FlailingAce
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User ID: 1084
FlailingAce
5d ago
Hispanic people are more likely to be illegal immigrants, therefore what? We round up anyone who speaks Spanish and run them through processing? But then we'd be missing other groups like the Somalis, so to be safe let's round up anyone browner than Marco Rubio. You know, just to be safe.
The thing you're missing is a concept called 'probable cause'. You can't round people up because they're statistically more likely to be in an offender class. At least you can't in America - authoritarian dictatorships actually do this all the time.
FlailingAce
5d ago
I’ll fine with spending a day a month in ICE lock-up while they verify my identity. I’ll gladly do my time to help ICE out.
Sorry, that's insane. I'm not going to dignify it by treating it as an argument.
Your response is wildly disproportionate to the suggestion, which (to be clear) is that ICE should make checking someone's citizenship part of standard operating procedures for immigration enforcement arrests so that US citizens aren't arrested and detained when they shouldn't be. It's already the law that they cannot detain US citizens for immigration, once they know that person is a citizen they are required by law to be released - this is literally just saying 'hey, you have to check if they're a citizen'. It's a procedural remedy to a mistake ICE has been repeatedly caught making. Your cost-benefit analysis is so off the rails it's laughable.
FlailingAce
5d ago
In other words, rather than rebutting what I'm saying, you point to instances of protestors behaving badly and sarcastically imply this means ICE should not be held to a standard for their behavior.
This is what-about-ism at its worst.
FlailingAce
6d ago
As I mentioned elsewhere, protestors are literally already doing this. They are accosting suspected ICE personnel and demanding their identification. So what exactly are you afraid is going to happen?
Besides, the original claim was that this is 'completely unreasonable'. The only person being unreasonable is Nybbler, acting as if a policy change would occur with literally zero guidance, that protestors could 'hack the system' by DDoSing agents during an arrest, like it's a video game and they can chain-stun them.
Watch my brilliant policy mind at work... "ICE does not have to identify themselves during an active arrest." Or how about this one... "ICE only has to provide a badge number to someone they are detaining or officially interacting with."
The point of this proposal, in case it didn't occur to you, is so that people can hold individual officers to account when they misbehave. This is an obvious good.
FlailingAce
6d ago
Who cares about 'vastly more likely'? We don't arrest people for being 'likely' to commit a crime. This is basic stuff, I can't believe I have to explain it.
FlailingAce
6d ago
This would allow any actual alien to avoid detention by refusing to identify themselves.
I can see how, again, you could imagine a poorly worded rule that would have this consequence. But any reasonable implementation would provide the necessary protections so that before someone is locked up in a detention center, ICE would be required to do due diligence on the person. Obviously anyone, US citizen or not, who refuses to give their name would not be protected by this. How could you imagine it otherwise? But there are cases where a US citizen told ICE who they were but were still arrested and taken to a detention center, and had to call a lawyer to get out. That's obviously unacceptable!
Because they're not required to tell their badge number and last name to anyone who asks.
Protestors would go up to ICE agents and ask their badge number, over and over again, just so they could film it when the ICE agent quit answering because he had something else to do.
Again, any reasonable implementation - in fact scratch that, literally any implementation - would provide guidance on when and where ICE agents need to identify themselves. Seriously, how do you imagine this stuff works? Not to mention, your horror situation doesn't even rely on the new rule, protestors literally already do this!
FlailingAce
6d ago
If you were a Spanish-speaking Hispanic citizen you would feel differently. If you were routinely stopped by ICE until you could prove your citizenship, solely on the grounds of what you look like, you'd be rightly furious.
ICE should not be rounding up people who look like they could maybe be illegal and demanding papers from them. That's insane! And blatantly illegal! You cannot detain someone on the grounds of 'looking Hispanic in public'.
There's a huge difference between you treating someone differently based on assumptions you make from their appearance, and law enforcement openly targeting people for the same. It's a totally different standard.
FlailingAce
7d ago
Okay I'll bite. Here's my issues with some of your points.
Uhh, if someone ICE suspects is an illegal alien doesn't have ID, how is ICE to verify they aren't a US citizen without ever detaining them? Just "trust me, bro"?
ICE isn't in the business of detaining every person they encounter without identification. This rule presumably wouldn't apply to people detained for e.g. obstructing law enforcement - just to people detained as part of immigration enforcement. In which case ICE should have some idea who they are before detaining them.
