naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
I do agree States get to run their elections but in this case the State Court is citing constitutional law to remove him.
Yeah, in morning's light I'm thinking about the difference between the law of disqualification versus the factual question of insurrection. SCOTUS isn't going to rule that insurrection isn't disqualifying, but if they do rule that (e.g.) insurrection requires some kind of criminal conviction then on remand Colorado will need to find a different excuse. But in a way that turns into a gift for Trump, who would then get to walk around saying "the media lies, SCOTUS itself cleared me of insurrection," which... well, I don't know. It would be nice if the Republican Party would just toss him out in the primaries, then this would all be moot, but that seems less and less likely to happen.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
Sorry, it would have been more precise to say "if Colorado's legislature says Trump can't be on the ballot, provided they haven't done anything unconstitutional in the process (e.g. racial discrimination or whatever)..."
In morning's light I am less satisfied with the rest of my analysis, though. The legal question of insurrection (and whether and how it may be disqualifying) is at least plausibly separable from the factual question of insurrection, though. So it will be interesting to see what happens.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
If states reign supreme, what’s to stop any state from stripping literally all of their political adversaries from their ballots?
I have heard many people argue that the current two-party system of "Republicrats" is already doing precisely that. Have you ever tried to run for public office? It's not always and everywhere completely insane, but certainly it can be a time-consuming and expensive process. Party machines grease the skids for you, so legislation is typically written with those machines in mind. But that means, if you are a political adversary of the dominant parties, then the laws on the books are overwhelmingly likely to work against you.
Fortunately, in many places Republicans and Democrats exist in small enough numbers that unaffiliated voters can occasionally drive legislation that places limits on the excesses of partisans seeking to strip their adversaries of electability. This is the most likely practical result: states that go overboard in stripping adversaries will face an angry uprising from independent voters. But in places with entrenched one-party rule, this is less likely to pose a meaningful threat.
More expansively: the main thing preventing this from happening in the past has just been good old-fashioned civic virtue. But the news media, education systems, etc. have been beating the "burn it all down" drum long enough that many, maybe most Americans now think that destroying their opponents is more important than finding a way to coexist with them.
If you put a gun to my head, I'd bet that this is overturned, or stayed until moot.
The ruling is absurd, but the Constitution is pretty clear that states get to decide how their elections are run, including their national elections. The only Constitutional caveats are that Congress can weigh in on Article I elections (legislators), and that the states must be structured in a republican way (i.e. representative democracy). Here are the (partial) instructions for Article II elections:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
If Colorado's legislature (or its sometimes-mouthpiece, the state court) says Trump can't be on the ballot, then Trump can't be on the ballot, and from a Constitutional standpoint, that's the end of the story. One Constitutional way out I see here is maybe a Fourteenth Amendment complaint of some kind, but the conservatives on the court are likely to be leery of that, and the progressives on the court will simply refuse to rule in Trump's favor no matter how much they may need to torture logic to get there.
My primary hesitation is Chief Justice Roberts. He is a pragmatist to the core, and may just oppose the chaos that would result: a likely domino-effect of progressive states using this ruling to (definitely) eliminate Trump from their ballots and (possibly in the future) even eliminate conservative candidates through bog-standard abuse of process. I could see Roberts relying on "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government" from the Constitution with precisely the intent of preventing political chaos, but in doing so he would do pretty direct harm to the plain language governing Article II elections.
I'm less acquainted with any federal election statutes that may apply, but prima facie I would bet cautiously against this being overturned--on grounds that Roberts, as an establishment man, may find his distaste for Trump encouraging him to affirm the strength of Article II. This would be a victory for establishment Republicans as well as a victory for Trump haters. But I can imagine Roberts imagining the electoral chaos of an affirmation, because that result would make the 2000 and 2020 elections look tame by comparison; faced with such a vision, he could very well flinch. So I would expect Trump's team to work that angle hard--assuming there are any competent lawyers remaining who are still willing to represent him.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
You've got eight comments in the mod queue and all of them are ban-worthy. Looking over your brief history here, this appears to be a troll account. Banned.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
Real pathways to raise fertility:
- Return or move closer to actual patriarchy
- Mass cloning/AI/eternal youth technical fix
- Return to devout religiosity as with Mormons of old and certain Jewish sects
I quite enjoyed this recent piece from the vice president for economic and social-policy studies at The Cato Institute, Alex Nowrasteh. Specifically this bit:
He asked what I’d do to increase fertility if that were the only outcome I cared about. After clarifying that I don’t support this policy, I said that I’d massively increase marginal tax rates on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity cost of having children.
