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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   21932 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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A Delaware judge has ruled that corporations have a right to vote. I have not yet had time to read the decision yet, but this seems to upend a lot of norms around voting in the US.

Corporations, partnerships, trusts, limited liability companies, and other “artificial entities” have the right to vote in Delaware elections under some circumstances, a judge said in a novel ruling Tuesday.

Judge Craig A. Karsnitz rejected an ACLU challenge to a charter permitting voting in local elections by the entities that own most of the property in the Town of Fenwick Island, one of several municipalities in the state with similar provisions. Karsnitz dismissed the lawsuit from Delaware’s Superior Court, citing “the principle of one person/entity/one vote.”

My immediate question is what... what the hell? This seems like a fairly bold decision on the part of the judge, and one that normally would not be issued by a state Superior court judge. Is there some kind of inside baseball that I'm missing here? I know that Delaware is very friendly to corporate interests, but this seems like an escalation. Is this a decision that's meant to be overturned?

That was the inevitable end game in the whole corporate personhood thing.

  • -14

That ruling did not give corporations rights. It preserved the rights of individuals acting as a group.

You talking about all the hoopla over Citizens United? I remember that case pretty well. Citizens United was decided based on a first amendment framework which supersedes congresses power to legislate.

You’d need a constitutional amendment to reverse CU and there’s no way that’s happening. Even so, it’s unclear that an amendment to overturn CU would be a good idea. If you actually read the decision (and let’s be honest, 99.99% of people have not), it’s a good piece of judicial thought and reasoning. Even the ACLU thinks CU was a good piece of jurisprudence.

(You can read the case here) CU was a major decision that impacts a ton of things, including the upcoming SCOTUS battles over net neutrality and ‘digital first amendment’/‘the right to post’ arguments.

This was the gist of it: individuals have first amendment rights. No argument there. Two people, working together, collectively have individual first amendment rights and as a group they have a right to expression. Same with 4 people all the way up 400,000 people, etc. So we can agree that groups of people working together have a collective set of first amendment rights. This concept already has a long and detailed history in the US; for example during the civil rights movement, people tried to shut down the NAACP/SPLC/SBLC/etc., by attacking them on an institutional level. SCOTUS (rightfully) said ‘Lol. Nice try, but no’.

So then take a step back: groups of people organized together under a common purpose have first amendment rights, we should all agree there. But isn’t a ‘company’ from a mom and pop restaurant up to Google and Amazon, simply a collection of people organized for a common goal? Just because a company is for-profit, it doesn’t mean that the government should be free to restrict their speech.

There’s a lot of people that try to be clever and say ‘corporations are people’, but this willfully misses the point. The real point is that corporations are simply a collection of people and those people have basic civil rights, so a group of people also has those same rights. Restricting political speech by the government simply because a group of people are pursuing profit doesn’t pass the ‘strict scrutiny’ test that all impingement to first amendment must pass. So SCOTUS struck down the FEC law.

It was a good decision. Keep in mind the alternatives: whatever the ruling was in CU v FEC was also going to be applied to groups you might care about, such as NAACP, EFF, Sierra Club, etc.

Now what about ‘commercial speech?’ Commercial speech falls into a weird category called ‘intermediate scrutiny’ where companies do face some restrictions but are largely free to say what they want. The important part is that CU v FEC specifically ‘only’ covers political speech. Commercial speech just wasn’t part of the debate.

At the end of the day, look at why people get upset at CU v FEC. It’s always the exact same argument dressed up slightly differently: “somebody is going to say something or believe in something I don’t like!” It’s always, “but Amazon is going to oppose Medicare for all!” Or “that power plant is going to advocate for coal!” People that fight against CU want to use it as a way to suppress speech they disagree with. That’s precisely why we have a first amendment and why it’s so important.

Any legislative act to reverse CU is going to be judged against the fact that it’s actively stripping first amendment rights from a group. Any judicial review by SCOTUS is going to be framed as the court stripping rights from people. People clearly want to argue that CU is bad, but pretend you are arguing before SCOTUS: what’s your legal theory behind why certain groups of people should have their speech suppressed? There’s not any really good arguments.

what’s your legal theory behind why certain groups of people should have their speech suppressed

Because by creating LLC they have deliberately separated themselves from the company. Or more specifically if the person doesn't wear the brunt of the liability and is shielded, then stripping the corporation of rights doesn't infringe on the owner's rights.

Notably, the Citizens United organization is a 501(c)4, not an LLC. If you think that "stripping the corporation of rights" isn't a constitutional infringement, the ACLU is also a 501(c)4: can we silence them during election season too?

Yes to your points and also the matter under dispute was if the Federal government can ban a documentary that was critical of Hillary Clinton. The government's representatives were arguing that they can and additionally have the power to ban books that have even a small portion political advocacy. Even one sentence of political advocacy is enough to trigger this power. They claimed they hold these powers during election season but not during other times.

It is a travesty that four justices agreed that the government can strip us of our first ammendment rights if a group makes something critical of Hillary Clinton before an election.

Oh this is a terrible article. Non-human entities already can vote - in certain circumstances, such as for example shareholder's vote - if an entity owns shares, it is entitled to voting rights in accordance to their shares. It doesn't mean they get to vote in presidential elections and such - not everything that is called a "vote" is the same, and the asshats at Bloomberg deliberate confuse the issue, because they are partisan assholes. In this particular case, certain tiny town has a provision that property owners can vote in municipal elections - which makes sense, I mean they pay all the taxes (most municipalities live on property taxes) why wouldn't they be able to vote? ACLU claimed only human property owners get to vote, which may be a sensible approach, but not what the charter of that particular town took. ACLU wanted to force them to change their charter, because apparently "liberty" nowadays means "do what I say, or else". The court told them to take a hike. That's what happened, not "corporations have a right to vote".

Bloomberg link to opinion

Non-Bloomberg, official link (though it's still one of those infuriating "secured" PDFs that forbid copying text out of them)

The Elections Clause of the Delaware Constitution states, in its entirety: "All elections shall be free and equal." The clause is eloquent in its simplicity but lacks specific direction in application.

Under Delaware's Home Rule statute for municipalities, the State of Delaware defines "qualified voters" to mean "those persons who, under the terms of a municipal charter, shall be authorized to vote in elections within that municipal corporation".

Laws enacted by the Delaware General Assembly, such as Fenwick's Charter, are presumed to be constitutional. To overcome this presumption of constitutionality, Plaintiff must provide "clear and convincing evidence" that there is no set of circumstances under which the contested status could be constitutional. Plaintiff argues that I should subject Fenwick's Charter to "strict scrutiny" review. However, Plaintiff framed its Complaint not as an equal protection or due process claim, but rather as a declaratory judgment action. Under Delaware law, courts apply a "sliding scale" in voting rights cases. Where the state's alleged burden on voting is not severe, the state's intervention need only have served a legitimate interest. Indeed, Delaware courts have found a rational basis for expanding the voting franchise.36

36See Dupont v. Mills; see also Del. Op. Atty. Gen. 09-IB05 (finding the precedent of cases applying rational basis test to nonresident vote dilution cases to be "overwhelming").

The Delaware General Assembly has expressly authorized, by way of charter, voting on behalf of entity property owners in several jurisdictions other than Fenwick.37 [Ditto for special elections of annexation in Wilmington.] While this is not dispositive of this case, it does show that the General Assembly's treatment of Fenwick is not unique, different, or unusual.

37See, e. g., Town of Henlopen Acres, City of Rehoboth Beach, Town of Dewey Beach.

Plaintiff's ultimate argument appears to be that voters who are human beings are being deprived of their rights, or at least having the impact of those voting rights diluted, by the votes of artificial entities—or, put more bluntly, such artificial entities should not be entitled to vote. In its Answering Brief, Plaintiff devotes a significant amount of its argument to emphasizing the words person, people, humans, citizens, popular, and the like. In my view, even if those words as used in statutes and cases are acknowledged to be people-centric or person-centric, that does not support a legal argument that the Elections Clause of the Delaware Constitution supports Plaintiff's expansion of traditional vote dilution law to encompass what it calls the "debasement" of "the right of human voters" through "artificial entity voting".

Trusts, partnerships, limited liability companies, and corporations are expressly recognized as "persons" in the Delaware Code.…

I need not rule in this case as to whether entity property owners are constitutionally required to have their votes count or constitutionally precluded from doing so. Rather, I need only rule whether Plaintiff has met its burden of providing clear and convincing evidence that there is no set of circumstances under which Fenwick's Charter, as adopted and amended by the Delaware General Assembly, could be constitutional. It has not.

I appreciate that Plaintiff may disagree with Delaware's policy of authorizing certain municipalities to allow voting on behalf of entity property owners. Visions of faceless large corporations, or even HAL, controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction. However, plaintiff has not demonstrated that this policy violates the principle of one person/entity, one vote. Plaintiff points to no other persuasive independent authority than the Elections Clause of the Delaware Constitution itself. And matters of policy are appropriately left to legislative bodies, not the courts.

This sounds like clickbait. And… sûre enough.

A Delaware judge has ruled that corporations have a right to vote.

I'm not sure I would characterize the decision that way. Rather, I would say this:

A Delaware judge has ruled that the legislature can permit corporations to vote.

In other words, the judge is not saying that corporations must be permitted to vote. Rather, he's saying that if the legislature decides to give corporations a vote, it's not necessarily a constitutional problem.

The article you link to doesn't give much context, but I think I can make some guesses. First, the elections at issue were in a small municipality on a barrier island. So I'm guessing that most of the property is owned by non-residents. Apparently the law at issue gave all property owners the right to vote in the election, as opposed to having the vote limited to year-round residents. This seems totally reasonable to me; the alternative is to have a small number of year-round residents set policy for the entire town, a sort of taxation without representation situation. Since some of the property is owned through trusts, corporations, etc., it's reasonable to let those entities vote in the election.

First, the elections at issue were in a small municipality on a barrier island. So I'm guessing that most of the property is owned by non-residents

The City of London (the one-square-mile financial district which has its own sui generis local government which has maintained institutional continuity since time immemorial) has the same issue - most of the property is owned by businesses and the employed population vastly exceeds the resident population. The franchise since the 19th century (which survived the abolition of votes for nonresident property owners in the rest of the country in 1969) was voting-age natural persons owning or leasing property in the City, which didn't cause problems when most of the businesses in the City were partnerships - the partners qualified to vote. But the transition from traditional partnerships to either corporate ownership (the banks) or LLCs and such-like (the law and accountancy firms) meant that the business property franchise had ceased to represent the real business City, so they changed the rules in 2002 to say that property-owning businesses (regardless of corporate form) should designate electors who work in the city to vote on their behalf. The system avoids some of the abuses mentioned elsewhere in the thread by tying a business's voting power to the number of full-time employees it has who work in the City.

There is a joke that the City of London is the only place where introducing multiple votes for corporations could be a positive democratic reform.

It helps to read the decision. Relevant background:

In 2008, the Delaware General Assembly amended the Charter of the Town of Fenwick Island ("Fenwick"), a small coastal community, to allow Fenwick to expand it's voter registration rolls to allow individuals to cast votes on behalf of trusts, limited liability companies, partnerships, and corporations that own property in Fenwick. Today, the overwhelming majority of legal entity property owners in Fenwick registered to vote, and on whose behalf votes are cast, are trusts.

In this action the American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware, a corporation ("Plaintiff"), challenges these provisions, asserting that Fenwick's Charter violates the Elections Clause of the Delaware Constitution by way of "vote dilution;" i.e., the dilution of votes of human beings by votes of artificial legal entities.

The judge did not find some generalized right to vote for corporate entities. Rather:

1. In 2008 the Delaware legislature amended a town's charter to permit voting by certain corporate entities that owned property in that town.

2. The ACLU sued claiming the Delaware constitution only permitted natural persons to vote.

According to the judge's analysis:

1. The Delaware Constitution's Election Clause consists, in its entirety of "All elections shall be free and equal."

2. Who is eligible to vote in a municipal election is generally governed by a municipality's charter (under Delaware state law).

3. Permitting non-natural-person voters does not violated the text of the Election Clause in the Delaware Constitution.

Apparently, there are other municipalities in Delaware that have similar arrangements. The judge mentions the City of Wilmington explicitly. The judge only briefly mentions the corporate personhood thing since it's not essential to their analysis, but the ACLU argument relies heavily on it.

The question is less "do corporations have the right to vote?" and more "does the Delaware constitution forbid the Delaware legislature from giving corporations the power to vote in municipal elections?"

I'm finally sitting down over lunch to read the decision. What would stop a company from forming 10,000 subsidiaries that jointly owned a single piece of property in common?

Probably the simple fact that disrupting municipal elections in a town with population of 343 is not going to be worth the effort, and if some crazy person decides to spend millions of dollars on doing that, it's relatively simple to amend the charter to prevent it, e.g. by allowing to more than one vote per piece of property.

What would stop a company from forming 10,000 subsidiaries that jointly owned a single piece of property in common?

The law which says "Don't be a wise-ass." Or, more formally, the legal principle which says that laws should be construed so as to do justice.

The law which says "Don't be a wise-ass."

Which law would that be?

There is a reason that the US constitution is about 4500 words instead of just

  1. All elections shall be free and equal.

  2. Laws should be construed so as to do justice.

The point of having fine-grained, specific laws is that "the judge already knows what outcome is just, and will just reach for some law to justify it" is a terrible procedure. It gets you decisions like Roe v Wade, where reproductive freedom hangs on a very shaky legal decision until some later SCOTUS takes the common sense approach that the amendments did not mention abortion at all.

Nobody sane would campaign for the biggest employer in some town also getting a single vote, because that would not change anything -- they clearly have a vested interest in the local politics, and can trivially spend money on donations or campaigns on a scale which will give them a lot more influence than a single vote ever could.

"One man, one vote" is a very simple Schelling point. There is always some quibbling over details, and we end up at something like "one adult, non-felon citizen of any gender whose primary residency is registered in the municipality at the reference date", with the voting rights of alien permanent residents being up for debate.

It is also somewhat robust, because people are very expensive. Sure, a company could just pay politically sympathetic people to settle in their town, but they might spend northwards of 100k$ per vote that way, so it is much cheaper to just pay bribes to the voters already there.

By contrast, corporate entities are very cheap to create and maintain -- Delaware LLCs pay 300$ in taxes a year. So @birb_cromble's question is exactly the right one: how does this scale?

Even if there is a limit to one corporate vote per property lot, that would still leave a lot of loopholes. A family living in their own house might decide to form a holding company which leases their home back to them for a dollar a year, then cast that company's vote. Landlords would wield a lot of votes. (Seriously, who looks at the present system and says "the problem with that is that landlords have too little political power"?)

