domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
Supah_Schmendrick
2m ago
what is "adversary-proof production"? What does it actually look like? I tried my typical strategy of hopping over to google scholar to see if I could find some academic writing on the topic, but perhaps they just use different key terminology, and I'm missing it. Can TheMotte help? Any academic work? Or even your home-grown (autarkic?) definition?
My naive assumption would be that a product is weakly "adversary-proof" for nation N when the production of the item and its inputs are located in territories directly controlled/defended by N's military, or the militaries of countries allied to N, and strongly "adversary-proof if all of the above plus having production located in places either beyond the direct reach of adversarial countries' conventional military and paramilitary capabilities, or meaningfully hardened against such attack.
ArmedTooHeavily
3m ago
I would like to register profound disagreement here. We should absolutely not relax any rules because "everybody knows we all agree." Allowing consensus building will degrade the quality of commentary significantly.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5m ago
Not much to expand on, the race of the people making the decisions is irrelevant to what you're discussing. What were you even trying to point out by mentioning it?
07mk
6m ago
I disagree. I think that part of the argument isn't being elided, it's being summarized with the word "optimal." At least, it's being summarized at least as well as in the phrase "the cost of reducing fraud to zero is too high to be worth it," and I also think that the that latter phrase is far less elegant and beautiful than the much simpler and pithy "the optimal amount of [bad thing] is not zero" while not really adding any extra meaning or explanation.
gattsuru
7m ago
Fair on Jole; like Ethan of Athos it feels like it's putting too much effort into trying to answer Le Guin's 'taking life versus giving it' problem, but without the big narrative tension from a speeding deadline. Flowers felt stronger if a bit more repetitive and is certainly no Memory or Komarr, but I still enjoyed it about the same lines as Cryoburn.
FtttG
8m ago
Something like "the cost of reducing fraud to zero is too high to be worth it" would be more accurate
The two phrases scan as synonymous to me, no different from "men are taller than women" vs. "the average man is taller than the average woman".
SSCReader
9m ago
Can you expand on this? I said white people were making the decisions, Coil said the call was not coming from inside the house, I pointed out that the politicians were also primarily white (the house in question). Being white was the house we were talking about as far as I can tell.
SSCReader
10m ago
David Cameron could have reduced non-EU immigration to literally zero and still have hundreds of thousands of EU workers coming in every year to flood the labour market.
Precisely! That's why Brexit will allow us to control immigration was such a blatant lie. We could always have done so. And that article also notes my view. I think he misrepresents it though. It is not that British workers won't do those jobs it is because they will want more money which will then make those services and products more expensive thus slowing growth. He comes close to it here: In reality, the demand for work is potentially infinite: it’s like trying to fill a bottomless well with buckets of water — the more you throw in, the more you need to keep throwing.
What he is talking about is expansion, more immigrants, means more jobs, means more GDP, means the line goes up. That is the driving factor.
I can tell you from direct experience David Cameron and Boris Johnson have barely a committed ideological bone in their body. They aren't allowing more immigrants in because of some love of global Britain or for other elites. They aren't committed enough to anything to sacrifice for that.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
13m ago
Whites had the nation you are envisaging and even more than that.
This assumes more continuity of people and culture than is advisable.
actually this makes us feel pretty bad when we look at in comparison to our theoretical national values.
When appealing to those national values and the ideals of the Founders, modern folk do tend to forget John Adams' ominous line- "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." And so we reap that failure mode.
If the rule brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
Or one of those other pithy lines, like "liberalism is not a suicide pact." A libertarian arguing for open borders is not a result of mental illness. For any other ideology, the root cause is at least mental illness adjacent. By extension, "white guilt" (and many other racial sicknesses) should be in the DSM.
There's a really nasty lesson here; that moral "improvement" has incredibly high costs for a culture. Either a culture has to be fully right and never commit even a single evil act, or go Full Evil and salt the earth behind you; anything in between tends to result in a blood curse.
