cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
1d ago
If his failures in life haven't deradicalized him I don't know if you will.
I was painfully lonely for a period and that made me drop some of the strictest requirements I had for a partner. That painfully lonely period was only months though, not years or decades.
You are a better friend than me. I would have probably dropped this bitter pill of a person from my life. Such bitterness and negativity will only get worse, not better.
cjet79
1d ago
Values are pretty important in a partner. He should at least know where he is willing to compromise or meet in the middle.
I'm atheist my wife is Catholic. I agreed to raise our kids catholic, but I never agreed to convert. And by raising them catholic I made it clear that I meant getting out of the way, and not undermining her efforts, but very little active assistance.
Would he be fine with a vegetarian?
Would he be fine with someone that is mostly apolitical?
In general, the more strict your filter is the more you are going to filter. I always had the approach that nothing was truly off the table. There are gonna be things you like and dislike in a partner. You want it to be net positive in the moment, and for it to be likely to remain a net positive in the future.
You can maybe get your friend thinking in the direction of tradeoffs by asking about age, weight, and looks tradeoffs. Since those things are more of a sliding scale and we all recognize that one of those characteristics being slightly off from perfect is fine if there are other positives to balance it out.
cjet79
1d ago
I'm reminded of one of Bryan Caplan's multi chapter reviews of the Malcolm X autobiography.
Malcolm never distinguishes between victimless crime (drugs, bootlegging, prostitution, gambling) and regular crime (burglary, robbery). For him, it’s all “hustling” – one person preying on another. Indeed, Malcolm appears to regard all for-profit business as “hustling.” While he’s clearly aware that mutually beneficial trade exists, the fact that trade is mutually beneficial isn’t morally significant for Malcolm. Purely charitable motives are the only ones he sees as admirable.
Basically this "hustle" culture seems equivalent to "Izzat". Caplan also goes on to point out how Malcolm has a lot of self destructive behaviors:
Still, Malcolm is well-aware of the importance of self-destructive behavior among the poor. Indeed, he’s a perfect example of the syndrome:
[A]ll the thousands of dollars I’d handled and I had nothing. Just satisfying my cocaine habit alone cost me about twenty dollars a day. I guess another five dollars a day could have been added for reefers and plain tobacco cigarettes…
Once he starts experimenting with Islam, Malcolm becomes puritanical – and predictably turns his life around. But he somehow manages to avoid the lesson that he was a major – if not the main – source of his own problems.
Imagine if Malcolm had stayed sober, stuck to victimless crime, and conservatively invested his money. He would quickly have surpassed the typical standard of living for contemporary whites. Yet the devil’s to blame for everything wrong in his life – and the devil is the white man
I think the idea of a sober Malcolm X sticking to victimless crime and conservatively investing his money is nonsensical. You are what you do. And Malcolm did petty crime so he also did all the petty criminal things. If you want to not do petty criminal things you need to not be a petty criminal. Malcolm instead became a religious leader and started doing all the religious leader things, which included a lot of righteousness and puritanical beliefs.
He sort of invented the role of black muslim religious leader. There was a great deal of flexibility in what he could have chosen for that role to become in society. It seems he made it more of an "anti-peti-criminal" role than anything else. Instead of no morals about anything, he had all the morals about everything. Instead of a life of debauchery and drugs, he chose a life of puritanism and sobriety.
Anyways, I think this "Izzat" culture is likely screwing itself over as well. Being a scammer would be a shitty life. Everything and everyone would feel fake all the time. You'd probably end up viewing all the victims of yours scams as pieces of crap that deserved it, and it would make you absolutely paranoid about being scammed yourself (so that you are not also a piece of crap that deserved to be scammed). You'll view many things that could be mutually beneficial exchanges as instead just scams waiting to happen.
If "Izzat" culture at all looks appealing its because they are running a scam on scammers. Probably recruiting for some sort of pyramid scheme. Think of it like a recruiting message for a company where the top salesman shows off his cool company car and brags about his company vacation. Meanwhile at that company most of the sales people joining are just doing cold calls and feeding that salesperson at the top promising leads, and then earning close to nothing on the commissions.
