeah you should probably leave the UK it sounds awful there for a number of reasons.

That seems like somewhat of an overreaction, like Reddit advice threads that always conclude 'you should leave your boyfriend'.

I'm not going to quit my job, abandon my family and friends, sell my house and uproot my wife and child because the unemployed welfare system is too generous. As much as we moan, the UK is still one of the richest and safest countries in the world.

Part of the iterated problem is that some people will leave, and those are the people most willing to take a risk and make sacrifices for a better life, which in the long run reasonably approximates more successful people. We are now witnessing the result of some four hundred years of this process.

Unfortunately, we've run out of places to go.

Yet I've never once heard a conservative suggest that cities should direct more police resources toward patrolling wealthy communities and less towards poorer communities with higher crime rates.

That’s how it used to work, then civil rights groups spent twenty years bitching and moaning about how minority communities were under-policed. When it finally changed they spent the next thirty years bitching and moaning about how minority communities were overpoliced because it turns out policing involves arresting people, and most of the criminals in those communities were locals.

For the record, that's more on the civil rights groups than the people they're supposed to represent. Wanting less policing is a minority position among all groups, notably blacks. Most are happy with the current levels, and with the exception of Asian Americans, "more policing" is more favorable than "less policing."

In other words, a group that was entitled to government assistance that would largely be paid for by someone else argued that they didn't need as much of it as was publicly assumed. In any other context, the conservative reaction would be to hold them up as paragons of virtue who were willing to be self-reliant and solve their own problems without the assistance of government. But in this particular context that was totally unacceptable, and they insisted that these groups accept as much of their assistance as they deemed necessary.

I don't think so. As far as I can tell, what progressives want from a police force is to limit the negative externalities of crime to the victims without limiting the negative externalities to the perpetrators (optionally, provided the perpetrators are of the appropriate skin tone). Because these two goals are obviously mutually exclusive (yes, having an active police presence in a neighbourhood might discourage crime, but in practice the only way to deal with criminals is by arresting them and sending them to prison), progressives are stuck between a rock and a hard place. It's a bit like a thermostat: when the rate of crime gets high enough, they will complain about police officers being too busy sitting on their asses eating donuts to actually do their jobs. When it drops, they will immediately pivot to complaining about police brutality, "driving while black", BLM and so on. Sometimes they'll even manage to complain about under- and over-policing at the same time, somehow.

It is possible to underpolice and overpolice at the same time. It's the equivalent of anarcho-tyranny. You can underpolice against criminals and overpolice against basically innocent people (which is what "driving while black" means). You can even overpolice and underpolice against criminals at the same time if you don't catch enough of them but are brutal towards the ones you do catch.

Of course it's possible. I just don't really believe overpolicing is happening in the US to any significant degree. Progressive complaints about alleged overpolicing in the US generally tend to boil down to incredulity over the idea that different ethnic groups could commit crimes at different rates, and hence that the different arrest rates between different ethnic groups must be indicative of systemic bias (and hence overpolicing) on the part of the police.

Unfortunately in the meantime the CIA had decided they wanted to be their own independent nation state, and determined that the best way to do that was to flood a bunch of communities with cheap cocaine. So you had urban drug paramilitaries forming, and those areas started to become everyone’s problem.

I'm not sure what the hell you're talking about.

The CIA created the crack cocaine epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The twofold purpose was to destroy black Americans, and to create a massive war chest free of Congressional oversight. Then they did it to white Americans 20 years later with the fentanyl epidemic and blamed China (and now recently Venezuela). People with their heads firmly lodged up their asses refer to this as a “conspiracy theory”, a term the CIA invented to shame people for paying attention.

Then they did it to white Americans 20 years later with the fentanyl epidemic and blamed China (and now recently Venezuela). People with their heads firmly lodged up their asses refer to this as a “conspiracy theory”

Something about proactively providing evidence for inflammatory claims.

Is this before or after Yakub created white people?

Depends if you're a Reformist or Orthodox NOI member.

While it might be morally offensive that these spendthrift slackers aren’t working as hard as you are, economically it doesn’t matter very much. You can think of your own prosperity in terms of absolute (nominal) numbers, but the real value of your wealth matters a lot more, and the real value of your wealth depends on your relative position in the economy- what fraction of the total economy you own.

If all government aid to these people were switched off overnight and your 27% tax bill were reduced to zero, you would own 27% more of the economy than you do now, but government spending is such a large part of the economy that the total size of the economy would be much less, possibly more than 27% less, which would cancel out your gain. So you wouldn’t be much richer, you might be poorer, and your relative status would be much lower because the median income would skyrocket (because the parasite class would be dead).

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but government spending is such a large part of the economy that the total size of the economy would be much less, possibly more than 27% less, which would cancel out your gain

I'm not sure how you convinced yourself into believing that. The government spending share of the economy, at least the amount of it spent by the dependent class, is being spent bidding up goods in services against the producing class. In no first order way way would ending welfare reduce the economic power of the productive, it would plausibly increase the per dollar power by draining some of the competing demand. That's before considerations of whether the unproductive might decide/be able to become productive if the money spigot was turned off. Now there are second and third order consequences like possible disruption caused by the dependency class reacting in anger, or the reduced demand reduce the protective's total wage(this is the strongest of a weak set of arguments).

You are confusing GDP with the real economy. Real economic value is increasing production so that the per unit cost decreases (ie over all wealth has increased). Government spending only helps the real economy to the extent it is increasing productivity. The items OP described are in fact not doing any of that—instead the government borrows and gives money to slackers as you put it.

While it might be morally offensive that these spendthrift slackers aren’t working as hard as you are, economically it doesn’t matter very much.

Of course it does. The luxury of the spendthrift slackers is paid for by the industrious.

If all government aid to these people were switched off overnight and your 27% tax bill were reduced to zero, you would own 27% more of the economy than you do now, but government spending is such a large part of the economy that the total size of the economy would be much less, possibly more than 27% less, which would cancel out your gain.

This is basically the Broken Windows theory writ large.

"The luxury of the spendthrift slackers is paid for by the industrious" is not an economic argument, it's a moral one. I don't see the resemblance to Broken Windows- can you clarify?

"The luxury of the spendthrift slackers is paid for by the industrious" is not an economic argument, it's a moral one.

It's an economic fact. Someone's paying for the spendthrift slackers; it sure as hell ain't them; it's people who are working.

The argument that the transfer payments from the industrious to spendthrift slackers are somehow contributing to the economy such that if they were cut off you would be poorer is the broken windows argument. The core of the fallacy is that forcing people to move money around is somehow resulting in prosperity.

It's an economic fact. Someone's paying for the spendthrift slackers; it sure as hell ain't them; it's people who are working.

Statistically, it's whoever buys T-bills. The government's budget is mostly debt.

Is it? We run steady deficits that we debt fund, but I’m pretty sure the majority of each annual budget is still paid by taxes.

Yep, for FY2024 outlays were 6.8T on revenues of 4.9T, so while the deficit was enormous, it was not over 50%.

Figures, I got a bunch in T-bills. (The spendthrift slackers don't)

A fact is not an argument. "If you don't stay home old people may get COVID" is a medical fact, but it is not obvious from that fact what the best course of societal action is.

But anyway, I thought you meant Broken Window policing. The difference between this and the Broken Window fallacy is that these people aren't actually inflicting any damage. They're spending huge amounts of money on frivolous stuff (which is why OP is offended), and that money is circulating around so that high earners can earn it again. The speed of money through the economy drives economic growth, and while a perfectly laissez-faire system might very well have a higher speed of money, switching to such a system, even if it were phased in over a few years, would cause a huge economic contraction. You might object that, as with broken windows, the 27% tax bill is imposing an opportunity cost, that taking OP's money so someone on "stress leave" can buy Tinkerbell statues prevents him from inventing a better battery or something, but A) not giving the Tinkerbell salesman that money might prevent HIM from inventing the same battery and B)the vast majority of taxes taken collected from the industrious and squandered by the poor on frivolous stuff actually impose the opportunity cost of the industrious not being able to squander the money on frivolous stuff himself. So it all boils down to who "deserves" the money, and all talk of desert is moral disputation. Since no one agrees on morality anymore, there can be no moral disputation on a wide scale and so people need to either make peace with the current system or wield it to their benefit.

The fiscal multiplier is a highly controversial hard to prove theory.

But yes there is no one literally breaking glass. But the question is whether dollars are flowing to their highest and best use. Taking from people who’ve proven themselves to be generally productive and giving the money to people who appear unproductive argues that it is less likely the money is being spent on its highest and best use (and therefore likely regards economic growth). Moreover there is deadweight loss on tax and transfer.

Of course, maybe the distributive effect is worth the economic slowdown but that’s different from saying tax and transfer somehow accelerates economic growth.

The difference between this and the Broken Window fallacy is that these people aren't actually inflicting any damage.

They are costing money for no gain.

They're spending huge amounts of money on frivolous stuff (which is why OP is offended), and that money is circulating around so that high earners can earn it again.

Again, this is just the broken window fallacy. If the high earners hadn't had it taken from the in the first place, they could spend it themselves without having to earn it again.

I'll continue this with you if you explain your understanding of the difference between an economic and a moral argument. You keep stating that the situation isn't fair, which is a moral complaint, not an economic one. I don't dispute that it isn't fair, I dispute that if it were abolished everyone currently alive would get richer.

You keep stating that the situation isn't fair

In fact, I have said nothing in this subthread about fairness.

I don't dispute that it isn't fair, I dispute that if it were abolished everyone currently alive would get richer.

Nobody's claiming that. Obviously the people who are spendthrift slackers would get poorer.

That relies on the presumption that conservatives seem to have where government spending is nothing but a deadweight loss. You see this in things like "Tax Independence Day", which is the day, usually in late May, where the average American "Stops working for the government and starts working for himself". Except this "working for the government" is really just financing one's own consumption. The idea is as ridiculous as "Mortgage Independence Day", when you "stop working for the bank and start working for yourself". Well, I do pay the bank, but I'm the one living in the house, not the bank manager. By the same token, I spend the first five months of the year driving on highways and sending kids to public school and enjoying police protection and all the other things that are provided by the government. And yes, this includes all the social welfare programs that some assume are for other people, but aren't really; I voluntarily spend a lot of money on insurance that I hope to god I never have to use, and social programs are no different. Are private insurance companies a deadweight economic loss?

Except this "working for the government" is really just financing one's own consumption.

No, transfer payments are financing other people's consumption.

The idea is as ridiculous as "Mortgage Independence Day", when you "stop working for the bank and start working for yourself".

Not ridiculous at all; there's a reason there used to be mortgage-burning parties.

And yes, this includes all the social welfare programs that some assume are for other people, but aren't really; I voluntarily spend a lot of money on insurance that I hope to god I never have to use, and social programs are no different. Are private insurance companies a deadweight economic loss?

Social welfare programs are called "insurance" in order to bolster arguments such as this, but they really aren't. For one thing, if they were like private insurance (other than extremely regulated forms like health insurance), there would be some actual underwriting involved. Premiums would have some relationship to risk. There would likely be policy limits. Incurring a loss deliberately would be fraud; failing to mitigate a loss would also result in loss of benefits. They don't look much like insurance at all, except when insurance is turned through regulation into a social welfare program.

Of course it doesn't resemble private insurance because it only exists to provide coverage that isn't economically feasible for the private market to provide. You listed a number of features that you see in private insurance markets, but none of them are truly essential. You mention premiums based on risk profile and underwriting, but if you found out tomorrow that your car insurance company was charging the same rates to everybody, or charging based on income, you might question their business sense but you wouldn't think that you didn't have insurance. Same with deliberate losses and loss mitigation. Not all policies have loss mitigation requirements (and when they do they're kind of difficult to enforce unless it's something easy and obvious), and the kind of fraud you mention isn't an issue the way the system is currently set up. People aren't intentionally quitting good jobs so they can collect welfare payments, and studies have shown that benefit amounts haven't affected the total number of claims since AFDC was at its peak in 1975.

The whole moral hazard aspect is priced into the system. People intentionally cause losses on auto and homeowners policies because, in many cases, the insurance payout is greater than the amount the asset is worth. If you lose your job and go on public benefits, you aren't getting anywhere near what that job paid, and most of those benefits are going to be restricted to vouchers for specific items. Hard insurance fraud wouldn't be a crime if the maximum you could get was a $3,000 voucher to use at a dealership. This is why I'm not sure what you were getting at with respect to policy limits, since public benefits have pretty clear policy limits, and they're often much lower than the actual cost of the misfortune. At the other end of the spectrum, I would add that making a claim for public benefits is significantly more difficult than making a private insurance claim. Some programs can take months.