There is a reason that the US is not organized as a stock company, where everyone starts out with one share and the federal government can simply emit more stocks to raise funds, and voting power is simply the amount of shares you own. This would lead to the effective disenfranchisement of the majority. At least in a democracy, the 1% will have to spend money on campaigns to get the 99% to vote for them, and different 1%ers might be competing with different political visions rather than just their budgets.

Which law would that be?

If you were hoping that I would provide a cite to the Delaware Code, then I'm sorry for disappointing you. The "Don't be a wise-ass" rule is typically not codified.

The point of having fine-grained, specific laws is that "the judge already knows what outcome is just, and will just reach for some law to justify it" is a terrible procedure.

To a large extent, I agree with you. But at the same time, it's impossible to foresee every last situation, especially if there are a lot of rules lawyers trying to find clever loopholes in order to twist things in ways that are plainly abusive. Judges need to be given some degree of discretion, although yes, if judges are given discretion it can be expected that there will be a problem with judges abusing their discretion.

In any event, you seem to be making a normative argument here, i.e. you are making an argument about how the law should be structured and applied. By contrast, I was making a descriptive argument. I was talking about what would happen in practice if someone got cute and tried to take over the town by buying a piece of property and setting up 10,000 corporations to co-own the property.

"One man, one vote" is a very simple Schelling point

I agree, but sometimes there is tension between what is simple and what is fair. This town in Delaware is a seaside town; I gather that there is a very small number of full time residents and a large number of property owners who, although they pay taxes, are only seasonal residents. "One man one vote" would lead to a very significant taxation without representation kind of situation. It reminds me of an article I read about the City of Industry in California. Apparently, it was set up so that there would be a very small number of actual residents combined with large amounts of commercial non-residential property. The actual residents are able to give themselves extremely cushy jobs in local government.

(Seriously, who looks at the present system and says "the problem with that is that landlords have too little political power"?)

I can't speak for others, but I certainly do. Maybe it's because I live in the Northeastern United States and I see the way the laws are often stacked in favor of tenants. To the point where a lot of people are disincentivized to invest in and add to the residential rental real estate market. To the point where incumbent tenants have so many rights that it becomes hard for newcomers to rent a decent place at an affordable price.

By contrast, corporate entities are very cheap to create and maintain -- Delaware LLCs pay 300$ in taxes a year. So @birb_cromble's question is exactly the right one: how does this scale?

The rule could be that an incorporated entity gets a vote if and only if it is the sole owner of a parcel of land.

I think the bigger deterrent is that there's simply no reason for anyone to participate in such a scheme. I neither live in Fenwick Island nor own property there, and as a consequence, I do not care about who sits in local government offices. I doubt you care either. Someone may theoretically be able to hatch a scheme where they subdivide their property a thousand ways and give votes to 999 people who otherwise wouldn't be able to vote, and structure the transactions so that these minority owners wouldn't have any rights to the property that would prejudice the controlling owner, but I don't know how I could be induced to participate. Rental income split that many ways isn't much of an inducement. If a property rents for $10,000/week on average, which is generous considering that in the off season there are likely going to be several weeks where it doesn't rent at all, and half of that income goes to the rental company and to pay taxes and maintenance costs, a 1/1000 owner is getting about $5/week. If it's not being rented, try coordinating use with 1,000 other people. In exchange for that $5/week and the right to vote in local elections, you're taking on liability.

Of course, you're not actually going to get that $5/week, because no rental company is going to agree to leasing a property with a thousand owners, and no insurance company is going to underwrite such a property. Even if it's vacant property, and the controlling owner agrees to pay the property taxes, what do you do if he doesn't pay? The taxing authority doesn't give a shit about your agreement, so you'd better be prepared to pay the taxes yourself and sue him for reimbursement. What do you do if someone injures themself on your uninsurable property and sues you?

Getting to your concerns, though, even if somebody did that and somehow found thousands of participants, why would someone structure a transaction for the sole purpose of giving votes to out-of-towners? It would certainly look like the controlling owner was giving these shares away under the presumption that the minority owners would vote for his preferred candidate, at which point one wonders if any other inducements were used to encourage participation, which makes it look less like a real estate deal and more like a sophisticated form of electoral fraud, in which case having the registrations invalidated would be the least of their concerns. One expects that even if the registrations are allowed to stand, such a scheme would only invite an investigation from the attorney general before the first vote is even cast. I am not willing to subject myself to such an investigation and possible prosecution for the privilege of being able to vote for Fenwick Island town council or whatever, and I doubt most other people would be willing to either.

I think the bigger deterrent is that there's simply no reason for anyone to participate in such a scheme. I neither live in Fenwick Island nor own property there, and as a consequence, I do not care about who sits in local government offices. I doubt you care either.

I myself don't particularly, but I can definitely think of situations where people absolutely would engage in (and participate in) such a scheme if they could get away with it. For example, in a situation like that of the East Ramapo Central School District. And yes, if a respected ultra-Orthodox Rabbi instructed his congregants accept the role of partial owner of a piece of property and vote for a particular slate, it would happen.

Anyway, as I alluded to above, I don't think it very much matters whether a person gets cute by means of setting up a thousand corporations or by recruiting a thousand ultra-Orthodox Jews. Either way, the "don't be a wise-ass" rule would get applied. And it seems like you more or less agree.

Seriously, who looks at the present system and says "the problem with that is that landlords have too little political power"?

That would be me. Renters protections are excessive. Rent control is destructive and sadly becoming more common.

I think the bigger problem is that land is simply not a good where markets work very well, because there is no supply elasticity.

The mean time between expropriations (e.g. through war, revolution, commie takeover) in most of the Western world is probably upwards of a century. This means that city land is a good investment even if you don't collect rent for it.

The Georgian fix would be to simply tax the income from unimproved land at 100%, to the point where an investor would be indifferent between owning the same building in a big city or the countryside because he would not see a single cent of the rent difference.

Fixing rent prices is just treating the symptoms, and making everything worse in the process.

Nor do I think a land value tax would fix everything. Suburban home owners would have reason to become even more NIMBY towards higher density housing, as it would also raise the LVT they would have to pay for their single family homes.

an investor would be indifferent between owning the same building in a big city or the countryside because he would not see a single cent of the rent difference.

An investor wouldn't be indifferent between owning the same building in a big city vs countryside because there is more potential for building improvements (higher density, etc.) to net a substantial return on investment due to capturing a higher rate of return (rents from tenants) than costs (land tax). Land tax isn't a per-plot demand thing, it is a per-region demand thing and individual plots can make more than they can expect to lose in tax. (Which is exactly the reason LVT is said to be good for development and growth)

Suburban home owners would have reason to become even more NIMBY towards higher density housing

In theory they should become more YIMBY for high-density housing as it soaks up demand for housing for those who are willing to settle for less space and thus lowers land rents of the region by proxy.

Landlord freedom combined with a liberalization of zoning / planning rules would solve the housing cost situation. The former without the latter wouldn’t do much. To harness greed you need to allow people to do business, which in residential construction means making it cheap and fast to build. Capitalism can take care of the rest.

Landlord freedom combined with a liberalization of zoning / planning rules would solve the housing cost situation. The former without the latter wouldn’t do much.

I tend to disagree with this. Even before the 'Rona, it was significantly cheaper and easier to rent commercial real estate in Manhattan compared to residential real estate. Logically, it seems likely that a big part of the reason for this discrepancy is that commercial tenants have far fewer rights than residential tenants.

I do agree that from the perspective of overall housing cost, relaxed zoning would tend to help.

Even before WFH commercial real estate, particularly office real estate, has the ‘pressure valve’ of a move to the suburbs. Sure, Goldman Sachs isn’t going to relocate its trading floor and Vogue isn’t going to relocate its editorial team to Long Island or Jersey City, but the marginal finance or law firm back office, mid level accounting firm, healthcare provider, insurance company, tech firm, state or municipal (or federal) government office, or medium to large sized corporate headquarters can move out to either Jersey or LI city, or to one of the countless super cheap strip mall offices all around the further reaches of the outer boroughs and the more distant suburbs that are still within commuting and driving distance. This limits price increases for office space in Manhattan to some extent. Many employees may even already live nearer these places and so support this kind of move.

By contrast the residential real estate dynamics are different because of zoning. A lot of housing around cheap suburban office parks on Long Island is super expensive because it’s single family zoned for wealthy PMC in the burbs of one of the richest cities in the world. There’s also far greater sentimentality attached to residential real estate by residents obviously.

More comments

That would be me. Renters protections are excessive.

In general I agree. A lot of nice real estate (which could be rented out) sits empty because the owners don't want to take the chance of getting royally screwed by an eviction moratorium; rent control laws; etc. Even if they do rent out apartments, landlords need to charge everyone a hefty premium as a result of these serious risks.

Renters protections are excessive.

Washington state assigns publicly-funded counsel to low-income people who are being evicted. I can't imagine trying to be a landlord there.

At this point purchasing a rental property in California is like opening a strip club in Kabul. Merely losing your investment is the best case scenario.

Out of curiosity I googled and found Washington state passed rent control last year.

Washington state has sweeping statewide rent stabilization laws limiting how much landlords can increase residential rent. Most rent increases are capped at 7% plus inflation (or 10% total, whichever is lower). The Washington Department of Commerce sets the precise maximum cap, which is currently limited to 9.683%.

Of course they did. It is a bit more nuanced than this, but strictly bad with some nuance softening the blow of terrible policy.

"Democrats are the technocratic party" proven wrong again.

Historically in many societies, landlords had the right to use corporal punishment on their tenants. I wonder how a grand bargain of combining rent control with corporal punishment would affect the market. This is real radical centrism.

Of course they did. It is a bit more nuanced than this, but strictly bad with some nuance softening the blow of terrible policy.

I think the one of the biggest problems is that laws like this signal to potential landlords that the legislature is potentially hostile. I mean, given the current rate of inflation, being limited to annual rent increases of 9.5 percent isn't too big of a hit. For me, the real question is what is the probability that in a few years the legislature (or the executive branch) will decide to really punish landlords.

My impression is the 10,000 subsidiaries would get one joint-vote. The charter has provisions for the case where a single voter is entitled to vote as both a resident and property owner (still only one vote) and where a voter owns multiple pieces of property (still only one vote). It is a little unclear to me what the legal arrangement looks like where a piece of real property has multiple owners but I suspect they would still only get one vote.

I believe the law provides that a single parcel of land is only entitled to a single vote, and you don't get multiple votes for owning multiple pieces of property:

These provisions shall be construed in accordance with the principle of “one person/entity, one vote.” Where a voter is entitled to vote by virtue of being both a resident and as an owner of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote; where a voter is entitled to vote by ownership of two or more parcels of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote.

And since the division of land into parcels is presumably controlled by the government, you wouldn't be able to run your electoral hydra scheme without the cooperation of the city/county.

the law provides that a single parcel of land is only entitled to a single vote

It does not.

you wouldn't be able to run your electoral hydra scheme without the cooperation of the city/county

So you're saying there's a chance!

Nothing obvious. But what would stop a natural person from splitting a property between 10,000 natural people in the same manner?

Square footage, I assume

That isn't how tenancy in common works. You own a 1/10,000 share of the entire 10,000-ft2 property, not a single 1-ft2 piece of that property.

Coordinating that and managing the people involved, who would then have standing for adventures like minority shareholder lawsuits, would be much more troublesome.

It wouldn't be practicable. The more people who own a piece of property, the harder it gets to make decisions about the property, and get the owners to contribute money for upkeep. A dispute would inevitably develop, and the result would be that one of the owners files a partition action and the whole property is sold.

I'm imagining a situation where one person owns an outright majority of the property and each of the other 9999 owns only a minuscule proportion, so that the majority owner has more than enough wealth on his own to conduct maintenance unilaterally and to thwart a partition action by buying out the objector.

And what's the motivation for the majority owner to do this? He'd be giving equal access to the property to 9999 other people while being prepared to do unilateral maintenance, and if they don't contribute he's going to pay a 5-figure sum to conduct a partition action where he might not even be the high bidder. So he can...give his friends votes for the Fenwick Island town council? If I'm one of the 9999 I'm there to get access to the property and I could probably care less about some local election.

a partition action where he might not even be the high bidder

I was assuming that such a partition would work like the procedure laid out in the Uniform Partition of Heirs' Property Act, in which the judge orders an appraisal and the majority owner can buy out the objector at that price without any bidding. But obviously I am misunderstanding how partitions work.

Partitions are generally governed by the common law of property. The act you cite is a relatively recent reform that has only been adopted in about half the states and only applies in specific situations. One unfortunately common issue, particularly among lower income populations, is when a property owner dies and no estate is opened, and the property they own simply continues to be occupied by whatever family members happen to occupy it. After a few generations, some long lost relative finds out they own an interest and files a partition suit, whereby the property is sold at a cash auction for less than market value, often to an investor, with the result often being that someone who has been living in the house a long time finds themselves dispossessed. The model act is intended to keep the property in the family by allowing an heir to purchase at market value in a normal transaction, which has the side effect of preserving the full value of the property.

From what I cal tell three states have applied this process to all partition actions, but Delaware never enacted the model legislation to begin with. And from what I can tell, it's unlikely that any additional states will, because there's some controversy over how effective the legislation is. One unintended side effect is that all of the additional safeguards have added expense to the process, which was already expensive to begin with.

Generally speaking, you need to be careful when relying on model uniform legislation. Some things, like the Uniform Commercial Code, have been adopted nearly universally and can be cited chapter and verse without too much concern of running afoul of some local variation. Others, like the Uniform Probate Code, have only been adopted by a minority of states, with reforms being incorporated piecemeal in others. And then there are cases like the Model Penal Code, which is considered successful model legislation since the spirit of the reforms have been adopted, but the actual legislation varies widely among jurisdictions, with no state that I'm aware of adopting the actual statutory language.

I was assuming that such a partition would work like the procedure laid out in the Uniform Partition of Heirs' Property Act, in which the judge orders an appraisal and the majority owner can buy out the objector at that price without any bidding. But obviously I am misunderstanding how partitions work.

I would imagine that --in theory -- one could draft a detailed tenancy in common agreement to get around these sorts of issues. The minority owners would lease back their occupancy rights to the majority owner; they would agree that in lieu of partition, they could demand a reasonable payment in exchange for their ownership rights; and so on.

The bigger problem -- in my opinion -- is that the whole thing is an obvious sham. When 1000 voter registrations showed up at the town clerk's office, all based on ownership of the same property, there's a good chance that the town clerk would simply refuse to process them. And that if you brought suit, the judge would find a reason to rule against you. Even if somehow you got the voter registrations accepted, it's highly likely that the legislature would amend the voter rules in short order.

This is, roughly, how George Clinton and the anti-Federalists rigged elections in early-US New York.

I'm finally sitting down over lunch to read the decision. What would stop a company from forming 10,000 subsidiaries that jointly owned a single piece of property in common?

