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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33784 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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Recently I've had a related observation while browsing a different website, which has an amount of bots and shills. But interestingly people seem to really despise it if you call a bot a bot, or a shill a shill. They might defend some obvious AI slop by saying "it's not a crime to write well" or "many people use em-dashes legitimately" or even just call you an idiot with no further explanation. All humanly written posts, all defending an obvious bot with vigor. I saw a similar thing on a local Facebook group, where an obvious paid shill posted a wall of text clearly written by ChatGPT, yet everybody just ate it up. It seems like when you bring up concerns, you end up as the bad guy for disturbing the peace, while the bot is the good guy because it's following the right conventions.

I remember a previous discussion about non-autistic vs autistic communication, where autistic communication is centered around an exchange of facts, while the core of non-autistic communication is emotional signalling. It seems that that this phenomenon extends to bad actors insofar as they can provide the right emotional cues to be accepted. Or at least people feel that it's not a disqualifying factor from engaging at face value. Meanwhile I know a shill is paid to say anything necessary in order to spread his message, and a bot is just a program with no emotions or sense of true or false.

But I think this touches on the idea of arguments as soldiers. To many people, it likely doesn't matter what the facts are, just the emotional message that they encode. And while debunkings exist, the practice they just act as another soldier from the other side knocking on the door.

Looping back into current events, it seems like there's little incentive for the administration not to bend the truth. The enemy was already deploying their rapid response arguments with zero regard for the truth, saying that a boneheaded ice agent just executed an innocent bystander on the street in cold blood. What good does it do to say "The agent made a split second judgement thinking he was grabbing a gun, which turned out to be the wrong call" (the truth) versus "an armed and violent individual resisted arrest and was shot while police were trying to disarm him" (not technically a lie). Twitter autists might try to go over the frame by frame, but for everyone else they're gonna live the lie.

Recently I've had a related observation while browsing a different website, which has an amount of bots and shills. But interestingly people seem to really despise it if you call a bot a bot, or a shill a shill. They might defend some obvious AI slop by saying "it's not a crime to write well" or "many people use em-dashes legitimately" or even just call you an idiot with no further explanation. All humanly written posts, all defending an obvious bot with vigor. I saw a similar thing on a local Facebook group, where an obvious paid shill posted a wall of text clearly written by ChatGPT, yet everybody just ate it up. It seems like when you bring up concerns, you end up as the bad guy for disturbing the peace, while the bot is the good guy because it's following the right conventions.

To be fair, I don't think most people's AI-dar is well-calibrated in either direction.

I recently had the frustrating experience of being accused of using AI to write some posts on Reddit, even though I did not use AI. The OP blocked me, and I learned first-hand how annoying Reddit's implementation of block is, because I kept getting notifications when people replied to my posts in the OP's thread, but when I clicked the notifications Reddit pretended the thread didn't exist. I had to log out to see that the thread wasn't, in fact, broken.

I didn't even get the chance to defend myself regarding the supposed AI usage. The OP just decided I was using AI after a few posts (their evidence was that I supposedly wrote in "ridiculously long paragraphs" and had posted in AI subs in the past), and then blocked me, effectively ceding the whole discussion to the other side of the argument in that thread.

Obviously, a false positive like this isn't the end of the world, but it will be annoying going forward if everyone's good faith efforts to argue an unpopular opinion on Reddit somewhere gets them accused of AI usage and blocked.

The way they implemented blocking is completely idiotic. The one thing you are still able to do is edit your own posts in the thread and add something like "lol this loser blocked me" which helps a bit at least.

False AI accusations are awful and I almost feel like they follow the same dynamic. When you're the one posting: "hey that's actually not ai" you'll be attacked just as much.

It seems like whether or not an account is a bot barely matters, it's only what side it's on that matters to the masses. Posting some wrongthink - insult and the account as much you want and people will love you. Posting the approved message - any criticism will draw hate.

In Nice Facebook Group people may be more genuinely unsettled by factual explanations in a that's our preferred style of bot way. On reddit, bot or AI accusations are regularly and routinely used to derail discussion. A portion of it is bots, trolls, or propagandists of intent, but then a greater number are people who have observed this and get the same use out of the technique-- a handy way to route around any type of discussion. "Echo chamber" is an accurate description of this phenomena despite being so popular to be meaningless. Bots are bad>bots say bad>you say bad>you're a bad bot.

Recently I've had a related observation while browsing a different website, which has an amount of bots and shills.

Not sure which site you're vaguebooking about, but my experience on reddit is that most of the time someone gets called a bot or a shill, the accused is really an actual human who simply dared to deviate 0.01% from hivemind-approved window of opinions. I know this because I'm often the target of such accusations (I am neither a bot nor a shill), and because I've reviewed the comment history of many of those people who get dismissed this way, and rarely are there any obvious signs of them being anything but a human being with an organic opinion.

To be clear, there are bots on reddit, but they mostly seem to be karma farming, and not making detailed political arguments. They will typically (re)post generic oneliners on cat pictures and the like. And there are shills, like Kamala Harris reddit astro-turfing campaign, but it's not even clear they are paid, and rather just act based on their own righteousness.

So how do I know you're not doing the same thing? Dismissing people whose views you disagree with as being paid for or generated by a LLM? In particular, when you say:

I saw a similar thing on a local Facebook group, where an obvious paid shill posted a wall of text clearly written by ChatGPT

Can you clarify how you determined that this person was getting paid to post that content? Did you see their paycheck?

And yes, people sometimes use ChatGPT to write arguments for them. I find that super obnoxious too, but mostly those are just losers who are too lazy or stupid to defend their own views. They're despicable, but they're not bots and they're not shills; they're just lazy morons.

But what I hate even more than those morons is the circlejerkers who avoid engaging in discussion and instead just label every outsider as a “bot” or “shill”, encouraging the rest to downvote rather than engage with their arguments intellectually. How do I know you aren't doing exactly that which I most despise?

Can you clarify how you determined that this person was getting paid to post that content? Did you see their paycheck?

That is a good point, but on the other hand I have seen 'reviews' left on websites, social media, and elsewhere which are full 5 star super enthusiasm over how great the product/service/movie/crawling abomination from the abyss is, where everyone else is giving much lower or even negative reviews, and where I have sampled the product/abomination myself and know it is not as good as claimed.

That's either a bot or someone being paid (pennies) to leave FIFTEEN THUMBS UP!!!! reviews to push the abomination up the SEO rankings. It's especially noticeable when you read a string of reviews all phrased almost identically, but even for individual cases you don't have to see the pay check to suspect the quality of the egg being laid, as it were.

Sure, I acknowledge that bots/shills exist; my point is that people are really bad at identifying them, and more likely to throw “bot” or “shill” out as insults or ways to dismiss an opponent, with little to no regard for the truth.

For product reviews, there is a clear incentive for the seller to prop up their listing with fake reviews, while legitimately happy customers often have little incentive to leave a review: if you buy a ream of printer paper, a set of kitchen towels or a box of pencils, how excited can you possibly be about your purchase? If the product is subpar, I could imagine leaving a negative review, as a form of revenge and a warning to others (I've done that myself). But for mundane products that basically meet expectations, you'd have to be exceedingly bored to leave a detailed 5 star review praising the subtle off-white coloring and the tasteful thickness of a sheet of printer paper. Consequently, I can imagine for those type of products, a relatively high fraction of rave reviews were left by shills.

For political discussions, the opposite is true. Lots of people like to waste their time online arguing about stuff that even politicians don't care that much about. These people are real humans. Take the presidential election, for example, where it was shown that Harris hired people (it's not clear if they were paid) to post positive stories on reddit in an attempt to generate buzz/get people to show up at the polls. Even knowing that that was a thing, I believe the majority of Harris supporters on reddit were genuine believers, not (un)paid shills.

This is based on the observation that reddit has millions of leftist users who would support Harris by default, versus only a handful of shills. That means the prior probability of any Harris-supporter being a paid shill is just very low, and I definitely wouldn't feel confident about identifying the shills. That can either mean I'm a terrible judge of character, or the people who confidently claim they can sniff out shills are just overconfident; the latter seems more plausible to me.

To give an example I saw today on reddit: this (re)post about Shell (the oil company) emitting orders of magnitude more CO2 than an average person has many people crying “shill”:

I love all the shills or dorks in this comment thread parroting fossil fuel talking points

man some of the people in this reddit thread must work for exxon-mobil lmao.

Thank you for your service /u/shellshillbot

These comments have to be bots or astroturfing. I’ve never seen so many people defending a multinational corporation.

Someone reasonably replies to the last comment:

They’re not defending a corporation, they’re defending basic logic. To attribute every emission to the company that produces the oil and gas is downright stupid.

And yeah, I agree. These are just normal people deviating from the “oil company bad—upvotes to the left” playbook. I tried looking at the history of some of the top commenters and they seemed to have normal histories with no clear indication of paid shilling. That doesn't prove they aren't shilling, of course, but given that none of the shill-accusers give evidence to support their beliefs, I conclude that they were making those accussations baselessly.

I've seen this so many times now that I've come to believe that on reddit and spaces like it, words like “bot” and “shill” aren't used to identify actual bots or actual shills, but they are terms used to dismiss real people who express unwelcome opinions.

my experience on reddit is that most of the time someone gets called a bot or a shill, the accused is really an actual human who simply dared to deviate 0.01% from hivemind-approved window of opinions

My experience has been the exact opposite. The calls are about obvious giveaways in how the accused comments / writes the post and how all their replies are the exact same non-committal bullshit that LLMs are prone to generating.

Not sure which site you're vaguebooking about...

It sounded like hacker news to me, but I imagine other places could have the same behavior.

See this is exactly what I'm talking about. Add "you're just dismissing someone you don't agree with" and "how do I know you can tell AI from human" to the list of insults people will throw at you when you call a bot a bot.

Now maaaybe you might have a point that normies can't tell me from those other people you hate. But they way your post is written it seems like you're accusing me of being a retard.

(to be clear, none of the stuff I mentioned is political at all.)

Please just answer the question. What method did you use to determine that the obvious paid shill was obviously paid to shill? That should be easy to answer since it was so obvious, right?

edit: instead of answering, phailyoor chose to block me. Cowardly behavior, that all but proves he has no reasonable answer, and my suspicions were correct all along.

Now maaaybe you might have a point that normies can't tell me from those other people you hate. But they way your post is written it seems like you're accusing me of being a retard.

You're not beating the allegations if you're not able to field any argument why I should treat you differently than the majority of people who accuse others of being bots and shills without evidence.

Your argument sounds indistinguishable from: “People seem to really despise you when you call a witch a witch. Whenever I call a woman a witch, there are people defending her by saying ‘that's just a woman with a slightly crooked nose’ when she's obviously the bride of Satan.”

Given that I know that most people who call women witches are full of shit, I'm not inclined to believe the women that you called witches were in fact witches, unless you can give me a solid argument why your ability to identify witches is so much more accurate than that of other witch hunters. And you can't just say “Yeah those other witch hunters were phonies, but I'm the real deal, trust me okay!” because that's what all those other witch hunters would say too.

Yes, this is a good point. It's a strange recurrent piece of internet psychology that people have a real aversion to believing in organic disagreement. Normie comment sections are replete with improbable accusations of Russian or Chinese payrolling; and even 4chan has traditionally conducted arguments by asserting that all disagreeing posts are made by a single person (even when this is at odds with post cooldown timers) or more recently that they are organised by a Discord cabal targeting the thread. Maybe this is the modus tollens of the democratic feeling that numbers and diversity make right: if you are convinced a view is illegitimate, you conclude that it can't be espoused by a large and diverse set of people.