Yes you’ve distinguished insurance (ie something that makes economic sense for both the insured and the insurer) with a government subsidy (ie something that on net does not make economic sense).

If the social safety net story actually made people take more risky bets that on balance produced materially higher returns, why couldn’t private insurance cover it?

insurance (ie something that makes economic sense for both the insured and the insurer)

As Saint Luigi would tell you, it's only supposed to make economic sense for the insurer.

And Luigi would be confusing health insurance (a weird chimera) with real insurance. Take life insurance. Premiums aren’t that expensive. But they help protect a family from an unexpected death. That is, both the insured and insurer are better off. That is, the insured are trading off EV for downside protection (which makes sense giving diminishing marginal returns) while insurer is making the EV positive play and provided there isn’t system bias should come out ahead.

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And we're supposed to believe that the welfare system is insurance, despite about the only aspect that matches is that some people get paid and others get the shaft.

You listed a number of features that you see in private insurance markets, but none of them are truly essential.

They're essential to insurance being a good idea to purchase.

People aren't intentionally quitting good jobs so they can collect welfare payments

People are certainly avoiding getting legal jobs and working under the table so they can continue to collect welfare payments.

They're essential to insurance being a good idea to purchase.

In theory, yes, but have you ever questioned an insurance company's underwriting standards before purchase?

People are certainly avoiding getting legal jobs and working under the table so they can continue to collect welfare payments.

And those people are prosecuted for fraud. Here in PA, the OIG has an entire section dedicated to public benefits fraud that prosecuted between 30 and 100 cases per month, most of them felonies, most of them for making these exact kinds of misrepresentations regarding eligibility requirements. The liberal appointees running these agencies don't shy away from this, and they talk in press releases about how fraudsters divert funding from people who actually need it. People complain about welfare queens that they know, but if they have specific knowledge of fraud they should report it, just as they would any other crime, not complain about it on the internet.

And those people are prosecuted for fraud. Here in PA, the OIG has an entire section dedicated to public benefits fraud that prosecuted between 30 and 100 cases per month, most of them felonies, most of them for making these exact kinds of misrepresentations regarding eligibility requirements. The liberal appointees running these agencies don't shy away from this, and they talk in press releases about how fraudsters divert funding from people who actually need it.

This is just an anecdote, but my father happened to work in another state's equivalent department, and he once (three or four years ago, I think) complained to me about how his bosses would regularly fail to prosecute the fraudsters that it was his job to uncover. IIRC, he said that over multiple years he nagged his bosses to prosecute one particular person, and eventually the culprit was diagnosed with cancer and his bosses used that excuse to close down the investigation as bad PR.

But this was in a different state, and he may be biased against the department. But on the third hand it's the same state as @The_Nybbler's.

In theory, yes, but have you ever questioned an insurance company's underwriting standards before purchase?

I haven't actually purchased any insurance I wasn't required to.

In the short term that’s true, but we’ve run lots of experiments to see if government can allocate capital more efficiently than the market over the last century, and the answer seems pretty clear. Once things had time to shake out, the economy would almost certainly be larger. There are lots of reasons to support government taxing and spending such as cool jets existing or reducing wealth inequality/pasification of the proles, but greater GDP is not one of them.

Government spending on these sorts of programs is so huge that anyone old enough to be posting here would not live long enough to see things shake out if things ever switched, assuming they survived the violence that such a transition would probably involve. If we were setting up a society from scratch, then the current system would be something to avoid, certainly. Having come as far down this road as we have, though, any benefits from switching would fall mainly on generations to come. That might be a great thing, but "duty to future generations" is a moral, not an economic argument. I'm not defending the morality of the system, just explaining that it's not the simple math problem OP seems to think it is.

Furthermore, all of the experiments (I assume you're talking about free-market vs socialist countries) have converged on wild government spending. Unless you say that REAL capitalism has never been tried, then maybe 90% of the population recirculating the wealth produced by the remaining 10% is just how it works? Maybe that's the true triumph of post-scarcity industrial victory: welfare grift and BS jobs for the lucky majority and productive, morally-pure, toil for the unfortunate few.

It would take a while to switch over, but definitely not on the order of 60 years.

Small states have definitely been tried, such as the American state before income tax, and it went pretty great from a growth perspective. The fact that no one in the modern age runs a tiny state doesn’t mean we can’t analyze it. We can look at the things run privately and the things run by governments and see which ones contribute more to GDP growth. There are basically no profitable government run enterprises. There are vast private industries serving government priorities, but that’s not really positive sum in the same way. All I’m objecting to is the idea that government spending is somehow essential to the economy and that we would all be poorer without it. Obviously switching costs would be significant if it was done suddenly, but it wouldn’t have to be. Besides “what would happen if this went away tomorrow” is the wrong question. We should be thinking about how things would look in steady state.

I’m actually in favor of a tax and spend redistributive state that fields an army. I just think pretending we get gdp growth because of it is silly.

The argument isn’t even to end everything right away; it’s to slowly reduce benefits. For example, let’s say you put the subsidies back on for Bill and Shelly. Perhaps you do it at 80% of prior benefit with mandated reductions in subsidy of the 1/4 of the remaining amount for the next four years. This is less of a shock to the Bills and Shelly’s of the world while still cutting off non productive spending.

We could start doing things like eliminating benefit cliffs; start raising slowly the age of SS; do more work requirements, etc.

It doesn’t have to change over night. But the goal ought to be within 10-15 years to drastically reduce these programs.

Government spending on these sorts of programs is so huge that anyone old enough to be posting here would not live long enough to see things shake out if things ever switched, assuming they survived the violence that such a transition would probably involve.

"We've created such a monstrosity that if you dare take it down, there will be violence. Also it's such a monstrosity that it will come down eventually" isn't the knock-down argument you think it is. The best time to stop this thing was before it started, the second best time is now. And yes, people posting here would see the advantages, because a lot of people posting here have a lot of working life left. The big losers would be the Boomers and some of the older Xers; I expect the Millennials are going to take away Social Security from the younger Xers anyway.

An extra $15k-20k a year is NOT going to bankrupt anyone worth a low seven figures.

I don't see seven figures anywhere in this.

The pension is easily worth that.

Someone making $50000 a year for 20 years will have made 7 figures, but we don't count that as "being worth seven figures". You have no reason to think they would be able to accumulate enough of that pension to reach seven figures.

Net present value of their pension at the current fed funds rate is about 3 million. Stocks and flows of money can be converted back and forth. If you consider the fact that most retirees will aim to draw down their nest egg, we should actually count their equivalent net worth as higher. On top of that they haven’t even started to draw social security. The total value of their government benefits is probably around 5 million when compared with someone seeking to get the same income from their own investments.

If the present value of their pension is 3 million and the total value of their government benefits is 5 million, that means that the value of their non-pension government benefits is 2 million. Unless a lot of those benefits are specific to them, that means that every similar retiree has $2 million of present value government benefits, which makes the claim "they have seven figures" useless to communicate information.

I expect the PV of Social Security benefits is actually quite a bit less than $1M, especially for early retirees.

I have to do rough calculations of this exact thing for work and reads economic expert reports that use more sophisticated analyses than I do. The only scenario where this number would matter would be if one of them dies and there's a wrongful death suit and you have to calculate future earnings. Other than that, the pension has no present value beyond the number on the check. Assuming for the sake of argument that the pension is Bill's, if he dies tomorrow it's gone. There may be some kind of survivor benefit but I don't run across these often, and when I do they're usually a lump-sum payment; it can be taken as an annuity in theory, but since it's limited to the widow if she dies the children get nothing, so it's better to just take the cash up front. If you're interested, the way we calculate the lost pension earnings is to simply multiply the benefit amount by life expectancy. Even the pros do this because it's assumed that the beneficiary will be able to get a return on investment similar to the annual adjustment. The upshot of this is that a relatively generous SS benefit of $2500/month taken at age 65 combined with a generous 20 year life expectancy only gets you up to $600,000, so yeah, quite a bit less. Pinging @Jiro and @whatihear.

A future income stream has value; there are standard ways to calculate it. Yes, we have to take into account thing like inflation and the chance of death, but those can be figured in.

If you have a pension paying out $127k a year the capital value of that pension even assuming a 5% rate is over 2 million dollars (as a perpetuity, in reality people die so the true value will be less, but still very likely over 7 figures).

Frequently there are death benefits

I’m assuming he means net worth

The parasites in this situation are the health insurance companies, and to a lesser degree, the actual providers.

I was recently sick, and it took four different doctor visits before somebody just gave me the antibiotics which fixed whatever problem I was having. The first one, an "urgent care" told me to just rest and hydrate. The second, my PCP, gave me a covid test, said that it was negative, shrugged, and said R&H, the third (telehealth) gave me a useless antibiotic and did no testing. The fourth, another UC, gave me a strep test, a mono test, and then some steroids and antibiotics.

This is retarded. A family member, when I was first complaining about being sick, offered to just write me a prescription for the cocktail of drugs he takes when he starts feeling sick, but me being a good little boy said I wanted to go see a doctor.

This should have been a 2 minute long discussion with a pharmacist at most where I tell them what drugs I want, then half an hour at my local lab where they do a few tests for me, and that's it.

As it is, with the retarded "health" cartel, there was probably thousands of dollars of useless waste spent on useless doctors and useless nurses performing useless tests (covid? Really? Flu?). Their goal is to gatekeep as many things as possible behind absurdly expensive gates, then when costs go to infinity, they demand the government subsidize them.

The couple you talk about in the beginning of this post suck, but so does the industry they're sucking.

As usual this is all made a lot worse when the government subsidises all of it.

As usual I'm probably pissing into the wind here but this is so much more complicated than your over simplification. You aren't paying healthcare workers to answer simple questions, you are paying them to do things like know when something isn't actually simple - ex: your shoulder pain isn't your shoulder it's your gallbladder and you need surgery not pain killers for your arm.

Patients will always ask for antibiotics even if we know in advance the issue is viral and antibiotics won't do anything, and that's not counting the goal of abx stewardship, or just minimizing side effect burden. No medications are safe, if you give everyone in the country a full course of antibiotics people are going to lose their kidneys, have joins explode, or just flat out die.

All lab testing has sensitivity and specificity and someone needs to know when it should be ignored.

And so on and so forth.

And if you went to an urgent care you probably saw an NP/PA who doesn't know what they are doing but was put in place as a misguided cost saving and simplification mechanism.

Patients will always ask for antibiotics even if we know in advance the issue is viral and antibiotics won't do anything, and that's not counting the goal of abx stewardship, or just minimizing side effect burden. No medications are safe, if you give everyone in the country a full course of antibiotics people are going to lose their kidneys, have joins explode, or just flat out die.

I was making a general point about the inefficiency of the healthcare system, but to address these point specifically:

I didn't ask for antibiotics. I was trying to do things exactly the way you are advocating here. I didn't just get antibiotics, I did go to the doctor four times, and the first 3 of them did essentially nothing. The first one had this interaction:

Do you have a fever?

Well yes, but I'm controlling it with tylenol every 4 hours.

So you don't have a fever?

Well if I stop taking the tylenol, my temperate goes over 102, so I keep on the tylenol and have been for a week.

Okay but your temperature is reading normal right now, it's not showing a fever.

Yes but like I said, I have been taking tylenol regularly to manage the fever, which I have now had for a full week.

Okay so no fever.

The second one was this interaction

Hi I've had a fever for a week and a half now, and the first person I saw said that if it didn't go away, to see my PCP, which is you.

Okay? You probably have a virus

Okay yes but is there anything else we could check for?

I guess I can give you a covid test if you want me to.

I'm asking you for your opinion here? I'm not a doctor, but I've never been this sick for this long before and it's got me concerned.

Okay a covid test I guess?

Sure?

The third one was a telehealth visit, literally not even a video just a text message with a doctor (maybe?)

The fourth was:

Hello I am now on week 3 of some sort of illness, the first week and a half was a 102+ fever, and now I have a sore throat that started one one side of my throat and then over a couple of days moved to both. I am having difficulty swallowing, and if you look deeply into my throat, you'll see it's covered in quite a few tiny white spots.

Those are tonsil stones

No I know what you're talking about, but to see what I'm talking about, you really would need a scope. I could only see the spots I'm talking about using a boroscope, and they're pretty deep inside my throat.

No i can see those from here, the two white spots at the back are tonsil stones

No, I mean a lot deeper than that.

Yeah I see it. Those are tonsil stones

etc.

