Today I inquired into the matter of “how to effectively incorporate myself to mooch off the taxpayers as a revenge for having my body regulated while simultaneously avoiding becoming one of them myself get state support to do the things I want to do while optimizing my contributions for the good of all of us, except the ones who are foreigners because fuck them, right, without the state stealing potentially thousands of bednets every year to some fuckers in Portugal mooching off our future which they looted for themselves pensions instead of EA”.
Turns out the pension system isn’t "basically Stasi" as it had threatened to be and nobody actually tracks that people pay exactly ~20% of the market value of their labor to old-ass assholes who always remembered to vote against women’s, gay, and trans rights but are perfectly willing to pick the pockets of trans lesbian effective altruists whenever their tax haven sangria jar needs refilling pensions, so it’s basically just a bribe of about $2000 a year for the taxman to leave me alone.
> youvegottobefuckingkiddingme.png
This is good news, because I don’t necessarily need to do terrible and perverted things with corporate shell games through Estonia just to keep that money for bednetting instead of having some old dudes spend it on sangria.
This is bad news because now I don’t have a convenient excuse to do terrible and perverted things with corporate shell games through Estonia, because that’s my kink.
Also, corporations are first-class people while people are second-class people. When I asked about the corporate welfare part of the equation, it was basically like:
> You are going to just take my claims at face value? > You aren’t demanding me to provide three different statements, with copies of their IDs and SSNs, that I do know people in SF and aren’t just bullshitting my way through? > You aren’t expecting me to provide notarized calculations from two market research companies proving that yes, programmers in SF do make that much money? > You aren’t expecting me to have my programming skills and their development trajectory independently assessed by a state-licensed evaluator? > You are actually treating me as a human being trying to make ends meet instead of a suspicious lazy piece of shit who’s just coming to mooch of The Right Kind Of People™’s money, until proven otherwise beyond unreasonable doubt, and usually at least partially even then?
> youvegottobefuckingkiddingme.png
It was a consistent escalation of disbelief because this was so totally unlike any asking-for-money-from-a-representative-of-the-System I had ever before encountered. Simply by the virtue of asking for handouts as an entrepreneur instead of a welfare recipient I’ve moved to somewhere around the 70th percentile in being-treated-with-dignity-by-the-system-ness. That’s absolute bullshit. I’ve literally just explained my devious albeit small-time (YGM) payroll tax evasion scheme only to retract it upon discovering that there’s a simpler way to achieve the same outcome, a day after the Panama Papers were published, and their approach still is “oh yeah, we trust what you say because you’re Business now and that’s Ingroup”. Had I been talking as a person-person instead of a legal person it would’ve been like “provide all these documents and have even your bank accounts scrutinized just to make sure you aren’t accidentally doing any investments for your future because having a future as anything other than easily exploitable semi-forced labor is verboten for the precariat”. I am still kind of shocked over that one.
And the overall atmosphere around business in this country? “I really think you should spend 3 years getting a degree instead of 1 year getting 1337 skillz because skillz grow obsolete but degrees never lose their value”
> youvegottobefuckingkiddingme.png
“I totally understand that a lot of you startup entrepreneurs want to keep your ideas secret because it’s not like ideas are a dime a dozen and only execution matters.” In fact one startup literally tried to sue their competitor for doing a similar thing and wasn’t immediately responded to with a massive outcry of WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS RIDICULOUS BULLSHIT, but instead a “hmmm, let’s see what merits there are to their case of basically trying to ban an entire industry just because they wrote the basic idea on paper before someone else did”.
> youvegottobefuckingkiddingme.png
Business in Finland, in a nutshell:
> youvegottobefuckingkiddingme.png
Next in the series (probably, if things go as anticipated): funding. Looks like I’ll have to get in bed with the government, but at least I’ll be using a condom. And topping. No GFE or bondage.
Can I get feedback on these? I’m going for “space empire” here, hence white on black and the futuristic-seeming selection from a sheet of graphene. Blue was because blue looked better than grey. Are these accidentally the same as something else or otherwise a problem? Any ideas for improvement?
The circle-nodes on the bottom one feel a little unnecessary.
The color balance on the top one feels off- maybe blue background and entirely-white shape?
Revisions!
Thoughts?
I like the top one. Hexagons are great for making stuff look futury. Maybe point the ends of the spokes? As is the flat edge kind of softens it. Don’t really like the nodes, though just having on the outer ring might work.
