roystgnr
2mo ago
"Scratch-made" is an excellent marketing term if you're looking for restaurant patrons, not so much if you're looking for new religious followers. Social proof is a big psychological deal, and nobody wants to leave their millions-strong religion to follow something some guy pulled out of nowhere. But if you reinterpret an existing religion then you've got a chance. People get to believe they still share the old truths of those millions of people in the old religion, and they've got new truths on top of that too!
The trouble is that those "old truths" are all still written down somewhere, and the farther your "new truths" diverge from them, the trickier everything gets to reconcile. "The first books of our religion are about how God was super focused on one coalition of tribes in the Middle East" and "The modern factor differentiating our religion is that we're super special for being from a different racial cluster centered thousands of miles away" are an especially tough combo unless you can strike out "different" ... but in any case "God handled a tiny fraction of the Iron Age personally and was hands-off with the rest" is the sort of plot hook that really calls out to be picked up, and "we're not part of 'the rest' is a satisfying-feeling resolution. Human psychology is so self-centered that you can get away with "God is super invested in our tiny group" to people for whom "God is super invested in someone else's tiny group" would be literally unbelievable.
roystgnr
2mo ago
And those sorts of decisions are mostly made by men.
I'd love to see a source for this. A quick Google isn't bringing up anything reliable either way for me ... though some of the questionable sources are amusing:
It seems that in married households both genders believe, in supermajority poll results, that they had the most influence over car purchase decisions.
A lot of feminist sources are happy to report that women make a supermajority or an overwhelming majority of car purchase decisions, not because equality means we must fight the matriarchy now, but because this implies we need to hire way more women as auto executives.
roystgnr
3mo ago
I would cite specific examples, but I doubt any of them are well-enough known to make sense out-of-context.
It makes sense that people might have to binge-watch all of Firefly before they'd be able to understand your analysis, but I'm confused ... you seem to consider this a bad thing?
roystgnr
3mo ago
To a first approximation, there are no social bubbles where "yay murder" against the right targets isn't an applause line.
I think part of why I understand how tempting "bubbling up" can be is that I'm such a big fan of the "borderline-autistic nerds" social bubble in particular.
"... we can't expect to meet on everything right away, you and I. So I won't ask you to say that the Dark Lord was wrong to kill my mother, just say that it was... sad. We won't talk about whether or not it was necessary, whether it was justified. I'll just ask you to say that it was sad that it happened, that my mother's life was valuable too, you'll just say that for now. And I'll say it was sad that Narcissa died, because her life was also worth something. We can't expect to agree on everything right away, but if we start out by saying that every life is precious, that it's sad when anyone dies, then I know we'll meet someday. That's what I want you to say. Not who was right. Not who was wrong. Just that it was sad ..."
I think this was surprisingly poignant for me because the moralist in me wants to say that this sentiment is so trivially, obviously true that it's not worth any melodrama, whereas the cynic in me wants to say that it's so empirically, historically doomed that it's not worth any optimism, and there's a lot of tension from that dilemma.
What is the difference between the division between, say, France and England or the Christian and Muslim worlds and Pillarization?
Are you thinking historically or currently? E.g. currently, trade between the UK and France is something like $100B/year right now, so they're hardly shunning each other, but historically, I'd say the Hundred Years' War meets my "embarrassing failure mode for a society" criterion hands down.
Rapid values change means that social homogeneity goes away, and we lose the necessary protection of distance.
Rapid values change and rapid communication. It's awesome to be able to learn about others' beliefs directly without a clueless game of telephone in between; it's admittedly less awesome when your neighbor can also get all the data they want but is still clueless about how to turn it into information.
I'd hope we might build up some immunity to memetic assault, over generations, ideally as people who take on poor values learn from their mistakes and teach their kids better, possibly as they just end up with fewer kids. I guess the biggest problem here is that, more than the France/England or Christendom/Dar-al-Islam separations, pillarization within a single country makes it much less safe to let your countrymen make their own mistakes, so long as they can vote to make their mistakes yours too. Or maybe we'll find that nasty memes can evolve faster than our immunity to them can? Nobody worries about "The Gin Craze" anymore, but the descendants of people who could resist "the devil's brew" etc. are now finding it harder to cope with fentanyl...
Or maybe it'll all be moot for one reason or another; everything's changing fast now, not just our values.
roystgnr
3mo ago
its not really out of proportion for me to say "hey that thing you said annoyed me, and I don't really want to talk with you anymore".