The problem is this: On the Internet, we don’t know if it’s organic disagreement or people in troll farms. Indeed, a lot of the really controversial stuff posted on X (Twitter) we know for a fact comes from a troll farm (a lot of that content trying to go viral is posted from India, Nigeria, or Southeast Asia, all three places with a lot of troll farms), since X lets us know the country someone posts from.

So, yes, it’s sometimes organic disagreement, but it’s sometimes troll farms.

It makes a lot more economical sense that troll farms would be active on a maximum-reach platform like Twitter, and is a lot more plausible that they would repost (possibly with minor alterations) shovel-loads of cookie-cutter "viral" content, than the idea that they would produce bespoke comments and engage with people in a complex way that requires solid command of English in comment sections and niche forums. However, these accusations are almost always flung in "close quarters" by people who are exasperated that someone specifically disagreed with something they said, not at faceless Twitter accounts retweeting Indian link farm pages into the void.

OK, let’s look at an example of something posted on X from a troll farm in Africa:

https://archive.ph/20260127123745/https://x.com/Chizitere_xyz/status/2015879947659645361

(I blocked them for being in a troll farm, and I could tell it was troll farm content just by looking at it)

Your impression?

Edit: Another troll farm post

https://archive.ph/20260128064238/https://x.com/meishato/status/2016321283693412834

(The notion that women do all of the domestic labor in partnerships is a myth; see this article and if you think IfStudies are too biased, this study shows that men do more work in partnerships when we take in to account paid labor)

Edit: The troll farms also post hot take replies to get engagement. See https://archive.ph/20260130134610/https://x.com/ohreallly170464/status/2016975167738491090

Your impression?

Yes, the poster is troll and, regardless whether he is made of flesh or bytes, he is effective troll because he effectively calls out internal contradictions in Current Year(TM) official world wiew.

"You say you believe in God. Word of God is clear that graven images are very, very bad. Why are churches full of golden and bejeweled statues and icons?"

"SHUT UP THIS TROLL!"

Yeah, these are both Xwitter posts shouting copypasta into the void? The point I was making is that this sort of troll farm activity is expected and sensible; the person nitpicking your post in some local newspaper comment section being from a troll farm is not. However, the latter is the setting in which people like throwing around bot/troll farm accusations the most.

On the object level (or is it the meta level?) I think people have not yet developed antibodies for bots/shills, especially bots. There's a kind of rigid commitment to free speech, too – «so what if he speaks weird?! It's the content that matters!», because people legitimately haven't internalized the astronomically high prior for the provenance of emdash slop, pointing out bots looks like paranoia. AI is too cheap and too good, we are not updating fast enough. There must be some high profile case to drive the point home.

There also is opportunistic support for voices in agreement.

On the more serious base reality topic, I think the problem with ICE is that the US is forming a whole new class of empowered oprichniki. American cops are already notoriously low human capital, but these guys in the videos are glib, sadistic and power-tripping like the worst kind of cops, and they are getting even with not so much illegals as the entire blue tribe; and the red tribe vicariously enjoys what they're doing. The worse the reputation of the ICE gets, the worse people are attracted to join it; the more it's excused by Trump's entourage, and signal-boosted by the regime social media (I can't call the current White House X account anything else), the bolder they become. The nervousness and tribal defensiveness (which i suspect you feel) also exacerbates the spiral; in a vacuum, these news would be condemned just 5 years ago by all but the most psychotic Red Tribers, now it's being normalized. Trumpism wasn't (isn't?) destined to become a form of fascism, but the ICE is a bona fide project of creating brownshirts, whether intentional or not. These are scum, and they're personally indebted to Trump. It's a very nasty kind of thing to have in a nation.

You still think it's about the hard but necessary work of reversing the demographic replacement or cracking down on crime, about culture war and unfair double standards. I believe that's too optimistic a way to look at the situation.

P.S. Minneapolis Police Chief on the track record of his boys vs the ICE.

The nervousness and tribal defensiveness (which i suspect you feel) also exacerbates the spiral; in a vacuum, these news would be condemned just 5 years ago by all but the most psychotic Red Tribers, now it's being normalized.

If you said 7 years ago, then maybe yes. After the summer of love following killing of George Floyd, I think a lot of people saw how their empathy can be weaponized against them. So yeah, people are much more cynical and tribal and less principled on all sides, especially given that there were several attempts to create new martyrs since 2020 - including pushes to create some sort of trans Floyd and others. Trying to create immigration related Floyd is probably the best bet activists have now, although white liberal Karen and now a white guy does not cut it. They will probably need something more juicy.

Anyways, my take on this specific situation is that both sides are assholes - both protestors and ICE. If ICE are brownshirts, then "protestors" are Roter Frontkämpferbund. The hardcore of democrat "activists" literally call themselves Antifa, which was founded by KPD Communist Party of Germany in 1932 as their equivalent of brownshirts. I am not exactly sure what to think. What do you think did German Christian or social democrats thought when they saw how communists and fascists beat and maim each other on the streets in 1932?

After the summer of love

This makes me laugh every time, I wish it was a more widespread meme

I don't believe the whole conflict is about immigration at all. It's literally oprichnina vs zemstvo, court vs country, and both sides try very hard to pretend it's not.

As people have written many times, if Trump really wanted to tackle illegal immigration, he would've attacked the employers and made hiring them a massive pain in the ass. No need to box in the CEO's car with unmarked pickups, just a few raids on the largest warehouses until their payroll and time tracking systems are submitting worker data to E-Verify in real time.

Somalian scammers in MN are not affected by ICE raids at all, being either legal immigrants or citizens.

There are no droves of illegals in the Twin Cities. However, there are droves of activists and government officials that vocally hate Trump. The whole point of sending thousands of icemen there is to force them if not to bend the knee, but at least to acknowledge that they cannot resist the federal power.

That's why "oh, if only the jails and courts and PDs had cooperated with ICE, we would've avoided both deaths" is not an answer, the whole point of withholding cooperation and encouraging protests is to raise the stakes. So what if some people die in the process? The tree of liberty federalism yadda yadda.

I agree that both sides playing chicken is a bad outcome, but not because it will create an army of brownshirts personally beholden to Trump. It's upsetting the balance of the states vs the DC worse than the commerce clause. It's not as bad as 1861 yet, but when the federal power flips blue again, no one will consider their hands tied. It will be easy to point ICE at Trump's biggest donors employing illegal immigrants in the red states. Why not arrest the next governor of Texas if he tries to defy the federal will again?

Looping back into current events, it seems like there's little incentive for the administration not to bend the truth. The enemy was already deploying their rapid response arguments with zero regard for the truth

It feels like you're just carrying water for the Trump admin's foolishness. "The outgroup is going to behave bad, so we need to behave just as bad!"

Or the admin could, you know, just not do inflammatory things when stuff like this happens? Do the politician-speak of "this was a terrible tragedy", imply it was an "accident" from split-second judgement, then leave the sectarian shitposting to people like Catturd who were going to do it anyways. Biden mostly did this with a few exceptions that I can think of.

Then again, the even smarter thing would be for them to call off this whole punitive ICE expedition. Minnesota has a problem with Somali fraud, and the US as a whole has a problem with illegal immigrants, but this expedition is not an effective way to address either. It exists mostly to goose up R's on social media, and because Trump personally dislikes people like Walz and Ilhan Omar. In terms of actual effects, its end effect will be to incinerate the anti-immigration political capital built up from Biden's open borders years with remarkable efficiency.

In for a penny in for a pound, you can’t back down now or leftists internalize that they have a veto over Trump policies. They can make anything “not an effective way” by protesting loudly enough.

I remember when learning Russian military ideology was the popular thing to do. A key Russian doctrine was escalate to deescalate. Which is basically where the Trump admin is right now.

You could choose to deescalate though you’ve earned legitimacy to act thru elections. Thus giving up a monopoly on violence and making the price to stop anything you want to do being the mild sum of 2 leftist. Or you can not sacrifice your political power and double or triple down. I don’t think we are anywhere close to a point where they could back down.

I think at this point it’s obvious these encounters are being engineered by leftist groups. Probably with some local government support. For whatever reasons both sides have decided this is where they will battle. The left hoping to sink Trump with a version of his Vietnam. If he wins here then he will gain a lot of power and have a demoralized opponent.

The last killing I believe is obviously a suicide by ICE. He doesn’t look like a guy who’s too dumb to not understand what happens when you’re armed and start fighting cops. Perhaps not quite a suicide but if his chosen encounter escalated he was a willing martyr.

He doesn’t look like a guy who’s too dumb

People's stupidity is one of the few things we don't know the limits of. You might have internalized the knowledge that bringing a gun to a protest makes sense only if you are willing and ready to use it, and if you want this to be a peaceful protest, then you open carry and never escalate.

This guy didn't. Maybe he really wanted to take one for the team. But my take is that he simply was this clueless.

Are you not an American? It's a pretty basic tradition for American gun owners to bring weapons with them to protests and it's extremely uncommon for them to get executed for it. He wasn't even egregious about it, for example here is some of the protests during COVID.

There's this image of the "Bundy sniper" who was even pointing the rifle directly at federal agents from a vantage point like a sniper, he still went home without trouble.

If you bring a gun to a protest in the US you do not expect to be killed for it because we have the 2nd amendment. There's a reason why the NRA and the Gun Owners of America have both spoken up against this "you can't have a gun at protests" claim, because it goes against American rights and protest tradition.

  • -11

This is an insurgency, not a protest. That's why they're tailing ICE agents and interfering with their work. That's why they're split into insurgent cells on signal, being trained in insurgency by handlers, and coordinated from above.

There's this image of the "Bundy sniper"

S-tier angle, beautiful

He’s an ICU nurse and looks basically semi-normalish white guy. At some point you have to assume a person has agency and semi-rationality.

1.Taking a full-loaded gun with extra mags 2. Getting into fisticuffs with ICE 3. 2 weeks after ICE shot a chick

99% of males who can hold down a professional career would view this behavior as strongly correlated with getting shot. It’s also possible according to the video that he had some plan of shooting a bunch of ICE guys as he appears to reach for his gun after he had be unarmed.

I am semi-surprised Right-Wing media hasn’t tried the suicide by ICE narrative because this clearly looks like suicide by ICE. It’s not going to be 100% of the time but solidly in the 2-10% chance something happens and you get shot.

Are you not an American? It's a pretty basic tradition for American gun owners to bring weapons with them to protests and it's extremely uncommon for them to get executed for it. He wasn't even egregious about it, for example here is some of the protests during COVID.

There's this image of the "Bundy sniper" who was even pointing the rifle directly at federal agents from a vantage point like a sniper, he still went home without trouble.

If you bring a gun to a protest in the US you do not expect to be killed for it because we have the 2nd amendment.

  • -12

This is clearly a current debate going on whether GOP is light on 2nd Amendments so I don’t understand the “are you American question”. If Trump cited him being armed.

The 2nd Amendment is your right to have arms. It is not a right to use arms. In this situation Pretti chose be violent with LEO while have deadly escalation 1s away. And everything I am seeing recommends that gun owners de-escalate situations in physical confrontations especially with LEO. They are specifically citing Kyle Rittenhouse who when interacting with LEO clearly showed his hands.

Everything I’m seeing all firearm training teaches you to be extra vigilante when carry since misinterpretations turn into good shoots very quickly

Also do NOT make arguments I did not make. I did not say you would get shot at a protect while carrying. I said if you do a violent act like fighting with police while carrying you are at a high risk of being shot. You still need commit a crime which Pretti did and the officers will still try to arrest you without killing you which ICE tried to in this instance. Until he also had a cheap gun the fires on its own making ICE thinking he was firing on them.

