aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
2d ago
Trampling on the rights of the individuals because a State cannot get people to volunteer is a state that shouldn't exist.
Your rights are not being trampled because you're asked to pay for taxes to support things that will pay dividends to you in your old age dude, be serious.
Why should I sacrifice for my society? What has my society sacrificed for me? It is a give and take reciprocal relationship. The state seems to have forgotten that and it has failed to instill a sense of civic responsibility in its citizens. Probably the REAL problem, is when the state exist merely for the interests of the mercenary elites. All this other stuff seems downstream of that.
Every society we know about is struggling with fertility. Even the bright spots are just declining more slowly. There is wide diversity in the makeup of each of these societies so it can't actually be that mercenary elite capture is the monocause. It's almost certainly something economic(in the very broad sense, concerning modern industrial incentives) in nature. In fact the darkest spots of fertility are some of the most abject patriarchal eastern societies so your general axe to grind about how awful western women are is particularly ill suited to explain the problem.
aqouta
2d ago
The problem with any redistributive scheme around this topic is that you are in essence punishing people for things that are generally outside their control. I'm a man. I cannot have kids. No about of forced taxes to pay for the privileged people who can is going to change biology. In order for me to have kids I'd need to find a woman who wants them. Single rates are up and unless the State is going to do something dysgenic like make it legal for me to go around raping woman or forcing them to marry me to get my TFR quota in, I'm not sure what there is much I can do about it.
You can probably not do much personally about whether other nations seek to make war with your country either. And if you're unfit for military service you can't serve a direct role in the conflict. But you can contribute through taxation. As I said in the outset, this isn't meant to be punitive or coercive. It's meant to get everyone to contribute their fair share, those having children are sacrificing their own consumption in a real way. If you were crippled and thus unable to participate on the front lines you might reasonable be jealous of able bodied men who returned with heroic stories, like people who always wanted to be parents and had great kids that brought them glory they were very fortunate in a way. But there are also soldiers that die in ditches as their lungs slowly fill with fluids, and there are parent's who's kids come out with severe disabilities. Life is not fair in that way and never will be.
And whether it's military defense of the nation or the production of the next generation we as a society simply cannot survive without it. If tax policy can be used a tool to prevent either the birth rate or the military from collapsing it ought to irrespective of how it might make some individuals feel.
A state that can't get its citizens to volunteer to make sacrifices for it has no right to exist. Apparently people have forgotten that quintessential rule. If that means most of the first world then let them die. Maybe the next batch of cultures will learn from our mistakes.
You're bemoaning that you might be made to make the sacrifice of marginally higher tax rates.
aqouta
2d ago
What compensation is owed the soldier for defending the homeland? What if one particular soldier fucks up and crashes a plane, in effect lessening the war effort?
We can't really think of these kinds of things on the individual level. Or rather doing so would be an intractable computation problem. You could probably come up with some clever scheme where parents are granted some kind of tax asset that entitles them to a share of lifetime tax revenue from their child. But most people can barely handle mortgages so simplicity and treating parents as a class rather than individuals seems pretty compelling. Either way it simplifies to the same thing.
aqouta
2d ago
My original proposal was not direct taxation of the childless, it was raising taxes across the board with a major deduction for parents. There is a delta in public sentiment for parents and childless adults that I'd say is the important wedge.
aqouta
2d ago
This is essentially the same policy except impossible because we will under no circumstances ever "more or less eliminate social security".
aqouta
2d ago
The market wage compensates the child. It doesn't compensate the parent for the investment. It's like a communist who sees a laborer use an expensive machine to turn $1 worth of materials into $2 worth of finished goods and demands $1 is the fair compensation. Or bemoaning that when shipping a package you must pay both for the road out of your taxes and pay the delivery company to move the package over the road. They're different payments for different services rendered, both of which are necessary for the end result.
aqouta
2d ago
Everyone claims their punitive, coercive, redistributive tax is somehow more fitting than the ones they don't like.
Is military spending punitive and coercive?
You're not proposing to tax the childless to pay for their own retirements [...] you're straight up proposing to tax them to pay for the other people's children.
