domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
WhiningCoil
7hr ago
If you're incompetent and unteachable enough that you need to be governed with direct intervention, and restricted from handling your own affairs, you're also not really equipped to tell if your overseer is making good decisions on your behalf, and even if they aren't actively exploiting you, they can of course be making decisions that are suboptimal for your personal wellbeing, simply because they are not as motivated to do the best possible job.
IMHO, this is a perfect is the enemy of good situation. Is someone managing your decisions better than you, such that you are having even marginally better life outcomes than you were before them telling you what to do? Well, then how much of that added value they skim off the top comes down to competition between overseers.
Shit, I think we just reinvented the labor market.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
7hr ago
Peter Watts is, in my opinion, a very original writer, but not a very good one. He introduces interesting concepts or combines concepts in interesting ways, but his misanthropy is downright monotonous, his characters are pretty much just "what if someone were extremely fucked up in this particular way", and the plots are always "everything's fucked and then it gets worse". Garnish with more or less novel scientific ideas, interesting to read, but not really good books as such.
My favorite flourish of his was in Echopraxia, where he casually dropped the non-bomb that reality in that book was proven to be a simulation, but it never comes up again and has no impact on anything.
I'll probably read anything he writes, if only to hear about his latest inventions.
faceh
7hr ago
On the flip side there's the principal-agent problem.
If you're incompetent and unteachable enough that you need to be governed with direct intervention, and restricted from handling your own affairs, you're also not really equipped to tell if your overseer is making good decisions on your behalf, and even if they aren't actively exploiting you, they can of course be making decisions that are suboptimal for your personal wellbeing, simply because they are not as motivated to do the best possible job.
Maybe there needs to be an overseer-advocate role whose sole job is to audit the other overseers and ensure they're at least complying with best practices.
But this adds extra complexity and expense to this system.
So one really hopes that in the aggregate the added costs of supervising the supervisors and auditing the expenses and otherwise ensuring that the wards are being treated adequately well are actually producing more value than just leaving those folks to their own devices to be exploited.
I can see why institutionalization was a popular solution for this in decades past. If you can put the wards all in one place and lock them in, it takes relatively few supervisors to manage them all, and in theory if you can check in on the conditions regularly and make sure there's no wanton abuses.
In practice, the people most drawn to these jobs would, in many cases, be the most likely to want to commit some kind of abuse.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
7hr ago
Are children possessions? Can they be bought and sold?
Er, well, no
Surrogacy businesses everywhere in sudden disarray.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7hr ago
My fancy ramen from the Asian grocery does indeed seem to have gone up significantly in price. That's the only "pain" I've been personally felt from the tariffs and I'm pretty sure the response from pro-tariff policy people would be that I should stop buying Chinese noodles and get aboard the Korean noodle train. Because I am a very stable genius, I predicted this months ago:
None. I think the impact of tariffs will turn out to be wildly overrated. I have no actual empirical basis for that belief or an articulable mechanism, I just kind of don't believe that Nike is actually going to have more than a marginal price change. Maybe I'll be wrong, but my current stance is that "tariffs don't work" will be even more true than many people believe.
In all seriousness, I will continue to be actually pretty agnostic about the whole enterprise and think that we won't really know what the actual outcomes are for quite some time yet.
Goodguy
8hr ago
"No plan survives contact with the enemy." Especially when the soldiers are untrained and inexperienced and likely to panic when gunfire starts coming back from the other side.
The idea of luring ICE agents out using fireworks and then shooting them once they are out in the open seems like good tactics to me. But it seems that the attackers would have probably done better had they delayed the plan and spent some more time on the target range first.
gattsuru
8hr ago
Supposedly at least some of the attackers were John Brown Gun Club nuts. Which isn't evidence against the feds being involved, but JBGCs are also pretty famously prone to collecting mall ninjas with expensive or goofy gear.
ControlsFreak
8hr ago
Compare what I wrote:
There are a bunch of reasons why they don't do it, and that's okay.
I don't know to what extent a clustering can be identified that can be simply labeled "not wanting to put in the effort".