This depends on what they said, on where they said it, and on what you'd otherwise be talking with them about, doesn't it? Even for a public-facing job?
If they say they think birth control is a sin they could never support, maybe you should find someone else to go to for a prescription but you should be fine with going to them for a soda. CVS might want to fire someone like them from the pharmacy but not from the checkout counter.
If they say to their friends that homosexuals/billionaires/Wiccans/Christians/Muslims/Republicans/whoever should repent their evil ways, maybe that's a deal breaker for you to talk to them as a friend, but unless they're preaching to their customers too you ought to be okay talking to them as a customer.
We made it out of devastating religious wars not because everybody stopped believing that infidels and heretics on the other teams would burn in Hell, but just because we got a little more tolerant and stopped deciding that we needed to rush the job on Earth.
Pillarisation is such an embarrassing failure mode for a society. It's so easy to find a bubble of like-minded people online that we do it almost by default, but at least eventually you have to go offline and touch grass and figure out how your worldview integrates with random people who might react with shock at some of the assumptions your in-group take for granted. That's a partial solution to a problem, not an extra problem in need of a solution.
Maybe I'm just pissing into the wind here, though. Part of the trouble with everybody bubbling up is that eventually the assumptions in a bubble online do legitimately become too shocking for someone to want to interact with you offline in any capacity. The Home Depot lady didn't just say her political opponents were awful people, nor even that one should be tried and executed, she said one should be shot dead by a random gunman. I'm not a Trump voter, but I'm not familiar with what her other triggers might be and I'm not bulletproof, so "I don't really want to talk with you" feels like it should be an allowable response. But isn't even that tragic? She doesn't seem like a killer, nor even a particularly serious person, just someone who does all her fun social chatting in a bubble where "yay murder" against the right targets is an applause line. The trouble is that we're also in a society where people don't want to risk becoming the white chalk outline in the background of a "she was such a quiet person, I don't know what happened" interview. She probably felt like she was commenting about a TV melodrama, not an actual incident where someone proved they were willing to take "yay murder" to its logical conclusion.
roystgnr
3mo ago
Reaching back 60 years to find an example seems like strong (if unintended) support for both "certainly possible" and "it doesn't happen often".
roystgnr
3mo ago
Traditional cell phone companies lobbied against the Starlink+T-Mobile service recently, if that's what you're thinking of?
I don't think "going after" a charter city means evicting everybody. It just means outnumbering the cops who want to enforce the charter city's laws with cops who want to enforce state/federal laws instead. The optics of that are going to very much depend on the specifics of the laws being enforced against nullification or rendered null against local enforcement, and are to some extent going to depend on surrounding culture and random chance. The Short Creek raid and the YFZ Ranch raid were superficially pretty similar, but the latter was a lot more effective long-term, in part because the wider culture had turned further against polygamy and much further against underage marriage and sexism in the interim. If your idea of local laws is (peeks back up thread) "intelligent peers, an actually challenging primary school system" then (assuming you can't fix every demographic gap yourselves) you're fine until/unless the surrounding culture turns much harder against the typical disparate impact of academic challenge. If it's "no danger of state abduction if they say the wrong thing to a school therapist" then you're fine until/unless the culture turns much harder ... in favor of childhood gender transition against parental wishes, I'm assuming?
And then on the other side, you have to worry about whether the culture is going to turn in the other direction and make your efforts moot. Are the "Wobblies" going to turn your current residence communist any time soon? (I read about them in now-70-year-old books!) Wouldn't you feel silly if you'd gone to found a new city in the middle of nowhere to avoid that, with a bunch of equally anti-communist fellows, to wait out a particular End of the World that never came? The other trouble with selecting for the most radically anti-anything people around is that radicals (including reactionaries - at least some other forms of radicals haven't already seen how their ideals fail...) tend to get weird in ways you don't like just as much as in ways you do. I respect the kids-must-have-intelligent peers crowd, but if you get the ones who are so extreme about it that they don't consider e.g. "move to Los Alamos" a solution (23 AP classes offered, because "kids in a small town full of nuclear physicists" is a sweet peer group), well, let's just say that I'm not sure they're going to be able to keep up with the nuclear physicists' kids even in that specific desideratum.
roystgnr
3mo ago
Starlink is very much a traditional "ask permission first so you don't have to ask forgiveness later" project, and they didn't start making the big asks (of the FCC) until they were already in good with NASA. IIRC the worst incident I can think of where SpaceX strained its sympathy was a Starship hop test years ago, where the FAA claimed (albeit vaguely) that SpaceX had exceeded what was allowed by its launch license, but the fallout only delayed their next test launch by like 5 days.
