promethea.incorporated

thathopeyetlives:

The Zeroth Rule Of Computer/IT Security Policies: 

No policy can be so stringent as to encourage people to break it in order to get their jobs done. With the exception of highly regimented and closely inspected environments, such non-conformance will be totally invisible even if universally rampant. Rule-breaking will probably be vastly less secure than simply liberalizing the rules. 

Signed, somebody who sometimes has to send large executables to customers, but cannot Google Drive share a file offsite. 

Correction: The Zeroth Rule of Anything With Any Rules At All

ozymandias271:

ilzolende:

bariumsulfateacetone:

argumate:

ilzolende:

argumate:

If someone was running a private security company in Ancapistan I wonder if they would be tempted to offer a deluxe package which costs ten times as much and offers immunity to minor crimes, or a platinum package which costs even more and shields you from murder investigations.

Would you want to buy security from a company that would let some members of Argumate’s Hypothetical Security Firm not be prosecuted for murdering you?

Probably not, in which case you would have to buy from me! :)

It’s kind of surreal to watch libertarians argue, and forget that some people don’t have money. Or do you just think that victims of crime don’t matter unless they are rich?

Presumably, people with fewer possessions are less likely to have lots of thieves target them, so they should be able to get lower rates. In terms of “random assaults”, normal police already don’t constantly go around breaking those up?

IDK. I mean, it’s not clear that current police serve poor communities particularly well.

The police don’t exactly help poor people a lot in the status quo… like, Friedman addresses this argument in Machinery of Freedom, and he’s like “in a statist society, poor people pay taxes to get victimized by police, and in an ancap society poor people will pay fees to get protection that actually has an incentive to, you know, protect them.”

Yeah. Black Panthers are what I’d expect marginalized people to have if the state wasn’t intent on smashing every such attempt (guess what the fuck happened to the Black Panthers in reality). If the poor have their own protection agency that negotiates with the protection agency of the rich, even from a drastically lopsided negotiating situation, it’s still strictly better than the status quo where the protection agency of the rich is allowed to kidnap anyone who tries to organize the poor people’s protection agency.

voximperatoris:

jbeshir:

voximperatoris:

jbeshir:

socialjusticemunchkin:

argumate:

@socialjusticemunchkin:

My brain has this ethical æsthetic. Taking government money feels disgusting, filthy and impure, the same way I’d expect stealing things from an independent food cart vendor might, even though I’d only be taking what the system should give me anyway (I want the state to basically tax people for a reasonable UBI and not much else; if I use corporate welfare to get less money than the UBI I’d want to implement there logically should be no problem, but it’s still yucky).

Then there’s the fact that I’m poor (YGM) and thus don’t really have that much of a choice; I’d love to survive without getting in bed with the state but it’s not really a realistic option because the state also makes surviving artificially expensive by eg. limiting the housing supply and banning contracts with which I could borrow money from future-me with less risk of getting in inescapable debt if future-me doesn’t end up as wealthy as I’m expecting. And it’s also caused me a lot of psychological harm from being terminally dependent on a thoroughly abusive system for years, and in any just world it would owe me big reparations for that.

But I’m totally planning to make a big deal of calculating all the services I’ve received from the state and spitefully paying them back to the penny once I can afford it, just for the sake of a grand gesture, and then I’m going to whine massively about how they are still going to try to impose bullshit and mob rule on me.

Does the state limit the housing supply though? At least in Australia, zoning rules are typically set by local councils which represent existing land owners, who typically oppose development and get very upset when higher levels of government overrule them to allow high-rise buildings etc.

If anything a libertarian paradise might have less development if owners manage to impose binding contracts on each other that no higher power can overrule.

In Finland there are a lot of regulations that limit construction and rig the system to favor the rich (mandatory parking spaces, regulations requiring the mean apartment size to be artificially large etc.), and while I don’t want to do full libertarianism immediately (the people are just totally unable to handle it), except maybe somewhere for testing purposes, injecting a hefty dose of laissez-faire would help as the builders could build more of the highly desirable aka. profitable city apartments.

Also, in full libertarian paradise people dissatisfied with the existing cities could just build their own city, with blackjack and sex workers who are treated with dignity and respect, and impose contracts that building is not to be artificially restricted. The working class would probably follow pretty soon because it would be a cheap place to live in, and the end result would be basically what the SF YIMBYs are trying to get. But this is pretty “would the workers’ paradise give everyone one pony or two ponies” because nobody is expecting full libertarian paradise to ever exist on this planet. All I’m saying is that we should seriously try the opposite of the cronyist festering regulatory abominations sometimes.

If people would be happy going off and building their own city to bring down costs, they could more easily just go off from SF and buy property literally anywhere else.

Whatever is stopping that working would presumably also stop the “go off and build elsewhere” strategy too?

You can perhaps get around building and zoning codes by building a new city in the desert, but you can’t just go build your own cities without obeying tax laws, immigration laws, drug laws, labor laws, banking and investment laws, etc.

It is, in fact, the case that states with less burdensome regulations (e.g. Texas) are growing faster than states without, but there are of course other compensating factors that make e.g. San Francisco more desirable for certain purposes.

If the greater desirability of San Francisco were caused by its greater level of government intervention, that would be one thing. But my actual belief is that it is desirable despite its greater level of government intervention. And therefore, it’s perfectly reasonable for people to say: “I’d like to live in San Francisco for the climate, the culture, and the high number of technology jobs; however, I think the restrictions on development are unjust and inefficient.”

I agree with this- SF has particularly inefficient and stupid rules, and they should change. I just don’t think that “and if people don’t like it they can go buy elsewhere” would solve problems caused by hypothetical private SF-style city rules any better than it solves them for the present public ones.

Which is to say, it doesn’t do nothing, but if you view the current setup as unacceptable when induced by the state and “move elsewhere” unacceptable as an answer, then you probably shouldn’t regard “move elsewhere” to be an acceptable answer to the hypothetical of them occurring in a private system, either.

And I’m inclined to agree with argumate that this could happen and be messier, depending on how the incentives and optimisation for competition worked out, in the absence of any central entity that can do gods-eye view optimisation.

A saving grace is that localities are already really bad at cooperating and incentivised by property owners to compete for land value, so we’ve already gotten to see some of the things, like efforts to move homeless on, that we’d see under a private system where they were more explicitly competing, and can see at least some of what would happen.

I agree that “if you don’t like, go somewhere else” is always a terrible answer, and I’m opposed to it when libertarians say it as well. If you don’t like how your workplace is run, the fact that you could or could not work somewhere else is irrelevant to whether the workplace could be run better, for the benefit of all involved.

Any form of bureaucracy is going to be inefficient, including private bureaucracies. The major point, though, is that they are incentivized to be somewhat better through competition. But the fact that they are not perfectly efficient is precisely why big corporations don’t, in a free market, form monopolies and take over everything: there is no difference between a “private” corporation owning the whole economy and a state socialist economy.

So the kernel of truth in the “if you don’t like your employer, work somewhere else” argument is that, while it’s a major inconvenience for your job to be so bad that you have to quit and find another one, it’s much less of an inconvenience than having to run past the sentries and escape over the Berlin Wall. Workplaces are dictatorships, but as David Friedman puts it, competitive dictatorships. The difference is that you have a many more options under a competitive system, and since you have those options, they all tend to be better.

Of course, it’s possible to think that all of your employment options are intolerable. The question is whether there is a practicable system that would give you better options. As Ludwig von Mises put it:

To advocate private ownership of the means of production is by no means to maintain that the capitalist social system, based on private property, is perfect. There is no such thing as earthly perfection. Even in the capitalist system something or other, many things, or even everything, may not be exactly to the liking of this or that individual. But it is the only possible social system. One may undertake to modify one or another of its features as long as in doing so one does not affect the essence and foundation of the whole social order, viz., private property. But by and large we must reconcile ourselves to this system because there simply cannot be any other.

In Nature too, much may exist that we do not like. But we cannot change the essential character of natural events. If, for example, someone thinks—and there are some who have maintained as much—that the way in which man ingests his food, digests it, and incorporates it into his body is disgusting, one cannot argue the point with him. One must say to him: There is only this way or starvation. There is no third way. The same is true of property: either-or—either private ownership of the means of production, or hunger and misery for everyone.

If there were no system better than contemporary welfare-regulatory state democracy, it would be quite proper to castigate people who complain about it: “You don’t have to like it, but this is the best possible system of social organization. Libertarianism would not bring about the conditions you seek; it would create conditions akin to those seen in Somalia. So if you desire civilized life, health, and happiness, you ought to prefer interventionism to laissez-faire.”

I do think left-libertarians can be somewhat naive, in that I do not think a libertarian society would bring about the consequences they claim to want. For instance, I think you’re entirely right that in a libertarian society, homeless people would not be allowed to lay around in the streets or parks of cities. Because they would be private property, and their owners would kick them out.

In general, though, I don’t think the central disagreement is about values. I think it’s about consequences. If socialism delivered all the good things that socialists say it will do, I would be for it. If laissez-faire delivered all the horrible things socialists say it will deliver, I would be against it. And I think the converse is true as well: I think virtually all socialists would find actual laissez-faire more to their liking than actual socialism.

