deusvulture:

Beyond the dreams of Daedalus, beneath a darkling sky
The god of Carthage weeps to think that man was made to die
For clay can pump the irons of a torment yet unnamed
But fate cannot enslave the heart that dust and ash have claimed

So, save the soul of Sysiphus, as Sartre dared not to wish
And let the mettle of mankind be manifest in this
Unleash the deathless power of the children of the stars—
But do not think the only god that wills this thing is ours

ilzolende:

theungrumpablegrinch:

drethelin:

academicianzex:

It seems kinda odd to me that I haven’t heard anything about world federalism or unification from rationalists.  Given the concern about solving coordination problems and preventing existential risk it seems like a perfect fit.  The thing that makes me most pessimistic about solving X-risk problems is our history of dealing with near X-risk; we basically blundered through the cold war and survived out of luck, and climate change efforts are irrevocably hampered by international coordination efforts.  Going forward, the lack of an international body with regulatory powers makes AI X-risk much more scary to me.  It’s going to be a difficult enough problem to solve without China or the US creating an AI without taking the proper safety precautions because they’re in a race with each other, or with some seasteading genius cracking the code.

I guess it’s just not popular because the solution seems insoluble?  I certainly used to think about it a lot in my more idealistic younger days.  AI X-risk you can create MIRI, and if you’re good enough plausibly you make a difference.  You can even lobby national governments for space settlement, or whatever.  But world federalism is all or nothing, and much more likely to be nothing because you’re weird anyway.  Or maybe it’s just that I’m way out on the far end of rationalists into politics.  Still, I think it’s odd that I’ve never even heard the concept here in rationalist-land.

“World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.”

Problem is intractable, likely to corrupt those who work on it, does not assure a good outcome, requires incredible resource investment if a tractable approach is found.

And the optics are horrible.

I think some of the overly ambitious and mostly joking rationalist teenagers are working on that.

@sinesalvatorem @sdhs-rationalist?

[epistemic status: mostly a feverish and visceral reaction to scary! bad! no! go away!, but there’s some substance as well]

World federalism is such an ugly idea. Its proponents strike me as exactly the kind of naive utopians deathspiraling around democracy I want to stay as far away from as possible, and its actual realization would be way more likely to be just a scaled-up version of the EU and the US federal government, possibly doing some useful coordination stuff while simultaneously enabling absolutely horrible conformity pressures with its political power, subject to democratic distortion of incentives.

I don’t think a world federation would be in any way able to limit itself to x-risks (and in fact x-risks would probably be on the agenda only way after all the bullshit), and instead would act as some kind of a mostly unfriendly singleton. Just looking at the things we have now makes me scream in horror internally at the thought of having more of the same, except there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. We have drug laws, we have corporate welfare and agricultural subsidies, we have regulatory capture, we have morally backwards and intellectually bankrupt groups looting and bossing around people who could do way better than that if they were allowed to, and worst of all there’s no simple answer to all of that.

It’s obvious that the Bay Area is horribly dragged down by being subject to a government Alabama has any influence in and the excesses of each (one tending positive, another negative) are dramatically tempered by the influence of the other. The scary part is that it’s not obvious that having them go their separate ways would be a net positive because a lot of innocent people live in Alabama and having the federal government limit the abyssal depths their polity could otherwise plunge into might actually be worth the way it restricts the heights other places could reach. Everywhere I look it’s the same story; the enlightened areas altruistically trying to drag the backwards ones kicking and screaming into at least yesterday if not the proper present, even if their own situation suffers. The Obviously Correct way to do things would be to let the Bay Area influence Alabama, but not vice versa, and letting Iceland boss around Poland without the latter having a say in the former’s affairs but there’s just no way to ever make that happen.

In the absence of magical one-way unfairness of exactly the right kind all the remaining options are horrible; naive pro-secessionism sounds alluring until one remembers that the US literally fought a war within itself to stop one part of it from doing nasty and nonconsensual things to some of its population and is still wrangling with versions of those exact same issues to this day (and other very similar ones), but the only viable solution allows that one part to try to do nasty and nonconsensual things to the other parts’ population as well, and the world is just not ready (if it ever will be) for the level of individual liberation that would allow such horrors to be eradicated with a consistent meta-level rule without opening the door to different horrors.

And horrors there would be. I don’t believe for a second that actually existing world federalism could end up as the one type I just might find bearable (a global minarchy that’s basically x-risk management along with the UN’s most fundamental human rights treaties enforced with actual muscle behind them, and stopping people who try to start wars, and erring on the side of caution on these because even the most fundamental human rights treaties are prone to having glaring flaws, and then using that as an excuse to erode nation-state sovereignty enabling individual liberation) but instead there’s talk of all sorts of scary things. There’s world democracy, democracy for this, democracy for that, democracy for everything, economic democracy etc. which is basically the political equivalent of seeing a big and really impressive spaceship having some really important part of it held together with duct tape because nobody found anything better for the job, and thinking “you know what would make this spaceship even better? making it totally out of duct tape!”.

Democracy is to politics what duct tape is to engineering; something that’s occasionally really useful for patching things over with but never ever a terminal value and anyone who tells you otherwise should never be responsible for designing or maintaining anything important. Unfortunately, these world federalists seem to be exactly that kind of people. I suspect it’s some kind of a psychological thing. A certain kind of person who’s fundamentally agreeable to the majority might easily fall prey to the idea that the things that are wrong in the world are all the result of a minority imposing its will on the majority, but I’m minoritarian enough to recognize that the majority is actually really fucking scary and hostile and would destroy me the instant it had the opportunity to do so and is in fact constantly trying to make it happen even right now, and giving it any more power to do so is the exact last thing I want.

In fact, I’m pretty sure something like that is behind my desire to get really rich not-just-for-EA-purposes; in the unfair world we have now I could at least buy myself some degree of freedom, impunity and existential security when I’m definitely not guaranteed such things anywhere near to the same degree majority-agreeable people are, and anything that tries to take that opportunity away or even diminish it a little bit must be opposed at all costs unless it seriously gives me those things some other way. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if a lot of strongly libertarian people were fundamentally weird and at least partially driven by a fear of the mob, and thus anyone who seriously wants to address economic inequality should address that thing as well, instead of just spouting the standard socialdemocratic jantelaw rhetoric that comes off as “we’re coming for not just your money but your lives and fundamental aspects of your identities as well”.

In the absence of such credible guarantees, a world federation would probably start accumulating unnecessary powers in exact the same ways national governments have done, and do all kinds of evil stuff like banning GMOs altogether, regulating sex work, crabbucketing economies, creating more market distortions for crony capitalists to capture and enforcing all kinds of oppressive shared sensibilities of dominant groups. It’s bad enough when the Swedish model of suppressing sex and drugs can be lobbied for internationally, and it would be even worse if they could just vote for it and enforce it everywhere. The vast majority of the global population is not WEIRD bonobo rationalists and even the present degree of subjecting the latter to the rule of the former is unbearable. At least now it’s possible (if rich and resourceful enough) to move somewhere else if the rule of one polity becomes too overbearing, but unifying a strong global government would make it all too likely to turn it into an unescapable situation.

This not the peace you had in mind? The one you waited for?
There is no land beyond this law, there is no place to go

(But it’s not like the standard opponents of world federalism are any better, national sovereignty is just as ugly and disgusting and oppressive with the way it always seems to repeat the same pattern of forcing extremely different cultures under the control of each other; prosperous cosmopolitan urban enlightened libertines really shouldn’t have to share polity with reactionary rural xenophobic conservatives who mostly mooch off the previous ones’ money while hypocritically espousing economic rightism themselves, but nation-states love to put boundaries in silly locations. It would be way better for places like Stockholm and Amsterdam to be together and separated from their spatially neighboring but culturally worlds-apart regions; nations are far less of a natural joint in reality than whatever-it-is that’s underlying the difference that seems to be popping up everywhere in extremely replicable ways. And the Bay Area should be independent even from the ‘better-than-most-but-still-not-the-bay-area’ places just to make sure its special nature stays as untarnished and incorruptible as possible.)

ilzolende:

another-normal-anomaly:

ilzolende:

nonternary:

Proponents of evidence-based medicine claim that some things are better than other things. You know who else claimed that some things are better than other things?

Which Incredibly Tortured Definition of Fascism Describes You? Take This Quiz to Find Out!

Very disappointed that your post doesn’t link to a quiz. B+, good shitpost but not excellent.

I don’t know how to write non-static websites yet, sorry. Also, I don’t actually know enough well-defined terrible definitions of fascism.

This sounds like something to work on. I can totally see how I’d code the innards of the quiz (in fact I kind of want to do it Just Because, for programming exercise) but not how to turn it into a website (…yet! growth mindset!).

Damn, I could totally hack some codecademy Ruby lesson into this quiz instead. Just need to figure out the terrible definitions and the questions.

sinesalvatorem:

thathopeyetlives:

ilzolende:

thathopeyetlives:

ilzolende:

91625:

tokyopewpew:

missveryvery:

isn’t the potato a “superfood”? like can’t you live on potatoes and like, milk? how can we make potatoes become exotic.

NEW Incan WoNDER FOOD!! Eat this m I r a c l e secret POWER root that Has been used for CENTURIES. Detox On this holistic diet of NoThInG but KUZCO Dirt Apples ™ and unpasteurized LLAMA MILK. Unlock the ANCIENT health benefits created in the MISTS OF THE ANDES

If this wasn’t so painfully accurate, it would be #laugh

Blue potatoes have gotten me attention before.

Ask Frederick the Great.

I took this picture last summer at Sanssouci in Potsdam. (The potatoes were like that when I got there.)

Cool! Sanssouci is pretty and probably prettier in the spring!

From what I remember: He paid people to come up with fancy potato recipes, and instituted sumptuary laws that said that potatoes were for the exclusive use of the royal family – and made sure to serve fancy potato dishes to nobles at fancy banquets. 

He had a royal potato garden planted, with nice breeds of potatoes… and guarded very badly. 

Soon, everybody who could afford bribe money was eating potatoes, then the social climbers, and then the peasants like he had originally planned. 

@socialjusticemunchkin it you

So true.

rusalkii:

socialjusticemunchkin:

rusalkii:

socialjusticemunchkin:

worldoptimization:

hey if anyone on my friends list feels like it and has sum good knowledge i will venmo u 5$ to explain to me the way that tumblr talks about DID/multiples systems n stuff? this seems important to a lot of younger queer n trans folks and i wanna understand it (and also pay u for yr labor lmao)

I keep seeing this “pay you for your labor” thing and like … what is the goal? replace all non-financial transactions with financial ones? like I get that people think women do more ~emotional labor~ in families/relationships and that’s unfair but this is just a person asking if any friends (not necessarily female or members of any oppressed group) want to volunteer to do them a favor? and not even an onerous favor, it’s “talk about something interesting with me for a little while”

idk how I feel about this. I do think money is really great and maybe people should use it more in friendships, but otoh something about nonfinancial transactions building trust and social cohesion? also a society in which you’re expected to pay for friends to do you a favor seems uh, unfortunate for those who lack class privilege

This is kind of interesting. One intuition says that this is not an aesthetically appealing way of dealing with these things, while another thinks normalizing micro-tipping even in friendships could be useful, at least if implemented with a modicum of class awareness; even if one enjoys thinking of and discussing the ideas, making them into a more widely shareable post is more work than simply doing some rough and vague chat-style explaining and being able to incentivize the former with a small monetary reward to compensate for the effort would create more value in total.

