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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   20542 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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Hizzoner Eric Adams, Mayor of New York, has filed a lawsuit in California court against TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and Facebook accusing them of "fueling a youth mental health crisis".

Among his particulars are

Using algorithms to generate feeds that keep users on the platforms longer and encourage compulsive use.

Using mechanics akin to gambling in the design of apps, which allow for anticipation and craving for "likes" and "hearts," and also provides continuous, personalized streams of content and advertisements.

Manipulating users through reciprocity – a social force, especially powerful among teenagers, that describes how people feel compelled to respond to one positive action with another positive action. These platforms take advantage of reciprocity by, for example, automatically telling the sender when their message was seen or sending notifications when a message was delivered, encouraging teens to return to the platform again and again and perpetuating online engagement and immediate responses.

I dislike social media as much as the next grouch, but this to me seems like it should be booted out of court for "Failure to state a claim, and if you did have a claim it would be precluded by the First Amendment, and also I fine you 1 million dollars for using out-of-state courts for political posturing."

It also strikes me as frivolous and far too general, and weirdly anachronistic. Even by politician standards, more grandstanding than substantive.

Might as well Cancel the Internet at that point. From search engines to the aforementioned sites to porn to online shopping to online gambling to vidya to The Motte. The Motte, as a sinister hive of scum and villainy, uses algorithms and likes, even if sometimes the algorithm is just sorting by new. Nefarious techniques such as meatbag-informed casual reinforcement learning is deployed via moderation and monthly “Quality Contribution”s.

Such a lawsuit, even assuming there’s sufficient standing or whatever among other issues, feels ten maybe even twenty years too late.

There's a bit of a motte and bailey with algorithms. People grandstanding against social media conflate algorithms intentionally tweaked to manipulate users with algorithms that simply give users what they want. TikTok, as far as I can tell, largely does the second. Google Search, on the other hand, extensively does the first. However, the sort of people who complain about 'algorithms' tend to approve of Google's goals in information curating.

To be clear, both types of 'algorithm' might be bad, in the same way cocaine might be bad whether a user snorts it on their own or an unsavory corporation slips it into their carbonated beverages. But banning the former is a harder sell given the moral justification for our current civilization is still technically supposed to be liberalism.

According to the articles about the enshittification of the net by Doctorow et al (on Wired and Substack), TikTok's algorithm no longer really gives users what they want anymore.

That's an interesting read, thanks. Though it sounds like TikTok is tweaking the algorithm to appeal to content creators rather than to manipulate users per se.

Cory Doctorow is an interesting cat. I remember him from the failed hamartiology of 'free culture' back in the day, so maybe I never had a good read of the man. So many of his hobby horses tag him as gray tribe, but when he talks normal politics he's as blue as lapis lazuli.

I think something of a grey tribe existed back in the day -- though I think it was really more of a self-selection of weird, intellectual men who used the internet rather than something that existed in person. But the more I really think about it, the more it seems obvious that this cohort has divided between blue-sympathetic people and red-sympathetic people, with those on each side finding more common ground with former enemies than with former friends.

So, you see grey tribe atheist types re-evaluating their views on Christianity (like you see often showing up in religious discussions on the motte) or even converting (as I did), because they started bumping up against the blue tribe in ways they didn't expect, or were directly repelled by the views of the blue tribe on cis-het-straight-white-men, who mostly made up the grey tribe. And you see the opposite too -- grey tribe people like Doctorow who have always been more into the "weird" side of the grey tribe (he's a science fiction author, after all) finding more common ground with the reformist blue tribe, or pushed that direction by a cultural, class, or regional dislike of Trumpism.

This doesn't mean these internet people go full red or full blue, but it does, I think, make people lean more in one direction or another.

IANAL but I also don't think much of the complaint. It does a good job avoiding the issue many social media lawsuits have where they sue based on the content third parties have posted. However the algorithmic delivery of content is, as far as I'm aware, protected first amendment activity. Nowhere does the complaint identify what first amendment exception the described conduct falls into, or even mention the fact that it may be protected.

Another oddity that strikes me as a laymen is the way the causes of action and prayer for relief are phrased. The causes of action are "NEW YORK PUBLIC NUISANCE", "NEW YORK NEGLIGENCE", and "NEW YORK GROSS NEGLIGENCE." The first paragraph in the prayer for relief also reads:

Entering an Order that the conduct alleged herein constitutes a public nuisance under New York law;

Are state courts often called upon to apply the standards of other states? Is this a totally normal thing I'm reading too much into? Seems odd. I would think the relevant standard in California court would be California public nuisance/negligence/gross negligence.

I wonder if there are any parallels between this case and lawsuits against tobacco companies where those companies had been covering up the health risks associated with smoking. I'm not very familiar with the cases. I'm thinking there is probably some precedent that if you have internal data showing something is dangerous/addictive and then you continue to present it as not dangerous/addictive then that opens you up to legal liability.

Since social media companies collect tons of data to optimize engagement on their platforms they probably have something that shows they know social media is addictive. If you have that internal data then you put out something that says, "Facebook builds its products to create value, not to be addictive" https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/What-The-Social-Dilemma-Gets-Wrong.pdf then I could see how this case has some legitimacy. It could also be strategically correct. They know social media companies will settle out of court to avoid a discovery process that would expose the internal documents showing that social media is addictive.

There isn't really a coherent definition of addiction here. Are people addicted because they use Facebook a lot? Can we distinguish that from people just enjoying using Facebook but not being addicted? Probably not.

That’s a good point, but I think the court can ultimately conclude if something is addictive. This would be similar to how the court can conclude if something qualifies as a religion. They use a list of characteristics common to established religions and say these things indicate something could be a religion, but at the same time realize that not every religion would meet all the criteria.

Furthermore, people can become addicted to video games, gambling, or porn and there are some established criteria for what those addictions look like. In the DSM-5-TR Internet Gaming Disorder is included in the section recommending conditions for further research:

  • Preoccupation with gaming

  • Withdrawal symptoms when gaming is taken away or not possible (sadness, anxiety, irritability)

  • Tolerance, the need to spend more time gaming to satisfy the urge

  • Inability to reduce playing, unsuccessful attempts to quit gaming

  • Giving up other activities, loss of interest in previously enjoyed activities due to gaming

  • Continuing to game despite problems

  • Deceiving family members or others about the amount of time spent on gaming

  • The use of gaming to relieve negative moods, such as guilt or hopelessness

  • Risk, having jeopardized or lost a job or relationship due to gaming

It's highly unlikely that Facebook has data indicating that users are experiencing these symptoms.

Target was algorithmically detecting pregnancy over a decade ago.

If Facebook doesn't have data regarding these symptoms, it's either because they haven't bothered or because they actively are trying to avoid it.

There's no external validation for someone being addicted to Facebook like there is for someone being pregnant.

In any case, as you suggested, there's no reason for Facebook to even gather this data. If it turns out there's no addiction (whatever that means), nobody will believe them anyway. If there turns out to be addiction, it's a liability.

For a long time, the trend was down. Things were getting safer, and the number of bodies dead on the streets declined nearly every year.

But during the pandemic something broke. In 2020, the rate suddenly spiked upwards. Many explanations were given, some more convincing than others. But most people expected things to return to the previous downward trend. The thing is... they haven't. The rate of people killed each year has remained at levels not seen for decades.

I'm talking, of course, about the rate of fatal auto accidents.

In 2019, the U.S. death rate per 100 million vehicles miles reached an all-time low of 1.10. But in 2020, it skyrocketed by over 20% to 1.34. This was by far the largest annual increase ever. In 2021, the rate increased slightly to 1.37 and then in 2022 it moderated to 1.35.

It's not just the rate that's increased either. The absolute number of deaths is up a lot. There are 6,000 excess deaths per year over the 2019 level.

The cope for the 2020 uptick was that, with highways empty, people built up greater speeds leading to more deaths. This might explain 2020 but certainly can't explain the 2022 data when highways had returned to parking lots speeds. Never mind that every year the rate should be going DOWN as older cars are replaced with newer, safer ones.

A decline in policing might be at least partially responsible. The overburdened police in my home city of Seattle no longer enforce traffic rules, for example. Predictably, Seattle's proposed solution to increased deaths is to install a bunch of cameras which will only punish those who choose to abide by the laws. For those who steal cars, or drive drunk, or refuse to get a license, or don't get insurance, or refuse to pay citations, the penalty will remain the same: nothing. The police isn't allowed to chase criminals even if it wants to.

Are these misguided rules the reason for the uptick in deaths? I'm not sure. I've heard that nearby conservative areas have also seen an increase in death rates. I think it's more likely that this is simply evidence of the U.S. becoming a more low-trust society. People in low-trust societies in Latin America and Africa drive like maniacs. People in high-trust societies in Europe drive safely. The U.S. is somewhere in the middle but slouching lower.

Here is a graph of both traffic and homicide deaths by race and time. Here are the black deaths by week, in which we see that both kinds of deaths spiked at the exact same time: immediately following the death of George Floyd. (Both graphs courtesy of Steve Sailer, the only person of note I've seen discuss the traffic component of the Floyd Effect.)

The simplest explanation is that it is still 100% the Floyd Effect. Police pull over black drivers less than they used to so dangerous drivers stay on the road until they kill themselves or others (as well as it possibly affecting deterrence and so on). The alternative explanation is that it was the Floyd effect originally but some other effect has taken over since then. I haven't looked at the most recent data, if you wanted you could check if it has become less racially skewed than the period covered by those graphs. But with the timing I'm not going to give credence to any explanation in which it was never the Floyd Effect and the spike just happened that week and primarily among black people by coincidence.

In many places the police have totally stopped enforcing traffic regulations period (e.g. SF). I wonder if the other lines on that graph have moved up in the past two years.

Assuming this data is accurate, then yes, I think we've solved the mystery. Case closed. In the end, it's less interesting than I thought.

Is the black rate jumping from 15 to 23 on the chart, given the proportion of drivers who are black, enough to have the statistical effect the OP discusses @sodiummuffin?

The OP discusses a 25% rise in overall fatalities. The post-Floyd jump on Sailer’s chart, assuming white and Hispanic levels stay the same, would have to be significant for 14% of the population to effect a 25% rise in the overall vehicular death rate.

Yes. If the black fatality rate went from 15->23 then the rate per mile driven would be more like 15->30. Keep in mind that the race-divided chart ends in December 2021.

So if a group responsible for 14% of deaths in 2019 becomes twice as dangerous in 2020 that could lead to a 14% increase of its own.

Note that the chart also shows a similar massive increase in the Hispanic fatality rate, and a smaller increase in the white fatality rate.

So, I do think Sailer's chart is consistent with the data showing a 20% increase in fatalities by mile driven in 2020.

I think people are just generally less empathetic and more angry than they were.

Covid was a fucked up society altering thing. At the same time large cohorts of the population were convinced that other large cohorts of the population were out there to kill them, and as a result we had a summer of violent, deadly riots all over the country.

I think people are basically just more cynical now, so they drive more aggressively, and don’t care that they’re putting people in danger. I see it in my city all the time. One specific demographic of people I have noticed have decided handicap parking stalls are free game. They also drag race everywhere, run red lights, pass like psychopaths, don’t look when they turn out of parking lots, etc.

I get it, honestly. Covid and the 2020 riots, and then the election fuckery, were massive blackpills for everyone. Couple that with the stress of the economy right now, the prospect of major wars breaking out all over the place, the cost of housing, the cost of groceries, the fact that nobody fucking each other anymore, and the totally disregard of immigration laws and it’s no wonder people don’t care.

How much of this is marijuana replacing alcohol as the recreational drug of choice?

Obviously, driving drunk is dangerous and anti-social behavior that some people do anyways. But aggressive DUI enforcement and education had massively curtailed these numbers, and a culture of how to have social drinking without drunk driving had taken root enough to curtail the worst effects. Designated drivers, uber rides, etc. In particular, some of these cultural changes could be pushed a bit more consistently than with pot because social drinking mostly takes place in bars, which can be held liable and can then encourage good behavior with things like free cokes for the designated driver and "we'll call an uber for you". With pot, this is not the case, there's no culture of avoiding driving high and nobody knows how you could push it. I also think pot stays in your system a bit longer than booze, but I'm not sure.

Weed is much less predictable, especially edibles.

Alcohol I can predict a reliable time period at which I will be safe to drive home. If I have two beers at the start of the night, eat a burger, and drink water, four hours later I'm fine. If I take an edible, there's no period of time until I sleep through the night where I'm comfortable.

I made a new account to post this - opsec and all.

When I was younger I was an everyday smoker. Stoned for years straight. Anyone who is an everyday smoker can function completely unimpaired. Physically and mentally. In fact people on MJ do tend to drive more cautiously perhaps for two reasons. 1) The effects of MJ don’t lend themselves to driving like an asshole. 2) Even today, I imagine people don’t want to be pulled over while stinking like pot. Most potheads will smoke while driving. Bake out a car. Hotbox. Music. It’s a whole part of the lifestyle.

I haven’t smoked in over 15 years. If I were to take one puff today and try to drive it would be extremely dangerous. Without a tolerance it can be severely impairing. I dislike Mj today and wouldn’t partake even if offered in a safe environment. I also think MJ is not safe and wouldn’t allow my family to use it casually.

It’s hard to disentangle how many permastoned drivers are out there today compared to 15 years or so. But if more people are casually smoking and driving. It could have an affect.

I think I recall a Louis CK bit where he said modern marijuana is much more potent than stuff back in the day. Does that ring true to you?

It's been a trend since the '70s via simple hybridisation and selective breeding but since the decrim/legalisation in America what I've seen on social media is people moving from the already strong weed to ever more potent extracts and concentrations, which they then use by eating them (which counter-intuitively gets you wrecked for hours because it's too easy to underestimate and eating it sounds more benign than smoking) or by vaporising them in elaborate "dab" rigs. I guess it's driven by the previously unavailable access to industrial tech like chemical analysis services and the removal of the need to be clandestine. Now you have people on Instagram posing for photos with their kilogram balls of lab refined 98.8% pure THC.

In the '90s you might see a variety of weed that was hyped up on claims of being analysed at ~25% THC (on an ideal sample a single time). Now, at least if you live in a decrim state and my impressions are correct, you can buy all manner of products that are regularly analysed by dedicated professional labs.

You also see more interest in the other cannibinoids now that the labs allow them to be distilled out and separated by people who know what they're doing rather than mad scientist stoners burning down their houses while playing with ether after reading a couple of articles in High Times.

With that said I think there is a separate phenomenon where people spend their youth smoking lots of weed, burning off all the neurochemical novelty and good times and being left with little more than the side effects that were probably always there but weren't very noticeable because they were having too much fun. They blame it on the weed being too strong but it's more like an alcoholic blaming the nausea and broken relationships on brewers putting diesel in their overproof rum. Yeah, the rum is too strong, but if you gave a couple of shots to a teetotaller they probably wouldn't shit their pants and start a fight with a policeman. They'd probably fall over, start laughing and tell you you're their best mate.

The stupid thing about illegal drug use is that people massively disregard dosage. There's a Scott article about Adderal vs street meth where he describes how the dose street meth users are taking is something like 100x more than the typical prescription dose. At that level it's no wonder that instead of studying harder they rip up their floorboards looking for listening devices. Instead people think that doing more = being hardcore, and people ignore that an overdose doesn't have to mean dying, it just means that you experience negative and unwanted effects from having taken too much.

70s weed had like 2-3% THC, modern US weed has 25-30%. (In Europe it’s more like 14-16%.) It is literally ten times as potent in terms of the psychoactive ingredient, yes.

The average in the early 2000s was probably 8-14%, so much of that growth is indeed in the last ten years. Unfortunately, states have adopted all or nothing approaches to a lot of weed regulation instead of just capping THC at moderate levels.

It would be interesting to see a weed regulatory scheme for THC (or CBD etc)% similar to how alcohol has a regulatory regime (beer/wine/liquor) that roughly tracks ABV.

Great idea, but I don't think it'll have legs until legitimate dispensaries become so normalised that imposing this regulatory scheme won't drive people back to their unregulated dealers. I know a guy who got a scrip to buy medical cannabis from a dispensary, 100% legal, but still bought cannabis from his dealer because it was cheaper. There are probably millions of people who live in states with legal weed with a dispensary selling quality-tested weed on every corner, but who still go to the same dealer they've gone to for years just because they have a business relationship with him. Until getting your weed from a dispensary rather than an unlicensed dealer is the rule for 80-90% of the people, there's no point imposing additional costs on the dispensary.

Yes, this is why I think a hard cap on production and sale at ~15% THC (high enough to satisfy most consumers, leaving little margin or value in illegal production of higher potency marijuana) would be best. Otherwise it’s an arms race.

I've never bought weed from a dispensary that didn't have that information.

It's just not particularly useful. Too many other factors.

The main difference is that many people enjoy the taste of alcohols of varying ABV, whereas outside of a very small niche of connoisseurs almost all stoners smoke to get stoned. Higher THC is always better for the weed user, since ingested dosage can be altered (although obviously it makes consuming huge amounts much easier) in a way that higher ABV is not always better for the alcohol drinker. I was in the US recently and except for a token 12% strain all flower was 26-30%. Meanwhile beer is always going to have a market over absinthe.

See this write-up. Anecdotal evidence, but I avoid weed nowadays as it seems far stronger than even seven years ago. The last time I used it was May and it was just unpleasant: full body shivering, anxiety, paranoia, unable to maintain a train of thought. It was like being on ket. I personally know four people who developed delusional/psychotic symptoms in the last ten years after smoking weed essentially every day for years.

I can echo this. I spent about a year in college smoking basically daily (and a couple years prior probably at least once a week). During this period my tolerance had become high enough gradually enough that it was usually at least a mildly pleasurable experience and only mildly disorienting.

A combination of turning 21 and becoming convinced that daily smoking was making me lazy caused me to pivot to alcohol (not a strict improvement in hindsight) and stop cannabis consumption completely.

I have tried it a handful of times in the years since and every time it has made me painfully anxious and disoriented. I attribute this to both a) me no longer having any tolerance and b) only being offered super high potency cannabis. The latter being because either everyone that presently consumes regularly has red-queen's-raced themselves to the point that they require it to feel anything, or the weaker stuff I started out on no longer exists in appreciable, widely distributed quantities.

I remember them claiming that in the 80s. Link. It's an evergreen drug-warrior claim.

It’s a fact, nobody disputes that potency has increased by an order of magnitude.

Which makes it about 112% THC now, right? If people really did usually smoke low-potency ditchweed, it was before most current smokers were born.

