Ultimately social sanctions are backed by something. Whether that’s losing your job as with Twitter mobs, or punishment from the state. In certain societies judging stares and shunning can work, but those kinds of places don’t legalise drugs and they still tend to be running on a legacy of extremely harsh legal enforcement. England’s Bloody Code, Japan’s 99% conviction rate, etc.
People do stuff that’s not cool all the time, especially if they’re stoned. And legalisation so far has AFAIK pushed up usage considerably.
To be perfectly honest, I suspect your suggestion results from a dislike of coercion more than genuinely feeling that your suggestion is the most effective way to limit antisocial weed usage.
Corvos
13hr ago
It was a reductio ad absurdam of course, but my point is that prejudice along many axes is an inherent part of any interaction.
For a more realistic example, if someone asks me for directions, I’m going to decide whether I’m comfortable pulling out my phone based on a number of factors, one of which is race.
Then you get to the social level. In London, a black man is 8x more likely to kill than a white man. Should we be focusing police attention based on this fact? If you’re a B policeman and find two parties are in a he-said she-said situation and one of them is black, or homeless, are you going to let that affect your judgement or are you going to wall off all knowledge about relative aggression knowing that it’s going to make your judgements less correct?
Unless you’re going to email the credentials to your bank account to every American, and see which ones are actually thieves, you are going to end up pre-judging them in one manner or another.
“Sometimes kindness comes from unexpected places and people aren’t what you expect” does not mean “and therefore you must turn your brain off and clap your hands over your eyes until you have enough information to judge people on an individual level, and statistics are the work of Satan”.
Do I feel genuine sympathy for someone who has a harder time because they belong to a group with a bad reputation? Yes, certainly. The tend to be fine once they demonstrate a good character but they still find it a lame harder than many others. I *don’t * feel so bad that I’m willing to ignore really obvious group differences.
Corvos
3d ago
On the second point, I used to think that (and my wife as well), but since legalization we changed our mind. Weed is an extremely pervasive, intruding smell and it's FUCKING EVERYWHERE NOW.
Agreed. If I have my window open I keep getting gusts of it wafting in. It's disgusting.
Damn right. No Asians could understand the red-blooded British man's desire for a meal so massively calorie-dense that one bowl can last a man through the winter, lol.
Though I bet they have something similar in Mongolia area, it's frigid up there.
Sadly central heating has mostly killed traditional British cooking.
Corvos
3d ago
Cultural question but what kind of knitwear does a Russian man wear? Jumpers?
Corvos
3d ago
Depends on what you mean by dumplings. British dumplings, which are no longer eaten much in the modern day, are essentially dough balls cooked from suet (a specific kind of beef fat) and flour. I very much doubt they come from China.
Corvos
4d ago
Funny, I liked the last third best. Read the book through in the middle of a screaming once-in-a-century hurricane, really kept the mood up.
Fair but that makes
At its core the company is an entity formed by shareholders in order to generate profit. This is intrinsic purpose of any company
an assertion and a tautology, not an argument or a rebuttal. I don't mean that in a rude way.
Corvos
4d ago
I wouldn’t call profit a necessary element. Lots of nonprofits were incorporated under Company House until we started creating special legal containers for them.
“A group of people who band together to do something with limited liability” seems to best cleave reality at the joints.
True, I just think that (dependent on circumstances) “it’s impossible, give up” can and should be countered with “it’s perfectly possible but you are sabotaging it”.
So eg inventing an EV battery with 6000 miles of energy is impossible in a different way than building a massive factory of them in Britain is impossible.
Now, this is dangerous because the response to genuine failure is often to blame saboteurs, as in the Soviet Union, but it’s true sometimes.
On the object point, the government in the UK has pretty much wiped out smoking now, for example. And I’m pretty sure cannabis is going to start slipping back towards illegality. It’s been behind some really nasty murders lately (schizoid breaks), even when legalised it’s heavily associated with crime, it stinks all the way down the road, and it turns people into boring vegetables when it’s not sending them crazy.
Corvos
4d ago
Nope, just proof a genius-level IQ can coexist with a spine of limp cardboard. Many such cases.
I have the appetite for it. Try smuggling that stuff into Japan. Your feet won’t touch the floor. Even the yakuza might turn you in.
As with so many things, it’s not that hard. The trick is preventing the other half of society from sabotaging you. When 90% of people on the darkweb or making calls to dealers are entrapment operations, and having or taking drugs is punished as harshly as dealing them, when drug-takers are socially treated like lepers who fund Mexican cartel massacres rather than cool dudes, then you will see drugs vanish pretty fast.
Corvos
5d ago
I think you’re agreeing with @ortherox. Screwdrivers exist to screw screws for a purpose. Screwing is their function.
Likewise armies exist in order to achieve certain things - border protection, having lots of gold, etc. This involves killing people.
Corvos
6d ago
This seems exactly the wrong way round to me. You were closest with choreography - corporations exist as a handy package to allow groups of people to coordinate to do whatever they want to do.
Or are you asking, “why does the government permit corporations to exist”? Beyond freedom etc.
Corvos
6d ago
Rather reminiscent of what they say about doing mid-level business in China. I wonder if there’s some structural factor?
Anyway, always interesting to hear from people with experience.
Corvos
7d ago
It's apprenticeship. You hire them because they are now more skilled than the newer interns as a result of your tutelage. Obviously, many ways for this to go wrong in practice.
Corvos
7d ago
I actually agree with the basic thrust of your point - being rich in your 60s is nice but doesn't achieve much for society in most cases and younger people would be better off with more money for having children - but you are making incredibly strong and bad claims that are distracting from it.
Yes, someone in their 30s is usually worth 2x as much as someone in their 20s. They've had 6 to 10 years of seeing stuff actually happening in the real world, they've got some experience in when and why things work or fail to work, and they are able to reliably handle things without needing their hand held. They are less likely (though still distressingly likely) to decide that they've worked out how the world really is and everyone just needs to get out of the way.
Corvos
7d ago
"How would you approach this problem?" in a 10 min interview seems like a fine hiring screen. AI or no AI, being able to ask the right kinds of questions and work out the right initial approaches seems like the best mark of a good candidate. AI is still slow enough I doubt they can type and read answers off GPT quickly enough, and having done lots of projects using AI or not using AI should give them the experience needed to answer at the high level.
First at 45 they are afforded half-UBI like middle management positions, which 20 year olds could easily do but can never get because they're essentially handouts for middle aged people.
Counterpoint: I worked at a broadly 'flat' tech company. Having thirty young and roughly equally-qualified engineers competing for middle-management positions makes for an awful working environment. Get the oldest to do it, as long as he's decent, and everyone can get on with work instead of agonising over reviews and stabbing each other in the back. Who's most senior is also semi-random, so you don't end up with the greasiest of the pack put in charge.
Corvos
8d ago
I still have a fondness for the traditional marking scheme:
3rd: showed up, wrote something.
2.2: Wrote an essay on the question asked.
2.1: Wrote a good essay on the question asked, showing a broad coverage and understanding of the relevant material taught in class.
1st: Wrote a good essay on the question asked, demonstrating original thought and knowledge of material beyond the syllabus.
It’s surprisingly objective whilst allowing for the material and the student’s response to be entirely subjective.
Shepherd Book works, although he’s a little harsh.
“Father, don’t the bible have something to say about killin’”?
“It does. It is however a mite fuzzier on the topic of kneecaps.”
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