while I was pretty thoroughly corrupted to begin with in the ways people usually think of, Ozy was a significant influence in turning me American and that is strange and worrying and entirely correct and perfectly fitting and I don’t know how the fuck it managed to happen and I don’t mind it although I have no idea how I managed to turn into one who would not mind such a thing because thinking back I totally expect that I would’ve minded and tl;dr: ozy is corruptive in even strange novel unexpected ways
ascerel asked: How serious are you about the "Every country has “those guys” who are only good for deathnote-fodder" thing? Sorry
First: #support your local supervillain is the evil tag, not to be taken 100% seriously. It’s Dark promethea, the side of myself that is best left as online ranting to relieve a frustration on the universe otherwise sufficient to cause so much facepalm to sprout forth as to destroy all the remaining rainforests in Southeast Asia to make room for the plantations necessary to hold them in.
Second: if one has to deathnote a national-level politician to deliver a message to the rest, one would obviously choose the most useless, the most harmful, the most dangerous, and the most anti-humanity politicians one can find. And as it happens, while I do not actually condone deathnoting politicians (although I acknowledge that this view might be subject to inevitable reconsideration were I to acquire such an artifact, which is why it’s probably good that such artifacts most likely don’t actually exist), but if one were to, I don’t think one would have to think too hard and long on which guys to sacrifice. I’m from Europe, we have really terrible politicians around here, and they are literally killing people through their really terrible policies.
For the record – do not give me the One Ring. Do not give me the Death Note. Do not give me the Left Hand of God.
Because I will be as beautiful and terrible as the Morning and Night, 私は新世界の
神
となる, and the hand of Providence shall deliver the weak from their suffering.
I won’t stoop as low to say that you should give them to me, but admit it, you guys would totally give them to me just to see what I’d do
Also, y’all know you want to see what I’d do with Phenomenal Cosmic Power.
Yes; although I suspect there’s one thing we both already know we’d do with that power and that we expect the other to know and expect as well. (and that it probably applies to most other people described by the relevant xkcd too)
Well, yes, but we want to see the method and the details of the implementation.
~rationalist acausal magic~ is the answer.
To share the Phenomenal Cosmic Power with those, and only those, who themselves would share PCP with oneself, if and only if, one would share PCP with them as the result of such reasoning; and to otherwise seek to seize said PCP to oneself.
Splitting up the future-light-cone is far preferable to a conflict over PCP with other ambitious people.
Where do coffee, tea, soda, transition hormones, and modafinil go?
I’d say that modafinil is purple, hormones are green (and purple secondary), the rest are pretty generic and not that descriptive. (I want to be mean and snark about coffee being red based on global consumption rates but it would be slightly unfair)
For the record – do not give me the One Ring. Do not give me the Death Note. Do not give me the Left Hand of God.
Because I will be as beautiful and terrible as the Morning and Night, 私は新世界の
神
となる, and the hand of Providence shall deliver the weak from their suffering.
I won’t stoop as low to say that you should give them to me, but admit it, you guys would totally give them to me just to see what I’d do
Also, y’all know you want to see what I’d do with Phenomenal Cosmic Power.
Yes; although I suspect there’s one thing we both already know we’d do with that power and that we expect the other to know and expect as well. (and that it probably applies to most other people described by the relevant xkcd too)
If I end up stuck with the One Ring, there is no way I’m giving it to the cool ambitious rationalists. As Alison and crowd have pointed out before, that thing corrupts. I think the consensus ended up being that we give it to aprilwitching, and only handle it in one of those lead-lined cart things you use to keep radioactive stuff away from you if you handle radioactive medicines a lot.
If the artifact is not one of the Inherently Corrupting ones, it goes to basically any of my online acquaintances who seem ethical, ambitious, and interesting who can either pick it up from me themselves or otherwise arrange secure transit.
So, an interesting question: that logic holds for the one ring. What about the other artifacts? Would you, for example, feel comfortable giving me the Death Note?
(Death Note b/c degree of corruption is…unclear, at best.)
Clearly the Death Note belongs to me, because we absolutely don’t have any evidence that giving it to someone named Kira would end poorly.
Death Note mentioned, and I heard someone here likes contrived scenarios leading to world domination, so let me present mine:
I’ve got 21 days of untraceable control on anyone, with the unfortunate side effect that it’s lethal. Kind of a bummer that last one, but it can be put to good use.
