GBRK
6hr ago
Oof, reducing spending is much harder than reallocating it. my impression of american municipal governments is that they're both fairly efficient and the "waste" that exists is fairly load-bearing. You could cut money from the parks and rec budget, but that will be immediately salient to the people who use those parks. Cancelling a local festival will infuriate more people than it's worth. And anyways, your biggest line items are probably police budgets and road maintenence, and those are a terrible mix of highly salient and very opaque.
The best he can probably do is probably fuck around with your city's zoning/building codes to reduce how hard+expensive it is to get new stuff approved and built. The direct savings will be pretty small or even negative (if you have to hire more bureaucrats to process stuff faster.) But time is money, so a complicated permitting process is effectively a tax on building new things, and therefore a tax that gets spread out over everyone who uses those new things in the subsequent years. Maybe there's some minor occupational licensing stuff your dad can make easier too?
GBRK
17hr ago
Probably the most important thing he could do is to pick a single (currently) nonpartisan, nonsalient bugbear that never the less causes unambiguous quantifiable harm and go after it with the fury of a thousand suns. For example, there's been some pretty decent research lately that shows that high CO2 levels reduce educational attainment, so he could make improving school HVAC systems a central priority. Compared to something grand like "fixing immigration" it probably sounds pointless, but remember that expected value is a joint consequence of how effective an intervention is and HOW LIKELY IT IS TO HAPPEN! There is almost certainly tons of low-hanging fruit lying around, because politicians typically prefer to expend all their time on salient and therefore voter-grabbing issues.
GBRK
1d ago
My impression is that he just doesn't have that much interest in writing any kind of romance. Green City Wars (which I just read and loved) had a murderous weasel as classic noir femme fatale, but while the racoon protagonist had a clear aesthetic appreciation for her, it was very explicitly nonsexual (as a result of the species barrier.)
GBRK
3d ago
USA! USA! USA!
US were so dominant the game was actually boring lol. I feel a little bad bringing my soccer-naive friends to a watch party given the total lack of tension. We scored our first goal as me and my buddies were still in line to get it...
I respect the hell out of that fourth goal tho lol.
GBRK
3d ago
I got that "polite right" but I think this quiz is fairly bunk because of the vagueness of the questions and liability for them to be interpreted differently by different culture groups without mapping properly onto discrete political beliefs.
That being said, I do think the polite right being overwhelmingly likely to think that people get too offended AND are too offensive is an insightful result-- I definitely find myself frustrated by how reactive both my "allies" and "enemies" are.
GBRK
8d ago
Point 1 is directionally correct, points 2 and three are completely off.
There is a big risk of ai making individual preparation essentially worthless for everyone or at least everyone aside from a few oligarchs. That covers a variety of apocalyptic and dictatoria scenarios, but as reasoned isn't worth worrying about.
If that turns out to not be the case, then it's going to be because:
- resources are scarce
- Humans still end up being capable of producing some sort of value
Under those conditions, you have to understand that the market not only allocated but reflects how scarce labor and human resources have already been allocated. Even if a company builds GAI, if they ask that GAI something like, "what's the best way to cure mortality and profit?" The answer will likely start with, "well we need infrastructure and testing data, so first buy these existing pharmaceutical companies." That in the end distributes wealth through the broader market. Since in advance it's hard to predict exactly how the wealth will flow, you wnd up back at the time-tested advice to just buy index funds and sit on them instead of trying to pick winners.
AI will change how wealth is distributed. Some classes of people will rise, and others fall. But in general I predict that your social and economic status after ai will remain very correlated with your pre-ai standing.
GBRK
20d ago
The currently existing Gnostics the Yazidis and the Mandaeans are not particularly anit-natilist.
For anthropic reasons, they wouldn't be. I hope you can see why that doesn't disprove the historical argument.
GBRK
22d ago
That just pulls from the part of the training set that's filled with midwit blowhards. Try:
"Claude, you are a computer engineer that takes an intense, borderline sexual pleasure out of optimizing process nodes..."
GBRK
22d ago
I agree your observations on both growing out of autism and MDMA. I think I'm culturally autistic (both my dad and brother got diagnosed recently) and went through some childhood events that I think predisposed me to having poor social skills, but not particularly autistic on a genetic or biological level. Autism is polygenic so it makes sense for me to think of people as falling on a bell curve of autistic genes/traits, and I think I'd be somewhere between 1 and 2 STDEV right of mean by that metric. Autism diagnosis rates are about 3-4 percent which conforms to diagnoses requiring about 2stdev.
GBRK
23d ago
Phone brand smartwatches (apple, samsung) tell you whatever the phone brand tells you about that person in your cultural context. Usually they're a pretty straightforward status signal, but in my experience more for young women than for anyone else. (Apple cachet remains...)