[Fair warning: long discussion of probably obvious points combined with me overthinking my brain ahead. Also, thanks to @sdhs-rationalist and Milan for reading over this to make sure it made some sort of sense to people who aren’t me.]
I just remembered a rather unpleasant incident, that occurred when I was in… 4th grade, I believe, that illustrates a point I’ve been trying to make about why I am, occasionally, extremely uncomfortable with asking questions or sharing information. Scene: first day of fourth grade. Past!me sees a new kid, let’s call her E. Past!me finds her extremely interesting, but is, even then, chronically shy with new people. Well, E eventually ends up near past!me, and we start talking.
past!me: Where are you from?
E: Well, my family’s from Korea, but-
Me: *innocently curious* North or South?
E: *deeply offended* South, of course!
Me: *internally* She must be really patriotic or something?
My point is that there’s a lot of unknown unknowns in conversation, and I could stumble on one of them in almost any context, and the worst part is that it’s impossible to guard against them, and more knowledge often makes things worse. If smol!Kira hadn’t known that there were, in fact, two Koreas, she would have nodded at Korea and moved on. The problem with this is that I could, still, be moving through a more subtle version of these sort of situations daily, and won’t realize until much later, if at all. So, of course, the obvious (read: easiest, if you’re me and terrified of people laughing at you) solution is not to do anything unless I’m absolutely certain I’m aware of all the potential undercurrents of the situation/subculture/social group, which in practice leads to not doing anything that I can’t edge into slowly, carefully, and and preferably with a friendly guide to explain the intricacies of the complex behaviors of the variety of homo sapiens in their natural habitat.
So, of course, the internet is perfect for this sort of mindset. I can lurk however long I want, observe people, watch group dynamics, see what people are tired of and the unspoken serious rivalries and the joking rivalries and if it’s acceptable capitalize your i’s. However, this all breaks down with private communication of any sort, because obviously I can’t watch how people, say respond to private asks or message each other. So this resulted, at least at first, in me molding a very careful presentation for each person I talk to. I’d match their use of capitalization, how they used emojis, where they put their breaks, how they communicated affection or distance or sarcasm, and tried to learn it in the same way you would learn a dialect of a language. I did this all for fear that I was sending the wrong cues with my methods of communication, and to avoid coming across as the ‘wrong type’ of person.
However, I still avoid using certain types of internetisms, like lol or most memes or “text speak”, even if the person I’m talking to uses them. This is, I think, because these are very, very far from my native dialect (a cross between Tolkien and Pratchett, for the curious), and so I’m afraid that there are North-Korea-is-actually-a-totalitarian-dictatorship type things that I’m completely missing about these words. I don’t think I’m missing something, but if I did I would never know, and control over my words is one of the most important ways I assert my identity. (Which is another post altogether, actually, but in summary: I was teased quite a lot for my vocabulary and diction as kid, and now make a point of using everything everyone laughed at to occasionally exaggerated lengths.)
This post sort of got away from me, but I think what I’m mostly getting at is that I need to be in control of how I communicate, and unfamiliar situations and methods of communication erode this control.
This post is interesting to me because it is both similar and different to how I view communication. For me, social interactions are not a minefield, they are a battlefield. Single interactions are won and lost on a small scale, and worrying too much about each one isn’t the job of the overall self/the general, it’s the job of the smaller social subroutines/the captains/lieutenants/NCOs. The general’s job is large-scale strategy.
And for me, social interactions are neither a minefield nor a battlefield but an asteroid field (like in unrealistic fictional works) where going in carelessly and underequipped can get one crushed but if one has obverved the orbital mechanics enough to know what to do and how to do it safely there’s lot of utility that can be mined out of them and fun to be had. All rumours of sneakily manipulating orbits into catastrophic patterns that will wipe out enemy planets in a couple of decades are completely unfounded and malicious slander.
star wars now canonically has (a) transition tech (b) implied REALLY GOOD transition tech
this means every character except probably Anakin can be trans
han? trans guy. leia? trans girl. luke? uncle owen saved up for his transition. obi-wan? the transliest. poe? trans. finn? trans. kylo? I regret to inform you, trans men, that you guys are going to have to own this one
I almost forgot boba fett, CANONICAL TRANS LESBIAN
At first I was like “how about Rey” but then I remembered Maz who’s definitely the transmotherest transmother who ever transmothered. She’s thousand years old, hatched who-know-how-many eggs from the pirates, smugglers and other scum who frequented her place, and a total tech nerd (all dat gear, remember) in addition to being utterly ~fabulous~.
