I agree that Star Wars is functionally dead now
Andor was legitimately great, and managed to make the already-fantastic Rogue One movie even better in retrospect.
I wouldn't count out star wars just yet. I think there's some small but nonzero chance that a good sequel-sequel trilogy could be made, on the conditions that it be managed by a single visionary director that loves the aesthetics and themes of the star wars series without being beholden beholden to a committee or pandering to existing fans. Or, shooting smaller, I think if the upcoming harry potter reboot TV show ends up working out, I could easily imagine a complete star wars TV series reboot to essentially re-tell the entire story, but with judicious editing, so that all the incoherent and terrible-in-retrospect parts get smoothed out.
That might seem overly hopeful, because 9 movies worth of events (plus however much background detail they want to add) is a lot to coherently condense, but I think advancements in AI will massively reduce the labor of making creative work, and as a consequence multiply the effectiveness of auteur geniuses. Where before all of an artists vision and wisdom could be poured to fill a trilogy, at best, AI might soon be able to spread that effort across a much longer period, like an upscaling algorithm applied to the problem of getting "twenty years to write book 1, and one extra to write book 2."
GBRK
2d ago
Why should you have to pay? Because you live in a big society, and state capacity costs money.
Your argument doesn't follow from your premise. Yes, I agree that we should pay the taxes required to mantain state capacity. Cutting old-age security from the budget, and reducing taxes proportionately, wouldn't affect that. "You need to pay taxes because we need roads" is a good argument. But adding, "So then you can't complain about giving money to a vampiric class of elders," is just building a bailey around your motte.
We don't pay old people entitlements because it's moral or just; I gather we paid them originally to ensure continued consumption and get them out of the labor market,
At this point you're just arguing against yourself. If there's no morality or justice in paying old people, why in the world would I want more of my consumption re-allocated toward old people? Why would I want services to become more expensive because there's fewer workers? You might be able to convince me that it would be worth getting everyone else to pay for old people specifically in my industry to retire, but why would I care if I get a promotion and a raise if the extra money was just going to go to old people anyway? I'd prefer to keep working at my current responsibilities and pay. I don't think I even need to address the "skim off the top" bit.
You would legitimately have a better argument if you appealed directly to my morality. I'm taking a bit of a hardline stance, but I could imagine wanting to maintain some level of old-age security out of pure altruism. It wouldn't be structured the way it is now, and it would definitely be less generous than social security + medicare, but I'd support a unified program designed to supply enough food, water, housing, and dollars-per-QALY efficient medical interventions to keep the elderly, destitute, and disabled alive. Such a program would, by design, offer very few luxuries-- but I would also allow local communities and charity groups to supplement those luxuries, and also create a simplified program to enable whatever marginal employment the participants are capable of performing to afford small luxuries. Babysitting children, cooking meals, performing chores, etcetera-- untaxed, and with maximally flexible hours. Basically, those "preschool + retirement home" setups should be the model.
GBRK
6d ago
So you'd be cool with your mom taking a cut of your paycheck?
I would be much happier if the money I paid into social security/medicare just went directly to my parents instead, yes. And even without the coercion of the state, it's not like children sending money to their parents is anything new. My mom has sent remittances to her mother in brazil for decades. That's effectively the same thing. If she hadn't been unfairly taxed to pay for feckless american non-parents she could have sent even more money back, and had more money to save for herself.
What would be the point of draconian policy if the community weren't planning to socialize the benefits?
So you admit that taxing the youth to pay for medicare and SS are draconian, and yet you think somehow socializing the benefits makes them any better?
Remove the taxes. Remove the social programs. If parents are good parents, their children will be happy to help them. If parents are bad parents, then they deserve what they'll get. If non-parents don't plan for the future, they don't deserve society's help. If non-parents try and invest responsibly for the future, they shouldn't be stymied by the fact that they have to also pay for the upkeep of bad parents and lazy non-parents.
in exchange for a nebulous promise of additional workers two decades down the road
What's "nebulous" is Medicare and Medicaid. Thanks to the demographic crisis, I have zero expectation of getting any substantial old-age benefits. So why should I have to pay for the lazy old people that hollowed out the base of the demographic pyramid in the first place?
