Corvos
3hr ago
Precisely. If you have a very thin profit margin when you are (indirectly) employing Chinese peasants, you will have a negative profit margin if you start employing people who want higher wages. If you have a larger profit margin, then you can have more costs and still have some profit left over.
I think that Farage's libertarianism is bogging down Reform, if anything. The Right has a problem where, because it's social death to be further right than David Cameron, it's drawing from a very small pool of potential politicians. In a lot of countries, you get maybe one serious, charismatic far-right politician and you just have to live with their quirks.
This is incidentally why the left tries so hard to get rid of them via lawfare. Not only does it narrow the pipeline, but if you can nobble this decade's Great Man then you've got a good long time before another one comes along. Look at how (on the other side) socialism just collapsed after Corbyn got pushed out. Albeit in that case he lost an election pretty badly.
Corvos
10hr ago
Yes, modern manufacturing is hyper-optimised and very fragile. I think this fact is well understood.
The fundamental debate is whether this fragility + low cost + slow drain of skill is more or less desirable than trying to keep manufacturing at home, and whether the latter is possible at any decent standard.
Corvos
14hr ago
On the face of it, yes:
Tiny profits -> lowest possible price for consumers -> GOOD
which is why it's been economic dogma for decades. However, 'tiny profit margins' is another way of saying that 'your business will go into the red if a butterfly sneezes'. Your profit margin is slack, it's robustness, it's the ability to invest without leveraging yourself to the hilt, and of course it's the ability to pay your workers more than Chinese peasants. Huge amounts of foundational innovation come from places like Apple, Bell Labs, Xerox where they had the money to try out new things.
I'm not saying that Trumpian economics is definitely a great idea, I'm just not yet convinced it's a bad one.
Corvos
15hr ago
I kind of think the same. This feels like the 'burning iron' stage of stellar dissolution.
Once a star forms an iron core, its days are numbered. Up to that point, the nuclear fusion reactions produce energy, creating an outward pressure that counterbalances the inward pressure of gravity. But iron fusion uses up energy instead of producing it.
England has a very very very strong cordon sanitaire. After Brexit, everyone is aware that popular dissatisfaction can have teeth but everyone who matters is also very firmly in control of the relevant levers and is determined never to give an inch ever again. So you get this absurd drama as they try and 'solve' popular problems by lying about what they are and then 'fixing' them. Are young men angry and unhappy? Yes. Is it because of the phones? No, of course not.*
At the same time, because of the social consequences, everyone is eying each other and trying to figure out what they actually believe. I had a conversation with a childhood friend a few days ago that played out like a meeting between two 'confirmed bachelors' in the 20s. It took two hours for us to work out that we were both Brexit voters.
*At least, not that way. Constant phone usage is causing real issues b/c of lack of social contact but the manosphere to the extent it exists is boys complaining about the problems they already have.
Corvos
16hr ago
I think this gets a lot easier when you use virtue ethics. In general, humans have almost always been in favour of courage, wisdom, having an appropriate attitude to one's station in life, religious devotion, and generosity to whatever sized circle is considered appropriate (family, tribe, village, ..., species, universe). They have generally been against cowardice, selfishness, stupidity, arrogance, etc.
What changes between societies is how these things manifest and how they are weighted in the case of trade-offs.
(Sorry, this should really be a much longer and more detailed post but I didn't want to let the point escape).
Corvos
18hr ago
For most people, housing is by far the most important investment they own. So they’ll do anything rather than sell their house at a lower price than they bought it.
A friend inherited a house and selling that house has become the centre of their life for years now. They’re convinced that if they just hold on, the price will return to what it was 5 years ago. Taking out loans to pay inheritance taxes, whatever. Anything to get the price from ‘nice income boost’ back to lottery money.
The TDS was 'He's a FASCIST like Hitler who's going to put leftists in concentration camps and he's a Russian agent and he's a christian white nationalist who's going to re-enact A Handmaiden's Tale in real life for giggles'. Trump's view on trade got obscured by all the other stuff, which is a shame because that's a much more interesting conversation.
EDIT: It's true that Trump also genuinely has a habit of saying stuff he doesn't mean seriously, like locking up Hillary Clinton.
No, it's not. We're talking about businesses with razor-thin profit margins and manufacturing chains spread over three continents - losing these and producing no home-grown alternatives might be a disaster but at worst removing global free trade takes us back to 1940 not 1440.
A friend works on high-danger vehicles (let's say helicopters) as a software engineer. The first thing that happens when they push a software update is that as many engineers as possible get rounded up to take a flight on the helicopter.
Similarly Kawasaki Heavy Industries used to show off their confidence in the precision and reliability of their industrial robots by having the CEO and various others sit on a sofa while their biggest robot moved it around, although that's obviously more staged.