These are the same thing. The parent's children are who will perform labor necessary for childless retirement. I'm not saying people should subsidize the life choices of people who selfishly want to be parents, I'm saying in your own self interest you need them to be parents, it's a bargain for your future self to not have to live in a demographically collapsed society just like funding the military is a bargain for your future self to not have to live in a conquered society.
Of course the effect this can have is limited; as with any sin tax, if it actually reduces the sin it also reduces the tax base.
I'm not framing this as a Pigouvian tax, but if you insist it is one then to the degree it shrinks the subsidy it is a pareto improvement, not a self defeat.
aqouta
2d ago
Sure, that'd reduce the redistributive tax burden and proportional reduce the difference expect from those producing the next generation and they who must contribute in other ways. Still there are many other ways you implicitly free ride on the parents. Even in ancapistan where you've hoarded capital, durable goods and gold for your retirement when it comes to you needing to exchange those things for youthful labor you are depending on someone to have brought that youthful labor into existence. One could probably come up with a fancy financial product to have parents paid now as some kind of royalty for future labor of their offspring by anyone who expects to benefit from it, but that simplifies to a general transfer.
aqouta
2d ago
If it's punitive or coercive it's only so in the way all taxes are, and less so because it more fittingly distributes fruits amongst those who planted fruit trees. Society needs a next generation to survive no less than it needs a military to survive. And at war if you're spared the draft you'll still need to pay for the tools our brave soldiers use to maintain your society.
aqouta
2d ago
the inherent politics of his act is pro-Puerto Rican independence
doesn't' this kind of undercut the whole, he's just as American as everyone else bit from earlier in your post? I think we had a portion of our country declare independence before and I don't quite remember what happened after but I get the impression it wasn't popular amongst the rest of the country.
aqouta
2d ago
You'd have to pay for the cosmetic surgeries before the dollars had anything to do with children.
Not necessarily. If our only option was to cut people a fully fungible check then sure that wouldn't work. But we could either have accounts that you have to spend on child associated costs, like a healthcare spending account, or more straightforwardly and better give them money if and only if they have a kid. That'd be equivalent to making the car cost $0.
aqouta
2d ago
Less kids means higher taxes on working aged people to pay for retirements. All one needs to do to properly apportion the costs to those that cause them is to raise taxes and give a tax break to those with kids. If you're footing the bill to bring in someone to pay for your retirement on average then you gotta contribute enough to pay for your own. pretty simple. Someone with a TFR of 0 should be paying roughly twice the redistribution portion of the tax bill(excluding more fixed costs like military spending that don't really figure into the per capita societal upkeep). I wouldn't consider this punitive or coercive, just making people internalize their externalities.
aqouta
3d ago
I just don't think there is any way this lasts. It's like the guys who learned that playing them + the computer edged on computer alone in chess for a period. Eventually the meat just isn't going to be adding anything and I doubt it's even that long after.
aqouta
4d ago
Unfalsifiable beliefs are pretty weak sauce. There are very few things more antithetical to the purpose of this place than do this kind of bulverism in the pursuit of defending taboos.
aqouta
4d ago
If he's here to shit-stir (especially if he's doing it to get juicy quotes to make rationalists look bad
Is this even still a thing? Where do they post their content? I checked sneer club but they seem to be basically exclusive anti-yud posters at this point.
aqouta
4d ago
This is saying something different I think, one of those as you approach absolute zero things get wonky kind of theoretical effects. A perfectly efficient rational stock market won't come to exist because it would imply knowledge is worthless, but this wouldn't really be a problem for markets for goods or equity which would still clear. I agree that if everyone who participated in prediction markets were omnipotent then the prediction markets wouldn't make any sense, but then we'd be able to get the information we want out of them by just asking the omnipotent people what the probability is. And in any case even very good super predictors are not actually omniscient.