The 2nd Amendment is your right to have arms. It is not a right to use arms.

I don't recall seeing Pretti ever reach for or hold his firearm, so you must be using a different definition of "use arms" then I would.

More comments

Then again, the even smarter thing would be for them to call off this whole punitive ICE expedition.

That would just be endorsing nullification so long as the left decides it can sac a few pawns.

What this confrontation is demonstrating is that only the left has the legitimacy to rule in the United States; elections don't decide that.

On the one hand, I do want to know whether I'm talking to a human or to a machine. Sometimes I do want to talk to a machine, and there are easy ways to do that. Sometimes I do want to talk to a human who lives rather far away, and I would like there to be reliable wash to do that as well.

On the other hand, if I care that much, I can go talk to a human in person, where I can (at the current tech level) definitely not be misled about who they are. I am not extremely serious about wanting to know what people think about what's going on in Minneapolis, or I would directly message people I personally know in Minnesota, and ask what people they actually know think about it. Or visit, but it would have to be awfully important to visit Minnesota in January over.

Not that people can't be shills in person as well, but then they get direct feedback of other people glaring at them, so it's not as likely to spiral as it does on social media. I'm not an anti-social media absolutist, but it seems best not to take it too seriously.

I do think there's actually a big merit in seeking the truth on the internet, and that's in large part what happens on this forum. I bet most of the posters on here have a more accurate picture of what's gone on in Minneapolis than most of the people out on the street there right now.

This is one of those "anti-memes" that pops up every so often. I have written about it and so have several others. The majority of normies almost never actually engage in thinking, they're are just running on vibes and feels 24/7 and reacting to stimuli. The normie's desire for truth is a weak and pathetic thing compared to his powerful overriding need to feel validated, righteous, and safe. It's Haidt's lawyer and elephant, except apparently many people have a lawyer so small and frail he can barely make himself heard.

I call it an anti-meme because it's the sort of insight people (including myself) seem to instantly forget. Because it's just too blackpilling. What do we do with that information? It means that dialogue is mostly futile and that the cynical demagogues and manipulators were right all along. It means that our democracy with its universal franchise is a sham and a joke. It means that people who are capable of actual thought must choose between postmodern linguistic cynicism and principled irrelevancy. I suppose the silver lining of AI slop is that should you be comfortable with former, the barrier to entry has never been lower.

I think the NPC criticism, while correct, is deployed overly aggressively. These people understand their place in the system and their relative irrelevancy. Making banal statements to signal loyalty to the group most loyal to you is rational. Hyper-analysing things for truth is costly. Knowing that you are a peasant and that what matters most to you are your material concerns and competitions with those around you is wise, even if mostly unconsious. Democracy requires three things: intelligence, engagement and character. Of course you should be blackpilled.

This is especially true of the intellectual class who actually do something more sophisticated. They understand truth on an unconscious level (they have to) and then warp their whole being to succeed in society. This is more sophisticated than our autistic analyses. Anti-social? Yes. But people level critiques of idiocy when they should be levelling critiques of character.

I remember the first time I went out canvassing for a political party. Knocked on the door of a council flat and a middle-aged lesbian with a glass eye opened it. Asked her who she was planning to vote for in the next election, to which she asked which party would be best for her financially. I was too shocked to even respond properly, had to get the candidate to come answer (you were supposed to do this if people asked political questions, anyway). But, with the wisdom of some more age, that's obviously the sensible question for her to be asking. Why should she care about the Iraq withdrawal, or carbon credits, or devolution? She knows what matters in her life and doesn't pretend to care about the virtuous distractions of the chattering classes.

Embedded in the demand for concern is the demand to take risk to bring about the positive outcome. Maybe life hasn't gone that well for you. Outcomes are very unfair by luck and nature. And yet it is you who is being asked to bare the burden; not someone from the natural aristocracy, who can fail and land on a gold hill. I reserve my contempt for the aged and wealthy who are very much in a position to do and say positive things and do not. Transferring this burden is very much "send young men to die in old men's wars".

And further, when you're asking them to engage, you're asking them to engage with power. Most people on this forum they can engage in political conversations and not worry about things flying over their head. As long as they're reasonably informed they'll be ok. The 100iq person has to worry about getting ragdolled and humiliated. At least if you are humiliated you'll know it's because you weren't prepared. For them it stings. They can't just show up better next time. It's a game played by their betters. Better to drink what's coming down the pipe. These people still have fully Shakesbeardean existences, just not with regard to politics.

I've observed this too. I think there is a feature of human communication that can be summarized by a slogan: "You have to know that they care, before you care what they know". In other words showing that you care about other people's feelings, that you are actively listening to their concerns, is usually more important than the logical accuracy of your statements.

I've also noticed that successful influencers on social media often drift from where they started to appealing to their audiences' emotional concerns. The influencers are directly seeing what gets like and what doesn't, so they drift to what their audience like most. If they try to occasionally bring on guests with alternate perspectives their own audience makes the original influence feel bad with dislikes and mean comments.

We're increasingly living in a version of the Matrix but with AI on the Internet. You're trying to hand red pills to those blissfully living in the Dead Internet. I sense we're increasingly going to be divided into those who can instantly recognize AI slop and normies who can't tell the signs, accusing authentic content of being AI and passing AI content as genuine. I think this is going to be IQ and age-loaded similar to computer literacy. If you're smart, you can clock AI-generated images from just the uncanny shading, thumbnails from the ridiculous exaggerated expressions (and also the distorted lighting), and you could probably distinguish the text from the vague genericness even without the em-dashes. If a video is from a channel with a generic two-noun name, and has those word highlighting, auto-generated subtitles, then I can suspect it's AI slop and not click on it.

Young people probably have an advantage in brain nubility and increased exposure to a lot of online content in general to recognize patterns. Even dumber people will probably learn certain signs but just slower. For boomers, however, AI slop is just another item in the list of entities on the Internet trying to deceive them, appended to the list after deceptive advertisement and scam emails. There's also an effect similar to Gell-Mann Amnesia, where people will recognize output in their own domain of expertise as vapid, generic fluff, even if they don't recognize it as AI-generated, but outside their domain, they won't instantly see just how uninsightful the output really is.

As AIs improve, I suspect we’ll end up in a situation where no one will be able to tell whether something was written by a human or an AI. The thing that makes AI writing uncanny now is that it’s much better than average (seriously, most people suck at writing), while at the same time curiously devoid of real content.

This is contingent that AI can improve that much far beyond a natural neural network. There may still be certain domains (or perhaps most domains) where animal intelligence proves more adaptable than machines, perhaps because of some inherent physical computational limits, similar to how simulating reality is that much more expensive just in terms of energy cost and atoms to atoms versus just running experiments in reality. Even if AI could reach human parity in generating art, I doubt it could create fully-accurate photorealistic images without uncanny artifacts from some perspective.

With human parity in image perception, they could probably generate an image that would fool the average human, but considering humans perceive and focus on different details and patterns from the same reality, that would leave potentially infinite angles of error. And considering the adaptability of human intelligence, if AI keeps making errors from the same angle, it'll eventually form a pattern that people will distinguish. AI would not only have human-level intelligence (which it does not, and even human's have blind spots), but it would have to be so intelligent that it could preemptively correct for any human-detectable flaw before being deployed.

I remain skeptical of the Muskian view of an AI-generated virtual future where we would replace all input with AI output. I'd hypothesize that limits in the laws of physics would mean there would always be plenty of glitches in the Matrix, and it would be more akin to uploading yourself to the simple world of a video game, which would have glaring deficits and would be unsatisfying as an indefinite permanent dwelling.

Why would the AI need to fool people (and not merely the average person but accounting for potentially infinite angles of error!) into believing an image was real?

The whole point of fiction is that it isn't true, it's more interesting than reality.

The whole point of video games is not that they have no glitches or are indistinguishable from reality but that they are fun to play.

If someone was uploaded into a video game, the glaring deficits would be that you don't have to wait around in a traffic jam for 40 minutes before getting to a job that you hate with people you dislike, eating some fatty food, going home and then doing chores. Then watching or reading or playing out a more interesting story about love, betrayal, drama, stakes, violence, power...

Even an imperfect fictional world can be far superior to reality for many. Even the imperfect fictional worlds we have today are a compelling substitute for reality for many.

Why would the AI need to fool people (and not merely the average person but accounting for potentially infinite angles of error!) into believing an image was real?

Well, I believe even a midwit would eventually telltale signs of whether an image is synthetic or not, just they would learn slower.

The whole point of fiction is that it isn't true, it's more interesting than reality.

Interesting perspective on fiction, but not one I necessarily share. I find fiction interesting in how it speaks on reality, history, human instinct, and the thoughts and feelings of the writer. I guess I'm just skeptical that AI would ever reach the stage of creating anything quite so interesting, rather than the generic slop that it currently produces. At the current rate, it seems like humans and animals will continue to be more adaptive and interesting.

I've worked on some LLM-based gaming services. I think you and many on this forum are way too highbrow and don't appreciate what the consumer is actually like.

They are stupid and boring, can scarcely string a sentence together in the logs I see. Lower your gaze from the peaks of human literature and meaning to the nhentai comments section, the ESL who for some reason is writing stories on webnovel.com, or the fem-smut books about milking some bullman with a monster cock...

The strongest contemporary AIs are much smarter and more interesting than these people in my opinion. They can produce novel and interesting ideas if prompted well by a smart person. It's not so simple as saying 'come up with a smart novel idea', you have to give it a premise or a basis and then it'll expand it.

The issue is the stupid people giving poor prompts to mid-tier AIs and producing an ocean of slop - because for stupid people that's all they need. But stupid people and cheap LLMs are very numerous...

As AIs improve, I suspect we’ll end up in a situation where no one will be able to tell whether something was written by a human or an AI. The thing that makes AI writing uncanny now is that it’s much better than average (seriously, most people suck at writing), while at the same time curiously devoid of real content.

I agree. I've gotten a lot better at recognizing AI-generated content, but given the rate of progress, it seems like a losing battle.

Unless there's a giant paradigm shift to some breakthrough outside of LLMs, I think you'll eke out an edge over all. With diminishing returns, the investment per gain appears to grow exponentially, and augmentations like reasoning models don't seem to have a proper pathway back into the training process, which I believe is still just the broad contents of the Internet and literature.

As I looked out my window, I saw the park across from my house. But something was wrong. There was a man sleeping in the park, by the playground fence, in the middle of winter.

I’ve been tracking the weather closely because our fridge went out and we are keeping our cold stuff in the garage. It’s a constant struggle to make sure food doesn’t get too warm or too cold. Lately the outside temperature has been getting down into the single digits at night and while the garage stays a bit warmer it has been hard to keep our food from freezing.

I knew it was under 10 degrees outside and no one can sleep on the ground in that cold. At least, not without a lot more equipment than he had on. This man didn’t even have a hat. So I worried that he might be dying.

As I got myself ready to go outside and check on him I imagined how the interaction might go. I know vagrants can be volatile, unpredictable, and dirty. I thought I would talk to him, tell him he needed to go, maybe offer to take him to a shelter in my car. I could give him my extra winter hat and one of my coats. I was loathe to invite him into my house with my wife and child but my car could be okay. I toyed with the idea of just calling 911 and not interacting with him at all. But I figured I would first observe up close and make a judgment call.

With my winter gear donned, I stepped out the door and walked to where he was laying. I spoke to him, “Hey man, it’s too cold out here. Can I take you somewhere warm?” or something like that. It was quickly apparent that my fears of him were misplaced. He was breathing and shivering slightly. His eyes were open. There was a pain in them, animal-like. Sadness without language. His fingers were curled and stiff. He was in far worse shape than I had imagined him to be.