Yeah probably a viral thing -> weakened immune system -> bacterial infection/secondary viral infection, and anti-biotics were a coincidence. My general point is that this entire escapade is only made worse by gatekeeping healthcare. Offhand I can think of 6 different doctors with different specialities in my very close family circle (either my siblings, or godparents of my kids), and all of them would easily just let me call them and give me recommendations on what do to while I'm sick. The point I'm making here is that I didn't do that, because I was just trying to use the healthcare system as prescribed, and that i was an inefficient joke.

I don't know your specific situation the abx thing is meant to be an example of more general problems, often brought up around here, including elsewhere in this thread.

Also, I want you to look up the professional credentials of the people who saw you and check if they are actual doctors. Bad doctors exist (although I don't know if you got bad care here) but several times a week I see questionable decisions and the patient says "my doctor blah blah" and I check and it's not actually a doctor.

The point I'm making here is that I didn't do that, because I was just trying to use the healthcare system as prescribed, and that i was an inefficient joke.

The thing is you didn't do what you were supposed to do. I don't blame you, this happens for all kinds of reasons - an expansion of options making it unclear what is supposed to happen, advertising dollars, certain locations not having resources, a desire for convenience, poor planning. All kinds of stuff.

The system is designed such that you have a PCP, you see your PCP, they know you. Urgent care is almost always bad, and the range of things you should be using it for is minimal. It shouldn't exist but it exists because people refuse to have PCPs. Sometimes this is because of a shortage and insurance issues but usually its because of people not actually sitting down and finding a PCP, their are almost always university systems taking new patients for instance (and likewise Telehealth companies if they have physicians at all are shit quality care farms and not providing anything resembling acceptable standards of care).

But this means you need to establish with a PCP and do things like go to a well visit yearly when you don't have any complaints.

Then if you have issues you call your PCP, they have spots on their schedule for sick patients and you come in, or they tell you to go an ER because that's what you need to do (or they need to say to protect their license from lawsuits).

This does involve at times waiting with discomfort, which people do not want to do, but 100% on demand healthcare is expensive or low quality.

Lastly, the vast majority of run of the mill illness has a treatment of "supportive care" aka we can't do shit so just wait and rest. Even if that is not your illness the best resource stewardship generally involves waiting for awhile before doing anything because it costs everybody less money and involves "do no harm" by not doing extra, unnecessary stuff that causes avoidable illness.

People don't want to sit and wait and be sick but it is often the correct thing to do.

My insurance changed last month, my PCP is no longer “in network” and the wait to get into a new one is long, which is why I was at UC. I did go to me “PCP” (a concierge group). That was the second doctor, which I paid cash for. As the symptoms worsened I could have gone back to them again, I guess. However when I was there, they seemed almost offended that I was because my insurance wasn’t usable to them. One reason the doctor said she didn’t want to do any tests (and tried to just get me to go to CVS for the Covid test instead of doing it there) was that my insurance wouldnt cover any of them.

So; just more ridiculous inefficiency in the inefficient healthcare system.

Kind of a meta point here, but I think you’re demonstrating maybe my exact frustration. You assume I’m stupid and don’t know how the system is supposed to work, or that I’m trying to abuse it in some way. I’m assuring you: I do know how it is supposed to work and I’m trying to use it correctly. It’s just that the system does suck

While that's something of an edge case, again watchful waiting is the treatment for most human illness by the numbers. That's appropriate, but annoying. Most doctors are used to doing something because patients demand it but that doesn't mean it's a good idea, just that they don't want complaints/bad reviews/lawsuits/etc.

So; just more ridiculous inefficiency in the inefficient healthcare system.

What about this was inefficient?

You want doctors to order expense interventions that are not risk free just because you demand them?

You want to do what most countries do instead which is provide significant care rationing and shortages?

You got to rapidly see several providers, in most countries you'd just be waiting for days to weeks or even months and then they would tell you they weren't going to do anything most of the time.

Maybe you want to be able to decide your own care. A few countries allow that but they are never countries remotely like the U.S. - usually some combination of much poorer (so few people can afford to dictate their own care), much healthier (and critically with less comorbidity so stupid decisions are less risky) and perhaps most critically: anti-intervention. I've heard from Indian doctors that their patients refuse to take medication most of the time. Americans overuse. It just wouldn't work here for a million reasons.

Lastly, who would they sue when things went wrong? Can the government sue you for fucking things up? Can we order your death because you chose to do something stupid and destroyed your kidneys for no reason?

Fundamentally most people can't be trusted to manage anything technical - if you poll people on a plane that's being delayed for deicing a good chunk would want it to take off and get themselves killed. Even most doctors can't be trusted to sensibly manage their own care because they are too close to it. People off the street? Jesus.

Recently experiencing mild inconvenience is not a good reason to advocate for disastrously stupid policy.

Again, I am not a doctor. The response I am giving here is essentially me echoing the response I've gotten from telling this story to my doctor friends/family. Basically: "You had a fever for a week, you tested negative for the few viral things they tested for, and they didn't want to explore it further at all or put you on an antibiotic as a precaution?"

Maybe that's wrong. I don't know! What I do know is that "the only people who should be able to tell you anything about this have to make $250k/yr at a minimum, and have to have a seemingly endless number of administrators around them" seems outrageously inefficient to me. Maybe it's not!

"You had a fever for a week, you tested negative for the few viral things they tested for, and they didn't want to explore it further at all or put you on an antibiotic as a precaution?"

As presented (which it may not be! One of the things we get paid for is to know what information is important) um, to put it gently they need to reconsider what they are doing or if they are specialists they should refresh on general medicine. Antibiotics target a specific organism, random antibiotics is effectively never a good idea in an outpatient setting. Empirical supportive care is fine for a variety of things. Things like an extended viral panel would be low value but critical for having an informed opinion. Knowing your Centor score (which a Telehealth doc can't do either) would be important.

To be charitable maybe they haven't been following practice guidelines. Or maybe I haven't been following practice guideline updates since I'm not in primary care, but viral illness is the primary cause of sore throat and with rare exceptions we don't have any way to treat viral illness.

Any kind of fever of unknown origin work up is a bonk straight to idiot jail with your timeline.

In any case, as I've mentioned before, we don't get paid to manage stuff like this - usually go home and relax is the treatment. We get paid to manage your aunt who is on 8 medications for chronic conditions including hypertension, diabetes, heart failure and s/p hysterectomy for 3a cancer who we see every 4-6 weeks instead of once a year.

Most of the job is not the kind of thing that relatively young and healthy people are seeing us for.

Outpatient administrative burden is usually because of regulation and actually has value (at least in my experience). You won't catch many (if any) physicians supporting the existence of the assistant infection control nurse for the 15th-20th floor but I'm zeroing in on the implied attack on physicians bit.

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Completely agree with this. I use a website called telyrx (https://telyrx.com/), so that I can have some amoxicillin and tamiflu on hand, if paxlovid wasn’t so expensive it’s another one I would have ready to go.

I use daily 5mg Cialis from HIMS.

About 4-5 a week so 149$ for 4.5 months or so.

This place cheaper and reputable?

Actually just asking reputable since I can check price myself.

E: I guess I didn’t need to give you any of that information but I’ve been sharing deep insights about myself online since 1997 so I guess why ever stop ?

I haven’t had any issues and it does include an actual prescription. It’s obviously sketchy in as much as you never actually see a doctor, but I’m assuming that the majority of telehealth firms work that way.

This should have been a 2 minute long discussion with a pharmacist at most where I tell them what drugs I want, then half an hour at my local lab where they do a few tests for me, and that's it.

This doesn't work because 1) stupid people will ask for antibiotics when they don't have good reason to expect them to work, and 2) giving out unneeded antibiotics has bad externalities. And the pharmacist can't administer a stupidity test.

And even in your case, you say that one doctor gave you a useless antibiotic before the second doctor gave you a useful one. If you go to a pharmacist, how are either you or the pharmacist going to know which one is useful and which one isn't? How are either of you going to know that your condition needs antibiotics at all, aside from you getting lucky? ("It worked for my family member, so it should work for me", and that actually being true, is luck.)

Well first of all the family member is a doctor (just not a family doctor), and second: how does the doctor know? Are they given secret knowledge that is inaccessible to mere humans?

Doctors aren’t priests. The stuff that 90% of PCPs are doing could be replaced by a flow chart. As far as antibiotic stewardship, when China and India and Brazil and everybody else gets on board, maybe.

My read is that when antibiotic resistance becomes a big problem, we will have plenty of warning because it'll be STD's and hospital caused infections first(and neither of those are a huge problem for normal healthy people), and also that there's lots of antibiotics to cycle through before we start needing to invent new ones. I invite doctors on the motte to chime in, of course, but that kinda points to it being a problem we don't need to be quite so vigilant about.

There's an additional discussion that the most common forms of antibiotic resistance seem to be otherwise fitness reducing; when bacteria need to compete without antibiotic pressure, the non-antibiotic resistant variant usually wins. Seems like it's some sort of limiting factor outside of, again, STDs and hospital caused infections, which don't have as much of a reservoir.

It's a real problem with research done on it - check out abx resistant in STDs (and by this I mean the details) MRSA vs. MSSA is a huge issue also.

We are in the growing warning stage with tons of money being pumped into avoiding the problem but as always man on the street won't notice until something boils over.

We have plenty of back up agents but often it means a switch to something less convenient, has worse side effects, or in the case with MRSA may result in increased sepsis fatality rates because of complicated things like time to static blood concentration, interaction with comorbid end organ dysfunction and other blah blah boring but important stuff.

Having an illness that goes from no big deal to no big deal but 1.2 out of 10k have a joint explode is not something the average person is going to notice but is an avoidable problem if idiots would stop pretending like they know everything and their doctors thousands of hours of education was meaningless.

Likewise you have stuff like some drug addict, illegal immigrant, or even just a regular person with the wrong insurance getting housed in the hospitals for 6 weeks because IV antibiotics is the only thing that works now instead of oral.

All these small things grow and contribute to the collapse of American healthcare.

In other countries rampant with problems (India, China) they just let people die a lot more. I'd like to keep our system.

Also hospital specific antibiotiograms are a thing.

In other countries rampant with problems (India, China) they just let people die a lot more. I'd like to keep our system.

What percentage of healthcare expenditure is going into 'not letting people die' and what condition are those people in?

A very large chunk of US healthcare expenditure is on end of life care that other countries more strictly ration.

EMTALA is also very expensive.

I'm pretty sure that community-originated antibiotic resistance is a myth kept up mostly to have a gotcha for anyone who wants to end the prescription monopoly, or just generally legalize drugs. The vast majority of the dangerous antibiotic-resistant strains are hospital-originated.

One of the most obvious examples if STDs, which is a known (and serious and growing) issue that's been magnified by homosexual sex norms (especially now that we have HIV medication).

I was under the impression that agricultural use (misuse?) was one of the biggest sources of antibiotic-resistant strains

A lot of antibiotic-resistant bacteria are resistant to antibiotics not used in agriculture.

As far as antibiotic stewardship, when China and India and Brazil and everybody else gets on board, maybe.

Nuking your microbiome for no reason with unnecessary antibiotics every time you have a sniffle is a bad thing for you personally even if the Chinese are doing it too.

Also, statistically, a bad thing for everyone else because it promotes antibiotic resistance.

The poster’s point was that China, India, Brazil don’t need American help to develop antibiotic resistant strains

I had very, let's say, luke warmly received thoughts on this earlier in the week. What if the dead weight is actually half of society? Or 75%? Or 90%? I'm not entirely convinced we're not already there.

(There were some good rebuttals but I'm still uncertain)

Basically your accounting in that comment was too loose to get a good idea of where the breakpoint is. First of all, bringing anything Federal into it is a problem because of the deficit; a lot of Federal spending is financed through debt rather than current revenues, so it's mathematically possible for no-one to be a net taxpayer. Also, there's a lot of indirect taxation (all taxes paid by businesses are ultimately covered by individuals) which you'd need to add in.

For another intuitive look at this, a family with two kids in public school will consume $3000-7500 per month(!) in state expenditure.

New York spends over $36,000 per pupil which gets you near that high number, but the average is about $18,000, which is your low number, so this is skewed a bit high. But it's pretty well known that people without kids do subsidize the education of those who do have them.

E.g. if 90% of education was funded through federal and state revenues, you could imagine purpose building a town just to have a lot of schools so that people with small kids move to it and pull funds from the rest of the country and state.

Yes, but only the Haredi have the wherewithal to pull this off.

a lot of Federal spending is financed through debt rather than current revenues, so it's mathematically possible for no-one to be a net taxpayer.

