faceh
1mo ago
A slightly less critical read could add the point:
They help politicians to design and pass actual policies that advance a given ideological agenda.
That is, if your think tank is focused in on immigration reform, and you've got some friendly politicians in office, and one of said politicians' staff calls you and says "Because of [event] immigration reform is now a major concern and we have a window to get some bills passed. Give us some moderate reform policies that we can present to the legislature."
Then the think tank pulls up its archives and can send over a 'package' of proposed legislation language, talking points, and research/studies they've conducted or collected in favor of the given policy, and can join in the campaign towards getting it passed.
This avoids the need for a politician to work too hard at becoming an expert on the topic at hand and designing bills from scratch.
Of course if the think tank ecosystem becomes too crowded, it probably makes it LESS likely for any legislation to get passed since every think tank is pushing their own favored issued or their own favored policy solution to a given issue, and politicians now are faced with deciding which ones they want to appease and which they want to anger, and are less likely to decide at all, I'd guess.
So think tanks are also probably constantly jockeying for status so they can get more funding and attention from pols so they can get more funding so they can get more attention... round and round it goes.
THAT is when they really become a grift, if you ask me. When they exist solely to convert money into public attention into more money (Hi there, Project 2025) without any real chance of getting a good policy agenda passed.
Every time someone tries to dismiss concerns about, call it 'election integrity," I would point them to the 2018 Election, specifically the Florida Gubernatorial Race. Specifically, Broward County.
The margin between Desantis winning (and all the stuff that followed) vs. Gillum winning (instead of being found drugged out in a hotel room) was 33,000 votes out of 8 million. .4%.
Desantis cleaned house of election supervisors who had delayed or faulty counts, and every election since then has been reported on time, without error, and... surprise, tends to favor Republicans, now.
So one big thing that can be done is to rapidly remove and replace election officials who show questionable performance, bias, or otherwise don't seem interested in a fair, open election. Failure in one's duties should be punished, as I keep on harping.
You know what would really increase trust in elections? If there were somebody or bodies who is actually on the hook, who can be visibly and tangibly punished if a given election has too many 'hitches.' Because fundamentally, the people in charge of ensuring elections are secure ALSO have a bit of incentive to compromise said elections if it serves them. See this Judge in Philadelphia, for instance.
As others have said, ID requirements to cast a vote are reasonable. Limiting mail-in ballots, likewise reasonable. The big one is to ensure transparency when counting votes in high-density, high population areas, where fraud would be easiest to hide.
And there is a reasonable case to be made for areas reporting their results at about the same time. Fraud is harder to achieve if you can't be sure how many votes you have to manufacture to put your side over the top, so being able to report your results after you know what other have reported helps shift the incentives towards cheating.
On the 'unreasonable* side, maybe mandate the death penalty for anyone caught falsifying more than, say, 100 votes. There should certainly be some entity or agency who is in charge of tracking down and punishing election fraud after the election has taken place, so fraudsters can be punished even after the fact. I would even stipulate that the election is not to be overturned if substantial fraud is discovered, but those who perpetrated it should be sanctioned heavily as an example going forward, potentially to include the aforementioned capital punishment.
There should probably be some symmetrical punishment for those who attempt to overturn an election without producing proof of fraud, since that is also damaging to election integrity, false claims of 'rigging' can be 'allowed' but there should be some well-understood process through which such challenges are brought and decided.
Hah, this taps into the dichotomy that I think gets little commentary: the "purity" of the sport vs the "entertainment value."
Watching elite athletes going all out to defeat their opponent with strict, fair officiating is fun, but it becomes more of a chess match where the competitors' moves are predictable, and thus outcomes are less exciting because you can (usually) discern who is better early on.
It's why I prefer to watch college football to NFL, the relative inexperience of the athletes means they're more likely to screw up and create openings for big plays that lead to upsets and reversals of fortune and other "exciting" outcomes, versus a game where everyone plays close to optimally but thus the outcome is never in doubt if there is a talent differential.