I called 911 and moved my car closer to the park as a potential warm haven for him. The ambulance was on the way, and we live very close to the hospital so I knew it wouldn’t be long. Approaching the man again, I saw that walking would be out of the picture and to move him would require that he be physically carried. I wasn’t confident in my ability to do so. He was breathing heavily and his eyes were darting around. His limbs looked frozen and stiff.

He appeared to be of Hispanic background, about 50 years old, short with a slim build. And as the ambulance was coming in a few minutes, I decided to do what I could to keep him warm. I put my coat over him and placed my hands on his cold skin. I said whatever little prayers I know from the liturgy in Spanish - “lord have mercy” and “the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit”. I played the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish on my phone and I lay next to him, covering us both with my coat to warm his body with mine. I reverted to praying in English since my Spanish is so limited.

Within a few minutes I heard the ambulance approaching. Still laying next to him, I waved the paramedics in. My hands felt like they were freezing, being outside only 10 minutes or so in the 8 degree weather. His fingers had a grey hue to them and seemed frozen stiff.

The paramedics parked and approached with a stretcher and I gathered my coat and walked off. They didn’t say much to me. One asked me if he had spoken (“not a word”) and one said thanks for calling. The four of them easily lifted him onto the stretcher and took him away.

I didn’t know how much my interventions mattered, besides calling the ambulance. Perhaps someone else would have called the ambulance if I had not. But it’s easy to get used to vagrants sleeping on the ground in an urban area and not put the facts together that given the weather and his dress it was an emergency situation. When there is a crisis, it’s easy for everybody to assume that someone else will handle it. I felt there was a chance that had I not called 911 then the next time my family went outside we would have been greeted by a corpse.

Later, trying to make sense of the incident, I asked Grok about the details of hypothermia and found it was a somewhat less urgent situation than I imagined. The man likely had been outside for 1-2 hours and likely would have been dead in about 3 more. Grok gives a big range of 2-12 hours for death by exposure in similar situations, varying based on the size and health of the person and whether or not they had any alcohol and drugs in their system.

I don’t know anything about the man but I can guess given the circumstances he found himself in. It’s likely that he was new to town and unfamiliar with the homeless support system. He had no friends or family nearby that cared about him. It’s quite possible that he was an illegal migrant — there are quite a few in my city, and my city has declared that it will not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement efforts.

Politically, I am an immigration restrictionist and fairly onboard with MAGA. I don’t see a contradiction in saving a migrant’s life in a tragic situation, and advocating that there be fewer such tragic situations, thousands of miles from home. I am in the party that insists on following the rules, because after a complicated calculus of plusses and minuses I think they make the world a better place. Had the man been picked up by ICE and sent back to Honduras or Ecuador or wherever he came from, I don’t view that as an inhumane outcome compared to a lonely death in a strange land.

The more extreme people on the political left, the kind currently protesting ICE in Minnesota, call people like me “nazis”. Well, if I am a nazi, I am one with a soft heart.

But I’m just guessing about the man’s circumstances. Perhaps he is a legal resident with mental illness or a drug abuse problem who somehow fell through the cracks.

Grok thinks the man will make a full recovery. Probably today, he will be released from the hospital. To go where, is the question. Who will take him in? Where does he belong? Who cares for him? Will he find himself in the same situation again? A blizzard is coming tomorrow.

May the Lord have mercy on us in this deep winter.

I asked Grok about the details of hypothermia and found it was a somewhat less urgent situation than I imagined. The man likely had been outside for 1-2 hours and likely would have been dead in about 3 more. Grok gives a big range of 2-12 hours for death by exposure in similar situations

Grok thinks the man will make a full recovery. Probably today, he will be released from the hospital.

Grok is a narrow-sighted idiot. Hours in single digit temperature weather and wind means frostbite. Even superficial frostbite (skin frozen solid) will blister, require pain management and permanent wound dressing. Walking on superficially frostbitten toes is excruciating, and for a reason - it should be avoided unless for survival.

His fingers had a grey hue to them and seemed frozen stiff.

Likely deep frostbite. Dead tissue may take weeks to declare itself. If that's the case, he's facing certain permanent damage to his hands and possibly amputations.

Let's hope he had his hands under his clothes for some of the time outside, and that he had proper boots.

I don't think this sentiment is very uncommon. One of the most frequent IRL complaints I have about my neighborhood is the number of homeless/violent drug addicts that wander around it all day. It really bothers me that my kids can't use any of the parks in my town because they have become de-facto homeless shelters/injection sites.

And yet: the number of shoes, clothes, etc. I've given away to people walking through my front yard who need these things is not small. The number of times my family has noticed it's cold, and left boxes of blankets and hand warmers around places where we know these guys congregate is not small.

Love the sinner, hate the sin.

Jesus cured lepers, not leprosy.

Isn't a leper just someone with leprosy?

I think the distinction being made is curing individuals with a disease versus eradicating it from the population.

There's something very David French about this, but I suppose that's just being Christian, and what makes them such frustrating fellow travelers. I think it's the sense that they would rather lose as long as they satisfy their own personal feelings of being a good person first and foremost. It's like a desire for martyrdom or something, they active want to lose while feeling righteous about their own goodness. Because if your goal is "live in a neighborhood without violent drug addicts", handing out free things to violent drug addicts directly undermines that. With allies like these, who needs enemies? Like, one could very easily donate to some kind of cause that aids the homeless without actively undermining one's own neighborhood. If there were actively violent drug addicts congregating outside my house and I found out my neighbor was giving them free shit I would be just about ready to kill my neighbor.

Because if your goal is "live in a neighborhood without violent drug addicts", handing out free things to violent drug addicts directly undermines that. With allies like these, who needs enemies?

I think you will find that this is not in fact the goal of the poster you are replying to or any of the other related posters.

Your stated goal is easy to "paperclip optimize" away by, for example, killing all of your neighbors. After the massacre, you would clearly "live in a neighborhood without violent drug attics", but you would also be living in a much worse neighborhood.

To use proper RAT/utilitarian/machine learning terminology, I view Christian morals as a form of regularization on goals like the one you state. You already are applying a regularizer that prevents you from considering murdering all humans as the correct solution to your optimization. The Christian is applying a stronger regularization where the ultimate goal of "living in a neighborhood without violent drug addicts" is just as much about wanting to benefit the drug addicts as it is about wanting to benefit yourself.

I've lived in a bunch of countries that are very low tolerance of random antisocial behavior. Generally I've found my average neighbor quality skyrockets in Singapore, even if they grapple with having Singaporean energy.

I think it's the sense that they would rather lose as long as they satisfy their own personal feelings of being a good person first and foremost.

The one thing Christianity isn't about is your own personal feelings. If the God of the Bible is real, and his only-begotten son Jesus Christ died on the Cross for our sins, then this matters. Different strains of Christianity differ over the precise relationship between "being a good person" and faithful acceptance of the gift of Jesus' sacrifice, but the end goal is mutual love between God and Man, and "If you love me, you will keep my commandments". (John 14:15). There is a lot of moral and social teaching in the Bible (although very little about secular politics), and if you find that 100% of it agrees with opinions your allies have adopted for secular reasons, you are engaging in motivated reasoning.

It's like a desire for martyrdom or something

Many people who are sincerely religious desire martyrdom. Read the lives of the Saints, or the sermons at your local Salafi mosque. The reward they seek is not of this world, and trying to point out the worldly unwisdom of what they are doing invites and deserves ridicule.

For me the thought experiment is rather something:

  1. To live somewhere where there are numerous homeless/violent drug addicts wandering about my neighborhood
  2. Where 1. includes the homeless/violent drug addicts walking through my front yard
  3. Where 1. includes the homeless/violent drug addicts rendering local public spaces unusable for my family
  4. Yet I do things that'll further enable and encourage 1., 2., and 3.

Your love for the sinner also poses a negative externality upon your neighbors who may not share such a love.

You're still supposed to hate what God hates. God hates sin.

Loving the sinner doesn't mean helping or enabling them to sin.

Loving the sinner is calling them to repent and allowing them the benefit of the natural consequences of their sin.

Loving the sinner is calling them to repent and allowing them the benefit of the natural consequences of their sin.

What if the 'natural consequences of their sin' make them less likely to repent?

Do you have an example?

If they die on a park bench they're out of opportunities to repent.

Are the only options providing resources directly to the indigent and perhaps inducing them to remain in the area or having them die on a park bench?

Some individuals 'rock-bottom' is death.

Each individual act seems merciful in isolation, collectively, it creates an unofficial support system that makes street life sustainable enough to avoid the harder choice.

This is the same dynamic as the family who keeps bailing out the addict, paying their rent, letting them crash "just one more time." Each act feels like love. The pattern is death.

Higher-intensity services often require something in return, sobriety, curfews, accountability.

The street, subsidized by scattered charity, requires nothing. You've made the path of least resistance also the path of continued destruction.

This isn't cruelty. It's refusing to be complicit in their slow death while feeling good about yourself. The hardest part of love is sometimes not helping in the way that feels most immediately compassionate.

Still, if you see someone actually freezing to death, call for help.

I am, by far, the most conservative person in my entire neighborhood. I live in probably the most liberal 1 square mile area of a liberal state. If anything my neighbors are upset I am not doing enough.

I'm not arguing that what I'm doing is rational, but I'm also a pretty devout Catholic and believe that everybody has intrinsic value. I want broad policies that fix these problems, but in the mean time also love the people who are suffering these things as individuals, and if they are in legitimate need, I will help them.

On a practical level, I want these people to understand that they aren't fully lost. They can come home if they want to and the world still loves them.

On a practical level, I want these people to understand that they aren't fully lost. They can come home if they want to and the world still loves them.

LOL. The world is at best indifferent.

I’m an Orthodox Christian and I’m not allowed to leave a man to die, even if his existence is an annoyance. That said, I resist all attempts of people to use my faith to blackmail me to support suicidal empathy as a national policy. I’m firmly in the deport them all camp.

It’s called “the middle way” or “the royal road”.

There may be a causal relationship between your second paragraph and your first.

Yeah maybe! It’s definitely a struggle to be upset at the general conditions, but also recognize the human suffering.

I put my coat over him and placed my hands on his cold skin. I said whatever little prayers I know from the liturgy in Spanish - “lord have mercy” and “the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit”. I played the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish on my phone and I lay next to him, covering us both with my coat to warm his body with mine. I reverted to praying in English since my Spanish is so limited.

Uh... pardon me if I'm mistaken, but this is where my bullshit radar started sounding.

When you mention temperatures are you talking F? So, less than -12 C?

Pennsylvania

The US is in the middle of a winter storm. If he lives in the mountains or the north, that's an entirely plausible temperature range.

According to my weather app, the current "feels like" temperature (in the afternoon in the Midwest US) is -20 degrees Celsius. And it's not going to get much warmer for at least a week and a half.

Why the hell is everyone telling me this? I don't doubt that the US can get very cold. I'm just asking what unit of measurement is used. Most of the world uses celsius. In a story where the temperature is highly relevant it would be best to specify the unit.

  • -12

Eight celsius is cold enough that it might be unpleasant without proper clothing, but it's not 'passers-by should worry about hypothermia'.

Exactly. Which is why I'm voicing the lack of unit specification as an issue with the post.

Kinda clear from context he wasn’t talking about 46 F.

That depends on the assumption that the story is true and not made up bs.

It still wouldn't make any sense if it was 46 F out.