Uber is a really good point. Start an axitay abcay service instead of a taxi cab service, then grow it fast enough that people will scream bloody murder if you take it away based on taxi cab regulations, and you're fine? (mostly; Austin kicked out Uber and Lyft for a year at one point) But Uber bought "grow fast enough" with $30 billion in investor cash; gaining power and sympathy more affordably might be a lot harder.
roystgnr
3mo ago
The protagonist a scientist burnout who literally became a children's school teacher. His train of thought is not quite "Sunday School teacher for ten-year olds", because that's the sort of person who may just never start cursing to begin with, but it's pretty solid as "late-career-change teacher for eleven-year olds", because that's the sort of person who may find themselves at work saying "What the he ... ck" so often that the euphemisms replace the original habit.
To each their own, though. I didn't like his second book, Artemis, for what I thought of as an incoherence along those lines; the main plot could have come out of a 1950 Boy's Life sci-fi adventure, while one or two of the side plots were R-rated, so it didn't work for me as adult fiction or young adult.
But in Hail Mary the goofy humor is what keeps the whole thing tonally coherent for me; it bridges the gap between the very dark plot points (where it works as gallows humor) and the very lighthearted plot points (where it works straight).
roystgnr
3mo ago
Do really legally weird, technically complex things that judges won't understand and have no business ruling on.
Has there ever been a judge who said "I have no business ruling on this, therefore 'Not Guilty'?"
force strained interpretation of existing law
For 80 years it's been established precedent that growing wheat on your own fields for your own use still counts as interstate commerce, because not buying wheat reduces the prices that other people sell it for. "They can't get you by straining a legal interpretation" is not good advice.
roystgnr
3mo ago
This is true for water heating (and natural gas cooking surely), but for space heating you can do better with a gas electrical plant (45% average efficiency, 60% in the most efficient) powering a new heat pump (300%+), because with the heat pump you're not just getting the electricity converted back to heat you're also stealing more heat from outside.
The catch is that your heat pump has to be overdesigned for your climate most of the time if you don't want it to be underdesigned some of the time. My old house had two modes, one "normal" mode that worked at heat pump efficiency for most of the mild winters here, versus one "emergency heat" mode that was necessary if the daily high got abnormally low for long. I presume "emergency heat" was just resistance "convert it back to heat" heating, 100% "efficient" instead of 250% or whatever, but the effect on our electric bill made "just freeze until the cold snap passes" seem like a reasonable alternative. Fortunately I'd moved to a new gas-heated house before we had a week-long cold snap...
roystgnr
3mo ago
It's not weird that everybody else is slavering over Valve taking 30% of revenues for thousands of games on Steam. It is a little weird that nearly everybody else's solution to that is "make a Steam clone but it only works for our 8 games and it gets a proportionally small amount of love+maintenance", not "make a Steam clone open to everybody but just charge 20%". GOG is the only thing that seems to be even close to an alternative.
roystgnr
3mo ago
I wouldn't say "bad". Civ 1 was obviously great, even if Civ 2 was much better, and Civ 3 and Civ 5 were both good, even if both started out as "one step forward, two steps back" in comparison to their predecessors. And then Civ 6 was the first one that I didn't even think was worth upgrading to even for novelty value. (I played one copy of it, but then didn't buy several copies for family multiplayer games like I had with 5 or even encourage friends to get it for multiplayer like I had with 4)
I think the more alarming thing about the odd numbered Civ games was overreliance on expansions/DLC, which went so far as to reintroduce game mechanics that had existed in previous versions and then been omitted from the sequels' base game. Civ 3 left out multiplayer, Civ 5 left out religion and espionage. And if you find yourself having to wait to upgrade until the game is back up to par again, why not just do what I did and wait a little longer until the game is in the bargain bin?
roystgnr
3mo ago
There's some protection for that in the US (see e.g. the RIAA vs Diamond) but not unambiguously enough (hence the RIAA vs Diamond).
roystgnr
3mo ago
That's still only 1 murder a week, and a population who goes 99.9% unmurdered each year. Hard to casually distinguish from 0 and 100%; it just adds up over time.
roystgnr
3mo ago
anyone that would rob or shoot me migrated away 20 or more years ago.
