wlxd
1d ago
If you do literally nothing, the gays and drug addicts will just die from AIDS. I really don’t understand what’s so complicated about it. It’s not even like they have no way of avoiding the fate: all they need to do is to stop rawdogging random guys and stop sharing needles. It’s really not complicated.
wlxd
1d ago
AIDS and Malaria cannot “just make a jump”. AIDS only is a thing in western world thanks to gays and drug addicts. Without them, we’d, uhm, flatten the curve by now (in fact, it would probably never become a thing in the first place, it only became a thing thanks to gay Canadian flight attendant who really liked to fuck random guys in places he flew into).
Malaria is not a disease that spreads from person to person, and we cannot have malaria become a thing in US, because we already stopped it being a thing. We used to have malaria in US, and we destroyed the conditions that allowed malaria to exist. We can’t have malaria now without recreating this condition, which, given the land use patterns, is highly unlikely.
wlxd
6d ago
Yes, the letters on a screen won’t stop you, but the cease and desist letter and lawsuit for damages will. I’m sure you realize that.
As for the partnership idea, this is an obvious non-starter. No competitor would ever want that. What would they even get out of it that would make up for the downsides?
wlxd
7d ago
You can’t do that. The Terms of Service of all of these services would not allow for such aggregation.
wlxd
7d ago
Beyond that, what factors would you include?
I explained it in the next sentence after wondering if you’re not trying to pull a fast one. Are you sure you aren’t?
Prison statistics in my country do not go that far back, unfortunately. The oldest statistics are only from 2000, but the cost per prisoner is almost the exact same when you account for inflation.
OK, where is it? I’m having a hard time believing that your costs are an order of magnitude higher than everyone else’s.
Beyond prison conditions, I would guess other factors like guard salary and construction are almost certainly higher as well (based on things in the rest of the country).
A typical inmate to officer ration in US prison is somewhere between 5 and 12. Let’s take the lowest figure. You spend $75k on correctional officer salary (actually your country almost certainly spends much less than that), which is $15k per prisoner. You’re left with $135k per prisoner per year. What could possibly cost that much?
wlxd
7d ago
In my country it costs about $150000 per year to keep someone in prison.
So spend less on that, it’s not hard. There is no reason it has to cost this much. I can guarantee you that 70 years ago, it didn’t cost (inflation adjusted) $150k. I strongly suspect that the main reason it does is because pro-criminal activists demand certain things that jack up the cost, and then use that to argue that prisons are too expensive.
Can you explain?
I explained in next sentence: comparing prison cost to damage of a single theft that resulted in the conviction is clearly wrong and misleading.
wlxd
8d ago
I should be more clear: harsher punishment is not a deterent. Getting caught and punished generally is a deterent. Increasing a sentence is not.
Yeah, I can believe that increasing a sentence from 5 to 20 years might not have a huge effect on people who commit the kinds of crimes that get you 5 years in prison, but I don't see it as relevant. First, it's good for the victims to inflict more retribution on criminals, and second, as the ACX article you mention clearly shows, it would prevent a lot of future crime too.
Cost and benefit is in terms of society as whole.
Yes, and the cost of crime in American society is tremendous. It's so high, in fact, that it would be extremely hard for government spending on crime prevention to come even close to it. We actually spend trivial amounts of money on law enforcement and justice system.
I think you would agree that punishment clearly has diminishing returns after a certain point. Locking someone up for minor theft for 20 years costs more money than the theft is worth.
There are diminishing returns, but whether they exceed the cost in your 20 years for minor theft example is far from obvious. In fact, the way you phrase it, comparing the cost of imprisonment to just the direct cost of the theft, suggests that you either don't understand the arguments being made, or are trying to pull a fast one. You also need to include in the benefits column things like crime prevented by incapacitating for 20 years the kind of a person who'd engage in petty theft even when it risks 20 years in jail. That kind of a person is highly likely to cause enough violence, property damage, and cost to the system to make up for the 20 years of imprisonment.
wlxd
8d ago
I acknowledge the human need to feel better about wrongs, but I think it can do more harm than good in a society of many.
Harm to whom, exactly? Good to whom, exactly? Think about it: you're putting avoiding harm to the criminal above the well-being of his victim.
There is little evidence to show that punishment acts as a deterent for crime in our current society.
I see people say things like that, and, frankly, I find it mind-boggling.