What, like in the middle of a contested arrest? To every protestor who asks? (and if you think they won't DDOS enforcement that way, you haven't been paying attention)
Why isn't this a problem for every other type of law enforcement? You're trying to conjure up an absurd situation that in practice would not be an issue. You simply have to have reasonable guidelines for when ICE agents are required to give their badge number and when they aren't.
Apparently the only way they're allowed to determine someone is illegal is being told by a higher power.
Or by, I dunno, investigation? Properly legislated, this is simply preventing profiling, which is discrimination and should be illegal.
The second might be reasonable if applied to everything. As a special pleading to protect leftist protestors, it's unreasonable.
Great, Republicans should make it apply to everything.
These demands are only unreasonable if you assume the least charitable implementation, rather than treating them as what they are - the first round of negotiations.
FlailingAce
8d ago
Can I just throw in my opinion that this is a totally uninteresting and pointless case?
Everyone involved agrees on what should happen. The intent of the law is for the biological children of Irish citizens to become Irish citizens - both the parents and the state want this to happen. The only objection is that the trans woman (and biological father of the child) doesn't want to check the box that says 'father' on a government form because she doesn't like how it sounds. This is patently ridiculous grandstanding. The reason it says 'father' is because the genetic material for the child comes from a male and female gamete, and the father is the one who provided the male gamete, so for the purposes of the law (whose intent, again, everyone agrees with) it can't say anything else.
What a waste of time for everyone involved.
FlailingAce
10d ago
For most people, wealth is only useful for retirement. The model is: you save and invest and develop wealth so that eventually you can stop working and live off that wealth until you die.
Two common ways to do that now are down-sizing from a large home where you raised a family to a smaller home/condo/retirement community (what my parents did) or a reverse mortgage if you don't have kids to pass assets on to. In both cases an inflated housing market gives you more cash.
I would guess it's rare to use leverage on your home to enter the capitalist class, but that's also a possibility. For instance, my first home has risen in value >$100K and I can potentially access that equity to help fund my new business.
FlailingAce
10d ago
A pretty interesting book called Red Helicopter, tells the story of a private equity guy who ended up CEO of a failing fashion business, and turns it around by focusing on intangible assets like goodwill and kindness. Spotted it at random in the library and have been enjoying so far - it's relevant to me since I'm in the early stages of starting a small business. We'll see if the thesis holds up!
FlailingAce
14d ago
what are you doing posting this shit to Facebook, this isn't Lesswrong. Are you autistic or something?
Thank you for this, made my day =)
FlailingAce
14d ago
Everyone wants discrete categories. Deserve or not deserve. Good or bad shoot. Nothing in the world works this way, only in our mind do these categories exist.
So I wouldn't want to 'bite the bullet' on that yes. Smokers deserve lung cancer MORE than non-smokers. But only God can give us true justice.
FlailingAce
23d ago
There is no circumstance in which you are forced to watch ads, in every case you are choosing to consume content that would not be available without advertising to support it, or you are choosing to consume it through a medium that is supported by ads. The revealed preference is that people don't care about ads.
This is an individualistic argument, but isn't the more compelling case for removing ads one from social good? Ads are a net negative to the consumer AND to the companies who have to pay for them. As someone who works in a marketing-adjacent field, it's worth noting that we still don't have good ways to tell if traditional advertising is actually effective at driving sales, and there's compelling evidence that its effect for many brands is near zero. Yet companies are compelled to have an ad spend in order to keep up with the competition. Side note: modern guerilla marketing (which is essentially word-of-mouth) is a different story, but I don't think that's actually what OP is complaining about, any more than OP would say reviews should be banned. On the flip side, the most heavily advertised products are generally the worst, or at least a subpar option, which is why the need so much advertising to begin with. As a result, naive consumers are bamboozled into buying worse products for higher prices (they have to cover the overhead of the ads after all).
In my view this resolves into a tragedy of the commons situation. Everyone would benefit if ads (or at least certain modalities) were banned, but each individual player is incentivized from taking that step. Hence we need the Leviathan to step in.
FlailingAce
23d ago
I don't think you're wrong exactly, just that you're trivially correct. Everyone responds to the inevitability of death by thinking about their legacy, whether that's wealth, impact, relationships, or something eternal.