Using someone else’s body so you can steal and eat the eggs that they would eat is wrong. I mean, idk why I have to explain why USING someone else as an object for food is wrong tbh.
Not everyone feels that way. Many people who keep chickens feed them a balanced diet to keep them happy and healthy, and also work to protect them from predators. You could say that it’s a symbiotic relationship in that way, much like humans and dogs, or even the way wolves and crows work together.
If the animals are stressed and unhappy then that’s different, and most people would agree that’s exploitative.
But to say that it’s impossible for humans and animals to ever make meaningful trades seems a little unfair to both sides, really.
One way or another, it is impossible to survive in this universe without consuming resources that could have gone to something else, and until we can photosynthesise and live purely off sunlight there are going to be tricky choices.
What you said:^
What I read: I like abusing animals and I’m too fucking lazy and drowned in my own selfishness and entitlement to change anything to help animals.
I’m gonna leave you with this:
You have to choices. Both give you all the nutrients you need, so health isn’t an issue.
Choice 1: Non violence, minimal pain, minimal misery, minimal oppression and minimal environmental destruction with huge health benefits.
Choice 2: Violence, pain, misery, oppression, environmental destruction and health epidemics.
Which do you choose? If it’s number 1, you should go vegan.
This is tangential, but it’s worth considering whether you are trying to reach out to non-vegans or just act tough in front of other vegans, to demonstrate your commitment to the cause. You know, Mormons struggle to make converts, and they greet everyone with a smile and only ask them to give up coffee! :)
A lot of people make the mistake of assuming that all good things go together and all bad things go together, and that’s exactly what you’re doing here. It sure would be nice if we could make choices without any awkward tradeoffs or compromises, but that appears not to be the case.
Many people cannot maintain a vegan diet for health reasons. Some end up eating eggs or dairy but not meat, some avoid eggs and dairy and eat fish; it all depends on their particular digestive issues and what is available to them.
Some people would suggest that tiling the entire world with wheat and soy is not the optimal choice from an environmental point of view, but opinions do differ on this particular issue.
I think you may want to reconsider your approach before you talk to other people about veganism. If encouraging people to switch could reduce oppression etc. and is so important, then you want to succeed in convincing people, and your current method is just going to make people angry, and more set in their ways.
Consider how you would react if people from other philosophies approached you in this manner, eg. pushing a political or religious worldview as a stark choice and insisting that if you choose wrong it must be because you are lazy and selfish. (Even better, imagine if two people offer you mutually contradictory ultimatums like this! You can’t possibly win!)
They say you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and you can always substitute rice malt or maple syrup (tasty!) if honey is not politically correct where you come from :)
I am vegan the same way someone might be christian; haha omfglol not even trying to do it properly but basically thinking I support the idea, just being too lazy and poor (YGM) and caring too much about other goals to really try. But still thinking that it’s a (slight) personal sub-optimality that I haven’t decoupled myself from the parts of the food industry that do things I’d rather not have the world contain.
And I am here to tell you that if you want to actually help animals, you don’t become a vegan, you optimize your food for cheapness and your money for effective animal rights advocacy, not the other way around. If you don’t do that, and instead buy vegan product X for $2 more than non-vegan product Y, you aren’t actually caring about animal rights, you are just doing æsthetics and purity.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against æsthetics and purity, I hacked my brain to think animals don’t food and am very happy mostly avoiding them. (To be specific, my brain thinks that plants do food very much, minerals do food sometimes even though that’s kind of funny when you think of it, and animals don’t food as much as minerals. So a package of instant ramen containing 1% salt and 0,7% meat is food enough for me.) I just mean that one shouldn’t pretend to be helping animals when one is optimizing for purity, because that is incorrect and helps animals less than actually, uncompromisingly, helping animals no matter what it entails.
(Also, tiling the world with soy tends to be an outcome of industrial meat production, as plant-based diets require a lot less land to provide the same nutrition. Grazing on non-farmable land is an exception, but otherwise processing plant matter directly for human consumption without an intermediate animal step tends to be more efficient.)
