MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
4d ago
That seems like a massive incentive for people to want to touch American soil. And either a ridiculous strain on the ability for America to care for all of its citizens, or more likely a decrease in the standard of care. Americans get really really really mad if foreigners harm American citizens, its a really scary threat of war. If literal billions of people can take a boat ride to America, touch its soil, then go back home a citizen, we can't protect them all from their actual nations. Either America gets dragged into every way because both nations are filled with dual-citizen honorary Americans, or we can't do that anymore and actual Americans have a lot fewer rights when traveling abroad.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4d ago
Amend it.
I'm imagining a hypothetical solution which would solve the actual dilemma of [People from third world countries want to come here to make lots of money (relative to what they can make back home)] + [Employers here want cheap labor] + [Many citizens here don't want to be overrun and outvoted by lower class and culturally foreign people with no long term investment in this nation or its continuity]. It requiring a constitutional amendment is yet one more reason why it's politically infeasible. No way the pro immigration people would ever allow that. But it would still solve most of the issues of the actual foreigners who want to come work here, since we could let many more of them in legally if they didn't carry all the costs of proper citizens: ie are guaranteed working and exempt from all the expensive social services and could be easily deported if they cause problems.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5d ago
Not politically viable, but if the issue is the economy then the obvious solution is to just make worker visas that let them bypass minimum wage laws. Get a bunch of workers to come and work for the cheap jobs that nobody wants to do for low money, but they still have to pay taxes, don't get to have anchor babies, and they eventually leave when it expires and return with piles of money to their families back home.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7d ago
My wife uses it for identifying plants. Every spring we have a bunch of stuff start sprouting up in the garden and she's not sure what's a weed that needs to be plucked and what's a flower that survived/seeded from last year that we might as well keep. But the phone knows, even when they're tiny little sprouts with a couple of leaves.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8d ago
It's called the "grandfather of isekai" for a reason. Not that it was the first ever isekai, but that it was fairly early, and so fantastic that everyone wanted to copy it, and also made a bunch of people want to make isekai and read isekai. The only reason I got into the genre was because Mushoku Tensei was the best story I've ever read and I wanted to find more stuff like it, although everything since hasn't quite lived up to it (some of the better ones come close).
MathWizard
Good things are good
10d ago
To be clear, he never fundamentally changes who he is as a person. He starts as a creepy pervert who steals panties, molests sleeping girls, and tries to groom his childhood friend, and progresses into a mostly harmless pervert who respects boundaries, asks for consent, has multiple wives but doesn't cheat on them, doesn't steal additional panties anymore even when offered on a silver platter by his minions, and keeps his panty shrine in the basement where others don't have to see it (also, it's less creepy after they're married, though only slightly).
He's still the same person, he still has the same desires, but he learns how to channel them into unharmful ways. I suppose you could say the lesson this teaches is "You're not automatically a bad person if you're a pervert, you just have to curtail the parts that actually harm the people around you. You can enjoy yourself AND be a good person if you do it correctly." Which, while highly controversial, seems like an excellent lesson to teach people, especially people with similar proclivities.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10d ago
The best story I have ever read is Mushoku Tensei. The original webnovel, although I believe the light novel is just a more edited and refined version of it (and the anime is also fantastic although it skips a lot of the deeper worldbuilding and isn't finished yet).
A lot of people bounce off of it, because first of all it's very japanese weeb anime harem. And the main character starts off as a creepy pervert scumbag with some very uncomfortable behaviors that turn a lot of people off. And the story does not smite him down with the force of a thousand suns. It gives him time. It lets him grow and change and learn and slowly become a better person. Slowly, there isn't ever a moment where the story tells him "no, you were bad and now you have to do a 180 and become the opposite and shun everything you once were." It's about redemption through slow and gradual growth and understanding. And also building a harem of cute anime waifus, there is still that, so it's not actually a story for everyone. But it basically mastered the isekai genre before it was even a proper genre, and every generic isekai slop to come out has been cargo culting features from Mushoku Tensei without understanding why they were there in the first place.
