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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1657 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 13, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What's the reasoning behind requiring users to vote on all posts on the Janitor Duty page before submitting their votes? Sometimes I don't want to read a particularly long post, but it seems misleading to vote "Neutral" and imply that I read it and found it of neutral quality.

I am thinking about the aesthetics of technology. Certain technologies seem deeply aesthetic to me and really appeal to my soul. So for instance, SpaceX capturing the booster, that really speaks to me, to be honest pretty much anything space related does. I would class this as 'real' engineering, as would I class building a bridge for instance, but that doesn't have the same frontier pushing edge. Whereas anything related to sensors and artificial intelligence, though can be cool, doesn't evoke the same feelings. I am trying to pin down why this is. I think maybe because I see the electrical technologies as more homogenizing, or more liable to the centralization of power and control? Mobile phones during COVID come to mind for instance. Does anyone else get where I am coming from?

You don't see rocket advancements made by a glorified military contractor to be liable to the centralization of power and control?

Perhaps, depending on how the space capabilities are used. But space technology so far has given me very little to be suspicious. Spy satellites etc are of course a thing, but compared to the thing in your pocket, they almost seem like old technology. I fear more the cars of the glorified military contractor than I do his rockets right now.

I feel really embarrassed at the idea of attending a meetup. Unfortunately, local to me that might be one of the best ways to meet people (single women). I know so many people who swear by them and I'm sure there's something to it.

But idk why I feel this deep disgust towards such things in my soul. I'm a big believer in doing things myself. A job that I find with my own merit would be infinitely preferable to one where I am refered. A date that I get by asking a girl out is infinitely more exciting than one setup by a friend.

Most people don't care! But why does the thought of this make me dizzy?

If you want to get at the root of your embarrassment, try flipping the scenarios around.

A job that I find with my own merit would be infinitely preferable to one where I am refered.

An employee found by making a job posting and collecting external applications would be preferable to one found through the referrals of existing employees.

A date that I get by asking a girl out is infinitely more exciting than one setup by a friend.

A date that a girl goes on because some guy asked her out is more exciting than one set up by a friend who knows her preferences.

Do those flipped statements seem correct to you? If not, what's the salient difference between them?

Something to keep in mind for that impulse against being setup or referred. You chose to associate and build relationships with the people that set you up or referred you.

Secondarily, do you ever recommend, encourage, and create opportunities for others? Do you do it because those recipients are lesser? Take the longer view that they are creating opportunities for you as well.

All except the worst sinecures still require the recipient to perform after they get the foot in the door. They still have to convince the blind date for another, still have to make friends under their own power at a meetup, and still meet performance quotas at a job.

one of the best ways to meet people (single women).

Be careful. If you attend meetups -- those that are not designated as "singles" events -- to pick up women, they'll sniff you out, and you'll have a bad time.

I'm a bit confused by what you mean here, unless you're using a very specific definition of meetup. You would presumably still have to ask out any girls you met at such an event yourself, just as you would those you meet at work/school/etc. and you're not really the one calling the shots or setting things up in those situations either. If you only want to get a girlfriend by cold approaching women in the street or at bars and clubs, that seems like an unnecessary imposition on yourself and one that will make your life infinitely harder, but I wish you the best of luck.

What is a meetup exactly?

But whenever you have a hang up with someone ask yourself why. Often the answer is pride, so the follow-up question is - what is more important, getting the thing done or getting it done your way?

what is more important, getting the thing done or getting it done your way?

I suppose it comes down to dependency vs self sufficiency.

It's kind of demeaning, per OP's examples, to have friends set up dates and jobs for you or resorting to open invitation public events to meet people. I won't argue that it can't be effective but there's something about the means tainting the ends. Do you deserve that job, or are you a charity case who couldn't do it on his own merit?

And with some extension the ends in turn taint the means; are you friends because you like that person, and are you at this event because it's interesting in itself, or is it because you had an ulterior need that you're using them to achieve.

The mature attitude is probably to recognise that it's an amount of both and that it's not that important in the end. But the ego likes things simple and binary, and there's a degree of maturity in accepting that the ego doesn't disappear just because we can recognise when it's irrational.

I mean this is a personal question that OP needs to answer, come to terms with the answer, and then act accordingly.

Both options are fine as long as the outcome isn't paramount, but if the plan is somewhat ego dystonic you get this angst.

Interesting. So the tension between seeing yourself one way while seeing yourself acting in a contrary way... Is it possible to integrate that in a decoupled manner or must it be a case of altering one of the aspects to produce a more stable sense of alignment? Is there any refuge in the irrational via humour and laughing at one's own absurdity?

I mean there's an entire type of therapy focused around the idea of managing seemingly opposite impulses, but nothing so fancy need be used here, I just think there's an element of "what do you actually want here" that needs to be assessed first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_behavior_therapy

I keep having a confusing experience where immigrants from third world countries, especially India, keep telling me that things are better in their home countries than they are here in Canada. This makes no sense to me given that the GDP per capita in Canada is about six times that of India, even after adjusting for cost of living. Also, the reports from people who visited there and the media show it to be an extremely poor and dysfunctional country. Far more Indians move to Canada for a better life than go the other way, giving up their maids and office jobs to work minimum wage jobs here, but then they say things are better in India.

Specifically, I've heard that the quality of healthcare is better in India and that the standard of living is generally higher. The people who say this still want to stay here, despite having been among the most privileged people in their home countries and living in a country that often doesn't recognize their qualifications or experience.

I've heard similar things from people from China. What is going on? Are they just lying? If so, why?

Specifically, I've heard that the quality of healthcare is better in India and that the standard of living is generally higher. The people who say this still want to stay here, despite having been among the most privileged people in their home countries and living in a country that often doesn't recognize their qualifications or experience.

From what I've heard online, the health-care system in Canada is highly overburdened, though if it's better or worse than the NHS, I can't comment.

When most Indians abroad say that healthcare was better back home, they're referring to private hospitals, decidedly not the government ones (I'd know, I've worked in both).

There's no months long queu to see a GP and you can pretty much self-refer to see a specialist. And a single consultation costs maybe 1% of your monthly salary to boot. And once in, I can't say the quality of care is any worse than in the West, and probably much more timely too for elective procedures. Look at me, staring the alternatives of being out a thousand quid for a psych assessment for ADHD here versus a 2 year wait list through the NHS.

In terms of standard of living, I'd say they're missing the creature comforts that come from low wage menial labor being available. There are so many things that are starkly better in the West, to the point where I don't feel the need to elaborate here.

Of course, by revealed preferences, the people you speak to still opt for Canada over their native lands. I don't think they literally mean that things were better back home, but certain aspects that they're missing now that they're gone, even if on an intellectual level they knew what they were getting into.

Hey that is me sometimes.

Well sort of. I don't know what those Indians are smoking but as a Turkish guy living in Western Europe for a while at this point, I do sometimes get into discussions with friends of similar background to the tune of "here things aren't actually better sometimes huh?".

A lot of it comes down to all of us being potential upper-class candidates back home, way above average in education and social stature and earning good money etc. Very few things can really substitute for relative social standing. It is difficult to get any above-mediocre social standing in Europe as a first-gen immigrant. So some of what you are observing is snarky comments from bitter people, but they have good personal reasons for being bitter.

GDP is a fine indicator but it will hide a lot from you in terms of living standards if you are ignoring costs, housing and taxes. For example Turkish PPP is at 44k, while German PPP is 62k from quick googling (Greece 41k lol). That is not such a massive difference. Pretty much all Anglo countries and Western Europe is suffering from gigantic housing problems, especially in major cities, especially effecting people who by definition could not have gotten into the mortgage market 10 years ago (i.e. young immigrants you are most likely to come across in white-collar and university settings). High progressive taxation systems are crippling for people who feel they deserve an upper class lifestyle and are trying to build it up with high-value professional labour income. You are basically slaving away for funding the boomer retirees of your host country. These boomers aren't even your own family so you won't benefit from this even in the form of inheritances. This creates massive resentment.

Often the first-tier cities of decent third world countries are actually quite decent places to be. They tend not to have "progressive" policing structures so ambient crime can be less of an issue (big variance here). They often have ample housing, and recently built. The infrastructure is often much newer.

And lastly, don't underestimate how much cheap low-class labour can improve one's life quality and how difficult it is to get accustomed to living without it.

So the comparisons come from a mix of real and perceived advantages of the home country, as well as people expecting an upper-class lifestyle not finding it in their host country. Also India is definitely not it, but a lot of "emerging" countries "emerged" quite a lot in the last decades and sometimes the perceptions didn't quite catch up in the West (and GDP is just not very good for comparisons between service and industry based economies)

In addition to what others have pointed out downthread with respect to food, crime, relative status, etc. another thing I've noticed is that people in developing countries are generally free from most of the mental health issues that plague North Americans, and often have a refreshing combination of optimism due to recent economic improvements and a sort of Daoist willingness to go with the flow however things turn out i.e. "Isn't it great we have all these shiny new cars and computers? Maybe it will all go to shit someday but we've dealt with that before and we'll get through it like we always do." I'm not sure if the latter is just a poor people thing or a non-Western country thing, but I suppose we'd have to take a closer look at places like Japan, which has been rich for a while now, to find out.