This happens a lot, where something that is basically a hyped up recruiting message gets translated by outside people as "this is how things really are". I remember a while back Stephen Colbert did some kind of expose on trailer park landlords and found this video about a guy bragging about how you could ruthlessly exploit trailer park renters. He claimed you could rent it out, immediately jack up the prices and they'd be screwed and have to pay cuz they'd have no where to move. The obvious thing that Colbert missed is that the guy saying this was selling trailers to trailer parks. The advertisement was trying to scam the scammers. Every point the guy made in the advertisement clashed with reality. The writers of the Colbert show didn't care though, they found this perfect little snippet of a guy being the most scumbag landlord you could imagine.
So yeah we need a category of things for "Advertisements between scammers getting mistaken for reality", and then we can hopefully avoid making this mistake again and again.
cjet79
2d ago
Starship Troopers Extermination again.
I play with a light military sim group. I recently got certified to lead 16 person groups for the company. This comes with a promotion to the NCO ranks. I'm corporal for now, but since I have the platoon lead certification I will be Sergeant once a week elapses.
The certification process was simultaneously easy and difficult. Easy because I was ready for it, and it was fun leading a well oiled machine of 15 other people. Hard because I have a baby that occasionally wakes up in the middle of matches and there is a bit of random luck to the game that can make certain matches very difficult. I failed my first attempt because the dropship was far away and I wasn't able to get all the troopers to the dropship alive. (A condition of passing the certification but not winning the match).
I'm looking forward to the next game update when there will be improvements to in game companies. Should allow for some more meta progression. I've mostly topped out a lot of the existing progression stuff.
cjet79
12d ago
If my understanding is correct, Comey basically signed off on a witch hunt that he knew was baseless. And it wasted two to three years of the first Trump presidency.
If that is true or someone believes it to be true then he definitely should be prosecuted for that shit.
The other political opponent is that New York prosecutor (Letitia James?) that went after him for real estate fraud. It was a bogus case that lots of people are semi guilty of. He went after her for the exact same thing. It's the most tit-for-tat political retaliation ever.
cjet79
18d ago
That and maybe yourself afterwards since you might be in a weird version of hell created for philosophers.
Yes it is low effort, and intentionally breaking and flaunting your flouting of a rule does not make it better. 1 day ban.
*Edit fixed my flouting of grammar and word definitions.
cjet79
19d ago
Sleeping beauty is cursed by a witch with a poisoned apple. She falls asleep and is only awoken when a prince comes along and kisses her
cjet79
24d ago
Not OP but it did always seem insane to me. Most bullets go through a pretty destructive process when they collide with a target. At those speeds lead is more like playdough. The barrels of the gun also don't seem like they should all be that unique. Mass production doesn't usually create uniquely identifiable things.
I could understand general identification differences like ammo or weapon differences. But anything that differentiates different guns of the same make and model seems suspect.
cjet79
28d ago
A world without patents generally just looks like a world with industrial secrets. Ultimately what matters in business is having a "moat" that gives your competitors an obstacle to overcome. The bigger the obstacle the bigger your profits can be without inducing a competitor to enter the business.
Patents were an attempt to get people to share their secrets. Before patents if someone comes up with an industrial improvement the general approach is to just keep it secret and utilize it as best they can. If they die and the factory burns down that improvement is just gone forever.
cjet79
1mo ago
Stardew Valley is a really great co op game. Lots of collecting. Endless dungeon running. It will probably feel a little easy.
Return to Moria is a survival crafting game that seems like it would be way more fun in co-op. It is heavily focused on mining and looting for gear upgrades. Movement speed is pretty slow compared to other survival games.
cjet79
1mo ago
Conversation is a skill and it requires a great deal of practice. I don't think most people ever get good at it. Top 10 percentile get good at it in their twenties. Top 25 percentile get good in their mind 30s. Most of the rest never get good.
I'd say my own performance is spotty at best.
cjet79
1mo ago
I get that there is a legal difference, but the line is very thin when it is an Obama administration team proposing a massive bill to Congress and pushing it through so fast that barely anyone had time to read and understand it.
If Congress is going to rubber stamp anything the president puts in front of them (with maybe just a few pork barrel spending concessions added in) then it's not very different from going around Congress altogether.
I'm not saying this is ok. I'd prefer it if Congress would do their fucking job. But the imperial presidency has been a growing concern for decades at this point (or a even a century). I don't feel entirely comfortable blaming it on one party or even one particular president. If I had to I'd probably put the blame on 9/11 over reaction and George Bush. Obama was partly elected by people claiming he would reign in this sort of thing. Instead he just changed the flavor.