In terms of dollars, yes, but in terms of goods and services (which are ultimately the point), surely not. It's possible to print money or hand out IOUs, but any goods and services must actually be real. Someone convinced to provide goods or services in return for inflated money or IOUs has, in effect, just been taxed more than otherwise.

The losers don't have to be anyone domestic, however.

Indeed. Inflation is the final tax for all variations of modern monetary theory.

New York spends over $36,000 per pupil which gets you near that high number, but the average is about $18,000, which is your low number, so this is skewed a bit high.

And? People outside of NY also pay less in taxes.

$18,000/year in spending per student in public school is still an absurdly expensive entitlement compared to what their parents and non-parent neighbors pay in taxes. People with families are not some rare occurrence in society. In the US, 1 in 4 people are under 18 and likely in this system.

This is true, but my point was only that your numbers were wrong, not that the correct numbers were good.

It also assumes the cost to educate is actually 18k. Instead I imagine in a lot of cases the UFT or NEA have negotiated a sweet heart deal.

Indeed, parochial type private schools cost less than that.

Of course, there's incredible amounts of profligate spending. Special education being the first place to look, but only the tip of a very large iceberg. But the money is spent whether it's a good idea or not, and getting a new family of 5 (including 3 elementary school kids) in town who pays only $10k a year in property tax is going to be very much net negative for the treasury.

I think that's true in the short term, but children are also, as much as I dislike the phrase, "an investment in the future": if we decide to stop having kids (experiment ongoing in South Korea, among others), we can save so much money in childhood education and improve industrial output. Surely this won't have any consequences on a longer time horizon. /s

I'm not sure how I'd recommend aligning the incentives more broadly, though.

I suspect if we stopped spending money on education entirely we'd increase TFR. This would obviously have some bad consequences but in South Korea at least it might be net positive in the medium term.

But I would suggest that most government spending on education is a very poor investment. You can divide special education up (which I believe is half the spending) roughly into two groups -- strivers abusing the system to get a leg up in college admissions for their own kids, and attempts at educating the ineducable. The first could be zeroed out with no loss whatsoever, and the second could be reduced considerably -- if a kid simply isn't going to ever become a functioning adult, there's no point in spending enormous amounts of money in trying to educate him.

Sure but the other poster was suggesting that the government was providing a subsidy equal to the value of government cost. That is not true.

This strikes me as a Hayekian knowledge problem. Local charities can help people in need but can use discretion (ie local knowledge) to minimize free riding. In contrast, federal government programs are designed to lack discretion (ie rules based). Even if the rules might make sense, people will figure out how to MinMax

people will figure out how to MinMax

And on top of that, they will then teach all their friends how to minmax, and entire communities will become devoted to and dependent on minmaxxing according to strategies shared by the hivemind to keep the gravy train running for them all.

Effectively cargo cults that just happen to succeed at evoking their intended goal.

Its not that far removed from multiplayer game communities that are constantly creating the 'meta' builds and strategies for competition, then the Devs try to shake things up and patch the game's rules and within a couple days a new meta emerges, and game mechanics become completely secondary to whatever set of items and strategies gives players an edge under standard competitive conditions.

Except we're not putting in patches, people are arguing that it's futile to even try, so we just have to keep putting up with it forever.

And to extend and further strain the analogy, the Devs probably don't care much as long as the whales continue to pay into the system to keep the game going, and average players who just want to play the game 'as intended' and not get stomped by whales or griefed by hackers and sweats have their experience degraded the most.

As @zeke5123a stated, its a knowledge problem, and the likely fix is to let people set up their own 'private servers' where they can retool the rules and mechanics more to their liking, and ban known cheaters and use social forces to try to shame and discourage pure meta builds in favor of a more overall enjoyable experience, and thus attract the types of players they prefer to join up.

Not without its problems, but sure beats forcing everyone to follow the same inherently flawed ruleset.

As @zeke5123a stated, its a knowledge problem, and the likely fix is to let people set up their own 'private servers' where they can retool the rules and mechanics more to their liking, and ban known cheaters and use social forces to try to shame and discourage pure meta builds in favor of a more overall enjoyable experience, and thus attract the types of players they prefer to join up.

This is a revolution-complete problem, however.

Strictly speaking I don't believe that, but practically speaking that's where we're at.

If there is anything I've learned hearing about the levels of fraud in Somali Minneapolis, it's that the fraudsters just take over the programs. When your entire workforce is low trust, high time preference, high in group preference, congenital felons, no public work can ever possibly hold up. Unless you disenfranchise them, disallow them to work in anything that requires any trust what so ever, they will just naturally siphon maximal stolen wealth from any institution you allow them access to. There is no mechanism to combat this beyond cutting the areas they inhabit off from the money spigot and hoping and praying Darwin solves the problem.

You think old people extracting wealth through government handouts is bad in the US? Wait till you come to the UK, the whole country is set up as a gerontocracy designed to protect the income and assets of the old over the needs of the young.

And yet I look at my actual pay stub and see that ~24% of that will never even touch my account due to Federal Taxes

If only I could get just 24% of my hard earned money taken from me instead of 47% (marginal).

Looking at how bad they have it in the European nursing home countries makes me feel better in relative but not absolute terms, it is true.

Parasitism seems to be baked into the bread itself over there.

This appeared in my history, so I've probably linked it here before, but as far as interesting old blog posts about welfare go...

I'll quote the pieces I think most relevant in response to your post, but I encourage reading the whole thing.

There is a significant misconception of what "disability" means, and I'm not going to say what you think I might. Dr. Balt, and I'll wager most people, think Keisha is probably able to work. However, the issue isn't whether she can work, but whether any employer would be willing to take a chance on her ability to work. Would you hire Keisha to run your office? Do billing? In the spacious comfort of an internet comment you might hire a woman like Keisha to work at a hypothetically inefficient McDonalds, but in practice, are you willing to tolerate "3-4 absences a month due to illness?" McDonalds neither, which is why the SSI application form asks that exact question.

As long as they-- and the inmates and the etc-- are munching on food stamps, weed, and Xboxes, nearly illiterate but keeping their nonsense within their neighborhoods, the rest of us can go on with our lives.

And if you want a bonus:

Say your father raped you repeatedly for a decade. Hold on, slow down, it gets worse: now you're 40, and he shows up asking you for $2400 because, and I quote, "you have a responsibility to take care of me." There he is in your living room, eyeballing the nice things in your home. If it is a fact that you will inevitably give him the money, is it easier to for you to pair it with your venom or your sympathy? Though it's enraging, there is a perverse pleasure in giving that bastard the money. It tells you that you showed him that you are better than him.

If you've gotten through the above, superior thoughts, I'll scratch out a few of my own down here.

As far as I can see it, welfare is the summation of a few factors:

  1. The eternal need to provide somehow for the unfortunate, the unmotivated, and the unwise. This truly does go all the way back. If people are left to their own devices, most of them will attempt to relax and reproduce as much as possible. Something must be taken away if they are to have a surplus for when they truly need it. Separate post, sometime, but I suspect this is the reason behind most forms of government.
  2. Globalism, industrialism, and economic deracination, which makes it easier to support idle workers off of the productivity of others.
  3. Liberal egalitarianism and the elites' sharp retreat from noblesse oblige, removing the old-school frameworks for compelling labor and moral betterment. Again, separate post sometime.

The result is a bunch of policies that address pressing first-order concerns, but have some pretty nasty second- and third-order consequences that are extremely difficult to talk about while retaining sympathy for the people involved.

Can welfare continue to exist in its current form? Not forever, sure, but forever is a long time. How long can it last? Until the rubber hits the road, which is probably keyed off of the sharp population declines in our near future more than anything. There's a reasonable argument to be made that Europe (to a greater extent) and the US (to a lesser extent) are currently getting choked out by welfare. But that's somewhat besides the point. The reality is twofold: first, that welfare will continue until the affected nations are more or less forced into a New Deal of sorts, because those benefiting from welfare planned their lives around receiving it and aren't remotely prepared for the consequences of not having it; and second, that it is much, much better to not be on welfare than to be on welfare. Look at your two examples. The first couple have their future at the mercy of regular politics - their future is not under their control, and if Idaho should ever become unable to pay their pensions, they will be in unbelievably deep trouble. The second are in wild amounts of debt and are going to be barely scraping by, eternally. Their (presumable) food stamps are a pittance compared to how they've decided to sell themselves into slavery for the benefit of the banks. Either their consumption will sharply dry up once their income equals their debt payments, or they declare bankruptcy and lose everything and will never have a house again. Is either case remotely enviable? (Also, I'm pretty sure that way more of your money is going to cases like the first one, and barely anything is going to the second one. Social Security and Medicare together are about 33% of the budget, and only around 5% goes to food stamps, child tax credits, etc. The second couple is more outrageous from a morality point of view, but the first is vastly more expensive.)

Couple of things you mentioned that stood out to me.

And finally. No dependents. Its not like they've got mouths to feed and kids to raise. Every dollar they spend here on is solely on themselves, and contributes 'nothing' to the future productivity of the country.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that standard economic measures like GDP are flawed insofar as they only capture production and not reproduction, when it's pretty clear that the latter means a lot more in the long term. So if everyone's just looking at GDP for a vibe check on how the economy is doing, they get the totally wrong perspective and miss the steamroller coming down the road.

This raises a question: are 'we' really supporting this entire apparatus on the efforts of some small and possibly shrinking minority of our actual population? Without getting too Randian, what's the ratio of productive/unproductive left now?

For America specifically, the source of this support is not so much "the productive" as "the debt." For 2024 the debt (1.9T) is comparable in size to Social Security (1.5T). So there are people buying US bonds on the principle that the government will pay them back before it has to raise taxes. That is bound to stop at some point in the near-ish future (order of decades, not years). When it does, either the welfare will stop or taxes will go up, or probably both. This is the "New Deal" territory I was talking about earlier. Who knows what exactly will happen here? Easy to make predictions, but reality has a habit of surprising you.

TFR adjusted GDP is a thing somewhere, it was calculated out on Twitter. The big winners were Israel and Kazakhstan. You'd have to be able to find it.

But it’s sadly not mainstream. (Also, IMO, pure TFR is not enough. You’d have to calculate things like the reproduction of various social and economic classes, weighted heavily towards the middle, and raw investment into maintenance and long-term infrastructure that can be used by future generations. Overbuilding networking in the dotcom boom would write out positive, while shuttering the steel mills would be negative. I guess you’d probably want multiple metrics to capture a place like China which is dramatically overbuilding at the same time as its TFR is cratering.)

AFAICT, outside of true third world shitholes and a few anglosphere cost diseases, places with expanding populations are building, and in the kinds of places with ginormous class differences TFR decline is most concentrated among the poor.

Though it's enraging, there is a perverse pleasure in giving that bastard the money. It tells you that you showed him that you are better than him.

This is like "I'm going to do nothing to my bully to show that I'm better than him", but worse. It's indistinguishable from "I am powerless to do anything against him, and I may be forced to actually help him, but I'm rationalizing it away".

Yes, that is the author's point. The article is meant to aid in the rationalization, you take part in a whole community of people lambasting the leeches, you feel superior and high status, the programs don't' change.

The reality is twofold: first, that welfare will continue until the affected nations are more or less forced into a New Deal of sorts, because those benefiting from welfare planned their lives around receiving it and aren't remotely prepared for the consequences of not having it; and second, that it is much, much better to not be on welfare than to be on welfare. Look at your two examples.

I disagree with this idea that it's "much better not to be on welfare" in the most strident of terms. What are you even talking about? You go on about how it's "insecure" for these people, without even mentioning the fact that they are far MORE likely to have security than someone actually working, paying for their benefits, who has to worry about losing a job or getting priced out of their area, etc.

This is just a completely nuts take imo. Not even mentioning the fact that these people DON'T HAVE TO WORK!!!

The point we disagree upon, I believe, is this: whether security can be guaranteed on anything beyond one’s own self (and, of course, the divine providence we are all obliged to depend on).

Let’s separate these two cases. The second is a simple one of self-imposed debt slavery. The man is working. The first is one where they have worked, but a great amount of their security is explicitly dependent on government largesse.

If Trump 2 has demonstrated nothing else, it’s that government largesse is far from guaranteed. It can be removed as political winds change, and possession being nine tenths of the law, is much harder to keep your hands on over personal holdings. One’s ownership, one’s capacity to work, one’s personal relationships are far more secure than anything coming from the government. The people on the dole are like that lady from Streetcar, always depending on the kindness of strangers. To dispel any subtlety to this point, she didn’t have to work, but she sure as hell got raped.