I suspect that some of this could be related to an equilibrium of norms where friendships and money are supposed to be kept separate from each other and anyone trying to unilaterally break it ends up worse even if allowing the right kind of commodification could be a better equilibrium overall. It would be undesirable if such things were totally commodified so that anyone asking for favors would need to pay the market rate, but I do think establishing a norm of tipping for effort, possibly at levels comparable to generic western minimum wages when asking a specific person to do a specific thing so that people making such money could do favors to friends instead of working without losing sorely needed money as a result but asking for a lot more would be considered at the very least exceptional so the system wouldn’t degenerate to a complete money-market, would be at least worth considering.

All in all, I think the (seemingly pretty common) norms of keeping money and friendships completely separate do contribute to class segregation by making it difficult to socialize across class lines.

If we take the classic example of a poor person and a rich person going for lunch together, expectations of both paying for themselves result in staggeringly sub-optimal outcomes as either the poor one has to pay way more than they can afford, or the rich one will have to settle for a place that might not meet their standards. If the poor one tries to change this, they will be perceived as a moocher, while the rich one might be seen as condescending and/or flaunting their money if they offer to pay. As a result, people will inevitably feel a pressure to only socialize within their class on pain of social disapproval or material constraints.

In my experience this is a big problem in Finland where it’s very popular to keep up a socialdemocratic facade of pretend equality in which even acknowledging that people don’t all make the same amount of money is at best gauche; if done from below it makes people uncomfortable and if done from above it creates resentment at how does this nouveau riche asshole dare to violate the sacred law of Jante. Naturally, this doesn’t work very well when there never has been a situation where such claims would’ve been at all substantiated outside a quite narrow space of comfortable post-ww2 suburban segregationism.*

Pretending not to see race leads to greater racial discrimination, pretending not to see gender leads to sexism remaining unchallenged, so I’d be very surprised if pretending not to see class wouldn’t make undermining classism more difficult.

As a result I’ve been trying to personally chip away at these norms by using a different standard whenever possible: in friendships it should be totally normal and acceptable for people to share material things in reasonable proportion to their material wealth, without the need to match the absolute financial values of contributions. In practice this means I’ll never say no if someone with more money than me offers to pay for something, and I’ll similarly offer to pay things for people poorer than me (right now that seems to mean only @sinesalvatorem but growth mindset!), if I trust that the person I’m dealing with is able to understand, and okay with, it.

The practical results of normalizing such things would be expected to be: a certain degree of redistribution as some de facto commodification of friendships shifts costs of social interaction from poorer people to richer people; a consequent undermining of illusions when people whose company isn’t worth the price of a lunch discover it**; and hopefully a certain degree of adaptation for possible higher-inequality futures, because if only a few people hold most of the material income in the world, everyone else’s jobs being automated away, I’d very much prefer such people to live with norms that expect them to share.

The last part ties to a bigger pattern of incomplete and asymmetrical commodification in a money economy, which creates and maintains some significant inequalities. When only certain types of work are paid labor and others are kept out of the money economy by moral censure, it isn’t surprising that doers of the paid kinds of labor get privileged over others. Sex, housework, child care, friendships, emotional labor, military service (in countries with conscription), etc. are treated as sacred moral duties which must not be defiled with money, which very conveniently ensures that middle-aged men have a disproportionate control over money and other groups, who tend to do more of the uncompensated types of work, have lower power in society.

One could propose removing money altogether as a solution, instead of subjecting everything to monetary markets, but I think these alternatives aren’t as diametrically opposed as most people would be liable to believe. The artificial distinction into profane (men’s, paid) work and sacred (women’s, unpaid) duties*** seems to maintain a situation in which money-work can be treated rigidly while a community which doesn’t make such distinctions could be less of a straw libertarian dystopia in which everything has an exact price, and more of a comparatively relaxed gift-economy-ish sharing culture (at least if the general level of material scarcity is sufficienly low) with a closer resemblance to open-source than to YA literature. People would create value to each other, recognize their unequal material situations, and consequently optimize the allocation of the surplus value their interactions create in a way which integrates material sharing (money being simply one form of it, not the psychologically hijack-y high score to counterproductively measure and optimize for it’s now treated as) into the social fabric, instead of segregating the social and the material into altogether separate magisteria and ensuring a certain material hierarchy tied to one’s position in markets which are artificially restricted to disproportionately favor some groups over others.

Yes, it’s possible to object that this would be impossible, but my prior for such objections is that they’re in the same category as claims that Sweden can’t exist without inevitably turning into Stalin. At the very least, it hasn’t been demonstrated that our current division of paid and unpaid labor is an optimum no amount of skilled memetic engineering could overcome, while there are a lot of reasons to believe that it would be an accidental artefact of cultural and material conditions to a relatively large degree. I’d predict the strongest argument against it to be that I’m generalizing from myself and a set of other rather exceptional people when evaluating the viability of such norms and that more median individuals wouldn’t be psychologically capable of what it takes, but then one could reasonably expect that at least such exceptional people should be able to live by them.****

* I suspect such middle-class sensibilities would be common in most western countries, at least among the middle class; a working-class pride of never accepting help from others seems slightly related but noticeably different.

** This could be considered a good or a bad thing; I personally think it’s good and it also lets people who do get the paid lunches from better-off people feel a bit more comfortable in how their company is indeed actually valued.

*** Of course, it isn’t anywhere near this clear-cut, but on a statistical level the effect is strong; also this sounds very much like the exact same mechanism as is behind “benevolent” sexism, with prisons disguised as pedestals. Conscription is an interesting case because the arguments for it sound exactly the same as arguments against sex work, in favor of domestic slavery, etc. but directed at men instead of women. This is easy to understand as an instance of ageist oppression modulated by gender though, as it’s mostly young men (and people mistaken for them) whom it exploits without compensation.

**** Slightly unrelated but possibly illuminating: I’m always kind of weirded out by how many of the same people who insist that money shouldn’t be a measure of a person’s worth as a human being also insist very strongly on people having the exact same amount of it, with arguments that really sound like they think money indeed is a measure of a person’s worth as a human being. I do intellectually understand where they’re coming from but on a different level make up your goddamn minds please. If the median person treats money as literally serious business it suggests that the median person might not be able to adjust to the norms I want to live by, but damnit I want these norms and I already have polyamory, I’m not going to let the median person’s failings prevent me from having casual money too.

I have a feeling that the norms you proposed would be far more effective in casual interaction between acquaintances, colleges, etc. For example, if you don’t own a car and want to borrow the neighbor’s second car for a weekend, you might offer them some compensation for it. So you don’t need to buy a car you’ll use once or twice a year, while the neighbor gets to make some money in exchange for having to drop their partner off at their weekend poker night or whatever. Or if, like OP, you want someone to explain something fairly complicated to you, you might pay them a bit. This might work something like commissions do: since it’s socially acceptable for people to promote “please pay me for my art”, it seems like the leap to “please pay me for my knowledge” might be fairly easy to make. However, I think that within close friendships, this might not be the best system.

Anecdotal data: I have a few friends with whom I almost always meet over coffee or lunch. I’m the only one of us with a job, and the only one who regularly has cash with me, so I usually pay for food. On one hand, this seems to match pretty well the the model you described above: I have a greater ability to pay, so I do, since the pleasure of my friends’ company is worth buying them coffee once in a while. On the other hand, this is a completely informal arrangement which we never discussed, and I’m not sure if they even notice it. We just usually ask around if anyone has money on them, and it ends up being me most of the time. I’ve been feeling rather resentful about this recently, and I can’t tell if it’s because I’m expected to pay for them, because it’s not recognized that I pay for them, or because I’m spending money that could be used for something else important to me. I’m not sure if this is a data point for or against your the norms you suggested, but have it anyway.

One glaring flaw with this system seems to be that while the poorer people might discover if their company is “worth the price of lunch”, the rich would attract even more moochers (on top of the considerable social capital they already posses), while the poor would have a strong incentive to make friends with as many rich people as possible and ignore those with as less money. You could argue that a free lunch in exchange for company is a fair trade, but this doesn’t seem like a good environment to foster genuine friendships between different classes.

A possible way to test the viability of this might be to look at how different societies treat money vs friendship, unpaid labor, socioeconomic differences, etc., see which come closest to the standards you set out and see how that affects their culture, morals, economy, etc.  I’m not sure how far this would go or how effective it would be, but it sounds like it might be worth a try. Anyone who actually knows history or economics want to chime in?

((please tell me if I missed/misinterpreted something you said))

Data points is best! So is criticism because good ideas don’t come out fully formed from a frictionless vacuum of mystical wisdom! In fact I suspect most cognitively formidable people are just really good at outsourcing brain functions and connecting some key dots others don’t. I definitely outsource my thinking a lot because it produces way better results.

“Pay me for my knowledge” is best ever. Artists (or so I’ve heard them constantly complain) suffer from people thinking they’ll do things out of the goodness of their hearts because True Art Must Not Be Defiled By Money and creating explicit norms of “yes, it is work and I will be compensated for it at my own rates” and telling non-artists to just deal with it helps, so philosophers, sages, and jesters should be able to have the same thing too.

If I tried to model that anecdote on my own brain I’d suspect being taken for granted would be the key problem, but I’m notoriously horrible at modeling others with my own brain instead of just treating them as black boxes that can be investigated empirically so this one could probably be just ignored.

The glaring flaw sounds more like a caveat or a qualifier but (…simulates…) the issue of the oversupply of sycophants pushing prices of company down is a real one. Focken moochers, people. The opportunity of  predictably creates incentives for people to do fraudulent signaling of friendship by increasing the rewards of doing it successfully, therefore turning rejection of material favors into a hard-to-fake signal and damnit I knew there had to be a reason for why that focken fence was in such a silly place to begin with. (However, the markets would probably settle as the higher rewards from pleasing rich people would be balanced by more competition creating higher risks thus making the risk-aversion-adjusted expected returns for different socioeconomic strata not too mismatched. Then again, far more people waste money gambling instead of founding a startup so this speculation of people being anywhere near economically rational-resembling-ish must be discounted really hard.)

Okay: plan B: how to filter out the moochers and sycophants so that at least the exceptional ones can have casual money. It can be done at least in a limited sense because I definitely have done it successfully quite a lot without turning into a cynical moocher but my brain kind of has an obsession with sincere one-sided reciprocity in the vein of “I observe you have created value for me; let me create value to you too, fellow value-creating person”.