The link the other user posted suggests that even in the 90s potency had only reached around 5-7%. Almost all studies around limited risks to high weed consumption revolve around weed of less than 10% THC, a third of the current amount common in legal states. And a doubling in the last decade alone is also significant.

The link I posted claimed 6-14% in 1985. Like I said, this is evergreen drug warrior propaganda and I don't give it credence. I doubt they know the actual numbers and if they did they would lie about it.

Great question, I'd love to know.

In a broad sense, being stoned is less impairing than being drunk. Not categorically - one (standard) beer is less inebriating than several dabs (especially sans tolerance). But, for typical consumption, I think it's clearly the case. The asymptotic inebriation is much greater for booze - people can drive blackout drunk, incapable of telling your their name. Even a hardcore alcoholic is still very fucked up at a certain amount of alcohol. I'd much rather be driven by the typical pothead who hits the bong every ten minutes than by the typical drunk who polishes off a fifth (15 shots) a day, or even the average person after a few drinks.

This is a double edged sword: it's easy and reasonable to say "don't drink (preferably any, certainly more than ~2 units) and drive." But, since THC is generally less inebriating, people are more likely to be stoned frequently/all the time, and this almost requires driving to participate in society. Similarly, I think it's much less acceptable to show up drunk to work than stoned.

A further difficulty is the lack of THC tests for current level of inebriation. It's hard to enforce stoned driving laws when all you can tell is "this person has consumed THC in the last few weeks."

I don't have a policy proposal here - just observing how tricky the situation/comparison to alcohol is.

See also my comment about changes to the legal status of weed since 2019.

The explanation I like the best is that Corona broke the culture. There was a culture of how to behave on the road that produced such-and-such behaviors with such-and-such results. Corona disrupted the culture. Now road culture has settled in a new equilibrium, and it produces worse results.

I'm contrasting this theory to speculation I've heard about how Corona made people more aggressive or anti-social or stupid. Maybe that's true, but I find it hard to make a compelling etiology of individual actors. Everybody gets Corona, and that rewires everyone to be less risk-averse?

Policing is probably part of it, but only a lagging response. It takes a lot of work for the police to establish the culture of how to drive. It's much easier for them to observe whatever the culture is and penalize the most aggressive drivers. Imagine, for example, that one day everybody started driving 5MPH faster. Could extra policing really roll that back? Maybe they could, but it would be a lot of work to pull over every driver on that small change. It's much more plausible that they would continue to police the top offenders, which might become a slightly-larger category.

The explanation I like the best is that Corona broke the culture.

This is my explanation too and I hate it. My inner Vox journalist wants to find some numerical explanation, some demographic trend, some "one weird trick" that explains the data. But I can't. I really do think the cranky old man theory is right this time. Society got worse. End of story.

The question is, will it heal on its own over time, or is this just the new reality?

The question is, will it heal on its own over time, or is this just the new reality?

We're back to the dark days of.... 2006. I think we'll live. Most of us, anyway.

I think we'll live. Most of us, anyway.

:)

We're back to the dark days of.... 2006

The cohort of cars on the road in 2022 were much, much safer than the cars in 2006. But driver quality in 2022 was so much lower that it has erased the entirety of that difference. Brutal numbers.

The cars on the road in 2024 are much, much safer compared to the cars in 2006.

Are they? What's so great about them? I'm fairly sure the big gains in car safety (crumple zones and such) came before then. Now we're on to "active safety" of questionable value (e.g. the car nagging you because it thinks you're crossing a lane line which is really just a tar patch)

Yes, crash test ratings are up a lot in that time.

Also keep in mind that the average car on the road is more than 10 years old. So, in 2006, the average car was from the 1990s.

Modern cars are at the point where you can literally drive your family off a 300 foot cliff to kill them and everyone survives.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna85033

It's not hard to find recent news stories of people driving off cliffs and dying. Either Teslas (a small portion of modern cars) are just exceptionally safe or that family was miraculously lucky.

I think teslas are pretty safe even among modern cars.

Simple answer: People driving bigger trucks and giving even fewer fucks.

Longer answer:

Pedestrian deaths are up by thousands and:

In 2016, cars hit and killed nearly 6,000 pedestrians. That’s a serious spike from the historic low—below 4,000—in 2009.

See: read://https_www.wired.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%2Fpedestrian-death-rates-climb%2F

Also statistically,

Key findings from 2019 to 2020:

• Fatalities increased and injured people decreased in most categories. • Speeding-related, alcohol-impaired-driving, and seat belt non-use fatalities increased. • Urban fatalities increased by 8.5 percent; rural fatalities increased by 2.3 percent. • Older drivers 65 and older involved in fatal crashes decreased by 9.8 percent; drivers under 65 involved increased. • There were fewer fatalities among people 9 and younger and people 65 and older from 2019 to 2020. Most fatality increases were people 10 to 64, with the 25-34 age group having the largest increase of 1,117 additional fatalities. • Male fatalities increased by 8.6 percent, and female fatalities increased by 1.9 percent. • Nighttime (6 p.m. to 5:59 a.m.) fatalities increased by 12 percent; daytime (6 a.m. to 5:59 p.m.) traffic fatalities increased by 1.4 percent. • Forty-two States and the District of Columbia had increases in the number of fatalities.

Caused by:

38,824 people died on U.S. roads in 2020. Fatalities compared to 2019: ↑6.8% overall ↑21% rate per 100 million VMT ↑14% in alcohol-impaired-driving crashes ↑17% in speeding-related crashes ↑11% motorcyclists ↑3.9% pedestrians ↑14% unrestrained passenger vehicle occupants ↑21% ejected passenger vehicle occupants
↑9.4% in single-vehicle crashes ↑8.5% in urban areas ↑12% during nighttime ↑9.5% during weekend

See: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813266

Basically, people driving faster, more impaired and fewer people wearing seat belts.

I wonder if it has to do with increased marijuana use. My impression is that it has skyrocketed the past few years, and most people don't think driving stones is dangerous.

In my area things have definitely flown off the handle. I see people run red lights multiple times a day whereas before I practically never saw it. If you're lucky, it's a tightly grouped pack of cars where the tail just disregarded the yellow and the red. At least you're not going to drive into the intersection because you can see them and they just eat into your green.

If you're not lucky, it's one motherfucker who runs the red with no cars ahead of him. You'd be toast if you're too fast off the line when you get a green.

I also see a lot of cars with reflective license plate covers that are supposed to foil red light cameras. I know a lot of people who drive in the carpool lane with no one else in the car. I don't know if these rates are meaningfully different from before the pandemic, but it's bleak.

I have contact with states attorneys who deal almost exclusively with DUIs and other traffic matters. The fact is, minor offenses are down, major offenses are up. DUIs, going 40+ over the limit, way up. Going 10 over, almost non existent in court. So we have seen the enforcement bifurcation, at least in this area.

The other obvious problem I've seen is people did forget how to drive. The number of bad drivers has clearly increased. Maybe the DMV waiving in person testing for a while is a cause, maybe people just lost it after 12 months with no traffic, but the roads are clearly less safe.

Could DUI be a contributing factor? Looking at the rules on cannabis consumption by state, by my count 29 states have passed legislation to make legal cannabis more accessible in the past five years - either making medical cannabis legal, increasing possession limits for personal use, or outright decriminalisation or legalisation, among others. (I'm assuming driving while high is significantly more dangerous than driving sober, no idea on how dangerous it is relative to driving drunk.)

The truly maddening thing is that, due to a lack of centralized criminal enforcement data, as well as the ridiculous amount of lag of reported data, it's extremely hard to sanity-check your speculations.

a bunch of cameras which will only punish those who choose to abide by the laws

What does the more granular data about who is dying suggest?

More young male drivers dead by their own (drunk / high / speeding / stupid) hand might hint at a different cause to more pedestrians dead, or more people dead in vehicular collisions.

There are cultural differences, but one of the lowest rates of any major nation isn’t in an extremely homogenous country but in Britain (a third of the US rate per mile travelled). Homogenous Eastern European countries do worse, as do the Southern Europeans.

Speed limits are actually higher than the US, too, (70 vs 60) so I wonder why British drivers are so much safer.

Do British drivers actually abide by the speed limits? US drivers routinely drive at least ten MPH over.

Everyone everywhere seems to drive 10 over.

What? No they don't. Only a minority of drivers go that fast anywhere I've lived.

Really? People don’t routinely go at least ten over on highways and rural roads where you live? We have vastly different experiences then. In the city where I work, even the timed lights require you to go about five MPH over the speed limit to avoid hitting a red light.

No. Both where I live now (Denver) and where I lived previously (northeast Wisconsin), people going 10 mph over were in the minority. People routinely go 5 over, but not 10 (let alone more).

Where I am, 5 over is ubiquitious on city streets and 10 over is common on city freeways where the speed limit is 60, most drivers go 65, and 70 is common during rush hour or among people in the left lane.

Sometimes I think that's bad, then I go to Nearby Big City and drivers ubiquitously go 70 on freeways where the limit is 60, with 75 being somewhat common and 80 not at all unheard of.

Every state I have driven in, has had the exact same thing on the freeways, at least 10mph over being the norm. From PA to Kentucky to Florida to Louisiana to Minnesota.

Having said that I have never been to Colorado or Wisconsin so I can't say you are wrong there.

The average highway speed in light traffic seems likes it’s pretty consistently around 80, which is 5-15 over the speed limit.

Yes they do, in my American coastal experience.

I'm willing to accept "Americans on the coasts routinely speed a lot", but not "Americans routinely speed a lot". The latter isn't true.

I have driven as far west as Las Vegas and as far east as NYC, I don't even know how many multi-day road trips, etc. I have a family member who sets the cruise control to the speed limit and doesn't touch the gas. We can go hours getting passed non-stop while never once catching up to a car ahead of us. Either everyone who isn't speeding is also doing the cruise control at exactly the speed limit thing, or almost nobody is driving at or under the speed limit. I often complain about how dangerous it is because even the 18 wheelers all want to pass us and that shit is risky on a two lane country road.

That says that most Americans speed, which I agree with. What I disagree with is the claim that most Americans are going 10 mph over the speed limit (let alone more).

In my American lifetime of anecdata coastal Americans and Texans very far from any coast love to speed.

And given the distribution of population in the US, I think that's most people. But yes, I've seen reddit threads were posters bafflingly ask questions about why anyone would speed. So someone somewhere thinks the norm is to drive 60 miles per hour on the freeway. Midwest or deep South maybe? Someplace I don't go apparently.

Were those posters possibly people who don't do much interstate driving? My experience is that you're much more likely to find speeding on the interstate than on a non-interstate highway, and more likely to find it on a highway than on local roads. This also applies to the magnitude of the speeding: on a highway, you might be going the limit at 45 along with most of the other drivers, but there'll be a couple cars who go past you at 50, whereas on the interstate the posted limit will be 65 and the speed of traffic as a whole will be between 70 - 75.

Personally speaking, I follow speed limits fairly religiously on non-interstate roads, but am willing to go 5 or so over the speed limit on the interstate, or up to 10 over if the driving conditions are good, everybody else is going at that speed, and the speed limit isn't already something pretty high like 70. I seem to recall that this was a bit of an acquired behavior on my part: when I was younger and most of my driving was local, I would obey the speed limit pretty much everywhere, but then got less strict with my interstate speeds the more I drove on the interstate. So I could see somebody who mostly drives local not realizing how going faster than legal is more common on interstates.

Midwest or deep South maybe?

I've driven in various places in the Midwest, and I don't think I've ever encountered a place where everybody stuck to the speed limit on the interstate. I guess here it would depend on what percentage of people would have to be going faster before this would be considered "the norm". If 20% of drivers are going 5 over, is considered abnormal (because the vast majority of people are going the speed limit), or is it normal (because it's consistently present behavior)?

My guess would be that a much smaller percentage of brits are doing 2 hour commutes on highways every fucking day of their lives. At one point you just start driving in autopilot and doing shit like sneaking in a quick text in if that's an everyday thing.

Also hot take but I've driven in 15 different US states as a tourist. But I'm a car guy so I notice this shit. Not a single American who isn't from New Jersey knows how to drive to save their life. Most of them don't even hold the steering wheel right, they do this hunched over 2-10 position thing. Don't get me started on the left lane hogging or taking hours to switch lanes. All unsafe driving practices. New Jersey drivers are good though, average speed of 85 in the I95 around philly, and things just moving along smoothly, I love it.

Not a single American who isn't from New Jersey knows how to drive to save their life.

That's because in New Jersey, driving to save your life is the only way you make it to next week. If you do the sleepy Pennsylvania driver thing, you're going to get hit by someone running a red light. If you hog the left lane you're going to be VERY uncomfortable as the other drivers zoom around you with not much margin. If you take hours to switch lanes people will pass you in the partial lane on both sides. NJ has a reputation for aggressive drivers, and it is deserved. Only place I've driven where you can be sitting at a red light with traffic in front of you and the driver behind you will be on the horn, apparently expecting you to go through.

You are kind of proving my point. That most Americans drive like grandmas (that too ones that don't know basic highway etiquette). All these things you are saying are how it should be! There are things to do and places to be.

New Jersey drivers are "aggressive" but the traffic actually moves! No matter how much of a warzone navigating a full 3-lane highway where the average speed is 85 MPH is, it takes more skill to do that and make it to next week than do whatever the fuck PA or CT drivers are doing. I'm from Dubai where the drivers are 2-3x more aggressive and unpredictbile than NJ drivers, so I felt right at home in NJ and found any other state infuriating to drive in.

Forget about the aggression though, using the left lane for passing (or atleast moving when you see a car approaching you at 95 MPH from the back), not taking hours to switch lanes, not braking randomly in a fucking highway, are all things much less common in most of Europe than America.

Running red lights is bad, actually.

Never said it was a good thing. Not left lane hogging, not braking randomly, not taking eons to switch lanes, Not sleeping on the green light are all good things though

Well you did say "All these things you are saying are how it should be!"

Every region has its own driving culture. NJ may suit you, but I find driving there to be absolutely miserable.

Among regions with aggressive drivers, I much prefer Boston. They are aggressive, but in a precise, pointed way rather than what I perceived to be the raw hooliganism of New Jersey.

The fact that NJ has fewer traffic deaths than other areas is probably more due to the fact that they've eliminated unprotected left turns than any particular skill of their drivers.

Not a single American who isn't from New Jersey knows how to drive to save their life. Most of them don't even hold the steering wheel right, they do this hunched over 2-10 position thing.

In joisey do they have one hand at 12 and the other out the window?

The reputation of New Jersey drivers in Philly is absymal. My wife always checks if someone driving badly has Jersey plates and then will announce that Jersey srivers are the worst in the world.

Having said that Philly drivers are themselves pretty terrible from what I can see.

New Jersey drivers are not bad. They are some of the best in the US. They manage to drive much faster under much more hectic conditions than most of the country and still have some of the lowest road accident rates, that is by definition what better driving is.

Well, unless aggressive driving is part of why the conditions are so hectic in the first place.

One measure of better driving is certainly road traffic accident rate, but thats not the only measure. How quickly on average do you travel? If everyone was zipper merging more politely rather than forcing in at the last second would everyones drive be smoother/faster?

Philly drivers are aggressive, and I think the road situation would be better overall if they were less so. I don't drive too much in Jersey myself and I don't look out for Jersey plates either so I am certainly open to Jersey drivers not being as bad as claimed.

For my money there are a couple of things almost all American drivers seem to be terrible at, zipper merging and roundabouts. Near universally awful as far as I can tell.

The US drivers tests do seem to be significantly easier than the UK (though it does vary by state of course). Delaware's is so simple I am convinced a 10 yo could pass it.

What’s wrong with 2/10? When I went through drivers’ training, that was taught both in the class and in the state-issued handbook as the position least likely to lead to serious injury in the event of an accident due to the way the airbags deploy.

(Actually, the teacher said we should do something closer to 2:30/9:30, but that’s still pretty close.)

Significantly less control than 3/9. Look at any motorsport driver, you will see 3/9 9/10 times.

As for which is safer, I can't really find anything concrete on that.

You may notice that motorsports is very different than regular motoring. Race cars tend to lack airbags, for one.

I now live in a relatively rural county. It gets between 0-1 murders a year. Traffic fatalities are almost as rare.

Nearly every traffic fatality I read about (and murder for that matter) is someone from outside of the county causing trouble. High speed chases originating in the part of town, in the county where illegal immigrants have created a festering boil of gang crime and chaos for going on 20 years. These high speed chases get on the highway at 120 mph, and usually wreck in our county where the roads are bit less hospital to those sorts of shenanigans. Drops down to 2 lanes from 4, more sharp turns, more grandmas going 10 under on their way home from church, etc.

I have no idea how representative this is. But if anyone said to me that my county has just as many problems with traffic fatalities, per capita, as that neighboring county where all the ne'er-do-wells that technically die in my county come from, I'd call them a bold faced liar.

I suspect a lot of it has to do with the numbers of uninsured and unlicensed motorists. I can’t actually find good #s on this so could be wrong, but im sure that the # of unlicensed and uninsured motorists has exploded since we no longer enforce laws against this in most large cities.

That would surely manifest itself in a divergence between blue and red states or counties, then.

I'd be interested in better numbers on the number of licensed drivers. The absolute number of licenses per individual have been ticking up. But some of these statistics... Well, it's easy to count the absolute number of registered licenses, but people can technically drive without a valid license, and people can also have licenses in multiple states.

Now, according to the numbers I have, the number of licenses has been ticking up. And the number of licenses per capita has been ticking up. From .89 in 2020 to .91 in 2024...

Now naively, increasing the number of drivers shouldn't change that deaths/hundred thousand miles number- but when you already have 90% of people driving, 1 more percentage point probably doesn't represent the best drivers getting licenses. The more separated society is, the less public transit there is, the more people are forced to drive to work to survive, the worse the bottom of the bell curve of drivers on the streets is going to look. I can imagine quite a few ways in which Covid may have incited these factors.

This is all just a hypothesis though. Really I'd want a curated regional dataset of accidents with information about when those involved got their licenses. Without that it's hard to correlate. It's likely the accidents aren't uniformly increasing, but are localized to some areas more than others. All in all, a better dataset would let us make much better hypotheses.

Isn't this all pretty marginal stuff? How could it explain a > 20% increase in a single year? In recent decades, the rate decreased smoothly, and almost every year until 2020, and then bam:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year

Maybe, maybe not. I'm skeptical of my own hypothesis without more numbers. But if a bunch of high risk drivers started driving again circa Covid, who were previously getting around in other ways (because they know they're bad at driving), we would expect those people to get into a disproportionate number of accidents per mile driven.

