GaBeRockKing
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User ID: 3255
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
If you got the forklift certification because you expected to make more money-- because the pool workers legally allowed to do jobs involving forklifts is artificially constrained by the certification process-- then you've benefited from the same economic mechanism unions do.
Morally, you're free to make a distinction between getting a forklift certification versus forming an insulin cartel or shutting down imports across the country to get $2 more an hour. But mechanically and economically, it's the same sort of behavior guided by the same sorts of incentives.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
Even in the utilitarian framing, it's sometimes okay for things to be neutral or unpleasant for most people to make a select group really, really happy. I enjoy brutalist buildings. I would be unhappy in a world where every building was brutalist, but that some buildings are brutalist is just really cool to me. Not independent of their property to be uncomfortable and unsettling, but because of it.
I hate to sort of boil this argument down to "let people enjoy things," but I don't think you actually believe Eisenmann wanted every single building on earth to be ugly and depressing. And in point of fact, I think you'd admit that, at least to eisenmann, his buildings-- even in being depressing-- were still beautiful. Take a look at this design study, for example. It's certainly no Mona Lisa. But even though it devolves into abstract shapes, that perhaps infuriate you with their intentional lack of meaning-- is the palette of colors used not lovely? Are the geometric forms involved wholly without harmony? I'm not asking you to like Eisemann's work. But try to understand the actual mechanisms of what brutalism, as a philosphy, is. Stripping out some of the aesthetic elements that we use to judge beauty of course makes a work unappealing to the people who primarily want to see those particular elements. But it also removes all obscuration from the remaining elements-- it puts the remaining beauty in the sharpest possible relief.
Consider music instead of architecture. People can love plenty of things about music... the harmonies, the melodies, the rhythms, the lyrics, the meaning, the context, the performance... etcetera etcetera etcetera. But liking big band swing shouldn't prevent you from at least recognizing the aesthetic qualities in ecclesiastical monophonic chant. And without making any moral judgements about pop music, I'm still very sure children should be exposed to the occasional string quartet.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
In case it's non-obvious, I'm making an argument about optimizing for expected efficiency, rather than saying there's any agreement about how many innocent people we would knowingly condemn to prison in order to keep guilty people imprisoned too. My claim is that we already make implicit cost-benefit calculations about what sort of false negative/false positive rates we're willing to accept from the justice system. Which, in turn, implies that we must also be placing an implicit, finite cost on how much damage we think particular crimes actually cost.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
I think there are cases where it's justified to kill someone. I'd refer to aquinas' just war theory as being illustrative. Every death is a tragedy, but there are times where causing a lesser tragedy serves to prevent a greater. But note that I specified "helpless" person. Which-- relative to the carceral system-- inmates are. In older, meaner times, when society had fewer surplus resources, the relatively higher difficulty for the state to efficiently contain criminals made the death penalty more justifiable. But in the modern context, that's simply not the case.
So yes, I believe life imprisonment (where technically feasible) is more moral than killing. I wouldn't try to life-imprison an enemy soldier in the middle of a firefight, but I would absolutely prefer to imprison rather than execute them after their capture.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
Weirdly enough, I agree with you about the public flogging. It's also the reason I think arguments in favor of the death penalty fall apart on practical grounds. Carceral systems that include flogging as an alternative or supplement to fines and lengthy prison sentences demonstrate that it's possible to make fundamentally different tradeoffs about how we administer justice.
If you assume we're keeping everything the same about the current system, then the death penalty is verifiably a net economic negative. There's little evidence it is, in its current form, much of a deterrent, and it costs a lot of money to establish someone's guilt to the required standard. If you assume we're going to change the system somehow, to require a higher threshold of surety for guilt but also a lower threshold of double-checking to reduce costs... then why not assume we can change the system in other ways? I refuse to believe we can't engineer a way to make an entire adult human productive enough to be worth maintaining.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
What I’m saying is that you’ve outed yourself as a liar.
I can't wholly discount the possibility that my more fundamental beliefs about the sanctity of life have biased me towards believing evidence and arguments that present my anti-execution position as fulfilling both my values about utilitarian economic efficiency and my values about deontological behavior. And yes, since my deontological values are more fundamental than my utilitarian values, I would still be anti-death-penalty even if I thought it wasn't a utilitarian evil. But I was in no way being dishonest-- I genuinely believe everything I said about alternatives to the death penalty. I would prefer lifetime imprisonment over hard labor for everyone on track to receive the death penalty because of my utilitarian and deontological beliefs about slavery, but I would be happy to accept hard labor as an improvement to killing people.