Even the Mormons are falling below replacement rate, though for all I know that is due to secularization. A "return to patriarchy" could work if it specifically limits women's opportunities, but part of Nowrasteh's point seems to be that with the luxury of ubiquitous electronic entertainment, even excluding women from the workforce would likely be insufficient to push the opportunity cost balance back toward fecundity.
Nowrasteh's proposal is deregulation to reduce the cost of raising children, but in my experience children are already pretty affordable--at least until they get to college! Rather, the benefits of having children are often poorly communicated or even perhaps outside the Overton window, and when they are understood those benefits still take decades to really come to fruition. Having a close-knit family is an extremely effective risk-mitigation strategy on numerous fronts, but it takes a lot of work to build such a thing, and it takes a lot of cultural input to get people believing it's even possible.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
There are of course a million angles on this, but the one that just got me was the "Republicans pounce" headline from NBC:
Forget the sense of defilement (in the old "despoil their temples" sense of defilement), the sense of entitlement on display (both in the video's creation and in the staffer's "I dindu nuffin" and "I play the gay card" and "I'm gonna sue" responses), how this impacts stereotypes of gay men as oversexed wantons, comparisons to the consequences of the January 6 2021 "riots," jokes about whose chair that was and what she's going to do about it...
Forget all that. Somehow, the headline is Republicans pounce. I don't know how something can be so simultaneously brazen and banal, but there it is. Totally unapologetic partisan propaganda from a major news network, just the most painfully obvious and insanely unprofessional bullshit approach to burying the lede, and I know they do this all the time but come on. We've got full-on video of gay sex in a Senate hearing room and these so-called "journalists" can't see it as anything but an opportunity to run interference for the Democrats?
I'm a big fan of the Free Press, in the old "fourth estate" sense. But I'm not sure there are any legacy media outlets left that aren't simply Democratic political action committees that murdered the First Amendment and now prance about wearing its desiccated skin, cultural wolves in political sheep's clothing.
That's the part that caught my interest: how did the rationalist community, with its obsession with establishing better epistemics than those around it, wind up writing, embracing, and spreading a callout article with shoddy fact-checking?
People occasionally ask whether the ratsphere is just reinventing the wheel of philosophy (my response then). I suspect that EA is similarly reinventing the wheel of non-profit profiteering.
This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, but so far all I have to show for it is a scattered mess of loosely-connected (as though by yarn and pushpins) thoughts. Some of them are even a bit Marxist--we live in a material world, we all have to eat, and if you aren't already independently wealthy then your only options for going on living are to grind, or to grift (or some combination of the two). And the Internet has a way of dragging more and more of us into the same bucket of crabs. AI is interesting stuff, but 99% of the people writing and talking about it are just airing views. MIT's recent AI policy briefs do not contribute any technical work to the advancement of AI, and do not express any substantive philosophical insight; all I see there is moralizing buzzwords and wishful thinking. But it is moralizing buzzwords and wishful thinking from top researchers at a top institution discussing a hot issue, which is how time and money and attention are allocated these days.
So for every one person doing the hard work of advancing AI technology, there seem to be at least a hundred grasping hands reaching out in hopes of being the one who gets to actually call the shots, or barring that at least catches some windfall "crumbs" along the way. For every Scott Alexander donating a damn kidney to strangers in hopes of making the world an ever-so-slightly better place to live, there are a hundred "effective altruists" who see a chance to collect a salary by bouncing between expenses-paid feel-good conferences at fancy hotels instead of leveraging their liberal arts degree as a barista. And I say that as someone with several liberal arts degrees, who works in academia where we are constantly under pressure to grift for grants.