I just see this as less of a bright line has been crossed and more of a continuing escalation. I don't know where I'd put the bright line. If you'd asked me a century ago to place a bright line I'm sure FDR would have crossed it first. If you'd asked me anytime in the last three decades I'm sure that line would have been crossed about a decade later.
cjet79
1mo ago
And? As you said Obama didn't create any brand new taxes, but he arguably did. And by arguably I don't just mean there is one loose interpretation where he might have done that. I mean it went before the supreme Court and it was a hotly contested issue by multiple states signing on to that case.
cjet79
1mo ago
Obama did some stuff along the same lines, but he didn't invent new taxes wholesale.
That was the exact issue that got Obamacare in front of the supreme Court. Individual mandate to buy insurance was a new type of tax or a very old one that hasn't been used in a while (a head tax).
cjet79
1mo ago
I'm somewhat tempted to blame venture capital.
Many of these web companies grew into what they are while catering to the whims of VC funds. Which usually meant massive and rapid growth to get as many users as possible. Which is not a bad strategy when you have less than millions of users. But at some point in the millions of users you need to convert to monetization of those user's. But that is typically when the firm goes public and loses all guidance from the VC. Or worst of all is stuck with founding leadership that was optimized for the "acquire users at all costs" schtick.
I'm now wondering if it's a software investment problem in general. AAA games seem to follow a similar dumb logic. Endless cloning and copying of the hatest hit, barely any differentiation among the top products.
cjet79
1mo ago
I think I said it before, probably YEARS ago, but if Twitch had made a serious effort to stick to its core model of "person records and broadcasts themselves as they play a video game on their computer" they'd be having an easier time avoiding scandal.
Seems to be a core problem of the internet. Reddit also had an opportunity to become the default discussion forum / comment section for everything on the internet. But they instead wanted to chase instagram and tiktok and came out with a UI that both destroyed their old model and failed to bring anything new to the doomscroll model. They've chased every internet fad and failed every time. Now a gaming chat service (discord) is stuck being one of the default discussion and comment sections for the internet. Which its bad at, but at least it isn't fighting that role like reddit has been since its inception.
cjet79
1mo ago
Regulation is often a barrier to entry rather than a full on industry killer. Big incumbent companies like barriers to entry. I think tobacco industry is fine with current levels of regulation.
Pharma companies political control doesn't show up as easily because they just do heavy ad spend on all the news networks.
I think there are heavy limitations to the AIPAC strategy and I laid them out down thread. I don't think it's as much of a killer strategy as Scott implies.
cjet79
1mo ago
Ya realized that last night and didn't care. Now it's morning and I kinda care again.
cjet79
1mo ago
You aren't too far from me, if you ever want to try a fun sport come down to the northern Virginia area and play some underwater hockey with me.
cjet79
1mo ago
I think the AIPAC method and big money spending in general has some big limitations:
- Can't be an existing issue with that divides along party lines. I just don't think any urban democrats are gonna come out in favor of guns no matter how much money you pour into their primary opponents. Same with rural Republicans on abortion. Purity tests are very effective, and that's partly why attack ads work in the first place. But someone that truly and openly fails a purity test is gonna have a lot of barriers to winning within either party machine.
- It generally can't be something most Americans care deeply about. Or else a backlash group will form and try to negate all your progress. The Koch brothers spent decades funding small academic institutions with the goal of having more libertarian scholars in academia. They've partially succeeded but now unKoch my campus exists and the universities have gotten much worse then they were decades ago when the project started. Americans care about universities. Barely anyone cares about AI, or crypto, or foreign countries on the other side of the world.
- Even if they don't care about it now, you can't endlessly exploit an issue without making them care about it. For half a century Disney was able to shamelessly and repeatedly lobby to extend copyright with basically zero opposition. Two decades ago people started to notice and complain. A bunch of groups formed, none of them with massive resources. But they grew to the point that Disney finally didn't bother lobbying for another copyright extension.
cjet79
1mo ago
The threshhold for a net productive citizen is very low in my mind.
There is a concept in economics called the velocity of money. Basically money doesn't just disappear when it is spent, it usually get reused and spent on other things. Higher velocity things usually cause more spending and re-spending.
I have these in person drunk chats with the local neighborhood dads. Many of the better discussions are about interpersonal stuff. Turns out that random dads in a good neighborhood are likely only experts at not fucking up their own lives. Political discussions vary heavily in quality depending on the topic.
We don't get to it as often as we would all like, but that is part of our expert ability to keep families together: we don't try and get wasted more than once or twice a month.
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