Likewise, imagine if on-field injuries could be fully eliminated (a good thing!) which would remove the chance of a given team having to bench a star player and thus potentially losing to an "inferior" opponent on a given day. Likewise we could imagine eliminating off-field conduct and problems, like players getting arrested or injured in freak accidents.
I think what you may be touching on is the lack of "randomness" from the play. Computerized officiating would (ideally) make every call deterministic and accurate, and wouldn't miss occurrences that a human official might.
Good for fairness, but it means there are no more games decided by "close calls" where the refs use their discretion to make a call that "favors" one side or the other, and controversially may impact the outcome.
Of course, if it makes cheating much harder to pull off, that's probably an undeniable benefit.
If we say that maximum randomness is just pure gambling, maximum fairness is a completely computer-supervised match, maybe maximum "entertainment" or "fun" is between those extremes.
I'm sure there are purists who want the sport outcomes to be completely determined by skill, with injuries, bad officiating, off-field antics, and hell, even weather to have zero impact on the match. The "no items, Fox Only, Final Destination" types.
There's also things like Pro Wrestling, where the outcomes are fixed but the fun is in the spectacle itself and the CHANCE that something unexpected can still happen.
faceh
1mo ago
Yes, there was a marked difference between the impacts that occurred in areas that were built up in the 70's and 80's and 90's to those built up post-2003ish.
Anywhere that has lucked out to not receive a hurricane hit in a few decades is more likely to get totally obliterated when one does come through.
But houses built to recent codes and specced to survive high winds can make it through mostly without damage, sans a tree falling on it or something.
Its a 'silver lining' of a hurricane strike, the stuff not built to current code will go away, and ideally be replaced with structures that will survive future strikes, and so the whole state becomes hardened against future impacts.
That, and the absolute speed and efficiency with which utilities are restored and cleanup ensues is a stark contrast from how things went even 20 years ago.
I don't know if there's a better answer where structures that are vulnerable get updated or replaced (with whose money?) over time, or if we are just resigned to having to clean up and rebuild such places after the fact.
faceh
1mo ago
Imagine that a bunch of rain falls into the mountains surrounding a valley. It ALL has to flow down to the valley, then flow through the valley as water tries to reach the lowest point.
Enough water collected in the mountains, flowing down a valley, all at once, can be a concentrated force that crushes most things it encounters. Like a GIANT waterslide, the water collects and gains velocity on the way down.
Florida has no mountains. We're flat. All the rain falls on the state and mostly just sits there. We have a lot of rivers, canals, etc, and the big lake in the middle of the state, so there CAN be flooding, but not a huge rush of crushing water.
Thanks to Helene, one of my friends who lives on a river in Florida (just bought this year, sadly enough) had three feet of water in his house. He was there when it started coming in, and when it hit the one foot mark he was able to load up his car and drive out.
Also Florida sits on a bed of limestone, which is porous, so a decent portion of the water will get absorbed down into the Aquifers.
Downside is there's nothing to stop the wind, so a heavy windstorm will flatten whole areas. But if there's a will to do so, building back up isn't too hard.
faceh
1mo ago
Also outside of the coastal areas it is virtually impossible to be caught off guard by a flash flood. The topography of Florida precludes the sort of sudden deluges of water pouring down on unsuspecting towns, rather it would be a slowly rising water level that gives someone time to find elevation.
Like I try not to downplay the power of a hurricane, but Florida is uniquely well-positioned to survive and eventually recover from an event.
faceh
1mo ago
My attempted Steelman (but also not really) is that FEMA/FedGov has absolute GOBS of emergency resources on tap that it can shower into the area, but it has a real 'legibility' issue, and ad hoc relief efforts make that harder, not easier.
That is, due to lack of decent infrastructure in these areas (esp. after the storm) FedGov can't tell where their aid is most needed, where it can be deployed effectively (i.e. whether there's airstrips and landing areas and people on the ground to distribute aid) and how much aid has already been deployed.
From their perspective dropping 1000 tons of resources into an area that 'only' needed 100 tons is a misallocation, esp. if the place 50 miles over that needed 1000 tons only gets 100 tons.
