domain:anarchonomicon.substack.com
ControlsFreak
9hr ago
if the supply curve is very flat, behavior that looks like that can happen. Suppose there are 10000 people willing to do a job from any price from $10/hr to $100/hr.
A very flat supply curve would, by convention, be nearly perfectly elastic, with the value of elasticity very close to infinity. In contrast, what you go on to describe is a perfectly inelastic supply, with the value of elasticity very close to zero.
This is in pretty sharp contrast to actual measurements of the elasticity of labor supply, which are more like 0.7-1.8. Do you have any sort of empirical support for this claim of (I believe) perfectly inelastic supply (as opposed to your description of the supply curve, which would be perfectly elastic)?
Maybe I'll put off dealing with the demand side until we see if we can make some progress on the supply side. TBH, I've got a bad feeling about this one.
2D3D
9hr ago
That claim holds only if Hasan expressed acceptability if heterogenous morality. His own stated moral framings are uncompromising and totalizing, morality as he defines it being foundationally right with no room for alternative moral heuristics. That he expresses sympathy for islamists and lgbt rights simultaneously is internal incoherence, not heterodoxy tolerance. Some conflicts do test this incoherence more, and livestreaming animal abuse is one of them. If he had a white skinhead paid to be whipped in the cuck chair that'd be fine for his morality, but reddit aww updooters are part of his moral universe and that is why this is breaking his world.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9hr ago
When a boss gives a speech to subordinates, we should at least consider the possibility that what he said was meant literally.
2D3D
9hr ago
I legit cannot tell if the spirited defense of "its just a dog bro make it suffer" are honestly held opinions about directional cruelty or just hasan stans desperately trying to downplay an obvious act of on air abuse.
Its not even like "dont abuse animals" is some niche position, the whole point of the leftist omnicause is to assign reputational damage to those who abuse those on the oppression scale. If Hasan beat up a white skinhead he'd have been ok, but he shock collared an animal that existed for reddit updoots. Thats haram no matter how you cut it.
Dean
Flairless
10hr ago
This is the point where the potential harm is. If a child spends 1-2 years thinking "Santa breaks my model of reality but I can't think deeply about this because the presents will stop coming" then they are learning to suppress curiosity for fear of punishment.
Lesson successful, then. That 'harm' is a very valuable lesson of the world which failure to learn can lead to far greater harms.
Curiosity does bring forth risk. One can appeal to a just world protest that it shouldn't, but it certainly does. If a young child is curious what a hot stove feels like or a poisonous thing tastes like, they will find out the truth. Similarly, if you are excessively curious of a patron bringing gifts, those gifts may stop coming. But if you are excessively curious of a criminal, that criminal may harm you. If you are excessively curious into the affairs of a neighbor or associate, you may lose a friend or gain an enemy. If you are excessively curious about government secrets, you can be fined large amounts of money and spend a significant part of your time in a small box.
These are not new concepts or an unfortunate modern sensibility either. There are various fables in which the curiosity of children (or child-like substitutes) is the bringer of disaster or misfortune. This even extends to adults, where the experimentations of adults who are curious and ambitious brings forth great and terrible things.
Curiosity is not a virtue in isolation. It does entail risk. Learning that is a lesson befitting a young child. Learning what do with that knowledge, regardless of whether it is to embrace risk and move forward or to temper the curiosities of others, are the lessons befitting a young adult.
2D3D
10hr ago
I wish to just confirm: a leftist womans hinge profile actively said she wants someone who looks like Hasan Piker? Setting aside the ick of saying "look like my favorite husbando", couldn't there have been any better fucking "this guy be my schlickbait" dakimakura? even Zoran Mamdani would be a better husbando.