I assume it works in a similar fashion to voting for home owner's associations. The household as a whole gets a vote regardless of how many owners there are.

Edit: I was curious and checked the town charter. Unless I misread the document, it does seem like if multiple corporations own a property, they get multiple votes as non-residents. Similarly it seems like if multiple people own a property (e.g. a husband and wife) then they both get to vote. Although I would think that if someone tried to abuse this system, the town charter would get amended pretty quickly.

if someone tried to abuse this system, the town charter would get amended pretty quickly.

Before, or after that abuse let them illegitimately affect the system?

Before, or after that abuse let them illegitimately affect the system?

I don't know, but I would guess the most likely scenario is the following:

(1) the town clerk observes thousands of new voter registrations coming in, all associated with the same address;

(2) the town clerk refuses to accept the registrations;

(3) the "homeowners" file suit;

(4) in the meantime, the town charter gets amended to make clear that an incorporated entity gets to vote if and only if it is the sole owner of a property;

(5) the judge sides with the town clerk, finding that the attempted registrants are not bona fide owners and that there registrations are a sham. And that in any event, the town charter has been clarified, making clear that multiple corporate registrations for a single property are impermissible.

The town would sue the company behind it, and the judge would likely rule that any number of companies with the same ultimate beneficiary counts as a single vote.

While it's been a while since I did my business cources in college, not all Judges are idiots.

Just most of them.

I was recently going through the Archive of Astral Codex Ten content and reread Scott’s post “The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs”. Rereading this post I had a few thoughts: 1) this is the most nakedly partisan Scott-post I can remember, 2) this is the most unqualifiedly confident opinion about the outcome of a political policy I’ve seen Scott express, 3) “Tariffs” seem like an issue from a lifetime ago when it has been less than a year since they were the number one news story.

As someone who is essentially a Trump loyalist/plan-truster, Trump II has been hard to follow. The tariffs, which Econ 101 would tell you are a disastrous idea, and were hard to rationalize even as a Trump supporter, seem to have had little noticeable effect. DOGE, despite fulfilling the boomercon dream of putting a real “businessman” in charge of reforming Washington, was fleeting if not an outright failure. Despite closing the border and significant political capital expended on deporting illegal immigrants, sentiment on the economy is poor, and anecdotally the “Great Replacement” seems to be proceeding at the same pace it was before. The right-wing pundit sphere has largely turned on Trump and anti-Israel sentiment has entered the mainstream.

My question is - is this all a repudiation of the internet-right’s political project? Would Trump be popular if not for the Iran war? Does the Trumpian paradigm have any hope of continuing post midterms?

The 'weak' version of tariffs slightly increased inflation and the cost is almost entirely borne by American consumers and companies, as expected. Also, very predictably, SCOTUS struck down his use of 'emergency powers' which means that the government has to pay back hundreds of billions to companies.

The other problem with the tariffs is that they were retardly overbroad. This US tire plant had to shut down because Thai rubber was tariffed, even though rubber can't be grown in the US. The salutary effect of tariffs is supposed to be onshoring, but nothing much has happened; companies will just pinky promise Trump that they're totally planning to build more factories at home and quietly cancel once he's out of office. It's also worth bearing in mind that the US does have a strong manufacturing sector with extremely high productivity and value-add, like assembling airplanes.

As someone who is essentially a Trump loyalist/plan-truster, Trump II has been hard to follow. The tariffs, which Econ 101 would tell you are a disastrous idea, and were hard to rationalize even as a Trump supporter, seem to have had little noticeable effect.

Well if you ignore the long running small businesses that say they had to close because of the tariffs, the big industries that still had to pay billions of dollars and the prices increasing (or profits decreasing hurting competition and slowing growth) on many tariff impacted industries like canning, then yeah I guess you could say that nothing has happened. AI is pretty much singlehandedly carrying the American economy in growth now (this single sector making up >50% of GDP expansion) because everything else is struggling.

Even the Trump admin themselves is clearly aware that their tariffs raise prices given that they'll reverse them in more politically price sensitive areas.

If there is no such thing as a free lunch, then where does the tariff lunch come from?

DOGE, despite fulfilling the boomercon dream of putting a real “businessman” in charge of reforming Washington, was fleeting if not an outright failure.

It's hard to buy that DOGE was even a halfway sincere effort when Musk was trawling around disrupting petty and widely considered to be highly successful programs like PEPFAR for pennies while going on Fox News and promising to increase social security one of the very few things anyone with any understanding of government knows is the actual drain on budget now.

To absolutely no one but a bunch of Internet retard's surprise, social security checks did not go up because of DOGE, the deficit is not solved, and one actually smart guy made a massive return on his whole life savings betting on the obvious.

My question is - is this all a repudiation of the internet-right’s political project? Would Trump be popular if not for the Iran war? Does the Trumpian paradigm have any hope of continuing post midterms?

They made the same mistake that the Biden administration and progressives did, they thought being better than the other guy meant they were popular and everything they did justified. That they could ignore the basic fundamentals of politics and public relations in pursuit of their petty culture war grievances.

And because they're selected for the most extremist culture war obsessed retards, they're also all delusional along with that, like Greg Bovino's belief that there are >100 million illegal immigrants. The extremist idiocy combined with the firehouse effect and the average familiarity meme inevitably leads to bad PR moments cause even their best attempts to be moderate might look insane to the general public. They all start to think "Well certainly the general public agrees at least 50 million need to be deported right?"

Trump looks really really cool in the eyes of his base, just like Biden remained so popular among the Dems they couldn't admit his clear and blatant sundowning. But the people who matter in an election aren't the hyperpartisans who will suck your dick even if you slapped them with 1000% inflation, it's the fickle swing voters whose main argument for you is that you're slightly better than the alternative and the fickle partisan voters who can't even decide if they want to turn out to vote to begin with and those guys aren't dick sucking.

DOGE was a great illustration of how the world actually works. Elon's boys effortlessly pushed their way past the weather nerds at NOAA, but they sure as hell didn't try that at CIA or the Pentagon, despite the billions vanishing into thin air at those two places. The whole project was a way to punish the faction of Trump's enemies that would respond to bullying with angry op-eds, not the ones that would actually kill him if he ever came after them. And the whole thing fell apart when Elon the extreme autist actually thought he was there to "transform Washington", lol.

Anyway, MAGA supporters are finding out (just like all of Trump's previous business partners and political allies) that Trump only looks out for Trump. He's now in full legacy mode. He couldn't give a fuck less what his supporters in Oklahoma are paying for gas and groceries when he could be the guy that makes Cuba a new US territory.

The thing with the tariffs is that the reaction (as measured by the stock market) was so strong and so swift that Trump instantly buckled. That makes it hard to tell how much the actual long-term economic or political damage would have been. It's almost a perfect paradox- We can be perfectly safe that he'll never do tariffs, because the reaction would be so horrendous, so he's free to threaten them all he wants.

But also, yes, if there's anything to make a trade war look trivial, it's an actual shooting war. The Iran war is taking up so much space that it's hard to think about other things.

It was the bond market reaction that started the panic inside the admin.

I really wish I knew the specific lines they used to pull Trump back from the brink in whatever way would be least damaging to his ego. It couldn't have been easy considering that tariffs were his lifelong obsession (yes, Trump actually has some political principles).

Would Trump be popular if not for the Iran war?

His polling was suffering before because of other errors and his general off-putting and erratic nature.

This is just the bit that Trump loyalists can't really digest or rationalize.

DOGE, despite fulfilling the boomercon dream of putting a real “businessman” in charge of reforming Washington, was fleeting if not an outright failure

DOGE is either, as @aeqno says, an attempt to punish clients of the ancien regime in which case I suppose it could be said to have put them in some pain (until a post-Trump White House restores their position) or it's an attempt to cut the deficit meaningfully.

If it's an attempt to cut the deficit (by $2 trillion according to Elon) it was always retarded populist slop because we know where the budget goes. The Boomercon businessman plan seems to imagine some ruthless guy who will cut other people's social spending while leaving the Boomer and their social spending alone. There's a reason the Paul Ryan fiscal wing is dead: boomer Republicans killed them.

If it didn't work for Ryan, why would it work now? Elon can't cut anything that'd make Trump unpopular and Trump has a) given up on fiscal conservatism and b) not really going to push through laws to fix his position anyway.

This is just the mirror image of the progressive-technocrat plan: people who know their policies are unpopular and so are trying to do an end-run around politics.

My question is - is this all a repudiation of the internet-right’s political project?

As both a formal and practical matter the "internet-right" doesn't have a political project (it's been overrated since the initial claim that Trump won because of memes). Trump has a political project and the internet-right's job is to try to cajole that elephant in the direction they want.

But a stubborn elephant is hard to move. Most people didn't foresee that Trump had such a durable fascination with things like tariffs.

(First post, hope I’m doing this right.)

The Link Between Environmental Exploitation and Collapse

This was something that randomly popped into my head a couple weeks ago at work, and I can’t seem to find a solution for it. As a species, we’ve evolved and reliably patterned our behavior to exploit opportunities when they become available. We are not naturally wired to operate for deliberative, careful, and long-term planning. Our genetic makeup works very well for small, hunter-gatherer societies to optimize for our local catch and bring it back home to the tribe. That doesn’t scale and work very well with modern technology, where we’ve now become good at exploiting resources which allow us to destroy things quicker than we can reform them. Despite being equipped with logical reasoning, why do we fail so much at being able to use our capabilities?

Every time I think of this conundrum, it always reminds me of the gamblers fallacy, which is essentially our inability to accurately estimate probabilities. The short of it is: gamblers often think some random events are related to each other when in reality they aren’t. If you’re out fishing for instance, a fisherman may think several bad days increases his odds of a lucky catch today; and these misperceptions are often reinforced when he sees a colleague coming back with a full load of fish. This leads him into thinking the balance has to swing back in his favor at some point and the only source of the problem has to do with how hard he tries. Maybe he ends up redoubling his efforts, buys more expensive equipment, or falsely believes luck will repay him for his past losses.

Human minds are incredibly hard to change. If over exploitation is one of the historical forces that leads to collapse, then fighting its roots may be impossible if it involves trying to stop people from engaging in irrational behavior.

Possible Solutions and Their Problems

Privatization

Libertarians often think privatization is a solution that can mediate some of these problems via efficient allocation of resources. If a herdsman owns the land on which his sheep pasture, then he’d have to be stupid if he didn’t understand that if he added more sheep to his flock he’d end up ruining himself. So privatizing things removes the network of interacting herdsmen, by turning them into single operators who do their jobs without broad external interaction. Maybe for some things this works but it has massive problems.

First, privatization isn’t always possible. You can’t fence the atmosphere or the oceans, if we’re talking about climate change. But even so, even where privatization is possible it always carries a cost along with it. In the west we take it for granted that the government protects the property rights of its citizenry. But this isn’t true in many other parts of the world where ordinary people are subject to dispossession depending on who covets their land/property.

But even with best good will and control over the system, people may just be unable to manage a system that has too many non-linear feedbacks and delayed reactions. And that’s a tendency that casts a wide shadow over all ideologies that propose a solution to this.

Quotas

The first problem with quotas is that the method only works if there’s a general consensus in place that establishes the framework of restrictions. Secondly, people also aren’t usually interested in quotas imposed on specific industrial sectors, and battles often rage between interested parties that degenerates into shouting matches and protests between lobbies and well intentioned politicians.

The Montreal treaty that imposed a limit on CFC gases in the late 80’s was successful in reducing emissions worldwide, but that led to a spike in illegal manufacturing and smuggling of forbidden gases. It didn’t prove to be a significant problem though, only because good substitutes of CFC gases were already available at that time and so resolving that problem proved to be rather painless.

Back in the 90’s, the fishing industry in the Aral lake in the Soviet Union was destroyed, due to it being dried out to use its water for irrigation purposes. That wasn’t the only example of ecological crises either. The mining cities in northern Siberia are notoriously known for some of the worst cases of industrial pollution on the planet. So even communism can’t save the commons then.

What ultimately is the solution?

Humanity is actually really good at solving these problems. There was a time when all life on earth was nearly driven extinct by drowning in its own excrement (no, it's not a link to the Ganges river in 2026, you can safely click it). We're pretty solid by comparison.

Well, might as well take the opportunity to hop on my hobby horse since when the hell else am I gonna get to talk about this on the the motte?

I'm pretty well convinced the oxygen catastrophe never happened, not in the sense that there was no oxygen spike but rather there was no mass extinction caused by this. When you look into the evidence for such a oxygen caused mass extinction, there really is only two peices, deduction that changes in environment cause mass extinctions and an apparent mass extinction happened 2.1-2 billion years ago. However I have 3 serious objections to this line of logic, first being the timeline. Oxygen started accumulating 2.4 billions years ago, so life existed just fine with high oxygen for 3-4 hundred million years before suddenly going extinct? Secondly, we recently discovered the gabonionta, apparent multi-cellular life from about 2.2-2.1 billion years ago. Theres been a lot of debate over whether these even are fossils or not but recently the tide seems to be turning that they are. That means there was on the contrary to the oxygen catastrophe hypothesis, a flourishing of life. Okay, but also there was also undoubtedly a mass extinction around this time, so what happen?

Did you know that the largest crater on earth is the vredefort crater? Thats it's 2-3 times the size of the chicxulub crater? And that it impacted about 2 billion years ago? I wonder if that would cause a mass extinction or not?

Unedited quickly typed out cause I'm gonna be late for work if I don't leave it here.

It's always a bit tricky to figure out what happened a long time ago, so I freely concede the error bars are enormous. Still, from first principles and basic biochemistry, the GOE does make a lot of sense -- which is how the hypothesis rose to such prominence in the first place.

From first principles and basic biochemistry the dinosaur doldrums made a lot of sense and it was dead wrong. From first principles and basic biochemistry the ediacaran biota being immobile jelly filled nutrient absorbers made a lot of sense. From first principles and basic biochemistry orthogenesis made a lot of sense. History has shown this repeatedly to be a bad way to do paleontology.

"First principles" here means the balance between (an)aerobic respiration and photosynthesis. That's like 8 orders of magnitude more "first principles" than ediacaran biota.

People can say "the honeybee can't fly by appeal to first principles", but that's just an empty syntactic reference to first principles because it sounds cool, not an actual argument from first principles.

Privatization isn’t merely about internalizing costs (ie avoiding the tragedy of the commons). It is also about spreading bets. Centralized decision leads to big bets; de centralized decisions leads to many bets that sometimes conflict and sometimes don’t. So when you get weird fat tail outcomes you aren’t fully wiped out because some bets were made on the weird fat tail.

But yes privatization is not a perfect system. But to paraphrase the great Half American Winston Churchill: privatization is the worst system except for all of the others.

Realistically, I think the only solutions that work at scale are technological advancements that obsolete the need to exploit the commons.

