cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
15hr ago
I'd count JFK, and maybe Nixon too. I think he was likely setup.
I don't think assassinations are likely to happen anymore. I think CIA or something similar carried out JFK assassination and then realized how much of a massive headache it was to cover up and never did it again.
Seems like they usually go the lawfare or controversy route to get people out of the way. Trump has just been a bad target for these methods since he basically excels in those situations.
cjet79
15hr ago
JFK assassination seems like a case of elites killing off the top guy. Or at least I'd say I'm 80% certain the elites at the time were involved in some portion of that assassination.
I'm also about 70% certain that the elites setup Nixon for his fall.
Intelligence agencies don't seem generally trustful. I just don't think they can use overt methods anymore.
cjet79
1d ago
As I mentioned, not too attached to the particular solution I had. Just that this is a problem. So I don't think we disagree too much.
cjet79
1d ago
There are obligations you agree to and obligations that are forced upon you. If I agree to deliver 10 widgets to you then back out, I've backed out of an obligation I agreed to. If government says I need to deliver 10 widgets to you then I back out, I've backed out of an obligation that has been forced upon me. Obligations that are forced upon people seem like takings to me. If I had any faith in older supreme courts I'd wonder why they weren't considered 5th amendment violations.
Which isn't to say I think the ADA way is right either, I'd rather just have a mandate passed on what a company needs to do, set up a department, people make complaints and the government either finds in the companies favor and does nothing, or uses government power to force the company to comply. Then you could also measure the cost both to the company and to the government of enforcement without diluting the whole purpose of having a government.
I would be somewhat fine with this solution if they also kept track of the costs of these mandates, possibly by allowing partial tax write offs for anyone complying with them. I'm not really firmly fixed on a particular solution for this problem, just firmly in the position that it is a problem.
A mandate without funding is just a sneaky tax and spending scheme that doesn't get added to the government balance books and has far less oversight and checks/balances than other forms of spending. Even if you are a big government liberal there are good reasons to dislike this kind of scheme. There are not unlimited resources, and unless you only care about one particular pet issue that is using one of these mandates without funding then there is less wealth available for all other issues. Take this pet example:
All businesses must spend about $10k to accommodate a particular disability. The disability can also be fixed with a surgery. Fixing the disability for everyone would average out to about $5k per business. The government in this case could tax the businesses $9k each, spend $5k paying for fixing the disability, and then have $4k in tax revenue left over. The business is happier with this solution, the disability is solved for all cases (and places that get exclusions from ADA aren't also excluding people with the disability.)
I am Libertarian, but I also was an Economics Major in college. The ADA stuff bothers my economist side just as much as it bothers my libertarian side. If I am going to have a government doing things that I don't like, can I at least ask that they not do it stupidly and waste a bunch of money?
cjet79
1d ago
Much of these are solved through private arbitration, with courts as a resolver of last resort. The reason they are a last resort is that lawyers will eat up most of the money in the case. Which kind of defeats the purpose of a dispute over money. Courts are mainly avenues of Justice. As in you want the person who screwed you over monetarily not just to pay you back but to suffer.
cjet79
2d ago
I can't even tell what the dude is saying. He is stuttering and mumbling and talking in circles.
"I'm waiting for someone to stand up and say: Why do we borrow our own currency in the first place?"
The way she phrased it made me think she was saying it is ridiculous that we borrow our own currency. But yeah maybe I am just totally misinterpreting her tone.
cjet79
2d ago
The lady in that video got on my nerve. She managed to compress so many bad economic ideas and implications into such a short few sentences.
I also had to double check the date on that video. Is someone seriously asking after the last few years why we don't just print more money? Have they been to a restaurant or bought anything recently? We did the experiment during covid of just 'printing more money' and then we had record setting inflation.
There is also the rather basic idea that if you expect to be paid back in X currency in the future then you have a vested interest in that currency maintaining its value. Its a way of signalling commitment to the future value of the currency. Its like a CEO offering to only be paid in stock options that don't vest for a few years. It would signal they are confident in the future success of the company.
cjet79
2d ago
Anything that expands the scope of things that one individual can sue another for is laundering costs.
This statement is often not true. Lawsuits are often a more efficient and transparent way of allocating costs.
I'm gonna stick by my statement. I don't think the example you give really contradicts it. The actual world we live in has a mix of both systems where the American government gets to flip a coin "heads I win, tails you lose". They regulate the industries, and allow those industries to be sued by individuals. From what I understand this is actually a little strange by international standards. Russia (for traffic stuff) goes more down the route of sue anyone but very loose regulations. And most of Europe goes down the route of strict regulations, but you can't sue (for a bunch of business regulations).
In general, I think in cases of death or serious bodily injury it makes sense to have a court involved. In cases of money or social interaction its a bad idea to have courts involved. I'm not suggesting entirely doing away with courts. But courts are a terrible place for solving economic distribution questions. They are simply far too expensive (judges and lawyers are generally smart and capable people).
But people can already sue for bodily injury or death, so when I say an expansion of what you can sue for is laundering costs, I mean that generally any new thing that you can sue for. (and there are some old things you can sue for that I also think are bullshit, but I specifically listed those things.)
cjet79
2d ago
I worked in accessibility stuff for front end web development. So my experience is limited. But the horror stories were numerous of companies that got sued successfully for some ridiculous ADA website violations. (things like not having alt text for images). https://www.levelaccess.com/blog/title-iii-lawsuits-10-big-companies-sued-over-website-accessibility/
The Act is not specific when it comes to the web (there are web standards for accessibility, but they aren't mentioned or referenced by the law). I assume like most acts it probably has some intense specificity in some areas for the sake of some special interest groups that were paying close attention, and then serious lapses in specificity for all other areas. Leading to the inevitable outcome of random courts throughout the country trying to decide what the legislators meant (or alternatively, what they wanted the legislators to mean).
