JulianRota
11mo ago
I prefer name-brands over generics for several categories in which I've tried the generics and they are definitely worse quality for not much less money. I don't have particularly great taste, so it has to be pretty significantly worse for me to notice and care. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe you are. I don't see anybody trying to prove that the specific products I'm comparing here are actually identical.
JulianRota
11mo ago
I'm actually not sure that's the important point here. There was infact sufficient WMD materials to make the claim that, yep, we did in fact find WMDs (links: 550 metric tons of Yellowcake Uranium, thousands of US troops injured from chemical weapon cleanup, weapons captured by ISIS, as referenced in this Reddit comment). Granted, it wasn't a pile of shiny, new, ready to fire gas shells and bombs, but it seems to me it was enough to support a claim. So the question becomes, why did the media narrative become "definitely totally no WMDs whatsoever"? Perhaps the CIA etc could have faked more evidence, but exactly what evidence could they have faked that would plausibly change the narrative? It would certainly have to be at least better than what they actually did find. Or did the Mainstream Media decide in advance on the "definitely totally no WMDs whatsoever" narrative and interpret all evidence in favor of reporting that line.
I also think the lack of enthusiasm for future such adventures are more down to how totally bungled the aftermath was. The administration narrative pre-war was that the Iraqis all couldn't wait to be a peaceful stable Democracy, all we had to do was bump off Saddam's regime. If that had turned out to be actually true and Iraq was a nice stable democracy in 2004, I don't think anybody would care much to what extent the WMDs claim was actually true or reasonable believable at the time. The reluctance now is IMO more due to the fact that Saddam was actually keeping a lid on a bunch of millennia-old religious and tribal beefs that promptly blew up in our faces and we didn't have the slightest clue how to handle, and it took a decade and tremendous amounts of blood and treasure to get things sort of kind of stable. Who wants to repeat that?
JulianRota
11mo ago
I think China's treatment of the Uyghurs is an example of successfully suppressing Islamists. It's not exactly pretty, but it seems to work fairly well for them, despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the Western powers. They do seem to have the will to put boots firmly on their necks and keep them there for decades; perhaps that's what it takes.
JulianRota
11mo ago
Curiously, before I went on Keto, I noticed I would get some pretty nasty acid reflux for a few minutes at a time when I ate unusually high-carb meals. When I went on pretty strict Keto, that vanished entirely. I'm now on what I consider "lazy keto", where all the meals I make at home are pretty strict keto, but I don't sweat eating Keto much when I go out to eat, which is a few times a week, and drink beer when I do. It seems to do the job fairly well as far as keeping my weight from going up much but not being too much of a pain in the ass to stick to. The acid reflux is still gone though.
JulianRota
11mo ago
My last paragraph basically covers that. But to elaborate, I think this kind of thinking is coming at it the wrong way - start with something you think might be related to a pedophile child slavery ring and imagine how it could possibly work. I think the right way is the other way around - you already have a pedophile child slavery ring, complete with kidnapped kids, vetted customers, safe delivery mechanisms, etc. With all that already in place, why would you choose to handle your finances in this way versus all the other options available to you? Why advertise with pictures of kids and cheese pizza instead of something completely boring and unrelated? Why aren't there 200 better ways to arrange this than to make suspicious posts on Etsy?
I don't know if actual child slavery rings exist, but drug dealing rings definitely do. They seem to have mostly decided that trying to sell fake products on online services is more trouble than it's worth when it comes to moving highly illegal products and laundering the resulting money. If "fake art" is going to be your jam, better to arrange a private, appointment-only gallery, which is still a pretty legitimate-looking thing but doesn't involve potentially tens of thousands of strangers checking out your product, screenshots getting posted to Twitter, all the critical data on servers of third-parties that will hand it over to the FBI on demand, etc.
JulianRota
11mo ago
I've found the "official" conspiracy to be rather unlikely. I don't discount the possibility that they might be trafficking kidnapped children out of hand, but I don't see any rational way for any of this stuff to be involved in such an operation.