Gary had 52 homicides in 2023, a per-100k rate of 76.8. This is a third higher than Baltimore, and 12x the rate of the US as a whole.
And they were a little proud of that number, because it was 18% fewer homicides than in 2022.
roystgnr
3mo ago
My kids got a mini amp (in addition to a real one) for just this reason; it's so much easier to accumulate practice time in if you can grab 10 minutes here and there without having to go to the floor amp and adjust it first.
roystgnr
3mo ago
The trouble with inflating away excessive social security payments means you're also inflating away debt repayments ... and maybe you can gaslight grandma into thinking she's getting a fair deal, but you're not going to pull one over on quants managing trillions of dollars of investments.
From a moral standpoint, it does seem like an improvement to stiff all T-bill owners rather than just grandma. If we were rolling over the debt every 30 years, gently inflating it away would seem to be a tolerable solution. "Aw, you loaned someone disposable income under the impression you were going to get to force their kids to pay it back with interest? Here's some monopoly dollars, and be thankful you're getting that."
But from a practical standpoint ... we're not rolling it over every 30 years. Something like 15% of federal debt is 30 year loans; more than that is one-year loans. And between the one-year loans and the older debt maturing in the same year, we need to roll over something like 9 trillion a year these days, at interest rates that are going to go up as inflation rates do. As soon as we find it too hard to refinance that 9 trillion (because cranking up inflation is when prospective reinvestors realize the game of musical chairs is now ending), the only way to bring it to levels we can repay will be very-non-gentle inflation.
roystgnr
3mo ago
I think Musk's other companies are extremely important
This is true.
and someone else hopefully could cut the budget.
This is ... I guess true, under the unlikely premise of a majority of politicians actually caring to cut the budget?
Acquiring lots of debt is super fun at the time, forgoing debt or even acquiring debt more slowly is so much less fun that stupid people call it "austerity", and actually paying back debt is almost a ludicrous idea now. We haven't repaid more than a couple percent of the federal debt in a year since the 1920s, and that was when the debt was like 3% of GDP, not 130%. If most voters were smart enough to grasp accounting identities then they'd consider the fact that debt spending in one year means debt repayment (or at least less opportunity for debt spending) in a later year, and they'd control for that when judging economic outcomes ... but they aren't, so they don't, and thus politicians have to choose between making themselves popular by making life harder for their successors or vice-versa.
Nobody wants to pick vice-versa.
roystgnr
3mo ago
To be fair, it's not like the flair itself has a hyperlink. In context it's a weird cross between a justifiable brag and a plausibly deniable cry for help, but out of context it does look hostile.
roystgnr
3mo ago
That was a threat Amadan received, not one he made.
roystgnr
3mo ago
I mean just look at this graph:
Wow. The launch industry divides pretty evenly 9 ways now, huh? There's "everybody else in the world combined", there's China, then there's "SpaceX on Sundays", "SpaceX on Mondays", and so on.
roystgnr
3mo ago
It's a terrible Zelda.
This is much more defensible than calling it a terrible game.
I loved it, 5/5, one of the best games ever, the "Skyrim for kids" I'd been hoping for ever since I had kids ... but it's a very different gameplay genre from most Zelda games and I can't begrudge bigger Zelda fans for resenting seeing it published under the "Legend of Zelda" name.
roystgnr
3mo ago
Harris, I think just genuinely has a very different idea about what democracy means
She has a very different idea about what constitutional democracy means. Back during the pre-2020 Democratic primary debates, when Biden was trying to explain that an executive order could be unconstitutional, she was laughing at him for it and explaining that Congress not passing a law they want is sufficient reason for a Presidency to write it themselves.
He got worse after that, but I haven't seen evidence that she got any better.
At least under current Austin law, "Riding a bicycle or micromobility device on a sidewalk is allowed, in a reasonable and prudent manner", so long as it does "not impede or obstruct pedestrian traffic on sidewalk paths."
This is fairly critical in a city with some nice bike paths that can in some cases be only accessed via 45mph roads, because too many car drivers can't be trusted with safety.
This sounds like it would be a great law, except that too many bicycle riders can't be trusted with safety (particularly the ones who you'd need to follow the law), and enforcement wouldn't fix that because too many police departments can't be trusted with safety.
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