Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Lowering taxes at all is bad on its face since the government needs more taxes and less spending. It's worrying that neither side really cares about ballooning debt, since it will almost certainly have a far bigger impact on the lives of regular Americans than something like climate change ever will in our lifetimes.
Poor people have been doing pretty well recently, actually. The Gini coefficient has been flat or declining for the past several decades (in FRED's most recent data for 2021 it was lower than any year since 1992). Also, if you want greater incentives for work, bolster the EITC.
I don't buy the notion that blue collar work is uniquely awful. It might be tough on the body, but it also has a relatively lower barrier to entry, and some people outright prefer it. How does capitalism balance the upsides and downsides? With a little tool called "market wages". If blue collar work is so bad, why don't blue collar workers just sign up to get those supposedly worthless, trivial desk jobs? Your argument feels like the right-wing equivalent of "women are only paid 77 cents for every dollar a man earns".
The only justification I can come up with for the latter is that it is the constitutional right of pro-Palestinian people to attack people supporting Israel.
Basically the government's view is if someone has tackled you and is beating on you, it's not sporting to fight back with a weapon (i.e. deadly force). Think of government as the two guys who hold you while their buddy punches you.
To add insult to injury, the pro-Palestinian man has not been charged.
You certainly don't seem like you're unbiased in describing this situation, which makes it difficult to take your account seriously.
In this article it says they're going to charge the pro-Palestinian guy after it became apparent that he would survive.
In terms of self-defense, there should obviously be some limits to prevent society degenerating into one where people try to bait their enemies into attacking them so they get a free pass at murder. See Cartman shooting Tolkien for a comedic example.
It comes down to proportionality here. On one hand you could say humans are intensely, catastrophically fragile. You could scare/startle a person, which could cause them to slip and fall on a jagged piece of cement that severs their spine and kills them instantly. In the same vein, a kid throwing a rock or wielding a stick could be "deadly" in unlucky circumstances. But under reasonable circumstances I don't think that justifies blasting them with a gun.
In this situation, if anything the fall was the most likely to injure. The pro-Israel guy had friends there so I doubt there was a reasonable expectation of getting strangled or anything like that, so him reaching for his gun was at least somewhat excessive, if not strongly excessive. That said, there should be some allowance for the ambiguity of the situation (shock, adrenaline, etc.)... which is what seems like is going to happen. The state is going to charge him, but not with the maximal punishment like attempted murder or even (according the second article you posted) § 15E, Assault and Battery by Discharging a Firearm which would carry a maximum of a 20 year sentence.
It seems like the state is doing a reasonably good job here, although it would be prudent to wait for more info. Though, of course if there's a bunch of info incriminating the pro-Israel guy then we probably wouldn't hear about it on this site, as the entire thing would just be ignored.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Perhaps they should have gone gray instead.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Most of the posts here don't really seem like they're "testing shady thinking". For that, it would be something like Scott's mistakes page. Most of the posts here instead seem like justifications of taking a few swirls down the toxoplasmic spiral. It seems a lot more "boo outgroup" with just a thin veneer of "here's how I was foolish enough to fall for their lies".
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
This thread invites people to discuss things they were wrong about, but most people are using it to grind their usual axes.
"I was naive when I was younger. I thought that the outgroup might be reasonable on a certain position, but I underestimated how evil and far-reaching the policy is in practice. I know better now (and presumably am a bit closer to hating the outgroup with every fiber of my being)."
There are a few that dodge that description but the vast majority fall into it.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Facebook was hardly the only company investing in the metaverse. If VR is included as well, which is at least adjacent to concepts of the metaverse if not outright intertwined, then the amount of investment almost certainly rivals what LLMs are getting (though data is sparse and a true apples-to-apples comparison is difficult).