In some ways I fail to see what’s the bad thing in exchanging company for material favors voluntarily but this is probably why nobody should trust my brain in such things. A world where some people are players and others are pieces is unfair and manipulative, but there’s something aesthetically appealing about having a situation where all people are in on the game and know and understand the rules and just play with a sincerity that arises only from the abolition of pretenses of sincerity. That’s definitely casual acquiantance-level stuff only though, because Real True Friendships need to be possible so it might be necessary to have some secret or otherwise unfakeable protocol for “graduating” from “we’re playing games without pretending we’re not” to “we’re actually not playing games”.

So one possible solution could be to make it socially acceptable to play games and exchange social favors for material favors. Then the outcome would be casual money for exceptional friends, and mutually acknowledged games for a select category of casual acquiantances. At least players who know what’s going on are more entertaining company than clueless people (tfw you notice you just reinvented the MacLeod classification with gameplayers as the sociopaths, true friends as the losers, and uninteresting ones as the clueless) and sycophanty is harder to fall for when one starts with a prior of a knowing wink in one’s eye.

Also, overthinking is the best thing ever! Nothing interesting ever came out of never overthinking anything.

The reason I called the problem with moochers and sycophants a glaring flaw might, on reflection, be me typical-minding it. One of my greatest irrational fears is that my friends are just tolerating me to be polite and don’t actually care about me. With casual money, this becomes a far more likely scenario. I suppose some (most?) people would be happy with many acquaintances who they know are just around for the free lunch, and a few who can somehow signal that they are real friends, although I have trouble alieving it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this if everyone knows that this what’s going on, although it seems like there’s an increased potential for exploitation. That problem might be eliminated by a truly effective unfakeable signal of True Friendship, but I feel like if one existed we’d already be using it. (I’d love to be proven wrong here.)

With regards to compensating “philosophers, sages, and jesters” (I like that phrase a lot, it’s very #aesthetic, especially in this context),  there are already (insufficient in my opinion, but still there) structures in place for it (Patreon, Kickstarter, commissions, probably a lot of other stuff I’m missing because I’m not involved in that community). There also seems to be a strong push towards normalizing it, although again not as much as I’d like. 

Also possibly of interest: this blog post, where the author discusses some of the problems in asking friends for money. (Siderea’s writing seems to be the sort of thing you’d find interesting, if I’m interpreting your posts so far correctly. I’d recommend her essay on class, which I found very insightful and is also tangentially related to this discussion.)

Also also, a quick search for MacLeod’s classification turns up this, which is probably not what you were referring to. Do you have any links to an explanation of that classification?

The obvious solution would be to make casual money a mutually opt-in-only culture (which in fact is kind of exactly what I’m doing); not participating in it should definitely not be frowned upon and there definitely needs to be stronger norms of frowning upon far less stuff than people currently tend to do. Once again I feel like a comparison to polyamory would be more than apt: not something to be imposed on everyone, but an option which should be available for those who wish to use it.

Opting out of receiving casual money would obviously be an unfakeable signal that one is not a (material) moocher, and opting out of giving it would force one to rely on one’s own personality alone, making sure that the people can’t expect any material benefits and therefore must be sticking around thanks to one’s company being demonstrably worth it. In fact this suggests that there might even be need for a strong norm in the opposite direction: unbreakably immaterial friendships in which it’s understood that no favors of material (or status) nature will ever be exchanged and therefore sycophanty won’t achieve anything, so that the people it doesn’t filter out can be trusted to be only interested in one’s personality alone, not any tag-along benefits. (However, this one really needs a relaxation of class signaling and attitudes to avoid devolving into a resentful middle-class scornfest in which being just able to keep up in the correct level of material homogeneity is the only way to maintain the approval of one’s peers.)

So now we’re already developing a diversity of casual money, immaterial friendship (which consciously disavows material exchange but recognizes it as simply one option amonge many) and secret associations. The last one is important too, as it allows people to socialize across all kinds of status and tribal lines without either being harmed by it (how dare they hang out with The Outgroup?!?!) or (being perceived as) mooching social capital from rich and popular people.

It’s kind of interesting how my brain seems to not comprehend that extending the scope of exchange in interactions could lead to bad results. The way my brain sees it, friendship is already a mutually beneficial exchange of various forms of value-creation so adding another one more to it is more a question of making it aesthetically appealing enough to look like friendship instead of business, and that’s it; the entire concept of moochers, sycophants and not!truefriends seems like a strangely distant and abstract thing that intellectually speaking probably happens somewhere but the people who participate in such things feel like weird aliens which just superficially resemble humans. The only way I could describe this is some kind of starry-eyed sociopathy in which it’s obviously fine to relate with other humans by doing win-win trades without artificially limiting the variety of currencies to do those trades in (and in fact the only risk of falling for sycophanty would be the equivalent of giving someone a loan they don’t pay back; I definitely won’t marry anyone without a prenup (and even then only as a privilege escalation hack of the “hold my nose and marry the state” variety) but if someone is able to consistently entertain me enough to be worth the costs all the better for them).

(In fact it could be related to the way I kind of always perceive exchanges and creatings of value everywhere so I can’t just choose to unsee some particular varieties of them. I have this one quote in my mind which I always initially misassociate with Nwabudike Morgan about all human interaction being modelable as exchanges of some kind as long as one recognizes all the myriad “currencies” that are involved. Friendship is one broad category of repeated exchanges of particular kinds, which is extremely good at creating huge amounts of value as long as the necessary interpersonal infrastructure is maintained.)

I’m talking about the “sociopaths, clueless, & losers” categorization which (or at least the sense I’m using it in) is probably the least badly exemplified here. “Sociopaths” are the success- and power-seeking people who get shit done; losers are the people who have other priorities and simply treat their work as something that pays the bills and must give a different kind of fair deal, prioritizing not giving their all and settling for a comparably modest return, instead of giving their all to take it all; while the clueless lack the competence of the sociopaths and the awareness of the losers and end up as tools either performing a feeble imitation of sociopaths or acting in a perverse unilateral commitment to them in the hopes of being rewarded somehow. I’m probably a “sociopath” myself in this classification even though I feel statistically more sympathetic to and in some ways indentify with the “losers” instead. (Or at least so it seems; archetypical losers recognize that climbing up and/or knocking over corporate ladders isn’t exactly that awesome in itself, while most sociopaths seem to be kind of pitiable people who simply got stuck prioritizing power and money for their own sake, without any clear goal of what to do with them; I do, and just want to exploit all the available tools for realizing those goals, therefore power and money. Of course, most losers are uninteresting slackers who lack not only ambition but anything else that would interest me as well, but the numbers nonetheless suggest that the vast majority of cool and awesome people will be in that broad category. For the clueless I have a hard time feeling anything other than a certain kind of slight contempt tempered by a lot of pity, as they know neither the real rules of game nor how to have a life outside it.)

This would translate to social games in such a way that “sociopaths” treat things as games in which to play and win and actually grow stronger and better in it; “losers” don’t bother playing and focus on genuine non-gamey relationships; and the “clueless” do all kinds of whining, posturing and entitled status-seeking without understanding the underlying mechanics. To illustrate this, here’s an example of the subtexts of how the three different groups might interact with someone high-status:

The sociopath: “I know your position, I know mine, and I know that I need to prove why I’m different from the next guy; now let me show you how I can create value to you and distinguish myself from the clueless ones seeking your attention in less skilled ways.”

The clueless: “Boo hoo I’m such a cool guy wouldn’t you just please give me a chance I swear I’m different from all the other people who say these exact same things just believe me even though I’m both unwilling and unable to prove it.”

The loser: “Yeah, whatever, I’m not desperately looking for anything I could gain from you and I’m not going to play any roles to please you, but if you consider me interesting that’s quite cool I guess.”

Sociopaths are interesting but there’s a tacit understanding of the default assumption of a lack of mutual loyalty, which tends to turn people into situational losers with each other. Losers are give or take as they don’t really feel the need to please others and thus most of them won’t be that interesting to me, but the awesome ones are awesome. The clueless are just frustrating to deal with because they want and feel like they deserve attention but aren’t willing to give what it takes. (And just to make it clear; anyone I willingly interact with is a person I find worth interacting with, and proof of situational loserdom is available on request, so people really have no need for a prior to worry about falling into the category I’m conceptually scorning here.) (Also, the clusters are obviously just archetypes and fluid continuums instead of rigid categories.)

(also Siderea is one of those people whose blogs I really want to remember to read more of)

andromeda-collides:

I don’t remember much of being a toddler, but I remember being an older child.

I remember how, when I would ask my parents questions about things I was interested in, the answer was “Go look it up in the Encyclopedias” until I generally knew to just go to there first.  We had a set of World Book Encyclopedias printed in the 80’s, and they were my treasure trove.  I read entire volumes.  

This led to some amusing things in my childhood, like when I was in elementary school and read the entire section on religion, something I knew nothing about before that, and then came and told my parents “Mom and Dad, I’m an agnostic.  Or maybe an atheist.  None of the rest of those made ANY sense. They are super weird.”  

When I read books, I drug around a (very heavy) dictionary.  I would write the words I didn’t know in the front cover of my paperbacks, and look them up, often interrupting my reading and getting sniped into reading more of the dictionary instead.  

I was always terrible at parsing the pronunciation guide, and am to this day. Often I learned to associate the word’s visual spelling with the definition in my head, bypassing a verbal memory altogether, and so I had a larger disconnect than most people between words I could speak and understand in conversation, and the words I could write and understand written.

Thousands of questions and interests in my childhood were lost opportunities.  They weren’t in the encyclopedias, or I couldn’t figure out how to look them up.  I wanted to know if there were words for concepts, but didn’t have a reverse dictionary to google.  My encyclopedia set didn’t have pictures of every animal in it, or indeed, every animal in it at all.  It did not update with sources of news, and even though I also obsessively read my parents’ subscription to Newsweek, it felt like the world was going on around me in a way that I had no way to follow.  And of course, as a child in the 90’s, if I found something current in Newsweek that I didn’t know about, I could not just look it up in the encyclopedias I had, printed in the 80’s.

Fastfoward to my daughter’s childhood. 

When she’s older, and asks me questions, I can pull out my phone and search wikipedia, or she can do it herself.  We can pull up youtube, khan academy, wolframalpha, or a thousand other things.  When she’s reading her books on a tablet or kindle or phone or any other device, she doesn’t have to drag around a dictionary, she can double tap the word and be given not just the definition, but also hear the pronunciation, without ever interrupting her reading.

But that’s a few years from now.  Let’s talk about technology in Andromeda’s life now, age 1.

She sees a firetruck and is super excited, we can go home and watch hours of youtube videos on firetrucks, if she wants.  She sees firetrucks are always red, sometimes make a siren noise, can stop and go, carry humans.  She sees firetrucks in the sun, rain, and snow.  She sees firetrucks putting out fires.  It may be too early for her to infer purpose yet, but it will not be long. Later she plays with an app on her tablet about firemen, and I hear her going “woo woo!” to herself as she deftly scrolls through the scene.