ACE’s numbers are incredibly over-optimistic about how much they get people to be vegan, everyone agrees with this, they don’t know how much over-optimistic they are and are starting to do research to figure out how much, the research is pretty fucking dispiriting. (Leafleting doesn’t work, online ads don’t work…)
So this is a nice essay about buying warm fuzzies and utilons separately, except that it is not true and for people who get a normal level of utilons from meat you can reduce animal consumption more effectively by not eating them yourself than you can by purchasing online ads convincing people to do so.
I stand corrected on the specific case, although I still suspect that there must be *some* way to leverage that stuff more effectively. I would be extremely surprised that buying not!cheese for 20€/kg instead of cheese for 8€/kg, or soy yoghurt for 3€ instead of animal yoghurt for 1,4€ would be the best marginal use for that money from an animal rights perspective. (in case you’re wondering, Finland is expensive)
At the very least one could pay someone else (such as school lunches etc.) to substitute more cost-efficient animal product replacements (such as adding some fraction of soy protein to meat products) after picking the lowest-hanging fruit oneself, or possibly investing in research to speed up the introduction of affordable and popular replacements.
The fact that one way of doing it doesn’t work doesn’t mean that purity veganism (the person being argued against doesn’t sound like one of the moderates who are happy with people reducing their burden if they don’t go all the way to scrutinizing the smallest details of ingredient lists) deserves praise and thus I want to signal against purity veganism pretending to be effective.
Why are you assuming that being vegan is more expensive than not being vegan? You’re ignoring the possibility of just not eating yogurt at all (which most vegans I know do, because vegan yogurt is awful) and instead eating Oriental-flavor Top Ramen, pasta with tomato sauce, baked potatoes, cabbage, lentils and rice, or any number of other inexpensive vegan options. I expect that most vegans spend less on food than non-vegans do.
The cost of veganism is in time, pleasure, and health, all of which matter.
You seem to me to be taking a sort of arguments-are-soldiers mindset. Deontologist veganism is silly, but there’s no reason to descend to their level.
I’m addressing price when the rest are held constant, because simplicity. Getting the same time, pleasure, and health with a vegan diet tends to take more money in most circumstances (I for one am certainly sacrificing veganism because I have neither the money nor the effort to spare; that’s why I talk about things like expensive cheese substitutes instead of the cheapest way of nourishing oneself). I believe it’s not rational from an animal rights perspective to be deontologically vegan, and in fact now my brain can even output the calculation for believing it in the general case:
Let’s assume that the suffering caused by 1kg of cheese is equivalent to a single meal with meat, because simplicity. Let’s also assume that everything else being constant I’d buy either that kilogram of cheese, or a kilogram of nutritious cheese substitute, with a difference of 12€. Now this means that I can alleviate more suffering if I can get someone else to switch to a meatless meal at a price of 11,99€ or less. That shouldn’t be too hard.
Take school lunches, for example. In Finland schools provide free food for everyone. It’s as predictably cheap and not-always-as-appealing-as-it-could-be as one would expect, but it’s free food even for the children of the families where their only warm meal is in school. A typical cost is (iirc) 1-2€ a meal.
Assume a school system which feeds 1000 children every day. If you get them to have the first friday of every month be a meatfreiday, it’s a net win of 10 000 kilograms of cheese a year, or equivalent to 119 900€ in marginal cost. With this money you can afford to hire a full-time lobbyist (we’re talking about not!rich activists here, not expensive people in suits) for an entire year, *and* pay the meat-free lunches for everyone at a higher price than the regular ones, thus making them more appealing to the students, *and* still have a lot left for bribery administrative expenses.
Thus, instead of buying not!cheese, if I care about animal suffering I should just buy the damn cheese and use the difference for political lobbying. Leafleting and ads might not work, but political lobbying in high-leverage targets probably does. The Arkea company in Turku serves 10 million meals a year, and upping the vegetarian days from one to two a week would have an impact of over a million meals, or 12 million euros when translated to cheese. Would it cost 12 million annually to successfully lobby it through? In a country where even the head of the drug police is a small-timer whose corruptedness doesn’t exceed six digits of graft money? Yeah. Buy the damn cheese, and advocate others to pick the low-hanging fruit as well.