As for your last accusation-- that I don’t actually care if that reason is true-- you are also completely wrong. It's true that I would ultimately be happy if you stopped supporting the death penalty regardless of why. (Though I'd privately think you were an idiot if you said something ridiculous, "lifetime imprisonment causes more net suffering" or alternatively the exact position I complained about in my original comment about people who are pro-execution but anti-government.) But I have practical objections against lying in arguments, and specifically in this case if you somehow managed to convince me that the death penalty was a utilitarian good versus alternative punishments I would reprioritize my time and emotional response. There's plenty of stuff that's a utilitarian evil but moral good, and plenty of stuff that's a utilitarian good but moral evil. Given that it's much harder to change peoples' minds on either of those categories, I prefer to focus my time on the slam-dunks that are both utilitarian and moral evils.
/u/Netstack if I haven't sufficiently toned down the heat of my rhetoric, please tell me and I'll stop responding to this subthread in general.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
It would be evil to make every prisoner live in a prison cell designed to make them sad all the time. But also... Prison is a punishment? And punitive measures can be used to achieve utilitarian and/or moral goals? Not every cell needs to be designed to make its inhabitants sad, but at least some of them probably should.
If the architect you're talking about genuinely felt that everyone should be sad all the time and his buildings were designed to do that, it would be evil. But I doubt that was genuinely his position l, and if it was he would bee the most incompetent supervillain of all time. I scrolled through his art and buildings and found several I unironically enjoyed, even as they reminded me of less than perfectly pleasant things.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
Have you ever ever obtained any sort of credential with a barrier to entry that enabled you to do specialized, abnormally renumerative work? If so, that's exactly the sort off thing I'm talking about. Unions are only one of many ways to obtain a labor monopoly.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
No amount of labor? Consider that statement very seriously. Would you seriously have executed that man if he were otherwise guaranteed to cure every form of cancer?
Everything about the justice system is an expected value calculation. If you let at most ten guilty men go free to save a innocent, you're implicitly saying that the risk of them committing crimes is outweighed by the good the innocent person could do. And you're also saying that an innocent person is worth less that the expected value of letting eleven criminals go free.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
Your stated concern is not your actual concern;
Yes. And? I want something from you. Does it make more sense for me to offer something I want, or something you want in return for it?
Are you seriously pissed off that I'm not assuming you should share my values and arguing from them?
If so, here's your argument: "Pope said so, Q.E.D."
Soldiers routinely commit atrocities worse than your average executed murderer, and yet people have been enslaving prisoners of war for literal milllenia. Forced labour literally pays for itself.
Prisoners don't have to be doing low-efficiency labor like breaking rock or pumping water out of lead mines... It's 2024. We can rent them out to mechanical turk for twelve hour a day and give them fentanyl doses to make sure they stay on task.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
Why wouldn't they have a union? It's in every corporation's self-interest to become a monopsony on labor so they can pay below market equilibrium rates for talent. It's in every worker's interest to become part of a monopoly on labor so they can force pay above market equilibrium.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
"makes me sad/makes me happy" is a separate axis from "good/evil" and a very separate axis from "ugly/pretty." Brutalist buildings are like tragic plays. Not every tragic play is good/pleasing, and not every play should be a tragedy, but people should be forced to read hamlet and people should be forced to interact with the occasional brutalist building.
I remember in particular the church my mother took me to in some of my earliest memories-- the famous brutalist church in UW Madison. I loved that church, and think it was a tragedy that it was later reformed. Sure-- it was ominous, and eerie. It doubtlessly inspired guilt, and fear, and terrible awe among its congregants. But those are all things one should feel before the Lord. It was unique, and special, and beautiful, and useful. Though I don't begrudge the Sagrada Familias of the world their status, it is no sin to build in styles more dour than rococo.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
The thing that pisses me off the most about this case are that so many people are like, "I think we should kill murderers, but executions of innocent people like this is why I oppose the death penalty".
They're the same, terrible, revenge-driven idiots as the pro-death-penalty people, they're just less slavishly subservient to the state apparatus. Whether this guy was innocent or not is totally immaterial-- what matters is the incredible investment of resources we spent as a society raising children to adulthood and how best we might make that investment back. "Hard Labor" is an infinitely better punishment, both for its renumerative and deterrent properties. A life in a reasonably comfortable prison followed by lots of media attention and then a relatively peaceful death is, at best, not very scary. And it wastes an entire human being. People clearly have no conception over how expensive people are. It's. Pure idiocy.
... And also killing a helpless person is morally wrong, but I suspect anyone willing to be convinced by morall arguments against the death penalty already has been.
GaBeRockKing
2mo ago
This kind of job is hard to fit in an hourly scheme, though. Do I go submit my time card with the random times I spent solving problems in my head while showering, walking my dog, etc.?
This is a solved problem. If you're getting paid hourly and there's no good way to discriminate non-work time from work-time you just claim as much time as you think your bosses and a court of law would let you get away with because that's what you're incentivized to do. If they can't accurately correlate your level of output to your hours worked that's a them problem.
