Summary will be posted below.
Thank you, much appreciated.
Land may be inelastic, but the inelasticity of housing is a choice.
To some degree, yes. It's a choice that's very difficult not to make - even my father (who is very hard headed about such things) got very short with me on the topic, simply because short-term he simply can't keep his family afloat through 20 years of retirement and medical bills (again, paying all that tax!) unless we can sell the house for a good amount of money. House prices are theoretically crashing in the UK at the moment, at least in certain areas, but nobody is selling because their life plans will explode.
There is a corollary, which is that the poor will not actually thank you for putting them in flophouses or big soviet blocks, or suburb-style council housing with a huge commute. They will take them but they will still feel poor.
Also a choice; see the writings of Jack Devanney. (Summary will be posted below.)
I don't believe that nuclear is cheaper than fossil fuels? Though I do believe that much of what you say in your summary is true.
@FirmWeird believes that the economic benefits of nuclear have been vastly exaggerated and someday I want to do a deep dive on what makes him say so. (Nuclear in France apparently requires heavy subsidies but that could be a union or regulation issue).
Artificial constraints such as 'the elites and middle managers must not be stopped in their monkey-dominance games',
Here, on the other hand, is where you and I part ways, and to my mind it deeply undermines what you've said in this and other comments. At least if I am understanding you correctly.
Wouldn't It Be Nice If Everyone Was Nice is not a program for government. There is nothing artificial about these constraints. You are going to get monkey-dominance and consequent 'misallocation' of resources. You can shift it to the bureaucrats and the allocators as happened in socialist Britain circa 1970 and communist Russia. You can shift it to the dictator-for-life and his court, or to the trade union leaders, or to the CEOs and middle managers, or to the scientific advisors and their committees as happened during COVID, but I will not accept arguments for high taxes and 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their need' on the basis of 'if people would just' because they won't 'just' and we both know it.
I am not going to ask you to write a 100 page monogram here, but I need something more than 'when I am King I will really crack down on this sort of thing'. Point to countries where it worked and continues to work. Talk about how you are going to address the second-order consequences of what you're advocating. Talk about public choice, or how to prevent the country falling into the kind of tax spiral I've described. Give a much more slimmed down expression of the sentiments you've already expressed and try to state clearly how far you think the obligation to help goes. Something. Because from where I'm standing this kind of politics failed. It failed over and over again, in many different countries, and whenever I buy something in this country or wonder how I'm going to get through my old age I am reminded that it's failing right here, right now.
Corvos
1d ago
I'm grateful for your confidence in me! FWIW I thought about it like Arjin, but I've given my ID to a few mottizens now and I don't really want to get into a habit of it. If it's important I certainly can, but it seems like it's not necessary in this case.
Corvos
1d ago
I'm legitimately curious as to what gave you that impression (and not in a defensive how dare you! sort of way).
What I meant in the context of my last reply is that you clearly not an advocate of totally open borders. That is, when it gets right down to it, you advocate for forcefully (if necessary) preventing people from voluntarily going to certain places, taking up certain jobs, etc. even when they wish to. It makes you less liberal in that area than somebody like Bryan Caplan. Whereas in some places perhaps you hold more liberal opinions around say free-speech on the internet (I don't know). This argument was in service of my overall point that I think the vast majority of people want government force used to bring the outgroup to heel and to enforce their will sometimes in some areas.
On the more general level, I had a vague image of you not being super-keen on immigration partly because I vaguely recall you reporting on the anti-immigration riots in an 'interesting, let's see where this goes' way and partly probably because I am projecting and I have difficulty seeing an intelligent person be super jazzed about the type and level of immigration we're getting in UK + Ireland. I might be wrong about that.
Immigrants who come to Ireland with the goal of assimilating and working hard without demanding handouts
I'm okay with this provided that they and their immediate descendants are capped to approx 2-3% of total population which is, aha, not what we see. I have described elsewhere that I think that there is a slippery slope / addiction mechanic involved with immigration and I am keen to forestall this even when I like and approve of many of the immigrants involved on a personal level. I don't know your feelings on the matter.
You will note that I said nothing about technology. Technology may change this fact, although it's less able to do so given that poverty unlike famine frequently deals in relative goods (status-related), in goods that are extremely inelastic (land) and in goods that are able to absorb extremely high spending (medicine). If you would like to attempt the creation of technologies that will alleviate the majority of poverty-related conditions, then taxing R&D out of existence as they do in the UK and Europe is not the way to go.
