A sort of extended comment section

"I de dager kom det sjelden ord fra Herren, og av syner var det få."

[grapnel]

An example of why one should use the Oxford comma.

[samueldays]

One should use whichever comma style makes the triplet less ambiguous. This depends on whether the first item of the three is plural or not. Compare these two examples:

"This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand, and God." "This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God."

But:

"This book is dedicated to my mother, Ayn Rand, and God." "This book is dedicated to my mother, Ayn Rand and God."

[femmenietzsche]

I don't know if you're familiar with my SoCal-imperialism posting but when the US falls apart the northern barbarians will be pacified.

Oh no, I hear you're building a mighty railway to transport arms and troops north at unprecedented speed, as soon as that's finished we're done for

[victusinveritas]

https://aeon.co/essays/silicon-valley-has-a-science-fiction-problem

[darnitjack]

Good essay

[thathopeyetlives]

Honestly I don't think it's all that great.

Like a lot of things in this genre it kinda points out differences between ideals expressed in science fiction (or cases when something dystopian has been produced), generates negative affect from them, and smears that negative affect all over a bunch of stuff with (in my view) little rational justification.

Also MASSIVE gell-mann amnesia regarding EAs and longtermism IMO, and "what do you care if the bridge falls down? The most important thing is that it centers minority voices" mentality.

I think some of these problems are common in an essay that jumps between many different topics.

It says we shouldn't care about a supposedly theoretical, far off human extinction by evil robots and then talks about Sam Altman perceiving that the potentially evil/dangerous robots are forming right now in his own hands.

Frankly I think that the fundamental basis of this article is that the author hates the idea of lone visionaries and likes socialist or left-wing-community governance, and they would be humiliated if lone visionaries or a non-socialist future were to carry the day. The self-interestedness and immorality of the current crop of tech people and the antidemocratic attitudes, contempt for normal/currently existing humanity, etc is almost window dressing, it's not really being explored.

[samueldays]

Bad essay.

One: Why does the top say "stories of a better future"? That's not what science fiction is. That's not even what the article body is about. The article later says "Gibson’s vision was explicitly dystopian".

Two:

Star Trek depicts a post-scarcity, post-capitalist society where money has been abolished and humanity works toward collective betterment.

Star Trek is wrong or incoherent on this point. "Post-scarcity" is a buzzword that collapses under scrutiny. The strict interpretation is physically impossible because Chateau Picard is scarce; there aren't enough French chateaus to go around. The loose interpretation is already accomplished. Roddenberry didn't understand why money is.

Three:

Seldon’s most important act is not his prophecy: it is founding the Second Foundation, a hidden network of scholars working collaboratively across centuries. The novels’ moral architecture is explicitly anti-authoritarian: every time a charismatic individual attempts to seize control of the mission, the story presents it as catastrophe. The series is, at its heart, a sustained argument for the indispensability of checks and balances.

The Second Foundation is an unchecked shadowy conspiracy of telepathic puppeteers making sure mainstream society doesn't diverge from The Great Plan. This is super authoritarian. Did Taskale ever read the books, or did he just hear "network of scholars" and think "that means ingroup, so it must be good" ?

Asimov’s vision of the far future is a defence of the mundane infrastructure of civilisation: the archive, the committee, the negotiated agreement

and the shadowy conspiracy. The shadowy conspiracy is very important to that particular sci-fi vision! And it only negotiates agreement within the conspiracy, not with the rest of civilisation.

Four: "Whitey on the Moon". This strikes me as a values difference pretending to be an argument. Taskale wants a maximin society and positions himself as a stereotypical mom telling off her child: you can't go to Billy's house Mars until you've finished your homework! I want a freer society: you're not my mother, you're not Elon Musk's mother, we are not children, you can shake your fist at the sky.

Five: "Silicon Valley’s selective reading" and similar pejorative phrases. So much projection, Taskale should find work in a cinema. Taskale is selectively picking parts he likes, such as the scholarly side of the Second Foundation but not its conspiracy control, then complaining that billionaires are only picking the parts they like. Fuck off. Double fuck off because the billionaires have the better excuse here for picking only some parts to implement: different sci-fi stories are contradictory and it's impossible to implement them all at once.

