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jake
13m ago
In the spherical cow hypothetical of half the supply of labor vanishing with literally no other negative effects, yes, quality of life for the remaining would improve profoundly. This isn't a matter of "belief," it's history and biology. Wherever civilized and sufficiently stable nations have recovered from sudden and large declines in population, golden ages have followed. It's ecological succession as applied to humans.
Not to be taken as personally misanthropic--I'm quite pro humans, quite pro there being many, many more. The US is simply not presently equipped for its number of inhabitants, and this is not a problem that can be solved without first deporting 50 million people.
(A: it won't, of course, because, broadly, more labor => more production => more Stuff That People Want)
It doesn't matter if you make $10 an hour and strawberries cost $5 or you make $100 an hour and strawberries cost $50. The way you bring down the price of strawberries is by producing more strawberries. Repeat x1b across literally everything.
You describe the mechanism. Yes, flooding supply is how you decrease prices. I'm not denying the mechanism, I'm saying its benefit is illusory. Abundant cheap offshore labor is how you produce abundant cheap plastic garbage. We wouldn't need abundant cheap plastic garbage if bankers hadn't destroyed the value of the dollar, if the owners hadn't outsourced so much labor, and if those same owners hadn't stalled out worker compensation.
That's all the economy is, now. The ongoing attempt to outrun the consequences of those decisions.
TheLoser
13m ago
Values-coherence is a prerequisite for the formation and maintenance of a functional society; the aim is to achieve values-coherence with others, band together for mutual benefit and defense, and prevent rule by those who hate you.
I have to ask, becuase this seems like a pretty important wrinkle in your thesis here. To what degree and type of values-coherence do you require? You are a Christian, so I presume you are against pre-marital sex. In your ideal society, would anybody who thinks pre-marital sex is fine be expelled? Would anybody committing it be imprisoned?
My question really is how much values-coherence is enough; that is, where is the line? And how can you even quantitatively/rigorously determine where the line is?
TheLoser
23m ago
I am very curious to hear what you would say. Try to dilute the message so it's acceptable, as painful as that may be for you.
Concrete questions: when, if ever, will it be acceptable to express even the blander motte views in polite company? Was it ever?
I sometimes question my own sanity, and start asking if my recollection of the Before Times was all a fever dream, but to the best of my ability to answer your question: yes. It was completely normal to have a friend group with all sorts of people. We've had a dude that was an open (actual) fascist in mine, and the group was majority left-wing. Sometimes things would get heated, and people would fight, but at the end of the day people just wanted to have a good time. The blander views wouldn't even raise an eyebrow. Insert "this is what they took from you" meme.
Now, while I also think the news of Wokeness' death have been greatly exaggerated, I do feel like I can breathe a little. Still not comfortable attaching my Tinker Tuesday github to my resume, but way better than "undercover agent" mode of the COVID era.
jake
32m ago
GDP as an idea is like a belief that doesn't pay rent. It doesn't tell you whether a country is good, a benefit in raising it is not found in evidence. Given otherwise equal choices among westerners, >95% would rather spend their lives in #39 Switzerland or #105 Iceland over #1 China or #3 India.
HDI is a lagging indicator for what could be called civilization development factor C. C associates totally with homogeneity except in Singapore (75% Chinese anyway) and the US, whose C increased following predominantly European immigration and has consistently declined over the last 5 decades. Those countries with high C reached their peak before accepting significant numbers of non-European immigrants, now their C is in uniform decline.
Economics is a pseudoscience whose total positive contributions to humanity are counted on one hand. It endures because it is useful to power, laundering corrupt motive under the veneer of something scientific. "The GDP is high," they say. They mean "Don't believe your lying eyes."
The more laborers you have, the greater the economies of scale, the more innovations you can sustain, the more surplus you generate.
Only pharmaceuticals stand as a market sector where surplus drives innovation, and there it is intramarket surplus from the profits of optional and less-critical therapies funding research in critical therapies. Abundant plastic garbage has resulted in no innovations, improving the delivery of said plastic garbage is not innovation. Millions of foreigners originating in H-class visas either stifle innovation, in itinerant farmhands preventing automation, or cheap tech roles for workers who, as H-class visa holders, are by definition not innovators. No innovation has resulted from the proliferation of Indian hotel, gas station/C-Store owners and low-class tech workers; among the behemoths, the rise of Indians in Alphabet and Microsoft, among many other corporations, preceded not innovation but enshittification. Amazon may be credited for leading to AWS, but Prime is now the lamprey on the whale of their hosting services. The billions who owe cheap computers for their access to the internet will stand in history as evidence directly disproving the utility of cheap goods.
We reached the moon in the 60s. Beyond medicine, the idea we have become more innovative is laughable. We do have better medicine, we do have better entertainment. Day-to-day life today versus the 60s remains worse. It's no coincidence video games, television, and cinema declined, and now the previous bastion of culture in the left is on the verge of collapse. In the absence of such distractions, we would have already seen revolutionary violence.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
50m ago
It's unclear what triggered the escalation to physical violence or by what dream logic Dumana's friend transformed into his sister.
I thought the person accompanying him, be it his wife, sister, or friend, was a woman? The local media articles about the additional arrests talk about "a man and a woman". Though it would be a whole 'nother level to start calling 12 year olds "sexy" in front of your wife or sister, I suppose.
The death of woke has been claimed many times. I'm not convinced.
I'm still afraid to admit to being centrist, maybe slightly right thereof, in social settings and certainly in work ones. A bit left of the modal Mottizen (someone, link the song, I've long lost it!). My close friends know, but I'd never casually admit to even a lack of antipathy for Trump in front of new people. And that's all as someone in many ways immune to censorship - I'm relatively old and well established, take me or leave me.
Concrete questions: when, if ever, will it be acceptable to express even the blander motte views in polite company? Was it ever?
"Trump? A little grating, but the country's doing fine, I don't mind him." "Trans? I mean...you do you, but you ain't a chick, and stop pushing books into the elementary school curriculum."
TitaniumButterfly
59m ago
Crazy like a fox. 🦊
Zvi Mowshowitz had been spruiking it as a potential EA cause area.
I was rather surprised at the effectiveness, too, though.
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