Private groups that aren't registered and reporting to FEMA are also not legible, so FEMA can't tally the aid they provide into the totals for a given area.
Their attempts to gain enough control and insight into the region to be able to figure this out would look like what we've been seeing. Checkpoints set up in and out of disaster areas, sporadic communications, and some resources idling around while they figure out the best place to send them.
All of this is to say that FEMA 'wants' to be able to coordinate efforts and maximize the impact of their aid, but until the situation is legible enough to them to see what is actually happening, their immediate efforts will be based on figuring out how to deploy their resources.
/steelman
The flip side of the legibility issues is that from FEMA's perspective, letting people die while figuring all this stuff out is not the worst outcome because a dead body eventually becomes legible, they can tally up the dead and identify them and update their records and produce a nice, tidy report about the death toll of the storm, since a dead body doesn't get more dead they can take their time to do this too.
So I worry that the lack of urgency is in part due to simple incentives to establish knowledge and some level of control of the local region before actually attempting to help the locals, and a few dozen extra dead people in the meantime doesn't show up as a problem, just another piece of data to come out of the storm that they have to catalogue, and explain why certain decisions were made.
faceh
1mo ago
The value it has as basically being a "really smart friend" with infinite patience and an extremely deep well of knowledge is hard to overstate.
But man, if it gets to the point where you can actually start replacing your friends with it and it can fine-tune its responses to make an idealized conversation partner... or partners, no reason it couldn't simulate multiple roles in a conversation... it seems likely to drive further atomization.
faceh
1mo ago
I wonder how much of it is reputational versus actual morality though. Probably mostly reputational.
I'd say its close to 100% reputational. Morality plays a meta role there, but I think what is being selected for is one's ability to keep bad behavior 'on the down-low' since being known for being a druggie whore is VERY DIFFERENT from simply being a druggie whore in private, but having an overall clean social rep.
Or, could we say, its testing your ability to be discreet and in-control of the bad behavior.
Its less about abstaining from all sins, and much more about not being obvious and obnoxious about the sinning, so as not to harm the social standing of those associated with you.
While I'd still judge the moral failings, I get that many, many people are fine with the sinning but care VERY MUCH that their partner doesn't do anything to harm their social standing.
Not even disagreeing, but realize that when you try to create 'clever' regulatory schemes like this you're up against the innovative power of every entrepreneur in that space.
Every single exploit or loophole that can be found will be used to the hilt, so you'll probably have to constantly adjust your regulations to add friction back into the system as market actors find ways to remove it. Kinds of like, I suppose, how Zyn has taken off with the decline in smoking and the general low-status of chewing tobacco. Or more directly, how vaping stepped in to replace smoking as well.
faceh
1mo ago
I'm sure I could find, with a bit of effort, stories of Sorority girls getting pulled into Social Justice causes and plunging down the rabbit hole, but my prior is that it would be a tiny fraction of them, which is already a small fraction of all students attending college, so yeah, my priors are that sorority girls will be less woke than average, and more likely to get married, which would further prevent a leftward shift.
So I'll work with the assumption that fewer than 10% of girls who join sororities will go woke, which is decent if you're sending your daughter off to college.
Indeed, if Greek life is effective at insulating students from the SJW pressure of university, that would be a factor in explaining why so many universities seem to be trying to bring them down or bring them to heel
faceh
1mo ago
I mean, that is what separates us from the animals, right?
Folsom Street Fair attendees doing it in the open vs. Eyes Wide Shut-style sex parties where most everyone has plausible deniability.
A friend of mine often points out that a fundamental sign of society degenerating is that most people now seem to lack 'discretion.' Virtually everyone is tempted to bad behavior on occasion. But it seemingly used to be that one would go to the local brothel, drug den, underground casino, whatever, to indulge if they ever did. It was shameful and they knew not to endorse it and certainly to keep it away from kids.