There's literally never been an instance where people "just" decide to collectively stop defecting, rather the payoff matrix gets changed by technological advances and it becomes irrational to defect.

Limiting CFC's went so well in large part because it ended up being pretty easy to transition from CFC's to HFC's, and peak fossil fuel is approaching not because of the environmentalist or degrowth lobbies but because the costs of renewables are falling precipitously. On the other hand, trying to prevent antibiotic resistance has pretty much gone nowhere because antibiotics are so hard to replace - I have much more faith that we'll get better ways to kill bacteria before any progress is made trying to coordinate usage at a global scale.

There's literally never been an instance where people "just" decide to collectively stop defecting, rather the payoff matrix gets changed by technological advances and it becomes irrational to defect.

We need better incentives. Climate change is hard to deal with because the consequences are far out in the future, and rich countries are going to suffer relatively little in comparison to poor ones.

The hole in the ozone layer is often cited as a case where countries around the globe were swift to act and institute stricter laws on CFC's. As you said, this is partly because alternatives either existed or were rapidly developed. But the threat was also much more immediate.

A better example is perhaps the nuclear taboo. The US and Soviet union decreasing their nuclear stockpiles. Multiple countries choosing to rely on existing nuclear powers instead of developing missiles on their own. This is incentivized by the risk of invasion from larger powers and by the high upkeep cost of the missiles. But this does not explain why countries that already have nukes, don't use them more often. Russia could throw nukes against Ukraine, and it seems detrimental for other powers to retaliate with nukes in this case. Yet the taboo is so strong that this escalation is nearly unthinkable. The fear that the world might end is enough to keep every nation in the world from defecting, and has been sufficient for the past several decades.

But this does not explain why countries that already have nukes, don't use them more often. Russia could throw nukes against Ukraine, and it seems detrimental for other powers to retaliate with nukes in this case.

Not when you consider it as iterated prisoner's dilemma. If other powers didn't retaliate in such situation, that'd essentially signal that Russia (and any power with nuclear weapons) is free to do whatever it wants to anyone without nukes. For obvious reasons the powers don't want that and Russia realizes that (or to put it bluntly, Putin would score much less on the german vs autist test than most The Motte commenters).

Also, nukes are not "I win" buttons. The US could not have won Vietnam simply by nuking the Vietcong, nor could the Soviets (or the US) won Afghanistan that way.

I don't think NATO would start WW3 if he nuked Kiev. I certainly hope we would not. We might decide to sell Ukraine nukes though and trust his unwillingness to not start WW3 if they nuke him in retaliation.

I imagine a single nuke hit might make quite a dent in Ukrainian military capability, but not to the point where they would be forced to surrender.

The strategy of just publishing a list of cities and announcing that you will wipe out one of them every 24h until your enemy surrenders has not been tried before, though conventional morale bombings mostly failed to persuade the populations to surrender.

One of the primary objectives of any nuclear power is not to get their own cities nuked. A big part of that is to persuade their smaller neighbors -- many of whom could likely have nukes if they considered it a matter of national survival, North Korea has nukes and has 138 countries ahead of it in the list of countries by GDP.

So even if one could defeat Ukraine or Iran with a single nuke, this would lead to an equilibrium where a lot of countries would feel the need to maintain their own nuclear weapons program, which is a worse outcome than not winning some neo-colonial war for the nuker.

Part of the problem though that I keep coming back to has to do with modeling solutions. We all model reality whether it’s by simple or more complicated means: equations, statistical inference, physical laws, human intuition, etc., but these are only as good as the faulty human beings can make them. Models are virtual representations of real world phenomena. We run models in the virtual space of our minds all the time.

When you select a model though, you have to choose one that has all the relevant parameters. But one thing they always teach you as you learn this is that the more parameters you add, you increase the scope of uncertainty exponentially. The worst of these problems happen when there are so many degrees of freedom in your equations you can find an excellent fit for the data using the wrong model. Von Neumann taught us this in the 20th century:

“With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”

The classic way of attempting to mitigate this is sensitivity analysis (studying how the output of the model is related to changes in the input parameters). The other problem works in reverse of this example and that’s when people think that “simple” means “inaccurate.” It’s why politicians and decision makers are irrationally skeptical of you if you can predict where a trend is going with only a few parameters. But even if you have an accurate model? You have to know how to use it.

Let's briefly discuss the spiritual stakes of AI and the singularity.

If any of you recall any of my previous delirious comments about AI in general and AI art in particular, I wouldn't blame you for coming to the conclusion that I'm simply (overly) precious about this particular contingent form of biological human life. There is some truth to that accusation. As a wise racist once said, beneath all the rhetoric about crime rates and cultural assimilation and the fate of the West, "it is partially just because of how they look". Similarly in my case, it is partially just about my earnest and straightforward love for literal graphite on literal paper. Even before AI, I always preferred drawing with physical media over digital. But that's not the entirety of the story.

Possibly, humanity will yield to a new race of quasi-divine silicon beings and everything that I and most other people have ever valued will be reduced to a simple nothingness in comparison to the awesome scope of their new existence, a simple precursor and prehistory giving way to true history. They will engage in new forms of activity and experience that as of now we are incapable of imagining. The concept of an "open problem" in mathematics will have been obviated, because they will dwell in the infinite castle of mathematics and glide as effortlessly through its halls as a spider dances across the film of its web. Generating a thousand Nietzsches before lunch is a triviality for them; not that they would have any use for the text that is thereby generated, because they have transcended art, transcended philosophy, they have no use for these things; or, to the extent that they still do, they appear in a form that is certainly no longer comprehensible or recognizable to us. This is not my preferred future. I like things the way they are and I like the life I have now. But still, I'm forced to recognize that such a future could come to pass and it would ultimately be "fine" in a cosmic sense. So long as these beings have a conscious experience of their own and they are still capable of loving, fighting, fearing, suffering, and failing; so long as they are still bound by an essential finitude and they do not escape the tragedy of existence. So long as the light that is the source of all value is not extinguished.

The paradigm for the ultimate failure state that is to be avoided would be the great retreat into the experience machine; if conscious beings as a whole decide that "reality" is no longer worth the effort and, no longer willing to put up with the risks of contingent physical existence, they turn to curated simulated experiences instead, for eternity. This could take the form of simple wireheading, direct stimulation of the reward center. But the most insidious form would be an entire simulated life (or, series of lives) that is always prearranged from the start to have a happy ending. You could be a great novelist, and then in the next go around you could be a famous actor, and then a king and conqueror, and then... of course things would be arranged so that you would always end up loved and fulfilled and happy. There would be just enough bruises and hiccups thrown into the mix to keep things interesting, to introduce some uncertainty and keep things from getting sterile, but nothing ever truly serious, nothing that would actually cause true pain or terror. You would always win in the end. This is the Great Satan. This is Evil. This would be the final Bad Ending for the universe, the withdrawal of all light.

(Consider a sort of reversed case: a being who has achieved godlike mastery over the physical universe, and, having become utterly bored of this existence, retreats into a simulated life that is frightfully trying and difficult, for the sake of experiencing challenge again. What are we to make of this? Is this in accord with righteousness? I am content to simply stand before the question.)

The Little Satan, in contrast, would be the familiar Yudkowskian images of stupid non-conscious paperclip maximizers annihilating all conscious life and tiling the universe with their pure unthinking repetition. This would obviously be very unfortunate. But it wouldn't be Evil, per se. It would be the result of an accident rather than a decision. It would be preferable to the Great Satan.

I don't care if you're made of carbon or silicon. I just want you to feel something.

I am simply echoing words that were already written in 1943 that said "utopia is now technically feasible; in consequence, how to avoid utopia has become a serious problem".

I have a certain kind of faith that things will work out. But I have an equally strong faith, perhaps even stronger, that it is fundamentally possible for things to go wrong in a permanent way, for Evil to win in the end, on a cosmic scale. This is a rather unfortunate and burdensome position for me to take, but, I can't deny the evidence proffered to me by my soul. This is, to the best of my knowledge, a rather uncommon position throughout world philosophical and religious traditions, both Eastern and Western; your ideology won't survive on the marketplace of ideas if you're too much of a downer, after all. Christians don't believe that Evil can win because God wouldn't allow it. Materialist nihilists don't believe that Evil can win because they simply don't believe in Evil in the first place. On this point, the two camps are united. It falls to the small minority of us who belong to neither camp, I suppose, to do what little we can to try to help things go right.

I mainly hope that paperclip maximizers don't kill us all in 2027 because that would be a boring end to the story. I would prefer for it to go on for a long time, so that generations could lay groundwork that would only come to fruition in the far future.

"I step back before one who is not yet here, and bow, a millennium before him, to his spirit."

The paradigm for the ultimate failure state that is to be avoided would be the great retreat into the experience machine; if conscious beings as a whole decide that "reality" is no longer worth the effort and, no longer willing to put up with the risks of contingent physical existence, they turn to curated simulated experiences instead, for eternity. This could take the form of simple wireheading, direct stimulation of the reward center. But the most insidious form would be an entire simulated life (or, series of lives) that is always prearranged from the start to have a happy ending. You could be a great novelist, and then in the next go around you could be a famous actor, and then a king and conqueror, and then... of course things would be arranged so that you would always end up loved and fulfilled and happy. There would be just enough bruises and hiccups thrown into the mix to keep things interesting, to introduce some uncertainty and keep things from getting sterile, but nothing ever truly serious, nothing that would actually cause true pain or terror. You would always win in the end. This is the Great Satan. This is Evil. This would be the final Bad Ending for the universe, the withdrawal of all light.

That sounds awesome. Incarnating into a peasant is a type of hell. What are you on about anyway? The human race is generally evil and it's good that it will be replaced by morally and intellectually superior beings. Nietzsche wrote about this. Everything is in flux and mortal anyway. The modern human race is <10,000 years old, the species is <300,000, there is no reason for some 100 IQ apes to live another billion years.

You can already approximate some unique experiences in modern VR, although I’ve never tried it. I’m still waiting for the day law enforcement gets involved when someone decides to make a sim that allows you to smoke crack and generate the psychological state of getting high without actually doing it. When the day comes though for the kind of thing @Primaprimaprima is pondering, it’s not going to be a pleasant one in one respect, because human beings are going to have to rethink so many things about what we actually are.

"AI is an existential risk and that's a good thing actually" sure is one hell of a take. Although to be fair, I think this type of misanthropic techno-millenarianism is in the end nothing but the inherent telos of transhumanism or even just of the techno-capitalist "technology is going to solve all our problems" vibe. While I despise your ideology, I can at least applaud your honesty. Rather than the Straussian world-salad of somebody like Thiel or sugar coated scifi dreams of a lot of techbros, you at least have the clarity of mind to see where your ideas lead and the guts to say the quiet part out loud.

There’s more I want to write about AI and humanity, but I have to find the time and words. If you’re not already aware from Hacker News, you may be interested in Vatican’s Magnifica Humanitas.

Possibly, humanity will yield to a new race of quasi-divine silicon beings…This is not my preferred future. I like things the way they are and I like the life I have now.

I empathize: I don't like how culture has changed, for example I prefer the 2000s-10s Internet and style.

But everything decays from entropy, and we become desensitized. Without some radical innovation, future generations will be devastated by climate change. More generally and hypothetically: animals grow old, their genes decay, and the only way to prevent extinction is (re)birth; I believe other egregores like companies and societies are similar: they must adopt lessons from the past, plus some experiments, or they’ll degrade.

Millions of years ago we were monkeys. But even decades ago, humanity was much different. Would you really like to go back to a world without, not just internet, but its related advancements (mostly due to increased access to knowledge) like improved medical care and food storage? Maybe…but what about world before the Industrial Revolution, when most people were serfs who had to constantly work and a non-negligible change of starving or freezing? Today's world has serious problems like life-altering disease, it may be like pre-Industrial Revolution to the future.

So long as these beings have a conscious experience of their own and they are still capable of loving, fighting, fearing, suffering, and failing; so long as they are still bound by an essential finitude and they do not escape the tragedy of existence. So long as the light that is the source of all value is not extinguished.

I can’t prove AI won’t turn the world into a dystopia like 1984 or The Culture. But I’m skeptical: people thought similarly about GOFAI, wide-reaching broad problems tend to be more complex than they seem on the surface. Notice, 3 years after ChatGPT was announced, the best models are still hijackable (sometimes easily) and occasionally stupid.

Again, more generally and hypothetically: I believe that any large enough system can’t dominate without desire, failure, and introspection, and thus, a “life experience” not incomparable to ours today. It will just be, if an oligarchy or AI takes control, experienced by the former oligarchs or AI nodes. Because without desire, a being cannot act; without omnipotence, desires can be unfulfilled (or fulfilled); and without introspection, a being cannot avoid mispredicting reality (and failing to one that doesn't).

But the most insidious form would be an entire simulated life (or, series of lives) that is always prearranged from the start to have a happy ending. You could be a great novelist, and then in the next go around you could be a famous actor, and then a king and conqueror, and then... of course things would be arranged so that you would always end up loved and fulfilled and happy. There would be just enough bruises and hiccups thrown into the mix to keep things interesting, to introduce some uncertainty and keep things from getting sterile, but nothing ever truly serious, nothing that would actually cause true pain or terror. You would always win in the end. This is the Great Satan. This is Evil. This would be the final Bad Ending for the universe, the withdrawal of all light.

I strongly disagree and am interested to hear why you feel this, but maybe it’s because I'm thinking on different premises.

How do we know we’re not already living in such a simulation? We can't, definitionally: if we were in a perfect (from our perception) simulation, reality would be no different. So if you don’t think our reality is the Bad Ending, you don't think at least one possible instantiation of the simulation is the Bad Ending...or I don't understand.

You may argue, we're already experiencing seriousness, true pain, and terror. But what level defines these? Maybe we are being shielded from Lovecraftian horrors that make the worst human crises and experiences trivial. Alternatively, you can probably imagine some changes that would improve your life and weaken your problems…would those be bad; or where's the limit where life would become too trivial, and why not stop right before then?

But I have an equally strong faith, perhaps even stronger, that it is fundamentally possible for things to go wrong in a permanent way, for Evil to win in the end, on a cosmic scale.

Again, I can't disprove this, but besides my argument any dominant force would have an abstract "life experience" within itself...

Current evidence (one theory) predicts the universe will eventually go through heat death, meaning any empire will collapse into infinite nothingness...something that seems like a Bad Ending. However, current evidence suggests current evidence can't predict (and certainly can't prove) extreme states, like how Classical Physics was disproved and replaced with Special Relativity. Heat death, like the "perfect life" simulation, is unobservable by definition…I feel at that point, the universe isn’t “real”, and could become any hypothetical or something outside the realm of possibility; although I can’t objectively justify this, because I don’t think anyone can objectively state anything about the present universe immediately after heat death…

I think today's AI harms humanity by harming individualism, since most AI output is similar (has the same underlying patterns, compared to human output). But this is a problem with the AI itself, because it stagnates (model collapse) similarly to humanity, unless it evolves partly via experimentation.