Why the hell is everyone telling me this? I don't doubt that the US can get very cold. I'm just asking what unit of measurement is used. Most of the world uses celsius. In a story where the temperature is highly relevant it would be best to specify the unit.

In the United States, it's very unusual for native speakers of English to report outdoor temperature in anything other than Fahrenheit. Even among scientists and engineers who regularly use the Metric system.

As a side note, it seems pretty clear to me that Fahrenheit is a much better scale for discussing weather since (1) 0-100 roughly covers temperatures your typical person experiences, including the occasional extreme; and (2) there's no real need to convert to other units like there might be among inches, feet, yards, and miles.

As a side note, it seems pretty clear to me that Fahrenheit is a much better scale for discussing weather since (1) 0-100 roughly covers temperatures your typical person experiences, including the occasional extreme; and (2) there's no real need to convert to other units like there might be among inches, feet, yards, and miles.

We're so not going back to this topic. It's purely a status quo preference. Which is a perfectly cromulent reason, but there's no need to insist that F is intrinsically better than C.

We're so not going back to this topic.

I'm not sure I understand you here. Is this sarcasm?

It's purely a status quo preference.

I would have to disagree with this. F really does appear to be better for discussing air temperature, for reasons mentioned by me and others.

I would have to disagree with this. F really does appear to be better for discussing air temperature, for reasons mentioned by me and others.

If this was the case, I would expect to see a nontrivial amount of people used to C, trying out F for a while as a result of travel, and saying "wow, this really is better".

What we seem to be seeing instead is everyone who grew up in a C regime preferring C, and everyone who grew up in an F regime preferring F, which seems to point to status quo preference.

If this was the case, I would expect to see a nontrivial amount of people used to C, trying out F for a while as a result of travel, and saying "wow, this really is better".

To an extent I agree with this. There is a little bit of a confound because the choice between F and C will be perceived as a choice regarding America in general. For example, I can imagine a typical liberal American college student spending a year in Europe and then crowing about Metric units as a kind of virtue-signalling. That being said, yes, I would expect that a non-trivial amount of Europeans, Middle-Easterners, Africans, etc. who spend a couple years in the US would admit, at least privately, that the F scale is better.

What we seem to be seeing instead

Where is this coming from? Is there a subreddit for foreign ex-pats living in the US?

To be fair, I tried out F as a Brit for fun / as a private in-joke post Brexit and I did like it and I still use it for weather, though I wouldn't use it scientifically.

It is quite obnoxious to be using a different unit than the locals. A better test might be how long it takes the average person to develop an intuition for the alternative unit. Such that they no longer have to explicitly or mentally calculate.

Your comment at a glance reads like the temperature is causing you to doubt the story (because the temperature is unlikely?). Instead, it seems like you meant the two sentences in your comment to be disconnected from each other.

It's a question to be answered separately from the first line but it is also related to the credibility of the story.

Americans are going to use Fahrenheit, that's just the way of the world. It's probably a better measurement system in many ways but I will never bother to learn it.

You can make whatever argument you want for metric, but F is objectively superior to C in daily life. There's no 'metric' advantage to C, you don't multiple or divide temperatures real world use cases. Both are effectively arbitrary.

However with Farenheit, 0-100 is basically, human habitable range. 0 is dangerously cold, 100 is dangerously hot. With Farenheit, 1-100 are basically every day weathers around the globe and in every day life describing your freezer up to your body temperature. Meanwhile 40-99 C are nearly useless.

The only time these numbers are really relevant in daily life is internal temperature of meats, but it's nearly arbitrary numbers with either measure, so C brings nothing to the table here.

Finally, Farenheit is over twice as precise as C, and right around human noticability. You can distinguish 1 degree F, but not really 1/10th degree Celsius, making F a more useful and intuitive unit.

However with Farenheit, 0-100 is basically, human habitable range. 0 is dangerously cold, 100 is dangerously hot. With Farenheit, 1-100 are basically every day weathers around the globe and in every day life describing your freezer up to your body temperature. Meanwhile 40-99 C are nearly useless.

You do not use 100 points of precision to tell the weather.

Like the other guy said, everybody just recognises like 3 to 5 ranges of temperature for the weather. Very cold, cold, light jacket, t shirt, very hot.

Do you think you need a much wider range of numbers to work this out? You don't, and in practice nobody does. They just snap-lock certain ranges to be relevant.

Celsius is definitely intuitive and a metric system more broadly works better on the whole.

The people of Arizona spend a surprising amount of time discussing each degree between 100 and 120, and they do actually matter for "eh, pretty hot, the metaphorical ice has broken on the sand river" and "get in a pool or inside right now before you faint."

I'm from Australia. We talk about the heat too.

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You’re conflating two separate points. When setting a thermostat you can tell the difference between 66 and 67. It’s a good increment of noticable but slight. Celsius degrees are too far apart and tenths are too small.

Separately, 0-100 is roughly human haitable weather

On the metric point, there’s nothing more “metric” about Celsius. It doesn’t math any differently. It’s just set to a different reference point, which is less human centric

Celsius degrees are too far apart and tenths are too small.

There is no way you can start with "objectively better" and end up with this lol. You're talking about a half degree of difference. My aircon works in denominations of .5. If you have a preference for 18.5 degrees, there's no limitation on this if you use Celsius.

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This is complete nonsense. All you've done is follow 'objectively superior' with a list of subjective claims.

For that attitude, I retract any concession that other metric units may actually have merit. Imperial all the way.

These units are the worst thing you Yankees have done since dumping loads of valuable tea into the sea. I trust you Ameribarbarians will see the light of reason one day and join the civilized world!

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It is objectively true that the range of double and single digit numbers is more fully used by F for day to day use. You can make subjective arguments about how relevant that is, but I think those numbers are easier to remember and work with.

The one advantage of C, that it benchmarks nicely to water, is not really something you need to think about, and doesn’t even hold true for people living at altitude.

I’m an American who goes out of his way to buy metric tools. I’m a big metric fan. Temperature is the one area were it’s just worse.

It is objectively true that the range of double and single digit numbers is more fully used by F for day to day use.

That would depend on your day to day, wouldn't it? 0°F is a random freezing temperature while 100°F would make a really cold sauna. 0°C is a much starker boundary where the outside world begins to transform, turning either to snow and ice or into slush and water. A day in frost is very different from a day in the positives. If the temperatures dip below 0°C your crops will die. And I could just as well say that Fahrenheit wastes an extra digit into the entire 38°C to 99°C range.

The one advantage of C, that it benchmarks nicely to water, is not really something you need to think about, and doesn’t even hold true for people living at altitude.

I don't know anyone quite so privileged that they don't need to think about water. I personally don't live on a mountain top and find it neat to know what the temperature of something is from the physical phenomena occurring in its water content without having to memorize the magic numbers 32 and 212.

I’m an American who goes out of his way to buy metric tools. I’m a big metric fan. Temperature is the one area were it’s just worse.

Well, I'm glad you can see reason somewhere!

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You can make whatever argument you want for metric, but F is objectively superior to C in daily life. There's no 'metric' advantage to C, you don't multiple or divide temperatures real world use cases. Both are effectively arbitrary.

I basically agree. The strongest argument I can think of for Celsius is that the freezing point of water has some degree of relevance for day-to-day life, and therefore there is some basis for making it 0 instead of 32.

That being said, people mainly use temperature to discuss air temperature not water temperature. And as a lot of people have pointed out the scale from 0F to 100F does a pretty good job of roughly capturing the variation of temperature experienced by people. Much better than the C scale does.

Fahrenheit set its 0 at 0 because that was the coldest temperature old fashioned dial thermometers could measure, and its degree as 5/9 of a degree celsius to make it 180 degrees(like degrees of an angle) on old timey dial thermometers between the freezing and boiling point of water. They're both arbitrary and random.

Fahrenheit has nothing to do with dial thermometers; it was originally set with mercury and alcohol liquid thermometers.

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I've heard this a million times from Americans, but you can just remember what C number means what outdoors (0 is freezing, under 10 is time to wear a proper coat, 20 is the beginning of tshirt weather, 30 is the start of too hot, and 40 is time to get out of Texas), and the only thing I actually need precision in degrees for is cooking/baking, where chemical reactions really do matter. I don't believe for a second that Americans actually use it as a % scale rather than finding their own personal breakpoints just as one does with Celsius (I suppose some do, some people also don't have internal monologues). If you can actually distinguish degrees of 1F, it may be that Irish thermostats are much better than American ones.

I can absolutely distinguish a thermostat set 1 degree. Not, I can walk into a room and tell you the temperature to a degree of precision. But in a building that I am intimately familiar with, like my house, I can tell when the thermostat is set differently at night. A degree F happens to be about the amount you can roughly distinguish

My experience of American thermostats is that 65 degrees is too cold and 80 degrees is too hot. Yet somehow 72 degrees is also too hot and 74 degrees too cold, while 68 degrees is too cold and 67 too hot. Weather's weird here.

The average high in my area of the US is 50°F. It's 10°F right now. Almost the entire lower half of the US got slammed by a winter storm this weekend.

When you mention temperatures are you talking F? So, less than -12 C?

For what it may be worth, there are a lot of places in the United States where the temperature is plausibly in that range.

That being said, the story does feel a bit like it might be concern trolling ("I support immigration restrictions but I have some concerns . . .") or just straight up trolling.

I’d absolutely save a man’s life and send him back to Guatemala without much hesitation. Although to get to the point that both decisions are obvious to me took a lot of life experience and thought

I'd probably do the same thing. The leftist mindset (or at least its narrative) often has no concept of the distinction between political convictions and basic humanity. To a leftist, I must be more universal in my morality or else I'm a nazi. I've been told I hate brown people because of this, yet I'm typing this right now while my brown adopted child (whose bio parent was probably an illegal) keeps saying "Dada look!"

I support restrictive immigration policies to maintain order and to deal with tragedies that I don't have to deal with, but that doesn't mean I don't feel a personal obligation to save a life. I understand the plight of many immigrants, but I strongly believe that we cannot afford to "save" them on a massive level. I support a system that will make these difficult and sometimes sad decisions about immigration so I don't have to. I support this because I believe it is necessary, not because I derive pleasure from turning away millions who want more opportunity.

If you do not have a US birth certificate for your adopted child, you will need to make sure they get citizenship before their 18th birthday. It's relatively easy to do before the 18th birthday, harder after. It's something many adoption agencies forget to help with for some reason.

They were born in the US and issued a birth certificate.

Politically, I am an immigration restrictionist and fairly onboard with MAGA. I don’t see a contradiction in saving a migrant’s life in a tragic situation, and advocating that there be fewer such tragic situations, thousands of miles from home

That's because there isn't any. "I wish these people would not come to my country" is not the same as "I wish these people were dead".

Regardless, you did the right thing. Thanks for posting, as reminders to have a compassionate heart are always helpful in my view.

A problem with this idea is that this doesn't extend to a general responsibility to save all freezing homeless people. If it did, the reasons why it's unworkable would be obvious. And since it doesn't, it's imposing a responsibility to save the people in front of you which means that "out of sight, out of mind" is actually true and that poor people have more requirements to help the homeless (since they live in worse areas and have to use public transportation, so they run across more homeless).

Unless you're going to have a moral standard "everyone has to save X number of homeless. If you run across fewer than that, you need to save some extras outside your sight to reach X. If you run across more than that, you only need to save up to X of them."

Not gonna lie, I was happy to see that your story was one of sympathy and compassion. From the tone around here lately, I was half-expecting it to end with "I decided 'Fuck this guy, one less illegal is a good thing.'"

The more extreme people on the political left, the kind currently protesting ICE in Minnesota, call people like me “nazis”. Well, if I am a nazi, I am one with a soft heart.

