cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
3d ago
Ya realized that last night and didn't care. Now it's morning and I kinda care again.
cjet79
4d ago
You aren't too far from me, if you ever want to try a fun sport come down to the northern Virginia area and play some underwater hockey with me.
cjet79
4d ago
I think the AIPAC method and big money spending in general has some big limitations:
- Can't be an existing issue with that divides along party lines. I just don't think any urban democrats are gonna come out in favor of guns no matter how much money you pour into their primary opponents. Same with rural Republicans on abortion. Purity tests are very effective, and that's partly why attack ads work in the first place. But someone that truly and openly fails a purity test is gonna have a lot of barriers to winning within either party machine.
- It generally can't be something most Americans care deeply about. Or else a backlash group will form and try to negate all your progress. The Koch brothers spent decades funding small academic institutions with the goal of having more libertarian scholars in academia. They've partially succeeded but now unKoch my campus exists and the universities have gotten much worse then they were decades ago when the project started. Americans care about universities. Barely anyone cares about AI, or crypto, or foreign countries on the other side of the world.
- Even if they don't care about it now, you can't endlessly exploit an issue without making them care about it. For half a century Disney was able to shamelessly and repeatedly lobby to extend copyright with basically zero opposition. Two decades ago people started to notice and complain. A bunch of groups formed, none of them with massive resources. But they grew to the point that Disney finally didn't bother lobbying for another copyright extension.
cjet79
5d ago
The threshhold for a net productive citizen is very low in my mind.
There is a concept in economics called the velocity of money. Basically money doesn't just disappear when it is spent, it usually get reused and spent on other things. Higher velocity things usually cause more spending and re-spending.
cjet79
6d ago
What edgecityred said is good stuff. Also:
Your secondary ID is other people that have not lost their IDs and are willing to make a lot of calls and spend money for you.
Parent / spouse work best since they will have a reason for knowing you and a paper trail that connects you.
Your employer/ HR department if you are traveling for business reasons.
A good friend might help you in some ways that require spending money, but not as much on identity things. Unless you pre-plan giving them documents or access to your private stuff.
If you are traveling outside of your country your embassy can also help you out.
You will need to memorize their numbers or have a way of contacting them in case of an emergency.
cjet79
6d ago
obiter dictum
Wut
a judge's incidental expression of opinion, not essential to the decision and not establishing precedent.
Ah ok.
cjet79
6d ago
This analysis looks wrong to me too, and I think I'd go further than @fmac and say that there are ways to make anyone a net productive citizen. There are probably barriers to accomplishing it, but its theoretically possible.
Adding a homeless / jobless beggar may seem always net negative. But if you can manage to rope in federal funds, or sympathetic donations from other areas you can turn that homeless / jobless beggar into a net bringer of wealth to the town. Or at the other extreme a single billionaire living in a town of ten thousand people. The billionaire basically pays all the taxes of the town. But that tax revenue gives the billionaire enormous leverage over all policy and enforcement. They can get out of just about any legal trouble in the town. They can get any building or new business approved for their friends, or denied for people that they don't like. Those are the theoretical reasons why I think your analysis breaks down.
In practical terms the story of the billionaire is usually more indicative of why towns are happy to add more people. Policy and policy enforcement can be carefully tailored in such a way that tax contributions and government services can be very equally balanced. Wealthy neighborhoods are often full of people who know how to manipulate the levers of local government, and are also full of people that are actively running the local government. Running governments requires human capital, and human capital tends to align with wealth and resources over time. Wealthy neighborhoods get better response times from emergency services, better access to public parks, and those parks are more likely to be kept clean and patrolled by the police. Their roads get repaved and fixed sooner. The schools get more oversight and quality. Successful businesses fill in the commercial space around those neighborhoods. The effects go on and on. The common phrase "you get what you pay for" applies to local government. Its hard to quantify it, but if you live in the different areas it just becomes very noticeable.
One major and obvious problem with your analysis that I saw in the discussion with fmac is that you are way over-counting the cost of schooling for a very simple reason: people aren't in school their entire lives. You need to offset the cost of school based on the number of years of their life that they will be in school. Just like if a road needs to be repaved every three years, you don't count the one time cost of repaving on every year's budget. You divide that spending across the three years. This does method does not even assume any benefits to schooling. To make the math easy lets just say people are only in school for 1/4 of their lives. So if the per student per year cost for a district is $20,000 you should instead think of it as $5,000.
cjet79
7d ago
WWII as the founding myth of the modern regime
I agree this is probably true, but it also strikes me as weird. Because the regime myth up until the 90s was way more about fighting and containing communism. Or just preserving a spot for freedom and individualism in the world.
cjet79
9d ago
@ZorbaTHut looked into it a few hours ago:
odd. it seemed like a memory leak, so I've rebooted it, and it's not coming up. trying to figure out what's up
alright, I think it was just a rapid increase in bot traffic for some reason. I've done some stuff to fight the bots back, and while it's not perfect, it does seem improved
cjet79
10d ago
I'm not conservative so maybe you aren't counting me among the responses you read, but I wouldn't fit in either of those categories.