More to the point, if you have an argument to make, then please make it. Rolling your eyes and saying 'oh, well, they said we'd never X too lol' is not an argument, and it's beneath you.
I don't think we will ever have cross-galactic teleportation either, but that's what they used to say about going faster than horses amirite? They used to think we'd never have energy too cheap to meter, and actually we don't have energy too cheap to meter, and it's getting more and more expensive. As is almost everything in my country except electronics, because we have reached the apparent end of a very specific confluence of beneficial factors. Some things are possible, some things are impossible, sometimes we turn out to be wrong about what those are.
If you think I am wrong, please make your case. And please explain why your preferred policies have failed so badly in the UK.
Corvos
1d ago
I've had broadly good experiences. A few tantrums, babies do that, but mostly they sleep. Later on, my godson is still pre-verbal but my friend's 4/5 year old children and my nieces are adorable, playful, and friendly for the most part, especially if you let them win at Mario Kart. (They make fun of my Japanese for not being as good as theirs, which is humiliating, but you can't have everything.)
The only hard part is that you have to put out as much energy as the kids do or it's no fun for anybody and it's exhausting after a couple of hours, so you have to tell them to bugger off for a bit. But it also seems clear to me that this is what the energy of young-adulthood is broadly for, my friends don't usually have to worry about doomscrolling or getting bored because the kids take up all of the energy that would otherwise get pushed inwards. Hobbies and career can do that too, of course, but not as effectively IMO.
Corvos
2d ago
I was putting that in Nybbler’s ’commodity’ category. My point was that ‘creative’ ‘raw’ ‘self-expression’ Art with a capital A has always been very rare.
Corvos
2d ago
How much work has there ever been for creative artists? I would bet that a solid 95% of art over the last 1000 years has been one of:
- Religious scene with fairly standardised iconography
- Portrait of commissioner or commissioner's loved one
- Pretty Landscape
Corvos
2d ago
FWIW I feel the same as you. I've been open that I would certainly have pressed that button when I was younger, and might now, and part of my resistance to trans stuff is that it's an infovirus that would have really fucked me up if it'd come ten, fifteen years earlier.
From that link:
To be clear, I never witnessed illegal behavior and never saw anyone who appeared underage in his presence.
One of the things that it's impossible for anyone in authority to say is that Epstein was not Jimmy Saville. Unlike our resident UK paedo, he wasn't going around children's hospitals and asking to meet the nice little boys. And even with Saville there's a fascinating reddit thread asking what the hell happened:
When someone has done something to endear themselves to the public, it can be hard to see what is really be going on and sometimes difficult to change that perception.
He fronted Top of the Pops at a time when music was beginning to be a part of everyone's everyday lives. As he was introducing new, exciting songs, people naturally associated him with the music. You'd be sitting around the tv, waiting for your favourite song to be played, and he was there, introducing it to you. People associated him with good times.
He went on to build that idea up. Safety campaigns, the idea that he cared about your kids' safety, TV shows where he helped kids dreams come true, charity events where he donated money to those who needed it all helped to associate him with good things.
That protects against an allegation here or there. Or some odd behavioural traits.
As he continued working for his causes, he built up some powerful friends. Meeting the PM, having royalty as friends furthered the idea that he was essentially good, even if he was eccentric. That warm, nice feeling when someone is remembering back to their favourite song they saw on the TV on Top of the Pops is linked with him introducing it.
I've always found it interesting that his personal assistant steadfastly refused to believe what he was really doing. She couldn't accept that he was an abuser. It took a very long time for her - even when faced with facts - to accept that he was a paedophile. And she was working with him every day. She associated him with doing good things and that perception is difficult to change.
and
I grew up watching Top of the Pops and Jim'll Fix It, and I remember his 'Clunk Click Every Trip' road safety adverts, and seeing his charity marathons on the news.
With hindsight, he was working extremely hard to attach himself to things that were popular or worthy. He wasn't everyone's cup of tea but most saw him as an oddball not a creep, and Britain loves eccentric characters.