Another small point. The husband of the first couple is a civil engineer. He alone should have been capable of pulling approximately six figures yearly across his career, probably a little less because it’s Idaho. If he went into private industry instead of civil engineering he probably could have gotten a reasonable amount more. Add on the wife’s salary, adjust for stock market growth, and they could have been dramatically richer if they’d bought index funds starting in the 90s, when they were 30. Why is that hypothetical other couple not up for our ire? Their money has to be coming from somewhere, right? And they sure aren’t working for it. Why is it morally wrong to defer spending on your income in hopes of a future relaxed payday if and only if you’re investing that particular future into the government?

I can agree with the point that, in an ultimate sense, your own skills are more reliable than being on the dole. However, the dole has been pretty good for the last ~60 years or so, and requires far less effort along almost every metric. I'm not saying that people on the dole have it equal to someone on a career, but that the relative security and comfort for effort is INSANELY disproportionate.

In terms of the second couple - they worked for their money and made smart decisions. They deserve to reap the rewards. Earning money via investing is again, a world of difference away from forcibly redistributing other's wealth to yourself via taxation.

Why is that hypothetical other couple not up for our ire?

Because no one made a political ad for them, and they're not crying over not getting Obamacare subsidies. I'm in more or less your theoretical private couple's position, and have been putting off my own retirement precisely because of the ridiculously high cost of health insurance.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that standard economic measures like GDP are flawed insofar as they only capture production and not reproduction, when it's pretty clear that the latter means a lot more in the long term.

I've occasionally mused that we should have a separate GDP term that captures "investment into The Future (tm)", specifically with an eye to things like capital investments that are net efficiency improvements. Something like "how much discretionary spending are spending above and beyond the cost of keeping the economy going?" But I think as a measure it's poorly-defined because "The Future" isn't necessarily something we all agree upon: is California's meandering, super-expensive high-speed rail project such a capital investment? I think it's easier to defend that (most) healthcare spending isn't a long-term investment because in many cases it's just fixing something that maybe didn't need to be broken: in an ideal world (let's assume Fully Automated Gay Space Communism, but that's probably a less-universal ideal than when Star Trek TNG was still on the air) we'd have relatively few doctors because people wouldn't get injured, at least as often.

But it's a hard metric to fully define. I'd be interested in reading more if any economists are looking this direction.

Progress Studies is basically this, with all the political issues one can imagine. But there is still some interesting work being done on the topic.

To be fair, most government-paid civil engineers take a much lower salary than they could in the private sector. So it's not quite that this guy figured out a hack here, only that he sacrificed early to reap a larger return later. Similarly the State took the inverse deal: pay him less now in exchange for more later, in order to make their budgets temporarily look better.

I think the solution for both is actuarial integrity -- defined benefit plans need to be run in such a way that the State pays in year X the expected future costs of all (incremental) future liabilities accrued during year X. The only real exploitation is that voters in X accrue liability for year >X without paying for it, another intertemporal transfer of wealth.

A non-solution (afaict) is for governments not to hire competent civil servants and instead farm that stuff out to McKinsey consultants and others. Not because the McKinsey consultants aren't smart, but because it's a diffusion of accountability that ultimately costs Idaho more than paying competitive salaries for in-house expertise.

[ One astute commenter noted that one good that McKinsey does produce is laundering the low status of working for bumfuck Idaho into PMC-respectability. An excellent observation, if something of a tangent here. ]

Presumably they have a net positive effect on GDP when measured on the spending side, and if we ASSUME they don't declare bankruptcy, or renege and duck out on the debt, or just die early (not something I wish on them), they're helping the engine of Capitalism in this country sputter along.

Eh, bankruptcy is (in expectation) priced into the transactions. Lenders make out fine charging these two 7% interest on their HELOC and car note. It's not like dumping it on the fisc.

Their retirement on the public dime, OTOH, will certainly be dumped on us.

A big issue for public pensions is that many were originally paid for with corruption. Public unions promised politicians support in exchange for pensions. Taxpayers at the time happy because they didn't get stuck with a big bill at the time, but now the bills are coming due. So I don't really have much problem giving these pensioners a haircut; their pensions are dirty money.

No different than any other public obligation or liability. Might as well shaft municipal bondholders too on this theory,

Yes. Difference is there's at least some chance the bondholders will be shafted.

Municipal bondholders will not be shafted because investors, quite reasonably, don't purchase them unless required to by law, and the people/institutions required to buy them by law are big institutions that can afford good lobbyists.

Munis can be attractive since they are tax exempt. HNW individuals should probably have a small sum in Munis

I've looked at NJ munis. They suck (for good reason).

Well fed and state tax free. If you are in highest bracket basically double the yield

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"The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away"

But I doubt it, they built the propaganda into the name "public servant".

Eh, bankruptcy is (in expectation) priced into the transactions.

In an efficient market, that's true. Is that even legal right now? I know that college admissions have changed over time (and between jurisdictions) between unmeritocratic discrimination being illegal and required.

I would not be the slightest bit surprised if charging previously-illegal immigrants the real cost of a loan (or just denying them) was blocked by anti-discrimination laws.

Lenders make out fine charging these two 7% interest on their HELOC and car note.

Nervous laughter.

Sorry, I came of age during the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage crisis, I am overtly sensitive to the whole "Just give money to financially irresponsible people and hope that in the aggregate we make adequate returns to justify the risk" approach.

I'm sure SOME lessons were learned since then. Maybe not the right ones.

I'm sure it'll be fine.

The problem with the '07-08 crisis wasn't with the returns, it's that the loans were packaged into MBS and sold to investors under a false bill of health. The lessons weren't that you can't have high-risk/high-return assets, only that you must not try to pawn them off as low risk with fanciful assumptions. And that buyers of those collateralized debt must do more diligence.

The bill of health wasn't false. It's trivially easy to take a cdo prospectus and simulate what happens in the event of a catastrophic drop in house prices.

It's just that everyone - buyers, sellers, rates, regulators, all assumed that this was a very low probability event. Reality turned out to be worse than nightmare/worst case scenarios in various stress tests cooked up by regulators.

The sellers (who are often accused of fraud) kept the risky tranches on their books while selling the safe ones - the opposite of what one would do if they knew the risk.

No, they assumed it was uncorrelated and that you could lower risk by bundling large tranches of mortgages.

That works until there is a large correlated event that impacts all of them at once.

I don't think you quite understand what was done. The risk reduction comes from being in the senior tranches and taking losses last.

This happened. Folks owning the senior/low risk tranches lost the least, exactly as CDO sellers promised. (This is quite mechanical and unsurprising.) The stress tests at the time did not assume uncorrelated losses - that's dumb, even for a regulator.

CDO sellers who kept the junior tranches (I.e. first losses) went bankrupt. Why would they do that if they were selling the senior tranches with a false bill of health?

I agree that the tranch setup distributed risk as advertised. The problem was that much of market (including CDO sellers) believed in their models that used a gaussian copula, which vastly underestimated the tails as compared to a power law.

This wasn't "sellers pull a fast one on buyers" -- that's too simplistic a model. They got into the business because they convinced themselves of an overall model that didn't put enough weight on the tail risks. Then they kept the most junior tranches because of that belief in the low overall risk.

[ There's a related problem which is that gaussian models are extremely sensitive to parameter changes in ways that power laws aren't. When you get to the CDO-squared (a CDO of CDOs) then you the output of one model being fed as an input to another, with the expected impact to accuracy. ]

See, e.g., this excellent summary: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/mrcbg/files/Barnett-Hart_2009.pdf

The issue was that they never really understood the level of systemic risk involved. The whole securitization scheme was based on the idea that, while high-risk mortgages might be too risky on an individual basis, in aggregate only a small percentage of them would default, and the riskiness led to higher interest rates. If you're assuming that a certain percentage of the mortgages are going to default over a given time period, you can price that in. They didn't forsee that there would be a foreclosure crisis that would lead to default rates grossly in excess of what was anticipated, and that this would cause a domino effect whereby the problem would keep getting worse.

Yes and no. It was obvious from day 1 that those CDOs weren’t good as good. They were labeled AAA but had yields materially higher compared to other AAA. This was attractive for insurance companies who legally were required to have a percentage of assets in AAA. But the only reason why one AAA trades at a yield much higher than other AAA is that the first isn’t really AAA.

Bingo. Pennies are free in front of a steamroller stuff.

I have mixed feelings about this.

As you alluded, it isn't clear how many jobs are civilizationaly load bearing to begin with. Mine certainly isn't, unless you count having and raising children, and, no, that isn't counted at this point, in these discussions. Depending on what they are, it's not clear how many people can or should do them. Mr and Mrs Tinkerbell collectors might not be able to do them even if they were in good health (again, depending on what they are). 200 years ago almost everyone would be farming and making textiles, and since farming and textiles have become relatively niche, it's unclear how many of the "jobs" that have replaced them amount to watching one another's children and walking one another's dogs. We're apparently close to automating even emails and spreadsheets.

If I had heard about this 100 years ago, I would have supposed people would work a lot less, or we would have something like a UBI, but that's not what we have. Maybe we have bullshit jobs and gaming the system instead? Which isn't great, plenty of people are upset about the current state of affairs. I don't particularly want my kids to spend 40 hours a week, for 40 years doing fake work, that seems in some ways worse than farming and textiles, but it seems to be the direction we as a civilization are heading in.

If I had heard about this 100 years ago, I would have supposed people would work a lot less, or we would have something like a UBI, but that's not what we have. Maybe we have bullshit jobs and gaming the system instead? Which isn't great, plenty of people are upset about the current state of affairs. I don't particularly want my kids to spend 40 hours a week, for 40 years doing fake work, that seems in some ways worse than farming and textiles, but it seems to be the direction we as a civilization are heading in.

Yeah I have to say, on the face of it, it really does seem absurd that we are so incredibly wealthy compared to our ancestors and yet we work just as much, or at least pretend we do.

Don't we have a ton of labor laws and tax laws tangled up in some concern about distinguishing part-time and full-time work, with the assumption of a 40-hour workweek defining full time work?

We do not work just as much, hours at work have been steadily declining as society gets wealthier.

Not just hours of work, but the intensity of work and the conditions of the work during the hours that are worked. Modern blue collar is still a lot sweatier than white collar, but a modern furnace worker is still working a lot more comfortably than a furnace worker a century ago, let alone a millennia.

Ok fair, but we often pretend we do, no?

Also, if you factor in that both parents work, it isn't as great as it seems.

In the days when small agriculture was king, 996 for both parents would have been the height of luxury.

We're this wealthy because we keep choosing to "work the same amount and increase quality of life" instead of "maintain quality of life and work less" every time there is a productivity increase due to technology/capital goods

Why is "civilizationally load bearing" a relevant yardstick? Civilization advances by making all that stuff trivial so people can focus on doing other shit. That's the the measure of civilization, not who produces corn.

And no one that has ever worked in textiles would dare assert that it's in any way worse than an office job. That shit destroys your body.

Parasitism, stripped of the morally-loaded connotation, is ultimately a classification of a symbiotic relationship between different species of organisms. The notion that symbiosis is an extremely widely-observed behavioral pattern in the Animal Kingdom, but for some reasons human relations can never be understood like that, is an artifact of political correctness. As far as the question over when is it appropriate to refer to someone as a parasite, you can say almost never. But when is it appropriate to understand relations between races of people as symbiotic, the answer is almost always. Take something like the behavior observed in the Animal Kingdom we call aggressive mimicry:

Aggressive mimicry is a form of mimicry in which predators, parasites, or parasitoids share similar signals, using a harmless model, allowing them to avoid being correctly identified by their prey or host. Zoologists have repeatedly compared this strategy to a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Foreign races of people establishing themselves in a host society- their identity, cultural signals, political influence, is unequivocally a symbiosis, its mere existence is derived from its interaction with its host.

But is in-group elderly care a parasitic relationship? The Elders of a society are typically the ancestors of the descendants investing in their care, so describing that as parasitism would not really conform with that classification of relationship observed ecologically. The impetus for elder care has in-group evolutionary advantages that explain its existence.

Take a racial and cultural identity like black. It exists purely in symbiosis with a host society. It depends on the host society for everything. It only exists relative to its host society. Without its host, it would not exist. Same with "Dreamers", foreigners who embed themselves in a host society. "Dreamers" only exist because of the long-term interaction between foreigners and their host body. That is a symbiotic relationship, in contrast with elderly care.