Now, well, almost all bets are off, the only people who keep things discreet are consciously choosing to do so.
faceh
1mo ago
Always the risk that the daughter ends up falling off the Sorority bandwagon and getting a degree in Women's studies and dying her hair some neon color, at which point the odds of even having grandchildren would tend to crater, but yeah, this seems on point as it basically casts Sororities as a way to mitigate that other risk in exchange for relatively small risks of, e.g. sexual assault.
But to consider it involuntary you have to basically remove all assumptions of agency from these young women. That they had no other college options, that they could only pick from the sororities that strictly enforce this social competition, and that they cannot slightly pull back once inside the competition to a level where they are comfortable.
So I'm absolutely not disagreeing with your point...
But this is literally the exact reason why a lot of "metoo" situations are not taken as seriously as others.
A girl going on a bad date and giving in and having 'involuntary' sex assumes "That they had no other dating options, that they could only pick from the men that strictly enforce this sexual competition, and that they cannot slightly pull back once inside the competition to a level where they are comfortable."
So I'd say that many ARE assuming limited agency on the part of women when thinking/arguing about both issues.
faceh
1mo ago
I mean, with Islam they also abstain from Pork despite that being an insanely popular dish in most countries that can afford bacon.
They've got the sort of equilibrium that I suspect is hard to achieve for most places.
I've also noted before how unlike most other immigrant groups, Arabs/Muslims DON'T seem to create any organized crime syndicates in their host countries in the way that, say Irish, Italian, Russian, or various South American immigrants did in the U.S..
Instead, they tend to form political units which, in their worst instantiation look like ISIS, but even in milder form look like Hezbollah or the Taliban.
So, STILL engaging in violence, but directed to a very different objective.
Good preliminary research. If tox screens rarely show date-rape drugs in the person's system (admittedly I don't know how reliable those tests are OR how long the drugs are detectable in the body) then yeah, update in favor of it being something else.
There are sketchy dudes slipping drugs into girls drinks somewhere. If it is as large of a concern as it is made out to be, then they might be the most effective, disciplined population of criminal out there.
Yep. Just as with the "razor blades in halloween candy" story, if it were a widespread issue then people would probably stop letting kids go trick-or-treating. If date rape drugs are used at every other frat party, eventually people will get wise and stop going.
Dammit.
Every time I want to take a break from motteposting, something interesting and topical rears up.
My initial reaction is "THANKS, I hate it." The social environment you're describing sounds like my personal nightmare. And the rules, to the extent they're legible, seem so ARBITRARY. Whether a given sorority picks Jaylynn or Bria or whatever seems to come down to where she parted her hair that day as much as any other qualifications. Barely better than pure random selection. Its filtering for social conformity, and that is pretty much it.
BUT, I did date a girl who was the "fun police" (i.e. the "Wellness and Safety Chair" or something similar) of a particular sorority who had the unenviable job of enforcing the moral code of the chapter, which meant snooping on girls' social media and bringing violations to the attention of the leadership. Now, this was NOT a large, popular school so the overall pressures were much lesser. And that's probably why the girls felt they could get away with a lot more. Alcohol and drunkenness, drug use, and such were pretty common issues that they posted on social media (normally a secondary account they made explicitly to post debauchery). And it was hard to bring them to heel because the sorority wasn't so critical to campus social life and status that getting kicked out would be a social death sentence. Also the Treasurer for the chapter embezzled a few thousand dollars of Sorority funds during her term so its not like the leaders were paragons of virtue either.
Of course, the things this girl and I got up to would also have posed issues to the moral code of the chapter, and I liked to remind her sometimes of the 'hypocricy,' but she was smart and discreet enough not to post anything publicly, and maintained her reputation quite clean, which I wasn't going to disrupt (like that one ex boyfriend the article mentions leaking nudes as revenge? Ugh).
Perhaps THAT is what these sororities try to filter for? Discretion? Like can you maintain public appearances and not hurt your sorority's social standing by, say, making your bad behavior obvious and obnoxious, can you conform well enough that nobody would single you out as a 'bad' girl or a goody two-shoes? Well you might be marriage material!