Six:

J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1937-49) is one of the great works of 20th-century literature precisely because it is an extended meditation on the corrupting nature of power. [...] Its central moral is not that evil can be defeated by the right hero wielding the right weapon – it is that power itself corrupts, that the Ring cannot be used for good by anyone, and that the only salvation lies in relinquishing the will to dominate entirely.

Hey Taskale, what's the third Lord of the Rings book named? Can you think about how Aragorn's arc contradicts your claim of what the allegedly "central moral" is? Do you see how there's some will to dominate involved in calling up an army and going to war?

Tolkien’s fictional race of hobbits prevail not because they are powerful but because they are outside the logic of power.

This is misinformation! When Frodo the hobbit reaches Mount Doom, he does not prevail this way. He claims the Ring for his own and puts it on with the intent to seize power.

(The other hobbits at large are not prevailing either; they're getting dunked on by Saruman.)

The essay is very, very, very bad throughout. Much of it is wrong, and more of it is not even wrong, it's buzzwords and slurs and free-association and Whig history and what Orwell described as "It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx".

Science fiction provides the aesthetic cover for this anti-democratic vision. It makes rolling back the franchise sound like bold futurism rather than Victorian regression.

Taskale has no business complaining about any sort of "anti-democratic vision" after he cheered the Second Foundation. Taskale does not have the wit to realize that rolling back the franchise can be bold futurism, either.

Take away the prejudicial framing and look at Star Trek again, then try to describe with parallell words to Taskale's complaint: "It makes rolling back money sound like bold futurism rather than Iron Age regression."

Money, like the franchise, was invented at some point. Perhaps these were good ideas and should be kept, perhaps these were bad ideas and should be abolished. Science fiction is a subcategory of speculative fiction: "What if?" stories where the author fantasizes about some change to society. It is good and right that authors can speculate about abolishing either or both of money and franchise. But Taskale does not want to let science fiction explore ideas freely; Taskale demands that science fiction should be politically correct and it's only "real" science fiction when it's exploring his favored ideas. Taskale wants disfavored ideas purged from science fiction and put in a containment box called "reactionary futurism" instead.

Fuck him.

[barryogg]

[shieldfoss]

What's 3 orders of magnitude between friends

[samueldays]

Minnesota has suffered a decade-long campaign of industrial-scale fraud against several social programs. This is beyond intellectually serious dispute. The 2019 report from the Office of the Legislative Auditor (a non-partisan government body) makes for gripping reading. The scale of fraud documented and separately alleged in it staggers the imagination: the state’s own investigators believed that, over the past several years, greater than fifty percent of all reimbursements to daycare centers were fraudulent.

-Patrick McKenzie, Bits About Money.

From that report:

Sometimes investigators would only provide video surveillance, which was not enough to prove intent to defraud in some cases. It was enough for probable cause but not enough for the higher level of proof of beyond a reasonable doubt to convict.

To answer prev's tags: Saying that Shirley "uncovered" it should have an asterisk: several people have arguably uncovered and re-discovered it over time and been unable to prove it because the bar for a conviction is very, very high. Even with video evidence of the wrong number of kids, intent is hard to prove on an incorrect billing number. (This is why some fraud laws use a "knew or should have known" standard instead. Miscounting one child is reasonable error. Miscounting the children by half-again is fraud.) Here's one of the convictions described in the 2019 report's appendix on previous Minnesota childcare fraud prosecutions:

In December 2013, law enforcement began conducting surveillance of Salama. According to court records, on 57 days, Salama billed for more children than were actually present by an average of 57 percent. Between December 2013 and May 2015, Salama received a total amount of about $2.55 million. Based on an average daily fraud rate of 57 percent, prosecutors extrapolated the fraud to $1.449 million. Ali pleaded guilty to theft of public money in exchange for dropping the wire fraud counts. On January 23, 2018, United States District Judge Joan Erickson sentenced Ali to two years in prison, two years supervised release, and restitution of $1,449,105.67.