There are clearly non-parasitic symbiotic relationships. "Chimerica" is a symbiosis between America and China but one that is mutually beneficial. But when foreigners embed themselves in a host and demand all sorts of political, cultural, and economic concessions that harm the host Nation, it's valuable to understand that as parasitism, in order to properly understand the nature of the threat, even if it's not constructive to call anyone a parasite.

aggressive mimicry

Honestly I am in awe at your ability to bring the Jews into every little topic, no matter how distant they may seem. Chapeau...

It's not at all a distant issue, the concept of social relations between races of people being characterized as "parasitism" originated with Jewish/Gentile cohabitation. That characterization of that as a foreign guest/host relationship originated at least with Marin Luther's writings but the concrete association goes back to the 18th century, i.e. the Enlightenment philosopher Johann Herder (1791):

The people of God, to whom heaven itself once gave its fatherland, has been a parasitic plant on the tribes of other nations for millennia, almost since its creation; a race of clever negotiators almost all over the world who, despite all oppression, long nowhere for their own honour and home, nowhere for a fatherland.

But I pointed to a more concrete example of Dreamers or in the general sense mass third world migration, foreign diasporas who deman some right to access to the United States and Europe and massive political, economic, and cultural concessions. Nor is the concept of aggressive mimicry only limited to that historical relationship, I have indirectly accused you of engaging in that behavior by appealing to concepts like "fair competition" that appeal to Whites but are just empty words you use to try to justify your presence among us. You only signal those values in order to obfuscate the threat of genetic replacement from the third world by making it some natural outcome of "fairness", i.e. signaling values you know we have an affinity for, but for an aggressive purpose.

Other examples of mimicry would be Kash Patel's humorous attempts to appeal to White culture, which very often become that Inglorious Bastards three-fingers meme.

long nowhere for their own honour and home, nowhere for a fatherland

Seemingly the great improvements in this matter havent been to your taste.

The majority of them would rather live and operate here, and support and display loyalty to that country from here and not there. And exercise power here for the benefit of that foreign country. They want it both ways. Obviously I would be very happy for the development if it not were for the subversive loyalty to that foreign state at every institutional level of our culture. If they all went to Israel that would be one thing.

I would ask if you're E Michael Jones- he's the only person I met who shares your talent for tying everything to Jews- but you're actually somewhat better on the uptake. You should take up longform writing.

But is in-group elderly care a parasitic relationship?

If it is sustainable over generations then no, if not then yes. This isn't a difficult question and it's clear that OP talks about the latter.

If it is sustainable over generations then no

It's always been a feature of European culture. In 5th-century BC Athens, laws mandated that sons provide fathers with food, care, housing, and protection and they lost citizenship as a penalty if they failed to provide. If Elder care is not sustainable then it's a societal failure. A foreign diaspora harming the host nation is a much different kind of dynamic than elder care.

Under the Romans during the time of the republic the paterfamilias (oldest male head of the household) had full powers of life and death over his progeny, even when they were adults and had been married off, see how during the Catilinarian conspiracy a conspirator was killed with no trial whatsoever just on the command of his paterfamilias.

That too is part of "European Culture" as you say but it's a good thing we have decided as a society that parents killing their children is abhorrent and to be made illegal (this power of life and death was de facto outlawed during the early stages of the Empire, the practice of exposing newborns still continued despite being made illegal but that's a different thing than killing a 20 year old), a very similar argument can be made with Elder care when the elders are those who took and took from society back when they were young without contributing enough and now want the younger generations to cough up more so they can go to the grave living the high life with no regard for what happens for society when they are six feet under.

When, if ever, is it appropriate to refer to someone as a 'parasite?' I don't mean in a literal sense, only in the political/economic sense. My instinct says 'never', its a very dehumanizing term... but I had that resolution sorely tested this week.

I guess it depends how much of a "decoupler" you are. Are you going to change your policy preferences based on two anecdotes about unsympathetic beneficiaries?

If anything I am now more aggressively wedded to my general policy preferences (Read: Anti-Federalism, reduction of FedGov Spending to whatever is needed to maintain national defense and a Judicial system, and throwing all welfare programs back to the state level).

How that shakes out in terms of what policies I expect to see passed is a little different.

That's a form of change...

Anti-Federalism, reduction of FedGov Spending to whatever is needed to maintain national defense and a Judicial system, and throwing all welfare programs back to the state level

Isn't that federalism? I thought that the federalist policy position was the one that wants to maximize power reserved to the confederated states.

Yes, but look at the positions supported by the people who actually labeled themselves anti-federalists.

Huh, interesting. I wasn't aware of that, shame on me I guess. Thank you for the correction!

Its a historical quirk that one wouldn't be aware of unless one had studied the Federalist/Anti-Federalist debates.

Which I have.

But the common parlance has changed.

Nothing you say is wrong on its face. Bill and Shelley are boomers milking the system in all the legal ways they were told they could. Oscar and his wife are a young dumb couple who, as you noted, are far from the worse Caleb has had on his show. They're only making the culture war rounds because they're illegals. They're also young enough that it's hard to declare they are going to be lifetime parasites--at least Oscar is working!

I can't get too worked up about them after watching all those bodycam and parole hearing videos I mentioned. The people who are really a "parasitical" class are not boomers crying that their health insurance is going up or a DREAMER couple who will probably declare bankruptcy. It's the people who will never be gainfully employed, will probably spend most of their lives on the street or in prison, and prey on society in much more literal ways than making your insurance premiums go up.

Insurance sucks and seems to be unfixable, yup. But how dare government workers collect pensions and how dare old people demand expensive medical care? These aren't the worst parasites out there.

Government has always been a cow to be milked, and under the old patronage systems the corruption was far worse. How many bailouts has the government shoveled money into to rescue failing businesses and failing industries? How much money did we spend on Afghanistan over 20+ years to achieve literally fuck-all in the end? We could also talk about Iraq, and Ukraine, and Israel, and Argentina, all can be plausibly defended as providing some value to American interests, but fuck that's a lot of money we're giving to non-Americans.

You may or may not have seen the latest trend in ragebait: all the (mostly black) people screaming on TikTok about how their EBT is about to get cut off if the government shutdown doesn't end. The comments are the usual: noticing how many expensive braids and fake nails and tattoos and the like these people wear, asking why Single Mom of 6 does not have a father in the picture, etc. Lots of nutpicking with juicy videos from welfare defenders openly telling poor people to steal from Walmart, single moms haughtily declaring they "don't want to work," etc. Numbers thrown around like $4000-$6000/month in welfare (which I seriously doubt).

These stories are understandably infuriating. They make for very easy ragebait to amp up working Americans who see a bunch of lazy, shiftless people getting fat on their tax dollars. I won't lie and say I would not enjoy seeing some of these "parasites" get made to work or go hungry as much as any Randian.

But ultimately I think you are being manipulated to hate the easily hateable. If you are really concerned about the government spigot and all the parasites bleeding the beast... well, like I said, there's much bigger bleeding to rage at.

Insurance sucks and seems to be unfixable, yup. But how dare government workers collect pensions and how dare old people demand expensive medical care? These aren't the worst parasites out there.

That you find their parasitism morally acceptable doesn't make it not-parasitism. The parasitism here isn't old people demanding expensive medicare; it's demanding to be subsidized in that. Generally I would consider pensions not-parasitism (since they're delayed compensation), but what I mentioned earlier -- unions getting pensions in "negotiations" where the other side of the table has been bribed through political support -- makes them something bad.

We can only know if they're a parasitical "class" if these people are actually representative of some class rather than being one-offs. The retired couple seems most likely to be such; surely there are many such couples similarly situated. The financially irresponsible DREAMER seems more unique, or at least I hope so.

It's the people who will never be gainfully employed, will probably spend most of their lives on the street or in prison, and prey on society in much more literal ways than making your insurance premiums go up.

But this includes the people in the videos you were complaining were just ragebait! Or, at least, it includes the absent single fathers who aren't in those videos. Sometimes there really is something to be mad about, and just trying to gesture at some other group who is worse doesn't help.

That you find their parasitism morally acceptable doesn't make it not-parasitism.

People collecting pensions they were promised as part of their work agreement is not parasitism. If you think workers should not receive pensions, you can advocate for ending pensions (and indeed, that is happening, and will probably happen even in the few places where pensions still exist, like government employment). You can complain about unions and their tactics, but the individuals who expect to collect on the benefits they were promised are not being parasites for expecting a legal obligation to be fulfilled.

As for old people demanding expensive medical care, we have discussed before the diminishing returns of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep Grandma alive for another month, and those are legitimate ethical debates, but an old person who wants health care and reasonably expects to receive it even if it is more expensive (because they are old) is not parasitism unless you're prepared to advocate for the ice floe health care plan.

But this includes the people in the videos you were complaining were just ragebait!

If you actually read my post, instead of just rushing to chew on my heel as usual, you'd have seen I admitted I also feel the rage and find these people infuriating. My point is not "A worse than B, therefore you should not be angry at B." My point is if you're concerned about the broad dysfunction of society and how to fix it, A is actually more impactful than B and you should consider that B might be an emotive distraction. By all means, let's squash the parasites as well, but let's be clear about motives.

People collecting pensions they were promised as part of their work agreement is not parasitism.

People who are net negatives are parasites irrespective of the method they've used to swindle the rest of society. If they have managed contracts which state they should receive more from the system than they have contributed, then these people are a drain. It makes little difference whether they then extract this tribute with sword and cutting throats or through the laws of a bullshit system of their construction. What obligation do later generations have to maintain a Ponzi scheme which they did not vote for, and in some cases was constructed before they were given the right to vote. If the elderly have unilaterally erected a contract in my behest, that I should be drained for their benefit, then what is this contract worth? Surely, tyranny by lawfare is still tyranny.

Indeed, let us then abnegate all prior agreements we no longer consider binding on us because we don't like the costs. This will be very reformative and beneficial.

This will be very reformative and beneficial.

Perhaps it would be. It seems to work for foreign policy. Tautologically if we remove contracts which are harmful to society, then society will benefit. Of course, you'd have to factor in the increase to future counter party risk evaluations. But perhaps we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with if boomers had operated under the assumption that future generations would annul any one-sided agreements that they should be robbed. And now is a good time as any to set new precedent. Surely, anything will beat continuing our civilizational death spiral in Boomertopia?

I think generally "harmful to society" is understood to mean "would be better for society if they hadn't been made". For it to be tautological you'd have to mean "contracts which are more harmful to society than the harm incurred by breaking them" and that is, I think, harder to demonstrate. The whole issue with, eg, student loan forgiveness, is that it incentivises people to choose based on the short term consequences, expecting they can always renegotiate at government-point the long-term consequences later.

You can complain about unions and their tactics, but the individuals who expect to collect on the benefits they were promised are not being parasites for expecting a legal obligation to be fulfilled.

If that obligation was obtained corruptly, I think they are.

My point is if you're concerned about the broad dysfunction of society and how to fix it, A is actually more impactful than B and you should consider that B might be an emotive distraction.

Transfer payments are huge. Trying to point to some bigger but much more nebulous problem looks like a distraction to prevent doing anything about transfer payments.

If that obligation was obtained corruptly, I think they are.

If I join a union that negotiated a pension for me, let's say I agree with you for the sake of argument that the union used "corrupt" tactics to get that pension. Does that make me a parasite because I shouldn't have joined a union, or I should refuse the pension? As as a follow-up question, is there any union or pension scheme that @The_Nybbler does not think is "corrupt"?

Transfer payments are huge. Trying to point to some bigger but much more nebulous problem looks like a distraction to prevent doing anything about transfer payments.

Did I say don't do anything about transfer payments? So what do you want to do about transfer payments?

Maybe we should also look at what the biggest problems are and consider how to allocate efforts accordingly.

"Bigger but more nebulous problems" are indeed harder to "do" something about than raging at welfare moms on TikTok. I don't fault people for taking the ragebait and going for the low-hanging fruit per se. You don't want to fix transfer payments because you have a rational economic plan to do so and you want to make things better for anyone else. You want to fix transfer payments so you can laugh as Laquisha is kicked onto the street. And I'm not even completely faulting you for that! I have not become as blackpilled as you, though my heart is increasingly bitter, but I have started to accept that schadenfreude is one of the few satisfactions left to us.

But don't lie to yourself about your motives. Tell me you want to fix some other stuff that doesn't warm your culture warring heart and maybe I'll believe there is some principle involved.

If I join a union that negotiated a pension for me, let's say I agree with you for the sake of argument that the union used "corrupt" tactics to get that pension. Does that make me a parasite because I shouldn't have joined a union, or I should refuse the pension? As as a follow-up question, is there any union or pension scheme that @The_Nybbler does not think is "corrupt"?