The things you complain about are already the tat for white peoples tit! (so to speak!)
Sounds like a subcategory of Onlyfans, or an Aella stunt. English is funny.
2rafa
15m ago
With enough lobbying they can pass laws that say things like “for each half hour spent in court, x lawyers based in local city who passed the state bar must have y billable hours attached to them”.
Lest that sound farfetched, Hollywood writers just got this kind of deal and the studios are far more equipped to play hardball than state congressmen.
Rov_Scam
15m ago
It's anime, a perfectly mainstream form of entertainment. Some women may find it off-putting, yes, but it's not like having kids, or smoking, or religion, or that kind of thing that you should tell someone up front. Most women probably wouldn't care if they found out, it's just not something that adds to your attractiveness. Worst case scenario, you can bring it up on the first date, or when you're texting back and forth. The point is just that it's not something that you want to waste valuable profile real estate on, to increase your chances of getting a foot in the door.
Rov_Scam
16m ago
It's not about hookups vs. soulmate. It's about whether or not you expect a soulmate to have certain interests. If the answer is yes, you only want to be with someone who likes anime as much as you do and is attracted to guys who like anime, then I agree that you would have to put it out there. But that's not the way it is with most things or people. Just look at how much attention to sports men pay vs. women. Or woodworking. Or hunting. Or any number of other hobbies or interests. You can't expect your romantic partner to have 100% of the same interests you do, and most married couple I know aren't like that, right down to my parents. So yes, it's possible that you can be really into anime and have a girl who knows nothing about it and rolls her eyes at the idea of it and still have a successful relationship.
Goodguy
20m ago
As someone who thinks that no organized religion that I am aware of is accurate to reality, I am actually glad that religious leaders did not do more against wokism. I think that this helped anti-wokism to plausibly portray itself as being rooted in reason rather than in superstitions or religious emotions. And for me, that is what I want anti-wokism to be rooted in. One of my main problems with wokism, besides what I consider to be its deleterious effects on public attitudes towards things important things like policing, is that I consider it to simply be inaccurate. This is something that would annoy me about wokism even if it had no deleterious impacts on my life in any way. So I do not want to use other things things that I consider to be untrue, like organized religion, to battle it.
What I'm really arguing (and what I take Davies to be arguing) is that fraud can only take place within a high-trust community. That is, a country might be low-trust on the whole, but there might be enclaves within that country in which the members enjoy a presumption of trust with one another (social clubs, religious communities, voluntary organisations etc.). It is within these communities in which fraud and scams will occur in countries which are otherwise low-trust.
I don't think we're talking past each other, I just disagree with yours / Davies' core thesis. No, that's not how it works at all. There are scams and frauds in Russia, and there are essentially no high-trust communities there. All that happens is that scammers have to come up with new tricks that other people haven't heard of yet, and so don't know to be on the lookout for.
A community that doesn't lock it's doors is high-trust. If they get burgled, and start locking up it makes them low(er) trust. A burglar learning how to pick locks does not magically make the community high(er)-trust.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
32m ago
Yes, if you're looking for someone who shares interests that 99% of women find unattractive (but not so unattractive as to be dealbreakers), and you aren't willing to date someone who doesn't share these interests, then just put it out there as a filter.
I think that's true, and there's also another filter aspect to consider. If you don't care whether a partner shares your interest in X, but you require them to be ok with your interest in X, then you should also put it as a filter. Doing so avoids wasting your time on a relationship that wasn't going to work out anyway as soon as the girl says "I think anime is icky, stop watching it" and you refuse to give it up.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
37m ago
To take a common example, the United States imports a lot of the goods used in our defense industry. Particularly computer chips and the parts used in their production.