Left-libertarianism may appear naive from an absolutist propertarian perspective, but it’s more coherent as liberty-maximization instead of property-maximization. In the nordic countries landowners’ rights to stop people from walking around in the forests are restricted, and this has probably increased total freedom even if it could not easily emerge from propertarianism (the first landowner to allow roaming might find everyone roaming on their lands and ruining them with erosion); similarly, imo, a culture of liberty should decide that nobody gets to build uncomfortable benches for the public just to send the homeless elsewhere, because if that shit is tolerated everyone gets uncomfortable benches and the number of homeless people doesn’t go down and everyone loses. Tight-assed conformists without alternatives are a problem, and mandating lawns everywhere is oppression.

(Also, N(involuntarily homeless) > 0 is already a failure of a society and a significant number of homeless people should not be the outcome.)

After all, property is “theft” the same way taxes are, and should therefore only be used where it’s actually consequentially justified instead of being treated as a morally absolute right. And I don’t pretend to have it all figured out, I’m just very intensely gesturing at the general direction of less horrible festering abominableness because “Somalia vs. Rapture” is not on the table; “a bit less bullshit vs. even more bullshit” is.

wirehead-wannabe:

veronicastraszh:

neurocybernetics:

kangeiko:

profuseponderings:

Which English do you speak?

What countries have most influenced the way you speak? Take this test designed by MIT researchers and find out.

Take this test, guys! It determines what dialect you speak (if your native language is English) and which country you are from (if English isn’t your first language!). 

It is an algorithm which maps out the differences in English grammar around the world. 

Hmmm. Well, it got my dialect correct (English (England)) but it also guessed my first language was English (Romanian and Hungarian were the other guesses). So clearly some work still to be done on that front.

Dialect: 1. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
2. Australian
3. New Zealandish 

Native language: 1. Hungarian
           2. German
           3. English
                           
               

I’m a boring American (Standard) English girl, so they got that. Full results:

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

       1. American (Standard)
       2. Canadian
       3. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

       1. English
       2. Norwegian
       3. Swedish

I wonder what I did to make them suspect Ebonics. And Norwegian/Swedish? – I have zero connection to N.EU.

Perhaps it always makes three guesses? I can see how you’d guess AAVE over (for example) UK English for me. I know far more black Americans that UK folks.

I’m guessing there were one or two sentences that are correct in Ebonics that you marked as correct, and everything past your first choice is pretty much equally unlikely. @cyborgbutterflies @multiheaded1793 @sinesalvatorem I wanna see you guys take this.

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
   
2. New Zealandish
   
3. Singaporean
   

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. Romanian
   
2. German
   
3. English
   

Didn’t exactly expect that, apart from german in the first language choice.

isaacsapphire:

socialjusticemunchkin:

rusalkii:

cassisscared:

ilzolende:

socialjusticemunchkin:

ilzolende:

nihilsupernum:

drug interaction checkers should include drug drugs (harm reduction!!!) and why and how they interact and stuff about chemistry

and drug interactions listed on pill bottles and stuff don’t even say severity

“don’t mix with grapefruit juice” will i have a headache or will i die this is an important distinction

As someone who went off a medication almost 2 weeks ago that is rumored to stay in my system for up to a month: I would love to know when I can eat a grapefruit and be a normal person entitled to do normal things again.

The peasants are too stupid and ignorant to understand. It’s for your own good. Trust in the experts. The experts know better than you. This information is above your clearance level, infrared. Informed consent is a myth. The System is your friend. Freedom is slavery.

Partially informed consent, with partial awareness of the gaps in one’s informedness, is the way of the world. Ask anyone who’s used a program with a license agreement.

(I have taken a 2-hour online training course in research ethics, and I get a fair amount of intuitions about consent from there, tbh. Not all of them, of course.)

I can see how the experts could handle this on their own, if they would just listen to each other. A system which accidentally leaves a diagnostic report about me in my folder in 5th grade is not a system that has earned the right to snatch it away when I foolishly report my concerns. (It did anyway, of course. I don’t even blame the person who took the file back. I still haven’t seen the thing, I still don’t know my blood type, and even the study I thought I agreed to participate in on the condition that I get another psych report only would send one to my parents, who chose to withold it from me. [1])

I trusted the person who told me she had a master’s degree in nutrition, and then found I was anemic only years later.

The experts may be wise, but they lack the time to collaborate and to compile their wisdom for each individual case. And I want a grapefruit as soon as I can safely have one, and my medical records as soon as I can sound out words and use a dictionary, damnit.

[1] Say what you will about religious leaders being deceptive liars, at least they tend to believe what they’re saying and not purposely hide things.

This really looks like a good trade off to me. Like, if you gave me my medical reports, I’d know not to over interpret them, sticks to just the things I definitely understand, realize that hard limits are hard limits, treat probabilistic things sensibly, etc.

If you did that with, say, everyone in my high school class, >50% of them would fuck something up. (Well, maybe. It’s also possible that most of them would hand them straight to me and/or Arion and ask us to interpret them :p ).
I think it’s a better world if none of us get them than all of us, and I see some fairly major hurdles to selecting the right people who can see them.

You can fuck things up just as easily without a medical report as with. At least if given the reports, their fuck-ups will be slightly more informed than otherwise.

The obvious solution would be for the information to be available somewhere where people who want it with informed consent can find all the info, and have simple lies to those who can’t handle the complexity. The wrong solution is to not let people access relevant things. I can’t even count the times I’ve had to correct my doctor or handhold them as little more than a rubberstamp.

I am under the impression that keeping that diagnostic information away from the patient is a huge chunk of how the current medical industry makes money, and they are quite eager to use governmental capture to prevent that changing

Yes. That needs to change. Fortunately it hasn’t been able to totally safeguard its interests against evil ~disruption~ from libre sources

jbeshir:

socialjusticemunchkin:

jbeshir:

socialjusticemunchkin:

jeysiec:

1. There are certain services and infrastructure required to have the sort of modern conditions that Westerners typically expect from their countries.

2. To not use those services/infrastructure you’d basically have to go live like the Amish, and that’s a best-case scenario.

3. If it wasn’t the government providing that services and infrastructure, it would just be private companies instead.

4. Those services and infrastructure cost labor and resources to perform/create/maintain.

5. Ergo any organization providing the services and infrastructure needs to be able to procure the necessary labor and resources.

6. If a private company provided those things instead of the government, it would almost certainly use money to procure the labor and resources and then demand payment for the resulting services and infrastructure, which would be identical to how the government procures using money and expects payment in the form of taxes.

6.5. In fact, it would probably cost you more money to get the services from the private company, since you’d be a captive audience, and a company would want to make a profit, and you would be less able to hold them accountable for bad service than you can government officials, since opting out would either be impossible or cause you great hardship. See for example: The US commercial internet providers and the outrageous prices and bad service they provide because they hold a monopoly over the proceedings, and how municipal internet is often better and cheaper.

7. If we instead provided the labor and resources via everyone making regular donations/volunteering in the required amounts, you’d essentially end up with a less-efficient tax system.

---

So when we consider all of the above, there is literally no way it makes logical and self-consistent sense to claim “taxes are theft” unless you think everyone both private worker or public worker is obligated to provide you with everything for free.

And then you run into logical problems anyway, because there’s no way in hell any organization can procure enough resources to provide you with free services without soliciting so many donations that you, like I said, effectively end up recreating the tax system less efficiently anyway.

(You’d also run into social problems, since there’s obviously no way in hell any business is going to accept the attitude that they’re obligated to give you free stuff.)

So the ancaps/libertarians/economic conservatives can stop projecting their own stupidity, insanity, and inability to understand basic economics onto everyone else, thanks.

If only the government stuck to providing those services, instead of shoving all kinds of “services” down my throat just because other people have decided I must have them.

Those vital services and infrastructure are a relatively small fraction of the total taxation. I wouldn’t object to them, what I object to is tax money being spent on kidnapping, ransom, and other kinds of banditry upon (mostly poor and black) people who are just trying to make ends meet in the totally legitimate businesses of sex work, drug dealing and braiding hair; tax money being used to “create jobs” for people in illegitimate businesses such as privatized prisons; tax money being spent on delivering barrels of pork to politically connected cronies; tax money being used to dictate my food in the form of agricultural subsidies; tax money being used to subsidize inefficient infrastructure in non-toll highways, fossil fuels and fucking alfalfa farming in fucking California; tax money being used to murder people whose only crime was being muslim in a region where some people are bad guys; tax money being used to prop up a bloated imperialist military that wastes ridiculous amounts of resources due to political gridlock; tax money being used to paternalize, degrade and humiliate poor people as a condition for being allowed to exist; tax money being used to prop up the privileges of the already privileged; tax money being used to keep brown people out and unable to make a honest living in a place where they want to make it, etc…

I would never pay a private company for about half of the things the government does, but thanks to the idea of democratic legitimacy combined with the inherent monopolies/oligopolies (at best) of states, I don’t have a choice.

