domain:npr.org
2rafa
16m ago
Fiscal discipline can only be enforced by the bond market, that is the reality. Since both Democrats and Republicans have borrowed and would borrow, the questions around deficit spending are only these:
-
How can we maximize spending to fiscally constrain a future opposition administration/congress?
-
How can we allocate the greatest possible funding to issues we care about?
This bill, while far from perfect, mostly accomplishes both. You can’t mass deport without large scale holding camp infrastructure. $50bn or whatever isn’t enough, but it’s a good start. Immigration is the only thing that matters until immigration is solved (AI matters too, but the state is powerless to stop that march of technological progress).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
19m ago
Broadly, it's bad fiscal policy in a way that fiscal policy has been bad in an escalating fashion for the last 10-25 years (Any self-described Republican fiscal hawks need to account for Hastert before we get to Ryan/McCarthy/Johnson.).
What I find interesting in the argument over Medicaid cuts is the fact that Medicaid spending somehow increased by 40% in the last five years? How?! I could see 25% given inflation, and a temporary covid bump makes sense, but we've allegedly had a strong working-class labor market for years.
Is a healthcare system that's rapidly approaching 20% of GDP even reformable?
functor
26m ago
Effectively there are too many people that have to be pleased by the budget for it to pass. Congress, senate and a bunch of other influential people have to agree to it. These people aren't fully autonomous but are being pulled in various directions by people around them. The result is not much can actually be done to cut spending as each cut will be fought by someone. Musk was probably right from an idealist perspective that the bill increased the debt. However, his view is too based on the corporate world in which he doesn't need to get hundreds of people to agree in order to set policy.
The bill highlights one of America's greatest issues, the inability for someone to ram something through and get it done.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27m ago
singularly terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget
They're not that strong though, glorified policemen. The US Army or Marines could surely roll right over them with numbers and heavy equipment.
Also, is there any need to use language like ingroup and neargroup? Do you just mean friends, leftists, liberals, progressives? Fiscal conservatives? Or do you mean well off, upper middle class, highly educated people? Or maybe you mean civil servants? I'm left guessing here. Surely being more precise would be better.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
47m ago
RE: Uploading.
Do we really need to worry about our uploads being abused and tortured, or sold for parts? By the time technology is far enough along to upload minds, what really is the value of an upload? It can be copied and modified infinitely. Most likely they can be synthesized, procedurally generated or just generated by "AI"s. If a virtual mind is good for anything, then there will be so many of them purpose-built that nobody needs a pre-singularity upload to do the job.
You'll be a useless scrap of data. Just to be very clear about that.
GBRK
1hr ago
Does anyone have anything to say about the OBBB being passed? I was genuinely surprised to see that no one was posting about it at all in this thread.
I'm broadly against the bill but don't have much of an opinion of the specific provisions. I understand that it's meant to neuter the political power of my ingroup and neargroup and it seems like it's going to be effective at that, so I know I'm going to dislike it regardless of whether it has any actual non-partisan merit. I guess if I had to single out few things in particular, I'm selfishly in favor of renewing the R&D tax writeoffs, but also singularly terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget... It definitely looks like trump is making a military force loyal to him personally because he doesn't trust the loyalty of the existing forces. There are... historical parallels. I'm (among other things) brazilian, and I can't help but remember the first republic's antipathy towards and neglect of the navy due to their royalist tendencies.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
In short terms (based on my experience), I'd say something like "Blue Tribers who like the movie Idiocracy for being 'so true,'" or "racist Progressives who've figured out they hate Red Tribe 'fellow whites' more than they do blacks or browns."
The first time I ever encountered the term, it was in a Substack essay by a "former white nationalist" who pretty much fit that second description — the moment he got out of his diverse, coastal, urban, Blue Tribe bubble into the >90% white "flyover country" and met his "fellow whites" of the Red Tribe, suddenly he wasn't a "white nationalist" anymore. The essay also went on about how "progressive" his politics were, how they were solidly in the tradition of past progressives like Galton and Sanger, and how eugenics are really the most progressive thing (I'd say he's not wrong about that), and that his "project" to "fix" our politics is about reclaiming "solidly Anglo" progressive eugenics from it's "unfair" association with Nazi Germany. (Meanwhile, I noted that his list of past pro-eugenics "Anglo" progressives that started with Galton included the rather non-Anglo Wernher von Braun.)