And since I'm getting this vibe that you're blue-tribe, and suspect you're just not interested in arguments about personal responsibility, let me try also appealing to a value I suspect we share:
The fact that dumb old people don't need to keep younger generations happy to receive benefits is why we have trump, climate change, and the housing crisis. Gerontocracy thrives off the back of old-age welfare.
GBRK
6d ago
It does apply to veterans. Re-read what I wrote, I never said it didn't. But veterans compensate for being relatively less capable, experienced, knowledgeable, etcetera in a job area by having their service be a hard-to-fake signal of a wide variety of positive qualities, plus training analogous to what they'd find in a lot of high-paying jobs.
For the record, I agree that motherhood is also a hard-to-fake signal of a wide variety of positive qualities, but the training it provides and the qualities it is a positive signal for just have greater overall supply relative to demand and therefore less total market value.
Just look at South Korea if you doubt my words. In a society where every man is conscripted, there's less of a relative advantage to being a veteran and young men face delayed achievement and worse outcomes compared to young women. If we massively increased the supply of veterans in the united states the same thing would happen. It's not systematic oppression, it's just the free market rationally allocating resources.
GBRK
7d ago
Canada Child Benefit.
To the extend that child tax credits directly help parents, they're unfair... But I'm not heartless enough to deny support to the blameless children. On net I think we'd have a lot less need for them if we removed elder-support programs and therefore let working parents keep more money in their pockets.
enabling them to minimize the amount they owe in taxes
The american tax code is designed to help families in a "working parent/homemaker" situation but ironically punishes cases where you have two high-earning adults. I've got some DINK friends who had to pay more taxes after getting married. TBH, I also think that's unfair. They shouldn't get elder assistance in their old age, but also they should be able to save and invest more of their taxes now so that they don't need it. Basically, our society can let people decide of their own volition whether investing in children or career advancent is their best retirement bet. Anyone who chooses to be both unproductive and childless can suffer the consequences and resign themselves to either poverty or becoming such a pillar of their community even unrelated adults are willing to help thm.
In an "almost certainly not what you meant" sort of way,
That's kind of exactly what I meant, actually. By removing the need to pay for unrelated elders, adults can focus on supporting their own parents. Reciprocally, that also increases the incentive for elders to help their adult children with childcare. My grandmother helped my mom with me while my mom was doing her PHD; in return, my mom has helped her quite a bit through the years with remittances. That all winds up with a greater incentive for adults to have children, and in particular to raise them well so that the children will be happy to take care of them.
GBRK
7d ago
#1
But I'm getting from your comment that you pretty much agree that mothers should be disadvantaged in hiring?
I don't think mothers should be disadvantaged-- I think people who are relatively less capable, experienced, knowledgeable, etcetera in a job area should be disadvantaged. And unfortunately, raising children makes it harder to become those things. I don't like that, but it is an unfortunate fact. Forcing companies to preferentially hire mothers is just going to lead to economic inefficiency and poverty. Yes, there are some specific roles where motherhood is actually good training. To the degree that those roles are prevented from hiring on merit, those roles should be reformed. But if you genuinely think mother are better for already-meritocratic roles like C-suite roles, then no actual intervention needs to happen. Companies will be darwinistically selected until they have the appropriate amount of mothers and everything in perfect.
Similarly, while I can tell that your whole veteran argument is non-salient, can you not see how it's proving my point? Yes, being a veteran makes you better at mcdonalds. Also, it makes you better at a whole lot of other places. Therefore those places preferentially hire vets, so that demand outstrips supply and military vets end up paying well. And judging by how well vet-owned companies seem to do, it looks like those place are actually making reasonable decisions. So why aren't I hearing about any companies that preferentially hire companies making it onto the fortune 500? If it was legitimately a good strategy, it would just be money on the floor. But it isn't, so it's not.
