ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
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User ID: 1098
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr ago
In the short term, society could stop wasting money and effort on policies that don't work and that make society less efficient. Humanity would be richer and better off without these drains on output.
In the longer term, making HBD common knowledge would (could?) lead to differences in values. In particular, it would be seen as relatively good for a competent person to have children, and relatively bad for an incompetent person to have children. This would produce a kind of crowd-sourced eugenics pressure, in that people's everyday choices in who to value and who not to would affect people's dating choices, their policy preferences, how they allocate status to others. My hope is that it would change the culture enough to improve humanity's genetic trajectory.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr ago
And after it expands globally to take over 100% of the entire market for left-handed grape peelers in every nation of the earth, what then? How can it continue to grow?
As GP said:
Economic growth just means "continuous improvement". Sometimes that's by making the pie bigger, other times it's from increasing efficiency.
Company F figures out how to manufacture left-handed grape peelers more cheaply, or makes them last longer, or makes them work better, or invents a machine that peels grapes that both left- and right-handed people can use. Or someone else invents a better grape, so the value of grape peelers to people goes up, and more people buy them on the margin. Markets aren't static.
I've gone back and forth trying to figure out how to form a coherent answer to this question, and I've decided it's ill-posed. Democracy is a pragmatic solution that makes it easier for people to live together. Any question about what "ought" to be subject to democratic control is moot; things are subject to democratic control because people agreed they would be, not because of any philosophical reasoning.
If I could snap my fingers and put any policy I wanted beyond the reach of voters, I'd select the a set of policies that get as close to the best outcomes (as I define them) without pushing people to the point of revolution. This is not a very interesting position though, and you'll probably find most people use the same kind of reasoning for what they think should be subject to democratic control. It's outcomes first, then principles are back-calculated.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr ago
It also doesn't appear in the first ~10 pages of DuckDuckGo.
This kind of thing makes me a bit paranoid. We're focusing on a topic that we already know about - how many other topics are there where search engines have their thumb on the scale hiding contrary takes?
There are news aggregators that compare how a story is covered in left-wing vs. right-wing newspapers. I'd like to see the same thing for search engines, especially comparing against results from different countries with different dominant narratives.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr ago
A heat pump is just air conditioning run in reverse. I got one installed last year and it's been great. It's quiet, pretty cheap so far (although I haven't gone a full winter with it yet), and it also does cooling. You need some backup system for when it's really cold, as it doesn't work very well below 25° or so. Mine has a built in gas burner but many just use resistive heating elements.
The reason I wanted one is that it's efficient and it uses electricity. I don't want to be subject to market fluctuations in oil prices or to fuel taxes. Where I live electricity is mostly hydro and doesn't vary much in price. For your situation the numbers might be different, and it's worth doing the math or looking up statistics for other households in the area.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr ago
You can get groceries delivered. This realization eliminated a big time sink and stressor from my family life.
Is quiet important to your family? When my wife and I were house hunting there were large sections of the city that were intolerable because of traffic noise. Conversely, if you don't care about noise you can get a cheaper/better place by tolerating some.
Intelligence can be measured separately from processing speed, but they are strongly correlated - processing speed explains 80% of the variation in intelligence. So to a first approximation the faster team is smarter. Edit: added link.
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