domain:anarchonomicon.substack.com
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
22hr ago
Introduce a $200 bill. Inflation means that the $100 bill is no longer as useful as it once was. It is time to acknowledge this by creating a higher denomination note. Whose face should go on the bill? My preference would be Ronald Reagan, but if we absolutely must have a woman on the bill, let's go with Ayn Rand.
If we actually want it to be done we should have Donald Trump's face on the bill. Or maybe also introduce a $1,000 bill with Trump's face.
Just think, Trump could be the face of stockpiles of US currency in countries which don't have a stable currency of their own.
(to be clear I would unironically support this)
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22hr ago
I appreciate you.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
22hr ago
I don’t think any of this will actually make currency more useful than ubiquitous payment processors, so I don’t see the need for #3.
...unless you consume things the payment processors don't like.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
22hr ago
The time wasn't right because there were too many useless coins.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
22hr ago
The problem is that local taxes are harder to deal with. You have state and local taxes to deal with which makes it almost impossible to make a national ad for a product if you have to include taxes. Just crossing a city/county line can change prices by a dollar or more depending on the product. If you cross a state line, you can get even bigger effects.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
22hr ago
I've never used dating apps. It would be pointless; since I'm in the DC area, white women who aren't the type to put those "HATE HAS NO HOME HERE / NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL" signs in their yards are damned few and far between unless you go way beyond the reach of public transit (I have no car).
SnapDragon
23hr ago
No problem, this is something we're all still trying to figure out. I wonder if there'll be a future career path of "prompt engineer", or, more fancifully, "LLM whisperer"...
ulyssessword
23hr ago
Canada already rounds cash purchases to $0.05, and it works fine. Sure, you can avoid a $0.02 upcharge or get a $0.02 discount when using cash, but nobody cares about that much money.
That being said, I wouldn't fix prices at $0.25 increments, at least at the low end. There is a real difference in price between a $0.65 can of soup and a $0.85 one, despite both rounding to $0.75. Maybe one cent increments up to five dollars (no more 9/10 of a cent for gas), and 25 cent increments after that.
quiet_NaN
23hr ago
Pass a law requiring prices and salaries to be advertised after tax.
The difference is that Starbucks charges everyone they sell a coffee to the same sales tax, but different employees are very likely to pay different income taxes. In Germany, you get tax credits for being married to someone without much income (Ehegattensplitting, also known as Herdpraemie (stove bonus)) and having kids. Depending on circumstances, you can also deduct a lot of different expenses from your taxes.
The closest practical solution to your proposal I can see is that jobs are required to advertise what a fictional reference employee (18yo, able-bodied, single, no kids, no other sources of income or deductible expenses) would get as a paycheck. Of course, for a single parent who already has another part time job, the amount they will make will likely be different.
TeknOShEeP
23hr ago
Ah, TIL.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
23hr ago
Where the feelings of aggression come in is he has a very intense stare, and I really do feel a sense of "this is an angry person looking at me with aggression" when he looks into the camera. This is a startlingly aggressive gaze for a youtuber to be making into the inanimate object of a camera. And the shadow that his ballcap casts onto his face doesn't really help.
Interestingly, at least this particular freeze frame does not actually register as particularly aggressive to me - I just read it as something like "triumphant expectation", like he thinks he just made a winning point in an argument and is waiting for me to concede.
I come from red country; the conservative men I know don't give off "aggressive, uncoordinated," vibes, but rather "more coordinated and chill than average."
To be clear, I didn't posit it as a general trait of conservatives; rather, it seems to me to be something that conservatives now appreciate in their influencers/thought leaders/talking heads.
For an example that separates the traits I am talking about from "working class markers" (as @OliveTapenade suggested), I got the same sense of unexpected aggression from the handful of Jordan Peterson clips I have watched. My feeling there was that he perpetually talked with a tension that sounded like a professional middle class father who was five seconds away from slapping his son so hard that he would fly across the room.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
23hr ago
Surely Trump backs down here. US MIC hard-needs rare earths, can't do without them.