First, this is so contrary to all human instincts and experience, that it would take some extraordinary evidence to compel me to take it seriously. Somehow, my children are deterred from committing "crime" against me by threat of punishment. I am deterred from committing crime by the threat of punishment -- for example, I feel extreme urge to smack the shit out of the street hobos that aggressively accost me, and the main reason I don't is because I know that the law will protect the menacing hobos and destroy me for it. I can come up with more examples like that.
Given that I, and many people I know are deterred by threat of punishment, the only way punishment could not act as a deterrent is if encouraged some people to commit crime. I don't believe this is plausible.
Second, this statement, even if it was true (which it is not), it is cleverly crafted to distract from the main argument for punishment as we practice it: it doesn't need to act as a deterrent in order to do the job you want it to do, which is to prevent future crime. Indeed, all it needs to do is to incapacitate the criminal, and it does so tremendously. Criminals who are in jail cannot victimize people outside of jail, and dead criminals are even less capable of victimizing anyone. This means that executing criminals is a good way to prevent crime, even if literally nobody is deterred from committing crime by the threat of capital punishment.
If the solution creates a bigger problem, (...)
I think you forgot to mention what problem is created by retribution. The only one I can think of is suffering of the criminal, which I see as a benefit, not a negative.
Or a step further: if retribution is a solution but there is a solution with better outcomes that does not involve retribution, the latter is better.
This is just a tautology: a better solution is better.
I think the greatest pitfall of retribution in a large society (versus a small one, where it makes a lot more sense) is that the moving parts are no longer in sync. You can see this with public shamings that target relatively innocent people with great impunity and consequence.
Few cases involve any publicity. In most cases, nobody cares about people close to victim and to the perpetrator. These form a small society.
wlxd
8d ago
You are correct about the first three, and wrong about the fourth (renaming obviously works, failed attempts are exceptions, not the rule). But so what? My enemies keep doing it. How do you propose to get them to stop it? Tit for tat is the only strategy I can think of that has any chance of success. Got any better ideas? Unless you do, I support renaming, and I think Trump should keep doing it.
wlxd
8d ago
In fact, I think it is a flaw because it causes people to act in ways that are less utilitarian/net good.
the exact course of action that should happen for the greatest benefit
Yeah, that’s the enlightened liberal framework I was talking about. Most people (fortunately) do not subscribe to utilitarianism, but nonetheless this is the dominant framework for the discussion, along with some specific assumptions, like granting substantially similar value to utils received by the perpetrator and the victim.
wlxd
8d ago
There is one more benefit of punitive justice: satisfaction for the victim. If you suffer, or people you care about suffer, it is satisfying to see the perpetrator of suffering to suffer in return. It’s a restitution of sorts.
You don’t see this argument being made though, even though this is extremely obvious and natural to most people (you can find millions of examples on X of people, both on left and right, full of glee from people being punished by criminal system), because it is obviously invalid in the enlightened liberal framework under which the discussion is happening.
wlxd
12d ago
non-condensing gas water heater ban are worse.
Wow I haven’t heard of it, so happy I got a non-condensing water heater and furnace this year. Condensing version would cost me extra $4000+ for more to need to make completely new exhaust ducting. Going from 80% to 95% would save me something like $200 a year, so it’ll take 30+ years for the investment to beat bonds, even if you assume gas prices going up steadily.
wlxd
13d ago
Thai or Eastern Europe standards
There is an enormous chasm between Thai and Eastern Europe. The latter are catching up with the west very fast, the lag is only 10 years. In Poland, for example, the purchasing power today is similar to that of Brits in 2018. The purchasing power of Thais is more like Britain in the 90s.
wlxd
20d ago
Consider, for a minute, the perspective of a person who is willing to wait an hour in traffic, but is not willing to wait 15 minutes plus pay $9. In a world of rational actors, this person should not exist. But in the real world, this person in fact does exist in great numbers.
I think you forgot to actually make an argument why this is irrational. I can imagine many pretty natural scenarios where this is perfectly rational. For example, if you are working a full time job with no ability to work overtime (i.e. most jobs), and you don’t have anything all that valuable to do that you’d rather spend extra 60-90 minutes a day, but you could really use extra $2k/year. If you were planning to spend this saved time on scrolling TikTok, why not just spend it sitting in a car and put a podcast on?
wlxd
21d ago
California passed a constitutional amendment decades ago where property taxes can only be increased on an home with the same owner by 1% a year. So some of those people bought their homes back in 1990 and only pay like $2000 a year. Made up numbers, but it's directionally true.