Rosencrantz2
10hr ago
I think in general ICE defenders want the perception of unpredictability, even if they don't admit it. The fact that it's sometimes ICE itself posting the videos of sloppy and menacing looking raids that serve as both content for those on the right and outrage bait to ICE opponents speaks volumes. Some here will be more open about the usefulness of this perception, arguing that it's only by creating a climate of fear among immigrant communities that you can defeat the pull factor causing people to come to the country. They believe 'I am here but at the pleasure of capricious forces' is what we want going through the heads of all immigrants, legal and illegal, as well as anyone who might be somewhat 'bad guy' presenting (e.g. tattoos, ethnicity, employed in a precarious and peripatetic part of the economy). They want a sense of order that comes through establishing, with shows of force, who is in charge. I understand the motivation behind that attitude, though I disagree with it. What I find insulting is people trying to claim that what we are seeing is genuinely intended just as efficient implementation of rules, and it's the media doing all the scaremongering.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10hr ago
8-10. Most parents put considerable effort into the appearance of "Christmas magic". There's an adorable age where they're old enough to question, but afraid of what they might find out. They'll test their parents and gossip among themselves. But my own were afraid that if I knew that they knew, then I might not bother with the presents ritual, so they pretended to believe longer. And once it was explicit, they solemnly accepted the responsibility to not break the kayfabe for their younger cousins.
This is the point where the potential harm is. If a child spends 1-2 years thinking "Santa breaks my model of reality but I can't think deeply about this because the presents will stop coming" then they are learning to suppress curiosity for fear of punishment.
FWIW, I understood that Santa was the same type of being as God and Jesus*, as opposed to the same type of being as my Mum or the Queen, as early as I remember having complex thoughts - certainly before age 6. Having been taught about Santa therefore made me less likely to accept Christianity as an older child (whether this is good or bad is unclear). I had Santa, God and Jesus in the same bucket as Mickey Mouse and Peter the High King of Narnia by the time I was 9.
* My parents were not Christian, but the local primary school was a C of E school so I was partially raised Christian
functor
10hr ago
The issue is that most jobs don't require excellence or speed, they require not screwing up. A driver can be the fastest, cheapest most reliable driver for years but if the driver causes one major accident the driver is an awful driver. There are plenty of bumbling lawyers who keep their job. If a lawyer is 10x productive, writes beautiful contracts and solves seemingly insolvable disputes for years, it counts for nothing if they do something once that will get them disbarred.
What matters isn't the median speed or accuracy of performed tasks, it is the severity of the three standard deviation worst screw ups that count. I really don't see the one in five thousand worst decisions by an AI not being worse than the one in five thousand decisions made by a human professional. Until then AI will be limited in a professional environment.
It will remain super useful for search, making funny videos, helping people fix things etc.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
10hr ago
I meant the bit about member's clubs at the bottom of the Athenaeum wiki page. All the big famous ones are listed there (and this list is reproduced on other London member's club pages). The list you've linked to is alphabetical (hence why Annabel's is second) and a lot more comprehensive and lists even small tiny clubs.
erwgv3g34
10hr ago
When I taught at a charter school, a WhatsApp chat group was the official means of group communication, and I had to use the Microsoft Authenticator app to log into Gradebook, which cause innumerable problems. I have seen a couple of restaurants that don't have physical menus, just a QR code that you are expected to scan to order. At my hotel, all the VIZIO TVs demand that you make an account or download the app before they let you watch so much as a single channel.
It's extremely annoying.
Dean
Flairless
10hr ago
Not yet.
Please don't.* The profit incentive to fall into a familiar but safe/profitable rut is the deathnell for open-minded exposition.
If you change your mind on any impression and make a concession of a mistake, mis-step, or overreach as a private poster, at worst people don't lean to you as a co-belligerent but at best other bystanders give you more credence. If you change your mind and make an equivalent concession as a for-profit poster, at best you maintain your current leadership and at worst you lose the money of the people who were paying you for being an ideological comfort food / co-belligerent in the first place.
The behavioral incentive of 'money' over 'internet respect' and is powerful, proven, and prone to memery.
*Exception being if this would actually let you spend more time with your family, friends, and performing more charity for your community of friends and partisan enemies alike.
it is a promise of war against domestic political opponents who are broadly popular in Chicago
No it's not, unless we're going for selective literalism. If you really believe that, I'll happily offer you a bet on whether military force will be deployed against local Chicago politicians, the same way I offered you one about whether Trump will run for a third term.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10hr ago
There is free movement within borders. Open borders for one part of the country means open borders for all.
