I think the right wing can be too cavalier about this, but there's definitely a spectrum no matter where you personally place the line.
On guns: from selling to a man who tells you outright 'I want this gun to shoot my wife' to selling to an army known for indiscriminate mass murders, to selling to an allied military, to selling to society in general knowing that some may misuse it, to selling only to men of good background with good references.
On alcohol: from selling spirits to the man whose family came into your corner shop to beg you not to sell to him, to the off-license on the motorway, to society in general, to society parties only.
And so on. "Either you hold people responsible for what's done with their products or you don't," seems like a false binary.
Corvos
18hr ago
In significant part because the end of the Raj split off famine-prone Bangladesh (the main site of the Bengal famine in 1943) into a separate country.
Bangladesh continued to have serious famines long after independence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_famine_of_1974
The postwar advent of intensive agriculture and chemical fertiliser presumably also helped.
Corvos
18hr ago
Interestingly, Marx came from a family of atheist Jews, who had converted to Christianity before his birth.
It makes more sense if you switch from
No house == homeless
to
No house == renter
If your home goes up hugely in value, and you sell without buying another house, then yes in a manner of speaking you have only acquired the approximate equivalent of a few decades of rental value which you will now have to pay, making the transaction net zero.
But if you had been renting all that time, you would still have to pay the new inflated price but you would have no assets to set off against them.
EDIT: I apologise, I see some of this was in your original post.
Corvos
22hr ago
Oh, sorry, I agree with your broader point. You see the same with the very stern rule of the samurai in Japan. I just wanted to make a joke about poor old Australia.
I've often speculated that the frontier served a similar purpose for the US, actually, functioning as a place where you could send those who struggled to fit in or behave, or where they would remove themselves. A sort of capital punishment where nobody has to lose their capita if you will.
Corvos
23hr ago
According to that article, relatively few people were actually sentenced to death under the Bloody Code.
They were instead sentenced to a fate worse than death. To whit, Australia.
Corvos
1d ago
Keep at it until Jonathon Strange comes in. Mr Norrell is really really boring, and it's not fun slogging through that, but the visceral experience of finding him boring helps you understand him better in the long run, as well as why the world reacts to Strange with such relief.
Yes, it is, and indeed I have a certain amount of time for the degrowth people on that basis. They're usually a lot more honest and consistent than the 'white heat of industry' technocratic ones or the 'don't worry about it, comrade, everything will work out once the revolution comes' strain. I think that their ideas are much better-founded than alternative ideologies but usually ignore the fact that:
- People have genuinely different capabilities...
- ...therefore keeping society relatively equal requires shackling the most capable in society, which is quite difficult, strongly negative for them, and...
- ...not a good idea in a competitive global system.
Plus, if you have to halt growth, now may not turn out to be the best place. It might be that there's a better equilibrium at a higher tech level where all the fundamentals can be protected but everyone is more comfortable overall. On the other hand, it might not turn out that way, in which case you have to remember that mod cons are not ultimately what makes life worth living for people.
Corvos
1d ago
That's the point. The two strains of argument against Scot Sumner's argument are:
- The fundamentals might have been better in earlier times - social life, community, family formation.
- Humans care about relative wealth and comfort, not absolute. Plus lots of other stuff like prestige, respect, etc. that you can't get from being a poor man even in the modern age.
Corvos
1d ago
unless the rural parts of the latter two countries are much worse off than would be expected
I think that's the main hidden variable, yes. UK is actually ~$60k, and I can't see QoL as better in the UK than Japan, but it makes more sense if you ask about rural Japan vs rural England rather than comparing Tokyo vs London.
pursuing a career as a journalist is one of the easiest ways to fail out of the upper-middle-class.
Can confirm, have sadly seen it happen to someone with enough talent to get their foot in the door but not quiiiite able to prise the door open under strong headwinds.
Corvos
2d ago
Quoth Agatha Christie: “I never thought I would be so rich that I could afford a car, and so poor that I could not afford a maid.”
This has got to be related to increasing urbanism, right? If I wanted to go and ‘play in the outdoors’ I could travel five minutes to a park packed with people where I’m not allowed to do anything, or more than an hour to the countryside.
If I wanted to do woodworking, the first step would be to get a new job so I could afford to move to a new house with the room to do it.
Corvos
3d ago
You’re correct but they can’t do bog standard everyday things like running a store either.
I think there are more fundamental issues related to
a: chaining multiple stochastic processes causes randomness to build up in the system producing wacky results (even with a supervisor agent since that is also a stochastic process)
b: a lot of the things that we do are ‘learn with your body’ tasks that aren’t adequately expressed with words.
For example, if you / Trump / Xi take ChatGPT5000 and type in
Here is the financial data we currently have access to: [data]. Here are this year’s issues of all major newspapers: [data]. Please suggest 10 changes that we can make to improve the country’s productivity / fertility rate / other desired outcome and some strategies for selling this to the public.
You can turn a text generation chatbot into a do-things AI by just asking it what should be done next and then following its advice… in theory. In practice that seems not to work well, and it’s not clear why.
Corvos
3d ago
Regret is a name, Sergeant. The name of one of the Covenant's religious leaders. A Prophet.
Corvos
3d ago
Ideally, perhaps this enables long-term research to separate out multiple causes of weight gain / aberrant appetite by analysing differences between those who respond to GLP agonists and those who doesn't.
Why do I get as worked up or more worked up about stuff in America than in my hometown? Well, for one thing, it's a lot more interesting.
Media and other kinds of second-hand experience forms a huge part of our personal lives and our 'experience'. In a way, we all live in CA/NY/WA now.
Corvos
5d ago
I didn't know the Mars500 project had been so rigorous. Is there anything interesting that came out of it?
Any group that is well-known to need supervisors for children is going to attract paedophiles, because paedophiles have two brain cells and follow incentives like the rest of us. So some fraction of each intake - what fraction I have no idea - genuinely are going to be paedophiles unless you use a criteria like marriage that is pretty good for excluding that.
I'm usually in team 'Let's shame men less' but in this case I see why they're careful about unattached men who want to work with children.
This is an interesting theory I hadn't really contemplated. Salisbury and Litvinenko aren't what comes up 'on the street' though - it's always "Putin is a tyrant and a bully and we know what happens when you try to appease those people; remember Munich?" so I'm skeptical that Salisbury is driving the difference.
IMO the difference comes from the fact that the mainland remembers wars on the continent as 'horrifying events they don't want to think about ever again' whereas Britain remembers war on the continent as 'hard but worthwhile and we always win'.
The main thing that I got out of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan is that most of the people in Islamic countries really are very devout muslims, who want the same in their leaders. There's a reason that most of the Arab Spring countries turned into Islamic theocracies - people want those, they don't want to be ruled by The Great Satan or by Moloch. Secularism in the Middle East is and always has been a project of the sultan and/or the army, it's pretty much never bottom up. Be careful before you make assumptions.
More options
Context Copy link