Presuming some operation along those lines is actually taking place, what's the point of posting an ad for such a thing, however disguised, on any public site? Surely you wouldn't dare make a delivery of such a thing, however that actually works, to just any random internet buyer. Buyers would have to be highly vetted and trusted. And any such buyers would probably want a lot more information about what they're buying and who they're buying it from than just a name that may or may not match up with a particular reported kidnapping victim and a semi-anonymous eBay or Etsy seller.
So there would have to be some other "real" marketplace where highly vetted buyers and sellers meet, with some way of inspecting the goods, reputations, etc and some way to arrange for deliveries. But if you have such a marketplace in place, what's the point of setting up these weird Wayfair, eBay, Etsy, etc items? Especially in public where any random yahoo can discover them and wonder what the heck is going on. Which gets us back to the old and strange point of it seeming far too much like a conspiracy to actually be one because any real conspiracy wouldn't be that obvious.
Possibly money laundering is the idea, possibly for such a scheme, but if you can manage to kidnap children in bulk, transport them around, and sell them to a market of buyers as an ongoing business without getting busted, surely you can figure out better ways to launder your money. If they have some kind of special juice with the Feds to get away with such a thing, why such a mickey-mouse level money laundering scheme?
JulianRota
11mo ago
I'm thinking the IRS probably operates more like a business than most parts of the Federal Government. For any possible enforcement action, they're going to be looking at how much money they put into it versus how much they'd recover, and they'll stick with the things that bring in the most money for the least effort.
Are they going to send a SWAT team to raid your house and drag you off to jail for 20 years? Probably not. All of that is super expensive (dozens of agents tied up all day, plus vehicles and gear etc) and not likely to lead to recovering much money.
If you're living a normal upper-middle-class lifestyle, they're going to write a letter to your payroll processor telling them to fix your withholding and garnish your wages, and they will. Then they'll write a letter to your bank telling them to hand over $x from your account, and they will. That takes 10 minutes of work for one guy at a desk and will probably recover whatever they want. If you think they took too much, well sucks to be you, you can spend your own $$$ and hire a lawyer to sue them, and good luck winning anything back. Maybe they'd let it slide for a few years until the amount owed goes over $100k, but no reason to think they'd forget about it entirely when they can still collect easily.
If you're a weird hippie who went to the trouble to have hard to track income and savings, maybe they'll just ignore it because it's too much work to track down and probably not all that much money anyways. Why bother, when writing letters to compliant corporations regarding normal upper-middle-class people is much faster and easier and yields much more money.
For a Donald Trump level figure (let's say pre-Presidency, so kind of a stand-in for any super-rich cantankerous person with weird complex finances), they can assume it'll take tons of their resources to really audit what's going on with him, and he's going to throw a dozen of his own high-priced lawyers and accountants at you, so maybe they'll just leave it alone unless they think they have a rock-solid case that you owe big bucks that they can actually collect.
I actually read some of the "War Tax Resistance" people's website. They don't seem to have much better advice for avoiding enforcement action. Basically, don't work for people who will report to the IRS and obey their garnishment letters, and don't hold money in banks they can track easily.
JulianRota
11mo ago
I think I'll take a pass on discussing the morality of it. I'd question the practicality though. Let's think here.
So it seems the primary mechanisms of enforcement against most people are through other institutions - they tell W2 employers to knock it off on bad withholding filings, and they do, they tell banks and investment institutions to hand over owed money, and they will. They know about all your bank accounts because the banks report to the IRS too. I am willing to believe that the IRS's most-feared punitive measures are actually pretty rare to come into contact with as the LW OP describes, but what is the plan for dealing with such institutional enforcement? You can choose to not actually write a check to the IRS when they come knocking, but your payroll processor and bank won't.
So then plans for refusing to pay taxes are mostly about living a lifestyle that avoids all such institutions. The low-end one is a pretty obvious option - take a job that pays cash under the table, seek living arrangement that accept cash, never use a bank. Certainly possible to do, but that's pretty low-end living, you'd have to be really determined to do that.