I enjoyed the book so much I read it four times. Not that there aren't quibbles to be had with some of its storytelling, but the concepts and overall narrative are strong enough to overcome its deficits.
something in me says Lovecraft did it better. Probably a matter of taste
Vehemently disagree with this in particular. In theory Lovecraft would be something I'd enjoy, but I get pretty tired of his penchant for showing the reader incomprehensible unexplained creatures, then stressing endlessly how easily our world could be ended by them - IMO, that is trivially easy to achieve if no burden whatsoever is placed on the writer to explain anything or make it make sense. The challenge with this kind of fiction in my opinion is to introduce a concept inherently clever or terrifying enough to maintain that sense of starkness, alienness and cosmic horror even when the mystery box is opened fully. I get so tired of aliens where the entire point of their existence is to be alien for the sake of being alien - it's easy to write godmade horrors if you're just optimising for weirdness and incomprehensibility, it's not easy to write them if you're simultaneously trying to make them comprehensible and plausible while retaining the dread. The horror in cosmic horror comes from it feeling real enough such that the audience would actually entertain it as a possibility.
Blindsight's cosmic horrors are maybe the only ones in fiction that feel truly alien and scary to me. Most of the others I've encountered are basically souped-up elves with even less plausibility.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
8hr ago
I think the "criminals" aspect of this is a red herring, and the real issue is the infidelity and "messaging multiple men" part. If she was a single mother messaging one man in prison, and he wanted to become the father of her kids, there wouldn't be an issue. If she was married and messaging a dozen non-criminal men and promising them to become the father of her kids they would end up in a similar risky situation.
Yeah, no. How do you think the situation would play out if a dozen dudes straight out of prison ran into each as they were serenading her in front of her house, vs. a dozen normal dudes? I'll go out on a limb and say the latter have a significantly higher chance of figuring out what happened, calling her a bitch, and laughing it off at the bar, and the former have a significantly higher chance of turning the neighborhood into a minor war zone.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
8hr ago
I have picked up Quasimorph the turn-based extraction shooter and have been enjoying it so far (still mostly at the stage where I stay at Mars and Mercury). The recent announcement that promises the player being able to set up his own trade outpost is, let me be excused for being repetitive, promising.
I have also looked into The Rose of the World, the schizo-cosmological tract the game pulled the parallel reality stuff from, and it is a fascinating read as well. It can be freely found here for inquiring minds.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
8hr ago
There's one false flag that I think you haven't ruled out, though, and that's the possibility that this was yet another FBI sting gone wrong. The FBI would have recruited Song under false pretenses, provided him with the guns and some plans, and planned to arrest the bunch at some point, but the group jumped the gun and actually did it. That's probably not what happened here, but it does fit their M.O.
I do always enjoy being reminded of the FBI's involvement in the shooting at the "draw muhammad" contest in Texas.
gattsuru
8hr ago
[Previous discussion here and here]
Mackey's a putz, but the trial and government arguments here were an absolute mess, and the court punting on both the constitutional and statutory construction issues is going to allow those messes to turn into a massive 'process is the punishment'-style problem at length. It's kinda funny that I called the appeals court doing so, but to be fair the long delay (15 months from oral args to decision!) makes me think that the court neutered a broader decision to keep out a dissent.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
8hr ago
Who's narrative?
The observation that BLM protests are often whiter than the police departments they're protesting is a running joke in southern states.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8hr ago
I think the "criminals" aspect of this is a red herring, and the real issue is the infidelity and "messaging multiple men" part. If she was a single mother messaging one man in prison, and he wanted to become the father of her kids, there wouldn't be an issue. If she was married and messaging a dozen non-criminal men and promising them to become the father of her kids they would end up in a similar risky situation.
The solution here which seems best suited to curtail dangerous behavior and not end up applied to ordinary good-faith actors seems to be some sort of child-protecting infidelity law. Or maybe just some sort of disclosure thing: don't tell multiple people that they can parent your kids without them knowing about each other. That way more benign cases like getting a new boyfriend while a divorce is being finalized, or consensual polyamory are not affected, while secretly cheating with a dozen people who become emotionally attached to a kid and then want to fight each other and/or kidnap the kid becomes illegal.
SophisticatedHillbilly
8hr ago
Is it safe in the two senses of:
-
Doesn’t cause any appreciable loss of strength, at least not beyond what losing that amount of weight would normally do via not eating (exercise held constant)
-
One can stop taking it without any negative consequences beyond just the loss of the benefits?