These 1-2% licensing numbers are probably the wrong ones to look at for this hypothesis though. What we really want is the number of infrequent drivers that became more frequent drivers. Or better yet, miles driven sorted by driver insurance risk profile. These people may have largely already had licenses.

I can imagine quite a few ways in which Covid may have incited these factors.

I have sometimes wondered if there are people who have started driving instead of using public transit simply because they fear that they'll catch Covid on the train or the bus.

In the USA? Outside of New York and the Bay Area everyone already drove. Driving in New York is ridiculously impractical, and besides, everyone who was that worried about Covid just refused to leave the house.

Now some people driving instead of taking public transportation because public transportation imposed a bunch of extra bullshit around Covid policy seems at least mathematically possible, but I’d bet the ven diagram of ‘people bothered by useless Covid bullshit enough to change their habits’ and ‘people who took public transportation when parking at their destination cost less than $15’ is two circles.

Not only that, but the kind of person who is worried about covid enough to drive rather than use public transport is probably the kind of person who tends to be more cautious in general and not the kind of madman reckless driver who goes around causing fatalities. Some people argue that overly cautious drivers tend to cause more accidents compared to normal drivers due to an unpredictability borne out of timidness. I don't know if that's true or not, but if it is I'd suspect that the resulting collisions are more of the fender bender/rear ender type than the stuff that causes fatalities.

Tens of thousands rally against Hungary's Orban after sex abuse pardon scandal

In Hungary, the biggest political scandal in years has been unfolding over the last two weeks, and has included the resignation of the (ceremonial) president of the republic, Katalin Novák. The linked article is useful but I'll sum up what we know for now.

As you may know, the government under Viktor Orbán has used protecting children as a big political topic in the last few years, they changed the law to be stricter with pedophile crimes and also blurred the whole issue of LGBTQ materials aimed at children with the topic of pedophilia. Including TV ads, billboards, a national "child protection referendum", mandating wrapping books that discuss homosexuality in plastic foil in bookstores to protect kids etc.

In front of this backdrop, news got out two weeks ago that the president of the republic had pardoned a certain Endre K., who was sentenced to 3 years and 4 months for his involvement in a pedophilia case as an accomplice. Endre K was the deputy director of an orphanage in Bicske, a town not far from Budapest. For years, the director, János V. molested boys living there, for which he was sentenced to 8 years prison. Endre K. knew about it and helped the director, including forcing the kids to revoke their police testimonies (which resulted in the case being dropped for some time until more reports came in). According to court documents, he even drafted the statement for the kids stating that the director did not molest them.

One of the few real powers of the largely ceremonial president is to give pardons, with no need to provide any justification, and the decisions are not made public by default. This pardon was one of about two dozen that she issued on one day in April 2023 on the occasion of the papal visit to Hungary (back then she had cited the tradition to issue pardons broadly when the pope visits). Endre K was already in house arrest at the time of the pardon and had a mere 9 more months to go.

It's important to know that, while the role of the president is officially independent of the government, Katalin Novák used to be a minister in Viktor Orbán's cabinet and was put into her new position by Orbán (who controls a 2/3 supermajority in parliament).

The only reason that the pardon got public is that Endre K. had already appealed to the Curia (supreme court) before the pardon (not an actual appeal, but a complaint). And despite the pardon, the Curia legally had to make a decision. They upheld the lower court's ruling but noted that the defendant got pardoned in the meantime, and this court ruling became public in September 2023, but apparently nobody in the wider public or media noticed this. However there is a professional journal for Hungarian lawyers that every few months summarizes bigger rulings and cases that happened in Hungary, and this case got included in the January 2024 issue. A lawyer read this and notified a major left-wing news portal, 444.hu, who published the story and asked the president's office for comment.

At first, the president simply repeated that "there is no pardon for pedophiles" including posting this sentence to social media, implicitly emphasizing that Endre K was not a pedo himself just an accomplice. The government aligned media did not know how to react at first. Some of them tried to defend the guy or said the president must have had her reasons etc., but most just remained quiet and likely kept monitoring the public sentiment.

It took several days until Viktor Orbán announced in a Facebook video that he is proposing a constitutional amendment that would prevent the president from pardoning crimes committed against children.

Three days later, the president resigned and admitted she made a mistake but did not share her prior reasoning.

But the story did not stop there because pardon requests are brought to president by the minister of justice and the president's decision has to be counter-signed by the minister to become effective. The then minister, Judit Varga, was now preparing for a new role, heading the party list of Orbán's Fidesz for this June's European Parliament elections. Simultaneous to the resignation of the president, Judit Varga announced she is resigning from all her political positions and will withdraw from public life. As her reason, she only said she followed a 25 year old practice of always counter signing presidential pardons, but she would take the political responsibility for this (it's is true that refusing to counter sign is extremely rare, but there was indeed such a case about 25 years ago). (Side story: after her resignation, Judit Varga's ex-husband who was also part of Fidesz circles and led state companies, has turned on the govt and started to talk about internal corruption cases, and is promising more spicy info to come.)

After days of public confusion and speculation as to why this pardon was actually granted, it started to emerge that the most likely reason is Endre K's good connections to the Reformed (Calvinist) Church in Hungary. Namely, president Katalin Novák has been a long-time protege of Zoltán Balog, the bishop presiding over the synod of the church (the main guy of the church), who by the way also happens to have been a minister in Orbán's cabinet previously. It turns out he was pushing the idea of pardoning Endre K, but once the initial news broke, Balog announced on social media he will take a few weeks to retreat to a monastery to pray (as it turns out, in Austria).

Balog couldn't pray for long though because after a few days the synod ordered him back to Budapest to explain himself. A vote of confidence affirmed his position, though this vote was a bit fishy as it didn't involve the bishops, just lower ranking people. His refusal to resign caused a big stir in the church, even the bishop leading the largest district publicly asked him to resign. Even notorious pro-government journalists urged him to resign.

Meanwhile several youtubers and media influences announced a big protest to today evening at 6 PM in Budapest, to which lots of other artists, and famous people joined.

Fresh news while typing this: Zoltán Balog has finally (4 days after the initial vote confirming him) resigned a few minutes before the start of the big protest. He says he made a big mistake but "I asked for mercy. I wanted mercy for someone" (Note that the Hungarian word kegyelem can be translated as any of pardon, mercy or clemency). He claims to have believed the person was innocent.

Now, it's also good to know that the Reformed Church is politically quite close to the government. All churches rely on state funding but Orbán himself, former president Novák and the speaker of the Parliament László Kövér are all members of the Reformed (Calvinist) Church. It is also the case that Bicske, where the orphanage is, is a neighbor town to Orbán's birthplace Felcsút, so Endre K might have used connections on that path too, though the government has denied that Orbán knew about the pardon before the news appeared publicly.

Orbán will hold his big annual ("year evaluation") speech tomorrow (planned a long time ago), and it will be the first time he speaks since Novák resigned.

Speculation time. It's all very strange. Some speculate that the case was not accidentally found by a lawyer but it may be some kind of orchestrated thing. Perhaps for delaying ratifying Sweden's NATO membership? For generally withholding military support from Ukraine? I'm skeptical and believe it can be a coincidence. Most likely Zoltán Balog felt powerful enough to push this without telling Orbán and thought it wouldn't be public so whatever. But it's a horrible picture, Orbán would have been crazy to approve this, it was 9 months house arrest! And for what? Now his own church is associated with a pedophilia case. It's Orbán's worst communication nightmare. He always claims that Christian illiberal democracy will defend Hungarian families and kids from woke LGBTQ pedophiles. Others say this is now bringing to surface internal cracks and factional fights within Orbán's party. The fact that the pardon was offocially issued on the occasion of the papal visit is the cherry on top.

So now Orbán has to find a new president, a new person to lead the list for the EU election and the elections for mayors and local governments will also happen in June, while they don't yet even have a candidate for Budapest's lord mayor. This is the most difficult situation they have been for many years.

Okay, this is obviously a very minor point, but a Calvinist church... with a monastery?

Also, bishops? I thought the Reformed had Elders, not bishops (which are a papist custom). I looked them up and the Reformed Calvinists in Hungary do have a Presbyterian polity.

I think this is a translation issue, as "bishop" and "elder" seem to be used interchangeably for the highest offices, but the English version of the website definitely says "elders" who seem to be the highest lay persons, as well as bishops who are the highest church ministers. I don't think it's the same as bishops within hierarchical churches, though, and may be a hold-over from Catholicism before the Reformation in Hungary?

And here's the guy himself, and he's certainly not dressing like a bishop (in fact, given that liturgical purple shirt, I'd have taken the guy on the right, the lay elder, to be the bishop): Zoltán Balog – Presiding Bishop, Ministerial President of the General Synod of the RCH.

As to the Austrian monastery, since Calvinists don't have similar institutions and he needed somewhere to lie low out of the public eye for a while, he may have had contacts that he used to get him there:

He was a caretaker at the Catholic Social Home of Hosszúhetény from 1979 to 1980.

Though I don't know enough about Hungarian history, there's an odd reference here:

He recalled that he was called to the Carmelite monastery, home of Orban’s office, when he was about to separate with Varga and was asked not to do "anything foolish".

Possibly this was a monastery taken over during the Reformation and the buildings repurposed. Anyway, for once it's not a Catholic sex scandal, interesting to see it happening in one of the Protestant churches with married clergy and lay people in positions of authority and all the rest of the things we are told the Church should adopt so as to stop sex abuse scandals!

I think you have to make a distinction here between the leaders of the Radical Reformation and those of the Magisterial Reformation. The radical reformers wanted to fundamentally reshape the church, shed the theological and aesthetic accoutrements of 1,500 years, and move back to a pure, primitive form of Christianity. The magisterial reformers saw themselves as still very much a continuation of the medieval church; their goal was to keep as much as possible while fixing only those things that were clearly broken. I suppose you could liken it to two people being given a shitty piece of code. One decides the best approach is to tweak it as necessary but otherwise to make as few changes as possible, while the other decides the best approach is to start from scratch.

You mentioned that the confessional Protestants in America take their confessions’ ideas on church order more seriously than their European counterparts. I won’t speak to the Reformed, but at least among Anglicans and Lutherans, that’s just not the case. Anglicans don’t have an agreed-upon set of confessions to draw on, but they universally have bishops, while the Lutheran confessions explicitly say that bishops are fine:

Concerning this subject we have frequently testified in this assembly that it is our greatest wish to maintain the old church regulations and the government of bishops, even though they have been made by human authority, provided the bishops allow our doctrine and receive our priests. For we know that church discipline was instituted by the Fathers, in the manner laid down in the ancient canons, with a good and useful intention. But the bishops either compel our priests to reject and condemn this kind of doctrine which we have confessed, or, by a new and unheard-of cruelty, they put to death the poor innocent men. These causes hinder our priests from acknowledging such bishops. Thus the cruelty of the bishops is the reason why the canonical government, which we greatly desired to maintain, is in some places dissolved.

In Germany, all but a couple of bishops opposed the Reformation, so the Lutherans changed their governance structure to eliminate bishops. In the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, the bishops were split, so those churches were able to continue on with the same structure as before.

From a Lutheran perspective (and all Finns are by culture at least a bit Lutheran) there's nothing strange about it. Luther did the correct amount of reforming; the reformers after him started doing weird stuff and all of that spun out of control and that resulted to 50,000 weird sects and also the United States of America.

It's probably best to think of the Nordic/English state churches less as having a strict confession and more like just the Church of [Country]. That's how they all were basically established, as far as I know - first you had the kings deciding to detach their national church from Rome (bishops and all) and then, in the Nordic countries, they (haltingly, with a bit of a back-and-forth movement like what I described here), they adopted Lutheranism as the formal confession of that church. Technically it wouldn't be impossible for them to de-Lutheranize - that's what Rome spent decades (centuries) trying to get them to do, still does in a way.

Luther was in a strange position, he was more like The Last Catholic than being The First Protestant. He had a very mystical bent to his theology, which is partly why he hated the (stultified version of) Thomism which was big at the time. A bit like Henry VIII, he didn't want much more than "The Pope should agree with me" and he'd have been happy enough to leave things much as he found them, if only that had gone his way 😁

The merry band of Reformers soon fell out, and had to do some desperate papering over the theological cracks, because all of the big names had their own views on everything, and backed that up with "I'm an expert theologian" (Luther liked using 'I have a doctorate' to smack down opposition). Often the only thing on which they all agreed was "the Pope is wrong and we're not Romans". So yes, bishops are Lutheran, it was the Reformed/Calvinists who went 'the only church office is pastor and then elder'.

The Low Church and Pietist movements which came later probably were influenced more in that direction, and of course the way things developed in America put their own spin on things.

He had a very mystical bent to his theology, which is partly why he hated the (stultified version of) Thomism which was big at the time.

Not exactly. There were major Thomists at the time (he interacted with some noteworthy ones, most importantly Cajetan, who was perhaps the most important Thomist in history), but I believe in northern Europe Aquinas wasn't terribly popular, and people more frequently made use of other authors, such as Scotus or Biel. The mystic part is fairly accurate. He republished Theologia Deutsch, a work written centuries earlier due to the influence of German Dominican mystics, in which work you can pretty clearly see the influence on Luther's thought, with its emphases on humility and the worthlessness of the self (probably not the best summary, but that's from memory).

A bit like Henry VIII, he didn't want much more than "The Pope should agree with me" and he'd have been happy enough to leave things much as he found them, if only that had gone his way 😁

True, and not true. Henry VIII did not solely want that the pope would agree with him, but did actually have committed religious beliefs. He was named Defensor Fidei by the pope for his writings against Luther, arguing that there are actually seven sacraments. Henry maintained his belief in the seven sacraments his entire life and tried to crack down on the Protestants at some points, even after he'd broken with Rome. I'm not extremely knowledgeable on it, but I'd believe that Henry's actions could have been sincere as to what he thought right, not merely a power grab.

Luther definitely did have a bunch of things he wanted corrected, though (far more than Henry). There's a sense in which he merely wanted the pope to agree with him, but what he wanted agreement on was far more extensive, and more about teaching (as well as the moral reform of the church). His thoughts on the pope changed fairly quickly at the beginning, going from that the pope was good etc. but not able to do quite as much as was claimed re:indulgences, to thinking that the pope was the antichrist. (but even at that later point, in 1520, when he thought that the papacy was the Antichrist, he still would have reconciled had the pope just fixed things—stop seizing power, clean out the corruption, and correct the problematic teachings and practices.)

The merry band of Reformers soon fell out, and had to do some desperate papering over the theological cracks, because all of the big names had their own views on everything, and backed that up with "I'm an expert theologian" (Luther liked using 'I have a doctorate' to smack down opposition).

This is overstated. Assuming you're not talking about the anabaptists, there was a general consensus on quite a lot, and a lot of the theologians were more conciliatory than Luther. Calvin wanted to be considered Lutheran and wanted to reconcile, and there were others pushing for unity and moderation (e.g. Melanchthon, Philp of Hesse, Bucer). But Luther and some others were prone to be scathing rather than charitable, and did not think Zwingli's view within the range of being acceptable on the Lord's Supper. (Though Luther did put up with some in-between stances like Melanchthon's or Bucer's, if I remember correctly).

So yes, bishops are Lutheran, it was the Reformed/Calvinists who went 'the only church office is pastor and then elder'.

Sort of true, as German Lutherans didn't really have bishops, because the existing bishops in Germany weren't convinced (not sure to what extent this was motivated by the power they'd lose if they did turn Lutheran). Swedish Lutherans do, as the turn to Lutheranism came from the king, allowing the bishops to be preserved.

I'm not sure to what extent presbyterianism was considered to be instituted jure divino. I know that belief was common in England when there were conflicts with the puritans, but I don't know whether that was something earlier, or whether it was merely something they recommended. I was under the impression that they got along pretty well with the Anglicans for a while. (e.g. Vermigli was in England for some time and worked with Cranmer)

Oh, Henry definitely thought he was a theologian; there's an account in MacCulloch's biography of Thomas Cromwell of Henry personally presiding over a heresy trial, all dressed in white, to argue theology with the accused. It wasn't simply about a power grab, I agree; that's why he was so upset when things did not go his way. He wanted this thing, he had convinced himself he was in the right on this thing, he had been promised this thing, why wasn't he getting this thing? That's why Wolsey fell, when his arrogance and power-grabbing weren't balanced out by being able to deliver the divorce for Henry, and why Henry got his pet scholars and theologians to scrabble up a decision that agreed with him on the rightness of the divorce. He couldn't see why the Pope just wouldn't agree with him, so the Pope must be in the wrong, and the genuine Reformers used that to get Henry to implement certain amount of reform in the new English Church.

That's also why Henry was so angry with the likes of Thomas More and the Carthusians; if people with good reputations at home and abroad were disagreeing with him, this was painting him as being wrong. And he was the King, and the King could never be wrong, so they had to pay for that. He was even-handed about burning as heretics both Catholics and Protestants who went too far from what he considered correct:

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Thomas Cromwell: A Life

This agenda had its problems, because the autumn of 1538 proved a switchback of religious extremes, always dangerous for what by now we can call a new evangelical establishment. ...The evangelical clergy were much more clear-cut in their views, more committed by vocation and hence more exposed, than the noblemen. Nevertheless, all were painfully aware of their vulnerability, particularly now that one of their most determined opponents, Stephen Gardiner, had returned from near three years of embassy in France, vigilant for any opportunity to arouse the King’s suspicions of evangelical proceedings. The evangelicals’ strategy to cover their backs was to show themselves as severe as possible to those on their more radical flank.

In any case they saw the persecution of Anabaptists as a necessary and congenial task to protect godly religion, as was apparent when the threat first appeared in 1535 ...Radical activity, it turned out, had extended to a printed English tract challenging orthodox views on the nature of Jesus Christ. Cromwell acted straight away, appointing vice-gerential commissioners from the areas around London where the threat was most acute; the commissioners were balanced between evangelicals and conservatives. Burnings of Anabaptists followed in the capital and in Colchester.

Alongside that campaign was an affair potentially far more dangerous to the evangelical cause, because it involved one of their own, a former don of Queens’ Cambridge called John Lambert alias Nicholson. In 1531, when the old Church leadership was still fighting its corner, Convocation singled Lambert out for prosecution alongside such figures of the future establishment as Hugh Latimer. By winter 1536 it was Cranmer and Latimer who found themselves constrained to get Lambert imprisoned by Chancellor Audley for sounding off about prayer to saints. Now, in autumn 1538, Lambert confronted a prominent London evangelical and royal chaplain, John Taylor, with outspoken scepticism about the bodily presence of Christ in eucharistic bread and wine. Taylor called on Robert Barnes to help him defend a real-presence theology which avoided papal error (Barnes was, after all, the most obvious and authentic Lutheran in all England), and he then brought in Cranmer. The Archbishop prudently put Lambert in confinement again – but all in vain: fatally convinced of his own rightness, Lambert appealed to the King to hear his case.

