pigeonburger
1d ago
As for the reason elderly women are often taking antisocial actions, I would hasard the reason is the same as anyone else. People, but men especially, are quickly thaught in life that them taking antisocial actions will usually make people around them angry. Sometimes this anger will turn to confrontation, and rarely (but sometimes) that confrontation will turn to violence. Minorities in majority white countries know that they could potentially turn it around if confronted by a white person by claiming it's racism so some of them abuse that. And elderly women (of any race) are the most oblivious demographic of all, because they are completely insulated from the consequences of antisocial actions as anyone confronting them immediately looks like the bad guy in the situation. If they had the physical ability to jump turnstiles, I have no doubt they would.
pigeonburger
1d ago
I find it sad because it means some demographics are going to have to shoulder blame. It would be much easier if the blame was diffused and we could blame and address society wide problems, but ones that are targeted are harder to solve because they elicit a defensive attitude.
It's also interesting to note that for the bus queues, the demographics at fault are not exclusively those you're probably thinking about. Yes, they are overrepresented, but some of the most frequently offending demographic I notice are elderly women (of all races).
So long as heterogenous outcomes are treated as failures requiring intervention, the meta will incentivize redefining heterogeneity to maximize resource capture.
Maybe the answer is the Tom Paris rebuttal.
The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher utilization rate of commuters when criminal vagrants are no longer an everpresent concern. The ROI of fare enforcement is the lower maintenance costs for repairs and cleanup when mentally ill homeless no longer defecate and trash the public space with the full expectation of someone else cleaning up their mess. The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher communal trust that the MTA will enjoy when it looks to be an organization that can steward its received resources with competence and clarity, instead of burying its head deeper in the sand about extant problems too inconvenient to address openly.
That's without counting the effects downstream from Broken Windows Theory. Which despite mainstream academia trying for decades to tarnish it, is so obvious from observation of humans and human nature that it still holds a quasi-tautological position in my thinking on this.
The Shopping Cart Theory is a great first-order test to determine prevalence of antisocial elements.
It is often a private choice, and it is harder to notice if this has any downstream effect because ressources are deployed to clean up, as you've mentionned. I've started to prefer bus queues to point out antisocial elements. Who, when coming up to wait at a bus stop that has an obvious, clear, nonambiguous line of people queueing up for the bus, decides to ignore the queue entirely, without any mitigating factors (joining a friend being barely acceptable). There's sadly patterns in what kind of neighborhood and people ignore bus queues.
pigeonburger
4d ago
Have you read The Toxoplasma Of Rage? Things everyone agree on don't get much attention, it's just the way our societies are wired.
pigeonburger
8d ago
But can those alcoholics down a hundred bottles in a night?
A hundred bottles in a night, and a hundred men in a day, are extremes for both. But apparently André the Giant could drink that much yes.
pigeonburger
8d ago
Indeed, at object level they tend to just be unfalsifiable claims against the other side, but I think at least it offers a credible rebuttal to the idea that conspiracies cannot exist past a certain scale.
What would distinguish a distributed conspiracy from a political coalition for me is methods and goals that the conspirants would not willingly disclose in the open. Without secret communications, coordination on those would be based on ideas that emerge naturally, that are downstream of memes shared by the distributed conspiracy. In a way this is like encryption, people with the correct key (sequence of memes) will decode the coordination instructions correctly. The left often accuses the right of this in the form of dogwhistles. If you want, for instance, to get widespread cheating in an election but don't want to say it out loud because that has consequences, you push very loudly memes that would justify cheating ("the other side will end democracy", for instance), so that without having to organize (at least not in large conspiracies), susceptible people will naturally wink, nod and act in support when they see hints that another person might be cheating in the direction they support.
pigeonburger
9d ago
So glad to hear your little bun buns is doing well!
Thanks, we're glad too. She's back to being her usual sassy self.
The great part about the price system is that this is never true, but it's totally fine. Consumers are not aware of what is efficient use of food resources. Or resources in automotive services. Or... or... or... In fact, believe it or not, many people even disagree as to whether something is an efficient use of resources!