I know people say the Japanese don’t really want to emigrate but from what I understand a lot of young Japanese are pretty unhappy. The quality of their English education is just extremely bad. If Japanese teenagers spoke English as well as Swedish teenagers do, I bet emigration to the West of young professionals would be much much higher.

As you correctly pointed out they are for the most part comparing being the top nth percentile of wealth and status back home to being give or take average in the first world. They are not really being sincere, push them a bit and they'll fold.

Also being high status and we'll respected in ones community makes one overlook a lot of the material downsides of a place.

They seemed to be talking about India in general terms, not just for themselves. I told one Indian that I heard their public hospitals are really bad and she agreed, but then she said it's even worse here.

The upper crust of indians has precious little idea of how the median Indian really lives once they are done driving them around or cleaning their house.

I can't compare India and Canada, but there are certainly many aspects of living in the US that are noticeably worse than major Chinese cities (where most immigrants will come from).

US food quality is garbage tier for anyone who didn't exclusively grow up on it (on taste, not on safety), our crime rates are high, our public transit is grimy and unreliable. There are many little things about day to day life in the US that grate on those who (perhaps justifiably) expect better. It's easier to notice these major and minor inconveniences than to account for all of the things that are improved.

Yeah, I think in the long run would-be Chinese emigrants will choose to stay in China. There's evidence they already are. The brain drain is becoming a trickle.

East Asia is just better than most places in a lot of ways, which is why you don't see people from Japan leaving very often. China will likely head that way over time as well as they become wealthier and more civilized.

India though... There's a reason they call it a 4th world country. It's one of the worst places on Earth. And yes I am lumping the entire country into that category. The only way someone could say it's better than Canada is through a very thick delusional lens.

Probably some nationalistic pride in the face of a growing pushback against their presence in the host country.

I see some posters that for some reason can't stay civil here and get routinely banned, but then are able to keep a civil tone over in the ACX open threads, even when talking about politics.

What gives???

Do we still have posters like that? Most people who can’t stay civil got weeded out already.

Are the exact same political issues being discussed at ACX?

I don’t think there’s anything about TheMotte that’s particularly conducive to uncivil discourse, outside of the emotionally charged topics that get discussed.

Man, I miss TPO…

Mainly thinking of Deiseich. She comments on US election posts on ACX fine but got banned from here IIRC.

Deiseach has always been very snappy & grumpy, and tends to respond to any authority with sneering contempt. Even at ACX at least to me it seems less like she behaves better, it's just that Scott cuts her more slack.

Yeah I guess @Amadan is just too based for that shit.

I valued her posts here greatly and I still think that chasing her away was a bad call.

There’s no point in enforcing the rules on a purely formal level if said enforcement decreases the overall quality of the forum.

She was not banned, and while I feel bad that she decided to leave, she was not "chased away." Like Hlynka, she was told over and over again that the rules still apply to her even if we like her, and she decided that was intolerable. It was too important to her to say exactly what she wanted to say exactly how she wanted to say it.

Yeah I kind of agree. I feel the same about Hlynka.

This place is much less interesting without these big personalities. I wish they had gotten a bit more leeway, even if they were annoying to keep in line.

A sufficiently big personality doesn't find any amount of leeway to be enough.

They both got a lot of leeway, so much that we got a lot of flack for allowing it.

Ahh yeah fair. Perhaps I'm just looking back with rose tinted glasses.

"He was banned because the (actual) Nazis followed him closely and reported every faux pas" is the argument you're running with now?

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Not familiar with that name, maybe they’re from too far back. Is that one of FarNearEverywhere’s aliases?

Ahh yes, exactly.

You're Donald Trump. Alex Cooper of Call Her Daddy extended you an invite to her podcast, to appear fair after inviting Harris. For the sake of the question's premise, you've accepted. How do you play it? Is there any way to make it +ev for your campaign?

I think a large amount of the viewership will be women, a lot will be solid liberals or leftists, and a lot of the viewership will never have actually heard Trump speak for more than five minutes, and I'll talk with that in mind. I think a large amount of Trump's supporters are very die hard too and he doesn't have to worry about people abandoning him because he says different stuff on the podcast than during rallies.

I think I'd take it as an opportunity to make it clear that a lot of things liberals attack me over are just false. Say you support abortion rights and make it clear you didn't implement any new abortion restrictions, you just gave the choice back to the states, and that states are free to be like New York and implement limits far looser than what European countries have if that's what they want. Double down on European countries having stricter abortion limits than a lot of US states, and that that could be what the whole US ended up with if congress ever overruled the Supreme Court about abortion instead of each state being left to its own devices.

I wouldn't dodge questions about tariffs and illegal immigrants, but I'd try to dwell on them minimally, and only bring up the strongest points about them. Talk about illegal immigrants committing rape or something.

Talk about pacifism and keeping America out of foreign conflicts, and not wasting American tax dollars.

Really play up my humour and make lots of jokes and small talk. Ideally most of the podcast would be talking about non-political stuff, like asking Alex questions and joking with her instead of her asking me questions. Trump's a very funny guy.

Personally I think there would be a lot of flaws in Trump's arguments, I'm more liberal/libertarian myself and think there are solid counter-arguments that a knowledgeable hostile interviewer could point out, but that Alex Cooper (I assume, I don't actually know her) won't be particularly knowledgeable about the details of the issues.

I got a CS degree a few months ago and I have been working as a sys admin for almost a decade. I don't have much of a portfolio other than coursework, but I have been hitting leetcode pretty hard and can solve easy and medium problems pretty well. How can I get interviews for coding positions? I haven't had much success so far.

I'm looking at it from the opposite perspective of someone who's on the ops side that has to look at resumes and gives interviews, but I would definitely consider 10 years of development experience as a plus for a sysadmin; to me that's someone that would be much more comfortable than your average sysadmin with scripting, and who will get infrastructure-as-code much more readily.

I work with a lot of devs and there's a lot of things that sysadmin experience can bring to development. There's a lot of debugging steps that your experience can have you breeze through: connectivity issues, permission issues, policy issues, etc...

Imho it’s a numbers game until you build out a network. My first job was the result of months of cold applying to things. Every job since has been joining someone I’ve already worked with which is so much easier.

Does your school have alumni job placement help? That can help bootstrap a network, along with talking to former classmates.

Are you getting interviews but not offers? Or just not hearing back after applying?

How do you build out a network? What does that even mean?

It's not all about impressing the boss, you need to make a good impression to your coworkers of being a reliable worker. And if you do user/client facing work, to the users and clients. If my employer wants to hire a person for me to work with my first thought will be to go in my head through the list of people I've worked with and see if there's one that I would like to work with again that might be up for a change of scenery.

I mean a network of people who know you and your work. Preferably from having worked with you. I checked in with school acquaintances for instance, many of whom were doing the kind of work I wanted to do.

The more you can be a “known quantity” the better I think during job searches. Someone who knows you and can say good things about you can be a major leg up.

As for how, I know there are often local tech meetups where you can meet people. My personal approach has been to make sure when someone works with me they like my work and they like working with me. It’s opened a lot of doors.

This might be SLIGHTLY too big for small-scale Sunday, but I will give it a go:

What is the strongest argument against "you will own nothing and be happy" as a concept?" Ideally an argument that can be expressed in a few sentences of average complexity.

For instance, one argument might be that "people will not be able to build up wealth." However, I note that most of the property people own are depreciating assets. It actually might make sense for someone to not own a car and instead simply rent one on a weekly basis from a fleet of vehicles maintained by a larger company that are mostly standardized and will suit whatever their needs are at the time. Or a system like Citibike for cars. Or maybe later on, just call a robotaxi as needed.

This means they will not have to worry about the costs of repairs and maintenance, or insurance, or storage, and they can expect to get new models on a regular basis, thus it reduces a potential source of stress and unexpected costs to a simple monthly subscription. This seems like it would work well for a lot of people, and save them money in the long run!

And similar can apply to housing! If you live in a rented, pre-furnished apartment you are far more flexible if you want a change of scenery, to expand your living space, or need to move to a new city to pursue opportunities. Home ownership introduces lots of complexity and presents an illiquid asset even if it appreciates.

Same can apply to, say, smartphones, which upgrade so fast that 'owning' one almost doesn't make sense as it becomes outdated in < 1 year.

So extending some logic, I begin to see reasons why the average person might prefer to own nothing but a retirement account, and simply have a subscription service for most items they will use throughout their life.

What philosophical, economic, psychological, social, biological, political etc. etc. argument do you think most strongly refutes or rejects this as an ideal?

Taking a guess at the argument that will be the most common response, Rot-13'd:

Vg qvfpbhentrf snzvyl sbezngvba naq yrnqf gb n pvgvmrael gung vf vapncnoyr bs erfvfgvat nhgubevgl.