With that high bar in mind, the fact of multiple million-dollar convictions for childcare fraud suggests that Shirley has correctly estimated the scale of the problem. Shirley walked into a fraud sector that was known to a bureaucratic office and made it known to a much larger section of the general public. This is a bit of a grey area for "uncovering". Maybe some other verb would be more precise, but there sure is lots of fraud here. Something as messy and sympathetic as childcare is very easy to defraud.

[pokemonheritageposts]

on multiple occasions i have seen people on socials excited for palworld 1.0 and it has taken me a moment to realize they aren't doing a bit and are genuinely excited

[morkitten]

Gamer here! This phenomenon can be explained from Palworld being what is considered a "good game" (任天堂以外のゲームをプレイしてください), which can be a concept that is difficult for fans of "Pocket Monsters" from the last decade or so to conceptualize. For futher reading, I suggest "On the Genealogy of Morals" by Friedrich Nietzsche and "Open Veins of Latin America" by Eduardo Galeano, hope this clarifies things!

[samueldays]

Nah, they both suck. Pokemon has suffered model collapse from remixing itself too many times and regurgitating the same kind of slop, under a developer team that doesn't want to take risks, just output a more-of-the-same sequel.

Palworld tried injecting new content but got a different kind of slop: SurvivoCraft BaseBuilder slop where "Wooden Club" is a craft item that requires unlocking to be allowed to make, and the technology levels are a senseless point sink of filler and level grinding.

"Wooden Board" on the same level as "Mill" but 13 levels over "Wooden Chest", while an energy shield can be made from sticks and stones and unobtainium crystals at level 4.

80 levels of this, padded out with item variations like the Makeshift Assault Rifle, the Single-Shot Assault Rifle, the Assault Rifle, the Heavy Assault Rifle, the Single-Shot Rifle, and the Semi-Auto Rifle.

[kevytmaitohorsma]

Reblog this photo of a käpylehmä to have a käpylehmä in your blog

It's a trick! If you reblog you get TWO käpylehmäs in your blog!

[kevytmaitohorsma]

They're traditional Finnish toys, little cows made out of spruce cones, on their way to see the world from one tumblr blog to another

[books-bread-and-brigandage]

@elodieunderglass not horrible, but things with legs?

[elodieunderglass]

I’ll send them on their lovely journey, thank you!

[most-sane-classicist]

okay had an idea...

Which Generic Homeric Epithet is prev

Shining, Divine, Glorious etc.

Wise

Great-Hearted

Tamer of Horses

White-Armed

Long-Haired, Lovely-Haired

Sweet-Spoken

Bronze-Armoured

Glancing-Eyed

Dreaded

Swift

Sacker of Cities

Voting ended onJul 12

reblog and answer in tags >

[captain-price-returns]

Arrest everyone involved.

[captain-price-returns]

Money saved: maybe a couple million dollars.

People killed: around three quarters of a million.

[brazenautomaton]

Okay but no though. I finally said "fuck it" and looked it up.

Everyone quoting this number is quoting what certain people predicted would be the number after a year without aid. I have never seen anyone cite a number that was not a projection written beforehand, based on estimates of what would happen with no aid.

Except that isn't what happened.

The "dissolution" and "aid freeze" were constantly tied up in the courts instead of being implemented. Marco Rubio was put in charge of USAID, and despite being a Republican, he is an actual human being who would show activity on an EEG and not an arc node of Trumpism. He issued waivers to keep funding the "critical" lifesaving operations of USAID going during the funding freeze, regardless of the courts' decisions. His explicit intent was to dissolve USAID as he saw it as a wasteful and counterproducrive program, but incorporate the parts of USAID that actually were useful (like these programs) into the State Department. From other pages linked on the same site, he appears to have done that. Rubio's "America First Global Health Strategy" lays out an extremely reasonable argument for what he is doing and why. He even goes into specific detail about how great PEPFAR is and why so much of its budget is being wasted on buck-wild overhead costs and inefficiencies instead of integrating local services.

I think the initial rush of "everything is cancelled NO WAIT no it isn't" probably caused harmful disruption, but don't know if I buy the story that it forced tens of thousands of layoffs. Because that period lasted, like, a week and that's not enough time for them to have felt the effect yet. Still wasn't good! Most things Trump just stumbles into dick-first aren't! But everyone I can find claiming this body count is making it based on projections from the first moment that aid was cut, and didn't alter their predictions to account for the fact that the majority of that aid was resumed pretty quickly..