When he died, some of the press reports emphasised how he never married, lived alone, and was close to his mother - basically implying that he was a sad, lonely, closeted gay man. There was a bit of a backlash to that, with people who knew him talking about his wide circle of friends. There was no mention of any allegations.
It was another year before the story broke. The public had no idea. Even the people who worked in showbiz or the NHS and had heard rumours couldn't have imagined the scale of his crimes.
(That last isn't true. Hospital people knew to give him a special room and send the children in, and everyone in the BBC knew. Famously, the one joke that the BBC vetoed from The Thick of It was about "what they'll find in Saville's basement after he's dead".)
and
Hang my head in shame time. When it first broke i thought it was a cash grab by the victims and it was a shame as he wasnt here to defend himself. To me he was just Jimmy Saville. He was always there so he didnt seem weird. Should probably add i accept he was a monster now.
But in Epstein's case 'rich man surrounds himself with nubile girls, one or two of whom may have lied a bit about their age' is not something that's going to make people's alarm bells ring.
Corvos
2d ago
May I suggest that it's more about When/Why? For example, I found myself becoming very authoritarian about immigration and drugs and trans, and I thought 'guess I'm not a liberal after all', then genAI happened and it turns out I'm still very libertarian about software and AI, which was kind of pleasing to me. @FtttG is generally quite liberal but was quite clear in the trans thread that (s)he doesn't think it's okay to write anything you want on a government form just because it makes you happy, and generally also doesn't particularly seem to like people traveling across borders as they please. (I criticise neither stance, I'm just noting.)
Who/whom correlates to some degree with this but doesn't actually match it. It's a bit like the saying that everyone is conservative in their area of expertise.
Don't know if you find this reassuring but maybe worth bearing in mind.
Corvos
2d ago
I find this take so hard to understand. I like talking about things, learning about things, thinking about things. The existence of vastly more minds (mind-like objects, I'm using shorthand here) with whom I can do that is great! GPT or other AIs don't mind me asking endless questions about beginner-level stuff, or helping with technical things, or working through ideas.
Granted, these AI are mostly junior partners at the moment, or at least 'experienced friend who doesn't mind helping if asked but won't do stuff of their own initiative' and perhaps I'd feel differently if I really did just become an appendage, but at the moment things are great.
Corvos
2d ago
I may draw a lot of flak for this, but I’ll slot a bunch of Brandon Sanderson in that category.
No, I owe a lot to Brandon Sanderson. As a very withdrawn teenager, Mistborn's message of
'Trust people, even when you can't prove they deserve that trust. Sometimes it works out.'
was exactly what I needed, exactly when I needed it.
In general Sanderson was part of a wave of stuff (mostly Japanese) that made me realise how absolutely infested my usual media was with irony and nihilism, and I appreciate that a lot.
Corvos
2d ago
I see I will have to be more careful with my words in future. It’s like dealing with a puckish, Irish genie :P
In the UK, the government eats everything. I pay:
- 45% tax on what I earn (up to 60% if I earned more)
- 20% more tax on the remaining money when I actually spend it
- more in stamp duty if I buy a house or sell a house (which I can’t because the government taxes me too much and inflated away my small inheritance)
- 40% of everything that’s left if, somehow, I manage to die with some money left.
And everything is hideously expensive because whenever I go to the doctor or anything involving any skilled professional I (and any of their customers including the poor) effectively have to fund their extortionate taxes on top of mine!
Like, I know that ‘pay another 2% of tax that you can easily afford to make sure that the needy are taken care of’ sounds good but it’s a fantasy. The above is where that sentiment ends up. Very quickly you get ‘the government has to tax everyone to make sure everyone gets the support they need to pay their taxes’.
I do not believe that there is any level of taxation that does not either blight the lives of half the population and slowly melt the economy or clearly and visibly fails to take care of the needy. “The poor will always be with you” is not a moral statement, it’s just a fact. We cannot, long-term, take care of everybody that we might like to. And no politics, no ideology however well-meaning can make it otherwise.
“My father was a tool—“
“Yes, we know, Mr. Starmer. And so are you.”
I don't think you really appreciate the extent to which many people really, really hate illegal immigration. 'I will endure a high and probably unnecessary cost on a regular basis just to prevent even the possibility of making it slightly harder for ICE to do their job over the next few years, until the illegal immigrants are all gone' is a valid position, even if your cost-benefit analyses don't work out that way.