This was a disastrous misjudgement. Henry’s customary inclination to occupy himself with theology when lacking a wife made him take a particular interest in the case, and his mood was currently veering towards the conservative end of his volatile spectrum. That was apparent from a new royal proclamation on religion: a personal public intervention, sidelining his Vice-Gerent, who one might have thought had already produced enough regulation for the Church less than two months before. The proclamation followed up various of Cromwell’s orders, and repeated condemnations of Anabaptism and Becket, but it also imposed censorship on the printing press, including unauthorized versions of the Bible, and it expressly forbade clergy to marry – a reaction to the fact that in southern England a number of clergy were doing just that (not to mention the Archbishop of Canterbury’s wife Margarete, lurking obscurely in one of his palaces in Kent).

Even if we did not possess a draft of this proclamation emended in the King’s own hand, the general shapelessness and theological incoherence of the final version is redolent of brusque royal papering-over of disagreements among his bishops. Worse still for John Lambert, this document was issued on 16 November as part of the theatrics in the most high-profile heresy trial that early Tudor England had seen, with Lambert himself and King Henry as joint and opposed stars of the proceedings. The Supreme Head of the Church of England chose to preside himself over the event in Westminster Hall, symbolically clad in white, with his bishops merely as assistants to undertake the theological detail of prosecution. Cromwell’s only substantial part was to house the condemned prisoner, presumably at The Rolls, before Lambert was taken to the stake at Smithfield on 22 November: the same fate as Forest had suffered there six months before, but for polar-opposite beliefs.

The whole Lambert business hugely embarrassed John Foxe when he wrote it up in Acts and Monuments, given that it implicated some of his chief Protestant heroes in burning a man who looked in retrospect like a good Protestant. Cranmer in particular has come in for plenty of abuse for inconsistency among later writers. Yet the Archbishop’s own theology of the eucharist at the time was opposed to the views of Lambert, who may also have affirmed some real radicalism on infant baptism and the nature of Christ, and the Lutheran princes of Germany expressed no disapproval of the condemnation. Cromwell kept his counsel. Two days later, effectively in a continuation of the same theatre, Bishop Hilsey returned to Paul’s Cross to deliver a definitive exposure and mockery of the Holy Blood of Hailes, this time with the relic on hand as his visual aid – in careful pairing with this symbol of old error, new error was represented by four immigrant Anabaptist prisoners standing beside the pulpit bearing their heretics’ faggots, preparatory to burning at the stake. The occasion was a necessary act of damage limitation for the evangelical establishment in relation to King Henry.

My impression was that he was fine with it, but didn't think it necessary, and the reason that he didn't end up with bishops is that the Protestants generally failed to attract bishops to their cause. But in Sweden, which went Lutheran, it was done top-down enough (like England) that they managed to keep the bishops.

It's certainly political. The reformed church is seen as the "Hungarian national" religion, while German protestants living in Hungary were Lutheran. During the Ottoman occupation when Hungary was divided, the Hungarian ruling princes of Transylvania were Calvinist (or sometimes Unitarian) while the Habsburgs leading Royal Hungary werr Catholic. And some nationalities like Serbs and Romanians living in Hungary were orthodox. Nationality and denomination were and are strongly correlated. Most lay people have no idea about the denominational details, they just get born into whichever church their ethnic community belongs to.

There are curious cases like the Hungarian-speaking orthodox in Transylvania who used to be Greek Catholics (and still earlier they had been Eastern Orthodox) but Greek Catholicism was banned during communism and their churches were converted to Orthodoxy. After the fall of communism in Romania, religious freedom was introduced, so the Greek Catholics got legalized again, but now these Hungarian communities are reluctant to convert back to Greek Catholicism, because they care more about their priests than the denomination and the liturgy is similar anyway. And in these areas actually religious affiliation is often the primary identity. So being orthodox, some of these people think they are "Hungarian speaking Romanians", since Orthodoxy is equated with Romanian.

Note however that political and historic events are much stronger in determining where someone ends up than theological fine points. It's just weird to belong to a church of a different ethnicity in these areas.

Hungarian religious history is definitely something I know much less about than what happened further west, so I appreciate the outline. What familiarity I have with Hungarian religious history is really... messy. I do recall being very confused when I learned about the Hungarian Crown being a gift from the Byzantines to a monarch who remained in communion with the Pope and on good terms with Constantinople well after the communication between the two fell apart. It sounds from your description like that complex situation has continued into the present where Latin Catholics, Eastern Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants are all significant in their own ways, which is rather a fascinating religious landscape reflecting the ethnic diversity of the country.

Most lay people have no idea about the denominational details, they just get born into whichever church their ethnic community belongs to

That's definitely everybody everywhere, people who study these things and seek something out are absolutely the minority. It's significant that the outcome of the Peace of Westphalia wasn't exactly "everyone gets to decide their own religion" but "every prince gets to decide the religion of his kingdom," though with toleration for dissenting subjects. And as kingdoms evolved into nation-states, this does seem to have developed into closely-knit national churches.

One reason for this diversity is the geographic location as the buffer zone between Western Catholicism / Habsburg / HRE, Byzantine Christianity as well as the Ottoman Muslim influence in the occupied area and the Ottoman-aligned Transylvania (the Hungarian princes of Transylvania rather oriented towards the Ottomans to oppose the Austrian Habsburg push for taking the country).

The Islamic influence was mainly that they simply didn't care which flavor of Christianity people followed as long as they paid the tax, so the counter-reformation didn't happen in Eastern Hungary and Transylvania and protestants could go to extremes in peace (like Unitarianism that outright denies the Trinity and Christ's divinity).

Today's landscape in Hungary (2022) is (note that 40% declined to answer) 28% Roman Catholic, 2% Greek Catholic, 10% Calvinist, 2% Lutheran. Orthodox practically nonexistent (0.16%).

I think, based on cursory reading, it's more a combination of post-Communism and Western secularisation; people weren't raised to go to church, the church didn't have too much influence, so there's a 'national' church now (the Reformed) but nobody much goes to church or gets involved past married/buried in church (if they even go for that). A bit like the Church of England, if I can be mildly snarky, which is the state church but has moved to position itself as 'the church of all the people of the nation', which means including Catholics, Muslims, Jews, and atheists as well because being a state church they represent the entire population (yeah, I know, that's pretty shaky but they have to maintain relevance somehow). Take these figures from 2022:

The Worshipping Community of a church is defined as those people who attend worship regularly, once a month or more (whether in-person or “at home”).
The total Worshipping Community was 1,113,000 people in 2019; 1,031,000 people in 2020; 966,000 people in 2021; and 984,000 people in 2022.
The Church of England’s Worshipping Community in 2022 was 1.7% of the population of England

For comparison purposes, the population of England (not Great Britain or the UK) is around 57 million.

I don't get the impression that Hungarian Calvinism is like American Episcopalianism, which was always a small church and did lean heavily towards 'the elite', hence its continuing pretensions to 'the National Cathedral' and so forth.

Not at all, actually it's more the religion of peasants (whose ancestors are from the east where the Austrians didn't manage to re-catholicize them). Orbán himself comes from a simple background. But also, as Hungary was ruled by the Austrian Habsburgs who led the counter reformation, being protestant was a kind of defiant national opposition against the Austrian rulers.

When I say they are a "national" church, I mean more that they tend to be more patriotic and nation-focused, they even sing the national anthem in their liturgy sometimes, they use the national flag more, etc. Since there is no pope above them outside the nation, nobody stops this type of thing, so as a Reformed Christian himself, nationalism and religion are strongly connected in Orbán's mind too.

I don't think the argument for married clergy etc. is that there's never going to be sex scandals - priests are human and as such sinners - after all - but rather that the Catholic tradition of nonmarried clergy means the position tends to attract a particular type of a person - ie. those who aren't attracted to adult women, pedos being in this category alongside homosexuals and asexuals - and that this in turn tends to eventually leave an increasing mark on the entire church hierarcy, its culture of silence, ways of shunting cases aside etc.

Anyway, for once it's not a Catholic sex scandal, interesting to see it happening in one of the Protestant churches with married clergy and lay people in positions of authority and all the rest of the things we are told the Church should adopt so as to stop sex abuse scandals!

Protestant sex scandals are if anything more common than catholic ones.

My impression of the "orthodox" Calvinist interpretation is that the words "elder", "bishop", and "pastor" in the New Testament all mean the exact same thing.

Does "pastor" show up in the New Testament? My understanding is only "presbyter" and "episkopos" show up, alongside references to deacons.

‘Presbyteros’ ‘diakonos’ and ‘episkopos’ show up in the Pauline epistles; the translations are literally ‘elder’ ‘servant’ and ‘overseer’ respectively but catholic and orthodox Christians think this refers to priests deacons and bishops(Protestants vary). Jesus in a few parables uses a word meaning ‘shepherd’ to refer to the general category of church leadership(and pastor is of course Latin for shepherd), but more as a metaphor for the role of church leaders than as a literal title.

The literal word is "shepherd", but there are some locations where it is clearly referring to some sort of church leader.

He went to pray in an orthodox monastery, called Maria Schutz. Don't ask why. Here's an fb post of the monastery where he's the guy on the right. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php/?photo_id=785558250264913

Uh, was his crime listed as ‘accomplice to pedophilia’ or was it listed as ‘hampering a police investigation’ or something similar?

Yeah, to me, it sounds more like "obstruction of justice" is what he is technically guilty of, it's what he did it in service of that understandably gets people's hackles up.

Pressuring victims of anything to retract their claims gets my hackles up. There are forms of "obstruction of justice" that don't outrage me, where people resist arrest, or destroy evidence when they get caught doing something illegal. Like, you shouldn't do that, but I get it. But witness tampering, threats, corruption? That's unacceptable, regardless of what it's in service of.

Coercion or duress, I'm not sure about the English term. Basically blackmail in plain words. He made the kids revoke their police testimony by threatening them with various things. Media reports he threatened that a pair of siblings who lived there would be separated and sent to different orphanages.

He wrote text for them to sign, which the court documents cite as (my translation) "I made it up that we had jerked off my genital together and that he had done that to other children. The truth is that he didn't pull my pants down and didnt touch it and didn't jerk it off."

One of the kids later committed suicide as well.

So it sounds like maybe she thought he had covered up eg embezzlement and was doing a political ally a dubiously legal favor.

The president obviously receives extensive documentation about the case, including the letter by the person requesting the pardon (it appears that this was the wife of the convict). It also includes a recommendation by the minister of justice. The government is currently refusing to confirm whether the minister recommended granting the pardon or not, but according to press sources the minister did not recommend the pardon, but she still counter signed it afterwards.

As one of Novák's advisors, it is rumored that Balog was very often in the presidential office to a degree that was already annoying the staff, and Novák was for long a "mentee" of Balog.

The pedophile director himself, who molested boys between 2004 and 2016, received a Hungarian Order of Merit (bronze) in 2016 from the previous president, on the recommendation of Balog. And apparently the pardoned man's father was a lay leader in the reformed church as well.

Based on currently available media reports by investigative journalists, it seems that Orbán was actually kept out of the loop here (one man can't manage every individual issue after all and must delegate). Probably the family lobbied the church leadership who lobbied Balog who told Novák to sign. Minister Judit Varga (if it's true that she did not support the pardon initially) may have also been left out of the loop and saw no reason to support this based on the documents, but all requests for pardon must be forwarded to the president by the minister. And upon seeing here recommendation overturned she may have assumed higher powers took care of this already so she didn't double check this with Orbán.

Orbán is a masterful Machiavellian and rotates the second line of leadership quite often, so nobody grows to be to autonomous. And he usually picks very trusted people to the president's position. The last one, Áder, for example was his college dorm friend. But he wanted a female president this time so couldnt choose one of the old friends as female politicians are quite rare. And it seems Novák was more loyal to Balog than Orbán himself.

Probably they all thought it's no big deal as it all remains secret anyway and everything routinely gets done through favors and corruption so whatever. And that's usually okay with the public if it's just about stealing public money. But people are very sensitive to pedophilia cases, not unrelated to the government's child protection rhetoric.

So to sum it up, I think it signals people in the second and third lines of power getting too cocky in offering and expecting favors, and Orban needs to cull some of them so they know who's the silverback here. And that he needs to manually control even more things because people even mess up such easy things.

According to here, this is the charge:

Konya, who was sentenced to 3 years and 4 months in prison for pressuring victims to retract their claims of sexual abuse by the institution's director, sentenced to eight years for abusing at least 10 children between 2004 and 2016.

So whether he knew or not that the director was abusing the children, he did help cover it all up by getting them to retract their claims.

Isn't this good? If pedophiles are pardoned and there's a massive fracas where people are forced to resign because it goes against the will of the people, that's democracy working as it should. In the US they pardon all kinds of creeps and weirdoes. Trump pardoned, amongst other people, a fraudster who then committed even more fraud: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/convicted-con-man-was-pardoned-trump-charged-fraud-rcna95172

This pardon happened almost a year ago but since pardons are not public they were going to get away with it. It only got public through a weird turn of events that a later court ruling referred to the pardon. But if the guy hadn't appealed to a higher court, the pardon would have remained secret forever.

Basically, it's good that these people resigned but the whole ordeal revealed that connections to the government circles is a literal get out of jail free card. That if your family has good church connections, you can get the church leader, who used to be a cabinet minister, to push the president to give a pardon. So it's more like, who knows what else they routinely do as favors based on connections. Who else have they pardoned and for what?

Thoughts on Consumption, Ethical and Otherwise

TLDR: As costs have changed with automation/globalization/etc the status implications attached to items or forms of consumption have changed, despite the costs reflecting less or even opposite directions of status. Why have the implications persisted beyond the mechanical reasons for it?

A discussion elsewhere since lost, and that acid-trip TEMU ad at the Super Bowl, had me thinking about a statistic I saw in a WSJ article that has really stuck with me.

American’s average spending on apparel has declined from 14% of expenditures in 1901 to 10% in 1960 to 4% in 2002. For the most part, we can see that as early industrialization in 1901, when many things were still tailored, to full factory industrialization in 1960, to early globalization in 2002. In 2023, with full globalization, expenditure on clothing declined all the way to 2%.*

My wife and I are probably a little fancier and more enthusiastic about clothing than the average on the Motte, if asked I would say that I spend more on clothing than I need to and own too much and too expensive of clothing, but we were absolutely blown away by the idea of spending 10% of our annual income on clothing. We agreed that we could probably do it, and have fun doing so!, for one or maybe two years, but after that the budget that would create would just be insane. The idea, as an upper-middle class professional couple, of spending something like $30k-$40k on clothing per year every year is insanity! Buying the best and starting with nothing, I don’t really see how a man in my position could spend more than $10k on clothing, once, with less than $1k/yr spending after that to maintain/freshen, unless one gets deep into really truly strange and expensive frivolities. Yet we still talk about clothing items as status symbols in the same way, despite clothing making up a decreasing percentage of spending, despite the obvious fact that if a lower income American spent like a 1960 American they could easily afford to look like a modern upper class American. Clothing just isn’t actually expensive anymore.

And this got me thinking of how many status symbols have changed so thoroughly in their cost, while remaining essentially the same in their perception. I own a 25 year old BMW 3 Series, which had a $27,000 msrp when new, which I like driving around casually; I also have a 2008 Chevrolet Avalanche which I drive for work, which had an MSRP of $48,000 new. ((For those of you following along at home, I never got around to actually buying a new-er manual car to replace it)) Persistently, people will give me “rich kid” jokes about the BMW, while the Chevy is treated as working class. Not only that, guys driving new pickups that retail north of $60k will give me the same guff about the BMW! The branding still gives credibility or prestige, even long after the relationship of cost has evaporated or reversed. Small “sporty” BMW = rich, pickup truck = blue collar.

I’m utterly confused as to how people around me spend their money, and I’m fairly certain they are equally confused by how I spend mine. I have friends with similar incomes to mine, who are in credit card debt, but also don’t have the things I would expect a person with my income who is also in credit card debt to have. The money seems to evaporate into nights out, travel, concerts, and house renovations. They look at things I “waste" money on, and I can’t say they don’t have a point: I could probably reduce my clothing budget significantly, I own too much expensive assorted strength training and fitness crap, I could reduce my grocery/food budget considerably if I cooked more from scratch. But then I equally look at their spending, and they invite me to go on a trip, or out to a bar, and I look at the price and say I’m not spending $2k on travel, or $100 on a night out. Though I’ll equally admit that my own travel habits are extremely cheap, and my own tastes in food and especially alcohol relatively light and plebeian.

We’re factually in the same social class, we make similar money in similar positions, but our consumption patterns are different. And what fascinates me is that one set of consumption patterns is judged as normal, even blue collar, while another is judged as fancy, bougie, aristocratic. And the meanings of these symbols of upper-class taste have endured beyond and transcended the actual cost-balance of the activities. The expensive microbrewery play-acts as industrial space. Expensive travel is normal, even treated as normative. Housing, education, healthcare are ruinously expensive but treated as normal, invisible even. I’m not sure I know who is right and who is wrong, or even if someone is right or wrong, in terms of what form of spending will lead to The Good Life. But I’m sure we’re both going wrong in reading into status symbols in the way people once did, when the meanings are so twisted and confused.

*Obvious confounding factor here is children. Children grow out of their clothing, ruin their clothing etc in ways that adults don't. This probably accounts for several percentage points in the decline, though that becomes its own discussion about natalism and children as cost and children as status symbol.

I expect this is balanced out by the usual cost saving measures available to families in 1900- namely, every woman could sew, and children weren’t expected to have multiple nice outfits, just one that was decent.

That, and you only really have to buy kids clothes once per gender; even today most families with 3+ kids are generally saving old clothes for the next sibling. The 1900 fertility rate was higher than it is today, but it’s not that much higher to balance this out.

I don’t really see how a man in my position could spend more than $10k on clothing, once, with less than $1k/yr spending after that to maintain/freshen, unless one gets deep into really truly strange and expensive frivolities.

Really? I'm not saying it's advisable, but it's pretty easy to spend a couple grand per suit, a couple hundred per shirt, and hundreds each on sweaters. Throw in some expensive jeans and fancy socks. Spend another couple grand on Tracksmith running gear. If we're counting shoes, I go through like $500/year in running shoes alone. Don't get me wrong, I don't personally spend all that much on clothes in aggregate, but it's pretty easy to spend a lot as soon as you're into bespoke clothing or just high-end materials.

