Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer
User ID: 2666
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
But past a certain point we have to wonder whether there is anything in her head at all.
Why, besides academic curiosity? After all, how much does "whether there is anything in her head" even matter? It's not like the President is actually in charge of anything, or serves any important purposes. (Sure, the rules on paper say POTUS matters, but those don't matter, and the rules as actually played in DC are completely different.)
I continue to maintain that this is all irrelevant, because democracy is fake, election outcomes don't really matter, power is all in the hands of permanent, unelected apparatchiks in various powerful institutions, and we're all powerless to do anything about it. "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." Call them "elites," call them "the swamp," call them the "deep state", call them whatever — all that matters is they are the strong, who will do whatever they want, and the rest of us are the weak, who can only suffer.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
not only because I've placed bets that Donald Trump will lose the popular vote since I thought it was a dead sure thing
I agree it's a sure thing — though I have no money to bet on it — but probably for different reasons.
Even if we assume that Elite Human Capital or the Deep State is running the show, why can't these people find a decent media spokesperson?
Why should they bother? Do they actually need their figurehead to be "a decent media spokesperson"?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
It's not just government. Lots of orgs have tried to replace expertise / experience / competency with process and procedure.
It's Weber's "rationalization," it's a hallmark of "modernity," and it's one of the top reasons why I want "modernity" destroyed. Go back to the personal leadership of @Stellula's "high agency people" and away from the tyranny of "idiots with checklists," to borrow from @AvocadoPanic, and away from Arendt's "tyranny without a tyrant" created by the bureaucratic diffusion of responsibility.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
I pointed out that he did claim that self-sufficiency was a lower bound for purposes of comparative advantage.
No, I claimed attempting self-sufficiency as lower bound. As the disabled illustrate, it doesn't mean one can succeed. And I'd dispute that most modern people could achieve self-sufficiency if they stopped specializing in their comparative advantage. After all, we're pretty much all "specialists," even the farmers. And there are the necessary resource inputs — try being self-sufficient without any land, for example.
the vast vast majority of able-bodied humans can, indeed, be self-sufficient, as evidenced by millennia of history.
No, for most of those millennia, many were specializing and trading (even if just within family/household/tribe). And, per Karl Smith, they held certain then-scarce factors of production, the value of which automation will drastically reduce.
Humans have agency, can understand (or at least act as if they understand) opportunity cost and comparative advantage.
Irrelevant.
Humans have — had — value because human brains were a scarce factor of production, there being no substitute. But now a cheap, plentiful substitute is coming. When supply goes up, price goes down. What steam and fossil fuel did to the muscle power of horses, automation will do to the brain power of humans.
And sure, the transition to mostly-automated luxury would be nice… were human beings uniform and perfectly fungible. The problem is in the middle, when large fractions of the population have become parasites upon the fraction that's still productive.
Many material resources will remain scarce even as the value of human labor declines, which limits how cheap the machines can become.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
but I don't think any human society comes close to crossing that line when it comes to alcohol.
How much time have you spent around Native Americans?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
It's funny seeing some of the comments about how "inevitable" the horrible consequences of Prohibition are, when I think about the various "dry" villages here in Alaska.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
I suggest you read about the microeconomic term "comparative advantage".
Right back at you.
I hate it when people brandish "comparative advantage" as a talisman against the idea of technological unemployment, illustrating that they fail to understand it. Ricardo, the very economist who originally coined the term "comparative advantage" recognized that technological unemployment was still possible, even likely, despite it.
"Comparative advantage" says that the value of an individual's labor will never fall to zero, and that they will still be better off specializing in something, and trading the products of that specialty for the things they don't specialize in, than if they try to be fully self-sufficient. It does not at all guarantee that the maximum value of an individual's labor, when they specialize in their comparative advantage, cannot fall below their cost of living. Indeed, there are some people alive right now, among the most severely disabled, whose labor is worth less than what it costs to keep them alive. There's nothing in "comparative advantage" that prevents large portions of the population from joining them.
I'd point to this quote from economist Karl Smith back in 2012:
My longer thesis is that the rising return to unskilled labor is a function of industrialization and that industrialization is unique in this. The wage rate on unskilled labor never benefited before and its not immediately clear that it will ever benefit again.
This is because rents always accrue to the scarce factors of production. Industrialization meant that the only thing we were short on were “control systems” everything else in the production process was effectively cheap.
However, any mentally healthy human being is a decent control system. So, this meant huge returns to being a human. It also meant collapsing returns to being a horse. Though, people think of this as a difference in kind, I urge you not to. Horses are not so different than you and I.
As it so happened the wage rate for horses fell below sustenance and they died off. There is simply no basic reason this cannot happen to humans, save for the fact that other humans will enact policies to stop it. The market itself will not differentiate.