Broadly, people are well-aware that the Left is the party of pro-bono lawyers and suspiciously-well-instructed activism. It's not that weird that people on the right have started refusing point-blank any restraints that are likely to turn out to be a tripwire or a trojan horse. Personally I'm not sure whether I think giving ICE absolute carte blanche would help or hinder them in the long run, but I can believe the former. It works fine in Japan.
What I'm saying is that it's not about Left and Right, it's about the Ins and the Outs. At present, the Left is broadly In and the Right is broadly Out. (Yes, I know, Trump, trifecta, etc. The valence may change, but we're talking long marches and it mostly hasn't changed yet. Journalism schools are taking in centrist-left-educated students and producing centrist-left-aligned journalists).
The Ins are broadly in charge of the historic institutions, that's what makes them In. They pull them as far towards their own position as they can without actually destroying them. (That can be touch and go, look at the decline of Disney/video games). They have monkey-brained In stuff as well, because that's what they really like, but most of them recognise the value of being able to propagandise the middle and have their opinions/prejudices/interpretations laundered through the mainstream press, so they have to preserve them. It's the same dynamic when the Right is mostly In and the left are limited to silly student magazines.
Rather than 'the Right lacks an ecosystem that punishes partisan slop' I would say, 'the Outs by definition lack a significant ballast of centrists'.
An interesting consequence of this is that you can get good semi-mainstream right-wing media if you find a community where the Right is broadly In and include a signficant number of centrists. Religious magazines like Tablet and the Catholic Herald come to mind.
Corvos
3d ago
Prediction markets are really an idea from 15 years ago, smack dab in the middle of the conjunction of 'software will save the world' tech optimism and 'profit incentives are the best way to solve an optimisation problem' liberal economics.
Kalshi didn't propose mass-market betting because they were too naive to realise that
the love of money is the root of all evil
but because they believed the literal exact opposite, for better or for worse.
Did you read that one Scott article on ‘The Right vs. The Centre’ or some such? The issue is that the left-tinged media is just about good enough for most people most of the time, plus a big chunk of the MAGA partisans really does want some level of monkey-brained dunking (equivalent energy on the left too of course). What’s left when you exclude those two groups is a theoretical maximum customer base of maybe 20% of population across all platforms and that’s not enough to create and sustain a full on serious investigative media equivalent to the BBC or CNN. In England, GB News just about pulled it off but it’s clinging on for dear life.
Right-tinged blogging is cheaper so Substacks does well as does this place.
In general, I think Musk's takeover of Twitter really lends massive credibility to the idea that it works for better for both sides to take over large institutions rather than to recreate them.
Corvos
4d ago
I don’t know, but I would guess this is very much ‘if you have sex at 16 and your culture regards this as abuse then you’ll probably be traumatised, but if society regards this as the natural outcome then you’ll be fine’.
Corvos
7d ago
The surveillance imposed on us today far exceeds that of the Soviet Union. For freedom and democracy’s sake, we need to eliminate most of it. There are so many ways to use data to hurt people that the only safe database is the one that was never collected. Thus, instead of the EU’s approach of mainly regulating how personal data may be used (in its General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR), I propose a law to stop systems from collecting personal data.
[...]
The EU’s GDPR regulations are well-meaning, but do not go very far. It will not deliver much privacy, because its rules are too lax. They permit collecting any data if it is somehow useful to the system, and it is easy to come up with a way to make any particular data useful for something.
The GDPR makes much of requiring users (in some cases) to give consent for the collection of their data, but that doesn’t do much good. System designers have become expert at manufacturing consent (to repurpose Noam Chomsky’s phrase). Most users consent to a site’s terms without reading them; a company that required users to trade their first-born child got consent from plenty of users. Then again, when a system is crucial for modern life, like buses and trains, users ignore the terms because refusal of consent is too painful to consider.
To restore privacy, we must stop surveillance before it even asks for consent.
Richard Stallman (you may have heard of him)
I think there is much to what you say. A few minor comments occur to me:
Do you mean that they would never dare in public because they would be crucified, but secretly they believe it? Or that even the far right don't believe in an ethnic conception of Irishness?
I am reminded of the end of the Cold War. No longer having an adversary really made the West lose its mojo surprisingly fast.
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