Now, were I to acquire one, I’d naturally test it on someone evil, well-known, and actively hunted, so that I’d get the news of it working reliably and using it would only leak the information that someone who knows about $famous_bad_guy did it, or in other words, basically zero. For example, if there was some kind of an intertationally hunted terrorist or something, and a superpower were to take them out in a surprise raid 21 days after me acquiring the Note, that would be pretty strong and safe evidence that it works.
Then, politicians. Every country has “those guys” who are only good for deathnote-fodder (such as nazis) and I’d use them to deliver my messages to the world’s influential people. In their own language of course, so they wouldn’t leak information. The rules themselves are pretty simple: do what the sovereign of the new world says, or face the consequences. Only those who disobey, or are actively extra-evil would need to be taken out. Trying to hunt down criminals is a waste of human life when one could be reshaping institutions surgically.
The interesting part would be whether I could use it to control other things; for example, would writing “$person dies from heart attack after hearing about $marvellous_invention on the news” make someone else invent $marvellous_invention? If it could, then that’s obscenely exploitable. Whoops, someone accidentally released gene-drivered mosquitoes with inevitable eradication instincts into the wild and the biggest bioethicist in the world had a heart attack, how “unfortunate”. And maybe someone were to invent a strange apparently reactionless source of propulsion or something too.
multiheaded1793 asked: "Privatizing public services and state-owned corporations would be most naturally done by handing ownership to their users and workers"... appears to be a bad enough idea that it was more or less consciously implemented as a wild primary accumulation grab in Soviet Russia. Vouchers...
Yes, I’m quite aware of the failure of the soviet voucher program, and that’s why I wouldn’t do it that way. I’d expect that turning public assets into cooperatives of the smallest functioning size (single clinics instead of county hospital systems; buses given to individual drivers instead of city bus corporations, etc.) would be far less vulnerable to outside capture away from ill-informed and desperately poor owners.
If one believes that workers who cooperatively own their workplace would be willing to sell their ownership and mutual autonomy to some external capitalist for way too little without an authority to keep them in line, then I’d suppose that it’s their property and they’re free to do what they want, but I don’t think that would be such a massively high risk.
The actual problem I’d anticipate for the newly created free cooperatives is that many of them would have no sustainable business plan.
While some, like clinics and schools, have an obvious source of value-creation and would only require an administrative adjustment to become well-functioning businesses (or non-profits, or whatever the workers want to turn them into), some ex-bureaucracies such as the National Pension Agency (whose function is to simply gatekeep welfare instead of doing anything useful) would be in really deep shit without the state apparatus of violence creating artificial use for their “services”. They would still have their offices though, and the workers would be able to scramble to figure out some kind of a productive use for them, or simply abandon the sinking ship and go find real jobs instead.
Some, like social services offices, would be somewhere in between; they would have counselors who could sell their services on the market for people who need help (and can easily afford to buy it with the 15k€), but they would need to shed their artificial make-work parts.
Obviously this isn’t equal in any meaning of the word; someone whose comfy office bureaucrat job turns into a glass parking lot would be in a really unfair position compared to another office drone who happened to be in a really well-functioning hospital, but tough shit, maybe they should’ve gone to the private sector in the first place if they didn’t want to be dependent on arbitrary state policy (oh, wait…), but that’s what the floor of 15k€ is for. It’s still way more than what they themselves dispensed to the poor while they were doing their own coercive state job.
Furthermore, the capital that actually makes people rich obviously belongs in the national investment fund instead, generating revenue and growing itself so that taxes could be eventually, if not abolished outright, at least drastically lowered when the publicly owned capital would be enough to pay for the basic income or a substantial fraction of it. And if someone were to buy up the welfare gatekeepers and somehow turn them into a profitable business on the free market, then that would be quite an amazing feat of value-creation and I wouldn’t be too bothered with such a genius becoming a billionaire. This mutualization plan would mostly be about “carving up the beast” so that whatever productive can be salvaged from the “expenses” column of the national budget would not concentrate too much in the hands of a few while still being able to reap the rewards of eliminating bureaucratic control of things that do have a way of functioning on markets.
And most importantly, it would be way too hilarious to see the CEO of the postal office (salary: ~500 000€/yr, a lot more than most executives on the private sector) sweating in front of The Owners, aka. mostly the previously precarious postal drones whom the executives had just recently been thoroughly kicking (wages: ~12 000€/yr at the lowest). And the same for all the other state monopolist cronies. I’d expect that this would be a pretty big redistribution from useless executives and bureaucrats to nurses, teachers and other Actually Value-creating public sector employees, who have been unfairly screwed over by the parasites way too much for way too long.