[samueldays]

The alleged kill count is wrong for two reasons.

The moral reason is that "refrained from rescuing" is not the same thing as "killed"; the equivalence is made up by people who will grab onto anything to Get Trump but they never apply the same standard for e.g. the Obama Presidential Library "killing" thousands of people by spending that money on something other than aid. (Except for like five Effective Altruists.)

The practical reason is that we don't have to lean on hypothetical "sophisticated modelling tools" any more now that we have data from countries that got their aid cut, and the data indicates the model was wrong, the projected deaths didn't happen.

[samueldays]

It's still funny to me how much math went into making LLMs, the computer program that sometimes unpredictably fucks up when I try to use it for simpler math. (Claude Sonnet 4.6, here.) Great demonstration of why calculators are not a complete substitute for math skill, because without math skill you can't recognize a wrong answer when a bug or a typo happens.

The last one is the most obvious to my spot check: 6*6=36, so any power of a number ending in 6 has to also end in 6, not 4.

But they're all wrong. Three of other the roots end in 7; their alleged cubes end in 3, 1, and 5.

And the roots range from 1e3 to 2e3, so the cubes should be between 1e9 and 8e9, but these are e12 numbers.

[samueldays]

On natural law, responding to a previous discussion but it's a deep tangent so I'm starting a new post:

[ @butt-rice wrote ]

do you (or other catholics) understand that the "natural law" reasoning is just an overexplained bias for things you (or your pastor?) saw as normal when you were 14?

[ @thathopeyetlives wrote ]

I think pretty strongly it's not that. In this way I would distinguish it from more generic conservatism or what I sometimes call 'conventionalism'. So no, I understand that it is very much not that.

I think this is a poor answer because it's short on argument for why Natural Law is not that, barely touching on the broader matter with "alterations that damage its function" and I want to offer some of that argument and explanation to butt-rice who seemed genuinely interested.

Short answer: because Natural Law reasoning goes back to people like Aristotle and Cicero, who died in the BC years, and so we can be fairly sure they weren't influenced by Catholics, and they didn't have the same idea of what was normal at 14.

Long answer below the cut, and explanation of natural law, for people who like reading.

The word "natural" has two different senses which sometimes get people talking past each other as they argue, so let clear that up first:

"nature" sense 1 is in terms like "good-natured": it means disposition, temperament, essence. "nature" sense 2 is in terms like "nature reserve": it means wilderness, non-artificial, animalistic.

Natural law is focused on sense 1 of the word. It's a theory that humans have a nature, a set of standard traits that one can use to substantively reason about how humans work and what their law is or shall be. Saying that so-and-so is found in nature is a sense 2 argument, which bounces off the natural law arguers.

Now, here's Cicero:

True law is right reason conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil. Whether it enjoins or forbids, the good respect its injunctions, and the wicked treat them with indifference. This law cannot be contradicted by any other law, and is not liable either to derogation or abrogation. Neither the senate nor the people can give us any dispensation for not obeying this universal law of justice. It needs no other expositor and interpreter than our own conscience. It is not one thing at Rome, and another at Athens; one thing to-day, and another to-morrow; but in all times and nations this universal law must forever reign, eternal and imperishable.

Cicero is raised in the Roman polytheistic tradition, but he's probably a sort of atheist and definitely a cynic about it. He writes elsewhere that religion is a useful tool of statecraft, and the rituals are ways of keeping the peasants happy and obedient.

Here, Cicero is not appealing to Jupiter or Justitia as the authority backing the law, he is appealing to the law itself as the righteous thing, which he later partly identifies with a nameless and impersonal deity, "magister et imperator omnium deus" (master and commander and god of all). Cicero says that there is some good and evil apart from the will of any man or legislature.

More than two thousand years later, when Martin Luther King Junior is writing the famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, he's writing in the same deep moral-legal tradition. Hear the similarity:

I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all." Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.

Another way of looking at this is that natural law is an attempt to answer the question "What do we mean when we call a law unjust?" by saying that there's some ideal law, what the law should be, with greater authority than the law that merely happens to be in effect right now. Our written laws are approximations to the Platonic Form of law the way drawn circles are approximations to the Platonic Form of a circle.