I think the right and the left are increasingly unable to model one another's thinking. I come here and see people who are celebrating violence and clearly want more of it. I get disgusted, go to other places, and see people... celebrating violence and clearly want more of it. Just directed at different people. I think about a reddit (yeah yeah, I know) post I read the other day, where some woman out of the blue texts her brother basically demanding to know "where he stands" on Trump and ICE. No indication that this had been a previous topic of discussion or that he was MAGA, just suddenly she needs to know if he's aligned with her. When he replies with a sort of mealy-mouthed "It's not a black and white issue, but I love you and family over politics," etc. etc., she informs him that she's going no contact with him and his family forever, and immediately tells their mother that he's cut out of his life. He didn't even say he's a Trump supporter (though I guess one could infer it), just that he's not completely on-board with her TDS.

I recently got into an argument here where I said I know very leftist "woke" people, and they are not evil. I was piled on by Motters saying of course they are, they just haven't turned on me yet. Unsurprisingly, I have had similar arguments in left spaces. "I know conservatives/MAGAs, they aren't Nazis, they aren't evil." "Well, you can say that because they don't want to kill you." (I mean, some of y'all do, but...)

It's just... very sad. And tiresome. Thank you for still having a heart.

Good and evil aren't the same thing as safe and dangerous, are they? And I care more about who's likely to get me killed than about the hope in their hearts while they do it.

People who say "don't judge appearance" and then hate anyone wearing a dress shirt and slacks are dangerous.

Especially when they aren't interested in letting ask questions first.

If I were a god, I would save everyone. They deserve it anyway. But I'm not a god.

Yes, well, define it however you like. Rightists and leftists both clearly believe the other side wants to kill you and is dangerous. Good news for the accelerationists -this will become a self-fulfulilling prophecy!

You don't need to want to kill someone to do it. I rather get the impression that that's how we got here. Being nice is the problem.

But I don't disagree. This will end in tears.

I appreciate the compliment about my writing. For what it’s worth, I have a history of leaving right wing spaces that become too harsh. It just became too dissonant to be dating my now wife and open my group chats to see TND spelled out and applauded.

It’s an odd position to be in. I’m full-right. Deport them all, pro capital punishment, hell I could be convinced to support a military coup. But I’m an extreme right-winger because I want to preserve what is good and beautiful in this world. I want to live a beautiful life with those I love. I want to feel like I’m fighting side-by-side with Aragorn, not sniggering in a cave with a bunch of imps reciting the word “nigger”.

I’m thinking I need to be a little slower about leaving though. If I leave, the places just become more harsh. I love the motte, I think it is one of the best run forums on the internet. But I have noticed an increase in harshness lately from people on my side.

I appreciate what the mods do here to tend the garden and I hope to provide the tone and perspective that I want to see in the world

I remember my surprise at how this forum reacted to the atrocities in Gaza. Not a lot of posts or interest about it; nothing compared to how it gripped political discussion in America at large. I was even mod-warned for posting on the subject too many times. Our empathy can be exceedingly narrow when it is convenient.

The motte is inherently going to lean towards conversations that can only be had in the motte. There's an infinite supply of places to discuss the plight of the Palestinians

Mostly ignoring Gaza is a sign of a healthy forum culture, unless your forum has a mission that specifically includes paying attention to obscure third-world humanitarian disasters. The Israel-Palestine conflict is boring, notoriously intractable, and has a low death toll relative to a mid-tier African civil war. It gets far more press than it deserves because it somehow became a proxy for the US culture war.

The key point of interest IMO is that we funded it and supported it, and so, as the evidence right now points to a lot of children having faced needless starvation for no legible reason, we actually funded and supported a policy of arbitrary mass starvation directed at children. For a lot of Americans that deserved attention in a way that an African civil war typically does not, although I’d note that we cared a lot about the Rwandan Civil War back in the day, and even growing up years after the fact I can recall seeing a lot of ambient social and political interest about it.

supported a policy of arbitrary mass starvation directed at children

The communications around this are/were so messy and awkward that it became quickly illegible to most people.

I agree that Americans have more of an excuse for caring about the I-P conflict than other Westerners do.

"The UK should butt out of the I-P conflict, and individual Britons who pick a side either have dual loyalties or are idiots" is probably my most dangerous political opinion in polite company.

for no legible reason

The reason is that their leaders which enjoy overwhelming popular support started a war. You might not like it but it is a very legible reason. I'm personally on the fence whether anyone in the middle east should receive western support, but if it's going to be anyone it's going to be israel over palestinians every day.

But really, middle east is gonna middle east, no point discussing it too much.

You were never warned for posting too much about Gaza.

From the tone around here lately, I was half-expecting it to end with "I decided 'Fuck this guy, one less illegal is a good thing.'"

And they say being the resident mod bad cop brainbroke Hlynka.

From some of the responses, I am not far off.

The mod log looks absurd. Amadan is doing too much of the work.

I think the right and the left are increasingly unable to model one another's thinking

Most people aren't good at modeling their own thinking, thus are very bad at communicating it, and the outsider map is more accurate in some ways, less so than others.

I recently got into an argument here where I said I know very leftist "woke" people, and they are not evil.

I've come around to a sort of cold comfort in that what the sides mostly see as "evil" in the other is what the allowable failure modes are, and the selectivity of attention (whiteness studies professors and actual no-joke neonazis aside, those two groups are evil in the regular sense). Maybe this is just warmed-over Arendt, I haven't taken the time to read her in full. A person can't legitimately care about everything, and where one chooses not to care- to draw their blinders close- has outsize effect on how they're seen by people that make the opposite choice.

Politically, I am an immigration restrictionist and fairly onboard with MAGA. I don’t see a contradiction in saving a migrant’s life in a tragic situation... I am in the party that insists on following the rules, because after a complicated calculus of plusses and minuses I think they make the world a better place.

You also called the hospital to leave your financial details right? To make good on the bill in case that man can't pay. Otherwise, net-tax payers and/or patients who do pay their hospital bills will find themselves in the situation of subsidizing your decision-making. Generally, the rule is that a bill is paid by the person or entity who requested the good or service.

I don’t see a contradiction in saving a migrant’s life in a tragic situation, and advocating that there be fewer such tragic situations, thousands of miles from home.

Your choice, at the margin, increased such situations. Whether it be with this migrant in the future finding himself in such situations again, or if other (potential) migrants hear yet another story of the soft-heartedness of gringos and the ultra low cost of consuming public services in the EEUU ($0).

The more extreme people on the political left, the kind currently protesting ICE in Minnesota, call people like me “nazis”. Well, if I am a nazi, I am one with a soft heart.

That's why they call people like you "nazis" and why the discourse is so one-sided. Because it works.

Because you (the general you) have a soft heart and care what they call you, whereas they have a hard heart toward you and people like you and don't care what you call them. Calling you "nazi" gets you to do more of what they want and do less of what they don't want. It makes you shy away from fighting them head on and instead turn toward policing yourself and your own side for Empathy and Compassion, for Going too Far. And then if you're religious they also have the "No, I'm not Christian and I have nothing but contempt for your backwards beliefs" card to play.

I felt there was a chance that had I not called 911 then the next time my family went outside we would have been greeted by a corpse.

For this reason I would had called emergency services to come pick him up, to spare my family this unpleasant sight.

Your choice, at the margin, increased such situations.

Indeed. The fact he reacted to a homeless guy sleeping in a park within sight of his house with “Won’t someone think of the poor homeless guy and help him” is exactly why we are in this mess in the first place. We need more people whose first thought is “Ew, get that disgusting bum out of my park” if we are ever to have hope of solving this.

Getting the bum out of your park means that the bum will move to someone else's park. Kicking the can is the reason why we are in this mess. If there were death squads killing them there would be no bums, if there were mental institutions working - there would be no bums, if there was better safety network there would be no bums, if there were plentiful cheap and affordable housing there would be no bums, if there were some form of rehabilitation and reintegration programs there would be no bums. If anyone was willing or capable of taking the full measures anywhere on the compassion/cruelty spectrum there would be no bums. The bums are failed because everyone is taking the half measures - enough to get them out of their park and their sight.

Oh - and in harsh conditions when someone is in what in my country is known as helpless condition - you go and check on them. Because next time it may be you, and you probably wouldn't want your life to depend on whether the single person passing by you can do the heuristic that you are not a bum, but upstanding citizen right while in severe snowstorm.

Getting the bum out of your park means that the bum will move to someone else's park.

And then they can kick him out. And if this keeps happening eventually he'll move someplace which isn't a park.

Oh - and in harsh conditions when someone is in what in my country is known as helpless condition - you go and check on them. Because next time it may be you, and you probably wouldn't want your life to depend on whether the single person passing by you can do the heuristic that you are not a bum, but upstanding citizen right while in severe snowstorm.

If it were me, conditions would be such that no one would check. "There for but the grace of God goes I" is usually false. And the prevalence of the false ones probably makes it less likely the real ones get helped.

We need more people whose first thought is “Ew, get that disgusting bum out of my park” if we are ever to have hope of solving this.

We don't need that at all. Indeed, if those people were to stop there (though in fairness you didn't say that should be their only thought) they would be evil people indeed, so if anything I think we very much need fewer such people. What we need in order to solve the immigration problems we have is people who are compassionate, but don't let that impulse override every other consideration. We can, and should, try to help the less fortunate, but also take into account whether third parties will be hurt by our attempts to do so.

I do have a bit of feeling of disgust at the sight of a homeless man in the park. Hostility even. It offends me as a sign of lack of public order and I resent the inconvenience I’ve undergone throughout my lifetime on their behalf. But I’m also a Christian and I’m bound to help a fellow man, even if I resent his presence.

You may or may not find it heartening to know that this is almost always a choice.

Every hospital has regulars, people who have medical, psychiatric, substance use problems. Sometimes (but rarely) nothing at all.

We see them once a year, once a month, once a week, once a day. We know them. Sometimes they disappear and it's because they moved on to the next hospital or stop on their rotation.

Sometimes they pass away.

Always. Every time - we make offers. During winter or especially days like today we make many, many offers. Do you want to stay the night? Please this time go to the shelter. Etc.

Scores of bright eyed and scores of burnt out social workers emerge from the offices like lice, all trying to get the patient help.

They usually refuse.

Living on the street is a choice. That choice is often complicated by drugs, and the way someone was raised. Sometimes it's complicated by medical or psychiatric problems and we can often intervene in those.

But most people on the street are there because they made a choice and our society lets people make choices.

They may regret it in the moment in the cold, but they will make the same choice again.

It sucks.

Certainly true for your frequent fliers. A Hispanic guy wearing the wrong clothing for the weather? That sounds like a classic case of "No entiendo, Senor". The people who made the choice for him were the ones who brought him here without mentioning or particularly caring that the US gets real cold compared to Guatemala.

Or he got lost on the greyhound. Or he was dressed appropriately for the weather a week before and didn't check the weather forecast. Or...

On an individual level, there’s no dissonance here. We should save this man’s life. But let’s zoom out. How many ambulances and EMT workers can be extended in your town? The fact that we have a moral duty to help this man, makes the moral duty to prevent this situation with unsustainable immigration all the more grave.

I’m caught up in this ice storm myself. My wife is currently 9 months pregnant and starting contractions. There is a real possibility we will need an ambulance tonight to get her to the hospital. What if every ambulance is busy with homeless illegals? I don’t want these people not to get help. But I also want a functional infrastructure.

The only dissonance is with the side that refuses to consider the world in any terms other than endless handouts without any trade offs, or worse resolving the dissonance with “fuck whitey”.