Maybe there's a Bitcoin variety of this? If you can take a job that pays in Bitcoin and doesn't pay attention to taxes, it might be possible to make pretty good money like that. Maybe you could convert that directly to cash by various means, buy prepaid cards and such, and consume luxury goods at a normal rate. Not sure about living space though, I don't think you can buy with crypto or any landlords would accept it, but maybe a roommate will, or would accept converted cash? Or maybe in a super-techy space like SV you could infact rent or buy with crypto. Though if you buy, you'll owe property taxes, which I'm not sure if we're also objecting to here. So maybe this is a practical way to avoid paying income taxes entirely while not living a minimum-wage lifestyle?
But then, the crypto world is not exactly a bastion of honest dealing and fiscal responsibility. What are the odds your crypto employer will pay the correct amount on time every time? How about the people trading crypto for physical goods? The failure rate for bank-like institutions working with crypto is not great either. I'm not even saying the scam and fraud rate is super-high, but if you're relying on it for your primary financial dealings, just one serious mishap could be a huge deal, even if it only happens once every few years. And where's the recourse on any of that? Think the police or courts will give a crap? I doubt it. Hey, organizations that are built around avoiding all taxes and regulation are rather less honest than the "legit" world, who would have guessed? If they're willing to screw over the Feds for more cash, why wouldn't they screw you over too - you're much easier and less dangerous to screw than the Federal Government. Maybe living and working in the normal regulated world isn't so bad after all, even if the Federal Government is not exactly great. Also, it seems kinda lame to be like, I hate the government so much that I refuse to pay any taxes ever, but then go crying to them for help when some third-party scams you.
Along the lines of there being other risks and dangers than the Government, if you live the all-cash or all-crypto no-taxes lifestyle, and you are anything but dirt poor, then you will probably have substantial cash/crypto lying around somewhere. This makes you an attractive robbery target. If you have any social life at all, people will figure this out eventually. You will be targeted. I've known people this has happened to, despite not being as obvious as guy who pays cash for everything because he wants to pay no taxes ever. Organized multi-person burglary schemes can very much happen to you if word gets around that you have 5-figures of cash lying around. Think the cops are gonna help? Unlikely. If you go crying to them that you got ripped off for $50k cash, they're probably going to be a lot more interested in why you had that much cash around than busting whoever did it. Also falls under the theme of, how you gonna refuse to pay taxes because you hate the government so much, then cry to them for help when somebody else screws you over.
I guess the independent community life might be an option. Can be called a "commune" or a "compound" depending on your politics. It can be a viable way to pay little to no taxes without living a completely shitty life. But it's definitely a very different lifestyle. If you dig that, well more power to you I guess, but I don't think it's worth going to that much trouble just for the specific reason of avoiding paying taxes.
So yeah, I don't have a strong moral objection to it, but show me a way to live a no-tax life that's not completely shitty and doesn't expose me to much more likely dangers than whatever the Federal Government is doing, and maybe I'd be into it. If it exists.
JulianRota
11mo ago
His popularity is interesting, but we've all been on this ride (of third party Presidential candidacies) before, and it doesn't end well. The system isn't structured for it. At best, all they accomplish is to take votes away from the main party candidate that's closest to their views, thus ensuring that the one further from their views wins. See Ross Perot. If you want to seriously argue for it, you need a reason why this time might be different.
JulianRota
11mo ago
To fill in some more details, I'm working in tech too, at a medium-large company. Not super hip and not one of the tech majors, but in the business, maybe like 1-1.5k developers total. The department I'm in has maybe like 10 or so female engineers, i.e. whose job is primarily writing code, and another few dozen in testing, product, and project management roles. Near as I can tell, all of them are ordinary straight biological women. I mean, I haven't like had sex with any of them or done medical exams or whatever, but all the ones I've seen certainly look like ordinary women, and most of them have normal-looking husbands or boyfriends and quite a few have been pregnant at some point. If any are secretly trans, I would be quite surprised. We have had a few gay men, but not any gay women that I know of.