Even if you steelman the above with non-made up numbers, then while true, this is irrelevant. Sure, without Prop 13, Californian municipalities would likely have more money, but so what? The actual question is, do they actually have enough money to cover services? The answer is, of course they do.
wlxd
23d ago
Insofar as I've understood, while Ukrainian has always been widely spoken in the countryside,
This certainly has been true in the western Ukraine, but I don’t think it has been true in the East. Pre-war, less than 20% of population of Donetsk Oblast spoke Ukrainian at all. Given that pretty much all Ukrainian speakers spoke Russian too, probably less than 10% of all conversations happened in Ukrainian.
wlxd
1mo ago
I was at a demo at work two days ago where a mid level engineer was showing some (very useful to the organization) results on data collection and analysis. At the end, he shows us how to extend it and add our own graphs etc, and he’s like “this python data analysis tooling might look messy and intimidating, but I had zero idea how to use it two days ago myself, and it’s all basically just a result of a long ChatGPT session, just look at this (he shows the transcript here)”.
This effectively means that if ChatGPT saved him half a day of work, then this generates hundreds of dollars for the company in extra productivity.
wlxd
1mo ago
I actually looked into this the other day. As it happens, Tubman was posthumously promoted to one star general last month, and her participation in that raid is given as part of the justification. Wikipedia says she lead it, linking to the website of the National Mall eyesore as a source. It says:
On June 2, 1863, Harriet Tubman, under the command of Union Colonel James Montgomery, became the first woman to lead a major military operation in the United States when she and 150 African American Union soldiers rescued more than 700 slaves in the Combahee Ferry Raid during the Civil War.
As its source, it links to History channel website:
Working in a series of camps in Union-held portions of South Carolina, Tubman quickly learned the lay of the land and offered her services to the army as a spy, leading a group of scouts who mapped out much of the region. Tubman’s reconnaissance work laid the foundation for one of the more daring raids of the Civil War, when she personally accompanied Union soldiers in their nighttime raid at Combahee Ferry in June 1863
So her leadership in that raid has already turned into just accompanying soldiers.
I looked at other sources talking about her promotion, like NPR and Smithsonian, both obviously very sympathetic to Tubman. They are much more careful about describing her role. NPR says she “helped guide” soldiers, which makes sense if you understand her role as a spy and a scout. Smithsonian says she “oversaw military operation”, which is close to claiming her to be leading it, but then it clarifies that she “worked with” Colonel Montgomery on it, and anyone with experience in corporate performance reviews knows that “worked with” means “been there but hasn’t actually contributed much”.
So, it seems like the Wikipedia and NMAAHC are basically full of shit when they say she led the raid, but somehow the belief that she did is widespread, apparently thanks to Wikipedia. Additionally, promoting her to Brigadier General for her military role is extremely jarring. While I think it would definitely be reasonable to posthumously grant her a military rank for her spying and scouting role, a 1 star general rank is much too high, and frankly insulting to other Civil War participants, like eg Colonel James Montgomery, who actually led the raid.
Either way, in my mind, Tubman joins the long list of diversity heroes whose actual achievements have been wildly overstated, like Ada Lovelace, or Margaret Hamilton.
wlxd
1mo ago
How does this have any bearing on the question of human consciousness? As far as I can tell, the consciousness qualia are still outside our epistemic reach. We can make models that will talk to us about its qualia more convincingly than any human could, but it won’t get me any closer to believing that the model is as conscious as I am.
wlxd
1mo ago
You’re right that grid scale storage is not very economical, but I was thinking a bit about this: doesn’t Norway have good geography for large scale hydro storage? Basically, dam up the fjords, and pump them high with water.
wlxd
1mo ago
It’s only hard if the drones are autonomous. With piloted drones, the operator is broadcasting his position out in the open.
wlxd
1mo ago
Two years in, she’s still unmarried, childless, and does not even have a partner. (I checked out of curiosity after browsing my old comments and finding this one with explicit prediction).
wlxd
1mo ago
Romania, like most of of the world, does voting by paper ballots only. I don’t see how hacking any “election systems” would be material for the election results that would warrant wholesale cancellation.
I doubt that, mostly because I don’t believe that the promiscuous party boy gays that use condoms use them 100% of the time.
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