The cliche that always comes to my mind when I weigh these things is, "what would you do, if money were not an issue?" Not in the "what if you had unlimited resources" sense, but like--what would the modal EA-AI acolyte do, if they got their hands on $100 million free and clear? Because I think the true answer for the overwhelming majority of them is something like "buy real estate," not "do more good in the world." And I would not condemn that choice on the merits (I'd do the same!) but people notice that kind of apparent hypocrisy, even if, in the end, we as a society seem basically fine with non-profits like "Black Lives Matter" making some individual persons wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. I can't find the link right now (but I thought it was an AAQC?) but someone here did a Likewise, there was a now-deleted deep dive into the Sound of Freedom guy's nonprofit finances posted here a while back, and he was making a lot of money.
So if you want to dig in, the 2020 return is here and the 2021 is here.
As far as most concerning stuff, there is a pretty large amount of money flowing out to Ballard and his wife. $335,000 of salary to Ballard in 2021 and $113,858 of salary to his wife. These aren't super eye popping numbers, but it is a pretty high amount.
The second thing is that they seem to be hoarding a lot of cash. They have like $80 million cash on hand, and are spending much less than they raise. This isn't inherently an issue if they're trying to build an organization that's self-sustaining, but it does mean as a donor your money is not likely going to actual stuff in the short or medium term.
Speaking of that actual stuff, they don't seem to spend most of what goes out the door on their headline-generating programs. A pretty big chunk of their outflow is just grants to other 501(c)(3)s, which is not something you need to be spending millions in executive compensation for. As best I can figure, in 2021 they did just shy of $11 million of grants to other nonprofits. It's a little tricky to suss out their spending on program expenses versus admin, but they claim for outside the US a total of just shy of $8 million in program expenses.
Legal expenses are also very high (at over 1.5 million). Not sure if they're involved in some expensive litigation or what is going on there. Travel is also really high at 1.9 million, but given the nature of their organization, a good chunk of that is likely programmatic.
Now it looks like, even if maybe he did (?) save some kid(s) from trafficking along the way, it was mostly a grift? Anyway, the point is, stories like this abound.
So it would be more surprising, in the end, if the rationalist community had actually transcended human nature in this case. And by "human nature" I don't even mean greedy and grubbing; I just mean that anyone who isn't already independently wealthy must, to continue existing, find a grind or a grift! As usual, I have no solutions. This particular case is arguably especially meta, given the influence AI seems likely to have on the grind-or-grift options available to future (maybe, near-future) humans. And maybe this particular case is especially demonstrative of hypocrisy, given the explicit opposition of both effective altruism and the ratsphere to precisely the kind of grind-or-grift mentality that dominates every other non-profit world. But playing the game one level higher apparently did not, at least in this case, translate into playing a different game. Perhaps, so long as we are baseline homo sapiens, there is no other game available to us.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
...is that sarcasm?
Nope.
I have to assume you are at least aware that Twitch isn't only for gaming, right?
I was previously unaware.
I know you said you don't watch it, but the idea that Twitch ... is just about gaming is trivially demonstrated as false.
Yep. No one had ever demonstrated that to me.
or even live-streaming in general
I understand that many things are live-streamed, though I basically never watch live-streams outside of oral arguments before appellate courts. But I always thought Twitch was a gaming service. I even have a login through Amazon that I sometimes use to get gaming bonuses, and I never saw anything there that wasn't someone else playing a video game.
I understand that the question is relatively simple to answer, but I'm pointing out that the question itself never even occurred to me. I've never had any reason at all to suppose Twitch was anything but a video game streaming service.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
I felt like this was a surprisingly complex problem when I started reading about it, but your replies (and others) are strengthening that sense dramatically. For want of a less politically-loaded word, "democratization" of technology seems to be taking our species to some pretty weird places already. How much further along this tech tree can we go before Something Breaks?
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
It's not only a gaming platform, that's why.
Thanks--today I learned!
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
This, along with other comments explaining to me that Twitch does more than video game streaming, was very helpful. Thank you!