That is true as as for allocation of ressources "to" healthcare; many of my friends seem to think we're crazy for the amount we did pay to have our bunny cared for, but to us it was worth it. But I think the issue is that allocation of ressources "within" healthcare is the issue. We had a certain amount of care we could pay for in our bunny's case. It was difficult to get from the veterinary what was the best use of that amount.
That's what I fear with human medicine; imagine how doctors could guilt trip people into paying way more by implying they're heartless cheakskates for not being willing to pay for low-likelihood tests and interventions. I do think in that case I would really like the service of someone knowledgeable who could argue on my behalf with the doctor.
pigeonburger
9d ago
A bit less than 2 months ago, our beloved pet bunny got life-threateningly sick. We took her to the veterinary hospital where she had to stay for 2 days. There is no insurance for bunnies here (we checked), so all the costs were paid out of pocket. The vets gave us an idea of the costs of specific tests, hospitalization, etc... so that was good.
The "ideal" of how to care for our bunny could have been ruinously expensive; surgeries, x-rays, etc... But one part of the process I did not enjoy is that the vet seemed reluctant to give advice as to what would be the best use of the money we could put aside for this. We could have easily blown over 5000$ or more on care if we had left her in their care as long as they thought was necessary, if we had done every test they wanted. Once it was clear to them that we were budget limited they were talking about how much it would cost to have her discharged and brought back if euthanasia becomes necessary, etc... Thankfully, our bunny is doing fine now, and I do think they did a good job taking care of her. And I don't think it's necessarily from a desire to extract money from us they were recommending expensive care, but because they don't like animals dying either.
Taking this experience of dealing with (veterinary) medical costs and bringing it to human care, what I feel would cause issues letting people take on the costs of medical care directly is that they are not aware of what is efficient use of ressources and doctors tend by their position to prefer to use unlimited ressources. And administrators are either detached from costs concerns (government administrators) or incentivised to minimise costs (insurance). What we'd need is hireable healthcare negociators who work solely for the patients, to maximise utility for ressources.
pigeonburger
9d ago
Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument.
This is the part that sticks out as what's broken in this otherwise reasonable and smart-enough sounding person. "This is a complicated problem that I can't say I fully understand but the answer is obviously violence." He keeps using adverbs like "simply, frankly, clearly", to try and drag violence within the realm of reasonable answers to a problem that is resistant to any other solutions. Violence is a reasonable answer when you are absolutely certain that it is the only way to resolve an issue with more severe consequences than the damage caused by the violence itself, which is why it's such a bad answer to complicated societal problems. But by his admission it IS a complicated societal problem that he doesn't feel like he has a good enough grasp on to explain himself.
pigeonburger
10d ago
We're getting close to it though. In a couple of years, when military kamikaze drones have become ubiquitous in all military armories (and thus can disappear from military armories), when the people with the knowledge to make them at home, from places like Ukraine and the ME, have spread everywhere, then I think we'll have a whole new thing to worry about.
pigeonburger
10d ago
Yeah, the victim surviving and appearing on TV with injuries won't garner the assassin much sympathy.
pigeonburger
10d ago
Yeah, but grenades are not as easy for civilians to acquire as guns, don't have that big a range and you'd need quite a bit of testing to get the sequence right for pulling the pin, cooking them and dropping them from a specific height. And in war you can usually iterate on failures, but an assassin doesn't have that luxury, one failure means the target goes into hiding or goes around with beefed up security and if you tried to use drones, that security will have jammers and will be looking for any drones that tries to get close.
pigeonburger
11d ago
On top of worries about the drone itself others have expressed, an explosive payload that's stable enough to be loaded on a drone, but reliable enough that you can plan on being able to trigger it, that's powerful enough to guarantee a kill but that's also light enough to fit on a small drone, that's not the kind of thing that you can get anywhere, and trying to acquire it is likely to attract more attention from the authorities than acquiring a gun.
pigeonburger
16d ago
"Competence" was not one of them.