I have more faith in the long-term viability of AI than I do of the metaverse + VR. That said, I find the idea of a near-term AI breakout to be highly improbable and decreasing with every mediocre release. At best, LLMs have years or perhaps even decades of research ahead before we get to human-level intelligence. There's also the possibility that the current generation of LLMs will eventually be seen as a dead end and AI focus will shift elsewhere, like how game playing used to be the forefront capturing headlines in the 90s before tapering off into relative obscurity.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
VR can become a lot better, but it will never solve the fundamental technical hurdle that has always held it back: It's supporters bill it like it will eventually usher in Ready Player One, but without physical movement the tech just sucks. All demos have to make critical compromises with how the player or user moves around, and they usually do it by teleportation or by being on-rails since the alternative is a one-way trip to the floor as the user's cochlea decides that remaining upright is no longer an option.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Tech companies ploughed insane amounts of money into stuff like the metaverse as well. Heck, Facebook even changed its name to Meta, yet all we got were some dead malls.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
The default failure-state for emerging tech is that a relative lack of improvement is explained away as setting the stage for a future explosion of progress. In a very few instances this has been true, but overwhelmingly it's been false, e.g. crypto, the metaverse, VR, etc. At best, LLMs are currently on the downswing of the Gartner Hype Cycle.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Speak of the devil, it just showed up for me.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
How are you playing with it already? I have the premium version of chatGPT and I only see the old 4o models.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit.
The point of "low hanging fruit" is that it's easy and quick to pluck, which means rapid gains. This is the opposite of that. This is grinding away at the margins for tiny, nearly imperceptible improvements.
They've pulled out the ladder and are scaling to the top of the tree to scrounge a handful of "strawberrries".
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Color me skeptical that this is much more than a mildly iterative improvement at best. LLMs have largely either stagnated or even slightly regressed since the big hype cycle last year, at least for everyday uses. There have even been a handful of people breathlessly claiming we'd hit the singularity, only for their claims to be proven as nothingburgers within a few days.
There's a chart later in the press release that shows whether people subjected to a blind test prefer the current models or the new models. For writing there was essentially no difference, for programming and data analysis there was a minimal difference, and only for math was there a moderate difference.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Trump chased every rabbit down every hole. Harris totally got under his skin. Criticizing the size of his rallies is a juvenile move, but Trump acted like she had just kicked him in the balls with a stiletto heel. Then a parade of nonsense. Relitigating J6. "Executing babies". "Eating the dogs". "Transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison". "I have the concept of a plan".
The only upside for Trump is that this debate was relatively early in the cycle, so hopefully for him people will have mostly forgotten about this by the time voting comes around.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Your post is a good example of how the discussion goes awry: not really focusing on "state capacity" in and of itself, but rather using it as a springboard to grind the usual axes. Talking about stuff like supposed FBI bias wouldn't be particularly high up on the list of concerns in regards to state capacity, but it can jump to #1 if you wanted to talk about it anyways!
I disagree with many of your object-level concerns, and think they're interesting discussions, but don't think they have much to do with state capacity.
In any case:
Sure nobody's trying actual insurgencies but the regime is considered illegitimate and unjust by half the population, though it changes which half.
The US is certainly polarized, but political stability of the kind capitalism requires to do basic business hasn't been impacted on a widespread scale, outside of maybe the BLM riots of 2020 which tend to be overblown by those on the right.
And your 'network of alliances' is actually a bunch of provinces you're busy ruining economically. Biden inflation reduction act was offering money to EU businesses to relocate to USA. You blew up their natural gas pipeline.
Equivocating the EU as a "bunch of [American] provinces" or as "puppets" as I've heard other claim is just flatly false. Also, nearly all evidence of the Nordstream bombing points to Ukraine, not the US.
And as to solidity of economy...... if democrats keep being in office and keep attacking energy supply, that's not going to last.
Under Biden, the US has produced more oil than any nation in history. Not just US history, but world history in its entirety.
Very good points! Maybe state capacity is like that old adage about bathroom janitors: you only really notice them if they're not around to do the job. That doesn't mean they're not doing their job in the vast majority of other cases.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
I think if there is anything that should be meant by state capacity it should mean the ability to wage war.
This is exactly what I'm talking about: People use it to talk about whatever they personally want to. For you it seems obvious that warfare should be the primary concern of state capacity, but for lots of other people I've seen discuss state capacity it has often only been mentioned in passing.
I think we get better results about being specific. If we want to talk about how well the US could fight a modern war, make that the main focus. It's certainly an interesting topic. US naval hegemony is rapidly declining, but how much that's due to US dysfunction is a matter of debate. China was always going to become more competitive in the area when its economy dectupled over a few decades, so any US shipbuilding issues might be tiny by comparison. Then there's the issue of recruitment more generally, with shortages reported in nearly every force. But is that due to a lack of "state capacity", or rather the military becoming a less appealing profession given relative wage gains in other areas?