I think people are allowed to be ugly imperfect beings within private spaces, because we already have a great deal of "public" spaces and the judgement within those public spaces is already very harsh.
Politicians and political actors need to be good about distinguishing between private and public spaces.
The Charlie Kirk situation seems totally different then this one or the Jay Jones one. The outrage there is about leftists making public comments of glee or happiness at the man's death. These aren't leaked conversations, its people posting it widely on social media, or saying it on a TV show.
The Jay Jones situation is comparable. And I think the democratic machine mostly did the correct thing and the republicans should have done it too: just entirely ignore this and pretend it didn't happen.
Which is a norm I'd kindly suggest everyone adopt: ignore all leaked private conversations. At a minimum, know that the leaker or publisher of the leaks is an asshole. The reason I'd suggest this norm is that society with zero privacy in communications is awful for everyone. And incentivizing leaks is going down the road of zero private communications.
cjet79
11d ago
What is your threshold for being convinced? If you don't have one that's fine, that saves me even more time.
cjet79
11d ago
So two adults coordinating a child porn ring is acceptable as long as it's done in private? Might need to walk back your literally nothing claim here.
I italicized "said" for a very specific reason. Plenty of things you can do that are unacceptable behavior. But the doing is the bad part not the saying. And ya you can larp being pedos in your own private time. As long as you don't do it why should I care?
I'm sorry, but if you're in such a world where you genuinely believe that every man jokes this way and anyone who doesn't is just a liar, it says a lot more about you and the people you hang out with in your dark matter world than about men in general.
This "world" I'm living in is also called TheMotte. Every other comment here is agreeing with me. I don't think it is literally every man, but it's close. Similar to the percentage of men that jerk off to porn. Sorry if that is also a revelation to you.
This type of defense is truly incredible just as a concept though. Like it's literally "Yes all men!" but as an endorsement, it comes off as a lack of imagination and theory of mind.
I don't think I'm the one lacking in theory of mind. Everyone here is telling you this is a common experience and your response has basically been 'no way!' how many people would you need to hear it from to believe us? I can find you clips of famous people talking about it, but unless you pre-commit to some threshold that would change your mind I'm sure you'll just find new reasons to dismiss that evidence.
cjet79
11d ago
Ha, ya the military is often the Pinnacle of male bonding rituals. I'm sure any given barracks regularly has the most heinous shit said in it.
cjet79
11d ago
I knew more leftists growing up than righties. They absolutely had these places. One of the most leftist people I knew in highschool was a Jewish guy and he had all of the best Holocaust jokes.
I know fewer super lefties today. But the moderate democrat dads I know are still willing to sling around the wild stuff in private conversations.
cjet79
11d ago
To be clear, is support of Hitler acceptable from politicians and staffers or is it not? If supporting Hitler is acceptable when done in private conversations, then what behavior if any is unacceptable to you?
It is absolutely unacceptable and abhorrent behavior to leak private group chats. See, I have standards!
In my opinion there is literally nothing that can be said between two consenting adults in a private conversation that I would consider unacceptable behavior.
When I was in middle school and highschool kids around me would make dead baby jokes, Holocaust / gas chamber jokes, they'd say all racial slurs, and they'd talk about fucking each other's mothers and sisters.
I think you missed the part above where I said this is lame because of how tame it is. These people are nerds. And the only thing I find lamer is pretending that this is horrible as a way to score political points.
Of course some Republican dude condemned them. As I said above they should resign for failing to distinguish between a private and public space.
You seem really stuck on the Hitler thing. But I clearly was talking in general terms about many different ways we can be terrible human beings.
My assumptions for someone that says they have not experienced this kind of bonding:
- They are female
- They are autistic
- They have no intrusive thoughts
- They are lying
It's fine if you are 1-3. You'll just have to trust me when I say that these conversations take place all the time. I'm 100% certain that you know a man who has had a "say horrible things" conversation within the last month. I'm decently certain (80%) based on your comments that none of these men would be stupid enough to admit it to you, so you'll never know who they are.
cjet79
11d ago
I googled myself in 2009 when I was a senior in highschool and the fourth result that came up was me on a Facebook post saying that a movie was stupid. In a group that I thought was private.