“It’s not only undesirable but *literally impossible* to afford basic social infrastructure or redistribute basically anything, so suck it up” is perhaps the most amazing article of faith I’ve seen among US-style libertarians.
Yup, it’s like Western Europe does not exist.
What if EU implodes and Western EU except Germany just go into full crisis?
You have to admit that the fiscal situation in most of Western Europe is not pretty and Brexit, Greece and peripherals really could be ticking time bombs. You can say money are just numbers on paper, but they really do reflect something fundamental even if non-obvious and distorted.
Like I don’t think I need to say that it’s entirely plausible that by making today nice it could make the future a lot worse, since that’s what more or less Greece did. In this case whoever they imported stuff that they can’t make easily stopped giving them imports because they can’t come up with those numbers in their bank account.
It’s easy to say pretty words, and I’m sure rich people as a whole are incredibly good at that. But if they are really less charitable than the average person, from that article I saw floating around, then probably you (idk what’s your objective, but just a reasonable guess xD) need to be careful there. Since we also can agree they are probably very good at dodging bills too. And just let you know I want those skills too for obvious reasons because I believe with good faith and careful consideration that it’s in my best interest to do so.
“We” might not be able to resist completely, but we are really good at it!!! And our resistance makes us less productive and also incidentally salt the earth for the rest of you as well. And who knows, I feel maybe, just maybe you people here actually will be pursuing your objective better if you kept us around and just tried to focus on structuring things better than to trying to take more and more blindly without focusing on the logistics. But then again this is like the whole strategy from a subgroup of us who’s politically connected. Because I’m pretty sure bureaucratic power must stroke someone’s fetish out there as well.
And honestly my charitable mood from my childhood over the years gradually turned sour from seeing how entitled people can be, so who knows. I don’t think I’m the only one here who might put up extra effort into resisting just because ~feelings~ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Greece? You want to invoke Greece in the last 6 years to caution against the successes of Western Europe since 1950 (arguably, since Bismark in the German Empire) ?
A crisis which was in part due to corruption, widespread tax evasion and financial advisors from Goldman Sachs advising the Greek government to misreport their level of debt ?
Where did the economic crisis began by the way¹ ? Oh yeah, a boom-and-bust cycle in the USA.
And then you want to argue why it is desirable for you to acquire those ‘skills’ ?
“Take more and more blindly” does not represent the reality. Increasing volumes of tax evasion, weaker enforcement of tax laws, greater sophistication of tax avoidance, on the other hand…
Nice veiled threats too and spite against the “entitled”. Thanks for reminding me why I am for very large punitive damages for tax evasion.
(note: even the IMF says that only in extreme cases redistribution lead to bad growth outcomes)
¹not that the Greek situation was stable, mind you.
Yep, the veiled threats and the laughable… petulant tone really got me as well. Also, nice passive-aggressive essay in the tags there…. Pretty words this ain’t.
Tagged with: politicsreference for discussioni honestly think with existing revenue you people already can do a lotyou also can reform god dam corporate tax and stuffand that will raise revenue and growthand you can reform welfareand bite the fking bullet and end protectionismmaybe if you people even did a bit rather than exacerbating it more I wouldn’t have gone to the other campbut I’m deep in there now and you won’t ever get me back except make me disinterested in topics like thiswhich is what I’m trying to do because I want $$$$$$$$$$
Okay seriously, I do agree with NN on a lot of this. The socialdemocracies of Western Europe are not in trouble because of the inaffordability of redistribution, they are in trouble because of the inaffordability of all the bullshit they’ve tacked onto the redistribution.
Finland could pay every single person a basic income of 15 000€ a year without increasing taxes a single cent. That’s almost double the minimum pension, nearly three times the spending money people on welfare get (along with rent, and significantly more than the highest amount welfare pays out even with rent included), and more than what tens of thousands of working poor earn. And as a result poor people’s effective marginal tax rate would go way down from the 50-100% it’s now.
And this includes children. Right now the state pays, at most, 4000€ per child; free education, healthcare and childcare would end but the extra 11 000€ a year would go a long way in letting poor families access the services they need. Or if we want to account for the fact that not all families would know to purchase the right insurance etc. and spend 5000€ per child per year in providing vital services to them we would “only” up the money children directly get to 10 000€ a year.