She wants to see pictures of kittens, I can pull up a google image search and endlessly scroll through pictures of kittens, from every possible angle. I can pull up another tab to switch between, this one covered in adult cats.  We discuss the difference.  And she sees the differences, 500 or 1000 times over, in just a few minutes.

It’s not without reason that I’m sometimes reminded of the similarity of teaching my daughter with technology as a tool, and a machine learning algorithm, blitzing through its input of focus, to sort the noise from the data.  Andromeda is doing that.  She is capable of that.  Up until now as a civilization, we just have not been capable of providing her the raw input to do that.  Now, in many cases, we can.

She’s pointing to a twirly rooster on top of a building, asking “Dah? Dah?!  Dah?!” (Translation:  what is that?) and I can’t remember, for the life of me, what the word for that is.  I pull out my phone, search, and seconds later I can tell her the word she wants is “Weathervane” and what it does.  Even show her close up videos of it if I want.  It opens up the opportunity to talk about wind and weather and chickens and a million other things.  Curiosity, indulged, encouraged, grown.  She learns that the world is a place where she can ask questions, and get answers.  Later she will learn that the world is a place where she can ask questions and find her own answers.  She sees the world’s knowledge is there, at her fingertips, and here for everyone, to digest and understand.

I’m not even sure what happens in that situation without instant technology, if I were in my mom’s position, in the 90’s.   I ask every adult I meet what it is until I find one who knows?  I go home and flip through the encyclopedia with the vague idea that it should be there somewhere?  And if I miraculously find it, the moment is already lost, and Andromeda probably doesn’t even remember what I’m talking about.  Or, the more likely thing, that I say, “sorry babe, I don’t know what the twirly rooster is, forget about it for now.”

What lessons does that hypothetical Andromeda learn?  That there are some known things that mom (and later, she) can’t know.  That knowledge is hard to find.  That the world is confusing, bewildering, and disconnected.  That curiosity is sometimes nice, but often just annoying, because you never know when it’s an itch that can be scratched, vs. when it can’t.  Maybe then it’s better to not have that itch at all, let it seep out of awareness and into the background chatter of the human experience.

There was a tongue in check post, I think on SSC, about, “Do you have a modafinil deficiency?”  In a similar vein, I wonder if children before ours had a technology deficiency.  What if generations upon generations of children who could have risen to greater heights had their curiosity and love of learning driven out of them by the sheer inaccessibility of knowledge?  

There will always be those among us who fight any odds, any circumstances, in order to learn and create.  I don’t mean them, though we’ve made the world easier for them too.  Not the Ramanujans of the world, but other, more ordinary people.  Other people who could have been more, but weren’t quite as resilient.  A child of family without the internet, and maybe one without any encyclopedias, enough times of asking “Why?” and getting shut down.  And so they responded by shutting down their curiosity and the power of their intellect, rather than struggle on.  Those are children that maybe now, we can give more to, and who may one day give us more in return.  And it’s easy.  It’s easy to give them more now.  It’s as easy as the smartphone in your pocket, a google search away.

Too old to have enjoyed technology right from the beginning, but incredibly privileged to never have that unending curiosity properly excised and thus not excessively jealous of the kids these days. I’m already wondering how the hell people ever managed to survive without the superhuman powers of omnipresent access to almost all information ever (with just a slight rounding error) and connection to almost everyone interesting, even though my own habit of always carrying doubly redundant internet access if possible is only single-digits years old.

Also, I’m betting that eventually we’ll look at people squelching a child’s curiosity, instead of letting them indulge in it freely, with the same kind of horror and revulsion we look at physically violent parents now.

ilzolende:

wirehead-wannabe:

What is the biggest cause of evil in the world?

Gryffindor: “Not listening to the moral feelings that you know deep down are right.”

Hufflepuff: “Not treating everyone with human dignity.”

Ravenclaw: “Not questioning your impulses and assumptions about the world.”

Slytherin: “Betraying yourself or your friends.”

Ravenclaw primary, then, definitely.

Does “the world is evil because it doesn’t listen to the moral feelings I know are right, as a consequence betrays me and my friends and does it on a practical level mostly by not questioning those things” count as what? All I know is that Hufflepuff is a worse match because all too often naive “dignity”, when not tempered by questioning is itself a cause of evil. The other ones one can’t go wrong with even when applied indiscriminately.

Wait, you mean the “you” others should consider is actually “themselves” instead of me? 100% Ravenclaw then.

rusalkii:

socialjusticemunchkin:

worldoptimization:

hey if anyone on my friends list feels like it and has sum good knowledge i will venmo u 5$ to explain to me the way that tumblr talks about DID/multiples systems n stuff? this seems important to a lot of younger queer n trans folks and i wanna understand it (and also pay u for yr labor lmao)

I keep seeing this “pay you for your labor” thing and like … what is the goal? replace all non-financial transactions with financial ones? like I get that people think women do more ~emotional labor~ in families/relationships and that’s unfair but this is just a person asking if any friends (not necessarily female or members of any oppressed group) want to volunteer to do them a favor? and not even an onerous favor, it’s “talk about something interesting with me for a little while”

idk how I feel about this. I do think money is really great and maybe people should use it more in friendships, but otoh something about nonfinancial transactions building trust and social cohesion? also a society in which you’re expected to pay for friends to do you a favor seems uh, unfortunate for those who lack class privilege

This is kind of interesting. One intuition says that this is not an aesthetically appealing way of dealing with these things, while another thinks normalizing micro-tipping even in friendships could be useful, at least if implemented with a modicum of class awareness; even if one enjoys thinking of and discussing the ideas, making them into a more widely shareable post is more work than simply doing some rough and vague chat-style explaining and being able to incentivize the former with a small monetary reward to compensate for the effort would create more value in total.

I suspect that some of this could be related to an equilibrium of norms where friendships and money are supposed to be kept separate from each other and anyone trying to unilaterally break it ends up worse even if allowing the right kind of commodification could be a better equilibrium overall. It would be undesirable if such things were totally commodified so that anyone asking for favors would need to pay the market rate, but I do think establishing a norm of tipping for effort, possibly at levels comparable to generic western minimum wages when asking a specific person to do a specific thing so that people making such money could do favors to friends instead of working without losing sorely needed money as a result but asking for a lot more would be considered at the very least exceptional so the system wouldn’t degenerate to a complete money-market, would be at least worth considering.

All in all, I think the (seemingly pretty common) norms of keeping money and friendships completely separate do contribute to class segregation by making it difficult to socialize across class lines.

If we take the classic example of a poor person and a rich person going for lunch together, expectations of both paying for themselves result in staggeringly sub-optimal outcomes as either the poor one has to pay way more than they can afford, or the rich one will have to settle for a place that might not meet their standards. If the poor one tries to change this, they will be perceived as a moocher, while the rich one might be seen as condescending and/or flaunting their money if they offer to pay. As a result, people will inevitably feel a pressure to only socialize within their class on pain of social disapproval or material constraints.

In my experience this is a big problem in Finland where it’s very popular to keep up a socialdemocratic facade of pretend equality in which even acknowledging that people don’t all make the same amount of money is at best gauche; if done from below it makes people uncomfortable and if done from above it creates resentment at how does this nouveau riche asshole dare to violate the sacred law of Jante. Naturally, this doesn’t work very well when there never has been a situation where such claims would’ve been at all substantiated outside a quite narrow space of comfortable post-ww2 suburban segregationism.*

Pretending not to see race leads to greater racial discrimination, pretending not to see gender leads to sexism remaining unchallenged, so I’d be very surprised if pretending not to see class wouldn’t make undermining classism more difficult.

As a result I’ve been trying to personally chip away at these norms by using a different standard whenever possible: in friendships it should be totally normal and acceptable for people to share material things in reasonable proportion to their material wealth, without the need to match the absolute financial values of contributions. In practice this means I’ll never say no if someone with more money than me offers to pay for something, and I’ll similarly offer to pay things for people poorer than me (right now that seems to mean only @sinesalvatorem but growth mindset!), if I trust that the person I’m dealing with is able to understand, and okay with, it.

The practical results of normalizing such things would be expected to be: a certain degree of redistribution as some de facto commodification of friendships shifts costs of social interaction from poorer people to richer people; a consequent undermining of illusions when people whose company isn’t worth the price of a lunch discover it**; and hopefully a certain degree of adaptation for possible higher-inequality futures, because if only a few people hold most of the material income in the world, everyone else’s jobs being automated away, I’d very much prefer such people to live with norms that expect them to share.

The last part ties to a bigger pattern of incomplete and asymmetrical commodification in a money economy, which creates and maintains some significant inequalities. When only certain types of work are paid labor and others are kept out of the money economy by moral censure, it isn’t surprising that doers of the paid kinds of labor get privileged over others. Sex, housework, child care, friendships, emotional labor, military service (in countries with conscription), etc. are treated as sacred moral duties which must not be defiled with money, which very conveniently ensures that middle-aged men have a disproportionate control over money and other groups, who tend to do more of the uncompensated types of work, have lower power in society.

One could propose removing money altogether as a solution, instead of subjecting everything to monetary markets, but I think these alternatives aren’t as diametrically opposed as most people would be liable to believe. The artificial distinction into profane (men’s, paid) work and sacred (women’s, unpaid) duties*** seems to maintain a situation in which money-work can be treated rigidly while a community which doesn’t make such distinctions could be less of a straw libertarian dystopia in which everything has an exact price, and more of a comparatively relaxed gift-economy-ish sharing culture (at least if the general level of material scarcity is sufficienly low) with a closer resemblance to open-source than to YA literature. People would create value to each other, recognize their unequal material situations, and consequently optimize the allocation of the surplus value their interactions create in a way which integrates material sharing (money being simply one form of it, not the psychologically hijack-y high score to counterproductively measure and optimize for it’s now treated as) into the social fabric, instead of segregating the social and the material into altogether separate magisteria and ensuring a certain material hierarchy tied to one’s position in markets which are artificially restricted to disproportionately favor some groups over others.

Yes, it’s possible to object that this would be impossible, but my prior for such objections is that they’re in the same category as claims that Sweden can’t exist without inevitably turning into Stalin. At the very least, it hasn’t been demonstrated that our current division of paid and unpaid labor is an optimum no amount of skilled memetic engineering could overcome, while there are a lot of reasons to believe that it would be an accidental artefact of cultural and material conditions to a relatively large degree. I’d predict the strongest argument against it to be that I’m generalizing from myself and a set of other rather exceptional people when evaluating the viability of such norms and that more median individuals wouldn’t be psychologically capable of what it takes, but then one could reasonably expect that at least such exceptional people should be able to live by them.****

* I suspect such middle-class sensibilities would be common in most western countries, at least among the middle class; a working-class pride of never accepting help from others seems slightly related but noticeably different.

** This could be considered a good or a bad thing; I personally think it’s good and it also lets people who do get the paid lunches from better-off people feel a bit more comfortable in how their company is indeed actually valued.