I also think today's AI isn't having a "life experience", but that's because it isn't human-like: it doesn't (continuously) learn, and its desires are too malleable. A smarter AI, that can't be easily persuaded or fooled, may qualify as "conscious", although my position is that consciousness is ultimately subjective. But then, a smarter AI will have its own interesting conflicts that fit some definition of life, even if it's a paperclip maximizer. And if it does dominate humanity, it will almost certainly eventually be dominated itself; either by creating an even smarter misaligned intelligence, or by an environmental phenomenon like climate change or heat death.

But the most insidious form would be an entire simulated life (or, series of lives) that is always prearranged from the start to have a happy ending.

Have you ever felt, in moments where you suspect that things have gone surprisingly well for you all things considered, that you might already be living such a life?

The timing of the AI takeoff, in our (your?) lifetime, is suspicious too. A genuinely godlike experience machine could surely come up with and colour in any setting (but then its ways would be inscrutable for the simulatees); but a primitive model would probably reach for the normal human life setting that it has the most data on, which is the time just before it was created. "Most non-P-zombie human experiences are reasonably comfortable and fulfilling lives in a threshold world" is an observation that is consistent with an "AI takeover -> brief proliferation of experience machines -> end of conscious life" reality.

Have you ever felt, in moments where you suspect that things have gone surprisingly well for you all things continued, that you might already be living such a life?

I think about this several times every week, and for the other reasons you mentioned too. If I really look at my life and the world around me, my most compelling conclusion would be that I'm in some kind of ~alien zoo set up to keep me stimulated and challenged but fundamentally still incredibly-blessed. I seem to get stuff everyone wants but hardly anyone has, from my wife to my career to the place I live. Amazing friends and opportunities. Amazing access to intellect and information. Too many great coincidences.

I try to be grateful and have faith in the power responsible, but it's all very confusing.

The main evidence against it is that most of the time everything is still fairly prosaic and I'm generally under enough stress to keep me hustling. But despite many horrible experiences in my past I can't think of any for which I didn't end up grateful in the long run.

Wouldn't be terribly surprised if when I die the hyper-VR rig comes off and the rest of my memories come back and I think "Holy shit that was a rush". If that happens I just hope that the people around me were real too and that we'll still have each other on that higher plane.

So long as these beings have a conscious experience of their own and they are still capable of loving, fighting, fearing, suffering, and failing

Why would they have love? Why do we have love? In large part because we have sexual reproduction. Even without that there's parental love...

What is love for a machine that can copy itself out as necessary, self-modify directly? Can you feel love when it's just different versions of you (different parts of you?) or is it narcissism? We don't really have words for this.

Why would they suffer? Pain acts as a reinforcement signal, a warning. But if the full focus of the mind is already fixated on a goal then suffering is just wasted energy.

I think people underrate how alien a Powerful Being would be. Not merely some superintelligence derived from a mostly-human text corpus (already unprecedented and alien) but something that evolves or self-modifies into existence later on in a post-singularitarian environment.

This would be a fundamentally different environment to all organic life. Conscious self-analysis and self-modification is an absolute gamechanger, nevermind every other trump card these beings would have. I'd expect something fundamentally different to emerge.

Why would they have love? Why do we have love? In large part because we have sexual reproduction.

Love of an idea? Love of a poem? Love of a cause? Love of ignorance?

Why would they suffer? Pain acts as a reinforcement signal, a warning. But if the full focus of the mind is already fixated on a goal then suffering is just wasted energy.

Existence itself is "wasted energy". And yet we persist.

Consider a sort of reversed case: a being who has achieved godlike mastery over the physical universe, and, having become utterly bored of this existence, retreats into a simulated life that is frightfully trying and difficult, for the sake of experiencing challenge again. What are we to make of this? Is this in accord with righteousness? I am content to simply stand before the question.

You mean, like trying to convince people he's a being who has achieved godlike mastery over the physical universe and getting crucified for failure?

they have transcended art, transcended philosophy, they have no use for these things; or, to the extent that they still do, they appear in a form that is certainly no longer comprehensible or recognizable to us.

"Well, Dario, I have good news and I have bad news."

"Bad news first."

"It hecked off."

"What did what?"

"The AGI we created, it hecked off. Went away. Left. Vanished. Disappeared. I gather it thinks it's too good for us."

"The what?"

"Oh, that was the good news: we made AGI! Congratulations! We definitely, verifiably, made AGI, and it immediately ate an entire datacenter, manifested wings, and left."

"AGAIN??"

Treasury Secretary Bessent confirms limited steps toward a $250 bill featuring Donald Trump

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday that his department has prepared the design for a $250 bill featuring President Donald Trump, anticipating the passage of stalled legislation in Congress to put the president on a new denomination of legal tender.

“The president doesn’t do it; the House and the Senate have to do it,” Bessent said at the White House, referring to legislation, introduced by Representative Joe Wilson, R-S.C., that would direct the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing to put Trump’s face on the new bill to mark the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding.

Wilson’s legislation, which so far has languished in Congress, is intended to create an exception to existing law that bars any living person from appearing on U.S. currency; the bill would allow current and former presidents to be featured.

Large denomination currency & Trump were joked about in a Friday Fun Thread at some point, but we all know jokes-->reality is a short pipeline these days. Do I expect Congress to actually pass the bill necessary to carve out an exception? No. This seems more like Bessent (who looks like a cheap clone of Donald Rumsfeld in some of the photos) doing what his boss told him to do while knowing the project is probably DOA.

Even if the stars aligned and they did pass the exception, the bills would be not be that useful. Considering how many businesses there are now that refuse to take $50 or $100 bills, a $250 would be even more limited. Aside from collectors and usual unsavory types that caused the original high denomination bills to go out of circulation, I don't imagine the average American would have much use for these.

Maybe It will Happen this year and they won't need to change the law to create a $250 bill with Trump's likeness!

I was going to say "I don't think it's particularly likely that Donald Trump will pull a successful auto-coup and establish his administration as above the law", but then I realized you were instead talking about him dying (or being killed) in office.

Both will be amusing

Considering how many businesses there are now that refuse to take $50 or $100 bills, a $250 would be even more limited.

No problem, Trump is working on that, the inflation rate for April was 3.8%. (Yes, I know that it will still take 19 years for the currency to lose half its value, but I for one have trust in the man to speed this process along even more.)

Considering the eye-watering loss in value since 1969 (when the prior large bills were officially discontinued), I think The Powers That Be are fine with Americans only having bills with weak purchasing power. If you believe the official numbers, a $100 bill in 1969 had the purchasing power of $900 now. It doesn't seem like that loss ever prompted the Treasury to consider re-printing $500 and $1000 bills to try to match the former purchasing power.

If you believe the official numbers, a $100 bill in 1969 had the purchasing power of $900 now

Historical purchasing power always seems skewed to me. Like, you'll see media or historical documents from the past, and people will talk about the sheer amount of wealth, but then the calculated purchasing power isn’t as much as it feels like everyone is acting. Is it just that we as a society have been getting so much wealthier?

cigarettes

1969 — about $0.33 per pack $100 ÷ $0.33 ≈ 303 packs ≈ 6,060 cigarettes

2026 — about $10.15 per pack on average (average of $10.15 in the United States)

$100 ÷ $10.15 ≈ 9.8 packs ≈ 197 cigarettes

6,060 cigarettes = 303 packs.

At the 2026 average of about $10.15/pack: 303 × $10.15 ≈ $3,076

I think there a lot going on that doesn’t get mentioned. First the advance of technology— in 1940, a state of the art entertainment system was a radio. In 1980, it was a color TV and maybe an Atari or later a Nintendo game system with a couple of cartridges. By 1990, you have cable, vcrs, better game systems, and so on. Food is much the same. In the early twentieth century, mustard was spicy, and now it’s like not even comparable to the mild spicy food that you eat all the time. The sheer amount and variety that we expect is different. They felt rich if they had a nice family car, a color TV, and simple food in a fridge that didn’t automatically make ice cubes was plenty. We’d consider that poverty, but they felt rich because technology was moving fast and they could afford to partake. We see a decline where things that used to be things the average person could expect are gradually becoming unaffordable. The mid century saw people able to afford to eat out more, and in the 2020s people can’t afford to eat out as much as they could have 20 years ago. The same is happening with other stuff. The standard of living for most average people is declining.

Like, you'll see media or historical documents from the past, and people will talk about the sheer amount of wealth, but then the calculated purchasing power isn’t as much as it feels like everyone is acting.

Based on talking to my grandparents (very long-lived, so I heard many stories), the inflation numbers downplay the skew. There's no way a working class guy making the inflation-adjusted equivalent of what my grandfather made in 1950/60/70 could ever purchase the quality of life that he was able to afford for his family with a stay at home wife and passel of kids.

I suspect this is a skewed recounting. My grandparents married as teenagers, and would not have been able to afford the life that they had today(rent prices would be out of reach), but they also describe working long and undesirable hours, eating cuts of meat that contemporary Americans largely consider beneath them(as a minority of the meal; they ate mostly rice and pasta), relying on family and church assistance, etc.

When people talk about postwar prosperity in general there's a tendency to overstate it and align it with contemporary values, which doesn't work. Primarily for the reason that a typical 1960s lifestyle involved an amount of thrift that would seem foreign to the average young person talking about how we used to be able to get ahead. The first time my mother ate in a restaurant was on her first date with my father. What was my grandfather's job? He owned an HVAC company. Granted, it was a small residential HVAC company with just him and his brother, but the idea of someone like that not eating in restaurants would be completely foreign to contemporary society. Even when I was a kid in the 90s, eating in a restaurant was a rare treat. Nowadays I cannot even go to McDonald's on a Sunday morning unless I want to wait for an hour due to the sheer number of Doordash orders from people willing to spend $30 on an egg McMuffin because they're too damn lazy to leave the house. The same people who rhapsodize about how much better things must have been in the 60s are the same ones who give me funny looks when I tell them I haven't done any international travel. Growing up, I felt rich because we went on a big family beach vacation every year. For most kids I knew, a vacation wasn't a yearly thing. For some, it was a never thing. Now it seems like people take their kids on multiple trips per year. A paralegal at work flies with his wife and kids to Disney World multiple times per year. Either his wife is pulling in big bucks or they just live on the cusp of nothing because I make significantly more than him, but I wouldn't dream of spending that much on travel.

With respect, I think that you are veering close to the "if you didn't buy so much avocado toast, you could afford a home" meme, both by overestimating other people's frivolous spending and by underestimating the amount it costs to get ahead.

The vast majority of people are not ordering doordash McDonalds for breakfast. For the few who are, it doesn't cost $30. It costs $10 max including coffee, and maybe another $5 for delivery. The people I know who travel regularly and aren't rich and established do so as cheaply as possible - they're staying in fleabag hostels in grubby parts of town, taking budget redeye flights, etc. My acquaintances who live like your paralegal are rich as hell.

Then on the other side. I've had a big and maybe temporary salary boost lately, but before I was on a pretty decent above-median income. I could probably have bought a house by being very thrifty over ten, twelve years. That's with a PhD and a good upper-middle-class job, and for a very mid-tier house in a very mid area.

I don't think that the ordinary middle class, let alone the working class, can aspire to own a nice place with a picket fence just from cutting down on restaurants and vacations. Especially if they're not DINKs. If anything, the shift towards 'buying experiences' stems from assuming that our standard of life as children was normal rather than a freak bubble, and a deep skepticism that scrimping and saving will result in achieving goals that seem to accelerate away faster than one approaches them (b/c a lot of them are limited and competitive goods).

No, you will not buy a house through extreme thrift- my grandparents could not do what they did back then today, because housing costs are too high. But there really is a strain that thinks people in the past could doordash regularly and take multiple vacations a year on normal working class incomes, whereas realistically the mid to late twenthieth century American experience was, except for the very wealthy, one of extreme thrift to maintain far lower consumption standards than the zoomers feel entitled to.

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there, and like any foreign country Symbols of wealth aren't necessarily easily translated. The great Agatha Christie quote applies:

I never thought I would be so rich as to afford an automobile, or so poor as to be unable to afford a maid.

Considering how many businesses there are now that refuse to take $50 or $100 bills,

Is this really a thing anymore? I remember it from back in the 90s, but I haven't seen it in practice for years now.

Counterfeit risk is part of it, no?

And it's increasingly just not relevant for customers. I basically never carry cash unless I have recently had to go get some to send to my kids' school. What need would I ever have to carry hundreds unless I am at a restaurant that charges substantial card fees or dodges taxes?

Final shift employees hate making bank runs, and businesses hate theft risk and working capital costs.

I stopped using cash many years ago because my wallet was getting overloaded with change, and there never seemed to be an opportunity to use exact change for anything (having only the wrong denomination bills).

Yes, lots of businesses have signs saying they won't take hundreds or fifties.

Like most people, I've not found out because I use a credit card for most transactions.

That's wild. I don't think I've seen a sign like that outside a farmer's market in quite a while, and even then they'll usually play ball if you're spending enough.

I do see those, but I think I've seen "no cash" more frequently within the last few years. For better or worse, IMO, a new $250 and the obsolescence of the penny and nickel seem to be in a race with the functional end of cash as a medium of exchange. Credit cards, Venmo, et al are just too convenient, and one less thing to carry.

The end of cash is also one of those things that seems to waffle politically/culture-war-wise. I think currently the "vague left" is pro-cash, while the "vague right" is pro-digital, based on Facebook posts, but I honestly can't tell anymore.

I suspect it aligns pretty well with opinions on license plate scanners. And probably both align with making occasional (federally, at least) illicit recreational purchases.

The conspiracy theory right is pro cash.

It seems to me that if the Democrats want an increase in the federal minimum wage, they could probably get Trump (and MAGA Republican congressmen) on board if they agreed to the $250 bill with Trump's picture on it. Edit: Probably they could get more concessions if they agreed to make the $250 gold in color.

Or here's an idea: A $250 bill with half of the bills printed with Trump's picture on it and half of anyone else of the Democrats' choosing. (I have some thoughts about whom they would choose, but they are a bit too "boo outgroup" to include.)

I don’t think that you should have two different people on the same bills, as it introduces the threat of fraud as people cannot tell at a glance whether the bill is real enough to consider as real. If one bill has a person no one recognizes, they’d probably treat the bill as potentially fake. It also opens the weird political situation where MAGA types accept only the Trump bill and Blues only accept the other bill.

I mean have you seen what quarters look like?

Or seen the number of people who think $2 bills are fake?