That was when I scrubbed what I could of old posts from Facebook and elsewhere that had my name attached. I started using reddit more instead to comment. But even on reddit I had it in the back of my mind that my username might be linked to my real name at some point.
Something in society has been damaged from everyone living in the panopticon. I don't even know what it is, because it has been this way my entire adult life. I do know that the way most people cope is by making the private spaces as different as they can.
Anyone leaking private space conversations is always the asshole. I try not to change my opinion of the victim of the leak, but that's not always doable.
cjet79
12d ago
This is in fact lame
I know discord chats. I know signal chatrooms. I know locker room joking. I can't help but roll my eyes at this, and I probably agree with Vance the most that it is Pearl Clutching. I'd also agree with Hanania that for a private group chat this is tame (and I'd go further and say that it is in fact kind of lame for how tame it is).
There are public spaces and there are private spaces. In public spaces you should expect hostile audiences and for people to take your words seriously. You better say what you mean and mean what you say, because you be held to account. In private spaces ... well we aren't actually robots capable of perfect emotional control all the time. Sometimes you want to blow off steam, or say ridiculous things you don't mean, or exaggerate for a joke. Or god forbid, the worst of all, have a friendly audience reading and interpreting your thoughts.
I understand trying to use whatever ammo you get against your political opponents. I just can't imagine any scenario where I'd condemn my political allies for this kind of leaked chat group. Especially one with younger professionals. God forbid I ever get judged for the things I have said in private spaces.
Making friends 101
I've had a mostly tame internet life because around 2009 I started considering everything I typed and wrote online to be public, even when written under a pseudonym. I try to write things that I am willing to attach to my name and identity. I do not have the same rules for spoken conversation or private group messaging. If you have not said things in private conversations that would get you pilloried and lampooned in public then I would submit that you have no real friends. Its a trust exercise. Say heinous crap, get a laugh, then they say heinous crap back. Or if its not funny, you still say heinous crap back because its a sign of trust in a society where certain opinions can get you "cancelled". Even if its your real opinion and your real opinion sucks and I hate it and think its evil, I can signal that I'm a real friend by being like "ok im not gonna hold that shit opinion against you".
And why the hell am I explaining all of this? Is everyone else just pretending this is not how the world works while we put on a public facade of 'oh yes this is so terrible, how could anyone ever say this'? Or is it genuinely secret knowledge to people about how to make friends and socialize? If its the former, drop it, we don't need to lie about the world here. If its the latter ... I'm sorry I don't mean to be harsh. But try something for me ... go nurse some beers at a bar. Try and find a lonely guy to talk with. One hour into the conversation start making it clear that you are something absolutely reprehensible. A nazi, a closet racist, a former criminal, etc. As long as it is not something directly antagonistic to the guy you are speaking with (can't be a racist to a black guy, that is hard mode and you can try it next time) they will mostly shrug it off and proceed to tell you something equally reprehensible about themselves. It can sometimes accidentally turn into a one-upmanship of "im the worst human ever". I was drunk enough to type up an example of what me and one of my friends do in the "worst human ever" one-upmanship game. But that violates my other rule of treating this like a public space.
As always I can test my acceptance of this by how I'd respond to people of different viewpoints saying this shit. And I remember "oh yeah I lived with a guy who was kinda communist". He definitely joked that me and my libertarian self would be one of the first ones up against the wall when the revolution came. I have another person I knew that is now a mayor in a small Pennsylvania town. I have video of him petting an endangered species (manatee), and saying the n-word just to get a rise out of another person on the trip we were on (I might have that on video as well). I like him more for having done those things. But I actually strongly dislike the guy. If he had not done those things in front of me, but I had evidence of him doing it, I'd probably happilly release those things.
Someone failed the trust test, or just didn't want to be a part of it all anyways. All the people that got caught saying heinous shit should resign, but mostly because they failed in the judgement test between a private and public space. Probably one of the most important social skills to have if you are a politician. This whole incident says little else.
cjet79
12d ago
Working on a new project. There is an old out of print book about my family. "The [family name] and their kin". Old copies run for a hundred or more dollars on Amazon.
There is a free scanned version of the book too, but the scan isn't great quality. Adobe was able to figure out most of the words, but there are some glaring mistakes. Typically a mistake every 50 words or so, which is far too common.
I'd like to do a reprint. I just attended the annual meeting of the "[family name] society" and there was interest from everyone there in getting a new hard copy.
I've been copying and pasting the text from the PDF into a grok window and having it make corrections, re-italisize, and de-format the text. Might be another 20 hours to get it all converted.