I agree that subsidizing the market will buy you more information, and dumb money can act as a subsidy, but other things can act as a subsidy as well. If I really want to know the answer to some question a prediction market in effect gives me the option to pay for an answer by offering a bunch of 50/50 liquidity. There is also a lot of subsidy available in people rationally buying shares to hedge outside of market positions. If I do a lot of international trading maybe I can buy shares betting Trump will impose tariffs to hedge against that risk.
aqouta
4d ago
Not necessarily. Zero sum markets can still be mutually beneficial, especially as a hedge mechanism. Hedge funds aren't primarily founded on extracting money from retail traders even if they also do that.
aqouta
4d ago
I still think prediction markets are good but how about this, you can only gamble with money from special government accounts that you allocate like an IRA. You can spend the money in the accounts anywhere including on gambling sites but you can't spend any money not in one of these accounts on gambling/prediction markets. Cap the Amount you can put into one of these accounts at some percentage of taxable income, say 5-10%. This limits the damage they can do while actually probably accelerating the rate at which the dumb money loses the ability to influence signal possibly improving the usefulness of the results.
aqouta
6d ago
This seems more to do with how polling stations work rather than something that ought to attache to ICE in particular. Aren't there already laws around what can help in and around polling stations?
aqouta
6d ago
I have conflicted feelings on what ICE is doing in MN. I think they were basically sent there specifically as an act of punishment against Walz and democrats for opposing Trump, which I find repugnant. I think their actual mandate to arrest criminal illegal aliens is obviously legal and something local governments shouldn't resist. I think the organized nature of the "protesting" is basically taking the form of a conspiracy to impede federal officer and the form it takes is cynically creating as many tense arrest scenarios as possible to farm clips of brutality which in effect is sacrificing human life on the altar of politics which is despicable. Never the less I think both shoots so far have been bad shoots, which I could take on the chin for the previous reasons but the Trump camp outright lying about the deceased is disgraceful.
This whole episode is a depressing spiral into the worst the red and blue tribe have to offer. I instinctively want to look away from it in shame. This is what we will be doing when we lift a machine intelligence to the heavens and all of civilization comes crashing down around us. A truly pathetic ending.
That said evaluating these asks:
- Targeted Enforcement – DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant.
Reasonable if and only if the judiciary is cooperative, needs a clause to say if the judicial doesn't cooperate then they get to use some kind of makeshift ICE version.
End indiscriminate arrests and improve warrant procedures and standards.
I don't think indiscriminate arrets are happening because at the very least they're discriminating on some grounds, this is meaningless.
Require verification that a person is not a U.S. citizen before holding them in immigration detention.
Seems practically impossible. In practice this just turns ice vehicles int o immigration detention.
- No Masks – Prohibit ICE and immigration enforcement agents from wearing face coverings.
Seems reasonable. I understand the complaints, but sorry, if you're signing up to carry out the violence of the state your face is on the line. That's the deal.
- Require ID – Require DHS officers conducting immigration enforcement to display their agency, unique ID number and last name. Require them to verbalize their ID number and last name if asked.
Seems basically fine so long as the need to vocalize has some reasonable clause. Honestly though just stamp it on the body cam footage and make sure they're identifiable.
- Protect Sensitive Locations – Prohibit funds from being used to conduct enforcement near sensitive locations, including medical facilities, schools, child-care facilities, churches, polling places, courts, etc.
Na, this isn't the middle ages, no sanctuary, sanctuary is in your home country.
- Stop Racial Profiling – Prohibit DHS officers from conducting stops, questioning and searches based on an individual’s presence at certain locations, their job, their spoken language and accent or their race and ethnicity.
Racial profiling is a scourge and violation of liberalism. also I'm pretty sure a case is already going through to make them stop doing it. Presence in certain locations seems fair game though sorry, it's not to much to ask any citizen not to hang around the guy obviously hiring and paying illegals under the table.
- Uphold Use of Force Standards – Place into law a reasonable use of force policy, expand training and require certification of officers. In the case of an incident, the officer must be removed from the field until an investigation is conducted.
Mostly fine, obviously depends on details. In fact make use of the appropriations negotiation to fund good training for these officers.
- Ensure State and Local Coordination and Oversight – Preserve the ability of State and local jurisdictions to investigate and prosecute potential crimes and use of excessive force incidents. Require that evidence is preserved and shared with jurisdictions.
Sure, feds should share information with locals, if and only if the locals reciprocate. i.e. not if it's a sanctuary city.
Require the consent of States and localities to conduct large-scale operations outside of targeted immigration enforcement.
Na.