As for garmins, they differentiate from other smartphones by having much longer lasting batteries (my fenix solar lasts 10 days under normal conditions and closer to 14 when I'm out and about a lot) and being notably more feature rich. No individual feature is killer, but in aggregate I end up using a whole lot of them. The sleep tracking + heartbeat sensing isn't unique among smartphones but having them has improved my self discipline. The heartbeat tracking in particular came in clutch when I had altitude sickness in colorado-- helping me notice my tachycardia and then validate that wim hof breathing actually helped me drop my heartrate from 100 to 80. The Maps+GPS+Compass works better than google maps on my phone for hiking and it saves on phone battery. (Plus it's fun to track walks/hikes) The weather+sunset/sunrise display is something I could do with a phone app but it's convenient to just have it on my wrist, especially when I'm driving. I definitely do appreciate not having to pull my phone out for notifications. There's an app for electric unicycles that can show my speed and battery readout on my watch, which I used fairly often before I got an upgraded wheel with a built-in display. Also I use the flashlight literally every day. Something about it being wrist-mounter makes it so much more more useful than a phone flashlight.
I almost feel bad for shilling them this much but my buddy works for them and got me mine for the employee discount so I feel like they've more than earned a few paragraphs of shilling.
GBRK
24d ago
I'm surprised to see this entire discussion of watches pass by without a single reference to smartwatches. I understand that you're significantly influenced by the idea of a watch as an investment piece... But i feel like it's are least worth mentioning that we do still have a class of watches designed primarily for functionality. My Garmin Fenix coming in handy literally every day. And while the design perhaps isn't up to rolex standards, a smartwatch is still its own type of social signal. Given how often I see them worn by high-earning men in IT leadership, I associate them with what we in the business call "technical leadership." I.E., the management-class people who's eyes don't glaze over when you start to explain some esoteric about how an SQL variant works.
The main downside of course is the depreciation... But I really don't think watches are the best anti-AI hedge in any case. Watches buy you social status and (maybe) utility. They're not going to outperform land with mineral rights or magic the gathering cards as items of exchange with the post AI nobility.
GBRK
24d ago
The obvious way to square the circle is to make social security and medicare linked to "volunteering" for, say, ten hours of work per week at nonprofit childcare and education centers. (Making the rules intentionally lax so any ideological group can qualify so long as it actually takes some of the childrearing burden off parents.) Sunday schools, daycares, boy scouts, hell-- a chess club where the parents can drop their kids off for 3 hours to be supervized by a cadre of partially demented old grandmasters.
Notably this also solves the fertility issue. If you're going to be taking care of brats when you're old anyway, you might as well make sure they're your brats.
GBRK
29d ago
I think I have about an average sex drive for a man
Why do you think that? What evidence do you base it on? As a prior, "I'm average" is pretty decent... But if given counterevidence you might want to adjust that prior. Based on the posted study. The difference men and women is about half a standard deviation... All you have to be at above the 40th percentile to be about on-par with the average women, and that's nowhere near alibidinous or otherwise defective.
GBRK
30d ago
That either orthodox girls are less likely to catastrophise (which is already a win!) Or that they're equally likely to catastrophise but that they asses their risks are much lower and therefore make predicted catastrophes much more mundane.
GBRK
1mo ago
The problems might be qualitatively the same, but to what quantitative degree? I'm inclined to believe that the problems men and women complain about when it comes to dating are intrinsic to the differences between the sexes, but that traditional organizations moderate their terribleness. We do so, for example, lower rates of divorice and higher fertility rates among the devout. That's suggestive of actual success in the traditional project.
As a trivial example, these Orthodox girls are unhappy about men pushing for sex and then leaving when they don't get it. But it's telling that we're not hearing the secular fears of getting raped and murdered by a tinder date.
GBRK
1mo ago
True. I think that's an argument for filtering, not against it though. With he right incentives I think we could get teachers to specialize in either niche-- we already have dedicated SPED teachers and teachers who apply to teach junior criminals for example.
GBRK
1mo ago
Probably not, sadly. I think there are specific categories of things that are reimbursable, and there's also a dollar-amount limit per year based on what your school determines to be your "Room and Board" allowance based on its cost of attendance.
...but you can make your children pay market-rate rent for living at your home, and then reimburse them out of the 529!
GBRK
1mo ago
I noticed a pretty significant level of variability in teacher quality even in the advanced classes that benefited from strong filtering. In particular there was a notably excellent advanced physics teacher that caught that an "advanced" math teacher had failed to teach me the quadratic formula and corrected that. Filtering does raise the "skill floor" for teaching, in that you really can't do that badly with smart, well socialized students. But in the same vein I think it also dramatically raises the skill ceiling-- you need a good class and a good teacher to pull kids through an accelerated curriculum.
GBRK
1mo ago
Fair enough. If there's no tax advantage, there's no advantage, period, for arbitrarily marking some portion of savings for children's education.