I’m utterly confused as to how people around me spend their money, and I’m fairly certain they are equally confused by how I spend mine.

Yeah, I remain persistently puzzled by how people making anything north of six-figures wind up broke. It is just not very hard at all to look at how much money you're taking in and elect to spend less than that.

Really. Though it may be that my definition of "strange and expensive frivolities" is doing a lot of work there. The tough thing isn't spending money once, it's spending money every year. I've always been a big second hand shopper, and I fell for the BIFL/Heritage Fashion/Investment Piece trend of the early 2010s, and the problem is you buy all this great stuff and it doesn't wear out. I like Allen Edmonds shoes, they can easily run $500-600, and those are quality American made leather shoes. But I really liked them, and pretty soon I had five or six pairs from picking them up at thrift stores, and I still have them all eight to ten years later. Same with suits, same with quality shirts (albeit less so). I'm wearing a lot of the same stuff I bought years ago.

If I were to budget $10k+, for a year or maybe two, I could buy a lot of the things I bought second hand brand new, which would be fun. I can easily go buy a few $900 suits, and a few really great $1k winter jackets, and some $500 pairs of shoes to match. But then I'd have all that the next year! And the year after that! The cost of that high-quality wardrobe is high to start, but the maintenance cost is low, you can't just keep buying suits every year or you're going need impractically large closet.

Yeah, I remain persistently puzzled by how people making anything north of six-figures wind up broke.

I've seen literal brain surgeons be very financially clueless.

If you're not educated in how to manage and invest, that sort of thing can get away from you very quickly.

I have literally never in my life seen a shirt or sweater that costs $200+. The most expensive shirts I can get cost $100 each, and those are dress shirts (which most people will only ever need one or two of). Everything else is less, often significantly less. The most expensive jeans I have ever seen are Levi's that sometimes cost upwards of $100/pair, but you don't need many and they last years and years. Most people only need one suit, two if they're really feeling fancy and want different colors (and again, those last for years and years).

I'm definitely with @FiveHourMarathon on this one. I can imagine someone who is trying to spend massive amounts of money might spend $10k+/year, for sure. But I can't imagine how someone might have normal clothing habits where they spend that kind of money without even meaning to.

Walk into a Brunello Cucinelli, a Hermes, a Thom Browne, or similar and you'll find hundreds of pretty normal looking clothes selling at 1k+ prices each.

You've never seen a $200 sweater? Take a trip to the mall today.

https://www.nordstrom.com/s/7542724

I confess that while I've been in a Nordstrom (and other mall stores), I haven't actually been shopping there. I am normally just sitting in the husband area while we all dick around on our phones waiting for our respective wives to finish shopping.

This is a human rights issue that needs to be improved upon: the lingerie section at Nordstrom needs a better husband waiting area. My wife always takes a million fucking hours while she gets fitted, is upset that her rib cage didn't get any bigger so the size is still so weird they'll only carry it in three bras, the sales woman digs through the back to find the one weirdo Barbie doll size, then tries all three on until she settles on the one that looks least orthopedic. But the waiting with my credit card area is too exposed! I want somewhere no one sees me!

I have vintage cashmere sweaters that cost $500+ new, but once again though expensive they lasted the original owners some period of time, and have lasted me years and years since. You can buy several of them but you can't do that every year without amassing a ridiculous collection.

Buying nice "vintage" clothing at thrift stores, both living near the sort of thrift store that regularly has nice things, and having the knowledge and patience to find the nice things also comes across as extremely bougie, with a bit of hipster thrown in. More so than just buying the sweater new, something someone who makes a lot less might be proud of, and see as an accomplishment. I remember someone commenting about how she bought nice boots once, and realizing she was an adult now, and could buy a $200 pair of boots she had always wanted now! Which was empowering for her.

Very true. Second hand shopping is a true High-Low barber pole activity. The Boston Cracked Shoe. The middle class is defined by discomfort with their status, which comes out as a sense of discomfort with buying second hand clothing. Where the poor have no pride to harm, and the rich are comfortable enough with their status that they feel no threat from telling someone they bought a suit at Goodwill. My father in law could not stop laughing about how, in a wedding of two one percenter families, we had a tiny wedding and my wife thrifted her gown while I had an old tux from Goodwill I dusted off for the occasion (though I did buy a pair of new pants for the occasion.

Though I do think more sanitized, online operations like Poshmark and TheRealReal might be changing things around.

There are definitely people who do just that, though, and they sell their old clothes or donate to thrift stores.

You can buy several of them but you can't do that every year without amassing a ridiculous collection.

Or you can sell the old ones to you and buy nice fresh ones!

People do do this; seems crazy to me as well but it's a thing.

To be fair, there’s a brigade of women who buy entirely new wardrobes every year to keep up with fashion. That crowd might spend 10% of income on clothes- I’m doubting they all have 6 figure incomes, so maybe more like $6k/yr on average. That seems like a thing that could be true.

dress shirts (which most people will only ever need one or two of)

The first result on Google for the query "how many dress shirts own":

Generally, it is suggested that men own around 8–12 dress shirts if you wear them every day for work, or just 3 if you only wear them for special occasions.

Yes, and most people don't wear dress shirts every day for work. There's a reason I said "most people".

I'm someone who's both fairly frugal and has no issue purchasing clothing/items second hand with the plan to wear them until they fall apart. This, combined with being patient, means I've acquired some choice deals over time.

It's also lead to moments where I realize that I'm out and about for outdoor chores while wearing clothing(shirt, pants, shoes, watch) that, had I bought new, would be edging toward a thousand dollars. So... shrugs helplessly

I think one thing missing from the clothes discussion is that real disposable income has exploded over the covered period. So much so that the 2% people are spending in 2023 is more in real dollars than the 10% in 1901. Americans spend more real dollars on clothes now than they did in 1901, it's just a smaller fraction of income because income has grown even faster than clothing expenditures.

while remaining essentially the same in their perception.

Did they?

I don't know what clothing you and your wife wear, but in general is seems like clothing primarily signals things about youth/age/region/tastes/subculture, and signals about wealth very little unless your wife is buying those bespoke ballgowns from the Oscars or something. Plumber is by far the most enthusiastic describer of clothing in the SSC-sphere, and is credibly an actual plumber.

There's a certain class of mostly older women who wear large pieces of turquoise jewelry. It's especially common among realtors in their professional photography. As far as I can tell, it signals "fussy and hard to work with," but I assume they're going for something else. Regionally sensitive PMC? I'm not exactly sure, but it's consistent enough to be meaningful and intentional. Turquoise jewelry is not so cheap that people don't think about buying it, but not so expensive that even a burger flipper working their first job couldn't save up and buy an elaborate piece if they really wanted to. Or couldn't get it at a second hand shop at a steep discount. But they generally don't, because it's a signal from a previous generation, from a time when a person could spend 10% of their income on clothing, and actually project a meaningful image. From a time when people inherited things for reasons other than nostalgia, and there weren't a bunch of china tea sets in the second hand stores for $10.

Keeping slim and in shape later in life signals status, and it does seem like there's a trend of people over 30 who want to show how young they still are training for and running marathons and climbing mountains. Especially the training part. our user name seems to fit into that pattern?

BMW 3 Series

I looked this up. It just looks like a sedan? A nice-ish sedan. I'm surprised you're getting comments on that car, were they joking? Is it because you have to find a special mechanic or something? I'm trying to recall people around me talking about cars, and other than comments about "compensating" or "mid life crisis," it's mostly been for hobby cars that they clearly put some personal attention into, like turquoise muscle cars that people decorate for car parades. I have heard some shade thrown at the big trucks that look like they haven't ever been used to haul anything, and likely never will, but I do also see a lot of expensive trucks genuinely hauling things (RV looking trailers if they're well off, but still), so it can be hard to guess.

the money seems to evaporate into nights out, travel, concerts, and house renovations.

My workplace tends lower middle class, with less money than yours, very far from the coasts, and I have been surprised by how many people talk about taking their kids to Disney World, especially, and also parties with a lot of other kids at trampoline sorts of places. It's not that we don't go on trips ourselves, or wouldn't go to Disney World on principle, but these are the same people talking about how they hope they can make it to their next paycheck, as though credit is not a thing. Are they not using credit because they're worried they'll go too far if they start, or just exaggerating about needing to wait until actual payday?

And what fascinates me is that one set of consumption patterns is judged as normal, even blue collar, while another is judged as fancy, bougie, aristocratic.

Sure. Construction contractors sometimes make a decent amount of money, but they will buy pickup trucks and take their kids to Disney World with it. They will not buy nice suites, because where would they wear them? Going to the opera costs the same as going to three regular movies, but then you have to sit through an opera. Visibly training for running events is extremely bougie.

these are the same people talking about how they hope they can make it to their next paycheck, as though credit is not a thing. Are they not using credit because they're worried they'll go too far if they start, or just exaggerating about needing to wait until actual payday?

They don't think about using credit, on principle.

I'm from a very similar background to your co-workers -- lower-middle class, not coastal -- and it was drilled into my head from a young age that debt meant slavery and you use credit cards only and exclusively to build credit for mortgages or cars (if you have to), and you must pay it off each month, and preferrably keep your credit utilization low. My parents have a solid nest-egg and little debt, but if you talked to them about money you'd think they were constantly in danger of bankruptcy. In their household, paying interest on a credit card even one month is something close to a mortal sin -- it's just unthinkable.

While I think this is probably an overreaction to the problems of debt, I suspect it's the same sort of cultural overreaction that made Baptists go hard against liquor. The American frontier was full of drunks -- literally, there were stories of preachers having their church ransacked by drunk mobs on Sunday morning. So the clergy who ministered to them (mostly congregationalists, Methodists, and Baptists) ended up taking the nuclear option: "You people obviously can't handle your booze, so we're going full abstentionist, no liquor at all, you show up drunk and we're disfellowshipping you. Shape up, you sinners."

And that view became crystalized and theologized from a discipline based on prudence to a definitive theological approach of Methodists and Baptists, the same way that clerical celibacy in the Latin Church went from a discipline based on preventing the direct inheritance of parishes to (in the trad days) a definitive theological approach where clergy are seen as marrying the Church.

Nowadays, the American interior (where evangelicals are the primary ministers, interestingly enough) is now full of people trapped in debt. So, the approach of normie American interior culture is shaped by this problem in a similar way alcohol to how alcohol shaped the frontier, eschewing it totally because of the potential for abuse (and perhaps because it signals separation from less conscientous people for whom debt is less controlled). I think in religious terms, so what strikes me is how this gets tangled up in the prosperity gospel, producing "supernatural debt cancellation", the favorite of slimy televangelists the world over. Call it evangelicals finally figuring out usury is supposed to be a sin.

Your parents are right about credit card interest.

That improperly risk-averse position is not having/using one for regular spending instead of a debit card.

I looked this up. It just looks like a sedan? A nice-ish sedan.

Bmw 3 (especially the M series) series from the 90s and 80s are the ultimate driver's car. Rear wheel drive. Very powerful, temperament, hard to tame. All around fun.

My thought with ethical or conscious consumption is a very basic principle of being frugal about purchases while trying to do as little harm with those purchases as possible especially in areas I personally care deeply about.

Now by frugal, I mean that I tend to try to not buy things I don’t need and when I do, I aim for things that last and aren’t going to be obviously out of style or obsolete quickly. My style hasn’t changed all that much so it doesn’t matter if I don’t buy brand new clothes all the time. I tend toward minimalist ideas.

As far as ethics, I avoid companies that abuse workers and aren’t terrible for the environment. Beyond that, unless the company is doing obvious evil, I don’t spend a lot of time overthinking purchases.

The detailed underlying statistics are available here.

Regarding the footnote: In year 2022, the proportion of income spent on "apparel and services" was 2.7 percent for all consumer units, ranging from 2.1 percent for single people to 3.3 percent for units consisting of five of more people (on average, 5.7 people, including 2.7 children, 0.2 person 65 or older, and 2.8 other adults).

Is the BMW sticker price fair? Maintenance still has to be at Euro-import level I would assume. Maybe a little cheaper than modern cars. Even a fully paid off bmw I would assume is running 3-6k minimum in yearly costs. While the big American truck probably has cheaper parts.

I have no problem on spending a lot of money on doing things versus clothing.

Funny someone else said they avoid companies that abuse their workers. I got no qualms and think I’m doing a good thing buying from them. In that case your most likely giving someone a wage versus subsistence farming or worse.

This will probably get some play and is a bit of a different topic. Former CEO of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicicki son died of a drug freshman year of college at Cal.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/former-youtube-ceos-son-found-dead-uc-berkeley-rcna139355

The obvious implications is he took something laced with fentanyl. Culture war wise concerns about fentanyl are red coded though issues with fentanyl seem apparent in both red and blue states and people.

Overall I feel like this issue has lost its place in the news cycle. A quick google overdose deaths topped 112k in 2023 an all-time record. I am seeing a current U.S. population of 334 million. So to put this in perspective 112k multiplied by an average lifespan of 80 years is like 9 million deaths. Or close to 3% of US population at current rates will die by a drug overdose. I think I can fairly say it’s a huge issue even if you disagree with how I’m calculating the average persons risks of OD at around 3% in their lifetime.

Quick analysis of the kid he looks in shape for a 19 year old and was majoring in math so he’s the dream of any parent. Odd thing is he was found unresponsive at 4:23 pm on a Tuesday. That is going to be weird and details will come out as that time frame is more of an addict death. Versus I expected a weekend OD and he did some fentanyl laced coke/Molly during the weekend.

From people I’ve talked to opioids are amazing. I do not know if I’ve ever done them. They have to be if people do them. I’ve done molly/coke/mushrooms in the past. The big thing to me is I’m paranoid I’m doing something laced now and have largely cut out doing anything now.

The midtwit take is that dealers either sell both and cross contaminate or lace other drugs to get people addicted. Personally opinion and perhaps a difference without a difference is it’s probably lacing just so people say it’s the good shit.

Sorry for their loss.

Culture war issues

  1. Plays into the immigration debate of not controlling the border

  2. Blue states seem to be adopting a let it happen and treat but it doesn’t seem to be working

  3. War on drug topics. I don’t think the old war on drugs ever dealt with the death rate we have now but war on drugs doesn’t seem stupid when it’s a 3% population level lifetime death rate which is far higher than COVID and killing people with high life expectancy

  4. Other policy considerations. Some would say things like legalize drugs to kill fentanyl and people get “safe” drugs. Some conservative arguments that something’s should just be illegal. Opioids probably are fantastic but the death rate for someone who tries opioids seems extremely high.

My numeracy tells me this is a big problem and I believe an order of magnitude bigger problem than COVID. I don’t think it’s quite as hard coded in culture wars.

I want to take this in another direction. - 'The universal empathy for the remaining life of a parent who has lost a child at a young age.' Susan is a billionaire with power, access and status. Everything you wish for, she has. And I am certain that she would give it all away to bring her son back.

Events like this hold up a familiar but often ignored mirror to the face of young people like me. My parents are still around. I will have kids one day. I have the one thing Susan has lost: time and agency.

Or close to 3% of US population at current rates will die by a drug overdose

No matter how much money I earn, it takes 1 not-so unlikely event to unilaterally turn me into a hollow husk of a person. Whether that be a permanent disability due to a car accident, death of child/spouse or slightly misplaced tap on my head.

From a utilitarian perspective, I am better off minimizing the changes chances of a unilaterally disastrous event, than trying to get billions. Because the money only matters if these disastrous events don't happen. I could live an unimpressive life where my kids live tiil a ripe old age, and I bet Susan would trade my life for hers any day. The negative utility of losing a child is THAT high.

Have kids, help them not kill themselves and you're already living a life that's the envy of many billionaires.

After a 24 hrs existential crises resulting from having the mirror held to my face, I shove it into the closet of 'things to think of when I have time.' I wake up, 2 continents away from family, 1 continent away from my partner, and innocently continue grinding it out in hopes of making a couple of millions in silicon valley at the expense of my 20s and 30s. Some people never learn. Hopefully, I won't stay this way for too long.

Even on this anonymous no-name forum, I feel the urge to say I'd never wish such a tragedy on anyone. I wish she finds the support and space needed to get through this difficult time.

Susan is a billionaire with power, access and status. Everything you wish for, she has. And I am certain that she would give it all away to bring her son back.

Have kids, help them not kill themselves and you're already living a life that's the envy of many billionaires.

I think you are typical minding someone who is not typical minded. There were dozens, if not hundreds of things Susan could have done differently in how she waged the culture war in her position of chief censor of one of the largest media platforms in the world to prevent this from happening. Not just for her own family, but prevent it from happening for hundred or thousands of other families. She did not. I do not expect her to change her behavior.

We'll see. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Youtube will adopt as capricious and neurotic a censorship regime against drugs as they have against guns, Republicans, COVID "misinformation", claims of election denial, etc. But somehow I doubt it. I sincerely doubt it.

Maybe Youtube will adopt as capricious and neurotic a censorship regime[...]

Indeed, this is what I suspect. Wojcicicki and Troper (yes, the kid had a father) will indeed try to do something, but they'll do it by flailing in ways that wouldn't have helped their kid, that probably won't help anyone else's kid, and will do general harm.

Apocryphally the billionaire Bill Ackman who was recently also behind ousting of Claudine Gay from Harvard may have gotten redpilled by his own daughter who is apparently very into Western Marxism and overall Social Justice, at least according to what she - a History Teacher - follows on LinkedIn.

This is depressingly true. So much activism is centered on "root causes" which often expresses itself as trying to isolate people from the consequences of their actions. And it only makes things worse and worse. Doing the wrong thing is much worse than doing nothing.

I hope I'm wrong and she comes out hard for criminalizing drugs again and locking dealers in prison. But I doubt it.

I'm still a believer in the desirability of liberty, if too blackpilled to be an actual libertarian, so I can't endorse that. Fentanyl and other opioids and most stimulants remain criminal, so I don't know what you mean by "criminalizing drugs again"; certainly I doubt he died from pot. The drug warrior approach might have saved him from death, though perhaps he'd have preferred it to the life in prison or drug rehab drug warriors would offer. If his death was indeed due to adulterated drugs or just drugs of unusual purity, then the libertarian approach might have saved him as well.

In many places in the United States, it is the policy of the police not to arrest anyone for drug possession, and even drug dealing is tolerated. For example, you can consume and sell drugs with impunity in my hometown of Seattle. This is what is meant by "decriminalization". Recriminalization simply means that existing laws are enforced again.

Recriminalization certainly doesn't mean that a young person would be thrown in prison for life for possessing a small amount of drugs. That is an absurd strawman.