#2
All that being said... I completely sympathize with
then it's no wonder young women get nervous about the tradeoffs involved
I definitely don't blame young women for not wanting children. You seem to be coming at this from a perspective where you think I both expect women to have more children and yet have zero interest in giving the woman what they want. That's not my perspective. I understand that the tradeoff is skewed against women, and that not having children is simply the rational option for many of them. But you seem to have this weird belief that motherhood is intrinsically skewed, and that therefore we need special government to make it not suck, but that's the opposite of reality. Motherhood isn't a profession, but it is an investment-- and one that has historically paid off very well. People have given up part of their entertainment and leisure potential to raise kids since the dawn of time because they reasonably and rationally expected that their kids would contribute to their well-being in turn.
From that framing, it's obvious that we don't need to specifically promote motherhood, we just need to stop hindering it. We need to let parents internalize the full value of their children by ending government-mandated transfers of labor to freeriders by ending medicare and social security. I know that might be difficult to process emotionally because there's this idea that those programs are "helping grandma," but if it weren't for the money they lost to taxes, grandma's descendants could help her themselves.
Look, just imagine if women gave birth to massive piles of money, or robot servants that did their chores and took care of their needs. If that were the case, they would obviously be happy to accept less professional advancement in order to give birth more often. Conversely, if the government started taking 90% of their robots and their piles of money, women would stop giving birth in favor of looking for professional advancement. That's the situation we're in: everything about our society is geared around socializing the benefits of motherhood while privatizing the costs. All we need to do to get above replacement fertility is to just stop doing that.
GBRK
7d ago
Not all work experience is universally applicable in every other domain. Experience in the military is highly transferable to jobs where you are expected to carry out orders while working as a team under time pressure-- a.k.a, most well-paying jobs. Experience as a mother is highly transferable to jobs where you are expected to determine your own schedule and manage small children. That admittedly does prove useful in stuff like hr/people manager/project management roles. (Basically all the managers I've ever had have been parents, and I think that makes perfect sense.) But the supply for those roles is much greater than the demand, so rationally self-interested companies filter for accumulated domain knowledge, which disadvantages mothers. Meanwhile the most numerically common jobs that benefit from experience as a mother are childcare and teaching related, but those jobs have a whole ton of structural problems that prevent them from accurately renumerating employees based on the quality of their work. The incentives of school district administrators are poorly aligned at best with actually maximizing learning, and any attempt to assess teacher skill and renumerate appropriately will piss off so many entrenched groups.
There are a few fields-- like nursing, for example-- that avoids the problems I've mentioned... but if you just compare the number of veterans versus the number of order-following jobs, and the number of mothers versus the number of caretaking jobs, and you see why things get to be the way they are.
GBRK
7d ago
making it easier for moms to return to the workforce after staying at home through toddler years
This is one of those things that sounds great when you say it but in practice requires some extremely unpleasant political compromises. Are you going to...
- Redirect the labor of childless women toward parents? That sounds a lot like coercion to me. (Also all taxes are coercion, but I'll only mention this here because this seems like the only type of coercion you care about.)
- Redirect the labor of childless men toward parents? To put it bluntly: taxing incels to subsidize chad and his baby momma is deeply unfair and liable to result in suicidality and violence.
- Redirect the labor of parents towards other parents? Congratulations, you have made parenting even less appealing.
- Force employers to disregard that the fact that having less experience and less availability to work makes someone worse at their jobs? In the best case, they'll route around you by just being more bigoted. In the worst case, every business collapses.
The only thing that could possibly raise birth-rates non-coercively is for society to stop forcefully redistributing the labor of working age adults to unrelated elders. Removing social security and medicare would give people a much stronger incentive to either invest productively during their working years or have children to support them in their old age. There would still be a need for welfare, but it could be distributed as a UBI: flat cash payments to every citizen.
GBRK
10d ago
Based and true. Remove the filibuster so congress haas to actually legislate instead of passing the buck. Stack the supreme court every election so there's no point being an activist judge. Make the house of representatives 25x bigger to match constituency ratios in the early republic. (Optionally) Return the senate to selection by state assemblies. RETVRN to tradition.
GBRK
1mo ago
You might think that in an age of frenetic short-form content it would be the tautly written books, in terms of both plot and prose, that would break through as they make less demands on our time and pack in more beats per page, but that has not been the case. At all. My theory is that people are so used to scrolling at speed and not having to think that they read in sort of the same way, so that repetition and cosy re-confirmation is the only way they can actually take in and understand what's going on in the story. Conclusion: the faster we read and the more distracted we become, the longer and flabbier novels are going to become.