- Build Safeguards into the System – Make clear that all buildings where people are detained must abide by the same basic detention standards that require immediate access to a person’s attorney to prevent citizen arrests or detention.
Yeah, that's fair
Allow states to sue DHS for violations of all requirements.
All what violations?
Prohibit limitations on Member visits to ICE facilities regardless of how those facilities are funded.
All limitations? Surely you're want some limitations.
- Body Cameras for Accountability, Not Tracking – Require use of body-worn cameras when interacting with the public and mandate requirements for the storage and access of footage. Prohibit tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in First Amendment activities.
Na, release them all. If the state has officer eyes on this why not let the public have eyes on it? Protestors are there to protest, why should not be seen? Completely ridiculous.
- No Paramilitary Police – Regulate and standardize the type of uniforms and equipment DHS officers carry during enforcement operations to bring them in line with civil enforcement.
Is ICE even particularly militarized? In all the videos I've seen they're in like rented SUVs wearing pretty normal kit.
Overall ranges from hard "No"s to reasonable enough stuff. We'll see how hard some of the more extravagant stuff is argued for.
aqouta
8d ago
I think that GDPR specifically was a step in the right direction of forcing companies to give more than absolutely zero shits about the privacy of their customers
People will say stuff like this but GDPR is actually a gigantic pain in the ass to everyone involved because it means every single database the holds any data about anything has to be manually cleared by engineers to not happen to obliquely contain data the could be viewed as slightly about europe. I'm going to have to get on early morning calls for the next six months to get our US facing entirely internal application dealing in US tax credits cleared because of this stupid law. All while the fly by night company registered in kekistan that will actually do malicious stuff with your data just ignores the law and all the apps that were collecting it on purpose before put up a cookie that 99.98% of people accept immediately with minor annoyance. The legislators behind this should be tried at the Hague for pissing away thousands or millions of lifetimes worth of dev hours for their pure hubris.
aqouta
8d ago
I don't know how any could possibly prove or disprove this statement. The levels of improvement are difficult to quantify and they keep needing to come up with new benchmarks because the old ones get saturated, meaning all frontier models max them out. I can say from personal experience that they still appear to be rapidly improving but quantifying the rate is impossible.
aqouta
10d ago
judging by all the leaked material and reports, does Epstein sound like he would couch such an offer in such carefully-guarded terms that an uninformed, intelligent man genuinely couldn't pick up on the scandalous age of some of the options? Maybe I'm picturing this all wrong, but that's where I'm coming from.
I don't really care to defend Trump but surely any fixer is going to propose what's on offer pretty opaquely if anything so specific as a request is ever even made. Stuff like conversations that come off as just idle curiosity:
Epstein: "What do you like in a woman?"
Trump: "I've always been a big fan of the Russians, great people, wonderful people, and so affectionate"
Epstein: "I knew you were a man of good taste, I have a party I'm throwing for some Russian Oligarchs in a few weeks and they're bringing many girls with, would you like to come?"
Trump: "You always throw the best parties Jeff, I'm always telling the staff you throw the best parties. Of course we'll come, I bet you can get a lot more people coming if they know I'll be there."
Epstein: "I think that's true, I'll make sure to invite some more girls who would love to meet a famous television star like you, are there any particular types of Russian girls you like the best so I know who to invite?"
And if Trump goes on to describe prepubertal Russian gymnasts then Epstein goes down that path, but if he starts talking about mature matriarch types Trump needn't ever have been informed of the other offerings.
These were when I first became aware of any of the controversy and I think did more to create the feeling of an us vs them mentality out of the whole thing. I couldn't have been made to care about any of the precipitating events like the depression quest review or whatever, gaming journalism was always terrible slop that no one read. Both the gamers knew it and the people who wrote for the outlets knew it. I think a lot of the anger on that side of the fence came from them not really wanting to do the job, they would much much rather be doing, what we would now call woke, activism but they didn't have the chops to get a spot in any of the outlets that specialized in it. Declaring one of your identity markers is "dead" however is a very provocative move and it did provoke. A wiser and less teenaged aqouta would have recognized this as the false choice that it was but I was prepared to side with basically anyone against the kind of smug jerks who were writing those gamers are dead articles.
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