See also Smith in Forbes here. I can't find the specific passage at the moment, but I remember Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms also making a similar comparison to what happened to horses as an example of what could await most of us.
While human wants may be infinite, jobs depend on humans being able to meaningfully contribute to the production of those wants. Humans are finite, and thus, I would argue that our capacities are finite, and thus, the number of ways we can meaningly contribute to the production of goods and services is ultimately also finite. I'll point to Kevin Kohler's Substack post here:
So, are we destined to eventually follow the path of the horse in the economy? Daron Acemoglu & Pascal Restrepo (2018) argue that “the difference between human labor and horses is that humans have a comparative advantage in new and more complex tasks. Horses did not. If this comparative advantage is significant and the creation of new tasks continues, employment and the labor share can remain stable in the long run even in the face of rapid automation.” In other words, the high human general intelligence allows us to be more adaptive and shift to new tasks as the automation of more established tasks rolls forward.
The economists Anton Korinek & Donghyun Suh (2024) have created a model specifically considering why humans might run out of new tasks in the face of AGI and what would happen to wages in such a scenario. Their basic approach is that all possible tasks that could be performed by humans are ordered in terms of computational complexity and as digital computation expands more and more tasks can be automated moving the automation frontier from left to right. This is essentially a restatement of Moravec’s metaphorical landscape of human competences and automation (see figure below). In this metaphor the peaks reflect the most complex human competences, whereas AI automation is represented as a rising tide that continuously moves the shore line up.
…
If the complexity of economic tasks performed by humans is bounded (in other words, if there is no infinitely high mountain in Moravec’s landscape of human competences), automation will eventually cover all tasks, leading to complete automation. In the short term, automation increases productivity and boosts wages for non-automated tasks. In the long term, humans run out of tasks at which they can outperform machines and the labor share of income collapses fairly steeply as we approach full automation.
…
My judgement is that it’s likely that AI will eventually be able to outperform humans even on tasks with unbounded complexity and irreducible uncertainty. First, in some domains the ability of AI to perform complex tasks can already not be matched by humans. No human can filter mails or social media posts based on 10’000-dimensional decision boundaries. Second, the exponential growth of parameters in artificial neural networks means that, given enough training data and compute, AI can represent an exponentially growing amount of complexity, whereas our biological neural networks have fairly fixed upper limits.
…
If, at some point in the future, AGI can work at or below the cost of human labor and masters the meta-ability to learn novel tasks at least as quick and as well as humans, we have permanently lost the reskilling race. Then, new tasks can be automated as quickly as they are created.
And what this leaves out, is that human capacities are not only finite, but unequal; some of us will "run out" of ways to meaningfully contribute — again, the value of contributing will never hit zero, but it can fall below subsistence — before others. (As a disabled individual surviving by parasitizing of hard-working taxpayers via the public dole, this is quite an acute point for me.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
From a secular perspective, why would AI be more drawn to chaos than humans are?
Darwin. The human brain, and its various chordate forerunners, is the product of hundreds of millions of years of ruthless selection forces; who knows how many vulnerabilities and failure modes both gross and subtle have been winnowed out over the aeons?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
put your money where your mouth is.
What money? My new landlords just raised my rent. I'm basically broke.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
First off there's only like a 50-50 shot she'll win the election.
What's "just goofy" here is the idea that Trump has even the slightest chance of winning, let alone 50%. I think Curtis Yarvin, in this interview with "Jolly Heretic" Ed Dutton, makes the case as to why Harris's victory is foregone conclusion: "Trump will LOSE."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
It doesn't matter what you believe or what you think is true, only that the proper forms are observed.
Why does "observing the proper forms" matter, then?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
AfD, the new right (or far-right, depending on your viewpoint) is the strongest party and it's not even close.
So, how much longer before the AfD gets banned, then?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2mo ago
Atheist materialist here. There is only "the mortal." There is no ineffable, no soul. So I don't see how to apply this analogy.
And if there were a soul, voting would be bad for it. Voting is bad. "Democracy" is a sham, "democracy" is evil, "democracy" must be destroyed!
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2mo ago
wherein recent economic growth in the west is not representative of an increase in the quality and quantity of stuff, it’s reflecting accounting tricks and rising real estate prices.
I've recently encountered a somewhat similar narrative, pointing to a similar stagnation and decline, but, rather than being purely "accounting tricks and rising real estate prices," it's, to put it succinctly, software isn't stuff.
The example given was to consider if you took every modern electronic screen out of your house. Get rid of your flatscreen TV, and maybe replace it with an old CRT set. Toss out the laptops, the tablets, the smartphones, the GPS and other "screen" electronics in your car, etc.