I've been thinking of something similar... looking at royal road every popular webnovel has extremely obvious, in-your-face exposition, presumably because they don't expect anyone to slow down and take their reading seriously. (And also because of all the foreigners reading english language fiction by other foreigners.)
I think the left-wing position needs to reckon with the fact that some percentage of people have problems that can't easily be solved and, even worse, risk becoming disproportionate consumers (of welfare or police resources or park space, etc. ) whenever you liberalize controls on them or make systems more generous and less skeptical.
Yes, there are some people who are bad targets for the policy. That's the exact argument for making these programs less conditional-- ideally, not conditional whatsoever. ubi pilots consistently show improvements in welfare, and while GiveDirectly wastes effort trying to pick specifically extra-disadvantaged villages, it redeems itself by distributing payments to everyone within those villages.
Consider this simplified model of the economy:
- Group A, given money, will generally improve their lives and their community with it
- Group B, given money, will generally waste the money
After a decade, semi-random economic events will have sorted people into "poor" and "rich". The "rich" group is mostly composed of people form Group A, and the "poor" group is mostly composed of people from Group B. But you know in principle that there are still poor people who might improve their lives with more money, and that, meanwhile, the rich people have mostly hit diminishing utilitarian returns for improvement-by-money. Your first instinct-- well, not your first instinct, because you're a conservative, but the first instinct of someone further left than you-- will be to take money from the rich people and give it to the poor people. At first, you see the lives of people of the poor people rapidly improve-- because they're improvers, and using that money to take all the low-hanging-fruit they were previously unable to. But soon, most of the improvers move into the rich group, and now you're just giving money that the improvers could be using to improve things to wasters instead, and the program fails. The better option would have been to take more money from the rich, but pay it to everyone. The richest of the rich would suffer a little as they're paying disproportionately more, but they're far at the reducing-rate-of-utilitarian-returns section of the scale. So given that they're also recieving the UBI, the only way they move from rich to poor is if they're wasters... and if they are, then society should want them to be poor, to discourage waster behavior. Meanwhile, the improver poor become improver rich, and the improver rich maintain their position, while the waster poor get to control a proportionately smaller share of the economy than they would if they were receiving direct welfare and also aren't facing any incentive to remain poor.
Funny, I just saw a new left-wing outlet wrestling with research that hinted at weak results when people are given money.
The funny thing is, I've also seen that same article, and I consider it direct proof of my point-- even though the leftist writing it doesn't seem to understand that. For example, they say,
Homeless people, new mothers and low-income Americans all over the country received thousands of dollars. And it's practically invisible in the data.
but then turn around and say,
But I do think cash as an intervention is best used in emergencies, for pregnant women, domestic violence victims
completely ignoring the obvious conclusion that if all these targeted giving schemes are failing, they should stop advocating for targeted giving schemes. Just give the money to everyone. The pregnant women/domestic violence victims that will use the money productively will still get it-- and so will everyone else that actually needs the money, and would use it to improve their lives. Sure, plenty of people who won't use the money to improve their lives will also get it-- but at least they're not directly incentivized to not improve their lives, and also they're probably going to be paying their money to people who can make better use of it.
Using the meme definition of insanity, this "transfer money to particular poor households" scheme is definitely it. Wealth-transfer research has promising results. Wealth-transfer-to-poor-people research has less promising results. Why do these leftists keep insisting that we trying to find even worse-off people to give the money too? That's just going to result in even worse results. Just give the money to everyone! The trump stimmy checks were the right idea, only held back by the fact that they were unfunded and increased the deficit (because deficit-mediated inflation is effectively a regressive tax on poorer people, who hold more cash wealth and suffer more from sticky salaries.)
To sketch out an ideal tax + welfare system...