You can join the union, just don't expect any portion of the contract that says something like "the guys we largely helped get elected have promised to let you enslave future generations" to be honored by future generations. You should have the same recourse as a southern slave owner when slavery was abolished, be glad we only take from you the future fruits of your corruption.

If I join a union that negotiated a pension for me, let's say I agree with you for the sake of argument that the union used "corrupt" tactics to get that pension. Does that make me a parasite because I shouldn't have joined a union, or I should refuse the pension?

You shouldn't have joined a corrupt union. The payment is not somehow cleansed of its corruption by the fact that it goes to you and not the union.

Did I say don't do anything about transfer payments? So what do you want to do about transfer payments?

Cut them off or reduce them very significantly.

Maybe we should also look at what the biggest problems are and consider how to allocate efforts accordingly.

Or maybe we should look at transfer payments.

You shouldn't have joined a corrupt union. The payment is not somehow cleansed of its corruption by the fact that it goes to you and not the union.

You didn't answer my question about whether any union would meet your criteria for being non-corrupt. And do you expect everyone who joins the union to do an investigation of its corruption and come to the same conclusions as you? Should we just take it as given that you think no one with a union pension should be able to collect on that pension because they're guilty of complicity in "union corruption"?

Cut them off or reduce them very significantly.

Okay. I say that glibly: at one time I would have been willing to take a personal hit in the form of reduced or no Social Security for myself if it would "fix" SS. Now I am too jaded to believe that's being anything other than a chump. But sure, at some point transfer payments are definitely going to have to be cut/reduced, and I bitterly hope it's not until after I'm dead.

Or maybe we should look at transfer payments.

Or we could look at both and not just go for your low-hanging emotionally satisfying culture war targets.

You didn't answer my question about whether any union would meet your criteria for being non-corrupt. And do you expect everyone who joins the union to do an investigation of its corruption and come to the same conclusions as you? Should we just take it as given that you think no one with a union pension should be able to collect on that pension because they're guilty of complicity in "union corruption"?

I don't know if any union would meet my criteria for being non-corrupt. Nor do I care if those who join the union do an investigation. These questions are irrelevant; if the pension was obtained corruptly, it does not become non-corrupt through either the honest or willful ignorance of the beneficiaries.

Or we could look at both and not just go for your low-hanging emotionally satisfying culture war targets.

You can certainly start a thread talking about Afghanistan or peso-buying. But when transfer payments are brought up and you want to talk about Afghanistan and Argentina instead, it sure looks like a distraction away from transfer payments.

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I have a woman who works for me (Well, for GloboCorp. I'm her manager.) 30yo single mom of two. The state provides her and her kids with free healthcare, Section 8 housing assistance, and more besides. Her kids go to school in one town, do sports in another, and she talks about moving their school district based on petty annoyances. Residency requirements are not a problem because she has told me that you can just lie on them. She was hired as a full-timer, but is down to 15ish hours per week due to latenesses and shrinking availability and callouts. She was actively scouted for promotions at one point (DEI considerations were involved), but she has no interest because making more money might impact how much she collects in transfers from the government. She takes two vacations a year, one usually international.

You're not wrong that she is less of a societal problem than some violent thug committing violent crimes.

But there's a similar theme of standards at play for the both of them. A huge part of the problem with crime is that too many people are sympathetic to the criminals. They believe it would be mean to judge someone just for being a feral rapist. And how many people have ever openly judged my employee for using the system like that? None, of course. We more functional citizens maintain a facade of social equality, no matter how many years we spend watching a perfectly healthy person decline to do more than the barest minimum, because doing more would cut into her TikTok time.

I hit my lowest point fifteen years ago. I dropped out of college after my girlfriend "accidentally" got pregnant to take a construction job with my dad. That was during the GFC, so all the construction work fueled by cheap, bad mortgages dried up until he had no work to offer me. I was getting windmill slammed by male post-partum depression and flirting with total personality collapse (What the fuck even am I if I'm not The Smart Guy? Smart Guys go to college. I'm not in college. What the fuck even am I?). And there came a day when the mother of my children brought me to a government office to apply for welfare.

And that moment, seared into my memory, of sitting in a cubicle while a nice man in business casual asked if I knew how to read... That was the single most humiliating moment of my life. If I hadn't had an infant child I would have preferred to just kill myself. It was so bad it broke through the depression and sparked enough agency to go get a job, any job, no matter how shit. Because a complete downward revision of my life expectations was still preferable to that.

What would my life be like if I hadn't suffered the sin of pride? What would my children's lives be like? How easy would it be to just slip into the permanent underclass? It looks like our society makes that pretty damn easy.

Maybe we should add more friction. Maybe we should hold people to a higher standard. Maybe we should spit at criminals and sneer at welfare recipients, and then do the same to their retarded gentle-hearted defenders.

Maybe we're not being "manipulated to hate".

Maybe we're being reminded to have some basic fucking standards.

From an emotional point of view, I understand. It's easier to get angry at Welfare Mom than Global Lobbying Government Siphoning Industrial Complex. It's a lot more personal when you meet the parasites and see how they live their worthless lives.

From an economic point of view, though, it really does seem like Global Lobbying Government Siphoning Industrial Complex would like to distract us with ragebait about welfare moms.

The economic point of view is valid and important, of course.

But the other POV is ruinous to a nation. Allowing people to live off of others' backs without contributing, or while merely pretending to contribute, requires harsh sanction and should not be structurally possible in the first place. Public no-strings-attached welfare is a dead end of social evolution. What does this make of people?

I'm fine with addressing both, but most people only want to address the thing that makes them angry in the moment.

Somehow the people who say that "X doesnt matter, dont be distracted from our great overlords" are never willing to give in on X to get the overlords. It always only doesnt matter in the way where you should do what I want.

Indeed, people who say X doesn't matter would be making a poor argument.

Global Lobbying Government Siphoning Industrial Complex would like to distract us with ragebait about welfare moms

Transfer payments are the largest Federal expenditures. Granted, most of this is old people and not single welfare moms, but single welfare moms are a not-at-all-insignificant part, and pointing to some nebulous group is just a distraction.

Is a "distraction" a thing @The_Nybbler does not care about, as opposed to things @The_Nybbler does care about?

I can be angry at single welfare moms while also noticing how much money we sunk into Afghanistan and the billions we're sending to Argentina. Our transfer payments, as you point out, are mostly to old people, and if you want to cut them to the point they are no longer our greatest federal expenditure, you won't just be booting single moms off the rolls.

Is a "distraction" a thing @The_Nybbler does not care about, as opposed to things @The_Nybbler does care about?

No, a "distraction" is an attempt to prevent something from being examined by pointing to something else.

I can be angry at single welfare moms while also noticing how much money we sunk into Afghanistan and the billions we're sending to Argentina.

Distractions. Social Security was over $1.5 trillion in 2024. Including over $200B not due to the old-age program.

While many people on disability are there fraudulently, it's almost certainly impossible to sort through and get mostly fraud cases pushed out.

Alexander of Macedon had a solution to that sort of thing.

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Without numbers, I'm not convinced there actually are larger problems. All I know is that the overwhelming majority of the federal budget goes to welfare of one sort or another, and not corporate bailouts or foreign adventures. Even if the undeserving only amounted to 10%, that's 10% of a staggeringly large sum.

Sometimes it seems like the main thing keeping me from doing the "exploit every handout and assistance program the government offers" thing is the capacity to feel shame.

Yeah, somebody in the gooning thread said a huge problem with modern America is that we lack the ability to utilize or feel shame.

I think that's true, but only for certain groups...

Government has always been a cow to be milked, and under the old patronage systems the corruption was far worse.

Notably, the old patronage systems often built large things of considerable value. The people being robbed by them often saw significant, tangible improvements in their standard of living as an offset. Can we build a Golden Gate bridge today? Can we build a national highway system? This is a legitimate question, I do not claim to know the answer. I'm worried about what the answer might be, though.

I think you are correct that actual criminals are a much more serious problem than mere fiscal-net-extractors. But as you note, insurance sucks and seems to be unfixable, and a lot of other things do too, and it's not as though the existence of a worse thing makes less worse things better. It is also, quite notably, not like the crime is actually being handled either.

Most of my life, I've operated off the assumption that even if these systems, both the fiscal handouts and the crime, are very wasteful but we're rich and we can probably afford it. The world I see around me seems a lot less rich now. Maybe this is the algorythm feeding me rage-bait, but it's not looking stellar for my actual family's finances either.

Can we build a Golden Gate Bridge today? Can we still go to the Moon?

We have the money. We have the technology. In theory, we still have the know-how.

But we don't have the will. It's graft all the way down.

I think about Robert Moses sometimes (never miss an opportunity to boost Robert Caro). Motherfucker was a petty, vengeful, tyrannical and (in his own way) corrupt bastard. Anti-democratic and considered public monies his to spend and control. But he got shit done. Arguably in terrible ways sometimes. Lots of people have opinions about how New York could have been done better. But he got it done.

No one can get shit done today. After all the bluster and owning the wokes, do you think Trump is actually going to get anything done? Make America Great Again?

I think sometimes about movies like Independence Day or Armageddon. You've got a literal world -ending threat, so surely under those circumstances, we'd all get our shit together and act like competent adults... at least for a little while, right?

I don't believe that anymore. We'd be so cooked, as the kids say.

We probably are anyway.

Can we build a Golden Gate Bridge today? Can we still go to the Moon?

We have the money. We have the technology. In theory, we still have the know-how.

But we don't have the will. It's graft all the way down.

For sure cost disease and other considerations are problem, but on a positive note - when I-95 got shut down a few years ago near Philly it did get fixed real fucking fast.

I suspect if the need is there we can fix stuff quite ably, we just don't bother to or need to most of the time.

You've got a literal world -ending threat, so surely under those circumstances, we'd all get our shit together and act like competent adults... at least for a little while, right?

laughs nervously in covid

Yeah I'm with you. I'm not saying that was anything close to world ending (it obviously wasn't, as we are here), but it strongly indicated how such a threat would go down. We would bicker and squabble about what was the right thing to do until it was too late.

I can't get too worked up about them after watching all those bodycam and parole hearing videos I mentioned. The people who are really a "parasitical" class are not boomers crying that their health insurance is going up or a DREAMER couple who will probably declare bankruptcy.

This is what bugs me, though.

Its sort of easy for me to accept that there will ALWAYS be an underclass that we can only ever 'contain' and 'placate,' never fully integrate into society regardless of how much we spend. Accept that its a fixed cost and move on.

But then you see ostensibly functional people happily tearing off chunks for themselves, and the scope of the problem starts to seem larger, where the justifications for the behavior are more elaborate, and the political costs of intervening are much steeper.

But ultimately I think you are being manipulated to hate the easily hateable. If you are really concerned about the government spigot and all the parasites bleeding the beast... well, like I said, there's much bigger bleeding to rage at.

Yeah, but I bring these up because they're not easily hateable. And yet I still find myself wanting to label them with the 'parasite' moniker because there's me, over here doing just about everything 'right' and getting rewarded with a portion of what I genuinely earned, with the potential for more to be taken later (one hopes not!), and then there's these guys, guiltlessly sucking up resources and clearly expecting no resistance or problems, and just generally living their life with much less stress than I.

A similar source of ragebait that you see on Caleb's channel: "disabled" veterans who are clearly very functional but have managed to find a sympathetic doctor who declares they have service-related injuries which mean they now get a check for life. Even if they never saw combat. Even if they were never in a combat-facing role. Are you man enough to call out veterans for welfare-queen behavior?

Likewise, I run into it in my professional life, "Retired" cops from New York, Chicago, other big cities, who qualify for Pensions from their home state (and pull certain tactics to maximize the payout), then move down to Florida (see my point about lack of income tax) to 'retire' while pulling part time gigs with local PDs for extra cash. Its one hell of a payout and there's clearly a known strategy for maximizing return on 'investment,' and who the hell would argue our brave boys in blue don't 'deserve' this special treatment? Not I.

Oh, firemen too.

We are culturally tuned to treat these 'heroes' with deference. Ignoring the fact that these jobs have gotten MUCH safer over the decades, and much cushier, and basically impossible to fire bad actors from said jobs.

How many bailouts has the government shoveled money into to rescue failing businesses and failing industries? How much money did we spend on Afghanistan over 20+ years to achieve literally fuck-all in the end?

Yep, my point when I stated "I've KNOWN how bad the Government money faucet was for the past 15 years." My political 'awakening' was tied up in realizing how much money was burned bailing out failed banks and pursuing pointless military debacles. Very impersonal, abstract harms.