I wouldn’t mind paying taxes to fund a sufficient basic income to somewhat consensualize the economy, provide basic (genuine) security for everyone, internalize externalities, handle natural monopolies, and do the important investments the private sector is bad at doing (basic science, basic healthcare research etc.) and [the things I’ve forgotten to mention but belong here]; especially if taxed from economically efficient sources like land, usage of natural resources (”privatize” the aquifers and the atmosphere, sell the water/pollution rights to the highest bidders and share the profits to everyone to solve so many problems simultaneously!) and the government’s services (there’s an argument to be made that since the police and military ultimately protect mostly property, the owners of said property should be the ones who pay for the system that protects them from people who would rather see the property in their own possession), etc.

Everything else is waste though, robbed at gunpoint (indirectly; I pay my taxes without guns being involved because I don’t want to get guns involved but the threat of violence is always upholding all state actions and that’s why we don’t do state actions except where it’s actually genuinely necessary and important) without consent. Those I am well within my moral rights to protest.

PS. Can we agree on a compromise that taxation is theft the same way property is?

---

(Also seriously, the war on drugs is basically such a perfect example of how utterly fucked-up the state is. It robs taxpayers so it can give money to people whose job it is to basically kidnap black men who do something some other people don’t like even if they hurt nobody in doing it, and deliver them to other people who are paid to hold black men in captivity, because the ~democracy~ has decided that such things are right and just and proper. Then when marijuana is legalized the state regulates it so that poor black people can’t make a legal and legitimate living off it because barriers to entry shut them outside the business.)

The part of this, and the part of left-libertarianism that kind of alarms me is that when you call for government service/activity reduction in general, taxation reduction in response to the illegitimatisation of taxation, etc, people move to satisfy that in the easiest possible way.

And the easiest possible way isn’t to get rid of any of those problems, because there’s pretty solid incentive systems keeping them in place. The easiest way to reduce governmental action/taxation is to reduce the *useful* services that are only there because the electorate want them to be. So, the dismantling of welfare and support systems.

And as near as I can tell left-libertarian political strategy right now is to just ignore that problem and keep hammering away at the useful services, so that when they’ve killed them all they can get at the bad bits they don’t like, while saying that in their heart of hearts what they really want is to affect the other stuff. It’s not really distinguishable from right-libertarian strategy, just pursued for different reasons.

This also often turns good services into bad ones in the process.

Narrowing services generally means adding a lot more bureaucracy to manage eligibility and calculate what is owed, and running more narrower services instead of one broad one. Welfare systems which do cash handouts in a broader rather than narrower way take more taxes. Welfare systems which use taper to avoid perverse incentives take more taxes. A basic income runs more yet through the tax system.

Campaigns for lower taxes and reduced services to “where really needed” take these off the table and replace them with a dozen or more broken ugly systems eligible for a handful of people each that require a lawyer to navigate, developed and implemented and operated by people who can’t get jobs in the private sector. The state of the American welfare system compared to European ones is the crowning achievement of the campaign for the illiegitimacy of tax and wouldn’t have been possible without the kind help of left-libertarians.

And cutting taxes also incentivises finding alternative revenue streams. The prison phones problem, civil forfeiture by random police acting as raiders on the road, those are specific to America not in spite of, but *because* of attitudes regarding taxation as illegitimate and preferring that local services find alternative ways to be self-funding. The sensible solution here is to just pay from general taxation and not permit self-funding; any fees levied go into the whole state’s pot. The left-libertarian strategy is to double-down on shrinking general taxation. It’d work, eventually, but you’d have to kill the rest of the state first, and thankfully people aren’t going to let you do that.

If left-libertarianism focused on actually trying to dismantle specifically the bad things, a focus which can’t be satisfied by dismantling welfare instead, that’d be awesome. If it was a project to create a vastly simpler system to accomplish the things regulation is supposed to be for, which I think would be possible from a gods-eye view at least, that’d be awesome too, although people wildly overestimate how easy it is and some of their criteria are not very good (e.g. verbose specific rules rather than brief broad rules are often preferable because they can provide companies with much less uncertainty as to whether their investments are okay or not, so you probably don’t want it to be *too* brief).

But in practice left-libertarianism seems to be basically an economic equivalent of the people grousing about the evils of foreigners who admit when asked that they think anyone who wants to work in the country should be allowed to; people whose action’s consequences are wildly different to what they claim to want, but who don’t think about that or act differently because they don’t have to live with those consequences. And I think it maintains the presence of a lot of harm in much the same way.

(I’m only talking about my own libertarianism, not claiming that others’ views would be the same)

The part of this, and the part of left-libertarianism that kind of alarms me is that when you call for government service/activity reduction in general, taxation reduction in response to the illegitimatisation of taxation, etc, people move to satisfy that in the easiest possible way.

And the easiest possible way isn’t to get rid of any of those problems, because there’s pretty solid incentive systems keeping them in place. The easiest way to reduce governmental action/taxation is to reduce the *useful* services that are only there because the electorate want them to be. So, the dismantling of welfare and support systems.

I think a big part of this is the way the right has a stranglehold on downsizing the state. Deregulatory capture happens because left-statists are too much in love with the state so the only ones willing to make it smaller are disproportionately on the right, and thus deregulation is done on the right’s terms.

There’s also this idea that there are two kinds of services: the bad ones, and the popular ones. A lot of what the electorate wants is terrible, and pork delivers votes reliably. One could take this fatalistic approach all the way, and conclude that what happens will happen anyway (in which case there would be no need to do left-statist advocacy for not downsizing), or try to find ways around it.

And as near as I can tell left-libertarian political strategy right now is to just ignore that problem and keep hammering away at the useful services, so that when they’ve killed them all they can get at the bad bits they don’t like, while saying that in their heart of hearts what they really want is to affect the other stuff. It’s not really distinguishable from right-libertarian strategy, just pursued for different reasons.

This also often turns good services into bad ones in the process. 

Narrowing services generally means adding a lot more bureaucracy to manage eligibility and calculate what is owed, and running more narrower services instead of one broad one. Welfare systems which do cash handouts in a broader rather than narrower way take more taxes. Welfare systems which use taper to avoid perverse incentives take more taxes. A basic income runs more yet through the tax system.

#notmylibertarianism

Narrowing services may make the state superficially smaller when measured in money, but it also makes it a lot more intrusive. A decently-sized basic income with a flat 40% marginal tax rate (or even better, no income tax at all, but simply taxing land, resources, consumption and pollution etc.) is superficially more expensive than a horrible bloated bureaucracy delivering a million different programs to people who pass the checks, but in reality it “governs” and distorts the economy far less (which is the *real* problem with taxes; if we could have a 90% tax rate which delivered exactly the things that “should” be delivered it would not be a problem at all, but because the state can’t allocate most things as well as the market, it’s better to just give people money/not take away too much of their money).

Campaigns for lower taxes and reduced services to “where really needed” take these off the table and replace them with a dozen or more broken ugly systems eligible for a handful of people each that require a lawyer to navigate, developed and implemented and operated by people who can’t get jobs in the private sector. The state of the American welfare system compared to European ones is the crowning achievement of the campaign for the illiegitimacy of tax and wouldn’t have been possible without the kind help of left-libertarians.

As an ex-recipient of european welfare, I can say that your view of this continent’s ability to be horrible and degrading to poor people is an underestimate. Left-libertarianism is basically unheard-of here, yet the system still sucks for poor people.

And cutting taxes also incentivises finding alternative revenue streams. The prison phones problem, civil forfeiture by random police acting as raiders on the road, those are specific to America not in spite of, but *because* of attitudes regarding taxation as illegitimate and preferring that local services find alternative ways to be self-funding. The sensible solution here is to just pay from general taxation and not permit self-funding; any fees levied go into the whole state’s pot. The left-libertarian strategy is to double-down on shrinking general taxation. It’d work, eventually, but you’d have to kill the rest of the state first, and thankfully people aren’t going to let you do that.

That’s not libertarianism. That’s banditry. Cops should not be authorized to rob and kidnap citizens. This is non-negotiable. Incentive systems that enable robbing and kidnapping citizens violate people’s autonomy and basic rights and this is economic conservatism combined with unchallenged state authority.

If I were running the prisons, I’d do it the nordic way because it’s so much better in every way. Short sentences, minimize the harm to everyone instead of looting the coffers of the public to lock other parts of the public to satisfy the rest of the public. The american “justice” system is exactly the kind of a travesty that unrestrained democracy produces; two wolves and a sheep (guess the color) voting on what to have for dinner.

Compare that with the cost-effective, freedom-preserving nordic system which gives no fucks about what the public thinks because screw democracy, we’re doing what works, and we don’t let the mob vote on judges and prosecutors and what the fuck, but simply install them based on competence and tell them to try to keep the prisons empty. One of these systems respects people’s freedom, another sacrifices their liberty to the whims of the vox populi; the fact that the superior system is also cheaper to the taxpayer is a nice bonus. There are other kinds of freedom than just economic freedom.

(And if I were to privatize prisons altogether, I think it’s rather obvious that it’s the prisoners who are the customers and who get to choose which prison they want to spend time in, if they need to be imprisoned at all. Assuming such thorough abolition of the state (which I don’t necessarily support) the natural system would be that people sign to a security provider, which then negotiates with others’ security providers and delivers justice to its own members. The Black Panthers would probably do a much better job protecting black people than the cops of Ferguson; and if I were a shopkeeper dealing with a cigarette theft I’d be a lot more comfortable handing the teenage miscreant to them, instead of bandits whose loyalties lie with white savages with no concern for the actual welfare of the people their actions affect. Fucking yay democracy!)