Revenue:
-
LVT used almost exclusively as a revenue-generating tax
-
Pigouvian taxes applied in conditions of high economic certainty
-
Service charges for excludable use of sensibly government-provided services (e.g., getting your passport renewed, driving on a toll road)
Spending
-
Pigouvian subsidies applied in conditions of high economic certainty
-
security (including military)
-
contract enforcement (the courts, plus the parts of the regulatory state that do stuff like fine people for lying about the efficacy of medical treatments)
-
the strictly necessary parts of the administrative state (e.g., salaries for judges, lawmakers)
-
the parts of the regulatory state that exist to solve multipolar traps/tragedies of the commons/failure states of capitalism/etc. (e.g., climate change, national parks, trustbusting)
-
the parts of the regulatory state necessary for auditing the other parts
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A UBI calculated to be the higher of {[enough so that almost* no one starves, dies of exposure, dies of easily treatable disease*, or otherwise lives considered strictly unacceptable for a citizen*], [Whatever figure maximizes the equation: RISE IN(MINIMUM OF(aggregate GDP, aggregate population utility*)) DUE TO PAYMENTS - FALL IN (MINIMUM OF(aggregate GDP, aggregate population utility*)) due to taxes]}
-
A service designed to care for people who are strictly unable to make economic choices (the mentally challenged, the insane, and the senile)
* I'm using fuzzy language in a few cases because some of these concepts/thresholds are strictly subjective... I concede that even in my "ideal" economic system there would be plenty for people to fight over and disagree about
GBRK
2mo ago
You're considering redistributive programs in a vacuum, but I contend that that's not the best way to understand my proposal. My position is that the best way to perform welfare is unconditional wealth transfers, and to various degrees UI, SS, and even GiveDirectly are all conditional. That naturally leads to problems, like your mention of the "repeat users" thing, but that's proof of the conditionality being the problem, not the nature of transferring cash. Consider if, alternatively, these programs were administered as deliveries of particular baskets of goods. Think of how much more room there would be for corruption and inefficiency. Cash is better than food stamps is better than a council of politicians getting bribed by ag lobbyists to buy specifically high fructose corn syrup and distribute it. Anti-welfare people look at poor people choosing to buy inefficient luxuries and claim that that's proof that programs should be reformed to give politicians more control over program administration... but the alternative isn't poor people getting a healthier diet, the alternative is financially motivated politicians forcing poor people to buy even more inefficient luxuries.
And yes, "giving people money to stay alive" does result in dependency, for the uncontreversial reason that if you pay someone to do something, they will keep doing it. If you only provide wealth transfers to poor people, they will remain poor. But if you pay people independent of their actions, their incentive is to put the money to the most personally productive use possible. And given that capitalism provides a network of incentives to align personal greed to societal benefit, that in turn funnels money toward what's better for society.
GBRK
2mo ago
Cash works because... everything is fungible to cash, but literal cash has higher liquidity and therefore fewer transaction costs than any other form of welfare. In any economy that is not a perfectly optimized free market, there will be some role for enforced wealth transfers. Unconditional cash payments are just the second-best way to do payments, after pigouvian subsidies.
GBRK
2mo ago
Who is the Pope (or Council, if you happen to be Conciliarist) who gets to decide what the Creed is?
The... the actual pope. The pope who is chosen by the holy, apostolic, catholic church. The pope who is chosen through the direct guidance of infallible God.
When the Creed changes, what should happen to Americans who do not get along fast enough, and to Americans who actively reject it?
Whatever the pope says. Probably some mix of compassionate incentives and stern-but-fair punishments ranging from financial inducements to banishment or life imprisonment (but strictly excluding execution.)
GBRK
2mo ago
But tell me, would handing out passports and giving full unconditional citizenship to every Chinese or Russian make a lot of sense to you in the current geopolitical situation?
If you're going to ask me about implementation details given current political realities, I admit that I would have to moderate my position. I would still be happy to give citizenship to every chinaman and russian-- but only after they spent time living in america, working, without access to welfare, subject to assimilation and naturalization. While still holding onto the highest principles I laid out-- the bailey, if you will, I'll concede that an illiquid political/economic situation required adjustments to reality, and a retreat to the motte. For example, I'll concede that
because they were only effective at it back when they were a lot more forceful about assimilation
is a good point. We're insufficiently forceful about assimilation, and that makes it hard to be a credal nation. Opening the borders and becoming a fully credal without toughening up would probably be a disaster. But why would we consider a policy in isolation without considering every other self-consistent supporting policy? If we're assuming a massive, unlikely change, we don't need to limit that change to a single axis. If we're considering strictly limited interventions imaginable within the current system, again, those interventions can include compromise policies. My maximalist vision is "assimilationist credal nation." But it's not an all-or-nothing policy. I would still be happy to let in modestly more muslims, paired with child-protection-service and educational mandates designed to make it harder for them to isolate their female children and force them into wearing burkas. I would still let in more poor hispanic immigrants, paired with a reduction in the taxpayer-funded subsidies for the noncitizen poor.
