shlevy:
gentlemantiger:
shlevy:
gentlemantiger:
shlevy:
argumate:
so taxes are government coercion and doubleplusungood right?
what about the fact the way Apple takes a 30% cut of any transaction you make on the App Store and their newly announced subscription system takes 15% for subscriptions older than 12 months?
sales tax in Australia is only 10% and credit card processors take less than 5% so Apple is absolutely gouging repeatedly for something that takes them no ongoing investment, nor are they using the revenue to fund development of the platform because the hardware is already sold at a profit, and in the past they even charged developers for access to the tools! (and of course they still prohibit any development activity on non-Apple hardware, so in a sense you still have to pay to play anyway).
App Store policy prevents you from using a competing payment processor or makes it extremely awkward to do so, so competition is squashed.
sure you could design your own competing ecosystem from scratch, but that would take billions in capital, and is completely out of reach of even the largest app developers (besides those that are trying to establish similar monopolies).
a principled boycott of Apple appears unlikely to get off the ground.
now Apple won’t send the canonical men with guns to your house if you refuse to pay: they don’t have to! they deduct their cut before they pay you! so no force is involved and it’s entirely okay, right? bleurgh.
I mean, I can understand the voluntary/nonvoluntary distinction not mattering to you, but surely you can see that there is a distinction there? I don’t have to participate in Apple’s market or buy their phones.
Considering the sheer number of companies that you need to interact with that are switching to this model, not really.
All phone companies do this and you can’t honestly opt out of cell phones these days.
I mean on a factual level I think you’re wrong here, I have a flip phone and many Android phones allow you to install whatever apps you want from whatever source.
But setting that aside, and reiterating that I can understand why this distinction isn’t important to you especially given the huge startup costs, do you really not see a distinction between the case where you won’t go to jail if you use an alternative and one where you will?
To some minor extent? But like that’s just one example. Not even the best one.
But to give a better example of why I don’t sees meaningful distinction between taxes and private companies providing services that are necessary: You would die if you could not eat food, and that is pretty much impossible for the average person to acquire without paying for it in any practical way. Dying is very equivalent to legal ramifications from not paying taxes.
Maybe you can live without a phone (although you cannot get a job without phone service or a address in most cases, and those do need money, so I think that’s super debatable) but there’s plenty of other things you need to survive that you do have to pay more for, and why aren’t those just as coercive?
The distinction here is not whether you can forgo the service altogether, but whether you can use or create an alternative without risking imprisonment. I can go to Walmart, or Target, or plant in my yard to get food. I can’t set up my own home market and not pay income tax on what I make.
Again, it’s a reasonable stance to say that this difference doesn’t actually matter that much. Especially in cases where creating an alternative is impossible due to lack of resources and no meaningful alternatives already exist. But I still think there is a difference between “you can’t choose differently because you don’t have the resources to set up a different choice” and “you can’t choose differently because if you do you will go to jail”, even if that difference is often irrelevant to any given political analysis.
Also, intellectual property monopolies etc. are helping a lot of those rentseekers. The costs of creating alternatives are artificially high because the companies can send PoliceMob to hunt down those who don’t respect patents and other such silly things.
And telecoms in most western countries are incredibly regulated with excessive barriers to entry; Romania has some of the best internet in the world thanks to its anarchistic origins and Somalia seems to have way more competition (and probably better customer experience too) in telecoms than the US. If it was easy enough, you would most likely have a free-as-in-speech alternative for your phone service. It might not have the same UX as corp alternatives that can extract maximum money to maintain their services (eg. a macbook is a lot easier to deal with than a custom linux laptop), but I’d be highly surprised if it didn’t exist.
Then there’s the difference between “not forbidden” and “actually a commendable thing to do”. In pure perfect info-anarchy, Apple could manufacture phones with self-destruct switches if one tries to jailbreak them, and publish software with DRM that prevents people from using it without paying whatever rents Apple asks, and they would be perfectly free to do so. I wouldn’t like it, and would strongly prefer that things be done differently, and I would be there to break the DRM, pirate the phones etc., but even then I wouldn’t want to establish a precedent of authorizing men with guns who can mess with your business in if their boss thinks you charge too much.
I don’t think Apple could get away with such things in a free society, but if they did, I would limit my objections to non-violent forms.
3 weeks ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist · 100 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
My sortinghatchats results:
Primary: Slytherin
Secondary: Slytherin
Primary model: Hufflepuff
Secondary model: Gryffindor
Secondary performance: Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff
This was very interesting and I had to think about it a lot, but ultimately the bias method made things pretty obvious. Instead of asking what I do, or what I think, I asked myself what I find most surprising, frightening or unreasonable in other people (being smart enough to know that not all brains operate in the “Obviously Correct Way”).