The fact that doing X (which is morally unproblematic of itself) makes it easier to do Y (which would be immoral) doesn't change the moral character of doing X-but-not-Y. As a matter of practical calculation, it might change the wisdom of banning X. Law and politics, not morals.
In the case of immigration, where X is migrating to a place where you are welcome, and Y is migrating to a different place in the same country where you are not welcome, there are good practical reasons for granting permission at the level of the sovereign state. But you absolutely can run a regime where legal immigrants can travel freely within a wider freedom-of-movement area while only enjoying the right to reside and work in the state that granted their visa - this is how Schengen visas work in the EU.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
11hr ago
The section of the speech I was thinking about was (transcript - at 40:51)
Washington D.C. went from our most unsafe city to just about our safest city in a period of a month. We had it under control in 12 days, but give us another 15 or 16 days, it was -- it's perfect. And people other than politicians that look bad, they think. You know, the Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape. We have many cities in great shape too, by the way. I want you to know that. But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they're very unsafe places and we're going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That's a war too. It's a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security. We can't let these people in. You know, we had no people enter in the last four months, zero. Even I can't believe that.
Clear statement that Trump wants to send troops to Chicago, in a warlike posture. And the enemy is "radical left Democrats" in a context which suggests that the term includes the elected governments of Illinois and Chicago and the voters who elected them. Even if it isn't a promise of war against Chicago as a whole, it is a promise of war against domestic political opponents who are broadly popular in Chicago. Given the segue to controlling the border, I think you can argue that Trump considers the war on domestic political opponents to be secondary to the war on illegal immigrants you mention - this is consistent with administration behaviour to date. But that just gives him a comprehensible motive - it doesn't change what he is doing.
Dean
Flairless
11hr ago
“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—
Death waved a hand.
AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY.
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
11hr ago
Arbitrary and capricious enforcement of paperwork offenses (and illegal immigration is a paperwork offence) is an injustice, though a minor one in the grand scheme of things and I certainly wouldn't call it an outrage. I think tolerating well-behaved illegal immigrants for decades and then rounding them up for deportation counts as arbitrary and capricious enforcement, although I understand why the people voting for right-populist parties don't*. It definitely isn't shocking given that almost every 1st-world government - especially the ones that don't actually believe in immigration enforcement - now engages in occasional bouts of arbitrary and capricious immigration enforcement as a form of reality-TV prolefeed.
As a separate issue, I think deporting well-behaved established members of communities harms those communities. If your neighbours like you, then the Tokyo government is hurting them by deporting you, and they are entitled to treat a government that does so as hostile, just as Chicago is treating ICE as hostile.
The median voter seems remarkably sane about immigration - people want system of managed legal immigration operated in the national interest, with criminals, scroungers, and radical Islamists deported asap and well-behaved productive immigrants on a 5-10 year path to citizenship. The "Why can't we have an Australian/Canadian points system?" discourse. There are multiple reasons why this does not happen in the UK or US, and the most annoying one is that the whole debate is poisoned by the completely broken humanitarian immigration system. It doesn't help that two-party systems in the social media age shut out the median voter, such that the public debate is between leftists who favour de facto open borders through a trivially abusable humanitarian system and rightists who want a near-zero immigration system that would have deported Elon Musk and Jensen Huang's parents.
* If you think that the 30 years of broadly-tolerated illegal working was a conspiracy by the Dems, the GOPe, and their corporate supporters against the American people, then the American people (and the Trump administration as their agent) aren't acting arbitrarily and capriciously - they are doing what they always wanted to do and always said they were going to do at the first reasonable opportunity. The comparable argument in the UK is similar but more complex because most of the low-skilled working immigrants in the UK entered using (possibly deliberately) easily-abusable legal routes, not illegally.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
11hr ago
No, my last comment was of course meant to reflect the state of last week.