Now, how does your stuff, your surroundings, your life differ from someone of similar class, job, etc. back in the 70s or 80s? What has gotten better in terms of material stuff, rather than telecommunications, internet, and software, software, software? It's the whole "flying cars vs. cyberpunk dystopia" thing, the building of the virtual "layer" atop a stagnating, even declining material one.
(I'm reminded here again of the likes of Tyler Cowen's Average is Over and the future he projects, where ~80% of the population lives in third-world style favelas, concentrated in the narrow latitude/climate band that minimizes annual heating+AC costs, eating beans, making pennies on Amazon Turk; but most people will be fine with that because VR will have become so good they won't care about their conditions in the material world (and for those who don't, there will be better psych drugs and cops with omnipresent surveillance drones).)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2mo ago
What would the federal government do if, like a podcast I recently listened to suggested, the Utah state government were to stop supplying water to the NSA's Utah Data Center?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2mo ago
does a sovereign have a duty to his nation?
I'd say the way that some of our modern elites behave — particularly those in the UK — at least some of them believe the answer is "no." That they can freely "dissolve the people and elect another," to quote Bertold Brecht.
The answer to this is well known: the people are.
It's the well-known "official" textbook answer, but I'd say it's wrong. The Iron Law of Oligarchy is absolute. "The people" are not sovereign, have never been sovereign, and will never be sovereign. The United States, and modern democracy as a whole, are built upon falsehoods.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2mo ago
So as long as you vote, the sacred institutions of the republic are preserved.
But at this point, are they really still "sacred," or have they been profaned beyond recovery; and should they be preserved at all?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2mo ago
I’ve never seen 2 in real life in my entire life.
I, for one, have encountered this view in personal discussions, from multiple people.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2mo ago
You may be right about that — it looks like Judge Merchan just delayed Trump's sentencing to after the election.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2mo ago
Define “real”.
I mean, actually a militia, and actually a group. As you note, they don't seem to be very fitting of the former, fiven the emphasis you note on trying to fix it, and I'd argue McVeigh and his accomplices failed to meet the latter.
But none of this actually answers the question of how one finds these groups. You mention the "online portion of these groups on YouTube" — any examples? (Though, if they're on YouTube, the odds of being riddled with Feds is pretty much near 1.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2mo ago
Former president goes to prison, where he is guarded by a disgraced former secret service agent who was already in, feels like a great premise for a network tv show.
It does; the sort of thing USA Network would air.
Trump won't need guards, they'll recruit themselves from the jail population, hoping for presidential clemency and aid.
How effective would fellow inmates be at protecting him from being Epsteined?
Trump is never going to see a cell unless he's on tour.
Why not?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2mo ago
In most cases the existence of the group is organic and the members and leadership really believe in it
That's not an answer to how one finds such a group, then.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2mo ago
Tell that to Epstein; or, for that matter, to the Romanovs.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2mo ago
This does not mean that there are no "right wing militias".
So, again, how do you find one, then?
I can't find it again, but I remember reading years ago a short passage from an interview with a never-Trumper Republican campaign strategist, which was being passed around online because he got a little too honest with the interviewer. Specifically, in the passage he said — albeit in less blunt language — that the job of Republican politicians is to, as you put it, convincingly dangle enough red meat in front of stupid flyover plebs to get them to vote for you, despite knowing you're never going to deliver for them, but only for the donor class instead; and that his job as a campaign advisor is to help those politicians lie to those low-class rubes more convincingly.
Multiple people have pointed out that our Republic, like most others, began with a very narrow franchise, the vote limited to a fairly small, elite fraction of the population; and, further, every time there was a (nigh-inevitable) movement to expand that franchise, it was accompanied by a movement to transfer some measure of power out of the hands of elected officials and into unelected ones — whether judges, or (temporary) appointed officials, or eventually permanent technocrat "experts." Further, that while most countries managed to make this transition, and keep real power out of the hands of the plebs, we have a few clear examples of states that failed, and made the mistake of letting the masses elect who they actually wanted to offices with actual power, the most notable — the type specimen, if you will — being Weimar Germany.
The patricians all agree that what the plebs want is beyond the pale, because what the plebs want is fascism. The average MAGA voter wants fascism, and Trump is comparable to Hitler because he's honestly appealing (rather than disingenuously baiting) to the same portion of the population that Hitler did to take power — the sizable fraction of the electorate that will go fascist if given any opportunity. Hence why so many on the left have long warned about the grave and looming threat of fascism in America — because there are millions and millions of would-be fascists in this country, and it was the tacit agreement of elites from both parties to maintain a cordon sanitaire keeping these people disenfranchised and powerless that served as the bulwark holding it back. And it is Trump who — even worse than George W. Bush threatened with his "compassionate conservatism" — breached this essential political barrier, and gave those previously disempowered plebs enough of a taste of what they were denied for so long, that it's going to be an immensely challenging political project to put them back into containment.
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