There's a bit more emotional valence when you can see the face of the person soaking up the wealth, even if its a comparatively trivial amount.

I have a family friend, retired Statie. He's been retired my entire life. He just bought a Z06 Vette, which is a bitchin' ride, and I joked that I wanted right of first refusal on it in his will. He bought it essentially because he liked the sound, he doesn't even drive it over 50!, and because he has no kids and too much money and he's gonna die soon.

And he's been very open about working the pension system, and the way every State Trooper cooperates to do it. The pension system determines salary based on average of your highest three years, including overtime. So in every barracks they know when it's your years to salary max, and you pick up every possible hour of overtime, and guys coordinate to call out sick at convenient times to get you more overtime, and you get every special assignment to hunt a fugitive or handle an event or whatever, so you look at the salary numbers for these guys and there are always precisely three balloon years to max out their pension.

Relatedly my litmus test for a True Small Government believer is, how do you respond to the data showing NYC has way more firefighters than they need.

The pension system determines salary based on average of your highest three years, including overtime.

That's interesting. My state government's pension system doesn't include overtime in pension calculations. And it was increased from the highest three years to the highest five years in 2010.

Tbf this is what an 87 year old told me, not necessarily the current system, they might have reformed that trick out of the system by now. Though I've no doubt there are other tricks.

The disabled vets thing on his channel always gets me. I certainly don't begrudge generous payouts to people who got seriously hurt fighting for their country, but there are people getting 3-4K per month who were helicopter repair techs in the military and auto repair techs now. That just seems bananas, and as he always mentions he has NEVER seen a vat come through his show who does not have 20K+ in disability so it doesn't seem like it is correlated to any actual metrics of desert.

And yet I still find myself wanting to label them with the 'parasite' moniker because there's me, over here doing just about everything 'right' and getting rewarded with a portion of what I genuinely earned, with the potential for more to be taken later (one hopes not!), and then there's these guys, guiltlessly sucking up resources and clearly expecting no resistance or problems, and just generally living their life with much less stress than I.

This reminds me of the (imo excellent) argument against student loan forgiveness. It's been stated here, but I've also seen it in other venues (my cousin was patiently trying to lay it out for people on FB for a while, God bless him for his patience). Johnny chose to skip college or go a far more affordable route for college, sacrificing four years of having fun partying with his peers, but gained the reward of not having student loan debt. Jimmy went to a nice school for four years and has a good time, but has to pay back those student loans the rest of his life. Except now Jimmy wants to get his loans bailed out at everyone's expense (including Johnny!), so he would get his short term reward and also Johnny's long term reward, without having to sacrifice anything. This is a terrible social policy to have, because the Johnnies of the world will (rightly) conclude that they are chumps for doing the right thing, and more and more people will mooch off the system until it all comes crashing down eventually.

Similarly, people like you (rightly) feel like chumps for working hard to get ahead when we refuse to let people face the consequences of their bad decisions. I'm not saying you should join them, because I believe virtuous conduct to be intrinsically valuable, but neither could I really find it in my heart to be mad at you if you did join them. It's a raw deal, doing everything right and watching as those who didn't bother still get away with it.

veterans who... get a check for life. Even if they never saw combat. Even if they were never in a combat-facing role.

In fairness, I think that isn't necessarily a prerequisite for time in the service to fuck you up in some way. One of my teammates at work was in the army, and has talked about how even just being on watch for the base can mess with your head because of the stress it causes to be hyper-alert like that. Then there's stuff like hearing damage from doing firearms training without ear protection (my understanding from him is that was a thing, which makes sense because in actual combat you don't have time to put in ear plugs so you have to experience it beforehand in a controlled situation), etc. I'm not saying the guys you are talking about deserve the benefits they are getting, because I don't watch the show and I am willing to assume from your description that they don't deserve the benefits. Just pointing out that not serving in combat shouldn't necessarily be a prerequisite here, as there can be legitimate claims even outside that situation.

even just being on watch for the base can mess with your head because of the stress it causes to be hyper-alert like that.

This seems to imply large fractions of human history where everyone was psychiatrically disabled.

in actual combat you don't have time to put in ear plugs so you have to experience it beforehand in a controlled situation)

I dont think thats true. I forgot my ears the first time duck hunting, and I didnt even notice until it was time to reload.

This seems to imply large fractions of human history where everyone was psychiatrically disabled.

I would not be surprised if that's true by modern standards.

I would also not be surprised if that wasn't the case because historical societies had rituals and other customs for dealing with stresses like this which we've forgotten.

Im not necessarily surprised either, but it would imply that trauma is something very different than people generally think.

People think that negative experiences somehow damage your mind and make it work worse. But while physical pain is a sign that your getting damaged, an experience cannot just damage you. How your mind reacts to things is generally up to your evolutionary optimiser with no real constraint besides complexity, and there is absolutely no reason to just work worse in reaction to something that happens to basically everyone. It might be an unfortunate sideeffect of a positive adaptation thats triggerd only rarely, or an "out of sample" type error, but it shouldnt be standard.

So on the conventional theory, healing/avoiding trauma is good because less damage is better, and getting less traumatised today is a lot like better nutrition today - but as per above, thats wrong. "Untraumatised" is instead an engineered mental state, like literacy, allowed for but not planned by human nature. This implies some very different things in how we should think about its benefits, potential downsides, and how to maintain it!

Historical research into PTSD and other conditions exists and has answers to some of these questions - life was better in some ways is something worth remembering (working with your hands, having nature around you, strong community). Also keep in mind that people with lots of conditions just tended to die or get killed if they weren't rich/powerful (ex: bipolar, schizophrenia).

I do believe that to some extent the plight of the "traumatized" (Let's pick on first world child abuse or domestic violence survivors for an example.) is that they were simply left behind by life getting so much better for everyone else that they find themselves surrounded by people blissfully unable to relate to the idea that bad things happen (I'm wildly oversimplifying here, but you get the idea.). When then "engineered" (I think the shrinks call this "securely attached".) become somewhere between the majority to the vast majority depending on what social circles you're running in, it can perhaps be alienating for those stuck by circumstances in the old ways with a different way of looking at people and the world at large.

it would imply that trauma is something very different than people generally think.

Yes, absolutely.

How your mind reacts to things is generally up to your evolutionary optimiser with no real constraint besides complexity

It's also up a lot of other things! Like your attitude, like the sort of things you do after the things, and so many other things. Historians have speculated that maybe the reason WWII caused less PTSD in US soldiers than Vietnam was that there was a longer time returning home on ships to process things together and get mental distance from it. I think our postmodern society has lost a lot of helpful rituals like that.

I've read that argument by historians before, but I'd add this: The US simultaneously deployed a huge amount of soldiers in WWII while asking a relatively small number of them to do most of the actual fighting. Something like one in sixteen American soldiers saw serious combat during the war.

By contrast, the US deployed far fewer troops during the Vietnam War and asked those who did to do a lot more fighting. The USMC deployed and lost more Marines in WWII than in Vietnam, but those who did deploy to Vietnam suffered a higher casualty/fatality rate than their counterparts in WWII, with around 3% of those deployed Killed in Action in WWII vs. 5% in Vietnam.

A similar source of ragebait that you see on Caleb's channel: "disabled" veterans who are clearly very functional but have managed to find a sympathetic doctor who declares they have service-related injuries which mean they now get a check for life. Even if they never saw combat. Even if they were never in a combat-facing role. Are you man enough to call out veterans for welfare-queen behavior?

This (and the pension double dipping thing) are super crazy. I know of multiple people who are mid 30s, work full time as engineers or accountants, and pull in 30k extra income a year because of military disability benefits.

I finally sit down to enjoy it all, in this version the farmer shows up with a shotgun and says "these other animals are hungry, you're gonna share half that loaf with them."

Half a loaf? You're quite the optimist that you think you're getting to keep half. I think it more likely that we're going to get the Boxer retirement plan.

Your overall post reminded me of the TW post about the "chump effect." I thought the term was coined by him, but apparently it was the City Journal article he links to.

Stories like the two you pointed out make me feel like quite the chump, as I do most days when I think about these things. I didn't have undergrad debt because I busted my ass in a hard science to maintain grades for my scholarships at a state school. I paid off my law school loans (what a mega-chump move). I drive a 15-year-old paid-off truck. I go to work every day to defend people who are mostly guilty and generally ungrateful. I'm earning a pension, but at best it'll be 60% of the payout that Boomers and Xers are getting from it (thanks to various reforms to keep the system solvent that only took effect long after their benefits were locked in), and that's if I can stick it for another 20 years. So give me that chump jacket, I've earned it.

Wow, how many lawyers do we have on this website?

I for one appreciate your sacrifices.

Probably second only to our programmers.

I didn't have undergrad debt because I busted my ass in a hard science to maintain grades for my scholarships at a state school. I paid off my law school loans (what a mega-chump move). I drive a 15-year-old paid-off truck.

Same, same, and same. Although its a 13-year-old Honda, and I haven't finished paying them off, its only a matter of time.

That said I can be 'proud' that I beat out the early stage of DEI-based admissions to actually secure a law school slot in a highly-ranked school and then (eventually) find a decent job.

Its only been in recent years I've realized how much of the deck was actually stacked against me and how much better off I'd probably be if:

A) The system was actually as meritocratic as I believed

or

B) I just said "fuck it" and cut the corners and cheated as much I could get away with.

I don't believe in Karma, although I do believe "what goes around comes around," so I expect I'll come out of things alright. I didn't become the 'type of person' who cheats and cuts corners, so I won't be subjected to the various failure modes that cheating and cutting corners are prone to.

But there's no avoiding the fact that the political system is still functionally designed to redistribute rewards of good behavior and high performance no matter how well you follow the rules, which makes one much less inclined to follow the rules.

I remember feeling like a chump in my 20's and early 30's. Graduated with a crisp engineering degree, making more money than most of my peers right out of school. And yet... the subsidized housing in my area was nicer than anything I could afford... except for having to live around people in subsidized housing. I'd meet women who went into education and the county would subsidize their first home, which I was still over a decade away from doing. About 10 years before I actually bought my first home with a 20% down payment and a fixed rate 30y mortgage, I went to a seminar about home buying which was packed full of immigrants being told all the programs they qualified for. The company I worked for routinely lost government contracts that would get diverted to no-compete minority owned businesses.

None the less, pride kept me from smashing the defect button as hard as I fucking could.

I did eventually get married, have a kid, buy a house in the country, and my investments have appreciated to the point where I may not have to work anymore. Also it turns out when you are married, if your only income is capital gains the first $100,000 are tax free. Is that my defect button? It just might.

Granted, I didn't have as many kids as I wanted. I wish I'd had them earlier. I wish home ownership hadn't been this constantly moving goalpost the first 15 years of my adult life. But unless they pass a wealth tax, which isn't impossible I admit, the 20 years of my adulthood doing the right thing despite feeling like a chump have been better spent than every parasite out there.

As a fellow Caleb Hammer enthusiast, I suggest you check in on some of the episodes with people in their 40's or 50's. The story of the out of control 20 something financing a lavish lifestyle ends quite catastrophically.

But also, I can't wait for EBT payments to halt if this shutdown continues.

I don't believe in Karma, although I do believe "what goes around comes around,"

Isn't that just karma? Maybe I misunderstand the term, I'm not well versed in Eastern religious thought.

Simply put, I don't believe in any sort of Cosmic Scale or Ledger such that bad behavior is guaranteed to be punished. Bad people will 'get away with it' in many cases.

But there's a level of path dependence to bad behavior. If you like to commit acts of violence and terrorize others, you're much more likely to hang around violent people and thus you're far more likely to be victimized and/or killed by violence.

Similar if you like to commit theft, scam others, leach off people's goodwill, the sort of people you hang around are more likely to steal from you, scam you, and leach off of you. Which can be its own punishment.

Do things that damage others, at the very least you're risking that one of those people will flip out and come for you in a rage.

The risks you accept by engaging in antisocial, harmful conduct may or may not ever come back to bite you, but you are inviting those risks.

Consider the ending scene of the film It's a Wonderful Life. George Bailey lived a life of relative destitution thanks to making choices that kept him from achieving wealth and fame. And yet, by constantly sticking to his guns and doing the "good" thing, the thing that benefited others, he is a beloved figure and nobody hesitates to come to his aid at the drop of a hat.

Mr. Potter, in contrast, will probably still die rich, but very much alone.

There is no 'just world,' but the world we create is indeed defined by our actions, and just actions will tend to create more justice, if only in your local environment.

Makes sense, thank you for the explanation!


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