If left-libertarianism focused on actually trying to dismantle specifically the bad things, a focus which can’t be satisfied by dismantling welfare instead, that’d be awesome. If it was a project to create a vastly simpler system to accomplish the things regulation is supposed to be for, which I think would be possible from a gods-eye view at least, that’d be awesome too, although people wildly overestimate how easy it is and some of their criteria are not very good (e.g. verbose specific rules rather than brief broad rules are often preferable because they can provide companies with much less uncertainty as to whether their investments are okay or not, so you probably don’t want it to be *too* brief).

I don’t want to dismantle welfare, I want to radically simplify it so that instead of the unholy bloated festering mess we have now, we’d simply give money to people who don’t have enough money, defined with the amazingly simple method of giving everyone money and taking back some of their income and letting the market, aka. poor people themselves, decide what the poor really need.

And instead of establishing an unholy bloated festering mess of subsidies, ill-considered efficiency standards, terrible regulations, and cap-and-trade aka. delivering windfall profits to cronies, I want to prevent global warming with the amazingly simple method of putting a price on greenhouse emissions and letting the market, aka. people who actually know whether implementation X is a good idea or not, decide how to cut emissions.

And instead of regulating the number of taxis and pharmacies (yes, the number of pharmacies is centrally planned in Finland), or mandating that housing must screw over the poor to subsidize car-owning families with parking requirements and mean apartment size regulations (yes, in Finland there are rules that condominiums must build more parking spots and big apartments that the market would deliver on its own, effectively redistributing upwards by making rich people’s housing artificially cheaper at the expense of poor people’s smaller apartments and non-car-owningness; and then builders evade the regulations by building one huge useless apartment so the rest can be smaller and that’s why the top floor of every other building in Finland has a square footage georg that should not be counted), etc. I want the state to simply fucking not do such things, with the amazingly simple method of just fucking not doing it.

And instead of having the state regulate my gender, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of regulating relationships and voting on whether or not gay and poly marriage is okay, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of deciding what substances people are allowed to put into their bodies and in which situations and kidnapping those who don’t obey, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of having the state decide what terms I may sell my labor with, or to be more specific it’s not even the state but the employers’ union (yes, we do have an employers’ union) negotiating with the labor unions but this is corporatism and they are an accessory of the state, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of trying to “create jobs” and looting Peter to pay Paul to push paper instead of creating value, it could just fucking not do it.

Over half of what the state currently does can be solved with two amazingly simple heuristics:

1. Just fucking don’t do it

2. Give cash to everyone instead so they can buy it if they really want it

and the corollary

3. Always prefer the simpler and more general option with less loopholes and less risk of terrible side-effects to poor people: give money instead of services unless you’re really exceptionally certain that this one service is worth it; regulate instead of banning, or just don’t; tax instead of regulating, or just don’t; tax generarly and broadly and avoid specificity because people are smart and will find ridiculous ways around your bullshit; let the market sort itself out; just fucking trust the market don’t fuck with it; if you think the market is screwing over the poor don’t fuck with the market just give the poor more money so they can afford to vote with their feet/wallets; and never ever let anyone do anything that would make someone say “vote for X because they care about the interests of group Y”

I’d agree with (or like to see tried, anyway) the goals here, I think, and in particular your third heuristic, which seems to contain a more nuanced version of the other two if I understand correctly. I might disagree on whether particular services qualify as ‘worth it’ or not (although I understand this is more about whether there is some particular reason the market can’t do them than about how important they are to life), but that doesn’t need resolving.

But I think the method employed, basically delegitimising the state until politicians fix everything, is a bad one. I don’t think narrow, invasive systems come from anyone *wanting* them, I think they fall out of the incentives that a sizeable mass of people who view the state as illegitimate create.

Specifically, I think they come from the natural political midpoint between “people who view state involvement in anything as morally heinous” and “people who don’t want poor people to starve on the street” that garners the most votes being to pander to the first group by cutting all services which normalize state involvement in/redistribution to normal people’s lives, and to pander to the second group by promising to save the people who *really* need it through these narrow targeted things that people in the former group can’t get strong feelings about.

And I think the louder the first group gets the more you see that happen. The more illegitimate the government taxing and spending money to help people is in the eyes of the electorate, the more people regard taxation as theft, the more it’s going to be narrowly targeted at the cases where it’s harder and harder to disagree with, meaning more and more complicated and expensive and invasive and impossible to navigate eligibility testing and holes that people fall through and lack of proper support and similar.

Similar for civil forfeiture and prison phone systems; I don’t think anyone’s ideology demanded those. I think they just fell out of being able to say you were cutting taxes playing to the popular attitude that taxation was theft (plus the all-holy “localism” which is the cause of so much NIMBYism, incompetence, and efforts by local governments to shove their problems onto each other, including when those “problems” are people).

More generally, I think there is a failure mode in lots of political ideologies working towards goals which boil down to “build new system for supporting people, destroy old inferior one” where because building is hard and has no coalition and destroying is easy and there’s all kinds of people to join up with, they run an effective campaign for crippling the existing system while making zero progress on the replacement. And no one notices or cares, because there’s no direct incentive on them to.

And I think the only solution here is to be very strict on the replacement being built first or enacted at the same time or with transitionary arrangements, and making it a part of proper incrementalism that nothing should be supported that hurts people now on the basis that it’ll be part of a complete improved system as soon as everyone else comes around on the rest of the plan.

Edit: Also I more specifically agree with the Nordic prisons bit, I think most everywhere else has an abominable prison system that I hope future generations regard as monstrous, and don’t have any objection to the prisoner being allowed to choose their prison in principle; we might find that the market goes too far towards comfort, especially for those with friends with money on the outside, but we can risk that and adjust when we see signs if we need to.

What I’d like to see politically done is delegitimizing state intrusiveness (no spying, no police oppression, no means-testing benefits (okay that’s a bit utopian), not banning things etc.) while minimizing the harms, because I don’t really trust in solving this with parliamentary politics.

I don’t think statist democracy would ever deliver freedom, and current welfare states seem unsustainable in the long term and unfixable because of voters, and thus I see eschewing the state and constructing alternatives outside it as the only properly viable solution (even if one has to go to the bottom of the sea to do it), or at the very least an extremely important backup plan.

The “don’t break it until you’ve fixed it” attitude is precisely why I’m so big about UBI because it’s really important to do it asap, and implementing it properly would allow a lot of freedom elsewhere (goodbye means-testing, most labor regulations, incentive traps, many value-destroying jobs for bureaucrats etc.).

Also, it’s really entertaining that I’m exactly 100% in both of those groups, and supporting the exact opposite of the policies the groups separately have resulted in. And I don’t think there’s (usually) a big ideological conspiracy turning things into shit, it’s just democracy without proper restraints, with people believing anything is okay if the mob says so. That’s the thing I want to delegitimize, along with it being okay that poor people die on the streets. Everyone should have their basic material needs met unconditionally, the democratic mob can go fuck itself because it doesn’t have the right to impose its will on non-consenting people, and apart from the things that are necessary to implement these two conditions as much as reasonably feasible, everything else should be up to the voluntary and consensual interactions of people, with an extra dose of “fuck you” to democratic statism just out of spite because holy shit demstatists are terrifying.

rusalkii:

cassisscared:

ilzolende:

socialjusticemunchkin:

ilzolende:

nihilsupernum:

drug interaction checkers should include drug drugs (harm reduction!!!) and why and how they interact and stuff about chemistry

and drug interactions listed on pill bottles and stuff don’t even say severity

“don’t mix with grapefruit juice” will i have a headache or will i die this is an important distinction

As someone who went off a medication almost 2 weeks ago that is rumored to stay in my system for up to a month: I would love to know when I can eat a grapefruit and be a normal person entitled to do normal things again.

The peasants are too stupid and ignorant to understand. It’s for your own good. Trust in the experts. The experts know better than you. This information is above your clearance level, infrared. Informed consent is a myth. The System is your friend. Freedom is slavery.

Partially informed consent, with partial awareness of the gaps in one’s informedness, is the way of the world. Ask anyone who’s used a program with a license agreement.

(I have taken a 2-hour online training course in research ethics, and I get a fair amount of intuitions about consent from there, tbh. Not all of them, of course.)

I can see how the experts could handle this on their own, if they would just listen to each other. A system which accidentally leaves a diagnostic report about me in my folder in 5th grade is not a system that has earned the right to snatch it away when I foolishly report my concerns. (It did anyway, of course. I don’t even blame the person who took the file back. I still haven’t seen the thing, I still don’t know my blood type, and even the study I thought I agreed to participate in on the condition that I get another psych report only would send one to my parents, who chose to withold it from me. [1])

I trusted the person who told me she had a master’s degree in nutrition, and then found I was anemic only years later.

The experts may be wise, but they lack the time to collaborate and to compile their wisdom for each individual case. And I want a grapefruit as soon as I can safely have one, and my medical records as soon as I can sound out words and use a dictionary, damnit.