Well, in absolute terms sure. But in relative term he only had to be more competent than the secret service. Something that in the wake of his attempt does not seem nearly as high a bar as it seemed prior.
pigeonburger
16d ago
more than cancelled out by not being able to say "first President to do X"
In normal times I would have agreed, but I think they overplayed that card in recent years and I think the american public just don't care anymore about hearing Democrats and the media self-servingly calling everything Trump does "unprecedented" and then doing the same shit but defending it as different. If they can the appearance of having at least a little integrity in the public eye then maybe their objections won't seem as partisan when they raise them later.
pigeonburger
16d ago
Another possibility: Joe Biden is doing his party a big service right now by letting himself become a sacrifice.
He's on his way out so there's no downside for anyone on his side to condemn and criticize him for the pardon. It gives them all a stage they can grandstand on to claim that they are the principled ones. It also increases the pressure on Trump if he wants to use his pardon on friends or family.
If you have to claim it never happened I think it does demonstrate that on some level you're either aware it's morally indefensible and do feel guilty over it, or you at least know it would look really bad if you tried to defend it as justified.
As long as they're not firmly on the other side of the friend-enemy divide to the West they do need a fig leaf, as flimsy as it is, so that it doesn't become untenable for the West to be on friendly term with them, especially since it was sold to the western public after WW2 that a country committing a genocide or other atrocities is all you need to justify war with them. (I mean, there were complex reasons for WW2, but if you asked the average person, they'll say it's because of the genocide, even if it doesn't make sense chronologically).
You'd get close to equal crime rates from irrational actors. Rational actors you just need to be sure to not let the benefit of crime outweigh the penalty, but that's a relatively low bar to clear. I think there's likely very few criminals in prison who believe whatever benefit they got from their crime is worth the time spent in prison (and the criminal record). Piling on more punishment after that has very little if any effect. Increasing the catch and conviction rate, however... It would hit the behavioral conditioning that irrational actors need to get.
As an interesting anecdote, I grew up firmly believing the mantra that "crime doesn't pay" and "criminals always get caught". I mean that I believed them literally, that the police had an almost 100% rate of solving crimes. Of course as I grew up I realized it's not really the case. But it still shaped me to be a person who is almost obsessively rule-abiding. Like I have a hard time jaywalking at night when there's absolutely no one watching, I feel dumb not doing it, but when I force myself to do it, it feels like I'm going against a deeply programmed instinct. I wonder what kind of person I would have grown up to be if I had the current perception that criminals almost always get away with crime, and get caught when they're unlucky or sloppy. There's a lot of kids who probably believe that nowadays, from seeing friends and family get away with crime.
pigeonburger
19d ago
I mean, the thought experiment is comparing two extremes' effect on irrational actors, but any sane policy would adjust punishments so that it doesn't at the same time create unfortunate incentives for rational actors.
It depends what kind of criminals you're thinking about, but most of them don't do any kind of reasonned risk/reward analysis. They simply believe punishment doesn't matter because they won't get caught. It's like reckless driving; a likely result is death, the harshest punishment, but it's infrequent enough that the people doing it discount its possibility to zero. Or teens and unwanted pregnancies, even when there wasn't an easy way out, it still happened all the time because the punishment was infrequent enough as to seem unlikely to happen.
pigeonburger
20d ago
The point is that criminals are not deterred by the length and severeness of the punishment but by the likelihood and immediacy of the punishment.
pigeonburger
21d ago
The people they are selling themselves to share the same self-delusion
Or, alternatively, are judging them on their ability to not go off-message on a public podcast.
pigeonburger
21d ago
If that's true these people must all be filthy rich now, from the prediction markets.
Elderly women should be offered accessible seats on a bus, for sure. But I think they need to either wait for people to offer these seats, or they should ask if other would mind if they went first. For an able young person, refusing to let an elderly person sit is itself antisocial. But them just taking for granted they are owed this is rude and antisocial, and I think most people (and most elderly women) know this.
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