When I consider Trump, I am reminded, actually, of the depiction of Alexander the Great (Iskander) in the anime Fate:Zero. Okay bear with me a sec:
The premise of the series is that legendary heroes of the past are summoned with super powers to fight in a battle royale over the Holy Grail. In Fate: Zero, there's a scene where three legendary kings get together and share a drink while discussing what it means to be a king. It's one of my favorite scenes. Two of the kings, Iskander and Gilgamesh, are basically dunking on King Arthur (who's a woman for some reason) because she's sacrificed so much for her people and is basically miserable and moping all the time. Gilgamesh lays out his belief that he's the best king because he's got the most stuff, but then in an exchange between Arthur and Iskander, our boy explains what he thinks being a king is all about. Here's the key excerpt:
Arthur: If I rule the nation as king, I cannot ask to live as a person. King of Conquerors, you seek the Grail merely for your own benefit. You could never understand - you, who became a ruler only to satisfy your endless greed.
Iskander: A king without greed is even worse than a figurehead! [Arthur], you said you would martyr yourself for your ideals. In life, you must have been a pure saint. A proud and noble figure, certainly. But who can truly admire the martyr's thorny path? Who dreams of such an ending? A king. The king must be greedier than any other. He must laugh more loudly and rage for longer. He must exemplify the extreme of all things, good and evil. That is why his retainers envy and adore him. And why the flames of aspiration, to be as the king is, can burn within his people.
That's what Trump is like, and it's why his retainers adore him. He exemplifies the extreme of all things, and he charges forwards without regret. It's awesome! One more excerpt for good measure:
Arthur: Iskander, your reign ended with your heirs slain, and your empire dissolved into three parts. You have no regrets about that end?
Iskander: None. Not if it came to pass by my judgment and my retainers' sacrifices. Its destruction was inevitable. I shall grieve. And I shall weep. But I shall never regret - let alone undo it! Such an act would be a mockery of all who fought with me!
I think it's a very Western mindset to think our leaders should be more like Arthur, 'servant leaders' so to speak. Trump isn't like that at all, and doesn't pretend to be. He is a goddamn king.
FlailingAce
25d ago
We don't trust Denmark, and we especially don't trust the people of Greenland. Simple as.
One example I've heard brought up was in 2018, Greenland was courting a Chinese company as a major investor in one of their airports - against the wishes of the Danes I might add! It didn't go through after much controversy, but the fact that Greenland can choose to partner with China, or Russia, or whomever, is a serious risk.
The idea that they're 'in our sphere of influence', and so we can just rely on them to be our buddies forever, is counter to the worldview of the administration. We've seen disasters like the Panama canal, which we gave back to our friends the Panamanians, and which is now de-facto controlled by Chinese companies, and taken the lesson that anything we don't directly control will eventually be co-opted by our enemies. It's not an unreasonable conclusion based on recent history, even if it chafes at our allies in Europe to hear it.
I can't imagine that (before this whole kerfuffle) Denmark would have made a big deal about a larger military presence of the USA in Greenland
If Trump was proposing it, I'm about 70% likelihood they'd have made a big deal of it.
FlailingAce
28d ago
Cosmopolitanism is a big culprit here. The reason we would need legible tests like IQ to rank people is because nobody knows anybody, and references have become gamified. Status (and even competence) is easy to fake over the short term, and if you're found out as a fraud you can disappear into the global economy and start again. We've designed a society for sociopaths.
My recommendation: get involved in your local community (or a sub-culture thereof) and build yourself a reputation. Human connection is the antidote to superficiality.
FlailingAce
28d ago
My basic claim that IQ is not and should not be a primary characteristic that we're selecting for. It's secondary, in that it can affect the acquisition of primary characteristics, particularly specialized knowledge. But it seems to me you are reducing my hypothetical PT to this one number, and that you are wrong to do so.