Because even a Frat bro is probably not going to wife up a girl who acquires the reputation of being a drunken, druggie slut, even if "Drunken druggie slut" is exactly his preference in women. He needs/wants a girl who will consider his social standing, as well, at his side if he's eventually going into politics or banking or some other important career where 'moral uprightness' is a critical variable. Maybe she really is that bad girl, but she isn't one to make it known, and so he can be confident she won't embarrass him with her behavior later.
And I shouldn't complain too much, Frats and Sororities at least offer some kind of Basic Life Script that make it more likely that somebody will make a few right decisions early in life that are more likely to pay off for them later. Rush for a good sorority, maintain your membership in good standing, hang out with Frat Bros and hopefully lock one down, and graduate with a MrS degree and you're probably golden! At least for a while.
We can admit that there's a toxic side to this where Frat guys use their dad's money and their connections to get away with actively criminal behavior because an arrest and criminal record might derail their life, but I would NOT admit that Frat Culture is the proximate cause of the behavior itself.
faceh
1mo ago
Why ban on commercial surrogacy or human cloning or CP or deepfakes doesn't result in breaking kneecaps, burning down, etc.
Well as I said:
correlating more or less with how badly people still want [banned thing].
Drugs and alcohol are an ur-example because the people that want them REALLLLLY want them. Similar with prostitution. Gambling too. I imagine legalized sports gambling has made it far harder for criminals to make a buck on it now.
It helps when the thing is legal overseas or is more readily produced overseas and can be transmitted electronically so there's no need for interpersonal violence at the consumer level.
Like, we had a brief change in the drug trade when crypto was still new and allowed Silk Road to exist, and money could be exchanged for drugs without the need for violent enforcement. But the state cracked down and so we slid over to the standard equilibrium.
They are not police states. There are no gangs or violence associated with drugs.
I've said it before, I am completely prepared to admit that Japanese people are less likely to be violent regardless of the policies they operate under.
See my point:
correlating more or less with how badly people still want [banned thing].
Japan doesn't have the huge drug-addled underbelly that the U.S. does, to my knowledge.
But they DO have Yakuza, who keep things orderly but, I emphasize, STILL rely on violence to enforce their business practices.
And allegedly the decline of the Yakuza is opening up space for more violent operations who are harder to police because they're less legible. Although as mentioned elsewhere, Japan is pretty close to being a police state.
So... my EXACT, PRECISE point still applies to Japan, even if less obviously so.
Similarly, some of the accounts of being 'roofied' I've heard from some girls end up sounding very much like they simply had a straight up panic/anxiety attack. "I had trouble breathing, my body froze up, my vision got blurry/dark, and I felt like I wanted to puke." These symptoms could be socially induced without drugs.
And ironically, if you hammer into girls' brains that they're at risk of being roofied, then they're simply more likely to interpet any symptoms they experience as that rather than more likely causes. Which, well, better safe than sorry.
Not to say it doesn't happen, but the scuzzy behavior I directly observed was usually a guy trying to keep a given girl isolated while her inhibitions are lowering, and keeping her plied with alcohol and fending off any good samaritan until he can 'close the deal' and escort her to his room or car or the nearest hotel.
Roofies might make that tactic easier but it actually directly depends on the guy who slipped it in her drink being the guy who actually has 'possession' of her when they kick in. I dunno if its honestly worth the risk for most guys, even assuming they can obtain the drugs.
EDIT: Now, I can maybe see it be a known tactic for a group of guys to cover for each other and maybe prey on women by spiking drinks and letting one of their members take the score, but as @wemptronics mentions below, this starts to imply a much larger 'conspiracy of silence.' Like, who is the Jeffrey Epstein of Rohypnol supply for frats?
And as you say yeah, they're a pretty convenient excuse for a sexual encounter you later regret, that can't be easily countered by the other party.
faceh
1mo ago
Yup.
The Prohibition impact isn't really the problem. The first order effect of prohibition is to decrease availability of [banned thing]. The long term effect is to decrease legal availability of [banned thing].