I’m interested in taking it but haven’t done a deep-dive into the subject yet. Any resources you’d recommend?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
8hr ago
This post is about Tariffs, again, lest I be accused of burying the lede. Just read the last two paragraphs if you don't enjoy window dressing.
China tightened regulations on real estate developers in 2020. Xi Jinping stated 'houses are for living, not speculation.' Ghost cities, huge numbers of Chinese citizens owning multiple houses as investment vehicles, I assume you're all familiar with the stories after five years of news stories and discussion. Economists and western commentators largely agreed that the policies were A Really Bad Idea due to the ensuing chaos and meltdown in property prices.
To which I have to say ...what? They said they wanted to reduce housing costs! What did you think that would look like? How else are you going to do it? And what do you think it would look like to 'make housing more affordable' in the USA? If the YIMBYs and neoliberals abundance socialists get their way, home prices are going to tank here too. This is a good thing! Maybe there's some Chestertonian benefit to the upwards spiral of housing costs, but this here's a fence I'm ready to take a torch to.
Anyways, to inch closer to the issue at hand - I have to confess that I had some tepid enthusiasm for Trump returning to office. Despite it all, I'm still an Elon stan and I thought some of the Dogemaxxers might have cogent arguments. I had some hope for racking up some China tariffs, eating bitterness for a few years and coming out the other end as a cohesive autarkical bloc of NATO + AUKUS + Japan + South Korea + anyone not named Putin or Jinping we can convince to join the squad. Setting aside my disappointments with Trump 2.0...
I'm utterly perplexed by the dialogue around tariffs? I can remember breathless fearmongering about shortages, empty shelves, inflation all spring. People on reddit posted invoices where what used to be a 10,000$ order from China was now over 50,000$. And yet...none of this chaos has come to pass? As far as I can tell, TACO is somewhat responsible, but also, average US tariff rates are just over 50% on Chinese goods?. Is it all TACO? If 50% tariffs have been painless, do you expect me to believe that 100% tariffs will truly be apocalyptic to the US economy? Do any of the firmly anti-tariff crowd have an explanation or prediction to make?
And on the other side, I fully expect victory laps and crowing about 4D chess from the 'Trump BTFOs retarded soyboy economics ExPeRtS crowd' again, but if the tariffs are painless and everyone is still buying cheap shit from China, aren't we losing??? Isn't the inflation, the spike in prices and the empty shelves the point of this whole exercise? Why are you promising people it will be painless, rather than YesChadding and telling them that the pain is the goal? You can have affordable housing when you're willing to accept that your own home will depreciate in value, and you can have low-skill manufacturing in your country when you're willing to accept higher prices for your goods. Eat bitterness with a smile on your face. Tell your daughter she only gets two dolls instead of 30 this Christmas because communism uncle Jerry with the high school degree needs a better job.
Grant_us_eyes
8hr ago
You went wrong a single sentence later
...do you not equate the phrase 'it's just that many people don't do it.' to 'not wanting to put in the effort'? I would think them rather similar.
With two main exceptions, I think that very few people in the West would say that it should be legal for people to be employed in jobs they can't quit. The number of people who would say that is, I think, not much larger than the number of people who would say that it should be legal to enslave people. Which is not surprising, given that being employed in a job you can't quit is basically a form of slavery.
One main exception is people's attitudes about conscription and about desertion after voluntarily joining the military. I think that these are probably an exception mainly because people even in liberal democracies are historically used to them and because fear of foreign threat is an emotionally powerful motivator.
The other main exception is prison labor. I think that one is an exception because people feel that prison labor helps to repay damage that prisoners have caused to others / to society.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
8hr ago
It could be, but it would be an unusual setup and it's not similar to any real case I've personally seen. One inmate talking to multiple women, where (some of) those women realize he's talking to (and scamming) multiple women but continuing to engage (and send money and run errands and help him further his criminal schemes) with him? Yep, seen those cases. One woman engaging with multiple inmates and sending them all money? Sounds odd.
gattsuru
8hr ago
Yeah, this seems mostly reasonable, and matches my understanding.