(Let us be clear, I'm not supporting owning nothing, but I do plan on trying to do a steelman or similar in the future)

Ownership creates slack in the system, slack in the system is what creates new and great things. You will own nothing is the logical conclusion of ruthlessly-efficient Capitalism, in that nothing will continue to exist that is not currently optimal.

Consider simple examples:

If you collect DVDs and books, you will continue to own obscure titles that you might never have watched, even if you don't watch them for years. If you subscribe to a streaming service, they will be pruning their service according to what makes money. Consider Reds a movie I happen to have the VHS of in an old basket of stuff in my parent's garage. I've never actually watched it, but if I wanted to I could do so tonight. Pending the destruction of the physical media, my kids could watch it five years from now. No streaming service carries it "free" with subscription, to my knowledge. With physical media one might stumble across it, with streaming it is impossible, with rental it can only be sought out specifically. Same with the vast numbers of old books hanging around my house from library book sales, many of them I could have gotten on Kindle Unlimited, but I probably wouldn't seek them out, there's no serendipity. You never read a book online because it's the only book in the beach house you rented and it's raining all weekend.

This extends even to the difference between when I "stole" media by downloading it from SoulSeek, versus when I "steal" media by streaming it on YouTube with Arabic subtitles. When I owned the things I stole, I had them around, and I would often download a pile of things from the same user. Once I found an obscure punk album on a user's files, I would start poking through what other music they had shared and downloading that as well. Some of those files still sit on my big hard drive, obscure punk bands from the early 2000s like Assorted Jelly Beans. I haven't listened to them in years, but if I wanted to, if the song Punk Rock Jock suddenly inspired me, I can do that. If I wanted to find it again, it would depend on the whims of Spotify.

Every day I drive to an outlying property of ours, I pass by a bright pink house. It's a double wide that's been renovated into a ranch house, and the owner painted it various shades of Barbie pink. I love driving by it, it makes me happy to look at it. No landlord would paint it pink, no landlord would have that house at that location. It only exists because of the odd circumstances leading to that particular human living in that particular location. And that brings joy. Somebody might see it and be inspired to do something with their house.

Buying gym equipment versus having a gym membership is the same tradeoff. A gym membership over the past decade would have given me access to more and better equipment every day. But my equipment has lasted. I spent $100 on two kettlebells in 2013. There have been times I didn't touch them for months, but when I get in the mood they are right there, waiting. Same with my squat rack, my heavy bag, my moon board. I might not use them every day, but I can use them when I so choose. When I get inspired, there they are. For a gym membership, unless I pay continuously, it isn't there.

Ownership creates slack in the system, slack in the system is what creates new and great things.

I also believe that allowing people to 'hoard' capital and property individually (i.e. decentralization) is important for ensuring systems are robust and to some extent antifragile.

It only exists because of the odd circumstances leading to that particular human living in that particular location. And that brings joy. Somebody might see it and be inspired to do something with their house.

This is also my argument against strict HOAs and zoning laws. Enforcing high levels of uniformity is good in some ways (making sure homes in a hurricane-prone area are built to a particular standard!), but really bad in others.

I prefer to live in an environment with novel and 'unique' aesthetics, even if this creates a hodgepodge of styles without any uniting theme, because the alternative seems to be everything is designed around the same blueprint and is painted the same shade of beige. But a lot of people seem to be fine with living in the uniform beige suburbs.

Same with my squat rack, my heavy bag, my moon board. I might not use them every day, but I can use them when I so choose. When I get inspired, there they are. For a gym membership, unless I pay continuously, it isn't there.

For me, the tradeoff of a gym membership in exchange for having more space in my living area is generally worth it, and the gym will have a wider variety of equipment that I wouldn't want to store long-term (let alone move) anyway.

Would it be so bad if you have a 'community' gym that was <5 minutes walking distance from your house and had all the equipment you needed, readily available in most cases (i.e. NOT constantly occupied by other users)?

Because there is certainly an efficiency tradeoff. If every household had their own exercise equipment, even assuming they use it several times a week, it is still sitting idle most of the time. Whereas a communal gym area will minimize the overall cost of setting up (because you're paying for less equipment overall) and ensure that the available equipment is in regular use so you're getting more value for the equipment you do have.

I'm seeing how the 'slack vs. efficiency' argument seems to be moving in favor of efficiency these days.

I also believe that allowing people to 'hoard' capital and property individually (i.e. decentralization) is important for ensuring systems are robust and to some extent antifragile.

And fertile! The existence of the dilletante is important in terms of creativity over time. Many great innovations have come from people having the freedom to fuck around.

For me, the tradeoff of having more space in my living area is generally worth it, and the gym will have a wider variety of equipment that I wouldn't want to store long-term (let alone move) anyway.

I live in a place where space is more or less a non-issue for me. This allows me to keep this stuff around.

Would it be so bad if you have a 'community' gym that was <5 minutes walking distance from your house and had all the equipment you needed, readily available in most cases (i.e. NOT constantly occupied by other users)?

This was basically the situation in law school, and in law school I did have a gym membership at the school. The cool feature there that I've never seen replicated at a commercial gym: you could "rent" gym clothes (think a gym uniform from the 80s: tube socks, mesh gym shorts, cotton t shirt) which made it extra convenient because I didn't need to pack clothing when I went to class in the morning.

But, just in my short lifetime, I've seen the equipment in gyms shift radically from machine focused, to free weight focused. When I was a teenager I never would have found a kettlebell in a commercial gym! And even today, unless I join a KB focused gym I'm not going to find one with a 97#er like Erica.

Ultimately I will probably dispose of some things. I don't really boulder outside anymore, I'm probably going to sell my crashpad for a loss. But that means some kid at my old climbing gym is going to get a great deal on a crash pad, and maybe that will help him become a great boulderer. Slack in the system!

Much like how the thrift store has historically been a prime driver of fashion innovation. Kids with more taste and time than money shop at thrift stores, pick up great vintage items cheap, and find ways to remix them to create something new. Slack in the system which wouldn't exist if everyone rented clothing.

Throw in all the stuff about power that everyone else talks about, but this is one reason.

P.S.

I prefer to live in an environment with novel and 'unique' aesthetics, even if this creates a hodgepodge of styles without any uniting theme, because the alternative seems to be everything is designed around the same blueprint and is painted the same shade of beige. But a lot of people seem to be fine with living in the uniform beige suburbs.

A big part of what makes for boring houses is that people don't really "own" it, the bank does, and they have no intention of ever paying off the mortgage and really owning the house, they just intend to sell it on to someone else at some point. As such, they don't decorate their house for their taste, they decorate for their idea of someone else's taste, for resale value. The same thing has made the watch market so recursive: everyone is obsessed with resale value, and as such they must stick to what "everyone" wants. The same thing has made cars more and more silver and less and less interesting, it used to be much more common to drive a car all the way from dealership to junkyard, now people don't want to get a car in a color that will make it harder to sell.

It's the same dynamic. When you're optimizing for general rather than a specific taste, you produce things that no one likes quite as much.

So I'm trying to distill the argument this supports down to a few sentences.

"Slack in the system" and "freedom to be expressive/innovative" is the basic idea, but what is the actual reason why systems without individual ownership wouldn't permit such innovation and would remove slack, which could be catastrophic?

Is it just a centralization vs. decentralization argument, or is there something a tad more nuanced here, where people who aren't able to own things will never act as if they own things, stifling their own creativity and preferences in the process?

This is probably the philosophical quandary I'm facing.

Probably if I had to summarize it in a sentence it would be this: Creativity comes from Freedom, and Freedom is the freedom to be stupid. Arguing merely that a rental economy is optimal in each individual case is not enough, because on a meta level we need variety, which can only be created by making sub-optimal decisions.

RE: HOAs and architectural standards for example. I would not want to live in most developments or towns with strict architectural uniformity, but I often enjoy visiting towns in New England that do have those kinds of standards. So I don't just want all freedom or all uniformity, I want varieties of different ways of running a town.

For me it all comes back to what kind of cash flow you need. Depreciation notwithstanding, if I lose my job I’d much rather have a car that’s losing value on paper than have a monthly payment I need to make.

That's just a way of saying you'd rather have savings than not. It doesn't tell you anything about the merits of owning versus renting a car.

It’s related but not quite the same. If my savings are in the market for instance and I’m let go because of a recession, suddenly my obligatory expenses could mean I have to sell at the worst possible time.

I’m not saying renting is never a good idea but racking up fixed expenses poses risks.

Why would selling your car be any better? Its value will be equally affected by the recession.

Yeah, but you don't have to sell your car. Savings and a fixed expense means you're vulnerable on both sides. Your cost of driving can go up, and your savings lose value at once. Owning a paid off car is locked in on cost of ownership. Sure, it can break down, but market fluctuations are irrelevant to you.

Seems like you're talking about owning property as a 'hedge' against economic downturns to the extent that, say, physical assets have intrinsic value to you whilst money held as equities can 'disappear' in a market crash.

And there's probably some logic there.

Yeah that’s a good way to put it. Ownership is a hedge.