I highly recommend it. It's super long, it has a single broad overarching plot that was planned for from the very beginning rather than the author flailing around inventing new plot threads every arc, and it masterfully sets up characters and plot elements in early chapters that show up again way later in interesting ways. And it subverts a lot of tropes too and does stuff with the main character and villain and side characters that I haven't seen in other stories. It's not for everyone, but people who do like it it really really really like it. It's my favorite story ever, so I recommend it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10d ago
The self-doubt in Empire Strikes Back and The Last Jedi always felt really weird to me. Like, Luke is never actually tempted by the dark side. There is nothing the dark side ever has to offer him that he wants, he never struggles with his darker tendencies. It's just people warning him "Darth Vader used to be on our side, then he turned evil, and you remind me of him". There's never actually any reason for him to turn, and never any threat that the audience could take seriously of it happening, even without plot armor. Even if he did obey the Emperor and strike down Darth Vader in anger, there's no plausible reason he would switch sides, he'd just strike down the Emperor too.
I think it's mostly just there to make it more cathartic when he does it the other way around and converts Darth Vader. But it's still weird how everyone in universe takes it so seriously.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10d ago
When another woman distributes a naked picture of herself, or sells sex at a discount, it means I now receive less resources for the same amount of sex.
That is indirect. This is the distinction I was trying to make by using that qualifier. Direct harm would be if someone literally steals money from you. Indirect harm is when someone does something that does not actually involve you, but has second order effects on you, such as economically competing with you and lowering your market value via supply and demand. The State doesn't/shouldn't make it illegal to open a gas station across the street from another gas station. The State doesn't/shouldn't make it illegal to open a soup kitchen and distribute free food next to a restaurant. The State doesn't/shouldn't make it illegal to distribute or sell sex for free or at a cheaper rate than someone else.
MathWizard
Good things are good
12d ago
As a general rule, actions which are immediately and directly harmful to others should be outlawed by the state. Actions which are generally anti-social but via some combination of indirectness, mildness, or fundamental to freedom or other universal human rights are not appropriate targets for the State's jurisdiction should be shamed and shunned but technically permitted. Actions which are neutral or have primarily personal impact (no externalities) should be tolerated. Actions which are positive but indirect should be socially praised and encouraged. Actions which are strongly positive, and have direct and objective measuremes should be subsidized, funded, or directly done by the State.
I see no reason why actions being done related to sex or done by women should be exceptions to this rule one way or another. Harmful actions like rape should be illegal. Anti-social actions like spreading STDS or having children outside of marriage should be shamed. Non-diseased non-procreative sex should be mostly ignored/tolerated. Having healthy happy relationships should be celebrated. Having reproductive and well-run families should be subsidized.
Half the problem is society and the media shaming housewives and celebrating career-obsession and promiscuity. If that just stopped a lot of people would have nicer relationships and families of their own volition, no compulsion required. Just stop digging the hole deeper.
MathWizard
Good things are good
15d ago
I read a few dozen chapters back when it was coming out. It was okay, but I didn't care for it a ton. It's on my list of stories I might go back and finish some day, but probably won't actually get around to.
MathWizard
Good things are good
16d ago
I just discovered and have been binging "The Years of Apocalypse" on Royal Road. Probably the most succinct summary I can give is: "It's almost Mother of Learning." Less rational, less super deep in depth worldbuilding, less comedy, less overarching grand mystery time loop shenanigans. But only very slightly less. Second best time loop story I've ever read, it's fantastic.
MathWizard
Good things are good
22d ago
Who is the best, most sane, and intelligent, centrist or left-leaning commentator/podcaster you can recommend for me to listen to? I'm a bit worried that as the Motte trends further rightward that I'm in too much of a filter bubble, and most of the stuff I naturally listen to is right-leaning, because the stuff that's explicitly leftist is braindead and infuriating. I don't want someone ranting about how Trump is Hitler, I want people good, calm, and reasoned defenses for their positions that I don't already agree with so I can understand their position and maybe find some insights that I previously dismissed as braindead because I only heard the stupid version of it before. I used to like Sargon of Akkad for this, because he was in a nice centrist zone: left on some issues but right on others, but every year he drifts further right and I don't think he serves this purpose anymore.
I like to listen to people talk about stuff while I'm playing casual games that don't take up too much brain power or require audio themselves, so multi-hour broadcasts with a lot of backlog are ideal. I do read things sometimes, obviously since I'm here, but I'm mostly looking for audio right now.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
- Implement Georgist LVT, assessing the rent value of land and taxing people that value.