This weekend, I got nothing done because I herded kids all day every day. And on weekdays...well, same as you.
They're projecting themselves as competent, efficient, confident, inevitable, and actually having a great time doing it.
That may be what they're attempting to do, but if so, I don't think it's working. "Chaotic", in the sense of "unpredictable; not reliably constrained by rules", is definitely part of the current image - see all the hubbub about their (supposed?) lack of respect for due process. I think if you're a legal immigrant, or indeed a birthright citizen who looks superficially foreign, you aren't currently going to have absolute confidence that ICE will leave you alone - or even let you go with an apology, if they should get you by mistake. To an even greater extent, if you are an illegal immigrant, I don't think you're going to be confident that ICE will guarantee you all the protections and legal counsel that you're entitled to.
And I… don't think this is an effect of left-wing smear campaigns? I get the vibe that these are, if not objectively justified fears, then at least fears that ICE are happy to encourage, presumably because they feel like it enhances their intimidation factor. They could certainly do more to fight that impression, if it is indeed a misconception. Hence, optics-wise - chaotic, not just efficient.
cjet79
12hr ago
As Ulyssessword pointed out, licensing boards often have their powers constrained and limited by the state.
There is a bargain happening here. Licensing boards get to borrow some of the power of the state to create and have the state enforce semi-monopolistic characteristics in their industry. But in taking that bargain they are in turn subject to the whims of the state that has granted them power.
When you are acting as an individual you have rights. When you are acting as an agent of the state you have constraints.
I'd be fine if the state licensing board for these therapies said "screw this, we are disbanding". That is fully an option for them. But they'd lose a lot of the benefits that they get being under the aegis of the state. Especially tie ins with insurance, both their own malpractice insurance, and medical insurance that pays for these therapies.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
12hr ago
Yes - trespassing often involves a malum in se crime like breaking and entering, breach of privacy if you get too close to the house, or trampling crops, but non-destructively taking a shortcut across someone else's field is one of the textbook examples of malum prohibitum and the law in most places reflects this.
Land Law 101 is that there are no legally cognisable natural rights in land and you only "own" land because the State says you do.
lurker
12hr ago
I assure you, porn was no less difficult to acquire in the ussr or iran than south korea.
RenOS
something is wrong
12hr ago
He thinks he has left the faith, but he still sounds like a Witness.
I almost want to say that parents SHOULD tell their children that Santa is real. That way they learn very quickly in life that everyone will lie to them without hesitation for the most trivial of reasons.
yes_chad.jpg
I literally don't know a single kid who had the problems he had with it, and I strongly suspect his JW upbringing has to do with it (and/or autistic inclinations unsurprisingly inherited from his parents). Not saying there are none otherwise, but it's just extremely rare. The average kid play-pretends a lot naturally already, and they instinctively pick up on Santa being somewhere in the same area, but they're not sure. Then as they get older they notice further facts solidifying that impression, and maybe have a short, smug santa-isn't-real phase, but they quickly join in again on the play-acting ... because it's fun. The "santa-lie" is a great way to indirectly teach kids how to distinguish between truth and fantasy, and the fact that ultimately this is something you can only ever do yourself, for yourself.
RenOS
something is wrong
12hr ago
I'll just quote myself here:
It's called ethnic spoils for a reason. It doesn't matter much whether the different ethnicities have immigrated recently or have been there for generations.
Foreign-born is generally one of the worst categories you can possibly look at, because it mixes vastly different groups together as if they are mostly interchangeable. Ethnic spoils systems also don't depend on trust/solidarity, it's quite the opposite; Because trust is so low, nobody believes any other group to actually do merit-based allocations, and without trust, allocating by quota is usually the only kind-of-fair system that everyone can agree on.
Whenever anyone says anything to anyone, we should at least consider the possibility that what they said was meant literally. But there's nothing here to suggest a literal interpretation, this is no different than Lyndon B. Johnson's "war on poverty" speech.
And if you disagree, then put your money where your mouth is, and bet me.
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