domain:betonit.substack.com
cjet79
10m ago
Government Programs Should Have Legible Budgets
This kind of rule may come across as obvious, pointless, or doomed depending on your perspective.
There is an impulse among many to see a problem in society and turn to government for a solution. I strongly disagree with this impulse. But I also think that these people and myself could come to terms on some shared "rules of engagement".
To start we should agree on some basic things:
- There is an unlimited number of things people might want to "fix" about our society, but a limited amount of resources to spend fixing such things.
- There should be a way to determine how many resources we want to spend fixing a particular problem.
- Paying to fix the problems should be done in a fair and above board way. (i.e. reverse lotteries where you randomly get fucked over are bad).
There are many devils in the little details, but what these three basic things suggest is that there should be: A set way of collecting taxes. A budget using those taxes that pays out to various social causes. The determination of that budget can be debated upon in some agreed way (maybe by electing representatives to a 'congress'). And that all social programs must go through this set of procedures.
To address the criticisms:
"This is pointless we already do things this way."
Sometimes governments do it this way, sometimes they don't.
The Americans with Disabilities Act does not follow these rules. Private individuals are given the ability to sue other private individuals to provide accommodations for them. The threat of getting sued also encourages a lot of preemptive work on the part of companies. How much does all of this suing and preemptive work cost? No one knows. How much will it cost you to provide for people with disabilities? Maybe a standard amount. Maybe you'll be one of the unlucky ones that gets sued in a new novel interpretation of the law and you'll win a reverse lottery.
How much do you think it is worth it to help disabled people in this country? It seems like a valid political question, but right now the American Government is basically on a blind autopilot path. It cannot know how much is spent. It cannot control how much is spent. And it cannot work out more lucrative and appealing deals for edge cases.
A little while ago (maybe a decade) some university (maybe MIT) decided to put all of their classes online for digital consumption, for free. Sometime later they were forced to take down the entire archive, because they were not subtitled, and a deaf person could not access them. The deaf person wanted them all subtitled. Subtitling a free online resource would have been too expensive and not worth it. So they were instead just removed for everyone. This is the kind of problem that a competent government middleman can solve:
[In the alternative universe where the ADA creates a government middleman agency for solving disability issues.] Each deaf person is allotted $5,000 a year to solve for their disability. They can choose to spend this on hearing implants, or on paying towards having some work transcribed. If enough deaf people want a thing transcribed it gets done. No business owner or non-profit is suddenly held hostage. No single person or entity is stuck paying enormous costs. Things aren't removed from public consumption just because a disabled person can't access it. We know how much is spent on deaf people per year. Medical companies that want to solve or fix a disability have a clear customer market for potential solutions.
This is doomed people would rather have the costs hidden and less obvious.
As I said above, sometimes the government does follow the good set of rules. I'd consider an agency like NASA a good example. The American people give some vague indications of how important they think space science and exploration is to their elected representatives. Those elected representatives can talk with the scientists, engineers, and managers at NASA to determine if maybe there are some important research projects that the general public doesn't know about but might want if they did know about it. NASA's budget is paid through taxes and is a clear line item on the federal budget. For the last two decades NASA has been about 0.5% of the federal budget. Which sounds vaguely correct to me in proportion to how much Americans care about funding Space related stuff.
The cynical reason why I believe that programs have hidden or "laundered" costs is that I don't believe voters would be actually willing to fund them if the true costs were obvious. If a party has a temporary political victory the best the best way to leverage it is through hidden and laundered costs. Pass a medicare act that doesn't really change the rules until you are out of office. Pass a civil rights act with murky enforcement that can be slowly ratcheted up every year.
Despite politicians doing this pretty often, I don't think it is what voters actually want. There is a huge amount of frustration from people over these sorts of policies. Hanania's book the Origins of Woke kind of blew up one of these issues recently. But they are all going to become problems, because when you remove the funding control from government there is no funding control. There is no countervailing force to push down the costs of these various programs. And the only way to get rid of them is often just destroy them altogether. So while people might have supported the ADA if it was 1% of the budget, they might start getting pissed at the program when it balloons up to 10% of the budget and a bunch of reverse lottery sob stories start showing up in the news. And suddenly instead of 10% or even 1% of the budget, you get 0% for your cause and no one trusts you with a 1% allotment cuz they will all remember the horror days of 10%. I don't know how likely a full reversal to 0% is for any of these policies. But that seems to be whats on the table as far as alternatives go.