There is exactly one person total at the company I am aware of who I suspect might be a trans woman. This person works in a completely different department and lives in another state, and I have never seen her in person or had any professional contact with her. I'm only guessing due to her face looking kind of masculine in a Slack profile pic and being oddly interested in pronoun declarations and other such woke things.
JulianRota
11mo ago
I've been interested in much more radical forms of education than shuffling classes around.
The current American school system seems to have basically no idea what to do with kids who seriously don't want to bother at all and don't have parents who care. They're required to do something with them though. It seems most of them send them through to the next grade anyways, even if they barely did anything and fought them every step of the way, either so they aren't that school/teacher's problem anymore or so they don't look so bad for failing so many students. Perhaps they should be able to just kick some kids out completely, though it's harder to figure out a system to make that possible but not also let them kick out every kid who's only slightly difficult. I dunno the right solution but there's gotta be something better than just sticking our fingers in our ears and humming loudly to pretend the problem doesn't exist.
I've always thought that there's way too much structure in current schooling. Too much, we'll stick you in a class where you must do X, Y, and Z, and get a grade based on how well they do it. Little kids I've been around always seem super curious, something perverse must be going on if they usually hate and get nothing from the system that's supposed to teach them. What happens if we designed a system around letting them do much more self-directed things? Ask why something happened, or something is a certain way, well here's a library and the internet, you tell me! Wanna build like a go-cart or a video game or something? Here's all the tools and guides, get to it, we'll give you a few pointers.
Seems to me that a lot of problems come from trying to come up with a generalized solution to everyone all the time. How can we do less of that, have a bunch of options all over the map for how you can learn. Maybe something like the voucher systems that have been talked about. Maybe flexible enough that you can go to something like today's regular conventional school, or the one in my previous paragraph if you do well in that environment, or just skip it and do real work as some kind of apprentice instead if you hate school but your family really needs the money, like my first paragraph. Of course then it's hard to judge success, which huge bureaucratic systems tend to do poorly without, but maybe that's the problem in the first place, we need less huge nationwide bureaucracy in this mess.
JulianRota
11mo ago
I'd echo "touch grass" for this, though it sounds a bit snarky. I live in a big blue city, NYC, and I work for a large tech company that spouts all the usual platitudes about equality etc. Even so, the presence of trans people is wildly exaggerated by both pro and anti trans media. Presuming you aren't going out of your way to go to LGBT+ events, it's pretty rare to even see a trans person. I don't think I've ever actually worked with any.
On top of the numerical rareness, the vast majority of trans people act like ordinary people most of the time. If you interact with them, you'll be talking about whatever work you're doing or some pedestrian hobby or something, their gender situation doesn't really come up unless you go out of your way to ask about it, and most would rather avoid or minimize any discussion of it anyways. If they look a little strange or unpleasant, well most people are able to talk to men and women who are just ugly but not trans without spontaneously yelling out about how ugly they are, so you can probably handle treating actual trans people the same.
No need to let the admittedly poor behavior of a tiny minority of a tiny minority (and the disturbing excusing of it by activists...) cloud your mind about people around you who behave reasonably.
Some aspects of it may seem a little weird or gross, but I could name like 10 categories of people I find much more annoying going about my life in this city. I'm far more grossed out by the dude shooting up on the sidewalk or sleeping on a subway grate in filthy rags than the guy walking around and buying a sandwich with a 5-o'clock shadow and beer gut, but also a dress and high heels (yes, all things I've personally seen multiple times).
JulianRota
11mo ago
Maybe not so much a mistake, rather an idea being limited due to it being new and there not being any way to try to put it into practice yet.
I tend to think the biggest issue is the huge variance in human intelligence. There are already mental hospitals and insane asylums full of people who just can't handle the real world at all. Millions of humans can't write down their thoughts coherently. A ChatGPT-4 level model programmed to pretend to be human could probably already seem smarter and more human than some fraction of the present human population. Especially if whoever is judging has not been primed to think that the thing they're communicating with might not be an actual human being.