if you're not enforcing a creed. ... but when I asked you about it before you started talking about property rights.
I don't understand this point. I consider a respect for property rights part of a specific creed. I consider education and police work as valid methods of enforcement for property rights. Therefore, I'm presenting them as a method of enforcing the creed.
Are you looking for a complete creed and list of enforcement mechanisms? If so, I'll concede that I haven't thought that deeply about it. But as a summary, I'd say, "I'm imperfect, so I'll just go with whatever the pope wants." (See also: Edict of Thessalonica)
Is communism more beneficial in North Korea and Cuba, than other economic systems?
North Korea and Cuba are both continuously reforming themselves to be less communistic (though understandably they're not very open about it.) See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jangmadang . And each of their individual citizens probably have (close to) the most beneficial ideas to hold for maximizing their performance within the systems they find themselves in.
There is absolutely no way that in practice America today is a creedal nation.
It's not a perfectly creedal nation, but it's far more creedal than the vast majority of the nations on the planet, and I would like it to be yet more creedal still.
GBRK
2mo ago
taking the easy way out
If it's the easy way out, that must be because of either or both of these factors:
- The demand (A.K.A. economic need, a.k.a. potential gains due to specialization and trade) for migrants is so large that we would be shooting ourselves in the foot to keep them out.
- The welfare state of the receiving country is too generous
If we fix #2 (which to be real, we should be doing regardless of the immigrant question) then there isn't any problem.
mostly in such societies that offer the most no-strings-attached public welfare.
That's a europe problem. Luckily, america is better than europe: we get way more illegal immigrants, which are the best kind, because they're ineligible for the most expensive forms of public welfare (in the non-stupid states) and therefore prove themselves to be the motivated kind by working hard for low pay.
America isn't the only country that sees immigrants.
You're right. Unfortunately, the whole world isn't america. That's their problem, and they should fix that. They can start by adopting our hyper-assimilationist culture and laws if they're leery of direct annexation, but I wouldn't hesitate to make the UK airstrip one if asked.
GBRK
2mo ago
I'd want some sort of mechanism to directly help him out over and above just me giving him cash
What if giving him cash is just mathematically the most effective option? I occasionally donate to GiveDirectly because I believe in their premise: that the administrative efficiency of just distributing cash directly is so high that enabling the occasional bad behavior is outweighed by all the good behavior it promotes and bureaucratic behavior it avoids. I'd concede that not every individual would benefit from the cash-- I don't give money to homeless people directly because I reasonably suspect they would misuse it-- but that's a rule-proving exception. Deciding which particular individual you want to give cash to re-introduces the hated administrative burden; better to do something like a UBI or the libertarian negative tax rate.
I think I agree, morally, that no amount of government spending can ever replace charity... but some amount of government spending is just sensible economics.
GBRK
2mo ago
Just dragging individuals out of one society to drop them into another
I agree that forcefully relocating people is unlikely to end well. The secret sauce is voluntary immigration. Immigrants are self-selected for motivation, risk-taking, ambition, intelligence, and willingness to assimilate. It's not a hard rule, I admit, but it holds extremely often. Isolated ethnic communities often manage to maintain a separate language and culture from their parent state for literally thousands of years (looking at you, Basque country)-- but immigrants to america lose everything except a surface veneer of their homeland within three generations, tops.
GBRK
2mo ago
The direct analogy to that would be a multiethnic empire promoting one ethnic group to the detriment of others, not one that attempts to merge multiple groups into a single one.