*** Of course, it isn’t anywhere near this clear-cut, but on a statistical level the effect is strong; also this sounds very much like the exact same mechanism as is behind “benevolent” sexism, with prisons disguised as pedestals. Conscription is an interesting case because the arguments for it sound exactly the same as arguments against sex work, in favor of domestic slavery, etc. but directed at men instead of women. This is easy to understand as an instance of ageist oppression modulated by gender though, as it’s mostly young men (and people mistaken for them) whom it exploits without compensation.

**** Slightly unrelated but possibly illuminating: I’m always kind of weirded out by how many of the same people who insist that money shouldn’t be a measure of a person’s worth as a human being also insist very strongly on people having the exact same amount of it, with arguments that really sound like they think money indeed is a measure of a person’s worth as a human being. I do intellectually understand where they’re coming from but on a different level make up your goddamn minds please. If the median person treats money as literally serious business it suggests that the median person might not be able to adjust to the norms I want to live by, but damnit I want these norms and I already have polyamory, I’m not going to let the median person’s failings prevent me from having casual money too.

I have a feeling that the norms you proposed would be far more effective in casual interaction between acquaintances, colleges, etc. For example, if you don’t own a car and want to borrow the neighbor’s second car for a weekend, you might offer them some compensation for it. So you don’t need to buy a car you’ll use once or twice a year, while the neighbor gets to make some money in exchange for having to drop their partner off at their weekend poker night or whatever. Or if, like OP, you want someone to explain something fairly complicated to you, you might pay them a bit. This might work something like commissions do: since it’s socially acceptable for people to promote “please pay me for my art”, it seems like the leap to “please pay me for my knowledge” might be fairly easy to make. However, I think that within close friendships, this might not be the best system.

Anecdotal data: I have a few friends with whom I almost always meet over coffee or lunch. I’m the only one of us with a job, and the only one who regularly has cash with me, so I usually pay for food. On one hand, this seems to match pretty well the the model you described above: I have a greater ability to pay, so I do, since the pleasure of my friends’ company is worth buying them coffee once in a while. On the other hand, this is a completely informal arrangement which we never discussed, and I’m not sure if they even notice it. We just usually ask around if anyone has money on them, and it ends up being me most of the time. I’ve been feeling rather resentful about this recently, and I can’t tell if it’s because I’m expected to pay for them, because it’s not recognized that I pay for them, or because I’m spending money that could be used for something else important to me. I’m not sure if this is a data point for or against your the norms you suggested, but have it anyway.

One glaring flaw with this system seems to be that while the poorer people might discover if their company is “worth the price of lunch”, the rich would attract even more moochers (on top of the considerable social capital they already posses), while the poor would have a strong incentive to make friends with as many rich people as possible and ignore those with as less money. You could argue that a free lunch in exchange for company is a fair trade, but this doesn’t seem like a good environment to foster genuine friendships between different classes.

A possible way to test the viability of this might be to look at how different societies treat money vs friendship, unpaid labor, socioeconomic differences, etc., see which come closest to the standards you set out and see how that affects their culture, morals, economy, etc.  I’m not sure how far this would go or how effective it would be, but it sounds like it might be worth a try. Anyone who actually knows history or economics want to chime in?

((please tell me if I missed/misinterpreted something you said))

Data points is best! So is criticism because good ideas don’t come out fully formed from a frictionless vacuum of mystical wisdom! In fact I suspect most cognitively formidable people are just really good at outsourcing brain functions and connecting some key dots others don’t. I definitely outsource my thinking a lot because it produces way better results.

“Pay me for my knowledge” is best ever. Artists (or so I’ve heard them constantly complain) suffer from people thinking they’ll do things out of the goodness of their hearts because True Art Must Not Be Defiled By Money and creating explicit norms of “yes, it is work and I will be compensated for it at my own rates” and telling non-artists to just deal with it helps, so philosophers, sages, and jesters should be able to have the same thing too.

If I tried to model that anecdote on my own brain I’d suspect being taken for granted would be the key problem, but I’m notoriously horrible at modeling others with my own brain instead of just treating them as black boxes that can be investigated empirically so this one could probably be just ignored.

The glaring flaw sounds more like a caveat or a qualifier but (…simulates…) the issue of the oversupply of sycophants pushing prices of company down is a real one. Focken moochers, people. The opportunity of  predictably creates incentives for people to do fraudulent signaling of friendship by increasing the rewards of doing it successfully, therefore turning rejection of material favors into a hard-to-fake signal and damnit I knew there had to be a reason for why that focken fence was in such a silly place to begin with. (However, the markets would probably settle as the higher rewards from pleasing rich people would be balanced by more competition creating higher risks thus making the risk-aversion-adjusted expected returns for different socioeconomic strata not too mismatched. Then again, far more people waste money gambling instead of founding a startup so this speculation of people being anywhere near economically rational-resembling-ish must be discounted really hard.)

Okay: plan B: how to filter out the moochers and sycophants so that at least the exceptional ones can have casual money. It can be done at least in a limited sense because I definitely have done it successfully quite a lot without turning into a cynical moocher but my brain kind of has an obsession with sincere one-sided reciprocity in the vein of “I observe you have created value for me; let me create value to you too, fellow value-creating person”.

In some ways I fail to see what’s the bad thing in exchanging company for material favors voluntarily but this is probably why nobody should trust my brain in such things. A world where some people are players and others are pieces is unfair and manipulative, but there’s something aesthetically appealing about having a situation where all people are in on the game and know and understand the rules and just play with a sincerity that arises only from the abolition of pretenses of sincerity. That’s definitely casual acquiantance-level stuff only though, because Real True Friendships need to be possible so it might be necessary to have some secret or otherwise unfakeable protocol for “graduating” from “we’re playing games without pretending we’re not” to “we’re actually not playing games”.

So one possible solution could be to make it socially acceptable to play games and exchange social favors for material favors. Then the outcome would be casual money for exceptional friends, and mutually acknowledged games for a select category of casual acquiantances. At least players who know what’s going on are more entertaining company than clueless people (tfw you notice you just reinvented the MacLeod classification with gameplayers as the sociopaths, true friends as the losers, and uninteresting ones as the clueless) and sycophanty is harder to fall for when one starts with a prior of a knowing wink in one’s eye.

Also, overthinking is the best thing ever! Nothing interesting ever came out of never overthinking anything.

wirehead-wannabe:

There’s been some talk recently about both criminal justice and translating fuzzy likelihood judgments into hard numbers. So here’s a practical question: how do you interpret the phrase “beyond a reasonable doubt?” Put your answer in the tags expressed as a percent chance of the defendant being guilty.

multiheaded1793:

ladylike-manhood:

sinesalvatorem:

jaiwithani:

reagan-was-a-horrible-president:

jean-luc-gohard:

I honestly don’t understand why there aren’t more people who, when given the platform to discuss minimum wage, don’t simply distill it to the simplest of facts:

• A forty hour work week is considered full time.
  
• It’s considered as such because it takes up the amount of time we as a society have agreed should be considered the maximum work schedule required of an employee. (this, of course, does not always bear out practically, but just follow me here)
• A person working the maximum amount of time required should earn enough for that labor to be able to survive. Phrased this way, I doubt even most conservatives could effectively argue against it, and out of the mouth of someone verbally deft enough to dance around the pathos-based jabs conservative pundits like to use to avoid actually debating, it could actually get opps thinking.
• Therefore, if an employee is being paid less than [number of dollars needed for the post-tax total to pay for the basic necessities in a given area divided by forty] per hour, they are being ripped off and essentially having their labor, productivity, and profit generation value stolen by their employer.
• Wages are a business expense, and if a company cannot afford to pay for its labor, it is by definition a failing business. A company stealing labor to stay afloat (without even touching those that do so simply to increase profit margins and/or management/executive pay/bonuses) is no more ethical than a failing construction company breaking into a lumber yard and stealing wood.
• Our goal as a society should be to protect each other, especially those that most need protection, not to subsidize failing businesses whose owners could quite well subsidize them on their own.

• Wages are a business expense, and if a company cannot afford to pay for its labor, it is by definition a failing business. A company stealing labor to stay afloat (without even touching those that do so simply to increase profit margins and/or management/executive pay/bonuses) is no more ethical than a failing construction company breaking into a lumber yard and stealing wood.

… Wouldn’t the metaphor be “company finds a cheaper lumber supplier”? And if a lumber company thinks they aren’t being paid enough for their lumber, they raise the price. What you probably don’t want to do it pass a law declaring a minimum lumber price.

My true objection is that minimum wage does not appear to do the thing that it is supposed to do, namely improve the well being of poor people - studies usually show extremely marginal positive effects at best, and often show no effect or slightly negative effect. We’ll have better data on this when Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has been going for a few years, but I’m willing to bet at generous odds that it shows no significant effect on poverty, and slightly less confident that it will have damaging effects on economic opportunities for the working poor. Would be awesome to be wrong.

To OP: “facts”. You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Like, number 3 isn’t even an “is”. It’s an ought - an unsubstantiated one at that. I mean, you can turn an ought into an instrumental value of mine by linking it to a terminal value I have, but just bluntly asserting it? Uh, noooo.

And 4 doesn’t actually follow logically from 1-3, even if we assume 1-3 are sound. It’s skipping steps. You need some premise somewhere if you want to define theft as “purchasing a service at a rate I disapprove of”. Like, what even is this?

5) This business would be failing to pay its labour if the price of its labour increased, the same way Starbucks might fail if the price of coffee beans skyrocketed. However, even if you think coffee beans must ethically cost 5x as much as they currently do, that doesn’t mean you can declare Starbucks a failure based on your hypothetical costs that the market is not, in fact, imposing. The appropriate comparison isn’t a company breaking into a warehouse to steal lumber or coffee, but them finding a new, cheaper supplier. Claiming theft and trade are equivalent is disgusting.

6) You don’t give someone a gift by refraining from stealing from them. Likewise, you don’t subsidise a business by failing to increase the costs it has to deal with.

I don’t think I’d describe myself as anti-minimum wage, but I hate shitty arguments.

Here’s the missing steps:

• The government has also prohibited homeseading, or otherwise reverting to peasentry or a hunter-gatherer lifestyle(which you might prefer to working for minimum wage)
• Absent money, in the USA, you will eventually starve, steal and be imprisoned, or poach and be imprisoned.
• Those who are not supported by others, and do not wish to starve or be imprisoned must therefore work for some kind of wage.
• The government has explictly prohibited most forms of collective labor action and mutual aid. (compare restrictions on employeers in the FLSA vs restrictions on Union in Taft-Hartly)
• Therefore: unskilled unsupported individuals who do not wish to starve negotate their wages under this metaphorical ‘gun to the head’ and are unlikely to be able to secure the actual fair market value of their labor.

Since we do not hold contracts made under coercion to be valid, it is fair to say that such employment arrangements are likely invalid, or only partly valid.

It’s like they are “stealing” the difference in the employees freely negotiated wage and the minimum that they actually get because of the above.

Note: IMO the solution is a UBI, or partial repeal of Taft-Hartly particularly permitting sympathy strikes again. McDonalds would get thier shit together quite quick if enough teamsters refused to handle their cargo until they were paying a living wage, or providing stable schedules.

