ControlsFreak
No bio...
User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
I think you might be sounding like a transphobe. Tests, forms, doctor's notes, medical gatekeeping?
But no worries, I think @Gillitrut's position can come to your rescue. See, you don't have to actually make any decisions about what test/forms/notes/gatekeeping will occur. You can sit back, remain completely agnostic about any underlying Big T Truth, and just be law-brained enough to observe that different jurisdictions will make different choices. Some jurisdictions, we can call them the Transphobe Jurisdictions, have rulers and tests and stuff like you might want. Other jurisdictions, the Nontransphobe Jurisdictions, don't. Australia happened to choose already that they are a Nontransphobe Jurisdiction, having no rulers, no tests, no nothing. They have a much simpler process that lets you quickly and easily change the authoritative document, which declares, with authority (thus the adjective), how the law views the situation. One can then just sit back, be law-brained, and see that the conclusions follow from the premises.
...but now, Person B is considering going to a local amusement park, a private service provider. There happen to be two amusement parks in the area. Amusement Park Z is run by young, hip folks. They have electronic controls everywhere. You can scan your driver's license and swipe your credit card at the entrance, and then just use the nifty electronic system to access any rides you desire. Amusement Park X is run by old fogies, practically boomers. You have to hand physical tickets to the white guy standing next to the ride, and he points to the sign that says, "You must be this tall to ride." Can Person B sue Amusement Park X for not caring about the authoritative document and simply observing, "Your head don't touch the top of the ruler, dawg"?
After riding a ride that mayyyyyyyyyybe wasn't super safe for short people, Person B isn't feeling so good. B makes his way to the emergency room. B tells the doc everything about what's happened in the time period leading up to that moment. B's last physical act is to pull an insurance card out of a pocket and hand it to the doc, but since it was right next to B's driver's license in the pocket, both are grabbed and passed to the doc. (Can insert/remove a hypo here about B's last words being, "Please help me doc; do anything you need to.") Then, B passes out.
The doc runs a bunch of tests. In the process, they strip off B's clothes and replace them with a standard hospital gown. They can't help but happen to notice B's genitals in the process. The hospital bed automatically provides B's weight. Maybe even in the future, there's a ruler built into the bed, too. The tests come back, and they happen to include chromosomes and other indicators. All of the medical indicators correlate perfectly toward B having a particular sex, height, and weight. But the doctor noticed that B's drivers license disagrees on some/all of these things. The only problem is that the next step that the doctor has to take depends on one or more of those things. Perhaps it's just a dosage selection; perhaps it's an even more significant change in the course of treatment.
Suppose the doc, a private service provider, proceeds according to the authoritative document and not the measurements, and B happens to die. Is that a successful lawsuit by the estate, according to pure law brain? Suppose the doc proceeds according to the measurements and not the authoritative document, and B happens to live. Is that a successful lawsuit by B?
I'm pretty law-brained for a lot of things, but when it comes to these issues, I cannot escape the phrase, "Live not by lies." If we bake lies into the premises, the principle of explosion surely follows. It is utterly unsurprising that if we start off with baked in lies, then attempt to simply close our eyes to the entire realm of truth and try to proceed purely by law-brain, contradictions will follow.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
Does one exist? Is anyone serious mooting one around in the world of think tanks?
I saw one discussed by William Spaniel. Though I have no other reference by which to determine whether the authors are "serious people", it seemed that Spaniel, who is definitely no Trump/right/conservative/whatever shill, seemed to think it was at least in the land of plausibility.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
when they are incorrect
This simply pushes the problem to the question of, "When are they correct/incorrect?" The silly version of this is that my driver's license has height on it. Suppose that for Person A, there was a genuine flubbing, a fat fingering. Their height was listed wrong. Presumably, they could request to have it changed on the document. On the other hand, Person B thinks that he's gotta be 6' tall for the dating apps, which in the future year of verified identity for everything, actually take in your driver's license information and use that in the algorithm. So, Person B waltzes into the DMV and says, "Well, obviously, you have a general process for updating these documents, so you need to list me as 6' tall." What should the government do when ye olde yardstick begs to differ?
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
I think that's actually the only plausible way that such sex could even occur, given many people's stated beliefs about rape via power differential.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
the time has increased, and the attention required during that time has increased
I don't know why this would be the case. In papers I've read that analyze the results of the American Time Use Survey over time, they do observe that time spent has gone up, but they mostly attribute it to people feeling like they have to take their child from one activity to another and do all the things. That's kind of a sub-phenomenon of the general opportunity costs -> more "busy" result. Since people are so productive and so wealthy, they feel like they have to "do stuff" with their time (stuff that costs all that money they're making), and whether that's taking a fancy trip or taking your kid to fifty-three activities, it all feels like the same phenomenon to me.