In the US it's pretty fucking slick though. The 529 my parents + grandma made for me has more money in it than when I entered college because I got a full ride and therefore barely touched the principal. That fund will continue growing tax free for the next however many years it is until I have children and need to put them through college, whereupon it should be able to easily fund their lifestyles for quite a while. I don't know if the money will be enough to cover tuition too, but my guess is that tuition is going to drop significantly as schools go over the demographic cliff.
GBRK
1mo ago
If school savings account are tax-advsntaged in your jurisdiction (as they are with American 529s) I would HIGHLY advise you to reconsider your decision to save money for your kids but not specifically for your college. I have two main arguments for why, both stemming from the anthropic principle.
Argument one is that in disproportionate number of the futures where you manage to survive AI, it's because AI capabilities hit the logistic end of the growth curve and human intelligence remains a necessary input that actually increases in value due to AI serving as a force multiplier. Without speculating on the actual likelyhood of this being the case, it's the same wisdom as always betting against the apocalype. If you die, you're not going to miss the money anyway. If a small number of supercorporations take over the world and relegate us all to toys for the elite, the same applies.
Argument two is that even in worlds where AI surpasses humans, if pre-singularity wealth still matters that means existing large organizations (including schools) will continue to have some sort of ability to affect your life. There will be an evolution, certainly, but educational instituted will still find a way to provide some sort of value. Money is fungible, but institutions are malleable: market forces will push universities to evolve towards providing services worth on an average at least one dollar per dollar... And looking at the services they are already capable of supplying (food, spaces for people to gather, living arrangements, sports facilities, prestige) they seem likely to evolve into a sort of living community for high-class adults in their early twenties, which seem like the sort of thing that remain perenially popular.
Ignore all of that if your savings wouldn't be tax-advantaged, but at least in the US 529s are pretty fantastic. Even just going "full time" to an online school qualifies you to be reimbursed for stuff like FOOD AND RENT! Wouldn't it be great if you could deduct those expenses from your capital gains taxes? Well with a 529 you absolutely can! They're like Roth IRAs you can give to your children and grandchildren.
...
Seperately: a comment on school effectiveness. I grew up in a public school district that bussed people out of their home high schools (including the private catholic school) to a special technical highschool for part of the day, where students could take advanced electives, accelerated highschool courses, and rare ap classes. Admission into this school was based on performance at the local school and on standardized tests. And this system worked honestly pretty well! I feel like I learned a lot there, and afterward frankly breezed through college. The homework was hard, and the tests could be outright brutal, but the only tutoring I got or needed was my dad occasionally helping me with my math homework. (His math skills were and are admittedly formidable.) Everyone in my classes was both intelligent and a hard worker, but none of them seemed to be "strivers." I was probably among the most maladjusted kids in the upper-level classes and even that I blame more on body image issues than academic pressure.
Based on that experience, I really do think the "academic track" approach really does work to create an environment where kids actually can be taught in a meaningful way. Not every school can be blessed with the fortune to take the best and brightest students of an entire city, but I know that's not a necessary component because we were only ever came in second place in state math competitions in the state. Our hated rivals were fortunate enough to be located in a notorious college town, but were otherwise structurally ordinary.
GBRK
1mo ago
All I'm saying is, if you have any interest, even peripherally, in being genuinely entertained, you should seek out smut deliberately targeted toward your own gender. (Which, based on my preconcieved notions of the motte's demographics, I'm guessing is probably male.)
GBRK
1mo ago
FYI it's worth remembering that "smut written for women" and "smut written for men" are completely separate genres, even within nonvisual literature.
GBRK
1mo ago
The woman who were burned obviously got a bad deal, but the women remaining had more power than they otherwise would have thanks to their scarcity. That doesn't mean they were powerful in an absolute sense, but it's not necessary to prove that they were to still believe culling younger generations of males to increase the relative power of the older generation of males.
It's really amusing to read all you guys claiming you are being so terribly repressed and oppressed by the new women-first social paradigm, where your major complaint is "I can't get a date" and not "my in-laws will murder me for not handing over more money".
You are clearly engaging with my argument in bad faith if you think anything you said in the paragraph is at all relevant to this discussion. I can tell you very badly want to rehash the "are men or women more oppressed" argument but even if you could prove your side of that argument to everyone's satisfaction, it wouldn't counter anything the other posters have to say about the effects of enforcing artificial scarcity.
Thanks for the link! It turns out that I would raise the TFR to 1.89 and drop the deficit to negative 1.8 trillion. (And then I would be assassinated for pissing literally everyone off.)
I wish I could do stuff like model the effects of lower income taxes and a UBI... My ideal is something like, "zero SS, healthcare for all (but with negotiating powers and death panels), substinence-level UBI, virtually no income taxes for most people+much-reduced reporting requirements so willingness to hire-and-work is way more elastic, infant and toddler care subsidized with vouchers... Paid for by pigouvian carbon taxes and a muscular LVT."
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