I've looked up some print options as well and think with about a hundred copies I could get per book costs to $15-30. Depending on options I select. Color / hard back / images / etc.
cjet79
14d ago
Some Benefits:
- People can be guilty of two crimes when they don't pay taxes: not paying the taxes, and lying about the amount of taxes owed. Which also makes it easier to catch criminals who are making lots of money illegally. (Al Capone Argument)
- Its only hard to pay taxes if you are trying to maximize the amount you are not paying. You can very easily give the maximum amount you suspect you owe, and if you are wrong the government will send you a reimbursement for taxes you overpaid. (Kennedy, do your part argument)
- Special interests can be given special and hard to follow exemptions that are only meant for them, and require a bunch of hoops to claim. You can then write off those estimated tax costs as something you did for the consumer while not having those full costs get reflected in the actual budget. (Cynical jack ass argument)
There are more special interests that benefit from complex tax systems than just H&R block.
cjet79
16d ago
I have been absolutely addicted to the song "Golden" from k-pop demon hunters on Netflix.
I'm not the only one, apparently it's a huge chart topper.
The story of the lead vocalist is pretty fascinating. She was part of some k-pop training academy but they never launched her career cuz she was "too old" 7 years ago. She left them and went into composing songs. She was good at that, got some of her songs picked up by other famous k-pop groups and then got tapped to write the songs for the k-pop demon hunters movie. Well she was demoing the songs for the studio, and they thought "you sound great" so she got the lead role. Now she is the biggest (maybe second biggest) k-pop star ever.
The group just recently did their first live performance on jimmy Kimmel.
cjet79
16d ago
Nah, he hated central banks and had a huge wheel of cheese in the Whitehouse on his inauguration. One of the coolest presidents.
cjet79
17d ago
The Waffles article is a reminder of how much I hate interacting with other parts of the internet.
Its a writing style that consists almost entirely of assigning the worst possible terms you can get away with to people you don't like. "Fascist", "race scientist", "shit-head", "racist", "white supremacist", etc. No regard for truth value, just pure culture warring and mud slinging.
I barely learned anything reading the article. There was about one paragraph of content explaining something that happened and then like 30 paragraphs of name-calling. That half paragraph that is most useful is here so no one else has to visit that link:
A little while back, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber approvingly tweeted a post by Jerry Chen about a person bursting into a Waffle House and shouting "oh, so you hate pancakes?". In the replies, someone asked her why she'd not yet banned notorious transphobe, fascist and serial instigator of harassment campaigns Jesse Singal from the platform, to which she replied with only "Waffles!".
Even in those two sentences she couldn't help but throw out some names.
I have to wonder if part of this writing style is a leftover problem of "micro" blogging platforms like twitter. In isolation you might believe those things about Jesse Singal, and it would be very useful to learn that thing. So a tweet saying that would get boosted up and retweeted.
But when its paragraph after paragraph of everyone being called a fascist, or some other thing that is the worst thing a progressive liberal can think about someone. You can't help but notice that this writer thinks everyone is a terrible awful no good human piece of garbage. And suddenly the information content collapses from "this person she is speaking about is really really bad" to just "she doesn't like this person, and everything she says about anyone is suspect".
It also highlights why some of Scott Alexander's takedowns of people are so damn effective and brutal. He will spend a lot of writing space saying many nice things about people that seem objectively bad. And then he will end by saying something slightly not nice about one person, and you come away thinking "damn that person must be the worst piece of shit ever".
If your default is to be nice, kind, and charitable to everyone, then if you ever need to stray from that default and say bad things about someone we know you really mean it. If your default is to insult everyone you just look like a misanthrope.
cjet79
17d ago
This is what was so concerning about Islamic terror attacks in the early 2000's. It was a group of people willing to think rationally about killing and causing a bunch of damage. They used box cutters and a few flying lessons to kill thousands of people in a day and cause massive damage in New York City.
I do remember people trying to war game potential avenues for future terrorist attacks where there might be low hanging fruit. It quickly got depressing. The Western world mostly functions and operates on the assumption that everyone is not trying to cause massive damage and death to those around them. The water supply, electric grids, transportation infrastructure, etc are all vulnerable to determined saboteurs. Massive crowds of people in unsecured areas are common in every city every day. Explosives materials are monitored, but anyone can walk up to a gas station and buy a fire accelerant with cash.
Regulation is often a barrier to entry rather than a full on industry killer. Big incumbent companies like barriers to entry. I think tobacco industry is fine with current levels of regulation.
Pharma companies political control doesn't show up as easily because they just do heavy ad spend on all the news networks.
I think there are heavy limitations to the AIPAC strategy and I laid them out down thread. I don't think it's as much of a killer strategy as Scott implies.
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