Catholics will tell you that the natural law can be inferred from human nature, and human nature was formed by the hand of God, so it's easy to fit this into Catholic thought, but there are also atheists like Philippa Foot arguing for natural law from humans alone, without God.

An analogy for natural law is that wood has a grain. If you take an axe and chop a log of wood along certain planes, it'll split easily; chop along other planes and you'll waste a lot of time and effort chipping away at the log. Human nature, too, has a grain, and natural law is the study of what laws are aligned with human nature, or going against the grain.

This is very abstract, so let me circle back to the previous topic of healthcare and transgenderism that started this.

The word "healthy" is implicitly essentialist in a way related to natural law. It implies that there is some right and good way for humans to be, and if humans aren't that way, then we are encouraged to fix them. It is morally good to repair broken arms, cure plagues, restore vision to the blind, and so on. It is morally bad to break arms, spread plague, cut eyes out, and so on.

If a man asks to have his eyes cut out, he's probably just being hyperbolic about having seen a disgusting image on Tumblr.

If he insists on having his eyes cut out, we might say to him: "You're not in your right mind. Go home, have a nap, you'll feel better when you're rested and sober."

If he still insists after that, the doctor might tell him: "The Hippocratic Oath says to first do no harm, and cutting your eyes out would definitely be a harm even if you say you want it. Your judgment is compromised. I will not cut your eyes out." (I know doctors don't always take the H.O. but I think you get the point.)

There are some exceptions like for self-defense and weird eye infections, so we can clarify the objection to cutting out healthy eyes, etc, and add a bunch more nuance and caveats that professional natural law writers use to fill an entire book. I am not going to fill an entire book here.

And so we get a conflict: people who insist on absolute will-and-consent above all as the determiner of morality, and people who also like will and consent 99% of the time but have a few reservations in edge cases for people with compromised judgment and aberrant self-destructive urges like wanting one's eyes cut out.

That is one of the Catholic objections to various kinds of hormone treatment and bottom surgery and transgenderism procedures: these are (the result of) aberrant self-destructive urges, not healthcare.

The Bible doesn't need to be specific about "no cutting off your dick", it's in a category with "no cutting out your eye" and all the other parts one shouldn't cut off, under general rules such as "Love your neighbor" which means to will the good and health of your neighbor, not to indulge him by assisting with self-harm like mutilation or drug addiction. If a state law says otherwise, that law is wrong and unjust.

[samueldays]

I can tell you have an essay in you about translating "besy", go on

(prev post for context)

Yes. :D though this response will be delayed. I'll start with the Pushkin poem excerpted at the beginning of the Dostoyevsky book:

Strike me dead, the track has vanished, Well, what now? We’ve lost the way, Demons have bewitched our horses, Led us in the wilds astray.

"Demons" (бесы, Romanized: besy) in this context are nasty wilderness gribblies from the Slavic tradition, goblins and fey sort of things, creatures that will fuck you up but without the grandeur and beauty of the Unseelie Court, they're more like a wasp nest, just grubby little bastards who ruin people's lives. This is perhaps a metaphor for the revolutionaries.

The other quote Dostoyevsky opens with is from Luke 8, where Jesus casts out Legion:

Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind; and they were afraid.

Quoting the Bible is straightforwardly the Christian meaning of demons/devils.

If this passage is also a metaphor for someone, it's perhaps for Fyodor Dostoyevsky himself being the healed man: In his 20s he joined a socialist society, it started as a peaceful literary reading club but grew a terrorist wing under Speshnev, who persuaded Dostoyevsky to join. The tsar found out. Dostoyevsky was arrested and sentenced to four years in a katorga labor camp. He spent much of the time being sick, suffering, and generally regretting this. Some of the more dedicated socialists with him in the camp spent much of their time going WE SHOULD HAVE BOMBED HARDER, WE COULD HAVE OVERTHROWN THE TSAR, I AM GOING TO BOMB SO MANY PEOPLE WHEN I GET OUT. I don't know if those specific individuals did, but Russia certainly saw a lot of socialist/anarchist/egregorist terrorism in the next few decades.