Backing out, though, it really is just a different claim to say that children are more expensive, monetarily, in terms of the purchases required (with the intermediate step being that material wealth hasn't kept up with the increased monetary requirement) and saying that people are so wealthy that the real resource being budgeted and subject to opportunity cost is time. It brings us to substantially different conclusions about the underlying dynamics and possible policy considerations.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
I think the economic term for the phenomenon you're describing is 'opportunity cost'. That seems plausible to me, perhaps even likely. It's a similar explanation to what I've heard given as the reason why people seem to think they're always "busy"; they just have so much damn money and economic power/opportunity that choosing to not spend your time traveling, skiing, whatever, has a higher opportunity cost.
But I would stress that this is not strictly lack of material wealth or access to affordable goods. In any event, I had forgotten about this explanation, and would consider it a contender with other murkier cultural/status factors.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
Our insane economic success (in markets that aren't completely whack to to TRBL gov't intervention like healthcare, education, and housing) has allowed people's standards for how much they spend on children to go through the roof, rather than standards magically rising on their own beyond our economic means. Perhaps one could argue that child rearing is one of the few areas where there's a one-way ratchet, such that any increases in standards are 'locked in', such that any decreases in economic ability present significant challenges and drive huge decreases in fertility, but it really seems quite unlikely, especially given that we're still not significantly struggling economically by almost any real measure and that TFR doesn't really track things like recessions all that well. I'm much more likely to believe that it's general cultural/status factors.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
For example, a movement that prioritised increasing GDP/capita at the expense of raw GDP seems not unreasonable to me
I'm not actually aware of many folks that do the latter. Most presentations I've seen of why GDP is a useful number at all actually reason about GDP/capita, saying that this tends to correlate well with general living standards. Not perfectly, of course, and those folks will be quick to point out areas where it's still an imperfect measure.
I think the main argument for raw GDP would be on a national scale. Raw GDP on a national scale tends to correlate with state capacity to wage war. This obviously has its own benefits, but it's definitely a sideshow for any country that doesn't have significant security concerns. For countries that have significant security concerns, I can't imagine that any form of degrowth could possibly have much purchase.
Perhaps an argument could be made for tech development, in that having a significant pool of economic activity/capacity is an enabler. Robin Hanson is probably the closest to this, but I think his model heavily weighs just raw population, though I could imagine that if you pressed him on edge cases, he would say that some factor or threshold on GDP, GDP/capita, or something or other is potentially in play.
My sense from reading court documents (some interesting 4A law) is that just getting access to some CP is not all that hard. What is prized/valued in those communities is new CP, which does inherently involve new victimization. Warrant applications will say that they found such-and-such a server, and it had some 'examples' accessible on the surface, but you were required to upload new material that wasn't in their database already in order to get an account to access the rest of what they had. Moreover, you had to keep uploading new material every so often to maintain your account.
It seems that having this be inherently valued has a two-fold purpose for that community. First, it creates a direct incentive for people to become producers. Second, it serves as a 'law-enforcement filter', adding an additional layer of difficulty for law-enforcement to gain deeper access to the site. The unfortunate side-effect is that I don't get the sense that people are making large quantities of currency money by producing CP; they're instead gaining status and access in their tiny little community.
One of the main questions is to what extent this community value is dependent on the current size of the pool. They seem to like "new" and have these reasons other than the actual pool size to value it. I've seen some pretty large numbers in court documents about how big some of their pools are. Perhaps some of those numbers are somehow fudged (like how they talk about 'street value' of drugs seized), but it doesn't seem like the currently large pools that these folks are able to manage getting access to has yet become a serious impediment to them continuing to promote a local cultural value of "new".
I don't know for sure the mechanics behind how they manage to verify "new", but just from background knowledge of tech, I sort of have to imagine that AI gen is a much more serious threat to this local cultural value than just plopping up a Megaupload.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
I don't know what state they were in at the time. I knew them well after the deed was done, but she said that she definitely had to sign. I'm maybe a little less confident now that it was a legal requirement rather than doctor-driven, but I can't really tell. Search is broken in 2024, especially when looking for good history. ChatGPT seems to think some states had such laws into the ~60s/70s (and its suggestions would jive with my guess of where my friends probably lived back in the day). Maybe it's hallucinations all the way down...
As I've written before here, the Violinist Argument does a very poor job, gets intentionality exactly backwards, and mostly serves to trigger people's disgust response at a secret cabal of shadowy figures being allowed to kidnap innocent, unrelated individuals in order to strap them to a machine and 'suck the life force out of them'. Zero percent of people are capable of suspending their disbelief enough to actually imagine that you "just wake up" one day and some random process of the universe put you in that situation. As such, it actually tells us very little about how people view bodily autonomy.