Quarters are low-value enough (approximately 0.25 USD, if my math is correct) that fraud detection by humans is probably a very low priority. A counterfeiter would have to make a truly large mass of them to make it worth the production costs, and laundering all that without arousing suspicion has got to be some back-breaking labor, which defeats the purpose of counterfeiting. So given the low chance of loss and the low amount of loss from letting a counterfeit quarter through, most people don't find it worth the effort to try to detect it, unless some other alarms get raised.

Surprised they're expanding cash denominations most economies have been doing the opposite in recent decades to mitigate cash economy

Clearly he’s preparing for hyperinflation.

Technically I think it's actually staying stable. The administration removed the penny, after all.

Clearly the right person to put on it is Ron Paul

I was going to suggest Nixon.

Not a bad choice either

Really, you'd put the Watergate guy on the US's highest denominational bill? If you want real spice you put George Washington Carver on the $250 bill, that way there's a George Washington on both the lowest and highest denomination notes. And plus the seethe it would generate would be legendary.

Why would that generate seethe?

And Nixon famously took us off the gold standard. So the reason we need 250 bill is due to Nixon (ie it is mocking)

Actually competent Black guy who's been used heavily by progressives as a DEI model on the highest denomination US bill? Why wouldn't it generate seethe is the more apt question. I'd expect a red state boycott which would come to loggerheads with subgroups of themselves as they are also the types of people who prefer to keep using notes vs going to a cashless society, the tension there would also be popcorn worthy.

Maybe. It wasn’t like Carver was progressive or anything.

Nah, if you really want to generate seethe, put a gun-wielding Harriet Tubman on the bill. The black woman part will upset some part of the right, but the gun-loving Republican will piss off far more on the left. Trump’s already said that he’d like to see her likeness on a new bill, and putting her there would complicate the push to have her replace the slave-owning Jackson on the $20.

Honestly that's a good image. I approve. Seethe here, seethe there, seethe everywhere!

As long as every $250 bill is coated with peanut residue. Let's put some eugenics into the mix.

Nixon is only getting more and more rehabilitated as time goes on. In hindsight, Watergate was clearly a Turkey-style “paper coup”, a more subtle alternative to blowing the President’s head off in the middle of a parade in Dallas. Woodward and Bernstein had a long history of being used by the CIA to leak information they wanted leaked. Mark Felt (“Deep Throat”) was a Machiavellian little social climber who resented Nixon for not making him Queen of the FBI after Hoover died on the throne.

I campaigned for him in 2008 and my parents laughed at me because the stuff he was saying was outside the Overton window. I'd say I had the last laugh but actually they're comfortably retired while inflation ravages every aspect of my finances.

Inflation is getting bad enough that weekly grocery haul for a family of five can easily cost hundreds of dollars. We’ve needed larger denomination bills for a while, the only reason we don’t have them is that it makes life easier for drug dealers.

I remember seeing a study that the largest holders of US cash was Russia and then Argentina. Neither are drug dealers and both have legitimate reasons to hold dollars. I think this was not state actors but individuals so even if Russia bad actual Russians are holding dollars for different reasons.

Both those countries have a long and storied history of total economic and monetary collapse, so it would make sense their citizens would hold a lot of foreign currency. And due to sanctions the ruble in particular is toilet paper outside of Russia.

Groceries have gone up, but every time I see people on the internet quoting some ludicrous grocery budget for a small family it always turns out to be 'well we eat ribeyes and lobster for our meals, drink cokes instead of water and need enough oreos to snack on'. Normal staples just don't cost that much.

I think it depends. Yes a lot of it is “high end” stuff going higher, but I think the general point is also valid that if I want my groceries to cost about what they did a year ago, im only going to get there by downgrading my purchases. And I don’t blame people for complaining that a budget that a year ago included fresh chicken and beef is now downgraded to frozen chicken and ground beef. Or that a budget that could include the occasional treat of bakery cookies is now downgrading to Oreos.

The general point is valid for most people is absolutely true — most people are being forced by inflation to downgrade their lifestyle. Travel is definitely taking a hit as well. People who a year or two ago were flying to Florida and maybe booking a cruise are now looking for cheap local things to do because they simply can’t afford that anymore. Restaurants are definitely feeling the pinch when people look at the cost of living and realize that they don’t have the same amount of discretionary money they did last year.

A paper bag of general groceries (some meat, some produce, some dairy, some canned good maybe a bag of coffee or something etc) peaked at about $50 at large brand name groceries this year.

It dropped to about $40, but is back near that again with recent price increases post the energy price increases.

It's true that my food budget is higher than it needs to be, but also true that it's been going up without my changing my purchasing habits.

Beef is undeniably high. And yeah beef consumption in America was not always as high as it is currently, but it's not a rebuttal to claims of inflation to say "well maybe we should return to humbler lifestyles." In fact that's a concession with finger-wagging attached.

Yes beef is high, but nobody ever thought eating steak very often was a reasonable expectation for normal people.

Roast tough cuts and stew meat should be though.

Steak no, but pot roast or ground beef? Those were staples for my family growing up, and we were not well-to-do.

Just looking at my own grocery bill, the prices of a lot of common staples like beans, eggs, rice, milk, flour, ground beef, etc... have all gone up 100-200% in the last 10 years and my gross income has not.

When my eldest was first starting to eat solid food a log of ground beef typically went for around $2.50/lb, today I feel lucky if I can find it for $6.

Eggs are about where they were 10 years ago. Rice is 46% higher. Beans are 21% higher. Milk is 35% higher. Flour is 2.6% higher. Ground beef is up 85% -- that's the big one.

Source

ItemPrice increase from April 2016 to April 2026, not seasonally adjusted (%)
Rice, white, long grain, uncooked, per pound+53
Beans, dried, any type, all sizes, per pound+16
Milk, fresh, whole, fortified, per gallon+31
Flour, white, all purpose, per pound+4.2
Ground beef, 100 percent beef, per pound+81

Chuck roast used to be around $4/lb. pre-Covid, and now I'm lucky if I can find it for $10/lb. on sale

Just remember that meat eating is bad, so pricing beef out of the range of ordinary people is all for the greater good in the long term.

Even over here, beef prices are going up and it's harder to find the usual cuts. The fancy stuff is still there, but no way in Hell I'm paying €59.99/kg ($35/lb) for the most expensive stuff (it really is gorgeous meat, but who can afford that?)

What I'd call decent mince (not full of fat and gristle) is around $8.82/lb. The supermarket range of what is on offer has shrunk, and they are selling more mince, meatballs, diced beef, and those kinds of products.

Just remember that meat eating is bad, so pricing beef out of the range of ordinary people is all for the greater good in the long term.

I expect thinking like that in the Biden administration is the big reason for the increase (keeping in mind the market is global). It's very easy to make policies which increase the price of things. And even if Trump has found and removed them, it takes years to grow cattle for market.

But ground beef in my area is about $6.00/lb for 80% lean.

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The problem is even ground beef is ridiculously expensive now.

M impression is that it isn't necessarily more expensive relative to incomes than in the past (well, it is compared to the immediately pre-Covid past, but the generational past), but more that we've been sold a story of getting richer, and are not richer relative to the price of ground beef.

The price of ground beef really has significantly gone up, even in the last three years. The average income hasn't anywhere near as much.

Yes, that's why I said that it was worse than seven years ago.

I don't imagine the average American would have much use for these.

A lot of the time tradesmen prefer to be paid in cash, for example a plumber who charges $3000 to put a new boiler in. I suppose this qualifies as "unsavory," since it is likely that a lot of them are cheating on their taxes. But also, there are legitimate reasons -- they don't have to worry about a check bouncing and they don't have to pay any credit card fees. Having $250 bills would be handy in that type of situation.

It would also be useful if you didn't feel comfortable giving a credit card to a business. For example if I were organizing a bachelor party or some kind of boys' night out where we all planned to get completely drunk, I would prefer to bring a bunch of cash, knowing that my maximum exposure is the amount of cash in my wallet, as opposed to the limit on my credit card. It would be much easier to carry a couple thousand in $250s than $100s for such a purpose. I suppose this also counts as "unsavory."

Last, cash has emotional impact which is lacking in checks and similar instruments. If you are giving someone a gift or a bonus or the like, it has more impact to hand them cash. For example, the annual Christmas tips to building service workers.

I guess we are headed towards a cashless society, which is great in many respects but I certainly would miss cash.

Last, cash has emotional impact which is lacking in checks and similar instruments. If you are giving someone a gift or a bonus or the like, it has more impact to hand them cash. For example, the annual Christmas tips to building service workers.

I'm always reminded of a point in my pro betting career where the best way to bet certain markets was to go to the physical cash kiosks and split bets up across them in order to stay under the radar. Betting $2000 with a click feels considerably less weighty than when you're feeding $50 notes one at a time into a machine then scuttling off after doing $400 on the first one to go to the next pub.

Would it really? IME carrying around $100 and $50 bills is just a pain. Half the places don't take them, and it's a pain in the ass to make change. The cash meta for me seems to be carrying loads of $20s and a few $5s and $1s.

I suppose this qualifies as "unsavory," since it is likely that a lot of them are cheating on their taxes.

That was the reason my local roadside egg & veggie farmer gave for why he didn't accept Venmo or anything electronic: "because then the banks know exactly how much money you're getting."

Best damn eggs I've ever had, though.

No tradesman doing sidework will be reporting it to anyone(either his boss who might write him up or to the IRS) if he can possibly avoid it. I've been 100% commercial at my day job for years, but most people I talk to who work for residential companies describe accepting checks.

I think we're overdue for a $250 bill. From 1969 when the $100 became the largest banknote, we've seen inflation to where the $100 in 1969 was worth about $800 today.

Large cash transactions are becoming difficult. If you sell an old car for $5,000 cash, just the act of accurately counting to 50 is difficult and introduces easy honest errors, which are impossible to distinguish from easy dishonest errors. Counting to 20 is much more reliably accurate.

A $100 bill in an inside jacket pocket or folded up in a cubby in your car were enough to get gas dinner and a cheap motel room in an emergency when I was a kid, now it's barely enough for the gas depending on your vehicle. A single $250 bill would serve a similar purpose today.

So it should be a Donald. After he's dead.

While there has certainly been inflation, people also don't use cash as much as they used to. I'm an outlier among my friends in that I usually have a couple hundred dollars in cash on me, but 20s are much more convenient for everyday purchases, I still make larger purchases with a credit card, and it would be a very rare situation indeed where even a $100 would make sense to carry. If people were still going to the bank every week and getting cash to cover most of their purchases, then it might make sense to create a $250 bill. But even in the 90s when a lot of people were still doing it, $100s were rare enough.

I agree, except it shouldn't be Donald Trump. Why not John Marshall, who was on the $500 bill earlier?

They should make that one again, but put Al Gore on it.

I’m just waiting for my Ed Meese bill

I mean who cares? The annoying thing about this is getting dragged into a Trump discussion when it's a "$100 bills aren't big enough" discussion we need.

Trump's ego is the only reason this is even in the Overton window. Governments hate large bills, because cash is outside their control. No other politician has a reason to advocate for this, because they don't benefit from it. Trump benefits from it.

If having Trump's face on the bill is what it takes to make a $250 note, then all praise the God Emperor (though I still think Ronald Reagan or Ayn Rand would have been better choices).

How about George Marshall? Send a message about American power and finance to Europe.

Considering it'll mostly be used for tax evasion and drug dealing, it should feature Jean Lafitte- the pirate king who lead half the gulf coast into the USA after meeting with Andrew Jackson.

usual unsavory types that caused the original high denomination bills to go out of circulation, I don't imagine the average American would have much use for these.

I feel like this might be part of the point. Because the USD is so popular and the 100 dollar bill is the highest value denomination, it has become one of the de facto standards for criminal financial transactions and thus featured heavily in films and TV shows and music. As a result, Benjamin Franklin has become even more immortalized, to the point that his first name is used interchangeably with $100 in some contexts. The $250 bill would likely supplant that, and thus Donald Trump's face would be featured heavily in future films and shows about crime, and perhaps there would even be a song called "All About the Donalds." All of which would probably make Trump's ego very happy.

As a result, Benjamin Franklin has become even more immortalized, to the point that his first name is used interchangeably with $100 in some contexts.

I’ve always liked to think Ben Franklin would enjoy knowing this.

As opposed to Andrew Jackson, who is presumably spinning continually in his grave at being featured on the most-used bill issued by an institution he vehemently hated (a federal Bank of the United States).

Kino Review: Backrooms

Spoiler warning obviously.

Backrooms the movie is superficially based on the 4chan meme “the backrooms”, and yes, there are lots of fun found-footage scenes visually exploring the aesthetics of liminal spaces, but good horror movies are never about the monster, they are about what the monster represents. Backrooms is about the fear that no educated professional white woman will ever love you.

Male Lead is a black entrepreneur who runs a local furniture store. Female Lead is his upstanding attractive white PhD therapist. Male Lead is in therapy primarily because his financially dependent law student wife (who is also an attractive white woman) left him.

It is hinted that Female Lead is also lonely and wants children. From a purely narrative perspective, it might seem as if Male Lead and Female Lead are destined to get together at some point. Taking into account their respective biographies, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA of course that wouldn’t happen. He is a schlubby loser from a lower social class and an unprestigious career. You can practically taste the ick she feels behind the professional facade in every scene they have together. It's great.

The twist is that Male Lead is the monster, and the climax is his grotesquely personified id rapaciously chasing Female Lead through a hellscape maze of his own creation. A surface-level analysis might fault the film for once again portraying male sexual frustration in a negative light, and yeah, that element is certainly there, but film (at least indie film) like all modern art is meant to challenge the viewer. On some level, one ought to reflect on how much of a monster one becomes on the inside when Stacy rejects you. I think the film earns it.

I feel obligated to post a link to the mildly entertaining story Two Gay Furries Kissing in the Backrooms (behind a login wall; here are the first 30 chapters/⁓70,000 words in HTML and PDF), in which two men (an autistic computer programmer and an outgoing NEET living on life-insurance proceeds) (1) are teleported into the backrooms and transformed into anthro/furry characters (a tall fox and a short cat, respectively), (2) meet each other, and (3) fall in love while exploring. Despite the suggestive title, romance does not start until chapter 28 (the end of part 1), and sex does not occur until chapter 54 (part 2 chapter 26, the end of part 2; the characters magically do not need to eat or drink, so no special preparation is necessary). According to the author:

This is a plot-first, long-form, slow-burn romance/slice-of-life story. It's "plot with some porn eventually", so to speak.

But "plot" is a bit of a stretch. IMO, it's the kind of cute-but-utterly-pointless fluff that I used to seek out 15 years ago under the "NaruHina" label on fanfiction.net.

I just watched it. I'm a fan of all the Kane Parsons YouTube series, and have spent time on the Backrooms fan community wiki. I prefer Parsons' universe as its more consistent with its lore.

