ulyssessword
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User ID: 308
ulyssessword
1d ago
Immigrants are taking our jobs, except when they're mooching off welfare.
I don't find that hard to square at all. Immigrants are adding to the labor pool more than they're driving job creation, therefore "taking jobs" is accurate on its face. Same with net tax payments vs. receipts (I assume).
As a current resident, the first-order effect is that it's harder to find a job and the government takes more from you while giving you less in return.
Option 2: One immigrant gets a job, brings in half a dozen family members, and receives welfare to pay for their needs.
Option 3: Fraud. There is no "except when", just "while simultaneously"
Option 4: Immigrants drive down wages of the industries they work in, to the point they qualify for welfare while doing a previously-high-paying job. No locals are willing to do the job that cheaply, which just justifies the need for immigration! Instead of one immigrant stealing one job, it's the entire immigrant workforce stealing (and degrading) an entire job sector. (This one's the most dubious IMO).
ulyssessword
2d ago
How cold is your house??
If you don't want to go full parka, then get a blanket (possibly heated) and drink tea. There's also a surprising amount of difference between sitting on a fuzzy couch and sitting on a chair.
It's not like the victim himself was prosecuted for saying a racial slur.
In what way is "you can be justifiably stabbed for saying that" not an infringement of free speech? The only thing I can think of is that it might not be covered by the Second First Amendment of the US.
EDIT: off-by-one error
ulyssessword
4d ago
One underrated aspect of books/articles/etc. is that they can give you something to argue against. Say what you will about the accuracy or the eloquence of its arguments, AI 2027 does make claims, and they are coherent enough to argue against. It may be a low bar, but it's one that so many commentators fail to reach.
ulyssessword
4d ago
ulyssessword
7d ago
ulyssessword
7d ago
In fact, social trust has been declining since the seventies, but has been on the upswing for the past ten years.
A bit of a tangent, but this is something that almost every study/article about anything skips over: Are those differences of opinion correct? Old, rich, educated, white people in safe homogeneous areas trust their neighbors more than young, poor, uneducated, non-white people in unsafe and diverse areas do. To what extent is that because the people they're interacting with are more trustworthy?
The findings are presented as psychological phenomena, but they only put a negligible amount of effort into arguing that the different trust scores are internally-driven instead of rational responses to different situations.
ulyssessword
10d ago
Yeah, at that point, you'll have a hard time waging a war that's chemical-free (SMBC).
ulyssessword
11d ago
He linked to two of his in-depth responses to different Unikowsy articles, both of which you read and responded to. Why would you think this one is any different?
ulyssessword
12d ago
Heck, with authors you can even go as far as "writes under the pen name of". For example, here is a mirror to "JK" Rowling.
ulyssessword
12d ago
Eliezer Yudkowsky, at his best, has leaps of genius nobody else can match. Fifteen years ago, he decided that the best way to something something AI safety was to write a Harry Potter fanfiction. Many people at the time (including me) gingerly suggested that maybe this was not optimal time management for someone who was approximately the only person working full-time on humanity’s most pressing problem. He totally demolished us and proved us wronger than anyone has ever been wrong before. Hundreds of thousands of people read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, it got lavish positive reviews in Syfy, Vice, and The Atlantic, and it basically one-shotted a substantial percent of the world’s smartest STEM undergrads. Fifteen years later, I still meet bright young MIT students who tell me they’re working on AI safety, and when I ask them why in public they say something about their advisor, and then later in private they admit it was the fanfic. Valuing the time of the average AI genius at the rate set by Sam Altman (let alone Mark Zuckerberg), HPMOR probably bought Eliezer a few billion dollars in free labor. Just a totally inconceivable level of victory.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone
ulyssessword
13d ago
You are in an extreme bubble if most people are looking for overtime.
Maybe a bubble, but I don't think it's extreme.
See here (1995 PDF): 27.1% of people want more hours, and 6.4% want less. Or here (federal workers only): 42% are working part-time due to family responsibilities or "other", while 58% are due to work not being available, working a second job, or going to school. Here says 39% of workers would take a 1/5 cut to hours and pay, which is the highest I've found.
Also, the full-time comparisons use a baseline of 44-ish hours, not the nominal 40 (or 38.6 if you count two weeks of vacation). People are succeeding at finding overtime, and therefore not looking for more than the current amounts.
ulyssessword
13d ago
Nope, the closest thing to a real counterargument is a distance-to-horizon calculation that forgets that the other side can be above the horizon too. I believe that you can see Newfoundland from Cape Breton (and vice versa), but it's not really thanks to the CBC for that. I had to recalculate it myself and I tried looking up more pictures as well.
ulyssessword
14d ago
we just shorten the work week!
Who's "we"?
If it's the government, then how? Currently, they can set incentives like full-time benefits at X hours per week and required overtime pay for >Y hours (X=30, Y=40 currently, IIRC), but they aren't anywhere close to banning work (outside of a few edge cases like long-haul trucking).