This could be presented as a solid argument. Renting also means the real owner can take back their property under certain conditions, leaving you with nothing even if you technically still have the money to cover it.

So you would want to own the basic equipment that allows you to be economically productive so changing economic conditions won't immediately kneecap you.

Right, exactly. I watched a talk from Elizabeth Warren when she was a professor about this years ago. She encouraged people to splurge on things like restaurants and vacations rather than cars and houses because if things go south you can easily just not go out to eat versus having to unwind an expensive car or house payment.

Similar logic applies here I think.

Also it seems like in most cases the lifetime spend for renting dwarfs the cost of ownership.

There's a cohort that largely already owns nothing, they don't seem very happy. Must everyone own nothing for them to be happy?

Renting / leasing may be more cost efficient if your the sort that updates on a regular cycle. New phone every year, new car every 1 - 3 years, etc. If you're the sort to buy a good 10 year old used car and drive it until it dies or is un-economical to repair in 12+ years, you've already optimized this as much as possible. Unless you only have a car and don't need a car, people living in cities who rarely drive etc.

There's a cohort that largely already owns nothing, they don't seem very happy.

I'd suggest that's downstream of them being poor, not necessarily their lack of ownership rights (which is, in this case, ALSO downstream of being poor).

If you're the sort to buy a good 10 year old used car and drive it until it dies or is un-economical to repair in 12+ years, you've already optimized this as much as possible. Unless you only have a car and don't need a car, people living in cities who rarely drive etc.

Or you live in a time where tech advances quite rapidly and so a ten year old car is qualitatively different and arguably inferior to the new versions, so you're missing some tangible benefits from not being up to date.

Kind rolls into the software as a service thing too. If you buy a piece of software outright but don't pay for patches and updates, eventually it might stop working, have security vulnerabilities, or otherwise become less useful as it is outdated. vs. subscribing to a piece of software, guaranteeing ongoing development and updates in response to security threats or new tech.

If you find it worthwhile to subscribe to a piece of software to keep it up to date and functional, why not do the same for hardware? The computer you're running the software on, for instance. Or, how big of a leap is it to subscribing to a service that does this for vehicles? They get you an upgrade whenever there's an improvement in safety tech or fuel efficiency, for example.

What situations does it make absolute economic sense to hold onto an older piece of tech, even if it is 'obsolete' or 'outdated,' for the sake of owning it outright?

Or you live in a time where tech advances quite rapidly and so a ten year old car is qualitatively different and arguably inferior to the new versions

Do we live in this time now?

I've not seen any recent technology advances in cars that I'm willing to pay a premium for.

software as a service thing

This is the model software companies use now. This hasn't always been so. There are still many use cases (mostly offline specialized stuff) that is seldom updated. It was feature complete when it shipped.

Software publishers like SaaS as it improves their revenue. I preferred the previous business model.

I've not seen any recent technology advances in cars that I'm willing to pay a premium for.

Me neither, but occasionally I drive a modern car as a rental and there's a lot of safety and convenience features that have arisen in just the past, call it 8 years alone.

This hasn't always been so. There are still many use cases (mostly offline specialized stuff) that is seldom updated. It was feature complete when it shipped.

But this model seems dominant now, and consumers generally don't seem to be en masse demanding one-time purchases (although for video games this is still a thing).

And from the standpoint of "everything is internet connected and thus a possible security risk" I can see the basic logic of paying to keep vulnerabilities patched, at least!

consumers generally

These are the same people that were renting their landline phones from the phone company, are renting their cable modems / firewalls from their ISP and own a timeshare.

Maybe everything doesn't need to be connected to the internet?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=UrEUzKTt7j0

Succinctly, it's that people who don't want you to own things want power over you. Vehicles, guns, food, wealth, houses are sources of power and sovereignty. If you own nothing, just have a few lines in some bank's excel spreadsheet, then you're much more vulnerable than someone who owns things. Your bank could freeze your assets for being politically unacceptable. What are you going to do - hire a lawyer? With what money ;)

Or just look at the wikipedia page, it talks about how Auken proposed giving up control of electrical appliances to reduce power consumption. So at peak use times, perhaps it would reduce your aircon usage. That makes economic sense but it transfers power from the individual to the company or state. Each tiny loss of power and control matters, convenience comes with a price. We can't - and shouldn't - all be autarchic farmer-warrior kings of our own domain, the Somalia experience. Neither should we be totally docile serfs, hoping that our lords and masters see fit to treat us well. There needs to be a balance and I personally think we're already too close to the latter, better to arrest this trend than accelerate it.

I'll add to the rot13 and say that people who want you unable to resist authority, who want more power from you, are probably untrustworthy. They're at least suspicious. 'Relax, you don't need to bring your pepper spray or the phone in your purse - I'm a professional boxer' is all well and good, how do you know the boxer is not the threat?

This ultimately seems like a generalized argument against centralized authority, however.

There's a version I can conceive of with enough competition between various entities that it is less likely that a person gets frozen out of everything at once due to violating the policy of one of them. And likewise the competition prevents any one company from engaging in full monopoly pricing to suck all the consumer surplus out of the system.

There needs to be a balance and I personally think we're already too close to the latter, better to arrest this trend than accelerate it.

What would you say the optimal balance looks like, and is that sustainable as an equilibrium? Or barring that, what metrics would you examine to determine where the balance lies, and why are those metrics important?

I ask because it can be a bit hard to measure "individual sovereignty" on a scale or "convenience" as an objective phenomenon. How much 'inconvenience' should we accept to avoid giving away too much autonomy?

What would you say the optimal balance looks like

Core capabilities are decentralized and privately owned, preferably by many people as opposed to few. Economic transactions via crypto for instance, private ownership of weapons, private ownership of land, private ownership of websites and communications.

Metrics - self-employed as % of the population, wealth equality, number of people arrested for social media posts per year, size of government as % of GDP

I want a more strictly defined role for the state and large companies. Police should be focused on real crimes as opposed to speech, the organs of government should be less ideological. Of course government is innately political but you should not be able to get ahead of the queue in the NHS because you're pro-Palestinian. The US Air Force should not have a written desire to reduce the percentage of white male pilots to X%, even if they say 'oh this is still totally meritocratic and just an aspiration' as a disclaimer at the bottom of the page. Institutions and companies should be purely focused on their formal goals, not social engineering. If people think 'oh this cause is worthy' they should donate their own money, not company funds. Spending other people's money on other people is the worst kind of spending, it should be minimized where possible.

Governments should accept limitations in their powers, not grasping at extraordinary interpretations of the constitution or law to retroactively justify doing things they have no head of power for (this happens all the time in Australia).

In some areas I want stronger government powers, to speed through industrial projects to completion, produce housing and crack down on crime. But I want them wielded by people with a different understanding of what their role is and what they're aiming for.

Clearly this is a difficult equilibrium to maintain. Governments and big corporations all want more power and control, that's a natural desire. Ideologues want more power so they can achieve their goals. The population at large has a tendency to be distracted by prosperity or the media.

What is the strongest argument against "you will own nothing and be happy" as a concept?" Ideally an argument that can be expressed in a few sentences of average complexity.

I love owning stuff and being self sufficient. I can play starcraft I and diablo 2 the way I like and as long as I want. I can play starcraft II and diablo 4 the way blizzard wants me to for as long as they allow me to. All for the same price.

If you live in a rented, pre-furnished apartment you are far more flexible if you want a change of scenery, to expand your living space, or need to move to a new city to pursue opportunities. Home ownership introduces lots of complexity and presents an illiquid asset even if it appreciates.

Here is the kicker. You can do the same with owning home. The rent of the place you own covers the rent of the place you want to live (roughly).

Same can apply to, say, smartphones, which upgrade so fast that 'owning' one almost doesn't make sense as it becomes outdated in < 1 year.

We are not in 2012 anymore. You can reasonably expect to extract 4-5 years of life from a top shelf phone and to use it for something for at least a decade. The iphone yearly refresh is just a welfare program to ensure that older men can get regular blowjobs from younger women.

But the whole this is that when you rent something you are free to do with it what the real owner allows you. So you are dependent. Every dependency is vulnerability and the less there are in your life the better you are.

It actually might make sense for someone to not own a car and instead simply rent one on a weekly basis from a fleet of vehicles maintained by a larger company that are mostly standardized and will suit whatever their needs are at the time. Or a system like Citibike for cars. Or maybe later on, just call a robotaxi as needed.

An immediate example of an answer (beyond the others given) that comes to my mind comes from a recent discussion about the need to own movies and video games on physical media. "Why bother taking up shelf space with DVDs of the original Indiana Jones Trilogy, when I can watch them anytime on my Disney+ streaming service?" Well, how about when said streaming service suddenly takes them down? Same with "games as a service."

"Services" can be taken away with far less difficulty than possessions. It's a lot easier for your "Citibike for cars" or robotaxi to say that they won't rent you a car because (thanks to your tweet on x.com last night) your social credit score just dropped too low, than it is for someone to come tow away the car you own.