The courts are a good place for dispute resolution but they are a terrible place for rule-making. The difference is important and vital in this context. A court is always getting a tiny subset of cases around a particular rule delivered to them. Higher courts are often getting the cases that the current rule covers worst. The people who are well served by a particular rule never see the inside of a courtroom. Courts thus end up making rules that serve to fix a tiny minority of edge cases, without having to really consider what said rules might do for the main use cases. Are legislature has become dysfunctional and slow enough that courts have been forced into a rule-making role.
Courts are also intentionally limited in scope. They are to address the current problem in front of them. Not to seek out the ultimate cause and work out a better overall solution. This is great for problems like murder where the final act is very meaningful and important, but all the things that lead up to it are probably more trivial and varied. For something like "why dont you have good alt text on your web images" the final act is kind of meaningless and all the reasons leading up to why that alt next needs to be there matter a lot more.
The problem space in the world is also not conveniently broken up in ways we would like. Sometimes it is cheaper for businesses to solve an issue. Sometimes it is cheaper if all of the people suffering from a problem solve the issue. Take nearsightedness as a simple example. One way to solve it would be to require that all text is much larger and thus more readable at a distance. The other way to solve it is to have people with nearsightedness wear glasses. The ADA often forces a one size fits all solution to these problems, businesses must solve the problem, end of story. It would be a lot cheaper if all screen reader tech was just way better and could read even crappy websites. But instead we have crappy screen reader tech and any website that doesn't go out of its way to be accessible ends up being unreadable to screen readers. Even traditional problems like ramps for wheelchairs might have had a cheaper solution, like just having a few strong men lift the chair up a few steps. Or if robotic technology advanced enough just giving the disabled better wheelchairs that can walk them up and down stairs.
cjet79
2d ago
Anyone playing manor lords and having any thoughts yay or nay? Or even just "wait a few months"?
cjet79
2d 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.
cjet79
5d ago
It does seem like individual taste buds are bad, but society wide taste buds are pretty accurate and good.
cjet79
6d ago
I have shit taste buds and a shit sense of smell. But yeah this makes my main point stronger.
cjet79
6d ago
It's an engineering problem, but the precision control needed is pretty high. I don't think it's impossible, just difficult and thus likely to remain expensive.
Human tongues are pretty sensitive, they can pick up very tiny differences in texture and taste. Consider diet sodas. If you've ever had a regular soda and a diet soda you can usually notice a slight difference between the two. They try to make the two sodas taste the same and fail, even though it's a much easier problem than textured meat.
cjet79
7d ago
Taste does seem very difficult, but cheapness seems inevitable.
Just from physics/energy perspective lab grown or vat grown meat is more straightforward. Animals are not 100% edible and some of the energy they consume goes to their non edible parts and to activities that provide no benefit to edibility.
I think it's comparable to the difference between cars and horses. Cars have more uniform energy requirements, and far less wasted energy. But horses have numerous aesthetic benefits that are hard to imitate (like auto navigation).
cjet79
11d ago
Tried it, you can just lie to it, which I guess would be the problem with any app, and why I want a human.
cjet79
11d ago
I sometimes work out with friends, but I want to do more training during work hours when they are not available.
The motivation isn't there right now (or ever?) to do workouts on my own.
cjet79
11d ago
And if you don't have enough drive to just start lifting without a trainer, you are not going to stick to it anyways.
Source: Seen this shit happen time and time again.
Yah I don't have motivation, how long can a personal trainer extend motivation. I certainly don't think it can work indefinitely, but a few months?
cjet79
11d ago
I lack personal motivation for follow through. Is there a chatgpt app that will nag me about my fitness goals?
cjet79
11d ago
No such things as pros for the sport I play. If I had to guess Underwater hockey only has about a thousand active players in the US.
The more experienced and in shape players offer some training advice when you are on their teams, but I'm not on their team and would just generally prefer being in good cardio shape.
I always see these reading threads and think y'all read such heavy stuff. I read for fun. Not a serious book in sight.
I just caught up in Markets and Multiverses. A young lady dies. Her soul gets pulled along in a big soul ocean to a galaxy sized ship floating in the soul ocean. The ship is called "the market". Its a place for re-incarnators to stop by and buy powers between reincarnations. But the ship has been taken over and all the reincarnators seem to have been killed, and the enemies are still lurking around. She meets some new people from different worlds who also just got reincarnated. Together they Reincarnate and try to build up their powers.
I'm currently subscribed to patreons for some stories I enjoy. Like Millennial Mage (A Slice of Life, Progression Fantasy) and The Path of Ascension. I recently got to read the end of Ar'Kendrithyst which is one of the longest completed stories ever at 4.39 million words. I'm also caught up on The Stubborn Skill-Grinder In A Time Loop which is the perfect level of trashy dumb progression fantasy for me. I'm waiting for Chaotic Craftsman Worships The Cube and Unintended Cultivator - A Xianxia-inspired Cultivation Novel to build up more of a chapter backlog for me to start reading them again.
I like action, powerful main characters that kick ass, and fantasy worlds that mostly don't resemble our world at all. I prefer stories with low levels of moral ambiguity. Made up fantasy systems and rules are fun. Betrayal is not fun. Horrors of war are not fun. Politics is boring.
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