[1] Say what you will about religious leaders being deceptive liars, at least they tend to believe what they’re saying and not purposely hide things.

This really looks like a good trade off to me. Like, if you gave me my medical reports, I’d know not to over interpret them, sticks to just the things I definitely understand, realize that hard limits are hard limits, treat probabilistic things sensibly, etc.

If you did that with, say, everyone in my high school class, >50% of them would fuck something up. (Well, maybe. It’s also possible that most of them would hand them straight to me and/or Arion and ask us to interpret them :p ).
I think it’s a better world if none of us get them than all of us, and I see some fairly major hurdles to selecting the right people who can see them.

You can fuck things up just as easily without a medical report as with. At least if given the reports, their fuck-ups will be slightly more informed than otherwise.

The obvious solution would be for the information to be available somewhere where people who want it with informed consent can find all the info, and have simple lies to those who can’t handle the complexity. The wrong solution is to not let people access relevant things. I can’t even count the times I’ve had to correct my doctor or handhold them as little more than a rubberstamp.

argumate:

oblivionnecroninja:

ellisif:

class-struggle-anarchism:

Just in case anyone still hasn’t come across that Der Spiegel interview in which Slavoj Zizek basically outs himself as a “New Right” thinker, here are some quotes from it:

“Why do we Europeans feel that our unfortunate situation is a full-fledged crisis? I think what we are feeling is not a question of yes or no to capitalism, but that of the future of our Western democracy. Something dark is forming on the horizon and the first wind storms have already reached us.”

“I am a eurocentric leftist. It has become fashionable in leftist circles to criticize eurocentrism in the name of multiculturalism. But I am convinced that we need Europe more than ever. Just imagine a world without Europe.”

“There is no way back to communism. Stalinism was in a certain sense worse than fascism, especially considering that the communist ideal was for Enlightenment to ultimately result in the self-liberation of the people. But that’s also the tragedy of the dialectic of Enlightenment. Stalinism still remains a puzzle to me. Fascism never had Enlightenment ambitions, it exclusively pursued conservative modernization using criminal means. To some extent, Hitler wasn’t radical or violent enough.”

“We feel too guilty in Europe – our multicultural tolerance is the effluent of a bad conscience, of a guilt complex that could cause Europe to perish.”

“It becomes an explosive problem if two ethnic or religious groups live together in close vicinity who have irreconcilable ways of life and, as such, perceive criticism of their religion or way of life as being an attack on their very identity.”

“What we need is what the Germans call a Leitkultur, a higher leading culture that regulates the way in which the subcultures interact. Multiculturalism, with its mutual respect for the sensitivities of the others, no longer works when it gets to this “impossible-à-supporter” stage…That’s why I, as a Leftist, argue that we need to create our own leading culture.”

literally MURDER this piece of shit

Germans are NOT ALLOWED to talk about ideas like that.

For obvious reasons.

Zizek is Slovenian

Europeans are NOT ALLOWED to talk about ideas like that.

jbeshir:

socialjusticemunchkin:

jeysiec:

1. There are certain services and infrastructure required to have the sort of modern conditions that Westerners typically expect from their countries.

2. To not use those services/infrastructure you’d basically have to go live like the Amish, and that’s a best-case scenario.

3. If it wasn’t the government providing that services and infrastructure, it would just be private companies instead.

4. Those services and infrastructure cost labor and resources to perform/create/maintain.

5. Ergo any organization providing the services and infrastructure needs to be able to procure the necessary labor and resources.

6. If a private company provided those things instead of the government, it would almost certainly use money to procure the labor and resources and then demand payment for the resulting services and infrastructure, which would be identical to how the government procures using money and expects payment in the form of taxes.

6.5. In fact, it would probably cost you more money to get the services from the private company, since you’d be a captive audience, and a company would want to make a profit, and you would be less able to hold them accountable for bad service than you can government officials, since opting out would either be impossible or cause you great hardship. See for example: The US commercial internet providers and the outrageous prices and bad service they provide because they hold a monopoly over the proceedings, and how municipal internet is often better and cheaper.

7. If we instead provided the labor and resources via everyone making regular donations/volunteering in the required amounts, you’d essentially end up with a less-efficient tax system.

---

So when we consider all of the above, there is literally no way it makes logical and self-consistent sense to claim “taxes are theft” unless you think everyone both private worker or public worker is obligated to provide you with everything for free.

And then you run into logical problems anyway, because there’s no way in hell any organization can procure enough resources to provide you with free services without soliciting so many donations that you, like I said, effectively end up recreating the tax system less efficiently anyway.

(You’d also run into social problems, since there’s obviously no way in hell any business is going to accept the attitude that they’re obligated to give you free stuff.)

So the ancaps/libertarians/economic conservatives can stop projecting their own stupidity, insanity, and inability to understand basic economics onto everyone else, thanks.

If only the government stuck to providing those services, instead of shoving all kinds of “services” down my throat just because other people have decided I must have them.

Those vital services and infrastructure are a relatively small fraction of the total taxation. I wouldn’t object to them, what I object to is tax money being spent on kidnapping, ransom, and other kinds of banditry upon (mostly poor and black) people who are just trying to make ends meet in the totally legitimate businesses of sex work, drug dealing and braiding hair; tax money being used to “create jobs” for people in illegitimate businesses such as privatized prisons; tax money being spent on delivering barrels of pork to politically connected cronies; tax money being used to dictate my food in the form of agricultural subsidies; tax money being used to subsidize inefficient infrastructure in non-toll highways, fossil fuels and fucking alfalfa farming in fucking California; tax money being used to murder people whose only crime was being muslim in a region where some people are bad guys; tax money being used to prop up a bloated imperialist military that wastes ridiculous amounts of resources due to political gridlock; tax money being used to paternalize, degrade and humiliate poor people as a condition for being allowed to exist; tax money being used to prop up the privileges of the already privileged; tax money being used to keep brown people out and unable to make a honest living in a place where they want to make it, etc…

I would never pay a private company for about half of the things the government does, but thanks to the idea of democratic legitimacy combined with the inherent monopolies/oligopolies (at best) of states, I don’t have a choice.

I wouldn’t mind paying taxes to fund a sufficient basic income to somewhat consensualize the economy, provide basic (genuine) security for everyone, internalize externalities, handle natural monopolies, and do the important investments the private sector is bad at doing (basic science, basic healthcare research etc.) and [the things I’ve forgotten to mention but belong here]; especially if taxed from economically efficient sources like land, usage of natural resources (”privatize” the aquifers and the atmosphere, sell the water/pollution rights to the highest bidders and share the profits to everyone to solve so many problems simultaneously!) and the government’s services (there’s an argument to be made that since the police and military ultimately protect mostly property, the owners of said property should be the ones who pay for the system that protects them from people who would rather see the property in their own possession), etc.

Everything else is waste though, robbed at gunpoint (indirectly; I pay my taxes without guns being involved because I don’t want to get guns involved but the threat of violence is always upholding all state actions and that’s why we don’t do state actions except where it’s actually genuinely necessary and important) without consent. Those I am well within my moral rights to protest.

PS. Can we agree on a compromise that taxation is theft the same way property is?

---

(Also seriously, the war on drugs is basically such a perfect example of how utterly fucked-up the state is. It robs taxpayers so it can give money to people whose job it is to basically kidnap black men who do something some other people don’t like even if they hurt nobody in doing it, and deliver them to other people who are paid to hold black men in captivity, because the ~democracy~ has decided that such things are right and just and proper. Then when marijuana is legalized the state regulates it so that poor black people can’t make a legal and legitimate living off it because barriers to entry shut them outside the business.)

The part of this, and the part of left-libertarianism that kind of alarms me is that when you call for government service/activity reduction in general, taxation reduction in response to the illegitimatisation of taxation, etc, people move to satisfy that in the easiest possible way.

And the easiest possible way isn’t to get rid of any of those problems, because there’s pretty solid incentive systems keeping them in place. The easiest way to reduce governmental action/taxation is to reduce the *useful* services that are only there because the electorate want them to be. So, the dismantling of welfare and support systems.

And as near as I can tell left-libertarian political strategy right now is to just ignore that problem and keep hammering away at the useful services, so that when they’ve killed them all they can get at the bad bits they don’t like, while saying that in their heart of hearts what they really want is to affect the other stuff. It’s not really distinguishable from right-libertarian strategy, just pursued for different reasons.

This also often turns good services into bad ones in the process.

Narrowing services generally means adding a lot more bureaucracy to manage eligibility and calculate what is owed, and running more narrower services instead of one broad one. Welfare systems which do cash handouts in a broader rather than narrower way take more taxes. Welfare systems which use taper to avoid perverse incentives take more taxes. A basic income runs more yet through the tax system.

Campaigns for lower taxes and reduced services to “where really needed” take these off the table and replace them with a dozen or more broken ugly systems eligible for a handful of people each that require a lawyer to navigate, developed and implemented and operated by people who can’t get jobs in the private sector. The state of the American welfare system compared to European ones is the crowning achievement of the campaign for the illiegitimacy of tax and wouldn’t have been possible without the kind help of left-libertarians.