Or what if the computers go down at your "Citibike for cars," and suddenly they can't rent anything out? Sure, there may be competitors, but they're now all suddenly swamped by all those customers. Centralization makes failures so much bigger — see supply chains under COVID.

In short, in increases your dependency on others, and on large centralized systems, and thus your vulnerability. Ownership grants resilience.

"Services" can be taken away with far less difficulty than possessions. It's a lot easier for your "Citibike for cars" or robotaxi to say that they won't rent you a car because (thanks to your tweet on x.com last night) your social credit score just dropped too low, than it is for someone to come tow away the car you own.

At the same time, the fact that people happily use Netflix instead of buying DVDs gets towards the idea that... the average person would be completely happy with this arrangement! There are probably more movies out there than any one person can watch. More being made every month. Its not clear why it would be vital to guarantee that you have access to EVERY SPECIFIC FILM you like at all times.

And I'm old enough to remember when it WAS economical to rent DVDs from Blockbuster (and Netflix! They used to do that!) because most movies you would only watch once or twice. Why store them permanently unless you want to watch them many times?

So I can imagine if people were offered a subscription where they could pick one from a dozen different cars every week to drive for just that week, then just return it at the end of the week and get a new selection next week, they might find it appealing.

Centralization makes failures so much bigger — see supply chains under COVID.

Decentralization seems important and is a good argument against renting everything, honestly. But I'm not convinced it is a knockdown argument as long as we assume there IS competition.

Ownership grants resilience.

Assuming you can handle all the risks/responsibilities that come with it.

I think for a lot of people, they can't. If they're negligent on repairing and maintaining their vehicle and aren't very responsible drivers, renting vehicles from a central depot where professionals will make sure they're in decent condition prevents foreseeable issues later. Kinda how it works with vehicle 'fleets.' The employees who drive them aren't the ones doing maintenance and repair, they're just expected to drive them responsibly.

And robotaxis, if they live up to the hype, avoid the risk of having a random breakdown because you let the "check engine" light stay on too long.

As a rentcel, I'm extremely disincentivized from improving anything about the unit I live in because I don't want to put money and effort into improving someone else's asset. For example, my wife would like to put some wallpaper up. But I've put up wallpaper up a few times in my life and it's kind of a pain in the ass. If I were going to enjoy the wallpaper for thirty years or more, that's one thing. If I'm going to enjoy it for a few years before we (inshallah) buy a house, and then we'll need to tear the wallpaper down, it's just not worth it to me. Same for minor maintenance issues around the house that the landlord doesn't give a shit about. I'd much rather have a place that I can do what I want with.

I used to rent and that organisation had a maintainance budget for every unit that was financed through the rent payments. This could then be used for redecorating, like new wallpapers, and/or repairs.

I thought the system was pretty decent and if not for how the housing market extremely strongly incentivises home ownership I might have stayed in such a housing arrangement.

As a rentcel, I'm extremely disincentivized from improving anything about the unit I live in because I don't want to put money and effort into improving someone else's asset.

I like this argument, although I prefer the inverse "I may be more neglectful and cause more damage because it doesn't belong to me." There's a reason its generally not advisable to buy a used car that was previously a lease or a rental.

But I begin to think that the average person isn't really going to do much with a place they own that would 'justify' having them own it themselves.

And why not just have them subscribe to a service that will do the interior decorating for them? Similar to those companies that do house staging for real estate sales, you could pay for subscription that lets you swap out your decor every 6 months.

Likewise, many people who own their homes nonetheless pay someone else to mow their lawn, and they rent e.g. their modem and router from Comcast, since its really a hassle to maintain your own hardware.

Seems like its not so far removed to just rent... everything in your home and then you can also outsource annoying maintenance and repairs.

Yes I am hardcore doing Devil's advocate here.

I like this argument, although I prefer the inverse "I may be more neglectful and cause more damage because it doesn't belong to me." There's a reason its generally not advisable to buy a used car that was previously a lease or a rental.

FWIW, the big car rental companies (Hertz etc.) get premium prices on the second hand market because they maintain their cars better than private owners. (Most ex-lease cars are sold "approved used" through franchised dealers so they command premium prices for a different reason)

I like this argument, although I prefer the inverse "I may be ncentivized to be neglectful and cause more damage because it doesn't belong to me."

The landlord holds thousands of my dollars to incentivize me not to cause damage to the unit.

But I begin to think that the average person isn't really going to do much with a place they own that would 'justify' having them own it themselves.

I think painting walls is in the Overton window of things people do to their own houses (edit: or redoing the kitchen/bathroom), but I'd never bother doing this to a rental. It's the ultimate and final cuck. Think about it logically.

And why not just have them subscribe to a service that will do the interior decorating for them? Similar to those companies that do house staging for real estate sales, you could pay for subscription that lets you swap out your decor every 6 months.

So they'll put up wallpaper, I'll pay them a monthly fee for years for nothing (I don't want my wallpaper changed every six months, and I don't want a bunch of strangers in the house every six months either), then they take it down when I leave? Maybe if it was like $10 a year or something but otherwise it's hard for me to see how this is +EV. I could just pay someone to put up the wallpaper and tear it down, and that would probably be more cost effective.

Likewise, many people who own their homes nonetheless pay someone else to mow their lawn

Yeah, but that's a task that needs to be done all the time. People have had maids and butlers for as long as they've had houses, this doesn't really seem to be the same type of thing as paying for a furniture subscription service.

and they rent e.g. their modem and router from Comcast, since its really a hassle to maintain your own hardware.

This is totally bizarre to me and I don't really know why people do it. I've literally never had a problem with a router/modem I bought from Amazon. This is probably the best example of what you are talking about, though. I don't know how many people opt to rent rather than just buy.

Seems like its not so far removed to just rent... everything in your home and then you can also outsource annoying maintenance and repairs.

You already can (in some jurisdictions and some cases, must) outsource repairs. Water leak? Call the plumber. Electric problem? Call the electrician. Floors dirty? Call the carpet cleaners. Etc. what is the benefit of renting my carpets?

This is totally bizarre to me and I don't really know why people do it. I've literally never had a problem with a router/modem I bought from Amazon. This is probably the best example of what you are talking about, though. I don't know how many people opt to rent rather than just buy.

Same here, although aging equipment sometimes takes some work to make compatible, or simply won't work and force an upgrade.

ONE reason I can understand people renting Comcast Equipment is that they'll upgrade it for you periodically and you pretty much don't have to fiddle with it to get it to work.

For me, though, owning the equipment gives me reassurance that I actually CONTROL my home network, in that no other parties can shut down or interfere with my personal equipment. At least, not without some effort.

So they'll put up wallpaper, I'll pay them a monthly fee for years for nothing (I don't want my wallpaper changed every six months,

Nah, I'm suggesting you COULD do that. But there could just as easily be a service that does it for a flat fee anytime you want to update, and perhaps there's also a guarantee to replace anything that breaks as part of the deal.

The point here is, what's the benefit to you from owning your furniture and decor? Why would you argue against someone renting it to you instead? Is it really just about having the 'option' to do what you want and decorate however you like?

Water leak? Call the plumber. Electric problem? Call the electrician. Floors dirty? Call the carpet cleaners. Etc. what is the benefit of renting my carpets?

In theory, it reduces complexity a lot. Now the expense to you is collapsed down to a monthly or annual fee which represents the entire expense of using the carpet. And if you want to replace the carpet, you can call up a replacement from the same company. Maybe they even have an app.

Apparently you can rent fucking clothes these days, so I'm trying to hear the strongest arguments against doing such a thing, if we assume the service that allows you to do so exists.

Nah, I'm suggesting you COULD do that. But there could just as easily be a service that does it for a flat fee anytime you want to update, and perhaps there's also a guarantee to replace anything that breaks as part of the deal.

The point here is, what's the benefit to you from owning your furniture and decor? Why would you argue against someone renting it to you instead? Is it really just about having the 'option' to do what you want and decorate however you like?

Change my furniture any time I want for a flat fee and with a warranty? we already have this, it's called having someone deliver/haul away your furniture and buying a manufacturer's warranty, no renting necessary. People don't usually do this because it isn't really worth it to them. Extended warranties in particular have a real bad reputation afaict.

To put it simply, it's difficult to imagine that a company providing this service can make money while the customers are not losing money over the alternative setup.

Maybe there really are people who change their decor every month, and for those people, yeah this might make sense. But for everyone else, the transactions costs are just too great for this to pencil out I think.

In theory, it reduces complexity a lot. Now the expense to you is collapsed down to a monthly or annual fee which represents the entire expense of using the carpet. And if you want to replace the carpet, you can call up a replacement from the same company. Maybe they even have an app.

Again, how does this pencil out? You basically are marketing a kind of insurance scheme or extended warranty scheme for my carpet, plus I guess the option to swap it out.

We all know that self insurance is the best insurance. Especially when we're talking about something like carpet where there's no catastrophic risk to consider (unlike a car where if I hit someone I can be liable for millions in medical costs), I just don't see a path to profitability for the firm renting out carpets without a price increase for the consumer over the status quo.