Okay, if merging multiple groups isn't overinclusion then let's just define ourselves to be part of a shared ethnic group containing everyone except the North Sentinelese islanders.
why the sudden switch to basic property rights?
You asked me for what I would put in a creed. I interpreted a "creed" as being a legally and culturally enforced set of beliefs. I would like to enforce a belief in basic property rights.
what is supposed to be the upside?
Converting the muslims by proximity and getting more people into heaven.
More importantly, how is it even a creedal nation if you don't exclude other creeds, and abandon the mechanism of enforcing your creed that you put forward yourself?
I think you're getting confused on my expected timeline. I think it would look something like this:
- (Where we are now.) Country has a creed (American civic religion) and enforces it (though not very well). The creed permits some catholics and some noncatholics entry.
- noncatholics gradually convert to catholicism or die out.
- Growing numbers of catholics push the creed, and enforcement thereof, to favor catholicism even more.
- Country now has a catholic creed
...or basically, what happened to the roman empire. We've done it before and we can do it again.
My point was that something can be true and beneficial, and lose to the false and detrimental.
If it lost then it must not have been so beneficial after all.
GBRK
2mo ago
are unfortunately necessary
Having them is necessary. Enforcing them isn't. At the very minimum Imagine a regulatory framework that has a shall-issue mandate on any kind of permit, but then your local community can sue you if you end up violating codes.
But consider this... [NIMBYism follows]
Consider this: if adding poor people makes things worse, why not take them away instead? Just bulldoze the houses of the poorest 10% and kick them out every year. With each decimation your schools and infrastructure would get even better!
Possible counterargument: the town is in a state of economic equilibrium, such that it can't spare even one garbage man without providing fewer services per dollar.
counter-counterargument: if the system is already in economic equilibrium, no one new will be incentivized to move in.
it is objectively unfair to American workers that we have the FDA, EPA, NLRB, OSHA, etc and then they have to compete against someone who can burn coal and dump arsenic into rivers.
I don't feel like it's unfair that my boss can't abuse me. If workers in other countries want to die on the job and deal with arsenic-rivers then more power to them, though. In fact I view it as pretty much a strict good that we've outsourced the most polluting industries to other nations. Why would I want a lithium mine poisoning our rivers, when with the magic of globalization I can get bolivians to poison their own rivers instead?
I'd be very interested in your patent law take.
All intellectual property law should be abolished with the exception of trademarks. If a sufficiently liquid free market demands a particular good, the free market will find a way to fund that good. Maybe at one point the market wasn't liquid enough, thanks to travel times and difficulty with communication, but thanks to modern technology we no longer live in such a benighted age. Intellectual property law doesn't encourage innovation, it just provides for a class of middlemen that can financialize and profit off of ideas. For example: The vast majority of J.K. Rowling's wealth doesn't come from sales of Harry Potter, it comes from her monopoly over the Harry Potter universe, which she uses to extract rent from the creative efforts of product designers, screenwriters, filmmakers, actors, cover-art designers, etcetera.
Trademarks are cool though.
GBRK
2mo ago
For example, looking specifically at that patent page, do you really believe that innovation from 2010 to 2020 was 2x or 3x the innovation between 1870 and 1990?
Plausibly yes. The impact of innovation might be on a logistic curve as we vacuum up all the low-hanging fruit, but the patent numbers are sufficient to demonstrate that immigration rates don't have an effect on people having ideas. I can anticipate your objections, but before making them first remember that the most important word in my argument was "anti-correlate". Even if patents granted becomes an increasingly-bad measure of what you would consider important about innovation, there should still be some identifiable correlation not lost in confounding because immigration rate isn't asymptotically increasing over the span of America's existence. Also, if you doubt America's numbers specifically, you can look elsewhere for confirmation-- we're both proposing general rules that should hold cross-culturally. You should be able to eyeball patent rates and immigration figures in any given country to see if rate of innovation (or rate of growth in innovation) falls after immigration spikes.
Your modus ponens is my modus tollens, though: if the vibes don't match the stats, then either the vibes are wrong or the stats are wrong/irrelevant.
Skill issue. Overcome your cognitive biases and find some better vibes. Or don't, I guess. I'm pretty convinced that relying on statistical techniques over faulty human wiring as a general principle overperforms in the aggregate, but maybe I'm wrong. If we're lucky we can compare life trajectories 50 years from now and hash it all out.