I don't really worry about someone invading + conquering the mainland US, as that's still decades away at the very least.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
I don't think discussions of state capacity are very fruitful. It's too ambiguous of a term that it can mean practically anything. It's like a somewhat more intellectual version of talking about "bullshit jobs" or "strong men create good times, etc". You're not getting any actual rigorous analysis, you're just getting people grinding whatever axes they think apply, which will be quite varied due to the provocative ambiguity.
For "state capacity", you get people discussing basically any long-run issues the US has. Climate change, decline of manufacturing, health care cost disease, economic inequality, political polarization, rise of the New Axis (China+Russia+Iran), infrastructure decay, military decay + failed wars, racial tensions, national debt, etc, etc. You can list problems forever, as peoples' negativity bias means the news is more likely to cover them. On the other hand there are quite a few areas where the US is doing well: leader of innovation, solid economy, politically stable despite Trump, massive network of alliances, leading financial system, energy independence, etc. So a lot of the question is just doomer vs bloomer.
Then there's the question of how much the federal government actually engineers beneficial changes, which is ostensibly what the conversation is about in the first place. In practice though it's far too large of a question to really measure in it's entirety, and it's a much better idea to break it up into smaller chunks and evaluate specific policies. Overall, the US has probably lost some amount of state capacity from polarization, as it's effectively become a vetocracy in many areas (e.g. housing), although to some degree the totality of this issue is overblown.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
I can't think of a single Trump debate moment that actually hurt his standing, there may be a couple but he's a known quantity. Unless someone else takes a shot at him during the debate it won't be anything remarkable.
His first debate in 2020 was very bad. Not as bad as Biden's recent debate, but worse than pretty much all others in living memory.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
There will be pressure on Harris to get in at least one "zinger", although it doesn't need to be too effective. She just needs to show that she can form a coherent thought to be better than Biden. Harris will be well-rehearsed so I doubt there's much of a chance that she self-destructs as spectacularly as Biden did. There's a chance that Trump could do something crazy, although he's too tired now to act like he did in 2020 so I also don't think the chance is that high. He can ramble semi-coherently and it will be enough since the bar is extremely low for him.
I'd say there's a 10% chance one candidate loses badly, a 30% chance Harris overperforms slightly, a 20% she underperforms slightly (relative to expectations), and a 40% chance that both candidates hold their own and nothing really happens.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
I'm not sure where you're getting the 3-4% number from. Polls underestimated Trump by 1.1% in 2016 and 2.7% in 2020. They also overestimated Romney by 3.2% in 2012. Drawing strong conclusions from n=2 in a system where there's historically been no net partisan bias is misguided.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Russia wanted a whole different system where they could develop and be left alone.
be left alone
It's weird to say this about a country that very aggressively tried to invade almost everybody around itself.
The Soviet idea of empire wasn't a perfect analogue to English or French or Dutch imperialism... but it wasn't that far off either!
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Maybe I could have phrased what I meant more explicitly (which I've gone and edited now), but you also cut out the part I had right before that explained the context. "Balance of power" != "Anglo hegemony" if words mean anything. Sure, Britain was willing to make alliances to prevent hegemony of others. I never claimed otherwise.
Once we dig deep enough, the real reason World War II started was to preserve Anglo hegemony over Europe
Oh brother.
You mention that the British guarantees to Poland were anti-German, which is correct, but might that have something to do with the fact that Germany had just broken its promises from Munich? There were also the serious deliberations about aiding Finland in the Winter War. The notion of Anglo hegemony over Europe is silly itself as Britain was never much interested in unilaterally dominating the continent. Instead, it consistently wanted a balance of power where no single entity gained a decisive edge, the goal being to get itself a free hand to manage its overseas empire. If anything, France was much more interested in continental influence, and Britain tolerated this since it was clear that France wasn't going to go full Napoleon but rather was trying to contain the revanchist nations.
Not at all. He could have fought back with his fists to try to get the guy off him. The problem was that he escalated with multiple gunshots instead.
The notion that he can't fight back at all is a goofy strawman.
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