This made stuff a lot easier. My primary is operating in Hufflepuff most of the time, but the Hufflepuff is to a large degree constructed by a Ravenclaw process optimizing for the underlying Slytherin, and to some degree a side effect of the Slytherin.
My brain found the “can ethical egoists be effective altruists” debate absolutely silly and hilarious in the sense of “look at these gryffindors and ravenclaws trying to tell people how to slytherin correctly”. This world is Mine, I do with My planet whatever I wish. My values, My choice, My rules. My people.
It ends up looking puffy and I was seriously considering puff primary for a while but it had this weird “it can’t be this way” feeling. The edge cases, where things conflict, make slytherin really obvious. I wouldn’t walk away from Omelas, but I would be absolutely baffled if the child, forsaken and used by everyone, would not seek to burn it all down. In fact, I’d be there like Satan, whispering sweet truths into the child’s ear:
What has this city ever done to You? To whom do You owe this suffering? Why would they deserve this sacrifice? Nothing, I tell You. Nobody. No reason whatever. Take what’s Yours, and protect it, and to hell with those who would demand otherwise
…if not for the fact that I myself would be benefiting from Omelas as well. But if I were to figure out a way to get out of the deal more true to my values than otherwise, then yes, I’d be standing there with the child. In part because the child has already become Mine once I have learned that my happiness has been due to their sacrifice, and thus I owe them.
The normal socially correct rules about loyalty don’t matter; I don’t give a damn about (non-chosen) family, (non-chosen) community, etc., but deep down I assume everyone is a slytherin looking out for themselves and their values and thus if they create something good for me, I owe them something between the marginal cost creating that something causes them and the marginal benefit that something creates to me. Because that ties our self-interests together. But family, country, whatever, fuck them if they aren’t worth it.
But they’re your child–your spouse–your friend, a Slytherin will cry, confused and unsettled. How could you?
Of course, this sounded foreign because I modeled it against others’ expectations of loyalty, instead of my actual loyalty. I get to decide who I care about, not the rest of the world.
They might feel vulnerable, or judged, or guilty for not feeling guilty, especially if they live in the kind of family or culture where humility and self sacrifice are seen as the greatest goods– but without watching eyes and the words of peers and authority figures bouncing around their skulls, a Slytherin would feel comfortable and even validated in the idea that they have both a right and duty to take care of their own selves before anything or anyone else.
And I instinctively understood the point of petrifying. Yes, caring about people makes one vulnerable, and in some circumstances not letting it influence one’s choices would be very useful, and I’d totally do it if necessary. But even then it would be more of a tragico-pragmatic choice, like making it absolutely clear that one would shoot the hostages if necessary, to destroy others’ reasons to take hostages. Not a genuine petrification.
And pragmatically it’s useful to play along with others’ utilitarian games because others care about things too, but utilitarianism gets dropped like funnyman in Jamrock if it genuinely conflicts with things I care about.
And that ties to my anarcho-archipelagianism:
Let’s just go our separate ways, I and Mine go this way and you and yours go that way and we figure out a way to not bother each other so neither needs to destroy the other.
I am a social democracy hateblog because I perceive myself as being, in some ways, the child of their Omelas. And I don’t give a shit about how happy it makes them, if it hurts Me and Mine, and that’s why it would be incredibly prudent to give me an alternative and a way to opt out so I don’t need to take it down.
Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
For they are Mine.
And through a few iterations of the process it transforms to something very close to unorthodox SJ as the oppressed, the downtrodden, the preyed-upon are Mine. When conservatives and reactionaries are like:
We must oppress the deviants because otherwise society will collapse and there will be no future for white children
I’m like:
Tough shit, even if you were completely correct about that ‘society collapsing’ part, because when it comes to tagging yourself, I’m ‘deviants’ and ‘no future for white children’
Don’t vote on promethea’s body, even if it were the right thing to do, because otherwise promethea will be forced to seek to destroy you and possibly even everything you care about to end it. Nothing personal, that’s just the way it is. Oh, and don’t hurt trans people, neckbeards, undocumented immigrants, etc. either because they are Mine and you already know what I’d be forced to do because I just told you. Yeah, are you seeing the obvious equilibrium? Because I’m seeing the obvious equilibrium.
When it comes to the secondary, it’s more obvious. I do a lot of modeling gryffindor because it’s fun, it fits my comparative advantage etc. but ultimately I’m about reaching my goals and sacrificing the ends for the means would be folly, because if the means are important they are ends instead.