My preferred analogy is rock climbing. When two people go rock climbing, they intend to have a little fun. They 'hook up', using the best safety equipment possible, intending to make the probability of an issue be as low as possible. But Murphy's law happens, snake eyes come up, and your partner ends up dangling at the end of a rope attached to you. Maybe that rope is causing you a little discomfort; maybe it's threatening minor rope burn; maybe it's threatening one of your limbs; maybe it's threatening your life. Lots of possible variations to handle a variety of scenarios people want for abortion. I don't think people are nearly as likely to say that you can choose to pull out your pocket knife and intentionally cut the rope, knowing that it will surely lead to your partner's death, completely regardless of what the danger is, all the way to the case where there is literally no real danger, just that they are relying on you to not cut the rope. This gets intentionality the right way 'round and also neatly handles the question of contraceptive use to reduce the probability of the undesired outcome, as well as the question of danger to the physical body of the woman. This should be an easy bullet to bite for any people who think they genuinely hold an extremely strong view of bodily autonomy.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
A man can absolutely get a vasectomy without his partner's approval or knowledge
This was not always true. I personally know a couple where the wife had to sign paperwork in order for her husband to legally get a vasectomy.
Society really used to treat marriage differently than we do today.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
People are taking Trump seriously as a threat.
I mean, maybe? I imagine that for a lot of people who only have a surface view of politics, the narrative on Trump has moved from 'he's going to put black people back in chains' to 'he seems weird'. That's quite a shift in how big of a threat he is.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
This reminds me of Matt Levine's observations on net worth calculations. Own a small business (maybe you're even the only employee) that made $200k last year? Well, we're going to assume it will continue to make $200k/yr for some number of years, do a net present value calculation, and blam, your net worth is however many million. You're a lawyer who works for The Man and makes $200k/yr? Whaddya got in the bank? That's your net worth.
suppress overall demand for goods and services
Possibly so, similar to how income taxes suppress overall income. I guess whether this is a good thing might depend on how one feels about vague things like "consumer culture".
might lead to government subsidy of "core" goods and services
I don't see why this would be the case. What would be the set of "core" goods and services in question?
Consumption and consumer behavior is how prices are discovered and demand signals are captured. I don't know how you'd do it otherwise. Investment is good, but you have to eventually invest in a company that makes sales.
Sure. I can't imagine consumption would go to zero, just like how income doesn't go to zero just because we tax it. People still want to earn income and consume stuff. Both income and consumption taxes have some distortionary effects and suppress some amount of things that we like... but a consumption tax just does it all slightly better. I think a shift from income to consumption tax would have, as they say, marginal effects for most people. On the low income end of the spectrum, the rate is likely to be quite low, but it may provide a small nudge for such people to think about saving a bit more (which is often good for them, individually). This should be a positive for anyone who is worried about poor people not having a lot in savings to get through the occasional tough time.
Most importantly, for people who are concerned specifically about the opulent consumption of the super wealthy, this should be incredibly appealing. If anything, it's great for figuring out which people actually care about extreme consumption inequality (who should be totally fine with investment that helps everyone)... and which mostly just hate rich people generally and want to stick it to them.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
There might still be some scope issues for me, personally. I'm thinking about my family. I don't think there's anything all that wrong with trying to impress upon a spouse/child, "You don't want to associate with that person; here's why." I mostly don't go beyond anything like that.
Another area that might be hazy is whether you're avoiding a specific person or a group. I had a friend once invite me to what was clearly an MLM scheme that they had just started to get into (they jettisoned it not long later, thankfully). I sort of tried to convince them that (implicitly) it wasn't a good group to associate with, but focused on the reasons why I didn't think it made business sense to do (framed as reasons why it didn't make sense for me, trying to soften it with, "...if someone else has these characteristics, maybe..."). This makes me sort of feel in my bones the value of people just blasting to everyone, "MLMs are bad, here's why, and you shouldn't get involved with these specific MLMs," but I can also see how this opens the door to some pretty big conceptual tensions.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
The typical proposal for something like this is call a "consumption tax", using the economics definition of "consumption". Though, my understanding is that most proposals either just put it all into a form of sales tax or have something of an "implied consumption", where the calculation is just income minus investment/savings, where it's implied that you've used the rest on some sort of consumption. This is a simplification that has some edge cases, but it makes the calculation problem a lot simpler. It's still slightly more complicated than an income tax, because you have to include information from your various financial institutions about how much net new investment/savings you had in that year. You're probably getting a tax document from all these people, anyway, since they're taxing interest/cap gains, but they'd basically have to include this number, too.