Is the option to swap out your carpet important enough for people to make this financially viable? I doubt it, because replacing carpets is pretty expensive and the firm would need to amortize the cost of the guy who swaps his carpet out every week across the entire customer base, even if the median customer changes carpets once a year.

Apparently you can rent fucking clothes these days, so I'm trying to hear the strongest arguments against doing such a thing, if we assume the service that allows you to do so exists.

How is this different from renting a tuxedo for prom, or renting some equipment from the hardware store? There's clearly a place for services that rent you something that you're only going to use once, and clothing for special events seems to be the target market for this list of services.

Change my furniture any time I want for a flat fee and with a warranty? we already have this, it's called having someone deliver/haul away your furniture and buying a manufacturer's warranty, no renting necessary. People don't usually do this because it isn't really worth it to them. Extended warranties in particular have a real bad reputation afaict.

Right.

So the model I'm proposing avoids you needing to pay for the hauling away part, or the repair or the warranty. It would all be folded into the subscription/rental fees, so you only have to worry about paying your monthly cost.

Its a close-to-identical outcome, but you are not the 'owner' of your furniture and decor.

If the cost ends up being somewhat less, then what argument remains for choosing ownership?

I doubt it, because replacing carpets is pretty expensive and the firm would need to amortize the cost of the guy who swaps his carpet out every week across the entire customer base, even if the median customer changes carpets once a year.

Or offer the "swap it out every week" guy some other kind of deal. I think we're hitting a point where companies have extremely creative business models and can use tons of data to identify how to best provide for each customer's personal use habits.

There's clearly a place for services that rent you something that you're only going to use once, and clothing for special events seems to be the target market for this list of services.

Yes.

And if there's a market for renting things you'll only use once. Why not a market for things you'll only use twice? Or 12 times?

People who try to keep up with fashion trends or who prefer to wear new clothing on the regular could probably save TONS of closet space (or trips to the thrift store) by having a service that will rent them clothes on some kind of set time frame.

If the cost ends up being somewhat less, then what argument remains for choosing ownership?

If you're proposing that someone offers a couch subscription service that costs less over the lifetime of the couch than the value of the couch itself, we're talking about some kind of economic paradox. But yeah, if someone's cutting their own throat and offering me a couch rental for less than the value of the couch, I'd probably take them up on it so long as I don't need to care about the damage I'll inevitably do to the couch.

People who try to keep up with fashion trends or who prefer to wear new clothing on the regular could probably save TONS of closet space (or trips to the thrift store) by having a service that will rent them clothes on some kind of set time frame.

Probably, but that's kind of a niche demographic. We're pretty far from the average consumer at this point.

If you're proposing that someone offers a couch subscription service that costs less over the lifetime of the couch than the value of the couch itself, we're talking about some kind of economic paradox.

Well, these companies do in fact exist, explain that to them.

Seems like I would have the option to buy a sofa for about $1000 new or pay $43/month for a year lease, after which point it looks like they sell it used for like $400 used. If I planned on moving after a year, then paying $500 for the sofa rental for the year would cost less than buying the $1000 sofa then selling it for $400 when I move (unless I really thought I could get more for it), as that would cost me $600.00.

I think I can imagine a scenario where I'm not planning on living in a given place for greater than a year, and rather than buy furniture, use it, then try to sell it on facebook marketplace OR pack it up and move it to my new place, I just rent the stuff I want and they arrange for pickup when it is time to move.

And incidentally, if we're living in this "own nothing and be happy" world, it should be pretty easy to pick up and move because you don't need to drag your belongings with you. Better job offer in another town? Drop everything, move into a new rental, rent new furniture, get a new vehicle subscription (don't even need to worry about updating registration!) and move along almost seamlessly. If you want to move to a new town every year, its much easier if you don't have to worry about the cost of moving or liquidating all your existing furniture, to say nothing of the house.

For a type of person who just follows the highest salary or moves about on a whim, surely this is the best arrangement?

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This is probably the best example of what you are talking about, though. I don't know how many people opt to rent rather than just buy.

That point in particular feels is a great pivot point to nudge people towards ownership. Show them how many months it'd take the modem to “pay for itself”, a screenshot of the ISP naming that specific model as compatible with their plan, and they'll usually get right on board.

This is directionally supporting, not opposing, but

For instance, one argument might be that "people will not be able to build up wealth"

I don't think anything in this vision prevents you from buying index funds, which will build wealth faster than alternatives. Real estate has appreciated over the recent past, but YIMBYs would argue it's just because local governments restrict good land use and properties in desirable locations are effectively taxi medallions.

"But stocks are just an abstraction that depends on the global economy!" Yeah, so is your property, you own it because the legal system and culture think you do and your use of it depends on your remote developer job.

I don't think anything in this vision prevents you from buying index funds, which will build wealth faster than alternatives.

Stocks allow your accumulated wealth to grow and hopefully to outpace inflation. But you need spare cash to accumulate in the first place.

When someone else is siphoning a bit of the “surplus” of each use of the countless pieces of capital I've accumulated, that opens up much more opportunity for companies to squeeze me to my absolute limit. What is the most you will bear to rent utensils this afternoon? (It's deeply colonialist of you to assume eating with your fingers is “unsanitary”, anyway, so it's a public good to discourage their use.)

Philosophy ain't my strong suit, so I'll just say I don't wanna deal with a a kitchen-implement subscription service every time I feel like frying an egg.

I agree, but you do need to make a recurring payment to the grocery store for the egg itself, and another recurring payment for the electricity, which I'm not sure is philosophically different in kind.

Eggs aren't vendor-locked; I can cook them in any brand pan I want; on an electric stove, a propane stove, or over a campfire made of logs I chopped myself using my choice of axe vendor. And you could even own a chicken, if you don't rent.

A house I own outright is much less likely to demand that I use cloud-connected appliances than one I rent. Connecting “my” (landlord's) water heater to the internet and installing a damn app that requires an online account with an extensive privacy policy is the only way to extract diagnostic codes to figure out why it keeps beeping (near my bed and loud enough to cause hearing damage over long term exposure, though I don't have the audio equipment to prove this) and shutting off the hot water.

Connecting “my” (landlord's) water heater to the internet and installing a damn app that requires an online account with an extensive privacy policy is the only way to extract diagnostic codes to figure out why it keeps beeping (near my bed and loud enough to cause hearing damage

Tangent, but this can be solved by saying "That's not working, the App is not connecting, it's still beeping, send a plumber" over and over again, until the problem goes away. Renting is the reason I'm absolutely not looking at diagnotistic codes, ever.

I mean, what if the subscription service was simply you pay $20/month (or whatever) and have access to whatever implements you desire, and can add to or return implements as needed or if they get broken, AND if you ever move out, you can just leave it all there instead of packing, as your subscription will carry over to your new place.

I don't imagine that there will be some central communal store of knives and whisks and bowls that gets delivered on demand in this scenario, just that you aren't so attached to your implements that you feel like they're 'yours', rather than you just possessing them for a period of time. No need to cart them around.

on top of the actual “mathematical” cost of the equipment per se, I'll have to bear:

  • the extra repair & replacement costs from wear-and-tear by the 90% of the population who treats their kitchenware worse than I do
  • the increase on the prior item due to the Principal-Agent problem as the other renters treat their non-owned kitchenware even worse than they would treat their own kitchenware
  • the decrease in Quality due to good-faith mitigations of the previous costs (e.g. spatulas with rounded non-scraping points, pans that can be safely maintained by someone stupid and unconscientious — not cast iron)
  • the decrease in Quality due to pure amoral Principal-Agent problem (e.g. spatulas made as cheaply as possible while fulfilling the terms of the contract, bowls that optimize for cost rather than usability)
  • the middleman's operating expenses
  • the middleman's profits

that's a hell of a lot on one side of the scale that needs to be balanced out before this actually becomes a good proposition for the consumer.

The increase on the prior item due to the Principal-Agent problem

Principal-Agent problems seems like the most basic argument against "everything is rented" as an economic model. You can't be sure that someone else will treat 'your' stuff as responsibly as you will.

That said, Uber, Airbnb, Doordash, etc. have what seem to be workable solutions to this issue, even if there are those who try to circumvent it. Those systems work well enough in most cases.

the decrease in Quality due to good-faith mitigations of the previous costs

Being honest, do we think that the average person is a good judge of quality? Do they care? or Are they buying the cheapest chinese knockoff they can find from Amazon in most cases?

I'm not convinced anyone who isn't a serious chef is going to pay attention to this, as long as anything that breaks gets replaced immediately.

the middleman's operating expenses the middleman's profits

Surely this also applies to buying your own kitchen implements at retail?

that's a hell of a lot on one side of the scale that needs to be balanced out before this actually becomes a good proposition for the consumer.

Hmmm. Let us assume that twice a year you put together a large feast for a big group of people (maybe its for the holidays, I dunno). You need more pots and pans, an air fryer, an instant pot, and a few other specialized tools that you WILL NOT use the rest of the year. They'll just take up counter or cabinet space waiting for the next big event.