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
I'm confused. Enough people were showing NSFW material Twitch thought was inappropriate that they reversed course. This seems quite different from your description of humans trying to become "teenage-presenting (cat?)girls."
I'm confused too, I guess.
My comment about Fisherian runaway was related to the AI stuff... like, if lewds are permitted and lewds get clicks, then yeah you're gonna get camgirls but also (I assume) you're going to get camboys using AI filters to present as camgirls for the views. But if that's not what was raising the AI concerns at Twitch then I guess I misunderstood something.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
When people say there were no WMDs, this is what they're saying. That it was bullshit and misleading what they did, that it was a lie. They're not really making a formal statement about whether the chemical weapons that were found are or aren't "of mass destruction".
Well, yes, but the fact that "people" do the motte-and-bailey thing constantly isn't really an excuse, to my mind. Saying things that are literally false but directionally true is something that bothers me a lot. Maybe that makes me an autist or whatever, but I am entirely comfortable that my way is better.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
What fraction of twitch streamers do you think are involved in this "Fisherian runaway?" What fraction of, say, the top 100 or 1000 streamers?
I'm going to go with "Enough that Twitch felt the need to substantially revise its policy twice in two days."
You don't seem to think this is a big deal, and probably that's true, but it's clearly a big enough deal.
Of course, on seeing this news I immediately wondered why it would count as "punishing" women to prevent them from doing something men don't generally have the option of doing (that is, making money by flashing breasts). Why don't we say it "levels the playing field" to prevent women from using their sex appeal to crush their competitors on a gaming platform? I was going to do a great Simpsons callback and everything, "Twitch became a hardcore pornography platform so gradually I didn't even notice," I had this whole post I was going to write about the sexual appeal of females versus males, maybe do a little amateur evo-psych ("as a treat!")--
--and then the whiplash hit.
Twitch Reverses Policy Allowing ‘Artistic Nudity,’ Citing AI’s Ability to Create Realistic Images
Here is Twitch's reversal of its... reversal? The meat is straightforward:
Moving forward, depictions of real or fictional nudity won’t be allowed on Twitch, regardless of the medium. This restriction does not apply to Mature-rated games.
I guess someone realized that if you allow streamers to turn your site into OnlyFans with Vidya, then the women are going to drop their tops and the men are going to just... use filters? (I don't actually know, I don't use Twitch because I play video games and have no interest in watching others do so, but I am decrepit and out of touch so whatever. I have an Amazon Prime account so sometimes I pop over to Twitch if there's an incentive or something but otherwise it's a mystery to me.)
Now I'm left pondering the apparent Fisherian runaway of human beings trying to become--virtually, at least--teenage-presenting (cat?)girls as quickly as possible. I hadn't previously considered the impact of AI on parasocial human relationships, and now I'm having a hard time considering anything else. But I also have to wonder--is the new policy re-sexist? Will it make any difference at all?
EDIT: From the helpful comments below, today I learned that Twitch is not just a video game streaming site, but also streams other activities like art creation; that the AI nudity concerns are not limited to filters/avatars but to art being produced on Twitch; and that Twitch's reverse-course was likely driven at least as much by AI "nudification" concerns as anything. I remain interested in the thought processes that led to the first change-in-policy, and in knowing what (if anything) actually happened on the server side to cause the rapid about-face! But I appreciate having the bits I did not understand explained to me.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
The WMD hoax was engineered by Zionists in the American government
Single-issue posting is officially against the rules. Your cooldown on "Jews did it" arguments has not adequately expired, so I'm banning you for three days.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
I'd be very interested in @2rafa's take on this, because this has become a gigantic political pet peeve for me. Even now, decades later, I hear people drop "Iraq WMDs was a lie" so casually, but I personally know veterans who were there in Iraq dealing with actual WMDs. It wasn't a fabrication; at worst, someone overstated the evidence (in much the way that people say "genocide" to imply mass murder even though technically mass relocation falls under the most widely accepted global definition of genocide). I don't even find it difficult to imagine that everyone was being honest, and the mess was just the result of inconsistent expectations surrounding words with different technical versus rhetorical meanings.