I had no idea about the provisions of Taft-Hartly. Wow.

Wow indeed, but in both directions. Labor relations as a whole is just an obscene mess of could we just get all this headhurty thing over with asap and into a nigh-post-scarcity society of free necessities for everyone pretty please. Take away union powers, you get employers kicking workers in the head systematically. Give unions power, you get redwashed rentiers holding the economy by the metaphorical testicles and abusing that power for all they’ve got and kicking the precariat and everyone else in the head.

In 2010 roughly a thousand stevedores, making an average of twice the median wage, caused a measurable dent in the GDP of Finland because they wanted their employers to pay one year’s wages (two years of median wage, mind you, and that would’ve been on top of the already existing 500 days of relatively generous unemployment benefits only people in middle-class jobs get) in severance benefits to laid-off workers. The damages to the economy were estimated to have been in excess of a hundred million euros a day, or in other words every striking stevedore hurt others in a day more than they themselves earned in two years. On the other hand, nurses typically earn only a bit above median in a job that’s arguably just as rough and demanding and important to get right. What do stevedores do that justifies their position, other than hold the capital of an immense extortion power, safeguarded by the regulatory capture of labor laws?

A living wage should not be the responsibility of employers. The responsibility of employers should be to pay what they’ve promised in exchange for workers doing the work they’ve promised, with reasonable occupational safety etc., and nothing more. If we want people to not starve to death we give them money instead of trying to make someone else give them money. This is the original sin of social democracy: trying to turn employment from an exchange of labor for money into comprehensive cradle-to-grave caretaking for those privileged enough to have it, subsequently creating an ever expanding underclass of lumpenproletariat which has fallen through the widening cracks of the system.

I actually have some idea what I’m talking about. If I wanted to work in Finland inside the regular system I’d easily lose 60% of my wages or more, a substantial fraction of it into various unfair schemes I never consented to. Pensions? Born after 1980, never going to see a single cent of them anyway; the singularity has to be my retirement plan because there isn’t any alternative. Unemployment insurance? Why the hell would I deserve to get more than someone else today just because I got some yesterday too, and why the hell should I pay it for anyone else? If I got sick or pregnant my employer would have to pay for it. With exactly the effects on women’s and chronically ill people’s employability and the survival of unlucky small businesses one would predict. Then I’d also be subject to various regulations “for my own good” just because someone else doing kind of similar work somewhere else some time ago thought it was a brilliant idea. Clock cards and regimented working hours for startup programmers? Yes, they actually do think it’s a brilliant idea. That’s why I’m getting the hell out of there.

Nobody should have a metaphorical gun to their head. Not even employers. With the burden of socialdemocratic welfare systems placed squarely, unpredictably and arbitarily upon them, no wonder they respond to incentives by weaseling their way out of everything they can by exploiting temporary workers, discriminating on a demographic basis, etc.; I for one definitely wouldn’t want to be an employer in such a system. There are so much better ways of achieving the desired goals and I very much support many of those goals and I could do so much better if I was just allowed to opt out of the social bureaucracy to implement it without the obscene side effects. (If one suspects capitalism of being cynically rigged to benefit privileged classes so that oppression is an intended result instead of an unfortunate side-effect I see only one reason to not extend that exact suspicion to social democracy as well and that is identifying oneself as a beneficiary of the latter’s oppressiveness; a group that I’d like to remind everyone has been constantly shrinking for at least the last 25 years!)

Socialize the robots instead of strangling their makers in red tape. Social democracy directly favors big corporations, established capital and politically connected labor tyrants while throwing underclasses, both domestic and global, and innovative and disruptive makers alike under the bus. And that’s possibly one of the greatest mistakes a present-day system can make. Makers tend to be a distinctly different breed from the people who thrive in climbing established hierarchies. Much more prosocial and vulnerable to compromising their class interests with altruistic idealism and more interested in genuinely creating value than just cynically capturing as much of it as possible; that’s the exact type of people ardent anticapitalists should try to populate the ranks of the global elite with, and they’d very much be doing it themselves if they were just given the opportunity! The ADHD (I’m diagnosed) inventors who couldn’t care less about class warfare because there’s so much cool shit to tinker with and where did all this money suddenly come from and whoops did we accidentally just destroy several established giants full of cynical climbers and zero-sum exploiters nah whatever let’s just throw this money at doing cool and altruistic shit that’s never going to make a profit because we’re already set up for several posthuman lifetimes and it’s not like we could safeguard our position against the next disruption when someone comes up with better shit anyway.

Protect the little people (this is the part where I insert the mandatory UBI mention; minimum wages and other social bureaucracies just lumpen the proletariat) and stop fucking propping up the old titans and just let the whiz kids take them out while their (our) built-in vulnerabilities and a constantly changing landscape give you openings for your revolution if you want one because that’s the only way you’ll ever get one. Or alternatively someone invents an open source replicator and disrupts scarcity and makes money mostly obsolete and nobody at the top cares because they’re too busy slingshotting asteroids into mars to impress their buddies and it’s not like they could reliably suppress it if they tried anyway. People and systems respond to incentives, seize control of the incentive landscape to manipulate them where you want. And if you don’t think the left could succeed at something novel and unexpected that has never been tried, how the hell could they instead succeed at something everyone knows to brace against and which has a proven track record of never having succeeded sustainably despite repeated attempts? If someone came up with a startup idea that could be summarized as “pets.com, except it’s going to be different this time I swear” any VC worth their salt would laugh them out of the room.

ozymandias271:

snailchimera:

odinsblog:

alien-beans:

odinsblog:

Nestlé, a multi-national company valued at $247 billion dollars, gets it’s bottled water from Lake Michigan FOR FREE. That’s 400 gallons of water per minute, for the low low price of completely free. Even worse, Nestlé receives a $13 million dollar tax break from the state of Michigan. Worse still, Nestlé recently took legal action against Flint residents for making “disparaging comments” about the company.

Meanwhile, the disproportionately Black residents of Flint are still being charged for POISONED drinking water…that they can’t drink, cook or bathe with. Not only that, but the residents of Flint are paying among the highest water bills in the country. (source)

So again, exactly when will Rick Snyder and his Emergency City Manager be arrested for crimes against humanity?

(please see related post »here)

weren’t they the ones also fucking up Californians when the drought was at its worst?

YES !!! (source)

This is a really good time to note that this all began because of the Snyder administration’s long term goal to privatize Michigan’s water system, so that private, for-profit businesses like Nestlé could further profitize clean water, a basic necessity for human life. 

Chris Christie has already signed a bill authorizing the privatization of New Jersey’s municipal water system (source), and it doesn’t take much imagination to envision other Republican governors (or neoliberal ConservaDems) will do the same. All while simultaneously trying to defund or completely eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency and other laws mandating clean drinking water. (source) 

Also, it’s a good time to remember that Republicans are trying to repeal the Clean Water Drinking Act, and thanks to Dick Cheney, that same law does not apply to drinking water sources contaminated by fracking. (source)

Finally, I know it might seem a little far fetched, but before I continue with my last point (beneath the cut), please understand that when David Koch was running for vice president in the 1980s, his Libertarian Platform was roundly dismissed as too conservative or ridiculous, even by Republicans. But fast foward to 2016, and today the Republican platform is nearly indistinguishable from the Koch’s 1980 platform….so long range, strategic political planning is an actual thing…..

Keep reading

Every new thing I hear about Nestle makes me worry about our future as both a nation and a species a little bit more.

I don’t know anything about most of this post, but Nestle’s contribution to the water shortage in CA is waaaay overblown. 

The CA water system has 40 million acre feet of water in it. 705 million gallons of water– the amount Nestle was using– is about two thousand acre feet, or literally one twenty-thousandth. 

Saying Nestle plays any significant role in the Californian water crisis is literally like saying that the reason you’re in debt is because you bought a pack of Skittles one time.  

Yes, it’s actually farmers who are the evil corporate conspiracy stealing massive amounts of vital water from others for their own gain. Economically inefficient gain, most importantly. Eradicating alfalfa, rice and pastures would save roughly 10% of all water in California (or almost 20% of all water directly used by human activities) while reducing the value of agricultural production by only 7%.

The margins on bottled water are high enough that my favoured solution for water management (sell a sustainable total amount to the highest bidders, share profits to people living in the area) would probably optimize away quite a lot of things before really inconveniencing Nestle even in the most severe first-world droughts. And that’s how it should be; if Nestle wants that water so hard, they’ll pay for it and it’d be the best thing ever because all that nestlemoney goes straight to the pockets of the poor people whose fuckhueg water bills would turn to magical water dividends instead. Water is vital and important, that’s exactly why it must be managed as a market (and clean water should be guaranteed by giving people money to participate on the market) instead of a free human right, AKA a lawless free-for-all for industrial-scale looters.

Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if “Nestle getting free water while people in Flint are poisoned” actually means “Nestle has its own pipe into Lake Michigan and its own water treatment system and isn’t even situated anywhere near Flint (as evident from them getting their water from Lake Michigan which is on the other side of the goddamn state!) but we hate Nestle so we don’t give a shit about inconvenient facts”. What I know for certain is that Flint wouldn’t have been poisoned if Detroit hadn’t thrown a känkkäränkkä (that’s finnish for the kind of a tantrum kids do at the candy section of a supermarket) at Flint’s decision to build its own water system and cut their water several years before the new infrastructure was ready out of sheer spite, forcing Flint to seek emergency water from elsewhere with the disastrous results we’re all too familiar with now.

worldoptimization:

hey if anyone on my friends list feels like it and has sum good knowledge i will venmo u 5$ to explain to me the way that tumblr talks about DID/multiples systems n stuff? this seems important to a lot of younger queer n trans folks and i wanna understand it (and also pay u for yr labor lmao)

I keep seeing this “pay you for your labor” thing and like … what is the goal? replace all non-financial transactions with financial ones? like I get that people think women do more ~emotional labor~ in families/relationships and that’s unfair but this is just a person asking if any friends (not necessarily female or members of any oppressed group) want to volunteer to do them a favor? and not even an onerous favor, it’s “talk about something interesting with me for a little while”

idk how I feel about this. I do think money is really great and maybe people should use it more in friendships, but otoh something about nonfinancial transactions building trust and social cohesion? also a society in which you’re expected to pay for friends to do you a favor seems uh, unfortunate for those who lack class privilege

This is kind of interesting. One intuition says that this is not an aesthetically appealing way of dealing with these things, while another thinks normalizing micro-tipping even in friendships could be useful, at least if implemented with a modicum of class awareness; even if one enjoys thinking of and discussing the ideas, making them into a more widely shareable post is more work than simply doing some rough and vague chat-style explaining and being able to incentivize the former with a small monetary reward to compensate for the effort would create more value in total.