How does the cost of buying specialized implements that you only use 1-2 times a year match up to paying to have those same implement delivered when you need them, then once you're done sending it back so another person can use it? A large air fryer, for example, costs $150-200 new. If, for example, it cost $30 to rent for the day, or was part of the deal of some larger subscription service you paid for, then it'd take 3ish years before your purchase paid itself off. And meanwhile its just sitting there taking up space for the 363 other days you're not using it.

Much of this really does seem to come down to how much you intend to use the more specialized, expensive implements.

Mostly for the same reason people don't want to eat bugs and stop flying: someone will still be eating steak, flying around in personal jets and that someone will also lease you the flat, the car and the phone. And because they own property and you don't, no one will ever be able to challenge their dominance, while property owners will be able to modify the terms of the social contract at will for ESG reasons or whatever new acronym is in vogue.

Yes, I've read Austrian-adjacent complaints that fiat money is functionally the same attack on liberty and that we should wake up and wrestle control over our money away from the governments.

someone will still be eating steak, flying around in personal jets and that someone will also lease you the flat, the car and the phone.

Most likely this will be a publicly-traded corporation, which means you can 'own' shares in the company (via your 401(k) or whatever) and thus the wealth won't inherently all accrue solely to the executives and such. Indeed, maybe everyone at this point only rents their property, but some people can afford to rent nicer property than others. Like there are 'tiers' of subscription models, and some people are in the diamond tier, but just as a rich person can't buy a better smartphone than whatever model is then-considered top of the line, they're not getting extraordinarily better service than you, just the best the economy has on offer, on demand.

Why would an extremely wealthy person want the hassle of owning a supercar or private jet, when they could, again, just rent one on the spot in any city they happen to be in?

What benefit does the private ownership actually convey to them in this scenario?

This sounds like an argument from either egalitarianism, or from human liberty, not sure which one you're couching it as.

So, what are you reading?

Still on Future Shock, Committing Journalism and Scaramouche. Sabatini never fails. Also going through Mises’ The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, which hits like a blunt instrument but offers an interesting model for understanding people.

Just picked up Bastiat's "The Law". It's...fine, I guess. It deserves to sit next to Communist Manifesto as an example of Romantic political pamphlets - their use of language points to their beliefs as self-evident truths. They don't wish to persuade, only to start talking points that they hope others repeat. For 1800s Europe, I guess that worked? It's still used on Twitter, Tumblr & Reddit today - so the technique seems useful enough.

But at least I finally have an idea of where "taxation is theft" came from. I wasn't fond of the idea before, and this book doesn't do it any favors.

I'm absolutely stunned by the audible production of Moby Dick I'm listening to.

A friend got me to read a book about Singapore in WWII called The Price of peace and it's fascinating how the war in Malaya was going to keep going on then all of a sudden the war ends for reasons none of them could possibly have known anything about or impacted in any way. Every account reflects that experience.

I'm absolutely stunned by the audible production of Moby Dick I'm listening to.

Which audible version is it/who's the narrator?

Related - I recently read this fascinating blog post about whaling by Matt Lakeman.

This vaguely reminded me of one of my favorite memes that went something like:

"When a Serb kills an Austrian in Bosnia so the British send you, an Indian, to Singapore to fight the Japanese."

This version is not quite right historically. Japan was on the Allied side in WW1, but didn't do much fighting.

I think it was meant to be a joke on the butterfly effect (I'm pretty weak on history but I vaguely remember lots of causal links between WWI and WWII). It could also just have been someone (and me) mixing up the World Wars.

What's the Motte's perspective on why Trump's "fake" (contingent) electors scheme not a great deal? Truthfully, I'm not very familiar with the US electoral system, so I'd be grateful for any and all corrections.

As far as I understand, this is not the first time when an alternative slate of electors was submit - 1960's Hawaii election seems to be another example and it became a precedent of when it's permissible to submit an alternate slate. From what I'm seeing, though, the differences between this example and Trump's scheme are

  • The election hasn't been certified yet in Hawaii, while it has been certified in all of the states for which alternate elector slates were submitted.
  • There was legitimate uncertainty who won - famously, the difference in Hawaii was 110 votes, while Trump's lawsuits were predicated on widespread fraud during the election. Apparently, Eastman knew that those lawsuits are dead in the water. In this case, I'm not entirely sure what's the steelman case for Pence not certifying the election, and what was the purpose of the alternate slates (other than to overturn the election, that is)

The Kennedy electors from Hawaii were illegally chosen and illegally counted. Article II Section 1 of the Constitution:

The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.

The "time of chusing the electors" ended with the safe harbor deadline on December 13, 1960, at which point only the Nixon electors were certified. Thus, they were the only electors constitutionally chosen. It was Nixon's mistake to side with the spirit of the law (who won the popular vote) instead of the letter of the law (who the constitutionally appointed electors were) and count the Kennedy electors.

The Acting Governor of Hawaii certified the election on November 28th, both slates of electors sent notice that they were 'duly elected' on December 19th, with the GOP electors including the certificate of election. It was only after appeals and a court order (December 30th) that it was recertified the other direction on January 4th, and then Congress recognized the electors that had been fake at the time they were sent.

Part of the problem is that we do have precedent that the House of Representatives can choose to not use the certified slate of electors, even if the corrections are done after the Electoral Count Act safe harbor date.

The other part, and a large portion of what the Eastman memos depended on, was that there's clearly some point where Congress can look at a slate of electors and go 'no', and barring very specific approaches to federalism, there probably should be. Most alternative schema either devolve to state executives being able to pick their electors, and/or a barrage of randos calling themselves electors and inundating Congress -- poetic, but not better.

The Kennedy approach was more colorable (though given what we've since learned about Texas and Chicago, it's still far from clear Kennedy legitimately won), but in both 1960 and 2020, the court cases were still ongoing when the electors sent their slates.

Has anybody come across good employment opportunities online? I'm between jobs at the moment and a little bored. I don't have any particularly impressive skillset but I like to think I'm smart, agreeable and easy to work with.
The last time I checked freelancing sites like upwork, they seemed to be flooded with low-standard workers racing eachother to the bottom.

Tutoring? Wyzant etc, or for that matter Craigslist (either posting or responding to posts)

I remember reading an extract about a Soviet anthropological study, possibly in a rat-adjacent blog post. The researchers interviewed poorly educated rurals who when confronted with a hypothetical/counterfactual couldn't seem to understand it and rejected the premise. Can anyone recall these extracts and where they're from?

From https://psychologyinrussia.com/volumes/pdf/2018_2/psych_2_2018-1_glozman.pdf. Bolded links are probably what you're thinking of?

  • Luria, A.R. (1928). The problem of the cultural behavior of the child. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 35(3), 493–506. https://doi.org/10.1080/08856559.1928.10532168
  • Luria, A.R. (1931). Psychological expedition to central Asia, Science, 74, 383–384. https://doi. org/10.1126/science.74.1920.383
  • Luria, A.R. (1933). The second psychological expedition to central Asia. Science, 78, 191–192. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.78.2018.191-a
  • Luria, A.R. (1971). Towards the problem of the historical nature of psychological processes. International Journal of Psychology, 6, 259–272. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207597108246692
  • Luria, A.R. (1973). Skhema neuropsykhologicheskogo obsledovaniya [A schema of neuropsychological assessment]. Moscow: Moscow University Press.
  • Luria, A.R. (1974). Ob istoricheskom razvitii poznavatelnykh protsessov [On the historical development of cognitive processes]. Moscow: Nauka.
  • Luria, A.R. (1976). Cognitive development: Its cultural and social foundations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

The author is Alexander Luria (easy to remember if you're an Infinite Jest fan, sort of). Didn't see it on google scholar with a cursory search, but I'm sure it's out there since I've also seen the pdf.

I think this is where I read about the study you're talking about.

A friend and I were talking about the changing attitude about the way games are made, marketed and sold to consumers by corpos. A very interesting question was asked that I'd like to repost here:

When was the first time you saw something that made you realise "I am no longer the target audience" for something you used to love? This needn't apply to games, it can be anything you took part in and enjoyed doing but no longer do due to the thing being changed beyond your power.

I'm incredibly biased as someone who plays tennis recreationally, but nothing quite stirs up a feeling of disgust deep in my soul like pickleball.

I've tried out most of the major racquet sports and pickleball is the first time I've felt like a "sport" is Pareto inferior. Racquetball and squash require utilizing wall bounces, table tennis and badminton require quicker reflexes, table tennis also emphasizes more uses of spins, while badminton emphasizes drop shots and overheads.

Pickleball manages to simultaneously de-emphasize speed, strength, reflexes, power, spin, and touch. It's really quite impressive how it can blunt the importance of every aspect of athleticism and skill, all while producing one of the most annoying sounds known to humanity. This type of lowest common denominator slop is effective when you need to get together a group of people of disparate physical ability to play together, but it's largely antithetical my idea of "sport", both for playing and especially for viewing.