- Use the same land value assessment mechanisms to "tax" all government owned land. It basically pays the money to itself, but this requires the value to show up in the budget, publicly displaying the amount of value the government is forgoing by holding onto the land instead of letting people have it (as determined by the market and how much people would be willing to spend to have access to that land). And also if the federal government is hogging land in different amounts owned by different states then it owes them funding for that land, so the money can get shuffled around a bit.
- Have the government make informed and transparent decisions about what the benefit of keeping the land undeveloped provides and which ones are or are not worth this cost. Sell off the parts with high market price relative to public value, keep the ones with low market price relative to public value.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
In my case, the goal is the end product. I want a videogame with every single feature I want in a game and none of the features I don't want, and whenever I run out of content I can make more content. The software project is "for fun", in that the game is for fun and tailored to me specifically, I don't think it will ever be commercially viable, but 70% of the fun is (or would be if I ever get anywhere) the game itself, 25% is being able to think about game design features and add and tweak things, 5% is the actual coding line by line. If I could tell an AI what features I want and have it keep adding them cohesively and coherently on a global level without hallucinating or forgetting details from months ago, I would easily drop the 5% line by line coding part.
Instead I keep getting bored and losing motivation because I get too ambitious and it takes too long to do what I want to do before I get to enjoy it in a playable state.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
By redistributing the proceeds/profits as a "citizens dividend" which is just UBI except the value is determined based on LVT revenue rather than cost of living. Although not the most economically efficient, the most philosophically/morally sound version of it is that you tax land based on its market rent value as measured via supply and demand, divide it equally into N pieces where N is the number of eligible recipients (which might be all citizens above 18, or all citizens including children, or all permanent residents, the specifics don't matter a ton here) then give each person that money.
It is their birthright as human beings and as citizens of the nation to an equal share of the land. Anyone who owns an average amount of land (not merely surface area, but weighted based on desirability) is net zero. Their LVT and their citizens dividend perfectly cancel out. They are morally entitled to live on or otherwise use a fair and equal portion of the land, same as everyone else. Anyone who owns an above average amount of land (or corporations which by themselves don't receive LVT) has a higher LVT burden to pay for the privilege of hogging up more space than their birthright. Anyone who owns a below average amount of land profits from getting more dividend than their tax burden. Essentially, everyone "owns" an equal share of the land, but some of them are leasing their land to others (or corporations) for money.
Even if efficiency gets really high, and therefore land values, and therefore tax burdens rise, anyone who doesn't want to participate in a Malthusian race for endless efficiency can simply satisfy themselves with an average sized home in an average valued location and pay net zero. This does provide economic pressure to reduce to below average, but the compensation rises accordingly. This is good. This means people can voluntarily downsize and live in a below average area (or out in a rural area that is in low demand) in order to free up valuable land for the high efficiency people and corporations to use, and those people and corporations then compensate the downsizers for the privilege of using their land. This is both just and economically efficient. The people who give up their land are the ones who choose to based on the economic incentive.
There is a potential downside where someone who has lived in the same home for decades might get kicked out if the value of the land around them rises faster than their own income. This is a serious issue, and most Georgists seem kind of cavalier about it. But there are potential solutions such adjusting tax rates slowly in response to rapidly changing prices, essentially grandfathering people in.
It gets slightly more complicated if you're replacing existing taxes with LVT and so not all of it can be redistributed via a dividend. But if you fix the amount of government spending, then in the limit as efficiency and thus LVT increases the excess can still be redistributed via a dividend and simplify to the above dynamics on the margin.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Seems to me like a hack step gesturing towards Georgism without getting all the way there and losing out on some of its better features. Primarily the economic efficiency, but through it also some of the justification. The country is a meta-market, paying an army to create a safe environment (land) where businesses and marketplaces can exist safely, without fear of disruption by foreign armies. This creates a finite amount of safe land to use. People should pay in proportion to the amount (and desirability) of the land that they use. If someone makes a business that is twice as efficient and earns twice as much money on the same plot of land, then they shouldn't owe twice as much tax. The army doesn't cost twice as much in response to their efficiency, the other people around them aren't being burdened twice as much by their efficiency. They earned extra money by their own cleverness and good business sense, they owe tax only in proportion to what they used from the commons (land, and similar limited resources that are economically defined as "land"). Contrarily, if someone snatches up huge swathes of land and then squats on them, generating basically value but still requiring the same amount of military defense and taking up space that someone else could have used, this "fair tax" wouldn't have them pay any more than a homeless man, while a land value tax would.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
At the very least the longevity would be nice. Living 80 years as a human and then putting your brain into a robot body, or ship of theseusing your parts as they fail, seems strictly better than living 80 years as a human and then dying, provided the robot body is good enough to not be literal torture.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
A good reason for this not to be a place to read AI slop is that place already exists: https://chatgpt.com/. People who want to can just generate it themselves. Unless you are privy to some super advanced proprietary AI that isn't yet available to the public and blows all of the public ones out of the water, each and every one of us can go ask ChatGPT any questions about any topics we care about and get generic AI responses to them. Or better yet, stuff more tailored to our own interests and in our own styles, and can ask followup questions. Same reason I don't need to see your AI generated pictures or hear your AI generated music, but am enjoying generating my own.