Another point of comparison for "besy" in English is the call of the void, the feeling some mountain-climbers have when "don't jump, don't jump, don't jump over the cliff" drifts into paying too much attention to the possibility of jumping over the cliff, and similar intrusive thoughts. The besy in Russian is like an embodiment of bad ideas. It possesses and it lures, it encourages one's worst impulses. It is a kind of evil that makes the victim complicit.

Three related meanings of besy. Crude one-word summaries: ruin, madness, obsession.

---

After evoking folklore and the Bible at the start, there's nothing supernatural happening in the main text of the book. The closest it gets is this sort of event:

“Listen, Dasha, now I’m always seeing phantoms. One devil offered me yesterday, on the bridge, to murder Lebyadkin and Marya Timofyevna, to settle the marriage difficulty, and to cover up all traces. He asked me to give him three roubles on account, but gave me to understand that the whole operation wouldn’t cost less than fifteen hundred. Wasn’t he a calculating devil! A regular shopkeeper. Ha ha!” “But you’re fully convinced that it was an hallucination?” “Oh, no; not a bit an hallucination! It was simply Fedka the convict, the robber who escaped from prison. But that’s not the point. What do you suppose I did! I gave him all I had, everything in my purse, and now he’s sure I’ve given him that on account!”

So how does one translate бесы, as the title of a book about revolutionaries who act as though they're driven by some combination of the above three? The standard Demons (or Devils) is plausibly close, note that English also has secularized expressions about "inner demons" and "personal demons".

The Possessed is another of the official translations. This word emphasises the humans and the lack of visible supernatural agency, the type 3 besy of ideology, the intrusive thought leading to bad decisions.

Foul Spirits is my own suggestion which is like Demons but without the implicit drama and scope of Hell. There is no cosmic struggle in the background of this term. There is just a pack of shitgoblins that are messing with people's heads.

Sirens evokes the luring, tempting aspect of the multi-layered title. The besy do not grab control by force, they inflame passions and invite people to very bad decisions. They have something plausible to say, but you shouldn't listen. "Let us liberate the peasants and bring democracy to-" (explosions and screams in the distance)

The Wild Hunt would be a bad translation, bottom of the list, I include it here because I think it captures one facet missing from the above: besy as a collective force, numerous, not dwelling in their own land but going on the prowl, destructively sweeping into a community.

Edit: adding Fiends from suggestion in comments.

[garmbreak1]

wow i wonder what the video shows

... yeah i can see why the cops don't want that getting around, holy shit

there's no way she didn't see what happened, right?

[the-grey-tribe]

Why the hell were there police and a guy already filming on the scene? Why the hell would you try to beat a guy up in front of police and on camera?

[isaacsapphire]

Is “the criminal is the White guy getting hit by brown guys” really is the default policy of the police across the pond or does it just look like that?

[samueldays]

Yes, UK Race Action Plans say something like that under a cloud of squid ink words.

There is an enormous markedness problem here that could get its own essay. This "anti-racist" Race Action Plan is favoring one race, Curse of Babel be upon them, their speech is confused.

The words I want to highlight as relevant to @isaacsapphire's question are "disproportionate" and "inequalities" and "Equality Impact Assessment". These are linked to the UK Equality Act which borrowed the US Civil Rights Act model of disparate impact: policies that are in principle race-neutral can still be illegal if those policies in practice affect one race more than another.

The theory behind this goes something like: after banning a "no blacks" rule, they don't want racists evading it with a "no people named Tyrone or Jamal" rule, that's de facto racism even if you can imagine a white guy named Tyrone.

But it turns out that violent crime rates differ by race, so the in principle neutral rule of arresting violent criminals is in practice something that affects one race more than another. The Equality Act has no common-sense exception for this, so there's an absurd contradiction written into law where it's illegal for police to enforce the law. Law enforcement would have racially disparate impact.

People tie themselves into knots attempting to justify and implement and resolve this, and one of the resolutions is for cops to lower the threshold to arrest whites and raise the threshold to arrest non-whites and try to get the arrest rates to even out by race. It's not quite the default policy, there's no single default under the cloud of jargon and contradictions and overlapping laws and court precedent that doesn't appear in the written law, but it is a common policy.