And cutting taxes also incentivises finding alternative revenue streams. The prison phones problem, civil forfeiture by random police acting as raiders on the road, those are specific to America not in spite of, but *because* of attitudes regarding taxation as illegitimate and preferring that local services find alternative ways to be self-funding. The sensible solution here is to just pay from general taxation and not permit self-funding; any fees levied go into the whole state’s pot. The left-libertarian strategy is to double-down on shrinking general taxation. It’d work, eventually, but you’d have to kill the rest of the state first, and thankfully people aren’t going to let you do that.

If left-libertarianism focused on actually trying to dismantle specifically the bad things, a focus which can’t be satisfied by dismantling welfare instead, that’d be awesome. If it was a project to create a vastly simpler system to accomplish the things regulation is supposed to be for, which I think would be possible from a gods-eye view at least, that’d be awesome too, although people wildly overestimate how easy it is and some of their criteria are not very good (e.g. verbose specific rules rather than brief broad rules are often preferable because they can provide companies with much less uncertainty as to whether their investments are okay or not, so you probably don’t want it to be *too* brief).

But in practice left-libertarianism seems to be basically an economic equivalent of the people grousing about the evils of foreigners who admit when asked that they think anyone who wants to work in the country should be allowed to; people whose action’s consequences are wildly different to what they claim to want, but who don’t think about that or act differently because they don’t have to live with those consequences. And I think it maintains the presence of a lot of harm in much the same way.

(I’m only talking about my own libertarianism, not claiming that others’ views would be the same)

The part of this, and the part of left-libertarianism that kind of alarms me is that when you call for government service/activity reduction in general, taxation reduction in response to the illegitimatisation of taxation, etc, people move to satisfy that in the easiest possible way.

And the easiest possible way isn’t to get rid of any of those problems, because there’s pretty solid incentive systems keeping them in place. The easiest way to reduce governmental action/taxation is to reduce the *useful* services that are only there because the electorate want them to be. So, the dismantling of welfare and support systems.

I think a big part of this is the way the right has a stranglehold on downsizing the state. Deregulatory capture happens because left-statists are too much in love with the state so the only ones willing to make it smaller are disproportionately on the right, and thus deregulation is done on the right’s terms.

There’s also this idea that there are two kinds of services: the bad ones, and the popular ones. A lot of what the electorate wants is terrible, and pork delivers votes reliably. One could take this fatalistic approach all the way, and conclude that what happens will happen anyway (in which case there would be no need to do left-statist advocacy for not downsizing), or try to find ways around it.

And as near as I can tell left-libertarian political strategy right now is to just ignore that problem and keep hammering away at the useful services, so that when they’ve killed them all they can get at the bad bits they don’t like, while saying that in their heart of hearts what they really want is to affect the other stuff. It’s not really distinguishable from right-libertarian strategy, just pursued for different reasons.

This also often turns good services into bad ones in the process. 

Narrowing services generally means adding a lot more bureaucracy to manage eligibility and calculate what is owed, and running more narrower services instead of one broad one. Welfare systems which do cash handouts in a broader rather than narrower way take more taxes. Welfare systems which use taper to avoid perverse incentives take more taxes. A basic income runs more yet through the tax system.

#notmylibertarianism

Narrowing services may make the state superficially smaller when measured in money, but it also makes it a lot more intrusive. A decently-sized basic income with a flat 40% marginal tax rate (or even better, no income tax at all, but simply taxing land, resources, consumption and pollution etc.) is superficially more expensive than a horrible bloated bureaucracy delivering a million different programs to people who pass the checks, but in reality it “governs” and distorts the economy far less (which is the *real* problem with taxes; if we could have a 90% tax rate which delivered exactly the things that “should” be delivered it would not be a problem at all, but because the state can’t allocate most things as well as the market, it’s better to just give people money/not take away too much of their money).

Campaigns for lower taxes and reduced services to “where really needed” take these off the table and replace them with a dozen or more broken ugly systems eligible for a handful of people each that require a lawyer to navigate, developed and implemented and operated by people who can’t get jobs in the private sector. The state of the American welfare system compared to European ones is the crowning achievement of the campaign for the illiegitimacy of tax and wouldn’t have been possible without the kind help of left-libertarians.

As an ex-recipient of european welfare, I can say that your view of this continent’s ability to be horrible and degrading to poor people is an underestimate. Left-libertarianism is basically unheard-of here, yet the system still sucks for poor people.

And cutting taxes also incentivises finding alternative revenue streams. The prison phones problem, civil forfeiture by random police acting as raiders on the road, those are specific to America not in spite of, but *because* of attitudes regarding taxation as illegitimate and preferring that local services find alternative ways to be self-funding. The sensible solution here is to just pay from general taxation and not permit self-funding; any fees levied go into the whole state’s pot. The left-libertarian strategy is to double-down on shrinking general taxation. It’d work, eventually, but you’d have to kill the rest of the state first, and thankfully people aren’t going to let you do that.

That’s not libertarianism. That’s banditry. Cops should not be authorized to rob and kidnap citizens. This is non-negotiable. Incentive systems that enable robbing and kidnapping citizens violate people’s autonomy and basic rights and this is economic conservatism combined with unchallenged state authority.

If I were running the prisons, I’d do it the nordic way because it’s so much better in every way. Short sentences, minimize the harm to everyone instead of looting the coffers of the public to lock other parts of the public to satisfy the rest of the public. The american “justice” system is exactly the kind of a travesty that unrestrained democracy produces; two wolves and a sheep (guess the color) voting on what to have for dinner.

Compare that with the cost-effective, freedom-preserving nordic system which gives no fucks about what the public thinks because screw democracy, we’re doing what works, and we don’t let the mob vote on judges and prosecutors and what the fuck, but simply install them based on competence and tell them to try to keep the prisons empty. One of these systems respects people’s freedom, another sacrifices their liberty to the whims of the vox populi; the fact that the superior system is also cheaper to the taxpayer is a nice bonus. There are other kinds of freedom than just economic freedom.

(And if I were to privatize prisons altogether, I think it’s rather obvious that it’s the prisoners who are the customers and who get to choose which prison they want to spend time in, if they need to be imprisoned at all. Assuming such thorough abolition of the state (which I don’t necessarily support) the natural system would be that people sign to a security provider, which then negotiates with others’ security providers and delivers justice to its own members. The Black Panthers would probably do a much better job protecting black people than the cops of Ferguson; and if I were a shopkeeper dealing with a cigarette theft I’d be a lot more comfortable handing the teenage miscreant to them, instead of bandits whose loyalties lie with white savages with no concern for the actual welfare of the people their actions affect. Fucking yay democracy!)

If left-libertarianism focused on actually trying to dismantle specifically the bad things, a focus which can’t be satisfied by dismantling welfare instead, that’d be awesome. If it was a project to create a vastly simpler system to accomplish the things regulation is supposed to be for, which I think would be possible from a gods-eye view at least, that’d be awesome too, although people wildly overestimate how easy it is and some of their criteria are not very good (e.g. verbose specific rules rather than brief broad rules are often preferable because they can provide companies with much less uncertainty as to whether their investments are okay or not, so you probably don’t want it to be *too* brief).

I don’t want to dismantle welfare, I want to radically simplify it so that instead of the unholy bloated festering mess we have now, we’d simply give money to people who don’t have enough money, defined with the amazingly simple method of giving everyone money and taking back some of their income and letting the market, aka. poor people themselves, decide what the poor really need.

And instead of establishing an unholy bloated festering mess of subsidies, ill-considered efficiency standards, terrible regulations, and cap-and-trade aka. delivering windfall profits to cronies, I want to prevent global warming with the amazingly simple method of putting a price on greenhouse emissions and letting the market, aka. people who actually know whether implementation X is a good idea or not, decide how to cut emissions.

And instead of regulating the number of taxis and pharmacies (yes, the number of pharmacies is centrally planned in Finland), or mandating that housing must screw over the poor to subsidize car-owning families with parking requirements and mean apartment size regulations (yes, in Finland there are rules that condominiums must build more parking spots and big apartments that the market would deliver on its own, effectively redistributing upwards by making rich people’s housing artificially cheaper at the expense of poor people’s smaller apartments and non-car-owningness; and then builders evade the regulations by building one huge useless apartment so the rest can be smaller and that’s why the top floor of every other building in Finland has a square footage georg that should not be counted), etc. I want the state to simply fucking not do such things, with the amazingly simple method of just fucking not doing it.

And instead of having the state regulate my gender, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of regulating relationships and voting on whether or not gay and poly marriage is okay, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of deciding what substances people are allowed to put into their bodies and in which situations and kidnapping those who don’t obey, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of having the state decide what terms I may sell my labor with, or to be more specific it’s not even the state but the employers’ union (yes, we do have an employers’ union) negotiating with the labor unions but this is corporatism and they are an accessory of the state, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of trying to “create jobs” and looting Peter to pay Paul to push paper instead of creating value, it could just fucking not do it.