And obviously this massive basic income would render pretty much any tax scheme progressive, so we could drastically simplify the tax code. I don’t even know what the true transparent flat tax level would be because the system is so complicated with all kinds of hidden fees and multi-level taxes, but it would make things simpler. If one assumes that, after privatizing all other forms of social security (15k€ is already more than a lot of people make even from the income-dependent benefits) the income tax level would end up a transparent 40%, someone earning another nominal 15k€ on top of the basic income would get to keep 24k€ to themselves. Easy, simple, not hard to calculate. (And if it sounds ridiculously high, one should note that currently around 25% of people’s wages goes straight to pensions but it’s hidden so they only see 7% as “”“the employer pays”“” the rest (they buy it because most people cannot into math))
But the tax system itself could use some (and by “some” I mean “an awful lot of”) change; property taxes should be replaced with land value taxes, income taxes could be shifted onto consumption, a revenue-neutral carbon tax should be instituted, corporate taxes taken only from dividends to owners, etc.
And we could end so many laws. Who needs regulations on working hours, minimum wages and benefits when one has the 15k€ option to simply tell the boss to screw themselves if a job offer is unacceptable? (only statists) Ending corporatism and freeing both employers and unions to negotiate without external coercive intervention would make the economy a lot more responsive to changes, and everyone has that 15k a year to fall back on even if they end up without work (and a lot of bureaucrats rightfully would), along with any savings they have. That’s a lot more than what most working-class people currently would get from unemployment insurance.
Privatizing public services and state-owned corporations would be most naturally done by handing ownership to their users and workers; so schools would be owned by parents and teachers, universities by students and professors, buses by drivers, etc.; this would prevent a massive transfer of wealth and capital from the state to cronyist oligarchs while allowing all service providers to participate equally on the markets. Finland is one of the per capita richest countries in the world because of its absolutely bloated pension funds (in fact, to such an extent that the national debt is effectively -80% of its nominal value) and this money could be either used as the basis of a post-labor universal capital fund, or immediately redistributed to everyone as an investment account of 15 000€ while keeping enough in reserve to cover the national debt (of course, paying out the debt would be folly when the interest rates are around zero but the return on investments is several percent; any sane corporation would borrow and invest on such terms).
Furthermore, this would completely decimate the non-productive parts of the economy, freeing both labor (which is not desperate and exploitable because remember that 15k€ a year?) and money to productive things (of course, ex-bureaucrats would be so pissed at having to learn how to do good things to people, but you know what scorn dem).
The private sector would be almost as dramatically rearranged as the previously public sector, as artificial industries such as agriculture (where something like 50% [fucken sic] of revenue comes from subsidies instead of selling things people want to buy) and exploitation of forced labor (the current welfare system is inhumane and there are basically sweatshops where disabled people work for 1,5€/h [fucken sic] making scarves rich ~designer~ assholes sell for 300€ a piece, pocketing the difference) would be flattened into the economic equivalent of a glowing glass parking lot. The ensuing stimulus of domestic demand and the abolition of many cumbersome regulations would open up massive opportunity for people to make a value-creating living while reducing the economy’s dependence on big businesses. The abolition of regional subsidies and artificial limits on the housing supply of Helsinki would trigger a significant movement into the big cities where jobs are available, workers productive, and services cost-efficient.
And if one wants to get really hardcore, abolishing patents and copyrights would be a pretty huge move. Suddenly obscene barriers on innovation would be wiped away and people wouldn’t need to waste time figuring out whether they need to push lots of paper just because someone else “owns” a number, and drugs and many other things would get dramatically cheaper.
And they should totally build the hyperloop between Turku and Stockholm.
Without an increase of a single cent in taxes.
Yeah, it would be quite a drastic shock doctrine. A glorious, magnificent shock doctrine leaving behind only the ashes of the old system. Ashes which the seeds of freedom and poor people finally not being treated shittily could blossom from. A beautiful, terrifying cataclysm of creative destruction. The value-destroyers and parasites would feel the pain of righteous vengeance, a pain which would be far less than what they had previously imposed on others because 15k€ a year.
But instead, we have some “”“engineer”“” who got lucky and became a millionaire prime minister despite having no economic or political savvy whatsoever, and whose dream seems to be to become the Thatcher of Finland; a dream he pursues mainly by trying to become as widely hated as Thatcher was/is, and assuming the rest follows on its own.