And if so, how do we prevent trivially easy abuses?
You don't. Abuse is the point. There's no possible way to segregate between "legitimate" hourly work and "illegitimate" hourly work without massively expanding the regulatory state... which of course would lead to regulatory capture that would favor all the people favored by the current system anyways.
"No tax on overtime" is transparently the sort of populist bullshit that succeeds as messaging but is is totally unworkable as a policy proposal. It's a way for trump to tell blue-collar workers that he's their guy without having to actually promise workable policy. When he tries to pass this and it fails his base will blame congress instead of him, and then content themselves despite a complete lack of further advancement. Just like his "build the wall" spiel.
GaBeRockKing
2mo ago
Passing around information is what software engineers do. And more importantly, I'm under no impression that the value of my work is correlated to how long I work is correlated to how much I get paid. And yet it would be trivial accounting-wise to turn me into an hourly instead of salaried worker, and the same is true for the rest of the bullshit-email-job cadre. The business doesn't even need to pay me any more money on net; in fact they could pay me less and it would still be worth it looking at total post-tax compensation.
GaBeRockKing
2mo ago
Our society feels as if it is run for the benefit of retirees and people with fake email jobs.
Hi, I'm one of those people with a fake email job (software engineering.) You do understand that offices could easily shift to paying their employees hourly, right? I already track hours. CEOs work a massive amount of "overtime" too. Who's going to tell them that golfing with their business partners isn't a business meeting? They can just shift their stock compensation to income instead. "No taxes on overtime time" alone or in conjunction with "no taxes on tips" is effectively just a massive, widespread reduction on income taxes for everyone who's not a public servant.
If your goal is to destroy the public sector, balloon the deficit, and justify cuts to every type of welfare-- well, I admire the elegance of your murder weapon. But at least be honest about it. This isn't a proposal to "help blue collar workers." It's a proposal to kill medicare, social security, and medicaid all at the same time.
And for the record, I 100% believe Kamala Harris is going to end up saying something similar, just like she copied trump's homework on the "no taxes on overtime" thing. The only difference is, she'll also impose punitive wealth taxes and maybe a VAT to continue funding our existing welfare state. It's a truly no-win scenario.
GaBeRockKing
2mo ago
Today, of course, the entire industry should just be drowned in a bathtub. It is so ideologically captured as to be worthless. I don't care if I ever read another book of "literature" written after the year 1980.
I think you have an overly narrow view of what the "industry" is. The publishing industry, certainly is staffed mainly by 30 and 40 something white women trying to appeal to the same. But the superset-- the literature industry-- is much larger, still relevant, and wholly unkillable. We think of "literature" as being "classical books about people being depressed in russian" and "modern books about suburban moms leaving their husbands" because that's what we learned about in school and that's what makes it onto the talk shows. And so because nobody reads those books and actually changes what they believe, we think literature is a dead, academic pursuit. But in reality, I think it's stuff like dark romantasy smut and isekai webnovels that are having the greatest net effect on philosophical and moral development. (Which is a terrifying thought, but I digress.) You can find any number of people talking about how, for example, Mushoku Tensei changed their lives.
/u/coffee_enjoyer this is also relevant to your comment.
GaBeRockKing
2mo ago
I mean in exclusively the technical sense, but you're a scrub. Effective emoji use is associated with better social outcomes. (Low quality study but I'm being lazy since I don't think you'll disagree with me.) Emojis are the new midatlantic accent are the new cockney rhyming slang. Their aesthetic qualities are totally irrelevant-- what matters is that their effective use signals charisma and social status.
Talking about specific here is probably past the limits of my knowledge. I'd guess there are probably some small crimes where the optimal punishment is something like, "expedite criminal sentencing and limit appeals, then put someone in a really unpleasant cell for a few days," rather than "put someone in a moderately comfortable cell for six months." Where if the legal system gets something wrong you lose maybe a week or two of time and your countersuit costs taxpayers only a small amount of money, and where if the legal system gets something right you get a pointed reminder to not be a dickhead but don't stay in prison long enough to get institutionalized.
I'm actually in favor of the corporal punishment idea for the same reasons-- you can search my comment history to see my position on floggings.
But in any case, I'm taking a philosophical position here, not trying to recommend specific policy. I believe causing harm can be justified to enable a greater good, but harm should never be a goal in and of itself. I'm completely against the death penalty because in practical terms we have cheaper + more effective alternatives and in moral terms killing someone adds absolutely nothing to the world, while simultaneously depriving them of the chance for personal redemption and salvation.
I don't think architectural preference would matter matter. I sincerely doubt an attempt to actually design prison cells to maximize the things I want to maximize would actually look anything recognizably like "brutalist architecture," except in an incidental sense if I end up being cost-constrained.
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