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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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When I was getting my documents in order to get ready for emigration, I had to spend quite some time at the MFC, which is like the DMV, but for all government services in Russia. And like the DMV, its customers are a representative sample of the general population.

We all live in fucking bubbles. We talk to smart people at work, we talk to smart people online. People that pump our gas and ring up our groceries talk to us through what is basically a very restrictive API and recognizing that is one of the biggest magic tricks. The ladies at the MFC have to talk to everyone and try to solve their problem.

From what I've seen at the MFC, everything in these two threads is 100% true. People on the wrong side of the curve are desperate and confused and can't build a working mental model of, say, who has to grant the power of attorney to who and why the public notary has to be involved.

This is why I firmly believe some degrees of low level corruption (ie just paying a little bit or invoking a relation to work around complex dysfunctional systems) is a massive public and political good.

Without this option, modern societies fall prey very easily to financial engineering or bureaucratic management types who are leeches and will run wild imposing low intelligence taxes on the society for their own benefit or satisfaction.