Basically, this is one of the places where I agreed with Hlynka, that there's a lot of these sorts who are supposedly on the "far-right." (My primary disagreement with him was always that he held being a "principled loser" as the essence of "the Right," and thus pronounced all atheists — and anyone else who disbelieves in "a future state of rewards and punishments" after death — as automatically and inherently Leftists, and thus The Enemy.)
Jiro
1hr ago
What about the atoms in your body that have gone through the food chain and been later used in someone else's body? Who gets them?``
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
Some people think being patriotic is some kind of duty, but I'm not one of those people. Your truest and highest duty as a citizen is to make a thoughtful vote at every given election opportunity.
This is something I'm inclined to disagree with. No comment on patriotism, which I think is a snarl word that admits of too many different meanings to be useful, but I think what you've done here is an instance of fetishism. Voting is one thing that dutiful citizens often do. It is not identical to dutiful citizenship. I think you're mistaking one expression of a duty with the duty itself.
As I would have it, responsible democratic citizenship does require participating in the political life of the community. That often involves voting, but voting itself is not sufficient for it. A responsible citizen may choose not to vote in certain circumstances (as act of protest, for instance); and an irresponsible citizen may exist even while regularly voting. I don't deny that there's a correlation - responsible and thoughtful citizens vote more often, the irresponsible and incompetent vote less - but the correlation shouldn't be seen as absolute. Moreover, there are many ways for a citizen to participate in the life of their community and support their fellows that do not involve voting, and I value a lot of those ways above voting itself.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2hr ago
Case in point: https://kirkbangstad.substack.com/p/the-case-for-shutting-down-minocquas
One of our state political cranks (a FIB, natch) has vowed to shut down the community's Fourth of July parade because he doesn't think they deserve one.
clo
2hr ago
the corollary:
I care about treating animals better when it makes them more delicious.
ulyssessword
2hr ago
I always treated the 1-10 pain scale as logarithmic, like earthquakes or sound. 7% of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake ("Near total destruction – severe damage or collapse to all buildings.") is 7.8 ("Causes damage to most buildings, some to partially or completely collapse or receive severe damage."), not 0.63 (the scale only goes to 1.0, which are not felt).
Or going the other way, stubbing a toe might be a 3. Stubbing three toes is definitely not a 9. It might not even reach a 4.
walruz
2hr ago
"Waaah, you modded Johnny but you didn't mod Suzy, obviously you love Suzy more!"
Pretty clear violation of the rule cited by netstack two posts upthread. One week ban.
TIRM
2hr ago
First off, it is not me torturing them in that game. They brought this on themselves. They board my ship then they deserve for me to cut power to life support, open the air locks and wait with the crew locked in the medical bay while they suffocate. They set foot on my ship, they choose the path of suffering.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
The former.
clo
3hr ago
Pro grill tip is to just rest your goddamn meat. Yes, it's a pain, yes, it's hard to resist meat fresh off the grill, but yes it makes a difference and yes you won't have it bleeding all over the plates if you did it properly.
The rest is just down to preference. Rule of thumb/eyeballing it is like 300-450g of meat per person depending on appetite/size of the person. But if you don't feel like doing a plethora of sides and someone is really invested in getting a Steak(tm) you can make some big-ass tomahawks to split between a couple people at around 600-700g a person. Meat's pretty simple. Sides on the other hand have a wide gulf between mid and great, try for both a healthy and unhealthy salad, cold cuts, etc. Stuff can be laid out without much stress. Grilled veggies also work fine as long as you watch the sear and oil/season appropriately; you can skewer the things if you like the visual but it's also fine to grill or oven them in a big batch well in advance and then toss em in a little oil and vinaigrette and season before serving. I actually like doing foil-wrapped fish in packets on the grill too, if it's a fatty fish you don't need to stress too much over being exact.
TIRM
3hr ago
Orthodox Jews believe in bodily resurrection. Which means they want their bodies kept intact. No organ donation or cremation, etc. They don't think God makes a fresh new body for you. It is your current body brought to life.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
3hr ago
There's a lot of bees around. If you multiply it out then we'd still need to put great effort into satisfying their desires, likewise with other insects. There are lots of ants and rats and whatever else, ludicrous numbers of them.
As a random aside, reading this gave me flashbacks to when I attended a 10 day Vipassana meditation retreat. Part of the expected behaviour while you are there is that (besides vows of silence, chastity, vegetarianism, no physical contact or eye contact) you are expected to not harm any other being. This is pretty much in line with strict Buddhist precepts.