Recriminalization certainly doesn't mean that a young person would be thrown in prison for life for possessing a small amount of drugs. That is an absurd strawman.

The charge gets upgraded to possession with intent to distribute, for all but the most trivial amount of drugs. Maybe you can plea-bargain it down, but if the prosecutor is in a law and order mood that week (re-election coming up?), no. You don't get life for that but you do get prison time unless there's a diversion program (rehab). The conviction disqualifies you from most white collar jobs, but fortunately still qualifies you for the kind of marginal labor you can do to make just enough to get a fix until you get tossed into jail again.

This is just so far away from the world I'm living in.

In my city, people who have committed literally dozens of violent crimes are being released same day only to commit more offenses. Meanwhile, more than 1 in every 2000 people in my county died of a drug overdose last year, and drug use is practiced openly.

I am honestly starting to even doubt how many of the abuses of the War on Drugs even happened. Whenever I hear a story about "he dindu nothin', just some weed", you dig deeper and find a criminal with a rap sheet a mile long, and so they stick him with some trumped up drug charge. A bad thing? Possibly. But its a far cry from the paranoid fantasy that smoking a reefer could land you in prison for life.

The number of people in U.S. jails for drug possession approaches zero.

Let's not let more than 100,000 people die each year, and millions more become addicted because we're worried about very rare police or prosecutorial abuse. And if they really wanted to get you, they could get you for something else anyway.

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‘If you get caught doing drugs, your life is over, and we WILL catch you if you try doing drugs,’ sounds like exactly what’s needed to fix the opiates epidemic.

You like shrooms, LSD, cannabis, ok, I don’t approve but we can argue about legalisation or appropriate penalties. But for anything harder, don’t do them, don’t associate with people who do them. It cannot possibly be that hard.

Q.E.D.

(and also this )

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criminalizing drugs again and locking dealers in prison

Good news: they are currently illegal to possess and dealers get locked up. That's true almost everywhere in the US, Portland and Seattle excluded.

There were dozens, if not hundreds of things Susan could have done differently in how she waged the culture war in her position of chief censor of one of the largest media platforms in the world to prevent this from happening.

You can't change human nature. Young guy (so risk taker), college age, smart (so thinks he has it all figured out and won't end up like the dumb addicts) and wants some fun. Drugs are no big deal, the whole war on drugs thing is right wing conservative Republican freakout. Plenty of people do drugs and have no problems. Heck, his parents generation, so there's a good chance his parents did too, did drugs in their time and they're successful, economically productive citizens. All his friends and the people he's hanging out with are trying different things. It's just fun, he's not going to become an addict.

You can tell your kids till you're blue in the face "don't do thing" but you can never guarantee it will catch, never mind if you're poor or a billionaire thought leader.

Drugs are no big deal, the whole war on drugs thing is right wing conservative Republican freakout

designed to tyrannize innocent BIPOC, of course.

See Portland moving to re-criminalise drug possession. My oh my, who could ever have foreseen that only nice, respectable, non-criminal, non-junkie drug users who confined it to the weekend for recreational fun, didn't need to steal or rob to feed a habit, and were perfectly rational about their drug use would not be the only ones using drugs under the scheme of de-criminalisation? Who could have imagined that making it easier to have and use drugs would mean the types who shoot up in public, beg, steal, and act like feral dog packs would also be out and about taking advantage of this? Such a shocking surprise, why did nobody warn them about it? No, it's all the fault of those right-wing conservative Republicans this utopia never materialised!

Your claim is that her son wouldn't have OD'd if drug content was banned from YouTube?

I mean, maybe? The King is never played by the actor playing the King, but by all the other actors around him. Lots of people say that drugs are bad, but look at how online communities treat drug content compared to how they treat content that they think is actually bad. /r/drugs still exists. /r/coontown and associates were nuked 10 years ago. Lots of social information here.

Reddit allows many gun subs even though most progressive elites hate guns. I think the difference versus racist subreddits is that advertisers don’t mind depictions or discussion of drug use (after all, AMC had ads on Breaking Bad) but don’t want to be next to racism.

And, of course, /r/drugs is probably one of the best deterrents against drug use on the internet. Scrolling down even the current main page there is horrific story after horrific story.

You're not wrong. They should quit the crappy 'drugs bad' PSA and show stuff from that subreddit instead.

Coke made my cock soft ended up having lesbian sex

The time I accidentally banged an old Asian woman

Tripping on LSD when a luxury sex doll arrives and things start getting weird.

i magnetized my dick on meth

My best friend just died

/r/drugs still exists, but the question is if drugs would still exist if /r/drugs did not.

I really quite doubt your culture war complaints against her (valid as they are) have anything to do with her freshman son probably accidentally taking some drugs laced with fentanyl. I also doubt if she was previously a YouTube drug warrior that would have saved her son's life.

Drug deaths and related "deaths of despair" have been wildly underappreciated for at least a decade. They tend to kill prime age people, and for reference they dwarf US annual losses in Vietnam (the worst year -1968 - was about 17,000; average over 20 years was about 3,000).

Preventable drug deaths have been compounding YoY since at least 1998, when there were about 11,000 "preventable" deaths. About 80% of deaths are due to opiates. Max statewide variation is almost 10X, with Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa, Texas near the bottom (approx 14 deaths/100k), and West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana, Kentucky at the top (about 60 deaths/100k). Cali, NY, Washington, Oregon are middling (about 27 deaths/100k). Large clusters are found in the rust and coal belt. Unsurprisingly, "manufacturing job loss predicts a substantial share of drug and opioid overdose deaths for women and men" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7725949/).

Opioids probably are fantastic

In my experience, there is a threshold for enjoyment depending on the person. I simply didn't find opiates all that interesting (prescription, tincture, inhaled), even at highly inebriating levels. Nevertheless, vs other drugs, the likelihood for life-deranging enjoyment is probably unmatched.

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/drugoverdoses/data-details/#:~:text=In%202021%2C%2098%2C268%20people%20died,%2C%20homicide%2C%20and%20undetermined%20intents.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mortality/drug_poisoning.htm

I tried estimating this another way -- 32.1 crude death rate from drug overdoses in the 12 months ending 1Q2023 (last data available) divided by 944.1 crude death rate from all causes in the same period. The result is 3.4%, so your estimate checks out. Assuming nothing changes, of course.

Among other things, as with COVID, one change will be killing off those likely to be addicted. As the easily addicted die faster than they are born, we'll start to run out.

I would be not so sure. I listened to some podcast where they had good data which supported a dysgenic effect thesis which boiled down to the fact, that getting pregnant is in modern times just another one of larger cluster of female risky behaviors ranging from having many sexual partners, having unprotected sex, being more prone to substance abuse etc. Remember, all it takes for evolution is for people to reproduce. It is "perfectly okay" from evolutionary perspective to have mother of three overdosing in her early twenties only for her offspring taken care for by welfare state to likely face similar fate.

The vast majority of overdose deaths are between 25-54, and the highest rates are between 35-54. In the same way that Covid didn't necessarily improve the overall health of the population, but it killed off so many immune-compromised or aged people that if we got a new similar disease it would have a lower death rate because the dead wood has cleared out. Eventually we're going to be killing off addicts faster than we are producing new ones, even if the overall rate of addicts doesn't change.

Eventually we're going to be killing off addicts faster than we are producing new ones, even if the overall rate of addicts doesn't change.

Why? If addicts reproduce faster than the rest of the population before they die due to OD, and if addiction is heritable, then we will in fact not be killing the addicts off faster than we are producing new ones. That is my argument: susceptibility to addiction is related to overall susceptibility to impulsive behavior including things like having unprotected sex, forgetting to take pills and other risky behavior related to fertility.

From people I’ve talked to opioids are amazing... They have to be if people do them.

Maybe I'm an outlier (or I was taking an insufficient dose as described in Drug users use a lot of drugs), but Opioids weren't that great unless I was in pain.

My experience made me much more sympathetic to the idea that the "opioid epidemic" is an appropriate reaction to the chronic pain epidemic (particularly among blue collar workers with physically-demanding jobs. Who would've thought.)

I've heard from people in the medical industry that the effect of prescription opioids is roughly split in thirds - about a third get basically no effect at all or strictly bad effects, another third get effective pain relief but no desire to do more once the pain is gone, and the final third feel dangerous addictive desires in addition to pain relief and are prone to addiction and all the resulting issues if other factors in their life line up right/wrong.

Meanwhile, it seems really weird that there is suddenly a "chronic pain epidemic". Why should there be such a thing now? Humans have been doing lots of strenuous manual labor for all of recorded history - especially before the industrial revolution. Have we all suddenly got worse somehow? Is it maybe related to signs that the modern diet is mostly terrible?

Humans have been doing lots of strenuous manual labor for all of recorded history - especially before the industrial revolution.

And in pain much of the time. Especially as they aged. The term "backbreaking labor" isn't new.

Eh maybe. But then still, why an opioid epidemic now? Opium and derivatives have also been around for a very long time. Is it just that much more appealing in pill form and prescribed by your doctor than in smokeable or snortable form?

There certainly was an opium epidemic in the 19th century US, but most addicts were middle class or wealthy, predominantly women; the poor could afford neither the drug nor the doctor to introduce it to them (you could buy it over the counter, but the poor then were very poor indeed), and it was primarily injected by said physician. There was a population of civil war veteran addicts too. It was estimated that 0.5% of the population were opium addicts, a much larger percentage presumably used opioids occasionally. Apparently there are about 2.1 million opioid addicts in the US (estimated number with ‘opioid misuse disorder’) today, which is approximately 0.6% of the population. This doesn’t seem like a huge difference.

Opium smoking only became a major issue at the very end of the 19th century, and was primarily a feature of Chinatown opium dens which were necessarily not fully geographically distributed across the whole country but concentrated in major cities. As soon as opium addiction became recognized as a major problem in the 1890s it was restricted and then banned pretty quickly, physicians were shamed for prescribing it (both within and beyond the profession) and so it was never even introduced to many working and underclass communities. There were also horror stories from Western travellers in China describing the opioid epidemic there (eg half of all young men wasting away in the opium dens of major Chinese cities) such that politicians acted relatively quickly.

Today opioids are much easier to produce synthetically, much easier to sell (eg on the dark web) and ship, global trade offers far more places to hide large volume illicit imports, and a decline in communal identity means that social pressure (around almost everything) is less than it was in 1890.

So I don't really dispute any of that, but it feels like this conversation is getting a little shifted or circular, I suppose as a consequence of it being with so many people. What I'm really arguing against is ulyssessword's point that "the 'opioid epidemic' is an appropriate reaction to the chronic pain epidemic". I find it pretty hard to buy into, humans have been doing manual labor for millennia, opium has been around for millennia at varying levels of availability, but only now somehow is blue-collar manual labor so strenuous that using opiates to dull the pain is an appropriate response.

It seems more likely to me to be something like the point that sarker and TheDag are making, that the pain is actually a symptom of broader cultural disease, not a natural consequence of manual labor.

Uh, I'm pretty sure that the laboring classes who had access to a lot of drugs have proceeded to do a lot of drugs for all of recorded history. "They drink way too much" is a pretty universal blue collar stereotype, because that's a nearly universally available drug that's priced at blue-collar affordable levels in most societies.

Opium may have existed in 1890, but it wasn't widely available in the US the way it often is now. Booze was the drug of choice for construction workers and miners suffering from nonstop pain; when we decided it was a medical issue doctors of course can't say "have you considered needing some AA?" and so prescribed oxycodone instead. I suspect that the issue will fade with the normalization of medical marijuana.

I think it’s much more available now and at much greater purity. If you have a script, you can pop into any pharmacy and have 100 pills in minutes. You don’t even need to get out of the car. Unless you lived in a big city, you probably had a harder time getting patent medicines simply because it required a trip to those cities, and it came as a bottle of a couple of ounces mixed with all kinds of stuff. Modern medical insurance covers a lot of the cost of modern opioid drugs where the older patent medicines were comparatively expensive. Cheap easy pills that you can get in large quantities without leaving your car are probably going to be a bigger addiction risk than something that’s expensive and sold in small quantities.

It is prescribed by a doctor, imparting legitimacy. And in pill form you can pop a couple in a quiet moment to yourself anywhere, something you can't do with a syringe or opium pipe. And the pharmaceutical companies only figured out in the fifties and sixties how to mass produce doses that would leave people mostly functional while still taking their pain away. Before that those drugs were prohibitively expensive and so people just drank themselves to death.

Pain doesn't have to be physical. Psychological pain is a thing and it is just as real a sensation as physical pain. See e.g. phantom pain which is pain experienced by an individual in a limb that has long since been amputated. Phantom pain is a very real thing we've known about for centuries so it's not some new fad or whatever.

What happens when a limb is cut off? Necessarily, the nerves that come from the central nervous system have to be cut somewhere as well. So now you have some unnatural nerve ends dangling around in your stump, which may still attempt to send signals to the brain. And since these signals are fundamentally nonsensical, they can be interpreted as almost anything - and in doubt, the brain often interprets unusual signals as simple pain.

Worse yet, even if a theoretically perfect surgeon does such a great job that these nerve ends do not send any signals whatsoever, our brain is actually wired to expect them. So now it's trying to interpret the lack of signals, which, in doubt, ....

I'm actually not against your main point - I think that modern life often does not fulfill our natural urges and fails to offer adequate alternatives, and that this can lead to depression, chronic pain and similar issues. But IMO phantom pain is quite physical in nature.

Because the pain isn't physical, it's mental/emotional/spiritual. Look up biopsychosocial concepts of pain, or for a more classic take, Healing Back Pain by John Sarno.

As someone who has experienced chronic pain for almost a decade, I can confirm that physical issues are not the cause of my pain at least. I've become convinced that the vast majority of chronic injury and pain is not a mechanical issue either.

and the final third feel dangerous addictive desires in addition to pain relief and are prone to addiction and all the resulting issues if other factors in their life line up right/wrong.

This may roughly correspond to estimates that 27% of Chinese males were addicted to opium as aftermath of opium wars and wide availability of the drug. To be honest, I do not get the whole idea of how decriminalization of drugs will be so fantastic with these and other natural experiments during 19th century. There was a reason why newly discovered drugs got banned in the first place.

Meanwhile, it seems really weird that there is suddenly a "chronic pain epidemic". Why should there be such a thing now? Humans have been doing lots of strenuous manual labor for all of recorded history - especially before the industrial revolution.

Tissue damage is only one part of pain.

https://www.painscience.com/articles/pain-is-weird.php

There could be other factors that might explain a higher rate of pain today.

Looks like an interesting article, thanks! I will read later. But that, and TheDag's point would imply that any "chronic pain epidemic" is just a broader symptom of, I guess I don't really know what to call it, the broad cultural sickness we have in the West and America right now, and treating with opiates is clumsy duct-tape over the real problem that mostly won't help much.

Yeah, there's something going on besides chronic pain. Opioids are also prescribed for acute pain (e.g. after an operation) despite the fact that acetaminophen and nsaids are similarly effective. When my wife got her wisdom tooth removed, the surgeon prescribed oxycodone a week before the surgery even happened. It's crazy.

I guess I'm somewhat lucky in not having many issues with serious or chronic pain. I did get my wisdom teeth removed, and I don't think I was prescribed or took anything particularly strong for that, but I don't recall very clearly. I had to get a root canal a few years ago, and I do remember that hurting pretty badly the next day. I had been prescribed Tylenol with Codeine, which I took and worked pretty well at dulling the pain, but left me pretty zonked out. Definitely not something I had any interest in taking if I wasn't in serious pain. I think I only took that for 1 or 2 days, and the pain was mild enough after that that I didn't bother.

It's probably not everything, but it doesn't help that we've gotten a lot fatter and older on average.

My friend was given fentanyl at a hospital for pain relief after an injury and had completely the opposite reaction. He said it felt so good he would almost certainly have tried to get more if he’d known how. Even now, he said, when something good happens part of him is thinking, ‘Okay, but fentanyl was so much better’.

This was a young, happy man with the world at his feet. The reaction was purely physical. I think @JulianRota is right, there must be an individual difference in response.

there must be an individual difference in response.

From my subjective experience, an individual difference is everything when it comes down to psychoactive substances. People tend to differ much more neurologically then physically, which is unpleasant truth for many. But we cannot see this on the first sight, so this thought rarely comes through our minds. For my part, I get almost no pleasure or kick from drinking alcohol. And I come from heavily-drinking culture, so this is a huge social burden. I have drunk hundreds times and most of the time I get instantly sleepy and then heavily depressed. And I know people who are extremely aggressive and psychotic when drunk, so the response is indeed deeply varied.

FWIW, I was given IV morphine before surgery for a broken arm as a kid and still remember how amazing it made me feel. They could've marched a firing squad in there with my death warrant and I wouldn't have cared in the slightest.

OTOH, from a very small sample size it appears that I'm allergic to hydrocodone. I got some of those after having wisdom teeth yanked out and they just made me feel sick and unpleasantly intoxicated.

I haven't run into any obviously drug seeking patients myself in India, the people getting morphine or fentanyl prescriptions climb the pain ladder at the same rate anyone else does.

I was prescribed tramadol once, for severe sudden back pain and costal tenderness (?acute pancreatitis but the the enzymes came back normal), and it was a warm glow, but I never felt the urge to get more once the course was over. It did at least help with the agony, when the strongest NSAIDs didn't. The maximum I took daily was equivalent to about 10 mg of morphine, oral.

I suspect it's a lot of people trying to cure SLS (Shit Life Syndrome), and well, if you can't fix your problems you might as well not notice them.

My experience was similar. Sure, being zombie and staring at the wall doing nothing was better than being in infernal pain but I sure as hell prefer not being a zombie given the choice. I can’t think of a single actually pleasant thing about the experience.

Opioids definitely do affect different people differently. I've had them prescribed once to take after a surgery. I took one dose immediately after the surgery and decided I'd rather no pain medication at all than a second dose. (Pretty sure I took ibuprofen, not nothing.) I've discussed this with others and gather this isn't an entirely uncommon reaction, although certainly far from a majority opinion.

My experience was extremely similar. When I got my wisdom teeth removed, they gave me a massive bottle of vicodin. Dozens of doses, apparently intended to be taken daily for months. I took two doses: one several hours after the surgery once the initial anesthesia wore off, and then another two days after the surgery when the pain became very acute. The rest of the pills in that bottle went untouched.