But those on the conservative side, as you note, seem disinclined to say "well, there were WMDs but they probably weren't of a kind or condition that was worth the trouble," while the progressive side has just gone right on beating the "there were no WMDs" drum. Truth is the first casualty of (culture) war.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
"Ethnically American" is a retarded statement when applied to anyone who didn't have ancestors dwelling on the continent before Columbus showed up
I don't think so, though I would not personally limit "ethnically American" to borderers or even to European stock. One reason your claim doesn't hold up is that "Hispanic" is the most widely-recognized ethnicity in the Americas, and all it means is "descended from Spanish (and maybe Portugese) settlers of the New World." Most Hispanic people are additionally descended from aboriginal Americans, but many are distinguishable from Old World Europeans only by the accent of their Spanish.
Remember that "ethnicity" is a word that was added to the English language less than one hundred years ago, and was not even a dictionary entry until 1972. It was intended to replace "dated" (the source says "tainted") terms like race, nation, and minority. From the link:
Today, “ethnicity” tends to describe any group that is characterized by a distinct sense of difference owing to culture and descent.
People who say they are "ethnically American" today are broadly asserting that they experience a distinct sense of difference owing to culture and descent. You appear to essentially be using "ethnicity" as a synonym for the older concept of "race." Which you're free to do, but it kind of violates the whole point of the word's coining. Which you're additionally free to disagree with, if your focus is more rooted in DNA etc., but you should then be at least conscious of the controversy.
Certainly as used by KMC, it carries a not even veiled implication that they're somehow more American than the rest of them.
I suspect this is partly due to the overlapping meanings of "American." Even Scott Alexander has noticed that "American" tends to tag the "red tribe" in at least some contexts. Of course, it is also the abbreviated name of two continents, and one nation, so using as the name of an ethnicity that is predominantly of European descent is clearly going to be fraught. As usual, when seeking clarity it's probably best to taboo our words--but of course, asking a large group of people to stop using their preferred ethnic tag tends to go over like a lead balloon.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
please stop reading dystopian fiction and watching anime
This is not a helpful, insightful, or interesting response--it's just a sneer. You have establishing a long history of low effort antagonism so I'm banning you for a week. Expect this to begin escalating sharply if you don't shape up.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
Please write as though everyone is reading and you would like them to be involved in the conversation. "Who cares what $GROUP thinks" is not permissible rhetoric here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
This text was linked some time ago, and it is quite silly.
Is it? You don't appear to have read it.
There is very significant difference that I have no some slave owner that may rape me, take all my stuff, sell me 200kmn away, flog me, forbid me to leave specific village or tell me that I am now obligated to do unpleasant job XYZ for 18 hours a day. Taxation is not like any of these things.
The text clearly accounts for all of this. All you seem to be saying is that you don't think #9 is slavery. What about #8, #7, etc.? The point of the text is not that taxation is slavery, it's that it is surprisingly difficult to specify, from a moral perspective, where slavery begins or ends.
Payment for the services which allow you earn that income doesn’t do it for you?
Which government services "allow" me to earn income? At best I suppose the provisioning of a fiat currency might qualify, but I'm not really sold on fiat currency being an improvement over known alternatives. Since government monetary policy is not typically crafted to benefit me (specifically), but to benefit banks and other large stakeholders, the absolute strongest steelman I can think of for fiat currency is that it creates a sort of "trickle down" effect where I benefit incidentally. Beyond that, stuff like the roads I travel to get to work, or the police I (basically never) rely on to keep my workplace safe, are all either privatizable, or easily provisioned through more direct means (e.g. tolls or vehicle purchase taxes or the like).
Or is it a sense of double-dipping with taxes on consumption?