I've played all of the racquet sports you mentioned casually (including pickleball) except one, two of which competitively as well in a more formal capacity when I was younger.

I agree, as a sport pickleball is the worst of many worlds. It reminds me of the Robert California quote on the Black Eyed Peas: Pickleball is like tennis for people who don't like tennis, badminton for people who don't like badminton, racquetball for people who don't like racquetball. Yet, it has a relatively high floor and low ceiling, which is a feature and not a bug for people who like it for its Inclusivity and lack of athletic Ableism, especially to serve as a social event.

Pickleball is a recurring source of displeasure in online tennis spaces, including /r/tennis and /r/10s, sometimes with even a "total pickleball-player death when?" vibe. However, mainly for a different reason: the tennis players in such spaces feel there’s a concerted movement to non-consensually Replace them with pickleball players, a movement they’re largely powerless to stop.

They see their local tennis courts getting converted into pickleball courts, when tennis court availability can already be sparse depending on time and geography. Sometimes the tennis nets are removed and pickleball nets installed, the lines repainted from tennis to pickleball court. Sometimes pickleball nets are installed on each half of the tennis courts and the tennis lines are painted over with pickleball lines. Sometimes pickleball players just bring their own portable nets to takeover tennis courts. They report that pickleball players are more wont than tennis players to bring non-playing friends and family, so even when playing tennis on an adjacent court there are more hazards and obstacles in the forms of kids running around and bodies and chairs eating up space in the “out of bounds” regions between courts.

They also resent the unspoken and sometimes spoken message that pickleball is the future and they as tennis players should just bend the knee and yield their courts to pickleball players, for they are on the wrong side of history. Naturally, tennis Redditors refuse or neglect to Notice any parallels there may be between their predicament and other ongoings in the world.

I really liked playing Arkane games, especially Dishonored 1, but after Deathloop I completely lost interest. It got high reviews, and if you mention it on Reddit most people say they like it, but it lacks everything that made their other games interesting, and instead makes it a theme park. It's the ideal gaming journalist game. You go on a short ride for 9 hours, and you're done forever. You can look, but you can't actually do anything except sit in your chair and see your character do all the actually interesting things you could've done in the previous games. On top of that they butchered half the mechanics so they could add pvp multiplayer, which added absolutely nothing for me.

Redfall was even worse, so I didn't even try playing it. And now they're making a third person Blade game. Maybe I'll be good, I don't know.

I don't think it's all bad though. I doubt we'll ever see a similar game of that type from a AAA dev, but there's plenty of cool indie studios making like that look promising, especially something like Peripeteia.

A different kind of game but: I've written before about how there's a cycle of sports in America, where nice nebbish upper middle class white students develop a sport as recreational competition, it becomes professionalized and fills with different sorts of people with more natural athletic ability who pursue it more diligently than the original hobbyists for monetary opportunity, and the next generation of upper middle class white students develop a new sport as an outlet for their desire for masculine physical competition. Historically in the anglosphere this has hit boxing, all three varieties of football, basketball, marathon running. I've seen this cycle hit a bunch of hobby-sports I played around with just in my lifetime!

When I was a teen BJJ and Grappling were, to a certain extent, combat sports for those in the know. A lot of Joe Rogans base was built off the number of amazing people who hung out at Tenth Planet. And while they've held onto that hobbyist base, you see real dedicated athletes in MMA now in a way you generally didn't in 2004, and BJJ gyms in every small town strip center.

In college I took up CrossFit, it was kind of out of the mainstream and for dorks who got into sports late. Now every box I've dropped into is dominated by former college football players and wrestlers, I will never be at the top of the whiteboard for any workout if I joined. When I first tried CrossFit at 20 it was my first real exposure to weightlifting, I was one of the east coast's worst college rowers. Within a few months I could consistently compete for high spots on the WoD. Today I have vastly better lifts, but the competition has increased to the point where it doesn't even register, and because I don't specifically do CrossFit every day I don't have the specialized techniques mastered to even rx some competitive WoDs.

Rock climbing is somewhat resistant to professionalization in that sucking at rock climbing is still very fun, comparable to golf in that way. But as it's become more popular a similar process is ongoing. When I worked at a gym I was one of the better climbers, not great but there wasn't much I couldn't project in the gym even if I couldn't flash it. A kid joined who was dating a girl who'd been a member for a while, he'd been in the local MLS academy system but hadn't quite made it in professional soccer. He was better than me within six months of climbing for the very first time. With climbing hitting the Olympics, it won't be long until every gym is full of real athletes, and the days of the hippies and burnouts and goof around yuppies will be over.

Surely the current yuppie sport of choice is pickleball?

No, pickleball is for high school kids and senior citizens. It's a considerably less yuppie version of tennis, in that it's cheaper and involves less skill.

Tennis is like golf in that it tends middle class, primarily just because of the demographics of existing players and because almost everyone playing it got into it because of a parent.

Pickleball is definitely a yuppie sport, though, like it’s a banker meme, almost an in-joke.

Funny, in my area pickleball is largely a "tech-bro" meme. I didn't realize it had penetrated the finance scene as well.

Pickleball is currently transitioning from the joke stage to the hobbyists taking it seriously stage. It's no longer entirely funny for your coworker to tell you they're going to a pickleball tournament, but it's not entirely serious either.

  • Pitchfork music. Due to cosmic chance, I had an obsession with obscure music in preteen & teen years. Pitchfork collected and reviewed this music. Racial politics didn’t come up in the early days of indie music, and it definitely wasn’t central to music reviews. Pitchfork changed ownership in ~2011 and suddenly they were talking about race and politics in more of their reviews. Bands I liked were smeared for being white. Black music was reviewed considerably more. Pop music was taken seriously (disgusting). This is probably the number one thing that radicalized me. Indie rock music was, just generally speaking, a majority white culture created by majority white musicians, largely from middle to upper middle class families, and wholesome as far as youth music goes. Pitchfork started bashing the culture that created and valued indie music, while boosting pop and rap with a side of LGBT.

  • Reddit in its earlier years. There was actually a time where it had a diversity of political views and some interesting discussions. Obviously, not any more.

When my then-favorite YouTuber, Bisnap, switched his focus from recording normal videos to streaming gameplay live.

Funny to see Bisnap here. I also stopped watching him around the same time.

For me, it was probably Crusader Kings II.

This happened around halfway into the game's lifetime, with the Way of Life and Monks and Mystics expansions marking the transformation from a grounded feudal politics simulator into a wacky reddit screenshot generator, with a slew of event spam I had to download mods to turn off. This was further followed by expansions that expanded the map to include cultures and regions that weren't at all comparable to the european feudal system and in addition slowed the game down to a crawl.

I have barely looked at CKIII. Beyond the fact they've got to recreate and overhaul all of 2's features to make it worth my while, the game seems to be designed for people who loved horse popes and/or want to play Medieval Bridgerton. Everything else that bothered me about CK2 is still there: limited diplomacy, can't intervene between two vassals fighting especially when one of your vassals is directly related to you and countless other things.

This has happened in a few other games but CKII is where I saw it happening in real time.

Felt the same about CKII. CKIII toned down the wackiness a ton, at least at the start (I only played at release), no horse popes or magical satanists, but it seems like the current issue is, like most PDX games, it's extremely easy to become overpowered with even a modicum of game sense.

CKIII toned down the wackiness a ton

Not really, designing new cultures and religions is exactly the kind of cancer that overtook CK2. Now CK3 has imbalanced adventurers where you go around the map as a medieval Herakles instead of dying with 80% probability in the first year like any other small business.

Yeah, the reception to the Roads to Power release has been really funny to me. Sure, adventurers are absurdly overpowered shonen protagonists who can live to 130 while making more money from one contract than most kingdoms do in a year, but hey, they feel really nice to play. The RP! The truth is most CK players don’t want a realistic medieval political simulator, they want the aesthetic of one (in which they win). Compare to Legends of the Dead being canned for the update introducing plagues (losing your genius beautiful Herculean heir bc of RNG sucks, Henry I would agree). But tbh winning is fun, as is dressing up your 3D medieval not!Sims in fancy clothes, so I’m not complaining

My last trip to the Warped Tour. I got a last-second invite from a friend and whrn I got there, I realized I had never even heard of 90% of the bands, everyone was wearing black, and the music had changed from skate punk to screamo.

I was 21 years old and I have never felt older in my life.

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Warped_Tour_lineups_by_year 2001 or 2002 looks particularly fun. Wonder if it will be brought back successfully next year.

When I saw Fortnite. I used to be a huge Counter Strike Source player when I was younger and then naturally moved away from the FPS genre (RTS's too) as I aged. I just really didn't see the appeal of Fortnite at all, but I realised it was me that had changed when I saw how popular it was on Twitch.

Also Star Trek Discovery after being a big Trekkie when I was younger (Deep Space 9 was peak Trek). This is probably the best example of a franchise where a small minority of creators decided that only people with their niche values are allowed to enjoy the show any more. Trek was always kind of progressive, but it really jumped the shark in recent years.

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