I don't think that is very likely in this case. I live 3 blocks from the hospital and the ambulance times are very short. This man was not taking up an ambulance spot for much time.

Anyways, I'm morally obligated to make the right actions given the information I have. I didn't have any information about this being the last available ambulance and someone else needing it more. So I did what I did.

I keep voting for the most immigration restrictionist candidates, as I'm concerned about the same externalities of mass migration that you are.

No I don’t think this or any specific instance is a moral conundrum; my point is that it can’t scale infinitely. At scale illegal kmmigrants and homeless do take up emergency room resources and cause downstream issues.

Were I in your situation I wouldn’t think twice about resolving some moral tradeoff over whether to help him. My issue is the system that grows the problem or anyone trying to frame this is as a contradictory wordview, as your OP pondered

Congrats! Hope for a happy and healthy mom and baby.

Good luck and congratulations! I had my second under similar conditions and in hindsight makes for fun stories.

Some bloodshed is priced into immigration law enforcement, especially after decades of intentionally lax enforcement. Of course, the alternative is not 'no bloodshed', but just different victims in different places and a net increase in bloodshed overall. The rest is propaganda.

Of course, the alternative is not 'no bloodshed'

The alternative is enforcing existing laws against employers of undocumented immigrants in red states where they are concentrated the most. It is it not happening due to fear of backlash - if ICE was hauling away CEO's it would have 90% approval rate. But, instead, you have violent street circus to satisfy sadism and bloodlust of MAGA base. You really do not have to be tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist to understand what is going on.

This reads as nonserious when we JUST had a reveal and discussion of billions with a "B" worth of dollars being fraudulently appropriated for essentially fake businesses run by various immigrant groups, with one standout being the Somalis.

Largely in blue states.

Targeting employers would ignore this particular flow of tax dollars into dubiously legal immigrant communities who have seemingly separated themselves from 'legitimate' society and operate insular networks with outsized political influence.

That seems like a pressing matter that can't be ignored.

Por qué no los dos?

I'd guess the reason we can't currently do both is the sheer amount of enforcement resources that are tied up in dealing with the active interference from protestors and state officials.

In theory, it should be simple enough to identify the largest employers with large numbers of illegals on the payrolls, throw the book at one or two of the CEOs, and let incentives take their course.

I am... very skeptical that the reason the administration isn't going after businesses is that those darn protesters are tying up too many resources, and if they all went home and localities stopped declaring themselves sanctuary cities, we'd start seeing CEOs arrested.

In theory, it should be simple enough to identify the largest employers with large numbers of illegals on the payrolls, throw the book at one or two of the CEOs, and let incentives take their course.

In theory it should be. Yet no one does this. Why?

For many years, I have heard, ironically from both open borders enthusiasts and even immigration conservatives, that we can't "really" crack down on employers because then crops would rot in the fields and restaurants and hotels would have to close. A tacit admission that we have entire sectors of the economy that are completely dependent on the existence of illegal labor.

I always found this a strange thing to admit, especially from liberals. "So... basically you want an underclass of underpaid, easily exploited labor with no real rights so your grocery bills will stay low?"

It's absolutely true that if we could magically teleport every last illegal out of the country, it would wreck a lot of the economy. In the absence of magical deportation rays, a serious effort to go after businesses depending on illegal labor would over time result in rising costs (you'd have to actually pay American citizens American wages to pick those crops and clean those hotel rooms).

I think this would be a good thing, but it seems to be a price even the so-called anti-immigrationists are not willing to pay.

So instead, what we have right now is absolute fucking theater. Does anyone think all this ICE sturm und drang is really going to result in a meaningful reduction in the number of illegals in the country? Because I'd like to check back in on that in one year, two years, and five years.

... especially from liberals. "So... basically you want an underclass of underpaid, easily exploited labor with no real rights so your grocery bills will stay low?"

I disagree this is in conflict with the liberal (i.e. pro-illegal-immigrant wellbeing) position.

Allowing the illegal immigrant to stay in the country is clearly in their interest. No matter how bad the conditions are, we know this is a good deal for them, because their revealed preference is to stay in the country as an illegal.

They are only "underpaid" relative to a legal citizen. But the liberal isn't able to give them citizenship - so trying to get society to look the other way and let them stay is the next best thing. And ditto for exploitation.

In general I find this line of thinking - in which it constitutes "exploitation" to give someone in a really bad situation a kinda bad option - very odd. See also:

  • It is morally neutral to just not help some random homeless woman (we're both doing it right now)
  • It is (extremely) virtuous to give her money, no-strings-attached, so she can get off the streets and back on her feet.
  • It is villainous (worse than just not helping at all) to do the above via hiring a prostitute. Even though she prefers to make the trade, this constitutes "exploitation".

The end result of this logic seems to incentivise avoiding interacting with suffering people at all.

I agree that not going after hotels and restaurants and farms for illegal labor is hypocrisy. But those in favor of remigration and deportations of such are not in the Trump administration: presumably, he is obliged to the business part of the coalition. This is not a happy marriage. But let it not be said that the good be the enemy of the perfect. If the current spectacle justifies building up the infrastructure so that such a future policy shift is feasible, I'm okay with it.

Illegals do not make massively less than citizens doing the same job. They are simply willing to do jobs it is difficult to get an American labor force on, and far more reliable than the non-working class that would theoretically be doing those jobs.

The problem with that is it eliminates the price incentive to find better ways of doing those shitty low-wage jobs. No VC will invest money into a startup trying to replace sub-$10/hour migrant hotel maids with robots. At $25/hour? Suddenly that's a lot more space to capture value.

Just as an example of this dynamic, look at touchscreen ordering in fast-food restaurants and self-checkout machines. The technology had been there already for 10+ years, what made it finally hit mass adoption was the point where the marginal hourly cost of a unit and its maintenance went below the cost of a worker by a significant enough margin that stores were willing to annoy their customers for a bit as people got used to it. I'd personally rather have an economic makeup that has fewer low-wage jobs and more engineers figuring out automation rather than an underclass of serfs that are paid so poorly (yet subsidized by the taxpayer) that they are impossible to displace.

jobs it is difficult to get an American labor force on

...at what price? If you raise the price, you can likely get American labor force on it. If you don't have to raise the price massively to get American labor force on it (because illegals don't make massively less than citizens doing the same job), then it seems somewhat minor. If you do have to raise the price substantially to get American labor force on it, well then I guess we're back to potentially significant cost increases for various crops/clean hotel rooms/etc.

far more reliable than the non-working class that would theoretically be doing those jobs.

If one raises the price, it is not clear to what extent the people attracted to those jobs will come from the currently-non-working and to what extent it will come from folks working other jobs. You can generally get the reliability you desire by raising the price. Of course, this will compete with other job opportunities, pushing wages up more broadly and likely ending some jobs that are at the low end of value. This could increase costs for other goods/services that don't directly employ illegals now.

The open boarders economists like Bryan Caplan make the argument well that immigration restrictions have effects like ending those low value jobs, reducing overall economic efficiency and total output. I've already observed that, for example, hotels have significantly rolled back on regular room cleanings post-COVID. You could imagine effects that feel kind of like that, possibly still in combination with price increases, as the market adjusts. Some folks think the tradeoffs are worth it (and may point to various different things that are trading off, one prominent example being distributional affects purely in terms of American wages), others disagree, and well, yeah, some are probably ignorant of how they're likely to be connected.

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That's just "We should maintain an arbeiter class" with extra rationalizations.

You can get people to do any job, reliably, if you pay enough. We don't want to pay enough to entice Americans to do this work. So right now, the only way we can get a reliable workforce willing to do it at acceptable wages is by importing illegal labor. If you actually want to end mass illegal immigration, you have to solve the left side of the equation somehow.

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In theory it should be. Yet no one does this. Why?

This is a full-on guess from my side.

At the top level, its not great optics. And from the corruption angle, some don't want their donors arrested.

On the practical, ground level where the prosecutions happen:

How do you prove that a CEO was knowingly complicit in the hiring process, was directing people to hire illegals, basically fully aware that the company relied on this to function?

A number of middle manager types would probably take the fall for the guys in charge in most cases.

Its a trickier prospect than proving that someone was de facto here without permission, and thus can be summarily removed.

It's absolutely true that if we could magically teleport every last illegal out of the country, it would wreck a lot of the economy.

I think "correction" is really the term to use. That is, there's clearly a ton of 'distortions' in the economy that will be removed if immigration laws are aggressively enforced.

I have pointed out how they actively compete with working class/poor citizens for housing, and use up healthcare and similar public services, and of course if there's increased crime/decreased public cohesion, that is mostly borne by the poor and middle class as well. Over the long term I think it creates Brazilification..

I think that the benefits and costs are very unequally distributed and we get effects like cheap food on one hand but far more expensive housing, car insurance, and medical care on the other. Distortions in economic distribution due to the presence of an underclass for whom the 'normal' rules are not applied.

Teleporting them all away would, I'd wager, remove a lot of the benefits... which were disproportionately enjoyed by the elite classes... but also would remove the costs that were broadly imposed on the middle/lower classes.

So yes, there might be some 'wreckage.' I would be willing to accept the bet that the pain is mostly endured by the upper class and thus the vast majority of the populace would suffer minimally, especially after the things get reshuffled over the course of months or years.

I mean, I don't think we necessarily need to arrest the CEOs of Tyson Chicken and Walmart (though that would sure send a message). But as it stands, the Trump administration isn't willing to even make a token gesture towards recognizing the actual root cause of illegal immigration. Which makes me think they are fundamentally unserious about addressing it as a real economic/social issue and are mostly engaging in performative theater to please their base.

I would accept such an economic "correction" if they were really serious about it, even if that meant I felt some of the pain. But they won't do it.

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Yeah, I have a hunch it's much more about lack of political will than lack of resources.

Here is a DOJ guide intended for employers to understand their obligations and responsibilities with regard to I-9 work authorization forms. I don't know what year it is from, but reading it gave me a much greater appreciation for why we ended up in this mess. Some choice quotes (emphasis mine):

"While not required by law, an employer may conduct an internal audit of Forms I-9 to ensure ongoing compliance with the employer sanctions provision of the INA. An employer may choose to review all Forms I9 or a sample of Forms I-9 selected based on neutral and non-discriminatory criteria. If a subset of Forms I-9 is audited, the employer should consider carefully how it chooses Forms I-9 to be audited to avoid discriminatory or retaliatory audits, or the perception of discriminatory or retaliatory audits."

"Internal audits should not be conducted on the basis of an employee’s citizenship status or national origin"

"An employer is required to accept original Form I-9 documentation that reasonably appears to be genuine and to relate to the individual presenting the documentation. If an employer subsequently concludes that a document does not appear to be genuine or to relate to the person who presented it, the employer should address its concern with the employee and provide the employee with the opportunity to choose a different document to present from the Lists of Acceptable Documents. An employer may not conclude without foundation that a photocopy of an employee’s Form I-9 documentation is not genuine or does not relate to the individual. In the context of an internal audit, for an employer that has photocopied Form I-9 documentation, it should recognize that it may not be able to definitively determine the genuineness of Form I-9 documentation based on photocopies of the documentation. An employer should not request documentation from an employee solely because photocopies of documents are unclear."

"While tips concerning an employee’s immigration status may lead to the discovery of an unauthorized employee, tips and leads should not always be presumed to be credible. An employer is cautioned against responding to tips that have no indicia of reliability, such as unsubstantiated, retaliatory, or anonymous tips. Heightened scrutiny of a particular employee’s Form I-9 or the request for additional documentation from the employee based on unreliable tips may be unlawful, particularly if the tip was made based upon retaliation, the employee’s national origin or perceived citizenship status."