Maybe? Nozick's "Tale of the Slave" captures the problem reasonably well. I don't mind paying for services I use. But if you split my "share" of income taxes proportionally between all government programs, at least 50% of that money is just being redistributed to people and programs who don't deserve my money. For every hour I work, I spend about five minutes enslaved to someone else's cause--causes that are not only unnecessary to the continuation of my community, but are in many cases (e.g. federal funding to Planned Parenthood, military incursions driven by sentiment rather than defensive or even economic considerations) things I regard as actively harmful to my community and to the world. I am told that this is why we have the democratic process, so I can have a "say" in how my money is spent, but realistically my "say" is worthless, and I don't think I should have only a 1/150,000,000 say in how my life is spent.
I’m having a hard time imagining why the income tax would be less justifiable than any other form of tax.
Because it's just stealing. Person A has $$$, so take it away and give in to person B. "Person B needs it more!" So? We don't actually redistribute money based on need, need is the excuse we give for redistributing money based on the political priorities of the powerful. Property taxes bug me (since they ultimately end with property confiscation) but at least they are mostly attached to services that make the property useable. Vehicle taxes, or even mileage or road taxes, are at least mostly attached to related services. Sales tax makes some sense to me insofar as we do have a shared currency, military operations keeping shipping lanes safe, etc. Even some of the more paternalistic stuff, like Social Security tax, is at least more justifiable that income tax, because (at least in theory) the money being confiscated is for a specific identifiable purpose directly related to the earner's well-being.
But income tax is just straight wage theft. It lacks even the patina of paternalism. People who pay income tax are just being milked by the government, in substantial measure for the purpose of outright buying votes from the poor. Basically every extant form of taxation I can think of is more justifiable than income tax. Which is not to say that I am especially bullish on other forms of taxation, but I'm not an anarcho-libertarian. I'm okay with sensible, relevant taxation, but income tax does not even remotely meet that threshold.
One one hand, it is true that the IRS cannot and does not audit everyone, or send all delinquent accounts to some form of collections. It is also true that they are disinterested in de minimis settlements from judgment-proof citizens, i.e. they're not coming after you for a $5 error (though they might send a letter about it!).
On the other hand, it is also true that there are things you can do that their computer systems will now notice more or less automatically, which will substantially increase your risk of an audit and/or collection activity. People can, and do, get hit with wage garnishment and even jail time for unpaid accounts.
I have never been able to think of a good moral argument for income or capital gains taxes; sales taxes possibly, certain limited property taxes maybe, but income and capital gains taxes are just straight theft. So please don't imagine I have any sympathy for the IRS when I say: just pay the IRS what you owe under the law as written. Unless you are at least a centi-millionaire for whom the cost of legal defense is arguably less than the possible savings, there are very few situations where I can imagine the risk outweighing the reward.
Now you might say--"but I don't know what I owe, because 'estimated taxes' are bullshit!" I sympathize, I really, really do. The fact that a single windfall can result in a year or more of the IRS asking you to pre-pay your taxes based on unrealized income you can't possibly predict is incredibly abusive. But so long as you pay a plausibly good faith estimate, you will have done something defensible. And also remember that the IRS doesn't (usually?) escalate to "jail time"--the first thing they do is demand their protection money, and the second thing they do is add penalties on top of that. So if you underpay your estimated taxes, there's a chance they'll hit you with a penalty for it.
Setting up a shady small business and taking deductions can indeed reduce your apparent tax burden, but it also exponentially increases your chances of an audit (and the penalties you will incur in the process).
Good luck!
Yeah, this is correct, I should probably have waited to post until after I'd gotten some sleep.
If you read the decision, the Colorado Supreme Court is not basing its case entirely on the federal constitution, but rather saying that Colorado statutory law provides a judicial remedy for voters seeking to remove a disqualified candidate from the ballot, and further that they are removing Trump from the ballot in holding that Trump is so disqualified. But there are two prongs to that--a question of fact, and a question of law. On the question of law, SCOTUS isn't going to hold that insurrection doesn't disqualify, but they could (even though supposedly appellate courts don't like to revisit findings of fact, they often do) hold that Trump has not actually been proven guilty of insurrection (the Due Process/Fourteenth Amendment question I mentioned but didn't elaborate upon).
The question then becomes, how far is the Colorado court willing to go, on remand, to keep Trump off the ballot anyway--but as others have pointed out, by then the issue may be moot.
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