There is also an ongoing legal weakness to many of these policies. Now that the supreme court is mostly conservative it could start invalidating different laundered cost schemes that have been liberal policy staples for decades. Affirmative action has taken a hit. Paid housing for the homeless might get hit next.
Conclusion
In general I think we should be suspicious of any public program that tries to hide its costs, or launder those costs onto private actors. Anything that expands the scope of things that one individual can sue another for is laundering costs. If you want a social program done or accomplished, you need to be willing to raise taxes and pay for it. If voters can't stomach raising taxes to pay for a particular social program, then too bad! Nothing is free. Start comparing the costs and fighting for them in the agreed upon battlefield.
By all means, bite.
I meant something more abstract (but still not necessarily complete). As a kind of meta-moderate between you and Nybbler, I'm interested in the general question between some and no regulation. By heart, I am exactly the kind of "move fast an break things" type you criticized, but some amount of breaking things, and seeing things broken by others, has taught me that there are places where "think before you do" is a better approach, and once good approaches are discovered, it might even be a good idea to codify them. On the other hand, I think there does need to be room for good old-fashioned anarchy in a society, for reasons ranging from (as other pointed out) innovation, through having a lower bound on the quality of goods and services delivered by major producers, and all the way just to plain having a life worth living. My personal way of squaring that circle is that I'm open to regulation on mass-produced end-user consumer goods, and a more freedom on anything that requires some deliberate action.
But they do actually mean that, in that moment, instantaneously, the game is over, the logic is iron-clad, the implications flow immediately, and the only conclusion is absolute death.
Look, I think that whole conversation got off on the wrong foot, and if you guys want it to go anywhere, you need a reset. I understand your frustration with lazy "regulation bad" arguments, and I understand his frustration with underhanded slippery-slope denialism. What I'm guessing is that neither of you is as bad as the other thinks.
cjet79
just now
Anyone playing manor lords and having any thoughts yay or nay? Or even just "wait a few months"?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2m ago
Now Space X
Careful. You might be using it as an example of the disasters lack of regulation will bring, before you know it.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2m ago
nobody gets to just go "nah I'm not listening to you". That's not ok.
But why though?
Neither "backtalking to a mod" nor "statement of intent to commit another rules violation in the future" are explicitly forbidden by the current rules. If one or both of those are not allowed, then the rules page should be amended to make that explicit.
DradisPing
4m ago
The culprit is overprofessionalization. Writters are now expected to go to film school then try to break into Hollywood.
Back when things were less competitive it was common for writers to serve in the military, travel around the US or overseas, and read a lot of random books.
Now they do professional schooling and then spend years dealing with obnoxious people in LA.
This is especially noticable in sci fi genre writting. The writers of new Star Wars and Star Trek have seen all the space battle movies but don't have any relatives with military experience and haven't watch many war documentaries. So all the commanding officers come off as a mix of incompetent and unbeliveable.
Writing engaging characters requires a broad mix of lived experience and reading.
Of course studio executives are similarly isolated from big chunks of human experience. They spent their lives viciously clawing their way to the top.
Let's take a look at those survivors then.
Shale fracking
Illegal in Europe at large.
Space X
Currently being sued for not respecting the contradictions between ITAR and the CRA.
Ozempic
Took three years to change the label of a drug that would never have been approved if they had to label it from scratch.
Finance
Most financial innovation is currently happening outside of regulation.
Self-driving cars
Technically very hard indeed, but I'm willing to bet they'll also become very hard legally once they start inevitably running people over.
On the whole, it seems hard to argue that these innovations are examples of regulation being compatible with or fostering innovation. They rather seem to exist despite it.
I'm willing to have the charity to shake on "there a general sense of a regulation-innovation tradeoff". This is true. The more regulation, the less innovation as a general rule, with some exceptions.
As for the second part of the argument, you haven't produced any reasoning as to why regulation isn't a slippery slope while I can point to the development of essentially any technology since 1940 to affirm it. From the dishwasher to the machine gun.