I suspect that some of this could be related to an equilibrium of norms where friendships and money are supposed to be kept separate from each other and anyone trying to unilaterally break it ends up worse even if allowing the right kind of commodification could be a better equilibrium overall. It would be undesirable if such things were totally commodified so that anyone asking for favors would need to pay the market rate, but I do think establishing a norm of tipping for effort, possibly at levels comparable to generic western minimum wages when asking a specific person to do a specific thing so that people making such money could do favors to friends instead of working without losing sorely needed money as a result but asking for a lot more would be considered at the very least exceptional so the system wouldn’t degenerate to a complete money-market, would be at least worth considering.

All in all, I think the (seemingly pretty common) norms of keeping money and friendships completely separate do contribute to class segregation by making it difficult to socialize across class lines.

If we take the classic example of a poor person and a rich person going for lunch together, expectations of both paying for themselves result in staggeringly sub-optimal outcomes as either the poor one has to pay way more than they can afford, or the rich one will have to settle for a place that might not meet their standards. If the poor one tries to change this, they will be perceived as a moocher, while the rich one might be seen as condescending and/or flaunting their money if they offer to pay. As a result, people will inevitably feel a pressure to only socialize within their class on pain of social disapproval or material constraints.

In my experience this is a big problem in Finland where it’s very popular to keep up a socialdemocratic facade of pretend equality in which even acknowledging that people don’t all make the same amount of money is at best gauche; if done from below it makes people uncomfortable and if done from above it creates resentment at how does this nouveau riche asshole dare to violate the sacred law of Jante. Naturally, this doesn’t work very well when there never has been a situation where such claims would’ve been at all substantiated outside a quite narrow space of comfortable post-ww2 suburban segregationism.*

Pretending not to see race leads to greater racial discrimination, pretending not to see gender leads to sexism remaining unchallenged, so I’d be very surprised if pretending not to see class wouldn’t make undermining classism more difficult.

As a result I’ve been trying to personally chip away at these norms by using a different standard whenever possible: in friendships it should be totally normal and acceptable for people to share material things in reasonable proportion to their material wealth, without the need to match the absolute financial values of contributions. In practice this means I’ll never say no if someone with more money than me offers to pay for something, and I’ll similarly offer to pay things for people poorer than me (right now that seems to mean only @sinesalvatorem but growth mindset!), if I trust that the person I’m dealing with is able to understand, and okay with, it.

The practical results of normalizing such things would be expected to be: a certain degree of redistribution as some de facto commodification of friendships shifts costs of social interaction from poorer people to richer people; a consequent undermining of illusions when people whose company isn’t worth the price of a lunch discover it**; and hopefully a certain degree of adaptation for possible higher-inequality futures, because if only a few people hold most of the material income in the world, everyone else’s jobs being automated away, I’d very much prefer such people to live with norms that expect them to share.

The last part ties to a bigger pattern of incomplete and asymmetrical commodification in a money economy, which creates and maintains some significant inequalities. When only certain types of work are paid labor and others are kept out of the money economy by moral censure, it isn’t surprising that doers of the paid kinds of labor get privileged over others. Sex, housework, child care, friendships, emotional labor, military service (in countries with conscription), etc. are treated as sacred moral duties which must not be defiled with money, which very conveniently ensures that middle-aged men have a disproportionate control over money and other groups, who tend to do more of the uncompensated types of work, have lower power in society.

One could propose removing money altogether as a solution, instead of subjecting everything to monetary markets, but I think these alternatives aren’t as diametrically opposed as most people would be liable to believe. The artificial distinction into profane (men’s, paid) work and sacred (women’s, unpaid) duties*** seems to maintain a situation in which money-work can be treated rigidly while a community which doesn’t make such distinctions could be less of a straw libertarian dystopia in which everything has an exact price, and more of a comparatively relaxed gift-economy-ish sharing culture (at least if the general level of material scarcity is sufficienly low) with a closer resemblance to open-source than to YA literature. People would create value to each other, recognize their unequal material situations, and consequently optimize the allocation of the surplus value their interactions create in a way which integrates material sharing (money being simply one form of it, not the psychologically hijack-y high score to counterproductively measure and optimize for it’s now treated as) into the social fabric, instead of segregating the social and the material into altogether separate magisteria and ensuring a certain material hierarchy tied to one’s position in markets which are artificially restricted to disproportionately favor some groups over others.

Yes, it’s possible to object that this would be impossible, but my prior for such objections is that they’re in the same category as claims that Sweden can’t exist without inevitably turning into Stalin. At the very least, it hasn’t been demonstrated that our current division of paid and unpaid labor is an optimum no amount of skilled memetic engineering could overcome, while there are a lot of reasons to believe that it would be an accidental artefact of cultural and material conditions to a relatively large degree. I’d predict the strongest argument against it to be that I’m generalizing from myself and a set of other rather exceptional people when evaluating the viability of such norms and that more median individuals wouldn’t be psychologically capable of what it takes, but then one could reasonably expect that at least such exceptional people should be able to live by them.****

* I suspect such middle-class sensibilities would be common in most western countries, at least among the middle class; a working-class pride of never accepting help from others seems slightly related but noticeably different.

** This could be considered a good or a bad thing; I personally think it’s good and it also lets people who do get the paid lunches from better-off people feel a bit more comfortable in how their company is indeed actually valued.

*** Of course, it isn’t anywhere near this clear-cut, but on a statistical level the effect is strong; also this sounds very much like the exact same mechanism as is behind “benevolent” sexism, with prisons disguised as pedestals. Conscription is an interesting case because the arguments for it sound exactly the same as arguments against sex work, in favor of domestic slavery, etc. but directed at men instead of women. This is easy to understand as an instance of ageist oppression modulated by gender though, as it’s mostly young men (and people mistaken for them) whom it exploits without compensation.

**** Slightly unrelated but possibly illuminating: I’m always kind of weirded out by how many of the same people who insist that money shouldn’t be a measure of a person’s worth as a human being also insist very strongly on people having the exact same amount of it, with arguments that really sound like they think money indeed is a measure of a person’s worth as a human being. I do intellectually understand where they’re coming from but on a different level make up your goddamn minds please. If the median person treats money as literally serious business it suggests that the median person might not be able to adjust to the norms I want to live by, but damnit I want these norms and I already have polyamory, I’m not going to let the median person’s failings prevent me from having casual money too.

ilzolende:

argumate:

afloweroutofstone:

A lot of y'all are following people who are buddy-pals with fascists, and it isn’t hard to notice. You can see this shit pretty clearly.

if Facebook is right and most people are 2.5 degrees away from everyone else, then this is irrefutable.

I probably am.

Is there a problem? I don’t feel unsafe. And I’m probably also internet friends with people who are friends with communists, and being disabled and Jewish and so on in the average Communist country historically also hasn’t been the greatest idea, but again, none of the Internet Horseshoe Theory Club people are going to launch a successful coup or revolution or what have you anytime soon.

Well that’s true. It’s going to take me a decade at least, trying to take Hofstadter’s Law into account. Then again, as far as I can tell my position in the Horseshoe Theory Club is “the one smashing stuff with it” so not sure if it’d count anyway.

argumate:

I guess what bothers me about the bullying thing is that it’s another triumph of identity politics, in that a bullied kid needs to have a named political faction that they can call on to defend them from their peers.

eg. protect nonbinary kids! protect trans kids! protect gay kids! protect kids of the non-dominant ethnic group! and so on.

Yes, these are all worthy causes. But what about kids who are just too quiet, or too loud, or look a little weird, or just don’t fit in with the others?

I mean, at some point protecting bullied kids is a necessary step.

If a straight kid gets bullied for being gay, because kids don’t give a shit about whether anyone actually really is gay, then is that structural oppression? And is setting up a LGBT-friendly student society actually going to help that kid?

It feels like identity politics is being used as a hammer on every problem.

On the other hand being able to name the thing which causes people to be bullied can be instrumentally useful. If a straight kid is bullied for being mistaken for gay, then yes eradicating homophobia could help with their problem, and the people whose job it is to remove structural oppression might be useful in that.

In addition, it can be argued that the basic mechanisms of bullying are extremely deep-seated in human psychology and vicious status systems, so trying to remove bullying itself might be less effective than removing pretenses of bullying which leaves less openings for it to happen. Knocking down ladders of hierarchy (and replacing them with status assigned on meaningful grounds, if removing status differentials altogether is too hard) is probably likely to aid in that.

However, there is definitely the thing where kids select the one which has the “bullying target” trait and then decide which status ladder to claim they fail on as the pretense (“gay” etc.) and at most removing the pretenses would make them make up a different one for that kid.

That doesn’t mean that the “bullying target” trait isn’t something to intervene on, just that it’s probably a harder problem. The weird kids are definitely suffering from other forms of structural oppression, just ones that we haven’t managed to pin down and name as easily yet (growth mindset!). “Bullied” is a vague and nebulous cluster in thingspace and clearly carves reality at strong joints, but it’s hard to see what exactly is the core issue and how to turn removing that into an actionable strategy, so the best we have been able to do so far is either generic anti-bullying, or identity politics which finds a more easily definable subset of the whole and focuses on the simpler question of doing something about that one. Both have their strengths and sometimes fatal flaws.

Being normative in ways that aren’t strongly linked to valueful things (it’s good to enforce the norm of “don’t yell at people who mind being yelled at” when done within reason and not overzealously enough to hurt those less able to control their voice, but not useful to try to force everyone to conform to “talk to people enough to seem normal even if you don’t have anything to say to them and the whole thing makes you uncomfortable”, also different spaces for different access needs can be very awesome in this) does confer privileges, and ableism etc. are kind of approaching some edges of this but I haven’t seen the core thing itself named. If someone came up with a practically applicable theory for that one it could be inserted into the tool labeled “identity politics” and the people who know how to use that tool effectively could do something useful about it. Or alternatively an entirely different tool could be developed but it would need to pull the right memetic levers; there’s a reason “let’s just not bully anyone mmmkay” pretty much never actually helps.

(In other words, feel welcome to give links and suggestions: I do have those 4000 SJWs to inject the memes into, after all. And to anyone who is reading this: you’re probably erring on the side of underestimating the value of your possible contribution. Unless it features slurs or other easily recognizable features of schoolyard bullying it’s unlikely be completely worthless and it could provide some important insight to this stuff at least indirectly. Some really good ideas have come from “okay this is wrong, but why exactly is this wrong?”)

(Also, the kids who called me gay all the time turned out to be totally right after all; it was my gender they had been mistaken on)

multiheaded1793:

allfeelsallthetime:

Here’s a partial defense of “the gig economy”:

The people I know and encounter who are broke are usually, for one reason or another, blocked from getting “normal” office jobs.  Often they have a disability that makes that hard or impossible. Or they never got the educational credentials. Sometimes there are mysterious reasons (personality friction, the wrong class markers, etc) why the System just doesn’t work for them.

In another world, that could easily have been me. I had a very privileged upbringing and my brain stuff happens to be fairly mild.  But I can see very clearly how it could happen if a few things had gone wrong.

Theoretically, people who are in this position could get social services, but a lot of the time that isn’t the most practical thing in the world. If you were good at bureaucracy you wouldn’t be here in the first place.