AI land already exists. I'd like this place to exist too and be distinct from it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Do you need to care about the environment to get an electric car? My brother is big into EVs because he's... I'm not even sure what to call it, mechanical tech nerd? Like he's obsessed with electric cars, electric unicycles, fancy powerful flashlights, and stuff like that, rather than computers and programming.
You don't have to pay for gas, you can use regenerative braking and stuff, it runs really smooth and quiet. The only reason to buy a gas car is because they're cheaper up front. For now. If Teslas can continue to improve technologically and get cheaper then they have a real future among normal people buying them for practical reasons, completely divorced from ideology.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Example 4 shows that to be an "oppressed minority" it matters that the overall sentiment of society is against you, rather than just anyone. Thought I also argue this above, example 5 shows us that in order to measure the disadvantage you hold in society, you have to multiply the amount of people who are against you by the extent to which they're against you. You should also multiply this by how powerful they are (if those against you are 10 times more powerful, they count for 10 times more). Now, simply find out if the sum of the sentiments in your favor minus the sum of sentiments against you, is bigger or smaller than 0. On the makro scale, this decides if you're oppressed or not, and the average sentiment is necessarily going to be the opposite of what it claims unless it's exactly 0 (If society as a whole arrives at the conclusion that society as a whole is against you, we arrive at a contradiction).
If you define this too strictly then it becomes tautologically true but meaningless. One could never know whether one is an "oppressed minority" unless one first painstakingly computes this sum, find it less than zero and then, having done so, can generalize it no further than saying that the sum is less than zero.
This only matters if it affects things we care about. So heuristically I mostly agree with the general mathematical framing, provided we are careful to measure the "extent to which they're against you" by actions more than words. Words probably count a little bit since they affect social outcomes and psychological well-being, but things like violence or job opportunities matter much more. Here then is I think where the apparent "paradox unravels", in that the internal sentiment of people materializes at different rates in the realm of socially expressed sentiment and actual material outcomes. In a phrase: "talk is cheap". Zooming in on Example 3, we have a world where 90% of people say they support C, they get angry when B do terrible things to C. If they witness a discriminatory event in person they probably get upset at the B who did it, yell at them a bit, and then go make a social media post about how awful B are. The apparent social sentiment is overwhelming in favor of C, and thinks B are horrible ignorant scum. But if they don't actually do anything about it, then it's all just surface level talk and C continue to get discriminated against while B are fine as long as they make do a little bit of op-sec so they don't get witnessed discriminating too publicly.
If your model defines "oppressed minority" using apparent public sentiment in the equation, it will classify C here as "not oppressed", and fail to recognize a scenario which, while not a central example, shares a lot of the bad features associated with being an oppressed minority. At the very least, some new term needs to be used to describe this and a problem needs to be solved, rather than ignored because it's "not real oppression".
If instead your model defines "oppressed minority" using actual behaviors in the equation then you have a major legibility issue in that it's really really hard to measure. You can easily have a society in which apparent public sentiment is overwhelming in favor of one side but they're still an "oppressed minority" because the behaviors skew the other way.
In either case, the map is not the territory. Whatever word you use for it, it's entirely possible to have a society in which the majority of public sentiment skews one way and the majority of actionable offensive and defensive behaviors skew the other. It's rare, because public sentiment and behaviors are correlated, and I don't think it's the world we live in (in the U.S.) but it's logically possible.