I think this is a targeted blow against the defence and EV industries, not against chips or electronics generally. Chips have only a tiny amount of rare earths. Only things with Big Motors or Exotic Electronics like military hardware are really affected. HDDs should be fine if we recycle more, F-35s on the other hand are in real trouble.
Yet another huge environmentalist error: https://x.com/skepticaliblog/status/1912469666272059526
Quantumfreakonomics
23hr ago
Let me just tell you from learning the hard way: These women are doing you a favor by making it clear this is a dealbreaker up front.
PreformancePertension
23hr ago
Also, this is not a website that I expect anyone to particularly like this line of reasoning (I don't myself), but the reason we don't have bills higher than $100 is that law enforcement and governments in general dislike high value bills due to their use in crime - untraceable cash and all that. The ECB massively regrets putting out a 500EUR note and only printed them for a decade before stopping and trying to take them out of circulation.
Throwaway05
23hr ago
No worries, I'm just here to be ornery on medicine topics periodically. >_>
07mk
23hr ago
Also, it is noteworthy that this case is literally "Burgers?". I guess life does imitate art.
Given how often Stone Toss gets parodied both by his fans and haters, I feel like someone must've already made an edit of that comic using "Waffles?" as a punchline, but I'm not clever enough to figure out what the joke would be.
anon_
23hr ago
Sorry, you're right. I didn't mean orthopedic surgeon, I mean osteopath/PM&R types.
My bad.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
23hr ago
By contrast I find the generic left-wing affect to be... one of two, it's either an affected sense of superiority (the I-can't-believe-I-have-to-explain-this-to-you style), or it's a kind of fragility? I don't know how to describe it, but if the right-winger feels like they're about to start screaming, the left-winger feels like they're about to start crying. There's a kind of insecurity. In my experience the superior, smug style is more common among men, and the fragile, desperate style is more common among women.
Does this apply just to left-wing politics youtubers, or to any "generically left-wing" (~anyone who does not register as having the aggressive affect to me)? (What about, say, this prolific tech reviewer, or these two default left-wingers talking to each other about vaguely politics-adjacent things?) Do you have any examples that you would consider typical?
quiet_NaN
23hr ago
From your link:
The new regulations create Beijing's version of US rules which block countries from selling chip-making equipment to China.
The US has used those measures to slow China's development of powerful chips that could be used for artificial intelligence (AI) with military applications.
Interestingly enough, I think that chip production does not require tons of rare earth elements. Even if the REE prices increased by a factor of 100, I am not sure if the chips themselves would be much more expensive. Of course, for ceramic capacitors the story is different, and a lot of other tech in data centers uses REE as well.
I think that the US (and it's loose allies, like Taiwan or the Netherlands) leading in chip feature size is them being ahead in a race which is relevant (at least if you believe that AI will not simply fizzle out, and care about who builds the paperclip maximizer).
By contrast, I am not sure that having cheaper REE extraction tech (which China likely has) is much of a game-changer. The price of Neodymium is a few hundred dollars per kilogram. As you need about 1kg for an EV, changing the price to 1000$/kg would increase the price of EVs slightly. For headphones, the relative price hike is probably even smaller.
That being said, investing in US REE refining is probably not a solid business decision. Sure, while China blocks exports your product is competitive, but as soon as they put their stockpiles on the market, you will no longer sell anything.
I think that the best thing you can do as a nation if a competitor controls a market of strategic importance is to (a) have a strategic reserve and (b) pay companies to produce the product at prices far above what the market would pay in moderate quantities, so that once an embargo happens you have some tech which you can scale up. (Arguably, (b) is also the strategy most countries use for military hardware. In three decades, Europe produced 609 Eurofighters. By contrast, in the six years of WW2, 800 thousand airplanes were produced by all combatants. The point of paying astronomical sums for a few Eurofighters is not that they will be very useful, but that if one ever finds oneself in the situation of wanting to spend a decent fraction of the GDP on fighter planes, one can ramp up the production in a few years rather than spending decades developing new planes.)