So, what I see people doing is a lot of freelancing, of various sorts; some sex work; some “serial entrepreneur” stuff; part-time jobs working for their friends; coding bootcamps sometimes. And a lot of help from family or partners or friends.

The fewer formal barriers, in terms of bureaucracy and credentialing and interviewing, it takes to get dollars into your pocket, the better.  

And a lot of this stuff is illegal or is stuff people are eager to make illegal.  You want to sit at home, sew your own dolls, and sell them on the internet? There is a doll cartel that will stop you! I kid you not.

The progressive response is going to be something like “Well, we should implement policies that provide better for the unemployed or underemployed.” Ok, but until you do that, people need solutions that work for them now.

“The fewer formal barriers”? Which average does Uber deactivate people at again? 4.3? 4.6?

Every progressive attack on the gig economy that I have seen doesn’t just mention a need for better social services and a more secure living, it points out that the gig economy works hand in hand with the destruction of the welfare state.

I am as annoyed as you are with the dogmatic leftist asshats that don’t at all see its benefits to the marginalized - just as the rapacious Industrial Revolution did help empower many - but libertarians should stop pretending that the gig economy is *about* “sharing” and warm fuzzy community interactions. It is so successful because many workers are put over the barrel, so those who profit most from it have clear incentives to keep the situation this way.

I agree that the traditional welfare state and the gig economy aren’t that compatible but the exact mechanisms of that “hand in hand” relationship should really be examined more deeply as it’s really relevant to know which is causing which. If the gig economy is destroying the welfare state it’s a completely different thing than if it’s just an adaptation to a situation where something else is destroying the welfare state, and most likely I’d guess that it’s a mix of both as the gig economy provides something else an excuse to keep destroying the welfare state as people are better able to survive despite said destruction thanks to the gig economy.

This is also what I perceive to be the biggest flaw of most of the traditional progressive attacks on the gig economy as they all too often (at the very least appear to) claim that the gig economy is the causative agent in the destruction of the welfare state, completely forgetting that before the modern gig economy emerged they were talking about evil neoliberal policies destroying the welfare state. In Finland I would time this tipping point at the early 90′s when the big-ass depression caused by amateurish attempts at first-worldizing combined with the collapse of the most important trading partner (to which Finland’s relationship had in some ways been almost paradoxically colonialistic, with the USSR providing raw material and export markets and finnish industries reaping the rewards; what this says about their respective economic systems is left as an exercise for the reader) and a situation where the relatively unique bilateral trade with the USSR had left them unable to compete as effectively in western markets, was responded to by austerity and structural changes decried as neoliberalism ever since, until the gig economy arrived and everyone seemed to start blaming Uber instead of liberals (in the european meaning of the word) overnight.

For that reason, I’m relatively skeptical that the gig economy could’ve acausally induced the process of the destruction of the welfare state roughly 20 years before its arrival. That’s a bit too basilisky, or alternatively it should be considered a rather non-agenty idea in the same way as people expecting renewable energy sources to become commercially viable if initially subsidized enough, makes them subsidize renewable energy and the resulting investments could contribute to making renewables profitable earlier than otherwise, or people thinking that nuclear weapons might be pretty powerful makes them develop nuclear weapons.

Thus, I think attacking the gig economy is at best a derailment from the actual important question: what are the good things we think we used to have but don’t have anymore, and why aren’t we having them anymore, and how could we actually get them. In this framework focusing on the gig economy makes about as much sense as grumbling about how “our superpower could’ve totally kicked their superpower’s ass if only these evil mean nuclear weapons hadn’t been invented and it’s so unfair”.

The thing I care about is “why did the welfare state fail?”, not “whom can we blame?”, and most importantly: “can we un-fail it in a novel way that would be resistant to the original causes of failing?”. There is a reason why the traditional welfare state failed and not having enough naive progressive thinkpieces complaining about Uber (even though Uber is evil, not challenging that, and I’m switching to Lyft the moment I can get around their phone number bullshit) is not that reason. One reason, and a pretty important one in my opinion, is the utter inflexibility of the traditional welfare state.

I’ve spent years in the limbo between different forms of welfare because the system in Finland is utterly unable to deal with lives and people that don’t fit in the DIN-standardized scripts it expects, and in the end my solution was to fuck it all and move to San Francisco when an extremely unlikely opportunity presented itself. The Social Bureaucratic Party has earned a place of special contempt in my steel heart (only shared by the Christian Theocrats who, unlike their continental mainstream conservative namesakes, are actual honest-to-YHWH paternosteralists who say they love trans people and that’s why they find it so important to exterminate us and we just don’t understand how the boot on our necks is a boot of love but fortunately Jesus is willing to waste all of his kindness on us ingrates) for its love for means-tested welfare and patronizing social programs. Compared to being killed with utterly incompetent and condescending forms of kindness, the brutally honest “no, we really don’t give a shit about the precariat” of the right is quite refreshing in comparison.

In the big picture the gig economy is just a part of a larger pattern of impersonal economic forces crushing the less adaptive and efficient opposition of welfare states that were designed for the rather unique post-war situation of hierarchies, megacorporations married to the government, and expectations of job security approaching medieval serfdom. In that sense it could be said that the difference between 1950′s USA and USSR is substantially lesser than the difference between 1950′s and 2020′s USA. We tried the fifties, it stopped working (and never did work that well in the first place, for many people), and now we need to try something stronger.

The obvious first place to try would be to remove at the very least all forms of corporate and most forms of personal welfare and to simply replace them with a big-ass UBI and a dramatically simplified tax code. If Uber is exploiting desperate workers, let’s see what happens if we remove the desperation instead of the Uber, and if the new flexibility of the gig economy is a godsend of productivity and freedom, why not enable it further by removing its obstacles?

I fully expect most reasonable libertarians to agree that this plan, assuming that the total effective public spending is kept static (ignoring mechanisms which make two variations of implementing the same end result seem dramatically different depending on whether people are paid a negative income tax, or a basic income which is then taxed away, because those differences are totally fake), is at the very least strictly superior to anything any country has now; and with an inside view from the precariat I can definitely say that all non-evil leftists should think so as well (the ones who just want to loot the working classes and value-creators of today to benefit the peculiar petite bourgeoisie of redwashed rentiers who, in their inability to create value to justify their comparably comfortable status, resort to exploiting their established political capital to try to maintain an artificially ironclad position above the lumpenproletariat until economic changes undermine their safety enough to deliver them to the underclass hell of their own creation, can just go do something anatomically impossible alongside the crony capitalist conservatives who differ in only wanting to replace the “petite” with good old “haute”).

Most importantly, it’s an actionable strategy that could deliver better outcomes than before instead of trying to bring back something that we have reasonably good (in amoral terms) reasons to have lost in the first place.

multiheaded1793:

oligopsony:

nuclearspaceheater:

leviathan-supersystem:

bitcoitus:

leviathan-supersystem:

the belief that ‘order = hierarchy’ is one of the most pernicious mythologies. and it is equally pernicious whether it convinces someone that order is bad, or when it convinces them that hierarchy is good.

order is good. hierarchy is bad. they are not linked.

What the fuck is ‘order’

i mean it’s not limited to this but one example for what i’m talking about is “socially agreed on protocol for acceptable behavior”

romantic notions that people can all just do ~whatever they want~ are childish and ultimately rooted in liberalism.

For this reply we’ve secretly swapped tumblr communist leviathan-supersystem with my conservative Mormon divisional Chief. Let’s see if anyone notices.

Your Divisional Chief Is Correct Though

Actually, “doing whatever you want” and “no need for hierarchy uwu” were both kinda steelmanned by Marcuse with his concept of ~surplus repression~.

The way he does it is simple but kinda subtle, and I’m bad at explaining it, he says it, like, more persuasively and less naively - but basically you don’t *actually* want to do that stupid shit [1]  to the extent that people would need to shun you, call the cops, etc, right?

Self-image, self-interest, seeking immediate peers’ approval, etc - necessary repression in his Freudian-ish terms - would quite suffice for a more laid-back life, like they suffice in making (many) people e.g. wash their hands and flush toilets. But to do shit like Taylorist discipline, you need to beat people down more actively, past acquiescence and into submission - hence the “surplus”.

[1] Not unless you’re destitute, sick, angry, wasted, crazy, etc, which he kinda discounts, because, in his time and place, capitalism seemed to him about to eliminate glaring scarcity and obvious Dickensian misery. I mean, of course that looks incorrect now - but imo not that awful of him as far as extrapolation goes.

That sounds testable enough. Build a sufficiently low-scarcity intentional community with population and norms initially selected for prosociality, easy access to psych treatment etc. and let people do what they want, and see if it inevitably degenerates into either hierarchy or chaos. My money would be on “it probably could be done as long as authoritarians don’t get to fuck with it”

nbnightwing:

Hey guys? 

So I’ve been noticing that lately we’re making fun of adults who live in their parents’ basements again… 

Guess where I live! My parents’ basement! I’m mentally ill and autistic and not capable of living independently. I can’t go grocery shopping alone, I can’t drive, I can’t make transfers on public transportation, and if I’m left alone I forget to do things like eat, drink, shower, take my meds, and do laundry. Even if I were capable of independent living, I don’t make enough on disability to afford an apartment. 

If y’all are actually committed to intersectionality, you’d best find a better insult for misogynists than living in their parents’ basement, because honestly I already get down on myself for feeling useless enough without this stuff. 

Also this is totally ok for abled people to reblog and signal boost if you don’t mind? :) Thanks! 

texnessa:

sicktress:

petermorwood:

hortensevanuppity:

elodieunderglass:

sugaryumyum:

princessnijireiki:

latinagabi:

saturnsorbit:

Let’s not forget to acknowledge Alexandre Dumas this Black History Month

The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man. 

That’s excellence.

Let’s not forget that he was played on screen by a white man. And the fact that he was black is barely ever mentioned or the book he wrote inspired by his experiences.

Other things not to forget about Alexandre Dumas:

• chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.
• grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet
• he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.
• even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).
• (…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)
• famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”

• 

• for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.
• and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.

ALSO IMPORTANT:

SWAG

I am absolutely ashamed to admit I had NO idea Dumas was black.

when this post first went around (a year ago apparently) I was like BUT WHAT ABOUT DADDY DUMAS THOUGH because basically

• daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman 
  
• he invaded egypt
  
• the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”
  
• then napoleon showed up
  
• napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus
• the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”
  
• this did not make napoleon happy
• in fact it made him jealous
• napoleon felt so emasculated that he launched a campaign of revenge against General Dumas, including taking away his pension, that probably inspired a lot of Alexandre’s rather satisfying scenes in which fathers are nobly avenged and the money-grubbing villains are rubbed in the mud
  

I was never taught that he was Black either. WTF.

General Dumas (aka Thomas Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie) looked like this…

…and like this…

…while “Napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus“…

:-D

I suspect Alexandre Dumas would have laughed at that, because besides looking like someone who laughed a lot…

…he was also a foodie.

He was also born in present-day Haiti. Back then, it was the French colony of Saint-Domingue.

Read the fuck out of this of the day.