It occurred to me how easy it would have been, and how profitable, to sell the rest of the pills. Although I’ve never used the “Dark Web”, nor do I have any familiarity with the sorts of websites or venues people use to buy and sell drugs, I can’t imagine it would have been difficult to figure out. And, sadly, there is at least one member of my family who would have taken them off my hands if I’d offered. I also did not want to throw them away in my dumpster, for fear of attracting a swarm of local homeless. I ended up returning the bottle of pills to the surgery center, over their objections, and told them to figure out what to do with it.

On the one hand, this could be read as a story about how easy it is for people to inadvertently become addicted to opioids; I went in for a minor surgery, was given a huge bottle of pain pills by a trusted medical professional, and told to use them to my heart’s content. I was fortunate in that I did not end up experiencing very much significant recurring pain as a result of my surgery, and therefore was not seriously tempted to use more than what was absolutely necessary. If my surgery had produced significant recurring pain, who’s to say that I would have had the fortitude and self-control to resist burning through that whole bottle of pills?

On the other hand, even if I had done so, I could not plausibly have claimed that it was inadvertent, or that I didn’t understand the risks. Every thinking adult with even a cursory understanding of current events is aware of the gravity of opioid addiction. Now, if there had been something laced into those pills without my knowledge - if I’d thought I was taking immunosuppressants and it turned out they had fentanyl in them - this would obviously be beyond my control. My sense is that people who talk a lot about the “opioid crisis” tend to imply that this type of situation - people taking opioids without realizing it, and becoming addicted - is very common. My naïve sense is that probably the much more common scenario is more similar to my experience, wherein people are given massively unnecessary and inflated doses of pain medication by doctors, and fail to exercise proper self-control over how much of that medication to use.

If there is a current epidemic of chronic pain, it's come in tandem with a broader shift away from physically demanding jobs and non-work activity.

I’m paranoid I’m doing something laced now and have largely cut out doing anything now.

There are safety precautions when taking something that didn't come from a pharmacy:

  1. Fentanyl test strips
  2. Reagent test to make sure you got the expected substance
  3. Never use alone and have Narcan on hand. That way if you have an adverse reaction someone can call the paramedics in time.

dealers either sell both and cross contaminate or lace other drugs to get people addicted.

The dealer's incentive is to get people addicted to something that will get the user coming back frequently to buy more. Fentanyl is cheaper by weight than many other drugs and doesn't last very long before it puts the user into withdrawals and causes them to seek out more.

If a first-time user comes in for drug X and then get addicted to fentanyl the dealer then has a daily recurring revenue stream.

In this case a potential pipeline is that the deceased user started with a party drug in the past, but it was laced with fentanyl and he then became addicted. Like you say it is hard to imagine what other drug he would have been intending to use on a weekday afternoon that would have been laced.

some would say things like legalize drugs to kill fentanyl and people get “safe” drugs

The DEA scheduling system is absurd. They should make some of the safer ones legal (especially psychedelics) so that:

  1. People are getting a pure substance
  2. People can create safe environments to use the legal drugs in (because if the drug is legal then you can legally have medical and support staff in the environment).
  3. Takes money away from the drug dealers (who are selling impure/laced product) and creates tax revenue (which can be used on support services to get people to quit more dangerous drugs).

The trouble with legalization is that if it’s perfectly legal for just anyone to have it, it’s going to be in homes. This increases the chances of kids getting it and tryin* it at younger ages. The first alcohol most kids take is often taken from the refrigerator at home where dad keeps it around. If hard drugs become legal, the same thing happens for those drugs, kids try whatever the grownups buy and have around the house.

This is already an issue with prescription drugs that are far more addictive and dangerous than psychedelics. This risk could be further mitigated by diversion control requirements like: the newly legal drugs must be stored in a locked location that only adults have access to, a log must kept anytime the drug is consumed/sold/gifted.

If a parent allowed kids to consume the drugs then they could face harsh penalties under the existing laws regarding providing controlled substances to a minor.

It’s illegal to let kids drink at home. That hasn’t stopped them from drinking. In fact drinking parties are so common that they’re practically a rite of passage for teenagers. It’s not going to be easy to catch something like that, and even if you did, figuring out if the kid got if from mom, dad, older sibling, by himself with a fake ID, or from a friend isn’t easy.

The principal you're implicitly espousing here is that if something is too dangerous for children to have access to, adults shouldn't be permitted access to it either. That is not at all compatible with a free society.

I’m not saying never ever, however I think it’s an important consideration because it will very likely happen. And especially for more dangerous or addictive drugs, I think it’s prudent to at least ask the question about the harm done by the drug being available to younger children.

A twelve year old trying pot is not really that big of a deal. The addiction is more psychological than physical, the LD50 is pretty high, and beyond the general dangers associated with smoking anything, it doesn’t cause much harm to the body.

Something like Cocaine or Heroin I think would be worse in all of those ways. Both are pretty physically addictive, have a fairly low LD50, and cause damage to the body. I can’t see a case to be made that the risk of a child of 12 trying crack is outweighed by the benefits of having crack be legal in the US. I’m sure there’s a steel man somewhere, but it seems a pretty high bar.

There's no need for a steelman, the principle itself is invalid.

I think it’s prudent to at least ask the question about the harm done by the drug being available to younger children.

That's stealing a base. You're asking about the harm done by the drug being available to adults on the assumption that if the drug is available to adults, it will also be available to children. Which is at least qualitatively true. But it's also true of knives, guns, poisons, matches and accelerants, fireworks, classified information (right Hunter?), cars, sex toys, etc. Proposing to keep drugs illegal on the grounds that if adults can have it a child can get it is an isolated demand to child-proof the world.

Like you say it is hard to imagine what other drug he would have been intending to use on a weekday afternoon that would have been laced.

I definitely knew people who did coke on weekday afternoons in college, presumably cost wasn’t an issue for him.

Also, I thought fentanyl test strips are often ineffective for eg laced coke because it could be just a tiny fraction of the powder that’s fentanyl, so the strip could come back fine even if the drug isn’t?

I definitely knew people who did coke on weekday afternoons in college, presumably cost wasn’t an issue for him.

But coke is usually a social drug and he was found alone. If he wanted a stimulant to use alone I assume he had access to prescription Adderall or Ritalin. I don't have personal experience on this subject so this is just speculative guesswork.

Also, I thought fentanyl test strips are often ineffective for eg laced coke because it could be just a tiny fraction of the powder that’s fentanyl, so the strip could come back fine even if the drug isn’t?

That is true that there is a detection limit on test strips. You could just test a larger sample, but then you'd have to turn the coke/water mixture back to coke or take it sublingually.

I doubt fentanyl will ever be as radioactive as covid because of the element of choice. Nice people feel like they can just not buy fentanyl, so they don’t care as much. Obviously the children angle changes this a bit but I to be a bit harsh I still think it’s basically true that only fuckup teenaged take hard drugs.

Might still get some traction like cigarettes but not fury in the same way. Personally what really infuriates me is cocaine users acting like they have no responsibility for gang violence in London.

Personally what really infuriates me is cocaine users acting like they have no responsibility for gang violence in London.

Stopping the use of cocaine by respectable middle class people in London would be easy, just have the police raid high end clubs, posh pubs in Chelsea and Clapham and a few private parties in affluent neighborhoods and search (and charge) everyone with the drug, and do so persistently every weekend for a year or two and the issue would solve itself. But they prefer to go upstream.

Middle class people know their situation is extremely precarious and would usually be ruined by criminal conviction; that they use cocaine so openly is a testament to the fact that the British police almost never prosecute or even arrest hard drug users unless they’re extremely visible or otherwise annoy them.

Agree completely. I once had someone pretty high up in the Met (London Metropolitan Police) proselytise me for legalising hard drugs. His argument was that they caused too many problems with blackmail.

Obviously he has the right to his opinion but I think it’s a pretty bad look for a senior police officer. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d been taking something himself.

A quick google overdose deaths topped 112k in 2023 an all-time record.

[...]

I believe an order of magnitude bigger problem than COVID.

Trying to put some actual numbers to this:

According to the NYT COVID data page, weekly COVID deaths in the past year have ranged from 490 (July 2-8) to 2,462 (Jan 7-13) or 0.9%-3.6% of all deaths. Of course, this is deaths from acute COVID, actual COVID deaths is somewhat higher than the official numbers, but hard to get good data on how much higher, so let's stick to these numbers. Also, going back further the numbers are a lot higher and less regular, I'm assuming the past year is a much better approximation of what to expect going forward than including any older data. (Also, I'm not seeing an official 2023 death count... looking I found this 2022 report published in May 2023 so it's probably just too early for finalized 2023 numbers.)

112k/52 = average 2,153 deaths/week from overdose deaths, doesn't seem hugely different from number of COVID deaths, although since overdose doses are mostly young and COVID deaths are mostly old, measuring in QALYs would likely paint a different picture... although if you're measuring QALYs, not trying to measure the impact of post-COVID conditions seems unfair, and I'm not sure how that would affect the conclusion.

There's also the obvious issue that COVID is practically unavoidable, although there's ways to reduce the impact (vaccination, antivirals, not getting old being healthier), while avoiding an overdose is straight forward: Don't Do Drugs(tm). Or, at least, that's the oversimplification in the popular conception of the two.

Comparing the badness of various problems to COVID isn't a meaningful basis for a response because the response to COVID wasn't driven by how bad it is.

It's tempting though, isn't it?

"We spent 10 trillion for zero (or possibly negative) value during Covid. Surely we can spend 10 billion on my issue".

Also works for Afghanistan/Iraq wars.

Yes when I say OD are an order of magnitude (or close to that) bigger issue it was adjusting for life expectancy loss.

Yeah, it's bad.

If you have a 3% chance of dying of an OD, and the average OD death shaves 50 years off a person's life, then easily 10% of life expectancy reduction is due to overdoses.

Someone might object that, when a junky finally ODs, society has not actually lost that much. Which is somewhat true. But that's only because of how much was already lost when a healthy person was gradually turned into a junky in the first place.

Let's consider the millions of people who are harmed (but not outright killed) by drug addiction. In terms of QALYs lost, drugs are one of the worst perils our society faces, possibly up there with heart disease and obesity.

A new war on drugs would save the equivalent of millions of lives.

A new war on drugs would save the equivalent of millions of lives.

If, really big if, it is effective.

Looking at the fentanyl deaths per year shows the dramatic spike beginnings in the 2015-2016 timeframe. I wondered what caused this spike, why that particular point in time and why so large? Fentanyl has been around for a long time, first being synthesized in the 50s.

An explanation that sounds plausible: opioid prescription rates have been increasing since at least the 90s, either for legitimate or illegitimate reasons (as alleged in lawsuits against Purdue pharma etc).

Opioid prescriptions peaked in 2010 but by this time we have a large subpop hooked on opiates. when prescriptions are heavily curtailed, addicts still need their fix, so they turn to illegal substitutes. First heroin (heroin ods start to rise in ~2011), and then illegal fentanyl. Fentanyl wins out because it's potency probably makes it cheaper than heroine per "unit high", and likewise it's high potency makes oding easier. not to mention the profliferation of fentanyl analogues which further complicates dosing appropriately.

If true it seems like another, particularly tragic , lesson in unintended consequences, or cruel indifference if you subscribe to the allegations against the pharma companies.

And unfortunately the same features that make it cheap and deadly also make it harder to fight a drug war against it. It is apparently easy to manufacture and total volumes trafficked are relative low, in many cases being trafficked through international mail.

I'm reminded of the old clip of an alleged 'jewish Democrat candidate' gleefully contextualizing how many white men are killing themselves.

In ingroup/outgroup terms, if my enemy is dying, I can only shrug my shoulders. Is it by his own hand? Wow, how curious, I can't imagine why he would do that. I can't contextualize his death in a wider context. It's just happening. Probably due to some failure on his part, obviously. There's not wider causal chain at play, no broad narrative to examine. Because if there's one thing I know, it's that my people are innocent, and my enemy is guilty and deserves it.

Now, if a member of my ingroup dies, that's not their fault or mine. There's a wider context, a system, that's at fault. We need to do something!

That's at least the rhetorical implication of noticing this event. Maybe now something will be done since the 'people with power' will take up arms for one of their own dying. In that sense, this is a joyous occasion for the 'have nots'. The more 'elite' children that die, the more their parents are forced to take up the common cause of others who have had to live in with such conditions for much longer. Conditions that people like Susan Wojcicicki had helped create, facilitate and ignore for a long time now. Some might even be waiting for any brave soul to take aim at more direct causal factors, like the Sacklers. Why do they get to exist free of the conditions they inflict on others? Not only that, they get to profit from it.

I think posts like this help illuminate where one stands in the hierarchy of everything. Those with power can place landmines in your environment, and if you or yours step on them you just get to suffer whilst they get to profit. The worst part is that your only recourse as a 'have not' is to hope that someone with power also steps on a landmine so that they just might lead your cause forward. A sort of validation of your suffering. That's it. Patriotism/national identity doesn't play a part, voting doesn't play a part, 'the voices of the many' doesn't play a part. The statistical significance, the economic impact, none of it matters even if it is so often acted like it does matter in so many different contexts. In the modern western democracy these things don't matter at all. The only common cause people can find is suffering. In clear terms: If a powerful jew isn't suffering your problems, you will just have to live with them.

White suicide rates are higher than black suicide rates in the US, although the gap is closing fast; black rates have risen by 20% or so in the last 5 years, white rates have iirc declined very slightly. As with birth rates the gap will close. Natives have the highest rate of all, which hasn’t changed.

In general elites, being more likely to live in eg. Manhattan than the median middle-class white suburban American, are more exposed to, say, psychotic violent homeless people hanging around in Central Park or whatever than ‘normal’ people of their race. It’s not a good predictor (the average NYT editor or Dem political advisor takes the subway, they don’t have bodyguards or chauffeurs).

This is not unique to modern western democracy, nor are powerful Jews the only one taking advantage of the hierarchy of everything. You are describing power. Power has not changed in thousands of years.

Power might not change but who benefits from it does, depending on who has it.

In clear terms: If a powerful jew isn't suffering your problems, you will just have to live with them.

It's interesting that at the beginning of this paragraph you say that something might be done about drugs and by the end you are talking as if something has already been done and those damn Jews just don't care about anything until it affects them.

Luckily, there are so many powerful Jews that odds are high at least one of them is suffering from any given problem we gentiles might face.

Are there any other large-scale problems our society faces where we need a “powerful jew” to personally suffer before we can make progress?

All of them, but it was taken care of two millennia ago according to the Catholic Church.

Ok that’s funny because I didn’t even consider the obvious joke.

That dang Original Sin anyway.

I know it's a popular narrative that fentanyl is mostly being brought by illegals across our porous border, but it's mostly not true. Most fentanyl, by a wide margin, is smuggled into the US by citizens across ports of entry. This makes obvious logistical sense. A US citizen driving a vehicle across the border is both much less likely to be searched and can transport far more drugs per trip than someone hoofing it with a backpack across miles of desert and river and mountain.

That might be true but I don't see how we could possibly know. What that source says is:

Over 90 percent of fentanyl seizures occur at legal crossing points or interior vehicle checkpoints, not on illegal migration routes, so U.S. citizens (who are subject to less scrutiny) when crossing legally are the best smugglers.

So we seize more at the places where the border is controlled and we don't seize much at the places where it's uncontrolled. This sounds a lot like the guy who only looks for his lost keys under the streetlights.

Believable to me. It’s small in size so you could easily sneak it in. But I have no expertise. It’s a nice narrative for anti-immigration to connect the two.

She got what she voted for. In fact, she got what she weaponized her platform to convince everyone to vote for.

I know, I know, she's a Party member in good standing, and these policies were only supposed to sacrifice the proles in the name of progress. She was voting for this to happen to you, not her sweet prince and future Party apparatchik.

This won't change anything. At most it will be taken as a test of faith. That she sacrificed her son for The Party, and progress. At worst it will be directly blamed on red tribe... somehow. Some MAGA extremist got to him. Not unlike how Paul Pelosi's attacker, a drug addled insane criminal in a city where drug addled insane criminals are given completely free reign to do as they please, was smeared as somehow being a product of MAGA America and not SF's abysmal policing and keeping of public order.

This post has gotten a bunch of reports, and while Susan Wojcicicki is a public figure and we usually relax the rules about being unnecessarily antagonistic to public figures, it seems to me that if you want to dance on someone's grave (in this case, a dumb rich college kid who ODed) you should justify it with a better reason than "She's one of my tribal enemies so Ha! Ha! (insert Simpsons gif)." The OP was about fentanyl and drug policy in general: your response is just culture warring.

What is the program of Republicans to ensure higher quality cocaine that isn’t laced with fentanyl for rich young Americans?

Strict drug laws and closing the border. The latter won’t do anything about this issue but the former can at least plausibly reduce the tendency of rich young people to do drugs.

Weirdly I would say rich young people want cocaine to be expensive. If you could buy coke at 7-eleven for the price of a Red Bull it wouldn’t be a status symbol having the coke in the club/after-party but a lower class stimulant.

Rich young people still smoke weed though, and that’s cheap now.

"How expensive drugs are" has little to do with how likely the children of billionaires are to experiment. "How likely you are to be arrested and prosecuted for simple possession" has a lot to do with it; we like to think of 18-20somethings as thinking they're invincible, and they certainly have a high tolerance for risk, but upper class kids are actually keenly conscious of living in a zero sum competition to stay at the top of the ladder. I'll bet this kid would never dream of getting a hooker because of the legal risk(which seems like it's probably not that high), despite being young and male and probably wanting some casual sex, because he knew getting prosecuted for solicitation would leave him with a permanent record. Putting drugs in that basket is at least theoretically a thing that strict drug laws can do.

Anything can be a status symbol if it comes in an expensive, fancy bottle.

My inclination is that if anything, strict drug laws make events like this more likely, because even very rich people end up getting drugs from underground sources. who knows where this batch of fentanyl originated? Where if drugs were legal, this kid would probably have gotten top-brand shit.

In Japan, drugs are illegal and almost nobody does drugs. The secret, oddly enough, is getting rid of the underground sources because they’re illegal.

The whole ‘if it’s illegal people will do it without supervision’ business is half people who think it’s fine and probably do it themselves, and half people whose moral codes proscribe actual enforcement of the laws

Unless the secret is, you know, being Japan.

The numbers I’m seeing here are all over the place, but the largest seizures were like 2,000 kg/yr. Meanwhile the US border seizes 82,000 kg/yr of meth alone. This can’t just be lack of enforcement.

I don't feel too strongly about this, obviously there's a whole bunch of factors involved here, but it's not like enforcement cannot result in a dramatic decrease in crimes that need enforcing against (see El Salvador) or lack of enforcement resulting in an increase (see post-BLM murder rate).

It’s definitely possible. Which is why I find it a bit premature to say the secret is getting rid of underground sources.