As a negotiation strategy with Trump, I think China's approach is decent, and as an European I wish them wholeheartedly success in standing up to Trump's protectionism.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
23hr ago
His manner of speaking doesn't come across as right-wing principaliter to me, it comes across as uncoordinated and aggressive. I think that's where your feelings of "this is like a drunken man" come from. It feels like he's rocking around and can't sit still. It comes across as sketchy to me -- I'm don't know the man, I'm just expressing what my snap judgment of his presentation says.
Where the feelings of aggression come in is he has a very intense stare, and I really do feel a sense of "this is an angry person looking at me with aggression" when he looks into the camera. This is a startlingly aggressive gaze for a youtuber to be making into the inanimate object of a camera. And the shadow that his ballcap casts onto his face doesn't really help.
I come from red country; the conservative men I know don't give off "aggressive, uncoordinated," vibes, but rather "more coordinated and chill than average." The feature that distinguishes a lot of the young conservative men I've met is they just feel calmer and pursue traditional milestones (marriage, children, etc). While there are lots of tells that this specific video creator is a right-winger, if you took the hat away I could easily see him being a Democrat, or a Libertarian, or a radical Socialist. He just feels like "angry man with bone to pick", not so much "proud conservative."
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
23hr ago
I don’t take this account literally. I don’t believe that Adam was real, which means I don’t believe that he was the first prophet of the “true gospel”. Because I don’t believe this part of the claim, the rest of it can only be interpreted symbolically or esoterically. The way I approach the idea of a “restored gospel” is informed by conversations I have had with intelligent Catholics and Orthodox, in which their account of what they actually believe about God and creation and the nature of the cosmos is so wrapped up in mysticism and symbolic reinterpretation and thousands of years of commentary by church leaders that it becomes totally impenetrable and incomprehensible. I do not want to have to sift through 2,000+ years of biblical hermeneutics in order to even begin to grasp God’s plan for my salvation. By clearing away those millennia of cruft and theological rabbit-holes, the LDS church can return to a reading of the Bible which embraces plain language and concepts that normal people can work with, while also building a High Church structure similar to Catholicism without all the historical baggage. It’s a sort of “post-Protestantism” that takes what works about Catholicism and Orthodoxy, discards what clearly doesn’t work, and allows for a 21st-century reinterpretation of Christianity.
I mean the problem with this approach is that the church fathers have written down things from the beginning. We have a pretty good idea of what they believed about the gospel, Christ, sacraments, church structure and so on. It does not match with Smith’s restoration. Ignatius of Antioch refers to Christ as God before we have a codified New Testament. There are references to bishops in early Christian texts, there are references to sacraments. The earliest known Christian catechism is the Didache, it’s pretty short and you can read it online. It’s not Mormon. There’s no mention of preexisting souls, God once being a physical being, or Christ and Lucifer being related, etc. it’s not present in the early church.
This makes even a metaphorical restoration nonsense.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
23hr ago
Jackson was one of the worst US presidents ever, he was a racist even for his own time, which is saying something. He shouldn't be on any US currency and ideally his grave and memorials get turned into spots commemorating his victims instead of him, a bit like what was done here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=nrATA8gWdaQ
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
23hr ago
Eliminate all coins other than the quarter. Inflation has made pennies, nickels, and dimes worthless. Half dollars are extinct, and every attempt the government makes to introduce a dollar coin ends in failure because there is already a perfectly good dollar bill. But the quarter is still useful to pay for laundry.
Completely agreed. Get rid of the quarter too, dollar bills are perfectly fine for laundry machines to take. Here in the UK I just physically handled my first Charles III coin this week two years after his coronation, and it was a special edition sold by the royal mint as a collectible.
Pass a law that businesses must advertise after-tax prices, not before-tax prices.
Again completely agreed, it's weird how the USA seems to be that one single country in the world where the price you see on labels is not the price you pay.
Introduce a $200 bill. Inflation means that the $100 bill is no longer as useful as it once was.
Nah, if anything scrap the $100 and $50 bills, larger denominations just help with money laundering. Take a page of out India's book when it scrapped its high value notes.