There are two contradictory regulatory schemes here. One is considered more important than the other. It's basically illegal for employers to enforce immigration law.

My abject guess:

On the top level its an optics thing.

On the rubber-meets-the-road level, good luck proving that a CEO or anyone in C-Suite was "knowingly" approving hiring of illegals, especially if the immigrants in question were able to produce sketchy but minimally sufficient papers to prove legitimacy.

Sure there's probably some who put it in an e-mail that you can uncover, but these are the guys who can afford quality legal representation.

Are the businesses hiring illegal immigrants ones that have C-suites? I would have guessed the majority are employed by small firms (potentially contracting for larger ones) as, if nothing else, plausible deniability. And I think quite a few work in cash --- residential construction, yard work, and housekeeping. Are there significant numbers in formal office jobs with tax paperwork?

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JUST had a reveal

This emphasis is just bollocks when the fraud was out in the open and essential shut and close by 2025 if what I am reading here is correct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020s_Minnesota_fraud_scandals

Anyway, ICE can do both and should do both. Let’s round up the illegal immigrants (kindly) AND prosecute the employers that employ them (kindly). I bet that if we crunch the numbers it would also be “B” worth of dollars that employers “took” from an equivalent hypothetical American worker.

If we think of the population of illegal immigrants as the “supply” of illegal work meeting the “demand” of cheap labor then it makes sense to shut off the supply. But we can also think the “supply” of willing dollars to employ shadily/illegally is meeting the “demand” of people wanting better economic future, then it’s just as important to shutoff that supply too.

Let’s round up the illegal immigrants (kindly) AND prosecute the employers that employ them (kindly).

And if the state in which the persons in question reside not only refuse cooperation, but actively interfere, can we also go after the officials who are thwarting any enforcement at all?

Can we also arrest them?

I just want to know where the limits of 'accountability' stop and why it should extent to employers but not state actors.

Why not? Maybe if you go after the CEOs, the people of the state would not vote in the politicians that “helps the helpless” because clearly CEOs aren’t helpless.

When you have lax immigration enforcement for decades, the whole structure of the economy rearranges around the presumption that illegal labor will be available. You can't just pull the rug out from under that in an afternoon. Those kind of structural changes take years to work out. The fault lies with the previous administrations, both red and blue, who intentionally allowed this to happen. Indeed, they were counting on it: "Oh well, I guess we can't deport now! Too costly, too unpleasant". And they are kind of right, because restructuring the economy is painful, and deporting millions is costly and often ugly. Unfortunately, it is necessary to pick and choose your priorities, where progress can be made quickly and where it must be made more slowly.

In principle, I'd like to do what you say, but I think it comes from a place of bad faith. The purpose of that suggestion is to maximize short-run economic pain and suffering, to maximize difficulties with politically influential businesses. The purpose is to make immigration enforcement so painful that it is essentially abandoned altogether, which is the same purpose that is driving things in Minnesota right now.

The pragmatic response is to acknowledge that immigration enforcement needs to proceed with some appreciation for the fact that we have dug ourselves into in a very deep hole. The laws weren't really written for a world where they would be neglected or subverted for decades before finally being enforced, and they would likely have been written quite differently had that circumstance been taken into account.

The pragmatic response is to acknowledge that immigration enforcement needs to proceed with some appreciation for the fact that we have dug ourselves into in a very deep hole. The laws weren't really written for a world where they would be neglected or subverted for decades before finally being enforced, and they would likely have been written quite differently had that circumstance been taken into account.

Hmmm, just jumping in here but what are your proposals? What are these “pragmatic responses”. On some level I think the wolves should be fed on both sides. Do some mass deportation of illegal immigration AND high profile CEO arrests for employing said illegals.

That is a fake alternative, made up by the left. More detail here: https://www.themotte.org/post/3493/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/405679?context=8#context

This is really lazy, right? Trump could easily change the "reasonably genuine" wording and just have employers only submit real proof of citizenship/visa status when they resister for employer-paid payroll taxes. That's how every single other first word country does it.

And sure, even then you're left with is millions of people working without anybody collecting employer-paid payroll taxes of their work, you're dealing with millions of "independent contractors" and the standard off-the-books shadow economy. But at least then you can nail them all for tax evasion. Keeping millions of people off the books and hiding envelopes of cash being passed around is a whole lot harder than just going "oops, I couldn't possibly have known, that would have been discriminatory and/or retaliatory! It's the liberals fault!"

I agree the law should be changed. I was disagreeing that Trump could simply enforce existing law.

The issue right now is this.

Waltz could stop what’s happening in Minnesota by cooperating. Trump could stop it by going after the employers. Neither actually want the problem solved because they both have a lever.

In the absence of this, ICE is the only avenue and they can’t be heckled into giving up. There is absolutely no dissonance with this view and the view that the leaders are failing us at the top on both sides or that homeless lives have inherent dignity and deserve emergency services where possible.

This is assuming that the only way illegals are getting money is via working illegally. There are tons of NGOs that will gladly help.

I think it's worth keeping mind that in a lot of situations, your neighbors end up subsidizing your compassion. For example, in this case, everyone in the community will have to pay for emergency services as well as hospitalization for this individual. Which is not a huge deal in the case of a one-off situation, but as someone who lives near a large American city, I can report that situations like this can multiply rather rapidly. Especially if word of local kindness/compassion makes it back to whatever low-trust society the person came from.

Edit: By the way, I don't know where you are, but assuming that half of the expenses for this guy were reimbursed by the federal government, I would estimate that I personally paid 1 or 2 cents for your decision. Merry Christmas!

I guess I don't think it is a "decision" to save a dying man. I would gladly report him to ICE if I knew he was in fact illegal and I had any contact details for him. But "hey, raid the hospital in my local Pennsylvania town, I'm pretty sure there's illegals there" isn't a great tip.

I guess I don't think it is a "decision" to save a dying man.

It's absolutely a decision. And I don't blame you for making it, but it's one decision among millions which, when combined together, have a very noticeable and significant impact on life in the United States.

I’m a liberal, I don’t think immigration restriction is wrong and would not call you a nazi even though I wish I was in a position to protest. I guess that means I’m not extreme in your books. I wanted to focus on one thing though because I think it highlights one of our differences.

Had the man been picked up by ICE and sent back to Honduras or Ecuador or wherever he came from, I don’t view that as an inhumane outcome compared to a lonely death in a strange land.

I don’t trust that ICE currently would treat the homeless kindly. To me, the way ICE follows the law is not the way I think you follow the law. Would they really get the paperwork right? Would they talk to the man if he’s able to talk? Would they deport him to the correct country? ICE says they followed all procedures, how can I tell? Who can verify? I admit mistakes are just going to be baked into any large scale system, and I’ll hold my final judgment until the dust settles and the stats can be collected. But I don’t feel good vibes at the moment with the way ICE carries themselves. At the very least, what ICE should do is target the companies and individuals that hire illegals, Americans are complicit in creating the initial circumstances of the current situation.

As a last note, “Honduras or Ecuador or wherever he came from” might at least be warmer, but I don’t think it guarantees there won’t be a “lonely death in a strange land” for him still either.

If somebody's gotten all the way to the USA without the communication skills to even identify their country of origin, it seems a very long bow to draw that they've both managed to do it entirely under their own power and that they're going to have a particularly successful integration.

I've done a bunch of traveling. The vast majority of countries in the world are broadly fine in the year 2025. Starvation and absolute poverty's been fairly effectively combated, especially amongst those with the resources and gumption to actually manage to get all the way to a Western Democracy. There are definitely places with less opportunity than Western democracies, but a reasonable floor of life quality can generally be accomplished

Well we are talking about a possible illegal that is definitely homeless and was in the process of dying of exposure, this isn’t the usual illegal that has under-the-table jobs and has some level of resources and gumption as you say.

Later, trying to make sense of the incident, I asked Grok about the details of hypothermia and found it was a somewhat less urgent situation than I imagined. The man likely had been outside for 1-2 hours and likely would have been dead in about 3 more.

I think it was still pretty urgent, given frostbite...

Some Nazis were known for having a soft heart. John Rabe is a famous one. He seemed to misunderstand the nature of the larger movement.

On 23 February 1938, Rabe left Nanjing. He traveled first to Shanghai, returning to Berlin on 15 April 1938. He took with him a large number of source materials documenting Japanese atrocities in Nanjing.[14] Rabe showed films and photographs of Japanese atrocities in lecture presentations in Berlin, and he wrote to Hitler, asking him to use his influence to persuade the Japanese to stop further violence. Rabe was detained and interrogated by the Gestapo; his letter was never delivered to Hitler.

It's not like joining the Nazi Party immediately overrode your general moral compunctions. A lot of things in life are a matter of finding the path of least resistance, especially with Rabe spending the vast majority of his time between 1910 and 1938 in China working for Siemens during the rise of the Nazi party during an era of middling communications and joining the party after they already assumed power.

I was driving my daughter to school on Friday when I saw a man laying down on the side of the road, just by my house. He was very underdressed, looked cold, and had tears in his eyes. I'm guessing he was high and confused. Most homeless around here are white, but this one had dark skin. I didn't think he would last long at all with how cold it was and how underdressed he was.

I didn't want to stop with my daughter in the car so I texted my wife and said could you just take a quick look and call 911? Just eyeball him from the front yard and see if you agree with calling 911

She texted me back later to say he seemed fine, he was bundled up and had another homeless friend with him.

I thought that was odd but did the school drop-off and came back home, then we spoke about it. It became evident then, that she thought I was talking about a different homeless person. The two she spotted were curled up in an alley behind a restaurant on the corner while the guy I was talking about was on the sidewalk in front.

But he wasn't there anymore. I don't know what happened to him.

The more extreme people on the political left, the kind currently protesting ICE in Minnesota, call people like me “nazis”. Well, if I am a nazi, I am one with a soft heart.

Hah, I love this. Very much agree. I'm a conservative and similar to you, but I am also a softie in many ways. I think that's the correct way to be.

Many conservatives seem extremely drawn to strict, overly rigid systems and get almost addicted to the authority derived therein. Personally I think the most virtuous way to be a conservative is to see the rules as sometimes harsh and cruel but necessary for greater flourishing down the road. Ideally we don't revel in causing others pain or hardship.

There's a lot of people online - including some of the official Twitter accounts - that seem to think, as the saying goes, that "the cruelty is the point".

I think a lot of people feel like their empathy has been abused over time. You are a nazi if you question tran kid surgeries and a Nazi if you do genocide.

To get immigration enforcement you not only need to win a lot of elections. You also need to be good at working the processes in the bureaucracy or ignoring them. Then apparently there is still a hecklers veto. If you try to do things the right way you’re never going to win. At some point a lot of us just decided if your going to call me a Nazi anyway then maybe I will just be the bad guy.

Doing things “cruelty” actually works. Shooting protestors - eventually gets rid of protestors. Being mean to migrants discourages future migrants in the future when the other side is in power. So yes I think the right has learned that just be the bad guy has a lot of benefits.

I think the right would prefer to be nice guys and when we win elections we get to do the stuff we want to do. Dealing with things like the hecklers veto it’s going to be much easier to be the bad guy.

There is definitely an element of revenge and signaling. There is a lot of cruelty, neglect, and betrayal in enabling mass illegal immigration for decades. This is not counted, but it is felt by many. They are angry, and they want to see cold and harsh enforcement; they want no quarter to be given and if a few troublesome protestors die that is more than a price they're willing to pay. If they allow ICE to fail because it's hard and upsetting, then they lose their country.

Indeed. It's the ugliest part of the modern conservative movement, in my personal opinion.


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