If it's the companies, then why? They'd have to pay four sets of benefits, rent four workspaces, run training four times, have single-path tasks take 33% longer, and have meetings with four people instead of three with a 30 hour workweek and 120 hour weekly workload. If they're early adopters, then they'd also attract people looking for reduced time commitments compared to the standard, which is horrible negative selection.
If it's the employees, then who are they? Most people I know look for overtime, not temporary layoffs or unpaid time off. That suggests that their optimal work week is above 40 hours given their financial needs and time commitments. Heck, some people take multiple part-time jobs (which sounds horrible) because they want to work more hours than one job can provide.
ulyssessword
14d ago
In today's episode of "Just Fucking Answer the Question Already", we have Can you see Newfoundland from Cape Breton? As usual, the closest they get is quoting an expert giving a half-answer, and not including a significant amount of rebuttal.
ulyssessword
15d ago
why men volunteer less in general,
A three percentage point gap may be statistically significant, but I don't think it's very interesting or notable. There's an eight-point gap in labor force participation rate, and one full-time-volunteer wife with a working husband can get a lot of volunteer hours. Heck, with a gap that small it could be something as banal as different responses to the same activities as men and women have different standards.
communities/pro-social activities/the male loneliness epidemic in general.
Male spaces get disrupted and socially attacked. Even if whatever comes out the other side is just as good (very doubtful), the transition still causes people to leave. Also, women have the opportunity to join both women's-only and gender-neutral groups, while men only have the second set.
"Men are afraid of being called pedophiles" isn't false, but my gut instinct is that it's noncentral.
That is the most visible part of the issue, but it's not the only one. You have to go through the anti-pedophile screening, take the anti-pedophile training, follow the anti-pedophile procedures, be conscious of pedophile-adjacent actions...and finally work at the organization with a reputation for pedophilia. It just doesn't seem that attractive.
ulyssessword
16d ago
why would we grant citizenship to someone willing to sell out their country to an invading power for a paycheck?
I don't really get omni-nationalism. Americans believing that the US is the greatest and deserves extra status/power/deference/etc? Sure. Ditto for the French, Brazilians, Chinese, or even Afghans. I don't see anything strange about different people having different values and opinions, even if they can't see the obvious truth that Canada is better than any of them (despite its current troubles).
Putting every country at the top of the list (but only when projecting your opinions onto other people) is a different matter. If you think your homeland is the greatest, then why do you want every foreigner to express incorrect opinions? If you're a cosmopolitan moral relativist who thinks there is no true "greatest" place and it's all opinions and tradeoffs, then why not let other people believe that too?
Saying that people should oppose you makes me feel like nationalism is a debate-club-style issue that's fun to talk about, instead of an honestly expressed and important core belief. Heck, I rarely see sports team omni-supremacy anywhere ("cheer for your home team, whichever one that is"). It's all either neutrality or people cheering for their specific favored team.
ulyssessword
17d ago
Contempt of court can still send you to jail, and I'm not sure if the limits past that matter. On a smaller scale, they can revoke drivers' licenses and passports, and refuse to issue leisure licenses (fishing/hunting, etc.) for unpaid child support. As far as I can tell, alimony and divorce settlements don't have quite as much power, but that only really helps if you divorce before having kids.
ulyssessword
18d ago
They can't easily reach out to third parties
Not the court's problem in those stories: Pay up or get punished for failing to pay.
ulyssessword
18d ago
Wikipedia reliably reports one perspective on culture war topics. Figure out what that perspective is and what you gain by learning it, and you'll never be betrayed again.
ulyssessword
18d ago
wronged wife gets wind that hubby intends to leave her without a penny, steal her assets, and set up with new snookums so she lawyers up in secret and transfers everything ...
For some odd reason, I suspect that a husband wouldn't have as much success with that strategy. I've heard of a few alimony/child support cases where the court is less "pay to the extent of your ability" and more "die broke in a gutter".
ulyssessword
20d ago
...yes, obviously?
American law sets speed limits, despite the fact that most Americans do not appear to act or express beliefs matching them.
ulyssessword
21d ago
Google Trends puts her at less than 1% of peak Jussie Smollett. Anything that's the 'Something of Something' isn't really the anything of anything.
ulyssessword
21d ago
That's the real shocking aspect of this: the Americans are:
Sounds like Europe isn't a reliable ally, since whatever unmentioned action he took was opposed so strongly. Swap out "African", "Asian", or even "South American" for European there, and it becomes an utter non-story, as written.
What? That's obvious nonsense that couldn't stand up to any scrutiny. Either it's using the novel expansive definition of "violence" where it just means "bad actions", or else finding counterexamples is trivial.
I can non-violently scramble an egg. Good luck unscrambling it.
Libel/slander is not a violent crime, yet the harm is often irreversible and can only be punished and compensated for.
Robbery and fraud are often not violent, but recovering stolen goods practically requires the use (or at least threat) of violence.
They might be able to stem the tide without needing any enforcement, but that's a long ways from actually reversing it. I think this is obvious enough that the argument would get shut down before it got any real traction.
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