You seem ready to argue elsewhere in this thread that the very idea of the slope being slippery is ridiculous and unfounded and here you're dodging. I think that is bad faith and that you've done nothing but project objections to your antagonism onto those that criticize it here. That is isn't just unconvincing rhetoric, it's a waste of our time.
So instead let's actually do something productive and establish your position definitively: what is your positive theory of the interaction of regulation and innovation, does it have any limiting principle and how does it maintain the innovation cycle and competition in the face of the interests that inevitably act on it?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5m ago
On the one hand, I think you raise valid concerns that are worth considering. On the other hand, people have been saying "pretty soon you'll have banned all the interesting posters" since like, 2020. And I think this place is still doing pretty ok.
Looking at the list of people who have been permabanned on the new site, the only posters on there who I consider to be serious losses are Hlynka, fuckduck, and we can add FarNearEverywhere on a technicality until she decides to come back. So that's not a huge list. Most of the accounts that get permabanned are literal trolls or spam accounts.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
59m ago
You're trying to use "rational discussion" as a cudgel to get people to accept your conclusion that a regulatory framework is a good idea and the rational thing to do is argue over the details. And you're doing it clumsily.
RegularlyExpressed
7m ago
If the weather seemed especially treif/haram this weekend, it is probably due to all these flying pigs. The guardian published an article on antisemitism in the US student protests which actually tries to be somewhat balanced.
Probably a belated attempt at credibility. It doesn't seem likely to me that the Guardian is doing this for the sake of balanced reporting, but they do try to present themselves as a serious news source, and the anti-semitism involved in the pro-Hamas demonstrations has been comically obvious from the start. I suspect it would even start looking weird to a lot of progressives if left-wing media kept ignoring it. You could ask a lot of them, particularly Muslims, about it and they probably respond with "of course there's anti-semitism, that's the point!".
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
17m ago
I'm focusing on this part because it's the part which matters. Reasonable people may disagree on whether the initial warning was right, and if FNE had chosen to politely argue that she wasn't in the wrong then all would be well. I think that the initial warning was a bit harsh, though I think "indefensible" is far too strong a claim. But the way you take up your cause with the mods matters a great deal, and nobody gets to just go "nah I'm not listening to you". That's not ok.
ControlsFreak
44m ago
Because not all slippery slopes logically entail exactly whatever anyone can just throw out there as a possible conclusion? So, perhaps, you're throwing out "death of innovation" as the end of the slope, but that's actually akin to "dog marriage". And someone else might throw out a different possibility as the end of the slope, and that's akin to trans stuff. A reasonable conversation can be had about the connection between gay marriage and those two different possible end points, just like a reasonable conversation can be had here about this regulation and different possible end points.
Let's kill those last two sentences and try again, then. Or do you think that "reasonable conversation" is a cudgel, also? Maybe we can try:
Because not all slippery slopes logically entail exactly whatever anyone can just throw out there as a possible conclusion? So, perhaps, you're throwing out "death of innovation" as the end of the slope, but that's actually akin to "dog marriage". And someone else might throw out a different possibility as the end of the slope, and that's akin to trans stuff.
Please respond on how you think about these problems. I won't even imply that your response should be reasonable or rational, but I'll probably be looking for these features, anyway.
Yeah, the geological carbon cycle is still a cycle, but slow enough there's no equilibrium at human timescales.
At least when I was in college the geo cycle, rock weathering, and vulcanism was considered the most probable driver of temperature over geologic time. Burning coal is basically short-circuiting that cycle by releasing fossil carbon that wouldn't have subducted and come out of a volcano until a hundred million years from now.
It's like comparing surface eddies with a deep ocean current.
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
23m ago
Presumably bits continue to grow because you can throw more bits faster these days, compared to 5 years ago. That seems like a field that hasn’t stagnated.
drmanhattan16
59m ago
I think you're getting at an important point. People don't like to think that others are doing things to them mentally. We make a compromise - don't make your thoughts other people's problems. If you want to masturbate to a classmate, you can't be stopped, just don't tell them you did that.
Of course, the pronoun/trans thing is a deliberate and willful violation of that compromise.
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