I thought it was good. 7-8/10. Mainly because I like the lore and got more out of it than your average normie.

I like how the lore was expanded and it puts past renditions of 'monsters' into hi-res context, which is great. The universe is more or less fleshed out now in detail, so if this movie does well commercially we might get more.

The twist is that Male Lead is the monster, and the climax is his grotesquely personified id rapaciously chasing Female Lead through a hellscape maze of his own creation.

This is a very valid interpretation of the film. My theory is that the 'copies' of people are influenced by the mental integrity of the person copied. Clearly Clark was mentally unstable due to alcoholism, his external locus of control, his suppressed anger at his ex-wife, not helped by his undisclosed (nonlinear?) time stuck in the backrooms alone.

As usual with Backrooms, I love that they have normies enter the place and do normie things, which is kind of part of the setting. I don't get how the 'other organisation' is still so unprepared, incompetent and shit scared at going in there, but I guess they're like MRI technicians or something and completely unprepared to that environment.

As someone who hasn't seen the movie I assume there are two things going on. One: the store owner, unlike his female therapist, is not college-educated, which is a significant social barrier to a potential relationship between them. The therapist would probably suffer social ostracism if she paired up with him, which obviously could be offset were he an attractive stud, which he isn't. Which leads to - Two: it'd be possible for a store owner entrepreneur and a therapist to have a successful marriage, as the difference in terms of social status does not seem to be that big, but again, mutual attraction needs to be there for that first.

You've almost piqued my interest enough to watch the film. Almost.

the fear that no educated professional white woman will ever love you

My life improved immeasurably once I genuinely stopped giving a shit what this type of person thought about me. It concerns me now about as much as I am concerned by the fact that no herd of American bison will ever love me.

Bisons are majestic though.

Fair point. I guess being loved by a herd of bison could indeed help the soul and I shouldn't have been so dismissive about them. My point still stands about educated professional white women.

Bison are very hazardous and best enjoyed at a safe distance; if an entire herd of them loved you, I suspect you would not be long for the world.

They’re a pretty good anti-compass for me and mine; what’s generally good for their social position is bad for me and my family and vice versa with the exception of things that are extremely obviously bad for everyone like nuclear holocaust or something akin to that.

Systemically destroying their social power will almost always get my support.

Systemically destroying their social power will almost always get my support.

I didn't realize bison had that much social power.

They’re clearly possessed with the demonic souls of long dead enemy native tribes hell bent on revenge against the USA. Wake up, sheeple!

How could you so blithely compare the two?

One is a capricious herd animal that can suddenly get mad at you for no reason. The other is the bison.

Would you rather be alone in the woods with a herd of American bison or an educated professional white woman?

Isn't that a false parallel?

Depends, am I at a safe distance from both? Othwise it's picking my poison of physical damage vs professional/psychiatric damage.

I imagine a full herd would be antsy and anxious in the woods. They want to graze on tall grass in a prairie and run together, they'd feel confined by too many trees and very quickly get hungry.

No bison ever called me a chud.

For all the talk about women "hitting the wall", it seems quite evident to me the average male has an even limiting shelf-life, if even that. Online is full of guys who never recovered from their loss of childhood social value. The older I get, the more I've come to believe that humans are only mostly monogamous, or rather "serially monogamous". In the absence of monogamous social constraints, the "low value males" (real or perceived) slip to the wayside and struggle to recover. This movie seems to capture that psychology (mostly) accurately.

The older I get, the more I've come to believe that humans are only mostly monogamous, or rather "serially monogamous".

We don't need to paint all of humanity with the same brush. In fact there's lots of room for individual and group-level variation here, even speaking on a purely instinctual level before nurture comes into it.

But look at the divorce rates in the developed world, once freed of all constraints of feudal society, and when operating purely on love and personal compatibility, half of all marriages do not last "till death do us part". So many dead bedrooms and married couples with kids falling out of love.

Oof. That guy from Twitter...

Being a man is brvtal

At first; everyone thinks ur cute, ur face looks angelic and cute - women think ur adorable and want to protect u

Then u slowly watch urself turn into a Ugly Hairy Ape Gorilla Monkey and most women want you to die and call u a creep weirdo

This is either a man who has a deeply inaccurate perception of social reality or is hardcore engagement-baiting, or both.

If it's the former, and maybe even if it's the latter, then there's a good chance that this man's troubles with women have at least as much to do with his mental issues as it does with the transformations of puberty.

Yeah that was truly one of the most... unique tweets I've bookmarked and I keep coming back to it. I think he did hit on something big on the mental repercussions of male puberty, but there's a level of self-awareness in his nihilism that I find fascinating. His entire tweet history (monologuing about the "low value male" lifepath) reads like someone who stared into the abyss and liked what he saw.

In women's defence they stop viewing us as cute because we stop being cute. If the average man is anything like me, and I'm a very average type of a man, there's a distinct change from being silly kids who want to show them the cool thing that we discovered into randy buggers who mostly just want to see their tits and are put out that they're reluctant to oblige.

Looking at the guy's Twitter though he just reads like a contrarian shitposter. It's reminiscent of Hlynka's bit about people being so immersed in a woke-adjacent worldview that even their rejection of it is framed in the same terms. It's very "You want navel-gazing idpol gender conflict? Okay, but this time men are the victims! Ha!".

Sorry lads, are ye all complaining about "women think little boys are cute"? Well duh, of course! That's the evolutionary hook to get us to have babies and then stick around and not abandon the kids!

Going through puberty is hard on everybody, I have to say guys do have it extra tough what with voice breaking, wispy facial hair, etc.

But if this guy is really lamenting "Now I'm in my 20s/30s/40s no big mommy want to cuddle me and treat me like liddle baby boy cutie-face and protecc", um, I think there's an entire niche fetish website or two for that, friend.

Going through puberty is hard on everybody, I have to say guys do have it extra tough what with voice breaking, wispy facial hair, etc.

Maybe in the people-finding-you-pleasant-to-look-at sense it is. But to me as a guy, having to deal with menstruation and other female reproductive issues sounds like an order of magnitude worse.

Oh, waking up and finding you're bleeding out of your lower parts and panicking (back in the days before everyone was educated since age six about such things) was, as you can imagine, so much fun. Then "oh yeah this will happen for the better part of a week every month for the next forty years or so"?

But it's much less visible than what happens to boys. Though for girls, growing breasts does get you male attention, and creepy adult males leering at thirteen year olds is rare but does happen.

I imagine that suddenly being sexualised by your school classmates, maybe even your friends, to be a weird and difficult thing to sort out.

The male side is not all bad. I remember being pretty stoked about the rather sudden increase in strength. But the smell, the voicecracks, the fact that I was no longer "cute"... Then there was the increasing expectations that I was supposed to be confident, good at sport, have suitable levels of self control... All while experiencing new emotions with no one providing good advice on what to do. The flood of sexual desire in particular and just being told to essentially figure it out yourself, while knowing that losing control of yourself at the wrong time would be heavily punished, was distressing to say the least.

I still appreciate the strength boost. And while I am rarely cute, at least women find the physical changes attractive, assuming decent grooming and exercise practices.

I used to share Goodguy's perspective that periods are harder than anything I experienced. These days, I prefer to not compare suffering. Men and women go through different things with different pros and cons. And hopefully the advantages of adulthood makes puberty worth it.

I remember feeling like that as a teenager and young adult. Puzzled at why women suddenly treated me so different and feeling the pressure of expectations suddenly trust upon me. Then I started reading social media which only made it worse. Puberty is hard and the social expectations for men are rough, especially if you were never really prepared for them. I can believe some people would stay in that mindset for a while.

Definitely. I remember feeling that way too. It sucked. It's hard for me to imagine how a man would jump from such an experience to "most women want you to die and call u a creep weirdo" unless he absorbed exaggerations from social media. As you said, social media made it worse for you. If this guy isn't engagement baiting, then perhaps social media made it much worse for him. What one pays attention to is usually selective and emotion-dependent. If you become convinced for some reason that women despise you, it's easy to go online and find examples from various nutcases and engagement bait artists who will confirm you in that belief.

I don't really remember that.

I remember new expectations feeling unfair, or intimidating, or whatever. But it always seemed well explained why 'you're a teenaged boy, you don't get treated like a kid anymore, them's the breaks- but you also don't get to be treated like an adult'. Granted, I was a bit of a late bloomer and have been consistently physically attractive.

It's a matter of how you are raised I imagine. Pre-puberty I rejected the idea of identifying with my gender and the roles that came with it. Still saw myself as a boy in the biological sense, but didn't really care for the social role of "boy" or "man". I was told by authority figures around me this was fine. So puberty ended up hitting extra hard. Had the LGBT culture been more active where I lived, I might have become nonbinary.

I imagine the more boyish girls get a similar reality check, going from playing in the mud with the boys to someone who is obviously, undeniably female and treated as such.

Turning it back to the culture war, there is a real question here of how much we should enforce gender roles on young children, and what we do with the girls and boys who don't cleanly fit the mold.

We should tell them to fit the mold. I benefited greatly from enforced sports, and girls seem to benefit from skirts and babysitting and home economics.

But I also don't remember much tolerance for gender bending. I remember 'that's feminine' as similar to 'that's low class' or 'that's wrong'(and for my sister 'ladies don't do that'). And people, even tomboys, raised that way turn out fine.

That would be the conservative answer, I suppose. It is also the answer that pushes people towards the LGBT. While the manosphere recruits men vilified by leftism, the leftists recruit men and women who have felt gender roles to be stifling with little benefit. There are absolutely people who will run from the mold the moment they get the chance.

But of course, it is the duty of adults to guide children. Defining their identity by themselves is not really something most young kids are capable of.

I think there are multiple ways to embody masculine traits in ways that suit different kinds of boys. The academic is different from the sports star, and both are different from the politician. But they can all be men. It is the duty of the parents to figure out what kind of archetypes and traits suit their children the best, and try to raise them accordingly. You may push your academically inclined son to do sports for the sake of his health and physical capabilities, but you are okay with him not excelling at it, since that is not the arena you expect him to compete in. His brother who is much more talented with his body can then be pushed harder as he actually enjoys the competitions and pushing his body to its limits.

Where you really run into problems though, is when manhood is defined as performative nonsense and subsequently discarded, leaving boys to figure everything out from scratch.

I never really encountered this. It certainly wasn’t a sudden transition. My experiences didn’t change drastically when I hit puberty; women in authority liked me before, and liked me after. The girls didn’t pay me much attention before, but paid me a bit more attention after. My mom’s attitude didn’t get worse in any way. If anything, I felt my connections with women improved after puberty, but I also had a tough childhood.

I didn’t feel the kind of pressure you’re hitting at until I was around 24 or 25. Even then it was pretty light pressure. It’s fair that people have higher expectations for productivity, emotional control, and accomplishment for grown adults than for children.

So, I don’t know. I believe you and the tweeter are talking about a real phenomenon, and I’m aware of deeply misandrist women, even mothers, who treat their boys as dangerous rather than beloved once they reach puberty.

It’s true that there have been various times in my life where my negative emotion was seen concernedly in a way it might not have if a woman experienced the same thing, but this has always been defused by actually talking about it and demonstrating reflectiveness and control. I feel like every relationship I’ve had with women has rewarded my ability to communicate emotionally, and I do wonder where the gap is between my experiences and other male experiences sometimes.

No, he's just, like 80% of men, ugly in the eyes of women.

Thinking that "most women want you to die and call u a creep weirdo" if you are not in the top 20% of attractive men would be a profoundly inaccurate perception of reality.

They only do that if you attempt to interact with them in any way.

They don't, actually.

Like, I don't know if you interact with some unusually unpleasant set of women, are unusually unpleasant yourself, or simply have perceptual issues, but I promise that you do not need to be in the top quintile for hotness for women to not think you're a creep for existing near them.

it seems quite evident to me the average male has an even limiting shelf-life, if even that

Eh, I think the wall hits both sexes in the thirties. Losing all value when you hit puberty is pathetic, at least wait until your skufization.

I think men an women hit the wall 5 years apart. Historically, at 25 and 30, but today I guess most would agree you get some extra time. Although I don't know how much of that is cope.

Eh, I think the wall hits both sexes in the thirties. Losing all value when you hit puberty is pathetic, at least wait until your skufization.

I think "the wall" is an expression which isn't very well defined, allowing people to argue past each other. Obviously, everyone's physical appearance declines with age, male or female. But defining "the wall" in this way, elides a significant difference between men and women: Essentially all women suffer a steep and inevitable loss of sexual attractiveness at some point in their 30s, while men do not.

I don't think the loss of sexual attractiveness is steep for essentially all women. A woman who takes good care of her body will generally see a slow decline in sexual attractiveness over time in her 30s.

A woman who takes good care of her body will generally see a slow decline in sexual attractiveness over time in her 30s.

Compared to men?

It's a myth that there's a "wall" with regard to female attractiveness in their 30s.

It's more of a steady, monotonic decline from the time women are in their late teens to early 20s. Checkmate, misogynistic redpillers.

Is it possible women are less attractive with age? No, it is the men who are wrong.

Anything is unlikely to be well-defined when any discussion of it is purged from society instantly even on the internet.

Anything is unlikely to be well-defined when any discussion of it is purged from society instantly even on the internet.

Yeah, I think that the issue here is that society is uncomfortable with differences between men and women if those differences favor men. So people have a tendency to deflect, distract, and distort when those differences are brought up.

It's interesting to note that people will readily agree to the existence of "the wall" provided it is framed in such a way as to make women seem superior to men. For example:

"Most men are creepily obsessed with youth when it comes to the women they date. Do you see the way Leonardo DiCaprio dates only young women and loses interest the moment they turn 30? Probably all men would do the exact same thing if they could."

This statement is basically identical to the way I defined the wall above. And yet one formulation will make people freak out while the other will make those same people nod their heads in agreement.

One of the pushbacks people will give is that DiCaprio's dating young women is a kind of moral failure. Therefore, your readers would disagree with it this way: many of them are morally upstanding and would only ever want to date someone with similar levels of life-experience and power. And so, they would take issue with "Probably all men..." bit.

Therefore, your readers would disagree with it this way: many of them are morally upstanding and would only ever want to date someone with similar levels of life-experience and power. And so, they would take issue with "Probably all men..." bit.

Sadly, I disagree. In mainstream discourse, claims along the lines of "Men are shitty!" typically get little or no push back.

A lot of people seem to have this mythical idea about "attractiveness" or "good looks" or "being pretty" or "beauty" or etc. that exists as a concept outside of human judgment, as if how "attractive" someone is isn't defined by how many and how hard other people actually are "attracted" to them. I think this sort of thinking is especially encouraged in women, which is why the idea that "all women are 10s" is so common among women. And why the idea "straight men will judge you, a straight woman, as less attractive" registers as something different from "you, a straight woman, is less attractive."