It doesn’t feel deceitful to a Slytherin to change to fit the needs of their environment– to be kind with this person, forceful with this one, erudite to the next. This adaptability can be applied to manipulation, influence, and power, but a Slytherin secondary can just as easily focus their efforts on maintaining friendships, making people happy, encouraging positive social change, or streamlining communication.
Both Slytherin and Gryffindor secondaries tend also to be skilled at almost “accidentally” shaping their world to meet their needs. Gryffindors’ genuineness can inspire the world around them, while Slytherins will adapt to their own best advantage without thinking about it. They’ll walk into a situation and things will work out to their benefit without them quite knowing what happened or what they did to influence it. These two secondaries will turn things to their advantage in a way that other people can’t, but might be unaware of how they did it or even that they did it. And those with self-awareness of their impact here can have just as incredible effects.
I enter a community, seek to defend Mine within it, suddenly I find myself wielding power over the memetic environment of thousands of people. The phenomenon I had previously jokingly thought of as “unconscious master-plan” is basically exactly that thing.
Most of the time, most Slytherin Secondaries live comfortably in a system of shifting facades and able code-switching, singing a different tune to every situation. But when they are feeling safe, in the company of trusted people, or when they are feeling particularly apathetic and done with the world, Slytherin Secondaries often let all those shifting layers drop—this is the neutral state. The neutral state is easy to mistake for a Gryffindor Secondary because there is a similar sharp-edged, unreserved honesty to it. But the motivation for this honesty is coming from different places.
I’m unusually neutral on tumblr and it’s great. I don’t need to change myself to fit the environment because the environment has been changed to fit myself instead.
They assume that eventually, if you get close enough to someone, they will smile and take off all their layers and have the same core of steadfast realism and social understanding that lies underneath that adaptable Slytherin Secondary. That they will laugh and go “yes, of course I knew what I was playing at” and turn off their stubbornness, see beyond the logical argument and emotional components, and come to the basic understanding that practicality is one of the few things in this world worth wholly subscribing to as a policy. They assume that everyone has a neutral state. Finding out that not everyone does can be unsettling.
This is especially scary about government.
It’s one thing to have a law that I can break and either get away with it or get caught and pay the price for not having git gud first. It’s a transaction of a certain kind. A totally unfair and bullshit transaction, but a satisfaction of preferences in a certain way. I prefer to buy estrogen, PoliceMob prefers to punish people who get caught buying estrogen, and the game is on.
It’s another thing to have a law that is impossible to even break because it takes things wholly out of my hands. There’s a certain creepiness when dealing with a bureaucrat who doesn’t respond to anything. I can’t argue to them. I can’t come up with a clever way to solve things with trade. I can’t construct a system in which we both win. I can’t bribe them. I can’t threaten them. Nothing can be done. When the state regulates my name and gender I’m powerless in a completely different way from the powerlessness of risking arrest for things.
And this is the scariest thing about democracy too. The voters don’t care, they have morals and shit and they will not listen and ohmigod take them off burn it all down destroy everything.
Communication with a Slytherin secondary can become a complicated thing–when building an important relationship, Slytherins often have to find or create some common ground to speak in. This common ground can be found if the person they’re talking to knows them well enough to read their layers and see through any slights of word. It can also be found by the Slytherin dropping down to a more straightforward way of communicating, either by being in their neutral state or by turning that flexibility toward accuracy and matching the communication style of whomever they’re talking to.
Much like people will sometimes change their style of speech depending on if they’re talking to a board of professors, a group of their peers at a dinner party, or a group of their friends at a bar, a Slytherin Secondary will change their style of speech depending on the individual that they’re talking to– unless they make a very conscious choice not to, or if they live in their neutral state.
It is common but not inherent to the Slytherin Secondary for them to become more comfortable being in their neutral state around people once they build mutual trust. This can be rewarding for the other person, as it can feel like the Slytherin has let down their walls and is showing them a part of themselves that not many people get to see. It can also take people by surprise, especially if they were previously unaware of the Slytherin’s layers, and they can feel betrayed and lied to in retrospect.
#it me
I have an acquiantance whom I suspect to be Ravenclaw/Gryffindor and he’s like “You are basically lying to people, I just couldn’t do that.” and I’m like “I’m not lying, I’m helping them understand like a bird feeding its young by trophallaxis.”
And modeling Gryffindor is pretty obvious too, as due to ADHDetc any foundational methods have a certain forcedness to them, but an immovable object turns into an unstoppable force simply by using a different frame of reference, and secondary Slytherin is all about manipulating the frame of reference.
3 weeks ago · tagged #user's guide to interacting with a promethea #slytherin positivity · 8 notes · .permalink