We were given guidance to try not to step on ants while wandering the grounds and to try not to harm flies/bees/other insects. It wasn't that hard really, except to not reflexively slap bugs on your skin but brush them off gently instead. Also, I ended up not looking too closely at the tracks I was walking on because otherwise I'd slow to a snail's pace. See no evil and all that.
stolen_brawnze
I am the way Sia says "batteries" in that one song.
3hr ago
It makes me happy that nearly all those users in the Smollett thread are here and active to this day!
GBRK
4hr ago
I have a private theory that reorgs are the company-level analogue to how human bodies evolved to raise their temperature as an immune response. When you can cleanly identify and resolve a dysfunction you do that, but when you can't... when all you have is a lingering sense of dread... you can stagnate, and let your corporate DNA die out, or you can generate a lot of "heat" and hope any entrenched dysfunctions eventually die off. No individual corporate T-cell knows what they're doing-- they're just thinking about advancing their careers and how shitty the coffee is. But the behavior gets reinforced by so many selection pressures that they conform to it anyway, as part of a larger system that they can interact with but never fully comprehend.
(This feeds into my whole conspiracy theory about how the stockmarket is already a meaninfully superhuman artificial intelligence but that's another discussion.)
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4hr ago
The median estimate, from the most detailed report ever done on the intensity of pleasure and pain in animals, was that bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people. Bees were guessed to be more intensely conscious than salmon!
I don't see why people are taking issue with this. Why should suffering and pain be cognitively complex?
Emotional heartbreak or intellectual suffering may be intellectually demanding but that's not really worse than pain. If you thrash a severely, extremely mentally retarded person then he may very well cry out and try to evade you, his suffering isn't obviously diminished by his stupidity. I might well choose intellectual pain over physical pain if given the option.
The real issue is concluding that because animals are suffering due to human policies there's a systematic need to change our behaviour. There isn't. Animals are not people by definition. There's no need to worry about them.
Saying 'oh well bees are only worth 0.0002 human suffering points not 0.02 or 0.07' is a foolish defence. There's a lot of bees around. If you multiply it out then we'd still need to put great effort into satisfying their desires, likewise with other insects. There are lots of ants and rats and whatever else, ludicrous numbers of them. Put the baseline animal moral weighting at 0 and there's no problem, regardless of how they suffer. Furthermore, it might be discovered that, by scanning the brain of the bee or some other animals, that these animals actually feel deeper pain and more profound suffering than we do. Who cares even if that were so? Does some weird mole or marmot deserve welfare because it has an overdeveloped sense of suffering?
There's no need to go out of our way to harm animals but they shouldn't be considered in this way. Instead of weighted benevolence, there should be a focus on reciprocity. If the bear or elephant is nice to people and helps out, then be nice to the elephant or bear. If the killer whale tries to sink human ships, kill it. The size of their brains or their ability to feel pain shouldn't relate to how they're treated. A bee is worth more than a pitbull in my book.
GBRK
4hr ago
cross section of ethical veganism, rationalists, and nerdy utilitarian blogs.
Surveying my vegan friends, what's been most interesting to discover is that they're mostly not utilitarians. I routinely pose the question of, "how many weeks of veganism would I have to endure to convince you to eat a single burger." One dude was provisionally willing to eat a burger if it turned me vegan permanently (and agreed in general that there was some finite number of weeks he would trade for a burger) but the rest turned out to be avowed kantians on the subject. Apparently they didn't care about saving animal lives on net as much as they cared about not violating their personal morality about not contributing to the suffering of animals. That was a particularly interesting result for me because these same vegans are also involved in the local EA movement (which is how I met them.) Going in, I was under the impression that EA was a pretty explicitly utilitarian movement, in the sense that it prioritized QALYs and net pleasure-minus suffering, but that wasn't the angle they approached it from.
I agree with your overall reasoning. Our favorite current-day technologies could theoretically be used as the next step in the formation of homo technicus, tool-using man who outcompetes his more natural rivals because technology just makes him better at life, but right now those technologies are mostly used to hook into our path-of-least-resistence hedonism to maximize engagement and minimize agency. In the long run, we'll figure out how to use them more intelligently and efficiently for productive purposes, and how to protect ourselves from addiction and brain-addling engagement-maximization-schemes. Well, "we" - some will, some won't, and the former will make it further into the future than the latter before technology progress makes humans in general obsolete.
More options
Context Copy link