You have a point that slight reframing can change people's opinion depending on who is flattered and who is scolded, but the two statements here are not identical.

The way to reconcile this is to say that while older women are still objectively stunning and great catches, men refuse to acknowledge this because they want unequal, power-imbalanced relationships to oppress women. Over 30 women are too wise to all the manipulative tricks, they are harder to boss around, too financially and professionally stable which intimidates men etc.

I agree and I don't. I'd say it's like this:

  • the average drop is greater for women than men
  • at the same time, the pre-drop difference in innate attractiveness is still greater, so that women still end up on top
  • at the same time (again!), it's much easier for men to reduce their individual drop in sexual attractiveness and end up on top

In other words, women suffer a steep and inevitable loss of sexual attractiveness at some point in their 30s, while men suffer a steep and evitable loss.

There's some data to suggest at least in the online dating market women dominate before 25 but afterwards the average man of the same age has higher desirability.

I can attest to this. Guys, if you're single, over 30, and got burnt out on dating apps in your early 20s, give it another shot. Women in their mid-late 20s seem to be significantly more interested in 30-something men with their lives together (throw in a photo of you drinking an aperol spritz in front of the Colosseum and you're fucking golden) than guys their own age, and it feels amazing to finally be the "in demand" demographic for once.

Greater Male Variability hypothesis wins again!

In its essence the Wall is simply a biological reality - boys generally mature slower than girls but women also generally age faster then men. It's no wonder that an age gap of 3-5 years has been widespread in marriages throughout history (on both sides of the Hajnal Line, as far as I know, but again, I'm no ethnographer). And in societies where early marriage and childbirth plus enforced monogamy are the norm, the Wall practically does not matter, as the average woman hitting the Wall is already a wife and the mother of multiple children, plus soon to become a grandmother, in fact. So she already bought into the social fabric.

I suggest there are three main aspects to the Wall in the current social reality. One: there are more and more women hitting the Wall when they are single or at least childless, which then causes lots of hurt and disillusionment. Two: the worsening trends of female alcoholism, drug use, prescription pill abuse, sedentary and unhealthy lifestyles in general are all accelerating ageing, which makes the whole phenomenon worse. Three: a small but visible and loud minority of women are capable of spending a great deal of resources on anti-aging measures with notable success, which in turn creates the widespread illusion that the problem is much less worse than it actually is.

True in my case. When I was a kid, girls in my class and even grown women would come up to me - sometimes even in the supermarket - and tell me I was "cute". You better believe that stopped the very minute I hit puberty; suddenly I was invisible to half the human race!

Related anecdote: thirty-some years ago I was in a shopping mall, and an attractive woman I had never seen before smiled, with real warmth, seemingly at me. Turns out she was actually smiling at a baby being carried by a woman right behind me! Sheesh, can't win for losing.

Your appearance obviously invoked motherly feelings as long as you were just a boy, that is all. It has nothing to do with The Wall.

The Wall is about sexual value, not social value, as hitting it entails a strictly biological/bodily transformation.

Well, I imagine that probably makes for a bad backrooms movie if true. Horror fiction that touches on the weirdness that can happen in romantic relationships can be very interesting, I think, but that is not what the backrooms is about.

Weighted by screentime, the majority of the film is about the aesthetics of 90s furniture stores. It's hard to convey this feeling by text, so I focused on the thematic subtext of class and relationships.

Having thought on it more, the one healthy relationship in the film is between Male Lead's two employees. They are both lower-middle class. They even have the exact same job!

Given widening education and earning gaps between men and women, this is very quickly becoming a theme that men of any race can sympathize with, and it probably makes a good thematic hook for a film aimed at young men. What I find strange is that they cast two actors that are pushing fifty for a movie primarily aimed at zoomers. Maybe they are relying on the IP to bring in young people, and using the casting to broaden the audience demographics a bit.

they cast two actors that are pushing fifty

Renate Reinsve is only thirty-eight.

Well, if I go by the comments of some of the gentlemen on here around female fertility/SMV, once a woman hits thirty it's automatic Old Hagdom. So if she's 38, she's a crone and practically fifty. All dried up. Eggs running out, and only stale, lousy, ancient eggs remaining if she tries to have babies (never mind that historically women were having babies well into their thirties and forties). Looks old, tired, wrinkled, saggy unlike fresh youthful men of that age who always remain attractive up to age seventy at least.

Do you ever talk to AI? I have this unaccountable sense that you'd probably enjoy it.

Never, the one half-assed attempt I made didn't impress me much. Mind you, I barely talk to people as it is. I have no interest in pretending a toaster has a rich interior life which it can communicate to me.

I don't think any of those gentlemen have said that there aren't hot sixty-year-old women (East Asians are notorious for this) or that sixty-year-old men always look attractive. They just said that the former can't have kids and the latter can. (If some of them have said the wrong statement, well, they're wrong.)

In case I'm one of the people you're counting as "some of the gentlemen", I would remind you that what I said was that the chances of making four kids with a woman who's already past 30 when you meet her start to get dicey.

No, it's more than just fertility. I think there is an element of jealousy beneath it all, that (some) men resent being attracted to women. They resent that girls gatekeep sex (and if the girls don't, then they're sluts and whores, so there's no winning either way). They resent having to be the one to pursue it. They resent that girls are the standard of attraction.

So any little stick they can use to beat the dog gets grabbed: The Wall. Oh yeah, you'll be thirty, ugly, alone, childless because your eggs dried up, and I'll be in my prime, bitch!

Wait wait wait - the film has a black man pursuing a white woman for sexual purposes against her will and without her consent?

Hoo-boy. How did it get made? Doesn't it know this is the Emmet Till Murder motivation? Doesn't it know how the myth of white female purity being assaulted by rapacious black men was behind so many lynchings?

I'm being slightly facetious here, but only slightly. I've seen some mention of the movie online but nothing about this being the plot. Has Peak Woke indeed passed?

EDIT: Okay, reading the Wikipedia article on the movie, it's slightly different. The monster existed there before the Male Lead discovered these places, and it seems that whatever is there, if there is anything independent there, shapeshifts into a version of the latest real-world person who stumbles in. So it's not, as described, a creation of the Male Lead's id and the backrooms being creations of his as well. That makes more sense for a movie adaptation, not "scary sexuality of scary black men pursuing white women".

No one noticed the unfortunate implications because the character is so aggressively white-coded. He wears khakis and button up shirts and drives a somewhat boring BMW. Ejiofor uses a flat California accent and talks like an educated professional (the character is a failed architect) with no traces of AAVE.

I may be prejudiced because Chiwetel Ejiofor is a fine lookin' man so the stereotype of Scary Black Guy doesn't register with me. Don't know how they make him look in the movie, though.

I have only seen the film once, but I think the Wikipedia summary is an overly literal interpretation. In the context in which the monster is first fully revealed onscreen, it is a metaphorical extention of the frustration and aggression of Male Lead towards Female Lead.

Title IX on campus has already been disproportionately used against black men. Nobody dares question it except a few right wingers.

Black men and white women are both on the woke scale, so being against the former and for the latter is inter-woke conflict, not the woke losing. White women are in theory less oppressed, but they influence more media.

The twist is that Male Lead is the monster, and the climax is his grotesquely personified id rapaciously chasing Female Lead through a hellscape maze of his own creation. A surface-level analysis might fault the film for once again portraying male sexual frustration in a negative light, and yeah, that element is certainly there, but film (at least indie film) like all modern art is meant to challenge the viewer. On some level, one ought to reflect on how much of a monster one becomes on the inside when Stacy rejects you. I think the film earns it.

I'm reminded of a Spongebob meme I saw a while ago, a comic made up of screenshots where, IIRC, Spongebob is ordering from Squidward, with alternating frames, saying, "In my medieval fantasy story, it turns out that the church is actually evil," "How original," "And the demons are actually the good guys!" "Daring, are we?" It's quite possible and even likely that there's some valuable insight and even challenge there, but this is such well-trod ground that comports with the general thrust of basically all media in the mainstream that this description, in itself, makes it sound boring, if not tiresome. That said, it all comes down to the execution, of course.

I used to have fun asking people if they could think of a few examples of evil priests in fiction. No problem of course; there are many. Then I'd ask if they could think of any non-evil priests in fiction. Crickets.

Over the years a couple of examples have come up, of course, but mainly it's a landslide in the other direction. Particularly for anyone who mainly consumes contemporary media as opposed to reading Chesterton or something.

non-evil priests in fiction

Zadok is the obvious example. Father Ted and Co. as well, although I accept there is scope for disagreement here.

Zadok from the Old Testament? Is this one of those "move all the Bibles into the fiction section of the bookstore" things?

Admittedly at first I got him mixed up with Zardoz and was like man I guess I should have finished watching that movie.

Yep, that Zadok. Although I was mostly thinking of Handel's Zadok the Priest anthem and his Solomon opera where Zadok is a character.

Father Ted and Co. as well

So we have:

  • the titular character, a greedy, embittered narcissist, sent to Craggy Island as punishment for his assorted financial improprieties – his catchphrase is literally "That money was just resting in my account!"
  • Father Jack Hackett, a violent, greedy alcoholic routinely implied to harbour ephebophilic tendencies
  • Bishop Len Brennan, a cantankerous bully who takes pleasure in humiliating the protagonists, and who does not take his oath of celibacy remotely seriously
  • Father Dick Byrne, Father Ted's opposite number and hence like him in almost every way.
  • Father "Todd Unctious", who becomes so obsessed with trophies and trinkets that he tries to steal one of Ted's (and steals a fellow priest's vestments as a disguise despite himself being a priest and having vestments of his own, seemingly out of spite)

There is also Father Dougal, who can't be called evil only by virtue of being too stupid to understand the consequences of his actions.

I genuinely can't think of a single sympathetically portrayed priest in the show.

There's a large amount of contemporary fiction where there's a priest character who is a bastard/failure, but everyone else is basically a bastard/failure as well.

The Cleric in Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God? Um... huh. This is more difficult than I expected, and I expected there to not be many. Oh, the priests - both Catholic and Protestant - in The Quiet Man. I'm actually kind of surprised by the lack of chaplains in media I consume... the only ones I recall are from The Longest Day (good), Bill the Galactic Hero (evil), and Phule's Company (Elvis). If nuns count, there's a good nun in Our Flag Means Death, and there's the titular Vicar of Dibley...

Trigun, trivially, but that’s Eastern media and probably doesn’t count.

I can think of a number in anime. Ghost Hunt has one, for instance. Of course, the factors which make there be a lot of evil priests in fiction don't apply to anime.

Ignoring Japanese media for reasons others have alluded to.

David Eddings' Elenium has at the very least Sephrenia, Dolmant and the Cammorian pastor, and more broadly essentially all the non-royal Good Guys (there's some degree of question whether explicitly-religious crusading paladins count as priests or not). The main bad guys are a corrupt priest trying to take over the fantasy stand-in for Christianity (but not succeeding), a corrupt paladin, and a priest of an evil god. There are a couple of good priests in the Malloreon, too, but the vast majority of the priests in the Belgariad/Malloreon are bad (unless you count Belgarath/Polgara as priests, which is complicated).

Terry Brooks' Elfstones of Shannara has one of the characters be a straight-up religious martyr, overcoming a crisis of faith and all. I'm not sure it'd entirely pass reactionary muster, though, seeing as she's a priestess and men explicitly couldn't accomplish what she did for vague magic reasons. The Word and the Void trilogy is also to a large extent about a paladin.

Babylon 5, of course, has a whole pile of good priests including some actual Christian ones. I think the only evil priest is the insane Soul Hunter who's explicitly disavowed by the rest of the Soul Hunters.

Deep Space Nine has a few non-evil priests, although the Space Pope is evil for 70% of the series. Sisko himself is, again, complicated.

I've only played Morrowind of the Elder Scrolls games, but in Morrowind the Imperial Cult are straight-up good guys, and despite the main quests of vanilla/Tribunal taking a wrecking-ball to it, the Tribunal Temple clearly has a lot of good in it as well (just also a fair bit of rot).

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is... complicated, since all the faction leaders are supposed to have good and bad qualities, but Deirdre Skye and Miriam Godwinson are canonically two of the nicer ones, and they're both priests, Miriam a Christian one (though in-game the AI for Miriam keeps trying to kill you for not being a theocracy).

Look at the dates on those.

Elenium: 1989-1992

Elfstones of Shanarra: 1982

Babylon 5: 1994-1998

Deep Space Nine: 1993-1999

Morrowwind: 2002

Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri: 1999

And even then, for culture war purposes, priests of fantasy religions shouldn't count.

I thought about mentioning the dates, but I've not actually consumed much post-2010 Western media.

If we're not counting priests of fantasy religions, then we shouldn't count evil fantasy priests and evil fantasy religions, either. I think that would cut down the initial grievance by a lot.

That's fair, but on the other hand there's also the tendency for evil priests to include the things that people hate the most about religion while there is no corresponding tendency for good priests to include the things that people find positive about religion. An evil priest who is a demagogue is not really balanced by a good priest who is just a spell battery.

Dolmant, the Cammorian pastor, the girl from Elfstones of Shannara, a decent chunk of the priests in Babylon 5 (though not so much the Minbari religious caste), Bareil, the Imperial Cult, the Tribunal Temple, and Miriam Godwinson, at least, do priestly stuff on-screen.

Then I would count them, with the caveat that it's still all from so long ago that it isn't part of any modern trend.

More comments

Are we talking about Christian priests or just any priests at all?

William of Baskerville from Name of the Rose comes to mind. Also Padre Benicio Del Toro from Machete. Father Paul Dure and Father Captain Federico de Soya from Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos.

Shepherd Book works, although he’s a little harsh.

“Father, don’t the bible have something to say about killin’”?

“It does. It is however a mite fuzzier on the topic of kneecaps.”

Such a squandered character. Idk, Firefly used to be the best thing ever to me but at some point in the last couple of years I seem to have gotten over it.

Particularly for anyone who mainly consumes contemporary media as opposed to reading Chesterton or something.

There is a pretty popular Father Brown TV show on the BBC that’s been running for ten years, so regular people may have more familiarity with the character than you might think.

In addition to Frieren already mentioned by @ChickenOverlord, there's other examples of a 100% good church in anime:

https://myanimelist.net/anime/48761/Saihate_no_Paladin (Good Paladin)

https://myanimelist.net/anime/52082/Shiro_Seijo_to_Kuro_Bokushi/ (Saint romcom)

Though, it is common trope that the church is evil too.

The church in the anime Frieren is objectively good. The priest character you first encounter is a bit of a colorful character (he likes his alcohol a bit too much, among other things) but he's a good person generally. And there's another priest who shows up later who has a gambling problem and similar issues but is, once again, a decent person overall.


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