Over half of what the state currently does can be solved with two amazingly simple heuristics:

1. Just fucking don’t do it

2. Give cash to everyone instead so they can buy it if they really want it

and the corollary

3. Always prefer the simpler and more general option with less loopholes and less risk of terrible side-effects to poor people: give money instead of services unless you’re really exceptionally certain that this one service is worth it; regulate instead of banning, or just don’t; tax instead of regulating, or just don’t; tax generarly and broadly and avoid specificity because people are smart and will find ridiculous ways around your bullshit; let the market sort itself out; just fucking trust the market don’t fuck with it; if you think the market is screwing over the poor don’t fuck with the market just give the poor more money so they can afford to vote with their feet/wallets; and never ever let anyone do anything that would make someone say “vote for X because they care about the interests of group Y”

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton:

The obvious conclusion that “many disabled people are rejected for benefits and end up dying without any basic income for food, shelter, and medicine”

Is not “it’s because of fakers. Fakers gaming the system are to blame”

It’s:

The people who are in charge of determining who’s disabled enough to need benefits are very, very bad at figuring out who’s disabled and who isn’t.

And from repeated reports from people who have gone through the process, and people who used to work in these capacities, for the most part, they don’t even bother to try to figure out who’s disabled or not. They fulfill a minimum quota and then reject everyone else indiscriminately. They use superficial details about the applicant’s appearance or speech. They use incredibly stupid and unscientific tests like making you recite “car, balloon, flag,” after a five minute conversation to determine if you have “real” memory issues, instead of devising tests that demonstrate how your memory issues would affect you in a work setting.

Blaming fakers isn’t doing anything for me. Stricter and undiscerning measures to keep fakers out is hurting disabled people, not fakers themselves. Punishing fakers is not making my life better. People who are actually trained to understand disability would make my life better.

Yes, having been on the receiving end this is 100% exactly precisely how it works. And this is why there is no alternative to UBI; because nobody the fuck is able to tell the “deserving” from the “undeserving” and UBI is the only thing that doesn’t either fuck up the incentives horribly for everyone, or screw over those who don’t fit the stereotypes of “deservingness”.

theunmortalist:

eccentric-opinion:

theunmortalist:

eccentric-opinion:

argumate:

skulkingscavenger said: I personally like to draw a distinction between pointing out that [institution X] is theoretically morally impure according to some abstract epistomology and believing [institution X] is harming your practical interests to an extent that would justify spending the resources necessary to abolish [institution X]

Oh sure. But I’ve seen a few people say that it’s fine to benefit from taxation while still opposing it on principle, and I think that’s weak. Typically the same people will point out that welfare creates a constituency that benefits from it and will agitate against it being repealed. Yet they don’t apply that logic to their own use of government services!

If George Mason University takes government funds, then it will hire more researchers and administrators with that money (presumably, hopefully). Then reducing government redistribution will require getting rid of people and scaling back their research programs, something they will bitterly oppose.

The only principled course of action in this case would be for them to subsist entirely on free market fees and donations, which they claim would lead to better outcomes for society as a whole anyway.

Unless they think Bryan Caplan is full of shit, in which case why are they putting him in front of students…

The principles they endorse imply the elimination of many government programs (and the ancaps among them want to eliminate all of them), something that would eventually lead to at least cuts to GMU, and presumably they’re smart enough to understand that, so that implies that they wouldn’t oppose cuts when they come.

As for the more general principle of benefiting from taxation while opposing it in principle, the question is what the baseline is. I benefit from taxation in the sense that I’m better off if I use some government services than if I don’t, but I’d be even better off if there were no taxes and no government services altogether. So as long as taxes exist, I’m going to use some of what they go to, but there’s no contradiction in doing that while calling for their abolition.

Wait, wait, wait. If people benefit from some taxation, then that taxation in particular is resulting in something good for them. Why oppose it? Because it’s TAXES? Do people seriously just castle every chess game and hope that strategy does something regardless of the consequences?

What’s the higher principle at work, here? What is worth giving up on the benefit to oneself and others, even in theory?

They benefit relative to not using the service but still paying the taxes, but not relative to neither the tax nor the government-provided service existing at all. So the preference ranking is: no tax and no service > tax and I use the service > tax and I don’t use the service.

Ah! Makes a ton of sense. However, it is really lousy for showing one’s displeasure with an arrangement. Proving one can manage without government assistance and management alters the way the debate works, I’m sure. “Taxes and I don’t use the service” option avoids accusations of hypocrisy, as well, since no one’s position is improved on the government penny while the benefit is phased out.

My brain has this ethical æsthetic. Taking government money feels disgusting, filthy and impure, the same way I’d expect stealing things from an independent food cart vendor might, even though I’d only be taking what the system should give me anyway (I want the state to basically tax people for a reasonable UBI and not much else; if I use corporate welfare to get less money than the UBI I’d want to implement there logically should be no problem, but it’s still yucky).

Then there’s the fact that I’m poor (YGM) and thus don’t really have that much of a choice; I’d love to survive without getting in bed with the state but it’s not really a realistic option because the state also makes surviving artificially expensive by eg. limiting the housing supply and banning contracts with which I could borrow money from future-me with less risk of getting in inescapable debt if future-me doesn’t end up as wealthy as I’m expecting. And it’s also caused me a lot of psychological harm from being terminally dependent on a thoroughly abusive system for years, and in any just world it would owe me big reparations for that.

But I’m totally planning to make a big deal of calculating all the services I’ve received from the state and spitefully paying them back to the penny once I can afford it, just for the sake of a grand gesture, and then I’m going to whine massively about how they are still going to try to impose bullshit and mob rule on me.

ilzolende:

nihilsupernum:

drug interaction checkers should include drug drugs (harm reduction!!!) and why and how they interact and stuff about chemistry

and drug interactions listed on pill bottles and stuff don’t even say severity

“don’t mix with grapefruit juice” will i have a headache or will i die this is an important distinction

As someone who went off a medication almost 2 weeks ago that is rumored to stay in my system for up to a month: I would love to know when I can eat a grapefruit and be a normal person entitled to do normal things again.

The peasants are too stupid and ignorant to understand. It’s for your own good. Trust in the experts. The experts know better than you. This information is above your clearance level, infrared. Informed consent is a myth. The System is your friend. Freedom is slavery.

metagorgon:

equestrianrepublican:

terminallydepraved:

charlesoberonn:

nexya:

I love how humans have literally not changed throughout history like the graffiti from Pompeii has people from hundreds of years ago writing stuff like “Marcus is gay” “I fucked a girl here” “Julius your mum wishes she was with me” and leonardo da vinci’s assistants drew dicks in their notebooks just for the banter and mozart created a piece called “kiss my ass” so when people wish for ‘today’s generation’ to be like ‘how people used to’ then we’re already there buddy we’ve always been

The Hagia Sophia has inscriptions that were considered sacred for centuries until they were deciphered in the 70s to be Nordic runes saying “Halfdan wrote this”

my old english prof told us that theres a cave in Scandinavia where a viking gratified some runes like 14 feet up on the wall and when they finally reached it all it translated into was “this is very high”

Give me some more ancient shitposts.

the degeneracy was with us from the very beginning

metagorgon:

slatestarscratchpad:

sinesalvatorem:

It was pretty cool. Many interesting humans. It was also the first time I became directly acquainted with the community’s gender-ratio issue, since I had mostly been in groups that were more gender-balanced until now.

I was not at all surprised by the ethnic balance, though. I made sure to introduce myself as “Alison sinesalvatorem. Y’know, the black girl on Tumblr. Yes: the.”

I met @slatestarscratchpad, who is cool. There was a dramatic reading of the upcoming Unsong interlude (that all you non-Bay plebs have to wait til Wednesday to hear), in which I voiced a character.

Besides Scott, the only new Tumblr-person I met irl was @eccentric-opinion. However, when greeting him, I used a slightly different introduction. I reached out to shake his hand and said “Hi, I’m a Marxist!”

We are solving the gender ratio issue one transition at a time.

so true

We should construct a platform for auctioning transitions; people who want to make the gender ratio more equal could donate money and people who are the most willing to transition could be paid to do it. It could also be used to coordinate things like doctor access, purchasing drugs, social support against hostile outsiders etc. to lower the trans-action costs.

jeysiec:

1. There are certain services and infrastructure required to have the sort of modern conditions that Westerners typically expect from their countries.

2. To not use those services/infrastructure you’d basically have to go live like the Amish, and that’s a best-case scenario.

3. If it wasn’t the government providing that services and infrastructure, it would just be private companies instead.

4. Those services and infrastructure cost labor and resources to perform/create/maintain.

5. Ergo any organization providing the services and infrastructure needs to be able to procure the necessary labor and resources.

6. If a private company provided those things instead of the government, it would almost certainly use money to procure the labor and resources and then demand payment for the resulting services and infrastructure, which would be identical to how the government procures using money and expects payment in the form of taxes.

6.5. In fact, it would probably cost you more money to get the services from the private company, since you’d be a captive audience, and a company would want to make a profit, and you would be less able to hold them accountable for bad service than you can government officials, since opting out would either be impossible or cause you great hardship. See for example: The US commercial internet providers and the outrageous prices and bad service they provide because they hold a monopoly over the proceedings, and how municipal internet is often better and cheaper.

7. If we instead provided the labor and resources via everyone making regular donations/volunteering in the required amounts, you’d essentially end up with a less-efficient tax system.