Because in Japan nobody is stupid enough to try it, and if they do they don’t have the layers of procedural and legal protection they would in America. Japan has something like a 90% conviction rate.

Obviously there are other factors, most notably land borders, but I think the vast majority of the discrepancy comes from severity of enforcement.

With all these other factors, why do you think severity of enforcement makes the difference?

More comments

Taking glee in the misfortune of others is a bad thing. We should aim to rise above such petty and base pleasures and be sad about the suffering she must now be going through, regardless of her actions and beliefs in the past. At least he was probably in complete bliss when he passed out and so did not suffer. But still it is a sad case of life being severed short and a reminder that one day we too will pass from this world.

I don't say this as someone who is even against people dying from an overdose. It's probably one of the nicest ways to go out too. I can make a strong argument that on net drug overdoses are positive for humanity as a whole (not in this case obviously but when you average out over the kinds of people who overdose the calculus changes significantly). However that does not mean that each and every such death is not a minor tragedy on its own, and we should be sad about this and recognise what the surviving family of the person who just died is having to go through.

In fact in this case the suffering is probably even worse than normal. Consider the fact that Susan Wojcicicki and her partner are probably more empathetically developed than the average person who just lost a family member and you'll realise the suffering they must be going through right now is an experience far worse than that suffered by most people in their situation. I sincerely hope they are able to find peace and wish them the best in this troubled time.

this issue has lost its place in the news cycle. A quick google overdose deaths topped 112k in 2023

"112k ODs is a statistic"

-Stalin

Additional culture war topic: my understanding is that most fentanyl is exported by China. How might this tie into the "calling it the Wuhan flu is racist/the lab leak hypothesis is racist" narrative?

Precursors are exported by China and then the drug itself is made in Mexico, isn’t it?

I'm pretty sure that tying it into Mexico would be considered racist by most of the same people for whom tying it to China would be considered racist.

You can't even blame China for exporting precursors because precursors have many many different uses. It's like blaming a steel mill for selling someone an ingot they used to forge a sword to behead people with.

clearly we need to secure the border so that we can get quality drugs again!

Cocaine seems to be far too risky in the US now, possibly in much of the world. And even if it’s not laced, there are so many people with undiagnosed heart issues who could easily die from a dose that others would be fine with.

The culture in public schools seems to have changed a lot in the 1-2 decades since I've been there, but surely they still tell kids, "drugs are bad, mkay"? I have a similar reaction to this as I do when people talk about the "suicide epidemic". There is a very simple solution, don't kill yourself.

I have a similar reaction to this as I do when people talk about the "suicide epidemic". There is a very simple solution, don't kill yourself.

You sound like you have a complete disconnect from other people's experiences and suffering, while also believing in free will.

Is this sarcastic? Do you genuinely not understand that many people live lives of despair and feel they have no hope of things ever getting better?

Most people don't want to OD from drugs or commit suicide. They do because their lives are purposeless, hopeless, and devoid of meaning.

I doubt the Stanford freshman son of the CEO of YouTube had nothing to live for.

Material success is not known to prevent suicidal ideation. Humans require a purpose greater than “make widget, do drugs and women”.

Yeah if anything, it's probably living too much that got him.

You actually misspelled Cal with Stanford. Which is sort of curious because even though I’ve heard Stanford is no fun now her son would have seem connected enough to get into Stanford with a mere mortals test scores. I would assume 99% of people who get into Stanford and Cal go to Stanford.

Yes, I read somewhere it’s typically considered easier for extremely well-connected Silicon Valley individuals to get kids into Stanford than Berkeley, private colleges having more flexibility. Seems he was probably pretty smart then.

Why doubt that? Just because he had status and wealth doesn't mean he had anything he cared about deep inside. Our culture is corrosive to purpose and meaning, I'd think wealthy scions would be more susceptible to a lack of meaning in some ways since so much is handed to them.

Oh I’m not disputing that the rich can be suicidal at all, just that if he was, it probably wasn’t because of a lack of opportunity in his life.

Yeah, I think we're talking past each other a bit. Opportunity =/= purpose and meaning. If anything a massive amount of opportunity can drain purpose and meaning, as you get slammed with the paradox of choice.

"Purpose" and "meaning" seem to be used here to refer to some sort of internal phenomenon which could probably be produced by the right drugs.

Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean favored, and imperially slim.

Maybe this is an obvious reference for the Anglophones, but why not just post the poem in its entirety?

"They do because their lives are purposeless, hopeless, and devoid of meaning."

Y'know, most people would say that people kill themselves because they feel their lives are purposeless, hopeless, and devoid of meaning.

Or alternately, because they think doing some drugs would be fun or cool, and pick up a habit.

Why would kids listen to a teacher and not the famous, status-signaling rapper than shows up on their YouTube feed glamorizing drugs? One of them is presenting a way to money and power, the other one is giving them homework.

Indeed, YouTube complicity in the opiate crisis is why I consider this death the least bad possible opiate death. While still a tragedy, it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving parent. I only wish that all parents of opiate victims worked in the music industry.

What the hell?

You're going to have to elaborate on "Youtube complicity." I'm struggling to imagine what policy they implemented that made you hate their former CEO more than, I dunno, the dealer. The manufacturer. Whatever rapper you have in mind.

It’s quite simple: YouTube allows drug glamorization culture and music videos to be watched by young people. For vulnerable young people, there is a straight line from idolizing a rapper to doing the drugs of said rapper. See: Lil Peep (1 billion+ views, mostly teenagers). Some of these rappers are a walking advertisement for drug use. When you’re then at a party listening to their music and there’s drugs available, you are more likely to participate in taking drugs.

dealer, manufacturer

— are not engaged in a sophisticated emotional manipulation campaign to get adolescents to find drugs cool.

I don’t see how allowing a certain type of content is comparable to making that content, let alone making the stuff which the content is about.

That’s the same reasoning which leads to colleges banning public speakers.

Colleges are environments specifically designed for intellectual inquiry among adults. And even then, a speaker whose entire shtick is “drugs are good and fun” should probably be prevented from speaking without serious warnings and counter arguments. YouTube is an environment for young peoples’ entertainment, which is very much unlike a college. The content is algorithmically fed to young people, and YouTube profits off of it. As a parent doesn’t escape jail by saying they only allowed their children to drink alcohol, a content server should not escape guilt and shame by saying they only allowed impressionable young people to watch music videos glamorizing opiate use.

Notably, YouTube bans holocaust denialism, which is a less bad thing than the promotion of opiates.

Guilt and shame isn’t equivalent to jail time. Algorithmic service isn’t the same as actually providing drugs. Which, at least in freedom land, isn’t actually illegal, not from a parent to his or her child. Not that youtube provides a parental or even collegiate level of authority over viewers!

Frankly, the analogy is completely incoherent.

We could imagine a scenario where a parent serves their child a reasonable amount of alcohol in their presence. But clearly, in this context, “a parent allowing their child to drink alcohol” isn’t referring to that. This is a discussion on illicit drug use, so a reasonable reader would interpret that in its intended meaning, as an illicit act. But I can be more detailed, if that’s important:

As a parent doesn’t escape jail by saying they only allowed their children to drink too much alcohol when they were not around

There we go.

Guilt and shame isn’t equivalent to jail time

But what do they have in common? They are considered the just responses to an infraction. Our society deemed it an infraction to allow children to drink alcohol illegally, and parents aren’t excused by claiming they merely permitted it and merely had the alcohol out in the open for easy access. Now, at least among many people, showing young people a glamorous depiction of drug use by their idol is considered shameful. The YouTube CEO is not excused from shame by merely permitting it and merely having it in the open for easy access.

So the analogy is comparing the relevant commonality of the two cases. Analogies are by their nature simplifications to save time. But your analogy re: college didn’t work because the expectations of freedom of speech on a college campus are distinct from the expectations on an app used by young people and children, from which the CEO derives profit per view.

Algorithmic service isn’t the same as actually providing drugs

Is it the same as providing a desirable lifestyle of drug use? Why or why not?

How would you react if someone went up to a teen and showed them really cool depictions of drugs? That would be pretty shameful, right? YouTube does this knowingly using middle men.

Does YouTube allow the “promotion of opiates”? From their website:

the following content isn't allowed on YouTube: Hard drug use or creation: Hard drug use or creation, selling or facilitating the sale of hard or soft drugs, facilitating the sale of regulated pharmaceuticals without a prescription, or showing how to use steroids in non-educational content.

I think videos explicitly encouraging illegal opiate use are probably banned on YouTube given they likely involve the use of hard drugs.

Does YouTube allow the “promotion of opiates”?

Yes. From their website: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mRTV-j87wOo

Yea I do them drugs, I don't give a fuck What u think

I don't eat food but I take blues

You can hear more of his lyricism in works such as Overdose, Benz Truck, and Giving Girls Cocaine. All on YouTube. He is not the only rapper who glamorizes opiates.

videos explicitly encouraging illegal opiate use are probably banned

Not if they encourage the drug through catchy lyrics and interesting music videos designed to be memorable to adolescents.

I think this is all too far. Notably, crime-glorifying rap was around well before YouTube was able to become a star-maker. I don't think YouTube not being around would have made that much difference for rapping about fent charting on radio or whatever.

But I don’t think that absolves them of their crime, because as per my OP, I think all of the players involved are complicit and not only YouTube. If our culture wanted they could make this music require an 18+ identification card for consumption, but there’s too much money to be made and they don’t care about the consequences of their actions.

If our culture wanted they could make this music require an 18+ identification card for consumption

I mean, we kinda tried, though it perhaps wasn't overly strict and the high-contrast label they slapped onto those albums arguably only made them more desirable. Our culture is not set up for this.

There's a lot that Susan gets flack for, chief among them being the CEO of YouTube during its TV-ification.

Second least bad, surely. It could've been a Sackler.

EDIT: Looks like I screwed up the math and chart stuff and it's all kind of weird. CDC says drug overdose is .32% of deaths, but that doesn't jive with their listed number of deaths in 2023, off by an order of magnitude. I'm wondering if deaths have more than one listed cause, or if some set of these numbers are projections or something.

As to why we won't talk about this more: We've talked about the opioid epidemic a lot, which is what this stat is about. 20% of opioid deaths are on prescription meds, and as far as I can tell the large majority of fentanyl users started with prescription opioids and then switched to fentanyl when they could no longer obtain/afford their growing addiction to prescribed meds.

Basically, you can't solve this problem without majorly overhauling the US healthcare system, which is a political quagmire that has been swallowing careers and movements whole for decades (Hillary Clinton started her political life as First Lady pushing for healthcare reform, and it didn't accomplish any more then than it has now).

Sure, you can imagine a world where you lock down the borders enough to stop all imported fentanyl (although the link to immigration is an obvious misdirect, imported drugs tend to come over sea borders and ports not the Mexican land border, and the programs to find caravans of people vs suitcases of drugs are completely different). But we import it because that's cheaper, not because it's the only way... US criminals are well capable of making their own fentanyl to sell if other supply lines close up.

You have to stop demand, which means fixing the prescription opioid epidemic, which means massively overhauling much of how we think about healthcare and the entire healthcare and insurance industries. That's disruptive, expensive, and politically difficult... not to mention opposed to the interests of a lot of rich capitalists. So, good luck on that.

as far as I can tell the large majority of fentanyl users started with prescription opioids and then switched to fentanyl when they could no longer obtain/afford their growing addiction to prescribed meds.

This is another drug warrior talking point. It's probably true, but the main study in support of it I have seen (with heroin, not fentanyl) includes a small detail which the drug warriors generally fail to mention: the prescription did not belong to the eventual street drug user.

Yes, this is correct, the media image (as seen in Dopesick and the Netflix version of it) of legal oxy prescription > illegal oxy purchasing [ > heroin ] > fent is extremely unusual. Most oxy prescriptions are to older people who aren’t taking taxis from retirement homes to buy fentanyl on Sunday afternoons in any great numbers.

Purdue and others were right that opioid abuse and the fentanyl epidemic is overwhelmingly because stupid children and family members stole legitimately prescribed opioids from relatives and then, when grandma didn’t get any anymore because she died or recovered from her fall, they search for an illegal equivalent. Then they sell or give various drugs on the way down to their friends or acquaintances, exacerbating the problem.

Every year millions of competent, middle class and above Americans get prescribed opioids for pain management, do their prescribed course and move on with their lives without incident. The Sacklers were just unlucky that a combination of grifting pill mill doctors (among the greediest professions in America) and feckless underclass communities cost them their reputation.

You have misplaced the decimal point. 112000/3500000 = 0.032 which is 3.2%

Hmm yeah. That's weird, I thought it was right because the CDC also says .32%. Don't know where the discrepancy is then, unless it's that deaths can be listed as having more than one cause?

I'm seeing

The age-adjusted rate of overdose deaths increased by 14% from 2020 (28.3 per 100,000) to 2021 (32.4 per 100,000).

but 32.4 per hundred thousand is 0.0324 %.

I think that the issue is that CDC is dividing (overdose deaths this year) by total population, but we are trying to get a feel for the meaning of the number of overdose deaths by doing the calculation

(overdose deaths this year) divided by (total deaths this year)

We are pondering: people are always dying, what proportion of deaths are overdose deaths?

One anticipates that (total population) divided by (total deaths this year) roughly approximates life span, so 70 or 80. But the ratio is more like 100. Err, I'm seeing in other calculations that (total population)/80 over estimates (total deaths this year) by quite a lot. Total population is around 334 million, total deaths for 2021 3.4 million. The ratio is surprisingly (confusingly?) close to 100.

Yeah I think that makes sense.

The US has around 3.5M deaths per year, 112K/3.5M=.32% of all deaths, pretty straightforward.

3.2%

EDIT:

Also, looking at the graph, on first glance it looks like overdose deaths spiked during Covid lockdown, and are already dropping quickly.

Are we looking at the same graph (Figure 1a. 12 Month-ending Provisional Counts of Drug Overdose Deaths: United States)? That apparent downward trend has the note "Underreported due to incomplete data", and the predicted value of deaths is holding steady at 110-112k.

EDIT2: @guesswho (do pings work in edits?)

EDIT: Looks like I screwed up the math and chart stuff and it's all kind of weird. CDC says drug overdose is .32% of deaths, but that doesn't jive with their listed number of deaths in 2023, off by an order of magnitude. I'm wondering if deaths have more than one listed cause, or if some set of these numbers are projections or something.

Still not sure where you're getting .32% from. From their first paragraph, 0.032% (32.4 per 100,000) of people died of overdose deaths (mostly opioid) in 2021. If you round it off to 1/100 people dying each year, it adds up to 3% of deaths.

I'm looking at this graph which runs from 1999 to 2021 and depicts a terrifying rising trend.

I wish someone would explain what’s up with my math and 3% rate. My extrapolation feels right but something not jiving with the lower percent of deaths.

I don’t buy the prescription opioids to fentanyl theory but can’t prove it. Any user I know of (young people) don’t have any reason for pain meds. Even someone I’m thinking of who did prescription meds was also just in the scene and doing both. If anything it would feel like an adderall as a kid to party scene pipeline.

“People who overdose on drugs don’t have long lifespans” - obviously because they died from an overdose. Absent substance abuse a 24 year old drug overdose would have lived to old age. There isn’t an underlying medical condition that would have killed them young absent.

I’m not sure what health care reform has to do with substance abuse. Data I have seen already have Americans doing more prescription drugs so better health insurance/single payer and more money spent on health care wouldn’t seem to shrink the amount of pharmaceuticals American are using. Now if you meant targeted reform like stricter limits on prescribing then it would likely do some good.

I wish someone would explain what’s up with my math and 3% rate. My extrapolation feels right but something not jiving with the lower percent of deaths.

3.2% is correct. His .32% was either a typo or a calculation error.

Now if you meant targeted reform like stricter limits on prescribing then it would likely do some good.

I think this experiment has already been tried. Opioid prescriptions are the lowest they've been in decades, down 50% from 2010. Curiously, the downward trend in prescriptions coincides with the upward trend in opiate ODs

https://thegarrisonproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/opioid-prescribing-1400x788.png

https://drugabusestatistics.org/wp-content/uploads/131/opioid-prescriptions-and-opioid-overdose-deaths.png

Wouldn't be surprised if the short-term and long-term trends are different here - cracking down on prescriptions while tons of people are addicted will force them to look for non-prescription opioids which are more dangerous, but in the long run it may reduce the number of people who get addicted in the first place.

PO->fentanyl pipeline I was getting mostly from personal observations plus common sense, but also backed by this paper. Though that paper isn't only about fentanyl so maybe it's not a strict majority for fentanyl itself.

For healthcare I can imagine a variety of policies including stricter prescription control, but really I'm thinking about something bigger than that.

I suspect that a lot of things we prescribe long-term pain meds for could be treated with combinations of things like rehabilitative therapy, biofeedback therapy, various surgeries, personal trainers to maintain overall health, etc. And a lot of things that do need pain meds could be prevented from turning into a long-term addiction with close monitoring by a doctor or nurse to test whether patients still need the meds and help them taper off slowly while using exercise/rehabilitation to recover promptly.

(obviously not all chronic pain conditions are like that, but I wouldn't be surprised if 60% of long-term opioid cases could be resolved with something in these genres)

The problem is all of that takes expensive one-on-one care and treatment by a variety of professionals, as well as some type of personal relationship with medical providers where they remember your name and your issues and are forming and executing long-term plans to work through them with you, and all of that is both more expensive than pills and not the way the system wants to be designed. The system is very much geared towards insurance only supporting the cheapest treatment in the short-term, which is normally pills, and in having an atomized care model where you get 15 minutes with your doctor and they follow a checklist to prescribe you something and then your relationship with them is over and you have to start from scratch if you want another appointment.

I really think the opioid epidemic in large part stems from opioids maximizing metrics that the modern healthcare and insurance industries judge themselves by - it 'solves' a ton of problems at a fairly low cost with very little physician time spent and no expensive in-care facilities needed. I think we could improve this and a lot of other medical problems if we weren't so focused on those metrics, but that would require really fundamentally changing the way the whole industry works.

The problem is all of that takes expensive one-on-one care and treatment by a variety of professionals, as well as some type of personal relationship with medical providers where they remember your name and your issues and are forming and executing long-term plans to work through them with you, and all of that is both more expensive than pills and not the way the system wants to be designed.

Not to mention a tremendous amount of personal discipline, faith, and ability to work through pain for years and years. Trust me, as someone who has done PT and put in over ten thousand hours into stretching/exercise to deal with chronic pain, it is brutally difficult. Easily the most challenging thing I've struggled with in my life.


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