JulianRota
11mo ago
Now I wonder. I don't think the actual suggestion is something I'd get behind. But if we step it back a little...
Say I, or any of us, were to have some current-generation LLM trained on everything we'd ever written and tweaked as appropriate. Then, we never post on TheMotte again but instead give that LLM our account and set it up to try its best to post as we do. I wonder how long it would take for anybody to notice. How long before somebody says, man, user X's posts seem a little less interesting than usual, I wonder if something happened to them.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I think it's worth keeping in mind that all English-language media from Al Quada, Bin Laden, etc after around the mid-90s is propaganda aimed not at middle eastern Arabs and Muslims, but at Western leftists who can be persuaded to sympathize with aspects of their cause. There's no reason to believe that it has any relation to what actually drives middle eastern Muslims to join the cause. Any messaging aimed at them would be in Arabic and published in news sources and media channels that they actually read.
I believe their actual motivations, which drives their actual planners and recruits, are along the lines of what is described here. That's from 2002, the Iraq war advocacy has not aged terribly well, but I think the second section on the actual motivations of Islamic fundamentalists is still right on the nose. Short version is that they're mad that western secular values have permeated the world and their own societies and have proven to be far more successful than Islamic fundamentalist societies. As such, they're likely to continue opposing us no matter what we do regarding Israel.
Also, as screye describes below, it seems that letter was in fact written by a radicalized American. As such, the real story is less that maybe Osama had a point than that the class of people who make this type of video are so utterly ignorant that they are trivially manipulated into apologism for an ideology that would have their women locked in the home, only allowed out in Burqas, and their men murdered if they fail to convert to Islam and practice it their way.
JulianRota
1yr ago
All I've been able to find on it in the history, for as much as I care to dig, is this small picture. No idea if it's some quest he made up or an actual thing. I can't find any reference to it anywhere else. Assuming Rov_Scam's description of Sagwon, the supposed destination, is correct (a quick glance at Google maps satellite view suggests that it is), it sounds more like something made up, and I don't have high hopes for it.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I'd side with Southkraut that it's not necessarily a terrible idea. I don't expect it will do anything at all for your social skills or success with women, but it could still be a cool accomplishment. It's at least as cool as climbing Mount Everest in my book, and less over-hyped. The big asterisk is your preparation, which I have no idea about and as far as I can tell you haven't posted much about.
If you're otherwise a generic suburbanite physically who occasionally runs a few blocks when the whether is nice, then you will definitely die doing this and you should abandon the idea if you have any brains at all. I hope you're not that unprepared, but that's one extreme.
If you're spending the 2 years leading up to it training hard at extreme cold weather wilderness survival, long-term hiking and survival, wilderness navigation, solo mountain climbing, and other related skills, then you might be able to do it. Have you at least accomplished something 5% as hard as that already? Hell, 5% as hard should feel so routine as to be boring before you think about trying this.
JulianRota
1yr ago
In 2017, I think Trump was under the impression that the bureaucracy would behave as though he was the CEO of the country, but it seems to me that he has learned that it doesn't work this way and could plausibly replace large amounts of that bureaucracy.
What bothers me about this point is - why didn't he figure this out 3 months after he took office, if not sooner? If he didn't figure it out and take effective counter-action against it then, why should we believe he is properly prepared to do it now?
A really effective conservative President at this point should come into office like Elon Musk went into the CEO position at Twitter. Everyone who might be opposed to him is out on their asses in 5 seconds. Cut every office that is obviously useless and like 50% of the company too, just so everyone knows you're dead serious. Adopt policies that are a little wacky at lightning speed just to be really sure everybody is going along with it whether they like it or not. Etcetra.
Hell, maybe we should do Musk for President. I may not love every bit of his politics, but he has demonstrated the ability to rapidly and decisively break a large bureaucratic machine to his will.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I can't see the AGI connection part, mostly because it doesn't seem to relate much to executive reshuffling. If anything along those lines happened serious enough to justify moving executives around, surely they would need to do something far more significant than that. Probably they would be best positioned to deal with any such thing with the current team in place. So I doubt it has anything to do with that.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Then possibly most people considered it too obviously dumb to bother trying to refute. But it's hard to be sure without evidence. Which doesn't exist, at least partly because you keep deleting your comments.