I'll caveat that there's also a little bit of messiness from a res judicata perspective. Overlapping or succeeding mass tort lawsuits are a complicated mess I won't pretend to grok, but from what I've read there are very few exceptions to the rule that, once you are bound to a class, you're stuck with the results of a case, win or lose. It's not just that an injury might only get an award from a far-earlier case, but an injury could potentially get no award because whoever brought the class-action lawsuit to start with was a nutjob. But this is already common in class-actions that only seek injunctive relief, since they don't (always?) require opt-out notifications.
That's one of the arguments in favor of class actions over universal injunctions -- The Groups can't just keep bringing forward the same claim with a slightly different plaintiff in every single jurisdiction in the country until they get a friendly-enough judge or SCOTUS specifically slaps down that one theory -- but it does have ways it could get ugly. In theory, class action certification is supposed to depend on having competent enough representation, and issue and claim preclusion don't entirely block things under every circumstance, but even in the more constrained domain of previous class-action lawsuits things like cy pres abuse or outright collaborative lawsuits intended to negate serious liability already get through the gates.
On the gripping hand, it's kinda how caselaw works anyway, just less formally; Rahimi or Miller might be less strictly binding on anyone else's attempts to appeal its class of prohibition, but such a third-party plaintiff would have no more ability to control the legal claims brought than someone who didn't exist for them, and I wasn't born when Miller was decided.
hanikrummihundursvin
8hr ago
I think the general sentiment regarding 5.56 is that it's great up until the point you have to take on armored opponents or longer range engagements. It's not without cause that the Army and Marines have been moving towards larger calibers recently. That being said, a high velocity 5.56 round hitting you anywhere except your chest plate will probably render you combat ineffective. Couple that with low recoil and it's hard to imagine a more preferable option for lightly trained persons.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8hr ago
Are children possessions? Can they be bought and sold?
Er, well, no, but historically? Yes, sometimes. The "proprietarian" theory of childhood and the relative personhood of minors is a separate but related question, which Aristotle uses illustratively and which remains analogous even today.
"Some people have difficulty running their lives and it would be better for them if someone else ran it to some extent" is a defensible proposition. "Some people should be the literal property of other people" much less so.
Sure, but my whole point is that the difference is one of degree rather than kind, and that much of law and culture is devoted to keeping people at least somewhat enslaved, while simultaneously obfuscating that fact. I would think it obvious from what I wrote, but in case it's not, I certainly do not endorse chattel slavery! Not do I endorse milder forms; I do not even particularly endorse our current cultural approach to the subjection of children. This is what makes the puzzle a proper puzzle, on my view--that the approaches we have adopted toward managing the lives of others strike me as at once both too great and too small.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
8hr ago
Upon making a full recovery, they are released to Substack.
Or if they go too insane to keep safely in the preserve, surely?
I don't know, I only ever played Ark on the official servers. The game .. may feel fun for ~800 hours if you play by yourself in the PvE mode but it's about 1/20th of the entire game experience. PvE itself can be challenging and fun, especially on Aberration, but the real experience is vastly more 'rewarding'. The issues is, permanently running servers reward no-lifers, so even those who could dedicate 4 hrs of it each night, as much as people used to watch TV, would be unable to compete with students, unemployed, part-time employed people who love the game..
The whole reason why it seems more fun is because people are smart, and you really find out what you're made of when there's no reload or do-overs.
Ofc, with Ark, the big issue is, that devs can't program and can't create good rules.
That's because they wanted to reward players and the level scaling is absurd. A tame direwolf with a few lvls into HP is going to have about the same HP as an alpha carno. If in the game high level tamed animals weren't absurdly stronger than wild ones, navigating the map could be an actual challenge. People wouldn't like that at all!
Ironically, you picked a pretty bad example because direwolves are notoriously 'squishy' due to having no saddle damage reduction. They're a niche animal with limited uses, mostly bred as pets. You want a high level direbear with a decent saddle, but ideally a high level t-rex. That's going to eat everything except a giga or titanosaur. (as to fighting those, the only safe way is trapping them and using weapons or dinos that do % damage, like another giga or allosaurus)
Anyway the meta to understand is relatively easy and in any case, there's always the wiki.
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