And to emphasize: what I linked above is not the Black-specific part nor version nor one of several race action plans. That is the single Race Action Plan for West Midlands (where Birmingham is).

It derives in part from the national Police Race Action Plan, where the National Police Chiefs Council say plainly in their anti-racism commitment that they want equality of outcomes.

They will be graded on a Police Race Action Plan 'maturity matrix' which is more of the same garbage. Fucked up, man.

[feathershy]

with globalization, "the past is a foreign country" is no longer true. The past is more foreign than a foreign country.

[samueldays]

🤔

[barryogg]

Some aggregations of studies analyzing rent control, by Konstantin Kholodilin

Rent control effects through the lens of empirical research: An almost complete review of the literature

Rent control is a highly debated social policy that has been omnipresent since World War I. Since the 2010s, it is experiencing a true renai

[barryogg]

I saw a post on my dash calling Kwame Mamdani a good politician, reblogged by people who really ought to know better, so I'm bringing this back.

[shieldfoss]

There's buckets for political skill though, with you and me in one and Donald Trump in the other.

You're in our bucket if you didn't get elected. You're in the other bucket with Trump and Mamdani if you're capable of getting elected. It's a pass/fail test and Mamdani passed.

[samueldays]

Mamdani is good at politics, while being an evil politician. He has a plan to squeeze property owners by denying them income while mandating their expenditures, then confiscate their property when they can't pay or buy it at a forced discount for being "distressed", and distribute the spoils to his clients. This empowers him and his coalition while weakening his enemies.

Studies showing that rent control fucks up the housing market and has nasty side effects: yeah he knows, he's weaponized it.

[samueldays]

Man there's a lot of people being smugly, confidently, ignorantly wrong about the falling birth rates on my dashboard recently.

[vriskakinnieaynrand]

maybe the problem is that people care about other people too much. so if you say, here's a political agenda that'll make you rich, they'll be like, wait, won't this also make other people rich? i don't want that. i'd rather have the other people be poor. i'm very sensitive to the condition of other people, you understand, such as people i read about in the newspaper, and people i hear about on tiktok – and i want them to be poor! ideally i'd be put in charge of making sure that the other people are poor, but someone's got to do it. whereas if you don't care about other people you're like, shit, i want to be rich! sign me up! what's the next thing that's as useful as the refrigerator, i want that. why isn't energy too cheap to meter, i want energy too cheap to meter. i want every disease to be cured because otherwise i might get one, et cetera. and the most politically viable way for me to get what i want is for the political order to make everyone else rich also, which i don't care about

[bambamramfan]

I think the human brain is very smart about social matters, and even if it is explained poorly, it is aware that other people having a lot more usually means they have less. "Decouplers" will say this isn't true, but in any of the specific examples it clearly is, which is why libertarians and rationalists keep using the vague, abstract form.

[barryogg]

is aware that other people having a lot more usually means they have less

I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that the Industrial Revolution broke people's brains, or rather broke reality while the brains remained where they were.

The quoted part is generally true for the premodern world, where the primary mode of accumulation of wealth is conquest. The returns from technological innovation were compounding, but on an almost imperceptible rate. Then we hit an inflection point, and now you can innovate and trade your way into prosperity, but many people are locked in preindustrial thinking where wealth could've only been taken from someone.

[samueldays]

OP mentioned a refrigerator, that's a specific example where he's correct and it is not true that other people having a lot more means I have less. Bambam is the one being vague about how it's clearly true in specific examples that he forgot to give any of.

But also, there's the democracy problem. There was a comment on California's """one-time""" wealth tax initiative that went something like:

Democrats can promise their constituents 100% of your stuff. Republicans can only promise to let you keep your stuff.

Expropriation is easier to organize a voting coalition around, and as we say in Norway, tyv tror hver mann stjeler.

[theragamuffininitiative]

Alright I want to know something here:

the 🙃 emoji means (approximately)

silly!*

ugh!*

secret third thing you will explain in tags*

Voting ended onJul 10

*if comfortable doing so, you may include your age range/generation in the tags for helpful demographic data

kindly reblog for bigger sample size, thanks!