In fact, I chose this example because I know a PT who is not a high IQ individual. He struggled a lot during school and barely squeaked by with a degree. I wouldn't estimate his IQ higher than 105. However, he's consistently rated as an excellent PT, with great reviews from his patients. How can this be? The answer is obvious - he put in a lot of work to acquire the necessary knowledge, and continues to work hard to research the unique problems his patients have, so he has the same functional knowledge as a higher-IQ PT. But he excels in other traits that correspond with high performance in this job, things like personability, conscientiousness, work ethic, and caring about his patients as people. I do not think a higher-IQ PT would be better at the job, even in negligible ways (you're right that 99% is a made-up number, well done spotting that). PTs aren't like Doctor House, coming up with genius insights that nobody else can see. They follow standard therapeutic guidelines. This is the case for most jobs.
As I said in both my comments, obviously IQ has an impact on many things, and 'all else equal' a higher IQ PT has an advantage - but all else isn't equal, and that advantage is not as significant as you seem to think. Overall, I believe that selecting for IQ is a mistake, for a lot of reasons - in this comment chain the reason I'm hitting on is that other traits are more important to many or even most jobs, and that we should assess people based on their performance. Hopefully that clarifies things for you.
FlailingAce
28d ago
You're not describing IQ. You are describing a combination of 1) specialized knowledge, and 2) attention to detail/conscientiousness. Only the first of these correlates to IQ, and then only because a higher IQ person can learn things faster, as I mentioned. Once the 100 IQ person works to acquire the knowledge/experience the difference between them becomes negligible in 99% of cases.
FlailingAce
29d ago
That commercial is awful; I want to punch that asshole in the face.
Oh man this is great. I just came down here to comment how much I loved that commercial! Like it legitimately made me swell with pride to see someone talking up America.
FlailingAce
29d ago
We create a hierarchy based on the performance of competence rather than the reality of capacity.
Good.
I recognize the point as it applies to top-tier quantum physicists, but in almost every other area of life I don't think we should judge people based on 'capacity' as indicated by raw IQ.
First of all, most careers do not have uncapped potential for improvement. Let's say someone wants to become a physical therapist - they need to learn a variety of details about human physiology, be competent at working with people, and have the capacity to keep up with developments in the field. This is achievable by a 100 IQ person just as much as a 130, the primary difference will just be how much time and effort is required to acquire the knowledge. I put it to you that most fields have this characteristic. The difference between a god-tier PT and a typical one may matter a little on the edge cases but for the most part these people are indistinguishable in what they can accomplish. Meanwhile, other traits like personability and compassion may be more relevant distinguishers for how well this person does the job.
Second, IQ already plays into every sorting algorithm we have. Do you really think that being more intelligent doesn't help you acquire certifications? Or that it won't be recognized by gatekeepers in fields where it's relevant? IQ is general problem solving, it's learning, in other words it already applies to all these systems. But, again, it's not the only thing that applies - you are judged on a variety of personal characteristics, such as willingness to put in work, reliability, trustworthiness, not being weird, etc. These things all actually matter.
Like I said at the top, there are some fields where raw IQ really does determine your effectiveness. Maybe you're in or adjacent to one of these, and are really griping about how the selection methods there are failing to identify intellectual capacity? If so I'm sympathetic. But in all other realms, if you don't produce anything with your big brain then you're no more useful than an idiot. I'd rather have someone conscientious and loyal on my team any day of the week.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
Not quite. If by prosecuting fraud you deter more future fraud, you can win, indeed.
Fraud is only deterred if the expected consequence outweighs the expected gain. In a Western world where fines for wrongdoing often are smaller than the money gained by the wrongdoing - fraud is simply never deterred. Especially among those who have few other options!
The solution is excessive punishment, potentially including executions as so many posters have mentioned, but this of course runs counter to Western instincts and our legal tradition. We don't have a solution to this problem.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
I don't know if this problem is unique to your locale out what, but I'm currently working on a project with my city council and can assure you they don't give a hoot about Palestine. The only reason they or anyone would care about culture war issues is if that pressure is applied from above.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
My goodness this is the most lazy straw man of protestantism I've ever seen. What the hell is it doing on this forum?
Please look into literally any main line Protestant church and you'll find plenty of in depth scholarship and apologetics. That you haven't done this basic legwork, I imagine, means you are languishing in the Catholic influencer bubble - but I would have thought you'd at least have encountered some of the 'debunking' material they put out so regularly.
Just to be clear, your argument is 'profiling doesn't happen that often, so stop complaining about it'?
It's wild to me how many people are biting the bullet on 'yes let's just racially profile people' despite the fact that it's illegal to do so.
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