The justification for such a tax regime is pretty much exactly what you've hit on. First, if what people actually care about for inequality is that some people can consume obscene amounts of things, then it makes sense to just tax that directly; we mostly don't care if some money sits in an investment account in perpetuity. Even if it is inherited, why would you care, except to the extent that those heirs are using it for consumption? Secondly, economists believe pretty strongly that investment/savings in capital is an important component of increasing GDP (super simple example here), and so people should be perfectly happy to incentivize investment/savings. Every dollar that you save, even in your bank account, makes the cost of capital 'cheaper' for a potential new product to be developed, improving the lives of everyone. So, if we want a rich society with cool stuff that people can consume, it's good to incentivize investment and not care if some baron has a billion dollars invested in an account somewhere, providing this capital. And if we want to make sure that people maybe moderate their consumption at least a little bit rather than going all out with opulent displays of consumption, it seems more palatable to just directly tax consumption, perhaps quite progressively.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
America had public ballots up until the 1890's
I've told the story of the "Australian ballot" here before:
When Australia was colonized by the Brits, they used it as a penal colony. Of course, they didn't go full Lord of the Flies with the convicts, but sent good, upstanding Brits to run the place and maintain good order. After serving out their sentences, many convicts did have the option of returning to Britain, but lots of them chose to stay. They were free citizens, but obviously, their jibs were cut a bit differently than the better class of good, upstanding Brits who were sent to run the place. The convicts were even free to run for elected office, and some even did. Yet somehow, confusingly, even as time went on and there were many more freed convicts than there were good, upstanding Brits, none of these convicts ever won any elections. Maybe everyone just realized that it was better if good, upstanding Brits continued running the place.
Other folks disagreed, and they managed to implement the 'Australian ballot', where each individual's vote would be totally, completely secret. Suddenly, magically, freed convicts began winning elections and were able to curtail some of the
harshest abusescurious practices of the good, upstanding Brits.
The Australian Ballot was first introduced in Victoria and South Australia in 1856. Being adopted literally halfway across the world only forty years later is a testament to how compelling the idea is to solving genuine concerns.
I understand that you've had mail in voting for a decade and that you personally have not encountered any issues with it. But basically right before you got mail in voting, international pro-democracy organizations had all agreed that in-person secret voting was basically the only way to do it. If you expand your scope beyond an extremely-restricted, probably high-trust (and high-other-things) setting, there are plenty of reasons to significantly favor an actually secret ballot.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
Oh, I'm totally aware that people tried to do that. Some were more hedged than others. Some minor academic spats happened. People mostly tried various ways to be like, "Well, we're not gonna, like, say that climate change caused caused anything (because we can't accomplish that), so we'll, like, call it a 'threat multiplier' or 'intermediate variable'."
But I guess none of that really matters, since one can so clearly see both the impact of climate change and the obvious moment of sparking the Syrian Civil War in this chart.
If you really want to rehash what is/isn't supportable for Syria/Arab Spring, we can. But in this thread, I was asking about Bangladesh. Do you have some data on Bangladesh that indicates a causal and/or primary role for climate change?
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
Obvious? As in, like, you have data sticking out in your face about the crop/fishing yields and food prices in Bangladesh leading up to the recent civil unrest? Where did you see this data? Can you point me to it?
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
If we're doing thought experiments, then I think you're missing some flexibility. Black markets and underground behavior are a typical result of heavy constraints by governments. So, while the number of units may be considered essentially fixed in your model, you'd probably see people packing 2, 4, 8, 12 people to a unit. Which, whaddya know, I feel like I've seen stories about that sorta thing going on.
But of course, that's kind of an extreme model, and I'm not really sure what your actual point is.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
I don't have a Twitter account, so I may not be getting a proper snapshot of his recent activity; I think they only give us a weird smattering of posts from different years. Anything specific to Bangladesh?
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
Any actual evidence for any of those intermediaries? Or even just actual "people" (as in "prominent, narrative-shaping type folks in the chattering class") actually trying to argue for such a casual pathway in this case (whether or not they bring any actual evidence for the proposed intermediaries)?
Like sure, I can just imagine a billion possible causal pathways that are at least as plausible a priori, but bare a priori plausibility for something to be the case is about the most thin gruel out there.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
Has anyone blamed it on climate change yet? There was a huge push for a while to talk about how climate change would cause a huge, worldwide refugee crisis. Bangladesh was the poster child, with maps claiming that some huge proportion of the country was going to be submersed in water. By those maps and estimates, it was by far the biggest outlier that allowed for some of the splashy-sounding numbers that were trumpeted.
I have no idea what's going on there, but I'm guessing that the country isn't submersed in water, is it?
What are the purposes of such marks when it comes to private service providers, say, like amusement parks and emergency rooms?
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