I've mostly responded to you at face value, but I'm honestly at least 50% odds you're actually an anti-semitic troll. Mostly because you keep deleting any evidence that might prove you aren't. I see you've now been officially asked by a mod to stop and have agreed. If you're legitimate and you do, you may work your way back into being trusted by most of the forum. If you don't stop, that'll make it nearly 100% that you're at the very least engaging here in bad faith, and quite possibly actively trying to promote anti-semitism too.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Man, I definitely remember reading about this at the time, but I can't seem to find anything solid on it now easily. I'm pretty sure that the severe real estate price swings were limited to a few counties in IIRC South Florida, Southern California, and around Vegas. Everyone else was mostly okay, at least as far as real estate investments, provided they didn't take out a crazy mortgage for something that they couldn't actually afford. Most of the nationwide and worldwide pain was from the knock-on effects of the banks' investment instruments collapsing.
JulianRota
1yr ago
In my experience, they mostly get a fairly negative response, if not necessarily right away, assuming they actually are bad. As do most comments advocating for other types of general bias against any type of identity group. Can you link any that you don't think got enough pushback?
Arguing about things you really care about can be challenging here, as you need to maintain high standards even against whatever viewpoint you hate the most. I tend to recommend that if you feel a certain category of generalized negativity against a group personally offends you due to your identity, you refrain from responding to those posts, as you are likely to make poor arguments that attract downvotes and bans. Find some other things to discuss instead. If you see something like that, just note it and come back to it a few days later, and you may be pleasantly surprised by the responses it has gotten.
In my opinion, if there's any identity group that this board is a little too hard against, it's women. I feel a bit weird about how highly upvoted comments I've made critical of feminism get. I know at least one woman has left the board because of it. It's a shame, but we have plenty of other great female posters here who can take that in stride.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I'm not sure it's possible to make general housing market predictions at all. Even at the height of the 2008 mortgage crisis in the US, the housing market was actually pretty okay in the great majority of the country, the real issue with housing prices only actually happened in 5 specific counties. Someone would have to be familiar with the local market where you are to take a guess at whether your local housing market is actually in a bubble.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Have you been prescribed facial corticosteroids by a dermatologist?
Yes I was, and I have kept using it and getting fresh prescriptions for I think like 15 years. They kept talking about "skin thinning", but nothing noticeable happened to me. They kept making me try other things, but nothing else worked (I don't remember most of the things they got me to try unfortunately). Personally, I'd rather take my chances with "skin thinning" than live with terrible itchy flaky skin on my face. I actually found that chart I linked when I was thinking about trying to order some prescription stuff from one of those sketchy overseas places that doesn't need prescriptions because I was getting seriously tired of them trying to push other things that didn't work on me. I didn't go through with that because all I could find was the ridiculously strong class 1 ones that might actually do something bad, but it did give me the idea to try the weaker OTC class 7 stuff since it's basically the same thing, just less potent. That seems to work, so I figure I both solved my problem of keeping my skin decent without dealing with annoying dermatologists and also somewhat went along with their fears by going with a weaker non-prescription version.
Obvious disclaimer, I'm not a doctor at all and haven't examined you, if you follow my example you're doing it at your own risk. I'd say try it for a week though with the OTC stuff. If it doesn't work, you're no worse off. If it works a little, consider trying to get some of the stronger versions by prescription. If it works great, then you get to decide if having something that actually works is worth possible long term risks of skin thinning. It sounds like mainstream medical advice hasn't exactly served you that well anyways.
Thanks for doing this and posting about it, very interesting. The results are roughly what I presumed - these LLM-based "AI"s are pretty good at regurgitating and mixing and matching things it's already seen, but have no real ability to reason and fall flat fast when asked to do anything unusual or unexpected.
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