The year is 2010. The Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (LADWP) publishes its initial environmental study on a large power infrastructure maintenance project. A portion of the project involves replacing about 200 wooden power poles that run through Pacific Palisades. The California State Lands Commission reviewed the initial study and requested that LADWP provide a Native American Ground Monitor during any digging to ensure that cultural resources are not inadvertently damaged or destroyed. By the final EIR in 2016 LADWP decided that replacing the all of those +70 year old power poles was no longer necessary.
The year is 2018. The Camp Fire ignites in northern California. It's cause was the failure of a 100 year old power line. By early 2019 LADWP decides to replace those 70 year old powerlines running through Pacific Palisades, they're in a now deemed high fire threat area. The California Public Utilities Commission has recommended they be replaced as soon as possible. Work is to start in 2019.
July 7th, 2019. LADWP has started work to replace the power lines, as well as leveling and grading new fire roads. Amateur botanist and avid hiker David Pluenneke is hiking in the area. David is a member of the California Native Plant Society. He sees that LADWP has trampled the endangered Braunton’s milkvetch. In all, 183 milkvetches were murdered. He is livid:
(What exactly would happen to a blue whale in this scenario David? What other than a bulldozer could get that whale off the mountain David?)
Our hero David reports LADWP to the California Coastal Commission. The CCC is not happy with unpermitted work done within their fiefdom. In order to get a CCC approved permit to replace the wooden poles LADWP must:
- Submit a detailed pre and post construction vegetation survey for the entire 2.5 mile stretch. The surveys need to identify the type and location of any and all sensitive species (all birds, shrubs, milkvetches), and it needs to show their location on a detailed map.
- Any work must be supervised by an on site project biologist, or biologists if the worksite is large. These observers will make daily surveys of sensitive wildlife species and they have the authority to stop any work that could result in their harm.
- LADWP agrees to excavate the new powerline poles by hand, with shovels. Workers will walk to the site. Helicopters will bring in the new poles and remove the old.
- No construction activities that generate noise above 60 dBA (loudness of an average conversation) may take place during bird nesting season, which runs from mid February to mid September. Of course this requires another observer biologist, a bird biologist, to verify.
- Pay $1.9 million in fines.
- All newly constructed fire roads must be unconstructed and returned to their original condition. Milkvetch and all.
- Etc.
I wasn't able to find if / when this particular project was completed by LADWP. Checking Google Street View, as of August 2023 these poles were not replaced. But overall there are 300,000+ power poles in LA. As of 2019, 65% of them were older than the average lifespan of 50 years old. In 2024, LADWP replaced just 2743 poles. Their average cost to replace a pole in the same year was $69,300. At their 2024 rates it will take LADWP over 70 years and $14 billion to replace all past lifespan poles.
To relook at the culture war angle - why was their a fire in Pacific Palisades? Maybe Jonathan Rinderknecht will be found guilty, maybe he won't be. But Jonathan didn't create a massive tinderbox in the LA hills for ideological reasons. Jonathan didn't let firehoses go without water while they sat a mile away from an empty 100 million gallon revisor. Jonathan didn't empower a council of retards at the California Coastal Commission to nuke every project from orbit at the behest of any and every nature activist. LA burned with or without Jonathan, the parallel Eaton fire was just as destructive and (as to current knowledge) not caused by him.
There will always be Jonathan Rinderknechts. We won't fix them by grasping for the very abstract universal meaning, or high-minded civic metaphysics, or better pathways, or whatever. If we need to have a confrontation with modern liberalism, it shouldn't be because it "prizes the autonomy of the individual above the stability of society". It should be because it fucking sucks. It empowers tiny little bean counter despots to make sure your critical infrastructure construction isn't too loud for the little fishes. It sets environmentalists as legally prescribed tattletales against those that produce and build. It fails to build and maintain basic infrastructure, and housing, and anything that isn't a patronage network. We should ask "Why was there a massive tinderbox outside our second largest city", instead of "What can we do to make sure every young man feels special."
Well you know, until the other big secret everyone pretends to believe, you know the one I'm talking about.
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