If you can convince everyone that you're an oppressed minority, you're not. That you can get the majority on your side proves that you are not discriminated against or in a vulnerable position, as being in a vulnerable and oppressed position is defined by having the majority against you.
I don't think this tracks. I'm going to use hypothetical thought experiments, because the counterexamples are somewhat contrived and thus rare in real life, but still logically possible.
Example 1: We have groups A (51%) B(48%) C(1%). A treats everyone equally regardless of their type. B hates C with a passion and will harass, threaten, ostracize, refuse service etc to any members of C (Let's suppose there are no explicit anti-discrimination laws, so refusing service is allowed. Violence is not allowed, but occurs anyway when they can get away with it). A thinks this is wrong, and will believe members of C, be on their side, and think poorly of members of B who they witness doing it, but offers no material support in favor of C to help against it other than treating them fairly the same as they treat anyone else. If the hatred and harassment that B inflicts on C is severe enough, I think C counts as an oppressed minority despite having "support" from the majority.
Example 2: As above, except A is (48%) and B is (51%). Now C is technically oppressed by the majority, and has minority support. Politically this distinction is likely to be important, since now explicitly Anti-C politicians are more likely to be elected and Anti-C policies are more likely to pass legislatively. But for day to day life not much changes between this and example 1. About half of the people a C person meets will harass them and half will not. Hopefully this demonstrates that the "majority" distinction isn't especially important.
Example 3: As above except A is (89%) and B is (10%). So now B is a meaningful minority, though not as minor as C. And yet 10% of businesses are owned by B, 10% of police officers are B, 10% of strangers you pass by on the sidewalk at night are B, and they all hate C and continue to oppress them as best they can despite only being 10% of the population. I'm not entirely confident that C counts as an "oppressed minority" here, because they have overwhelming majority support. But I'm not sure that they don't. Conditional on the harassment being bad enough and A doing nothing to stop B from doing it, this still seems remarkably unpleasant to be a C.
Example 4: As above except A is (98%) and B is (1%). Now B and C are equal in numbers. I assume that if A is fairly apathetic to both sides, then B and C end up in a race war where both fight each other constantly, and they should have equal power and ability to do this. So in this case I think C is unambiguously not an "oppressed minority", although it still seems unpleasant.
Example 5: As in 4, B and C are both (1%), but B is disproportionately wealthy and influential in certain spheres. Maybe 95% of bankers are B and they all refuse service to C. Maybe every single grocery store is owned by a B and so C have to grow their own produce or buy overpriced food from gas stations. Maybe 90% of people who work at power plants are B and they keep sneakily cutting off power to houses owned by C and getting away with it. I'm still not sure if this counts as C being an "oppressed minority" because they're being harassed by a group of the same size, but there's still something going on here that "having majority support" doesn't solve.
I should clarify that I don't think we live in any of these worlds, but my impression is that most leftists think we live somewhere in Examples 1-2. Hopefully it's clear that this is a world that could exist in theory. Therefore, opposition to it should be based on empirical grounds (this is not the world we live in, and haven't for decades) rather than logical grounds.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
In some sense this proves the point though. You stopped playing. It's not that social validation is the only thing these games could provide in theory, but that due to selection effects people who like the social validation and the joy of destroying someone who was just trash talking you are the people who play obsessively play these games, while people who find it toxic and unenjoyable stop.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2mo ago
Yeah. "If you refuse to show up everyone else just votes without you" seems like a way better principle than "if you refuse to show up you deadlock the system", conditional on the not showing up being voluntary rather than some scheme where a surprise meeting was called.
Deporting people physically is super easy: you load them up on a plane and drop them off outside the country. Gone, someone else's problem. I do concede that deporting people ethically, humanely, and politically can be hard if you don't know where they came from so you don't know which country to drop them off in and the country doesn't agree to accept them.
But the plan with the temporary worker visas would ideally happen simultaneous with a massive increase in border security. Make it super easy for people to enter on cheap temporary worker visas, which require them to register where they come from and where they are going to live and work while in the country. Then if they overstay or violate the conditions of their visa you know where they live and where they came from (not just the country but even have them register a home town or city for them to return to when they leave) and then you expeditiously drop them back off at their literal home in their old country. And then anyone still trying to cross the border despite the ease of acquiring a visa is way less sympathetic because they're clearly trying to circumvent the proper procedure, so you can meet them or deport them with more force and get less public backlash.
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