In theory, defense supply chains aren't supposed to do this. In practice, counterfeit components do sneak in unexpectedly (and there are safeguards to reduce this risk), but I don't think Lockheed (or its subcontractors) are allowed to design in Chinese (or even Taiwanese) bolts and capacitors into an F-35 without a whole lot of paperwork, if at all. There are domestic component manufacturers for those, but often they're not used for vanilla commercial products because they are pricey. There is a reason "mil-spec" components are expensive: maybe part of it is grift, but part of it is supply chain management.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
37m ago
I understand that there are inescapable parts of the human condition which make it so. But I still think that by eliding that (very important) part of the argument, the phrase becomes incorrect as it gets stated. Something like "the cost of reducing fraud to zero is too high to be worth it" would be more accurate, and the extra few words is not really a significant amount of verbosity.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
44m ago
What I'm really arguing (and what I take Davies to be arguing) is that fraud can only take place within a high-trust community.
This isn't so; fraud takes place all the time in low-trust communities.
FtttG
49m ago
In the case of scams, all it means is that they have to put more effort into appearances of legitimacy.
I think we might be talking past each other. I've been using "high-trust society" and "high-trust country" kind of interchangeably, but I think more specificity is called for. What I'm really arguing (and what I take Davies to be arguing) is that fraud can only take place within a high-trust community. That is, a country might be low-trust on the whole, but there might be enclaves within that country in which the members enjoy a presumption of trust with one another (social clubs, religious communities, voluntary organisations etc.). It is within these communities in which fraud and scams will occur in countries which are otherwise low-trust. This, I think, is what you're getting at with "putting more effort into appearances of legitimacy": scam artists must consciously infiltrate these high-trust communities, and this may be more difficult in a low-trust country than in a high-trust one (as the members of a high-trust community within an otherwise low-trust country will be doubly suspicious of outsiders).
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
55m ago
Right, but those politicians are white themselves overwhelmingly right? 75% of Congress is white.
None of that proves "the call is coming from inside the house", unless you're one of the more advanced racists.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
55m ago
I'm not a mod and I don't speak for them, I only speak for myself and my own opinions.
There obviously is an anti-woke consensus here, I don't see what point there is in denying that. That doesn't mean that wokes aren't welcome, it simply means they're not in the majority. The rules about neutrality and consensus building made more sense in the early days when this was all new and the ideological split was closer to even, but now we've gotten to the point where the regulars have been here for 10 years, and they all know each other's positions fairly well. Nitpicking someone about consensus building this late in the game seems a bit silly. As though every post in a 10+ year dialogue has to assume that we're starting from a totally clean blank slate.
I think it's good to still have the rule about consensus building on the books to deal with particularly obnoxious violations (like, saying "obviously we all know that [woke position] is wrong..."), but I don't think it should be enforced that stringently.
Fair point. I do, however, feel reasonably confident that even if we devoted 100% of a country's budget to preventing e.g. premature violent deaths of children in that country, we wouldn't be successful and the side effects unrelated to premature violent deaths of children would be disastrous.
Your smallpox example reminds me of an old post by Scott:
See, my terrible lecture on ADHD suggested several reasons for the increasing prevalence of the disease. Of these I remember two: the spiritual desert of modern adolescence, and insufficient iron in the diet. And I remember thinking “Man, I hope it’s the iron one, because that seems a lot easier to fix.”
Eliminating a deadly microorganism is a piece of piss. Eliminating the fact that people will sometimes tell other people things that they know to be untrue, and be believed? I don't even know where you'd begin.
faceh
58m ago
Even if that take is outdated, liking anime and video games isn't something that women are going to find attractive.
As stated by @MathWizard up there, if you want someone with similar interests to you, you gotta put it out there somehow.
And as per usual, if you're hot, you could straight up say you're into lolicon and hentai and you'd still get likes.
So are you optimizing for hookups, or something resembling a soulmate?
In the grand scheme, its probably not changing your odds much in aggregate, but somewhat increasing the chances of finding someone who likes what you like.
as an aside to your point, strategic grain reserves are pretty common.
More options
Context Copy link