The second order effect is to push the markets for [banned thing] underground, correlating more or less with how badly people still want [banned thing].
And the third order effect, or one of them: when merchants of [banned thing] can't use normal conflict resolution/contract enforcement methods, they have to invoke base violence in order to operate. Wars over turf, breaking kneecaps to collect on debts, burning down establishments that don't pay protection, killing snitches, those all become necessary to the business. And then it eventually becomes organized and systemic.
They can't use the court systems and the state-sanctioned violence, so unless you have a full-on police state, this stuff will spill over into civilian life.
So yeah, flipping a switch on and off between "banned" and "legal" will show some effect, but leave the switch on "banned" long enough and you'll ultimately see a system evolve which perpetuates violence. THEN maybe you can assess whether the additional violence is worth the actual harm reduction achieved by the ban.
It seems unfortunate that for many things there isn't a stable equilibrium of "Legally permitted but socially verboten" where a given activity or product is not banned, but the social judgment that comes from engaging in it is so severe that it necessarily remains hidden on the fringes of society, so there's 'friction' involved in accessing it, and most 'right-thinking' people avoid it because they don't want to risk the social consequences, even if they're curious.
I can distinctly remember two:
One was back in Covid days somebody pointed out that evolutionary pressures would make it almost certain that mutations of a virus would trend towards making it less deadly, which somewhat alleviated my fears of Covid running rampant and becoming more deadly as it spread.
The other was someone arguing that we currently have the capability of tracking any incoming asteroids or other celestial objects that are large enough to pose a danger to earth, and as long as we're actively looking we should notice one in with enough time, in theory, to intervene/deflect it, which led me to slightly downgrade "asteroid strike' on my list of existential risks.
One that the jury is still out on is whether LLMs/AI will end up hurting lawyer employment and salaries by supplanting entry-level attorney jobs, or if it will instead bolster lawyer employment by enabling contracts and other transactional documents to become MUCH more complex.
I have had my mind changed or adjusted by arguments I read here over the years.
The quality of arguments seems about the same or even better in some ways, but there are not as many people just casually commenting on a given phenomena without staking out an actual position on the issue itself, around here.
This might be SLIGHTLY too big for small-scale Sunday, but I will give it a go:
What is the strongest argument against "you will own nothing and be happy" as a concept?" Ideally an argument that can be expressed in a few sentences of average complexity.
For instance, one argument might be that "people will not be able to build up wealth." However, I note that most of the property people own are depreciating assets. It actually might make sense for someone to not own a car and instead simply rent one on a weekly basis from a fleet of vehicles maintained by a larger company that are mostly standardized and will suit whatever their needs are at the time. Or a system like Citibike for cars. Or maybe later on, just call a robotaxi as needed.
This means they will not have to worry about the costs of repairs and maintenance, or insurance, or storage, and they can expect to get new models on a regular basis, thus it reduces a potential source of stress and unexpected costs to a simple monthly subscription. This seems like it would work well for a lot of people, and save them money in the long run!
And similar can apply to housing! If you live in a rented, pre-furnished apartment you are far more flexible if you want a change of scenery, to expand your living space, or need to move to a new city to pursue opportunities. Home ownership introduces lots of complexity and presents an illiquid asset even if it appreciates.
Same can apply to, say, smartphones, which upgrade so fast that 'owning' one almost doesn't make sense as it becomes outdated in < 1 year.
So extending some logic, I begin to see reasons why the average person might prefer to own nothing but a retirement account, and simply have a subscription service for most items they will use throughout their life.
What philosophical, economic, psychological, social, biological, political etc. etc. argument do you think most strongly refutes or rejects this as an ideal?
Taking a guess at the argument that will be the most common response, Rot-13'd:
Vg qvfpbhentrf snzvyl sbezngvba naq yrnqf gb n pvgvmrael gung vf vapncnoyr bs erfvfgvat nhgubevgl.
(Let us be clear, I'm not supporting owning nothing, but I do plan on trying to do a steelman or similar in the future)
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