---

So when we consider all of the above, there is literally no way it makes logical and self-consistent sense to claim “taxes are theft” unless you think everyone both private worker or public worker is obligated to provide you with everything for free.

And then you run into logical problems anyway, because there’s no way in hell any organization can procure enough resources to provide you with free services without soliciting so many donations that you, like I said, effectively end up recreating the tax system less efficiently anyway.

(You’d also run into social problems, since there’s obviously no way in hell any business is going to accept the attitude that they’re obligated to give you free stuff.)

So the ancaps/libertarians/economic conservatives can stop projecting their own stupidity, insanity, and inability to understand basic economics onto everyone else, thanks.

If only the government stuck to providing those services, instead of shoving all kinds of “services” down my throat just because other people have decided I must have them.

Those vital services and infrastructure are a relatively small fraction of the total taxation. I wouldn’t object to them, what I object to is tax money being spent on kidnapping, ransom, and other kinds of banditry upon (mostly poor and black) people who are just trying to make ends meet in the totally legitimate businesses of sex work, drug dealing and braiding hair; tax money being used to “create jobs” for people in illegitimate businesses such as privatized prisons; tax money being spent on delivering barrels of pork to politically connected cronies; tax money being used to dictate my food in the form of agricultural subsidies; tax money being used to subsidize inefficient infrastructure in non-toll highways, fossil fuels and fucking alfalfa farming in fucking California; tax money being used to murder people whose only crime was being muslim in a region where some people are bad guys; tax money being used to prop up a bloated imperialist military that wastes ridiculous amounts of resources due to political gridlock; tax money being used to paternalize, degrade and humiliate poor people as a condition for being allowed to exist; tax money being used to prop up the privileges of the already privileged; tax money being used to keep brown people out and unable to make a honest living in a place where they want to make it, etc…

I would never pay a private company for about half of the things the government does, but thanks to the idea of democratic legitimacy combined with the inherent monopolies/oligopolies (at best) of states, I don’t have a choice.

I wouldn’t mind paying taxes to fund a sufficient basic income to somewhat consensualize the economy, provide basic (genuine) security for everyone, internalize externalities, handle natural monopolies, and do the important investments the private sector is bad at doing (basic science, basic healthcare research etc.) and [the things I’ve forgotten to mention but belong here]; especially if taxed from economically efficient sources like land, usage of natural resources (”privatize” the aquifers and the atmosphere, sell the water/pollution rights to the highest bidders and share the profits to everyone to solve so many problems simultaneously!) and the government’s services (there’s an argument to be made that since the police and military ultimately protect mostly property, the owners of said property should be the ones who pay for the system that protects them from people who would rather see the property in their own possession), etc.

Everything else is waste though, robbed at gunpoint (indirectly; I pay my taxes without guns being involved because I don’t want to get guns involved but the threat of violence is always upholding all state actions and that’s why we don’t do state actions except where it’s actually genuinely necessary and important) without consent. Those I am well within my moral rights to protest.

PS. Can we agree on a compromise that taxation is theft the same way property is?

(Also seriously, the war on drugs is basically such a perfect example of how utterly fucked-up the state is. It robs taxpayers so it can give money to people whose job it is to basically kidnap black men who do something some other people don’t like even if they hurt nobody in doing it, and deliver them to other people who are paid to hold black men in captivity, because the ~democracy~ has decided that such things are right and just and proper. Then when marijuana is legalized the state regulates it so that poor black people can’t make a legal and legitimate living off it because barriers to entry shut them outside the business.)

thetransintransgenic:

transgamerthoughts:

Coming the same day as another piece that derides the ways in which social media endangers the critical ecosystem, the nature of this piece as somewhat ironic does not escape me. Indeed, this is the definition of reactionary but I hope it will be understood as a call for mobilization, preemptively done or not.

Let us look at the situation. The short version is that the ESA does not seem predisposed to provide the EFF an exemption from the DMCA’s Section 1201. If that sounds like a lot of jargon, it is. So let’s talk about some of it. First off, the DMCA. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a United States copyright law that exists mostly to criminalize circumvention of DRM and to strengthen the protection of copyrighted materials in digital spaces. Most casual individuals may be aware of this act because of DMCA takedown notices that often are filed in spaces like YouTube, where copyrighted material is disseminated digitally.

That’s not quite what’s going on here. The Entertainment Software Association is a group representing video game software publishers and companies. You may see why they’d feel they have a vested interest in lobbying against a copyright exemption. Not to be reductive but as an association representing the interest of primarily corporate entities, their interest rest in having said entities maintain sole rights to how their data is handled. But there’s a problem.

Older games are dying. In some cases, this is rather literal. Try pulling out Pokemon Gold or Silver and see if the time/date function is working. It’s been running ever since you got that game and by now? Well, the battery that keeps that function going is pretty much dead. Use that image in your head as we move on because that’s just a function that isn’t working. Some games, either through the gradual disappearance of the tools needed to play them or the servers necessary to maintain them either cannot be played or can rarely be played. Makes sense. You don’t have the hardware or the data structures in place, you can’t play a thing. So some games are dying out as the means to play them are falling into disrepair.

But that’s not all. There’s also data degradation. Solid state devices like EPROMS or flash drives keep data stored via electricity but those things aren’t perfectly insulated so the charge dissipates over time. On the same page, floppy discs or other storage methods (including hard disk drives) that use magnetism can lose some of their storage capacity for many reasons, often environmental ones. Humidity, for instance. 

Blah, blah, the point is that not even data storage devices are assured things for preserving pieces. I’m not much of a hacker. For older games, I can’t speak much to thing. I don’t know the degree to which, say, an NES ROM is subject to bit rot but I know EPROMS are more prone to it. Regardless, the point being made is that old data and therefore old games are at risk. If you’ve ever tried to boot up an old game and it’s looks all glitchy, that’s bit rot and you’ve got a bum cart.

So what’s the big deal? The big deal, as you might suspect, is much like the issue with film preservation. Old work that is important to the history of the medium is at risk for multiple reasons and while film might have something like the NFPF, games do not. So when the EFF asks for copyright exception, it’s basically so they can function as an ad hoc NFPF for games. But the ESA doesn’t want that exemption. In fact, it doesn’t even want museums to be making the tweaks needed to preserve games. They say it undermines video games as a whole, encouraging hacking and other illegalities.

As far as I know, there’s no say so one way or the other on the EFF’s request so I don’t want to panic but with the ESA functioning as a lobby to block the request, there’s problems. So what’s the solution?

Basically, a giant middle finger. No. Seriously. 

The internet provides various ways for people to maintain and keep hold of the data of games long since abandoned by producers. The acquisition and distribution of this data is imperative to keeping the history of the medium intact. One of the keys is emulation. Because the means to play games is not always available, emulation is a crucial workaround. Seen as the providence of pirates and hackers, it provides a very real solution to our problem. One which we should embrace and encourage when it comes to old games. It is an imperfect solution to a larger issue but one of the few appreciable, actionable things that can be done.

ROMs, ISO, even things as esoteric and specific as .GDIs need to be acquired, maintained, and passed around. More than that, the tools to play them need to be shared as well. What needs to occur is nothing more than the creation of a functional data underground for games. Curation achieved through the mass cooperation of enthusiasts in the digital age. Some such structures already exist but they are questionable at best. The solution needs to be more intricate. A dotted web of connections where we might share data the same way people passed around, copied, and shared concert recordings. Straight out digital bootlegging may very well be a necessity if is means undermining power structures that threaten the preservation of our art’s history.

Now, this is the extreme case but I make no bones about it. Should it need to be done, we will need to do it. And we can lay a foundation now simply by keeping hold of the data we do have and preserving the hardware/software we do have with care. That is the first step towards a functional, underground preservation system. 

 I have no conclusion here. Only a postulated scenario and what I believe we should do. If anything else, all the aforementioned data cannot be stored in one location, it needs to be widely disseminated. Preservation may very well need to be a sort of movement, comprised of various curators and specialists. And, you know, even if a copyright exemption is somehow granted I think this is a necessary development regardless. 

Accumulate, preserve, disseminate. 

I support this and also don’t know what to do, but these folks might be a good place to start looking/building off of/coordinating around:

http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

(Jason Scott – one of their people – was/is the main push behind the Internet Archive bringing up all the old DOS and other old systems games in a js-based emulator.)

unknought:

ozymandias271:

Really good, sad SF short story about a trans girl.

On the third read-through I managed to only get a bit misty-eyed at the end.

Fiction doesn’t do this to me, what the hell.

A bit misty-eyed and screaming inside…

Keep reading

h3lldalg0:

theunitofcaring:

i’m just so happy like - the GiveDirectly people have a really impressive track record in terms of turning money into results, being super transparent, publishing literally all of the data they collect on their website for people to look at….they even do stuff like randomly sample the population they serve for the stories they put up on their website, instead of trawling for the most inspirational ones

they preregister their studies

my sacred values are autonomy and empiricism and GiveDirectly is so deeply committed to both of them

if universal basic income works, this is how we’ll know. if it doesn’t, this is how we’ll figure out why. 

This makes me incredibly happy.  :D

In which promethea fanbies GiveDirectly even harder