cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
1mo ago
I think the inside view for a lot of these people paying the tax is that it feels about as "voluntary" as actual taxes. Many of them have a sense that their political opponents pose a credible threat and danger to them and theirs.
I think ideologically capturing professions is short term gain for long term cost. These institutions will cost off their reputation for a time, and then everyone will learn to discount their value as neutral organizations. And their funding sources will start drying up.
cjet79
1mo ago
I believe it is a race to the bottom type of situation. If the other side has ideological Institutions then you need their own to counter them. Wokeness came from ideological universities, and a bunch of orgs had to pop up to defend against it.
My point about these organizations being bad is that the woke fight might not have happened at all. There was a lack of things for leftist organizations to gather on. So they invented one.
cjet79
1mo ago
Ideological Institutions
The other day I was explaining my understanding of think tanks to a younger friend. They had a reaction of "no way!? Is that really how they work". This is the most common reaction, followed by "yeah of course that's how they work, why are you telling me this like I'm stupid?"
The purpose of ideological Institutions is two-fold:
- To be a standing army of sorts for a particular ideology. That way anytime a new issue comes up in political discourse there is a ready and willing group of people willing to advocate for the ideology. I'd sum this up as "political coordination".
- To extract funds and resources from wealthy people of a particular ideology. I'd sum this up as "a tax on political beliefs".
These may sound like they are at cross purposes, but they are not. A successful think tank does both very well.
Some of you here might have the immediate complaint somewhat along the lines:
Universities can also be ideological Institutions but they don't have their people paying a tax on their beliefs. But this isn't true on two dimensions:
- Tuition costs for parents and students. Some of the most clearly ideological small liberal arts colleges are private and very expensive.
- Ideologically captured departments within universities also impose a cost on their graduates: 4 years of their life and a useless degree.
I think the existence of these ideological Institutions has had an overall negative effect on American politics. Similar to news organizations they benefit from ongoing political conflict.
But they are also a necessary set of institutions for balancing out democracy. They act as a way for people who care and hold strong beliefs to feel like they have more of an impact on politics than their single vote would normally allow.
cjet79
1mo ago
I like STE more, but that is going to be personal preference.
Helldivers is 4 people. Most of the STE matches are 16 (but they also have a single player campaign, and a 4 player game mode)
Lines of sight are much further in STE. Bug corpses can pile up.
cjet79
1mo ago
Starship Troopers Extermination came out of early access.
There is cross play with consoles.
A galactic war that everyone is a part of.
A new ice map.
It's been hella fun playing with a group of other players that have organized into a military structure.
I'm a corporal and usually I'm in charge of a squad.
There have been some growing pains and problems with the game, but from my experience in alpha I'm pretty confident they'll get ironed out.
cjet79
1mo ago
They might not care either way. If they only talk to or visit the people with control of the nukes, then the secret is secure that way.
cjet79
1mo ago
I mostly agree with your viewpoint, but the alien enthusiasts have a simple explanation for the visitation pattern: nuclear weapons.
This would also explain ongoing secrecy about Aliens. If the Aliens have any degree of control over nuclear arsenals, then part of the illusion of world powers is shattered.
I do think we have had unusually good luck in that nuclear weapons have been used exactly twice in a real conflict and then never again.
cjet79
1mo ago
First one was just a simple table. Haven't built any charts yet, but thinking about Tableau because one potential gig I know about wants to use them
cjet79
1mo ago
I was thinking more public policy oriented data sets. Right now I'm looking at using TaxFoundations state tax data, that might get me some interesting stuff. I also know a potential contractor position where I can help someone create table or chart to display homelessness across different states.
cjet79
1mo ago
I lost my job this Monday. Officially my job was outsourced to contractors. But I feel the bigger problem is I had no political cover.
I have a suspicion that the contractors that replaced me might have paid off an employee on the inside. It feels so paranoid to say that, but people also told me I was paranoid 9 months ago when these contractors were hired. Once I was kicked out and the contractors were in the employee that I think they paid off left the same day.
My initial emotions were close to relief. The axe that was hanging over my head finally dropped. Now there is some mix of anger and resignation. I feel like I am often on the losing side of office politics. Some of my anger has me wanting to get back at the organization's president, I've heard rumors of him being an unwitting Russian or Hungarian asset. Which would be funnier if it wasn't so real.
Doing alright now, thinking of doing contracting work in the near future.
cjet79
1mo ago
I built a state tax burden calculator with react.
I was thinking I want to build more little form and graph things, but the main limitation is data, anyone have any good clean datasets they know about?
cjet79
1mo ago
Simple economics.
Labor unions compete with compete with non-union labor.
You can compare the economic effects of most unions to something like a plague that kills only teenagers or inexperienced workers.
Any employer in that situation would try to keep their current employees, possibly pay them more, or provide other non-monetary side benefits to keep them.
But there is an obvious loser in both situations: the teenagers and inexperienced workers.
An anonymous online forum would actually allow the teenagers and inexperienced workers to anti-coordinate with the striking workers. What's a great time to walk in and get a job ... The same day half the workers are no shows.
cjet79
1mo ago
There was at some point issues like that. Nowadays its more true that if something is releasing radiation, it can be used as a nuclear fuel source.
Similar concept with engines and biofuels. Early engines and modern hyper focused engines need clean perfect fuel for burning. Then along comes the diesel engine, and the fuel requirement is instead more like "will it burn". My loose understanding is that modern nuclear plant designs are closer to diesel engines.