GBRK
2mo ago
GDP as an idea is like a belief that doesn't pay rent. It doesn't tell you whether a country is good, a benefit in raising it is not found in evidence. Given otherwise equal choices among westerners, >95% would rather spend their lives in #39 Switzerland or #105 Iceland over #1 China or #3 India.
I didn't cite GDP, I cited GDP per capita. Critical difference. And while I wouldn't use GDP per capita to prove that any particular country is good, but I can use it to make statements about the general trend of increased goodness because it's very strongly correlated with a lot of measure of goodness like e.g. life expectancy that everyone agrees on.
civilization development factor C
Not well defined. Give me empirical data or give me death.
Economics is a pseudoscience
You're using no science whatsoever. I'll take "psuedoscience" over that.
Abundant plastic garbage... Millions of foreigners
You're trying to make an a priori argument but I reject this comparison on it's face and also empirically. Go look at a graph of utility patents granted in the united states: https://patentlyo.com/patent/2023/08/utility-patents-granted-calendar.html . It doesn't anti-correlate with graphs of "immigrants as a share of US residents." so I'm pretty damn confident that if you want to track down a graph of "noneuropean immigrants as a share of US residents" it's not going to anticorrelate with that either. It just correlates to graphs of US population growth. More people means more innovation.
Your argument is entirely based on vibes. That's cool, but I've got statistics.
GBRK
2mo ago
What I said was that with "over-exclusion is worse then over-inclusion" approach, you will turn the category of the nation useless.
The irony of this is that the whole idea of a "nation" is an over-inclusion: an 18/19th century fabrication intended to artificially bond disparate ethnic-linguistic-cultural groups together. Before people were White they were French, German, British... they were Occitan, Cornish, Bavarian... they were loyal to their tribes, villages, clans...
Every framework to unite ingroups into outgroups makes the previous ingroup identities less powerful and useful. That's the whole point!
Well... do you mind providing some details? General rules as to what kind of transgressions would meet with what kind of sanctions? Examples?
General rule: people have the right to allocate the use of their excludable property
Weak sanction: if some dumb kids tresspass on your land to use your fishing hold it's fine to yell at them
Strong sanction: if someone steals your TV they go to prison.
You're really not making this easy... What is? My description of your views, or the statement that I misunderstood something? If the latter, could you put some effort into bridging the inferential gap? Where do you think I've gone wrong?
Sorry, I meant that your description of my views was accurate.
And if it can be shown that a mosque is a proper church, with similar advantages for individuals and their communities, you'd be ok with that, and you'd enforce your rule by forcing people to go to EITHER a mosque OR a Catholic church?
For someone to show that to me they would have to convince me that muslims have an equivalent chance of getting into heaven as catholics. If hypothetically I was ever convinced of that, then sure-- church, mosque, either is fine. Ceding that would basically require they convince me to stop being a catholic though.
What was the point of the "truth is an asymmetric weapon" thing then?
If it's true that my beliefs are beneficial, then that truth is asymmetric. Also some beliefs contain the sub-belief that they're guaranteed to be beneficial if [and sometimes only if] they're true. So long as I'm confident in the meta-belief that I'm maximising personal benefit, those beliefs have an asymmetric power over me (so long as they're true.)
GBRK
2mo ago
Zoning laws. I hate, hate, hate them. They're also mostly a Democrat thing, so there's an example of me being appropriately mad at "my side" for acting against my interests.
Aside from that--
Other tariffs. Excessive FDA regulatory burden. The existence of patent law. The Jones Act.
I could go on.
AI is a tool, like any other. It saves time on technical execution, but near-completely lacks vision. The problem is, the vast majority of people who use it also lack vision, so we get "art" that is technically excellent but totally uninteresting. Where an artist uses the time-savings to add even more vision, though, it performs a strictly additive service. For example-- I've seen a lot of webfiction where the story is wholly human-generated, and then AI art is just used for character portraits. The art only benefits, because a constant amount of vision is still being expended on the writing without the opportunity cost of the author having to learn how to draw.
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