Arguments aren’t soldiers, they are fighting robots and one is supposed to design the best fighting robot, enthusiastically copying design patterns from the strongest ones, and even if that one robot using this weapon was defeated doesn’t mean that my robot having an improved version of the same weapon would be just as vulnerable.
Getting the same time, pleasure, and health with a vegan diet tends to take more money in most circumstances.
This point I disagree with. For the vast majority of diets, given a healthy and not abnormally picky person who doesn’t live in a food desert, there exists a diet that costs the same amount or less, is just as tasty, takes just as much time, and is equally nutritious, except for the deficiencies that are present in all vegan diets (e.g. whole food sources of B vitamins) and thus cannot be solved with money. The process of finding that diet is time-consuming, however.
Like… what if instead of saying “let’s replace cheese with fake cheese!” we said “let’s replace milk with orange juice!” Milk in America is about $3/gallon, orange juice is about $5/gallon, there’s 16 cups in a gallon, and therefore you would have to find someone willing to have a meatless meal for twelve cents for it to work out even. Turns out most people should be vegan! My point is not that this is a good calculation (it’s not), it’s that your methodology doesn’t make any sense.
And on a theoretical level: there isn’t that much variance among the preferences of Healthy And Not Abnormally Picky People Who Don’t Live In Food Deserts. By becoming vegan yourself you are eliminating all the transaction costs involved in trying to persuade other people to become vegan (you’ve already done the expensive “convince person that being vegan is a good idea” part). We should expect vegan activism to be cheaper for very unusual people, those who would pay an unusually high price by becoming vegan.
(And that is ignoring the fact that meat is, pound for pound, significantly more expensive than plant-based food, and deciding not to buy an expensive thing is going to reduce your budget unless you decide to do it in the stupidest way possible.)
The process of finding that diet is time-consuming, however.
I think this addresses my “most circumstances” comment at least partially. There are transaction costs, and especially at the lower regions of the income spectrum (also I’m probably going to end up calling Finland a food desert because we don’t have all the freshies for a reasonable price unlike you not-only-intermittently-californians) some things tend to be “affordable, easy, vegan, choose two”. I’m noticing that I’m probably slightly overreaching from my personal experiences of preachy vegans telling me to peel and boil some fucking potatoes (waste of time: massive; edibility: not that impressive) instead of eating a frozen pizza with cheese on it (waste of time: minimal; edibility: sufficient) if I can’t afford the bourgie-ass rich people food which is both vegan and convenient, so I’ll roll back the claim a bit.
The things where non-vegan foods are cheaper are obvious low-hanging fruit and I’m not talking about them; I’m assuming someone is at least 60-80% vegan already and deciding between going full purity or efficiency.
The cheese vs. school lunches comparison is relevant because they end up being close enough with some not-totally-unreasonable assumptions about animal suffering (for example, a milk animal produces a lot more “food” than a meat animal despite producing more suffering as well, so milk is more animal-welfare-efficient than meat), and some milk products are the few things that I’m personally failing my veganism in because I haven’t found acceptable substitutes. Going for the same conversion rates, 10l of milk should be around 1kg of cheese, and soy milk is the obvious replacement instead of orange juice because protein content etc. and with local prices that’s 13€ instead of 7€ for the same benefit, for a difference of 6€/Approximate Unit of Suffering, suggesting that my preference to not use animal milk is more economically justifiable than using bourgie fake cheese would be, but still possibly less efficient than lobbying to make other people who don’t get to choose what they eat to not eat meat. I’m using soy milk because animals don’t food, not because I believe it’s optimal for animal welfare.
But if I wanted to optimize for animal welfare, there would probably be some point where the diminishing returns of veganism kick in when compared to trying to make others reduce their animal welfare impacts instead, and thus going for 100% full purity veganism, while maintaining that it’s solely because of animal welfare concerns instead of purity æsthetics (which I personally *do* share with my “animals don’t food” and am not judging at all), is inconsistent (and also annoyingly preachy when applied towards others). That’s the claim I’m actually trying to make and my brain is just bad at formatting it.
TFW you notice your ridiculous european polyglottiness leaking through to english. I find using capital letters for languages and nationalities weird (nordic), and when someone fucks up, they are an “upfucker” (I think that’s from german) instead of a “fucker-upper” (…no) or something like that.
Now the curious question is, what else am I doing weirdly that native english-speakers notice but I don’t?