Storage of nuclear waste fuel is not difficult, unless you choose to make it difficult. Which is what the environmental lobby has been trying to do for a long time.
cjet79
1mo ago
The political problem with Nuclear shows one of the main problems with democracy.
When downside risk is a single major event, and not lots of spread out minor events than it becomes a lot more important in people's minds. Even when the costs of the minor events adds up to more than the costs of the major event.
This is clear on a bunch of metrics with nuclear, where the radiation released from a nuclear plant is less than the radiation released by a typical coal fired plant. Other metrics like deaths, safety incidents, spills, and particulate pollution are all the same.
cjet79
1mo ago
They will often tell us why they have left, and none have given us that as a reason. Usually it's complaints about low quality comments that don't quite break the rules, but are bad enough to annoy them when aggragated together.
Im fine dropping this, I did feel like new things were coming up.
cjet79
1mo ago
The mods all talk. Netstack ask us to come by and check this. And noticeably Netstack only said not to do it. Which is basically the minimum level of "mod action" that we can take. It is impossible to be softer.
I don't think as many people would be apprehensive about it if every time this came up there wasn't a cadre of posters making it sound like we have super strict requirements for top level posts.
Doing it after we have warned you not to do it isn't treated very well, but same with most rules.
cjet79
1mo ago
And here's mine: it would look much like the weekly thread on /r/blockedandreported, only better because the quality of commentators here is higher.
Or it would eventually look exactly like that thread or worse, because:
- The higher quality of commentators would leave
- Everyone would put in less effort.
- And we don't have a popular podcast that draws in a stream of new and active users.
Dude, this whole discussion started because a "rather well-written" effort post received a warning. You are definitely setting the bar too high.
A well-written thing that is not a discussion is still not a discussion. The bar is not high. In this case they went and climbed at a neighboring gym and put in a bunch of effort, but the bar we were monitoring which is much easier to reach was left empty.
cjet79
1mo ago
No I think my model is pretty similar to yours.
Specifically:
My model is a different one: quality posts happen because a poster gets inspired by an ongoing discussion.
My model is only different in that I strongly emphasize that last word. Bare links do not count as discussion. A story that amounts to "people I don't like did a bad thing" is not a discussion.
We specifically ask that top level posts start a discussion. It does not have to be a high quality post. It just has to start a discussion. I've said before and given examples that it is possible to start a discussion here in three sentences.
Context. Interpretation. Opinion.
We ask that people not clog up the board with non-discussion.
cjet79
1mo ago
Also cult like experiences can be really awesome for a lot of the participants. In fact it can be so awesome that they end up doing crazy things with the cult. A semi controlled environment where you can join a temporary cult sounds great.
cjet79
1mo ago
Lots of things were different back then. We were on reddit and the culture war was red hot and banned in a bunch of other places. And there are also places like culturewarroundup that allow bare links and they are far deader than theschism. If anything the comparison suggests theschism strategy is a better viable long-term option. Neither us or them can compete with X in terms of sheer content of bare links and subjects being discussed. But we can compete on enforcing some minimum quality standards.
Look, I know this is a lost cause. But I wish you guys would at least acknowledge the point about low effort top posts leading to high effort comments.
I feel like I've never disagreed with this point. I might have even said somewhere that it is easy for bad quality comments to generate good discussion. But I also feel it suggests that you are entirely missing the point I am making.
I think our actual disagreement is on the effect of permissive top level comments. You seem to think it's positive sum. I think it is neutral sum, or possibly a little negative sum.
We are generally getting a similar number of high quality comments each month. And that amount is limited by the number of users.
The people that write quality comments have told me before that they like having their comments read and discussed. I also share that preference. Its rare for me to want to type out a quality comment that is just going to get buried and read by only one person.
The place where you get the most attention and discussion is at the top level. That attention is limited by how many top level comments are above you, and how recently that thing has been discussed. Bare links fill up the top comment slots and bury posts faster. And you can easily get your topic sniped before you finish writing a quality comment.
I don't even understand your mechanism for how permissive top comments increase the number of quality comments. I understand how it increases total comments, but that isn't something I care about.
cjet79
1mo ago
Its news you find interesting. But if others find it boring or distracting then a conversation about it doesn't add to their enjoyment of the site. For example I am interested in tech news but very uninterested in foreign policy. The whole war in Gaza is less interesting to me than Amazon's return to office policy. If this thread was 10 times bigger with the same quality writing but all about foreign policy then it would be no better for me.
We don't have unlimited people producing unlimited content like X does. Every time I read your complaints that seems to be a built in assumption, that the lack of top level content holds people back from the total amount they post. I just don't see it personally. I'm limited in how much quality content I can write. Probably only a few good comments a day.
I would love to have more people here posting more quality content. If we as mods got overwhelmed with moderating we would add more moderators as we've done in the past. An unlimited amount of low quality content is useless.
I don't buy your point that it is a conflict of interest. As a user I also hate low quality content, because it's crap that I have to filter through to get to the good stuff. X and Facebook and YouTube are all unusable to me. Too much crap, not enough gold. And I'm only a user on those websites, not a moderator.
To be clear, I wouldn't wish them away if it was an option. Something can be negative but the overall correct solution is to just do nothing about it.
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