Corvos
3d ago
Funny how these TIL posts always seem to update in favor of Russia, isn’t it? No one ever comments “I revisited my strategic assumptions, and it turns out Putin is a huge bitch. Like, tinpot-dictator paranoia. Now I’m more sympathetic to the Ukrainians.” There’s no alpha in agreeing with the mainstream narrative.
This is natural, isn't it? The 'Putin is a huge bitch' narrative was pushed so heavily right from the start that any new information is likely to update in favour of Russia simply by virtue of regression to the mean.
Corvos
3d ago
Jeremy Corbyn remains the only (potential) Prime Minister ever to say publicly that he would instruct commanders never to fire nuclear weapons under any circumstances. It was hugely politically damaging for him.
Corvos
4d ago
Are there any models that you would consider generally good? I have a Claude-based personal assistant that I'm working on but medical queries don't work out well. The positivity bias is too strong - it tends to agree and amplify, which isn't good in medical care!
Corvos
4d ago
People who become spies are generally really weird. Being willing to lie and sneak for your masters tends to come with a cluster of pretty grim characteristics.
Oddly enough that’s why so many spies are flamboyant exhibitionists like Arthur Ransome (who was either a Russian agent, a British double-agent, or a Russian triple-agent) or Burgess of the Cambridge Five. The narcissism and fantastical thinking gives them the ability to persuade themselves of whatever narrative they need in order to be convincing.
Corvos
6d ago
It’s different, though. Being anti-abortion in Europe is like being royalty in the UK. In practice the royal family has very little remaining power in the UK, and what it does have is basically a historical relic that persists because lots of people have vaguely positive associations with royalty and royal rule is perceived as harmless.
The King recognises that actually attempting to exert royal authority in the UK on anything other than a rare, informal basis where most of the public agrees with him (as when he requested Saudi investors to reconsider some particularly ugly building designs in mid London) will swiftly lead to overthrow of the monarchy. They accept having given up 95% of their power to preserve the remaining 5%.
As with royalty, so with abortion.
Corvos
7d ago
Three (rather hypocritical) cheers for actually going and looking at the evidence.
Corvos
7d ago
Right, exactly. Which in turn breeds disrespect for load-bearing parts of society.
Not that it matters, but I did not sin against gay or black people in thought or deed before I found myself in the Left’s sights.
The collective Left chose to wage wide-ranging racist, sexist campaigns of persecution in flagrant contradiction of all their loudly stated principles and as far as I’m concerned they have utterly forfeited the right to tell sob stories about the 1950s.
We had a society that was, for all intents and purposes, colour and sex and sexuality blind. It was the left who chose to push that pendulum back up on the other side. In retrospect, I think they probably had to, because pertinent facts about these different groups did not make it possible for them to become interchangeable in reality, with all the consequences of that.
But the pendulum is still going to swing back, and it should.
Corvos
8d ago
What I mean isn’t really that “what the first amendment allows” becomes the definition of free speech.
It’s that turning politics into law distorts politics and degrades law. On the one hand nominal proponents of free speech (as an example) forget why they care about it and how to argue for it because they get used to just saying “First Amendment rights, bitch”. On the other hand, it means that actual meaningful discussion of what these rights ought to be get distorted into legal wrangling about how to interpret legal documents; these being matters of high impact, this means increasing politicisation of legal appointments and blatant distortion of the law on both sides (abortion rights, gun control etc. on the left and now birthright citizenship etc. on the right). As an outsider, it doesn’t look healthy.
Britain has historically operated on a ‘whatever parliament says, goes’ basis, softened but not constrainted by historical convention. We moved to a more rights-based system in the last few decades due to importing European human rights law, and it’s having exactly the kind of distortion art effect I describe above.
Corvos
8d ago
Sure, he’s autistic and probably was quite self-righteous about being ‘one of the good ones’.
I think though that a lot of people here are Red-Tribe-ish enough that they’re used to having largeish families.
If you don’t have children until mid-late 30s that means…
- Your children are unlikely to have more than one sibling, if that (so 50% chance no sisters).
- Their aunts and grandparents will be quite old and weak by the time they’re physically mature.
- Their parents are unlikely to have many siblings either, so few aunts/cousins. Both sides are likely to move regularly for work, so you don’t see them often.
It’s sad but having relatively little familial contact is quite normal for a big section of society at this point, especially upper-middle class.
Corvos
9d ago
Eh. This is just the "but how does it affect you PERSONALLY" meme seen from the other side. Trans advocates argue about it because letting people say 'there is a physical difference between trans women and women-women and we're justified in treating trans people differently' goes against the heart of the project; they care about it because of trans, not because of sports.
@OracleOutlook, I am your father
In all seriousness, pretty similar situation. The friend spent 10 years taking care of her father and in her head the (hypothetical) money from her father's very valuable London house became the solution to all of the problems in her life. Now prices have dropped massively, she's on the hook (I think) for inheritance tax based on the old value not the new value, and it would be VERY nice amount of money but it's not going to pay for a divorce and a comfortable retirement.
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