promethea.incorporated

metagorgon:

argumate:

xhxhxhx:

#xhxhxhx #fighting the good fight

@argumate​ is tired of my neoliberal bullshit

The threat of new entrants keeps monopolists on their toes. Deep, liquid, and liberal capital markets ensure that the entrants always have access to deep pools of money. 

Deregulation is good, privatization is good. Private firms do what public firms don’t. There were too many mines and rail lines, too many plants, too many lines, too many products, and too many employees. There are still too many post offices and airlines. 

Norton Villiers Triumph was a mistake. British Leyland was a mistake. British Aerospace was a mistake. British Airways was a mistake. British Steel was a mistake. British Rail was a mistake. British Coal was a mistake. There was much to be liquidated, and much that was not.

Deregulating the railroads was a good thing. Rate setting, employment, and capital investment did not need to follow the priorities of the regulators. It could follow demand instead, and liquidate everything that was not worth the cost. And the Bell System breakup was a wash. 

I don’t know whether the app market works the same way, but you’ll forgive me if I’m skeptical of state monopolies and state regulation of private carriers. It doesn’t usually work well.

I’m always eager for your bullshit! :)

It’s certainly easy to point to examples of successful deregulation and privatisation, and China could benefit from a whole heap of that right now.

It’s also possible to point to awful failures of privatisation where the state ends up subsidising private companies to do the same job more expensively, typically due to other natural monopoly constraints that make it impossible to have a truly competitive market.

But back to Apple, that may actually be an example of an overly-regulated market, just the regulation is being done by a (huge) company, not the state.

While the app market seems free and competitive as absolutely anyone can make an app and try to sell it, Apple has absolute discretion on which apps they approve for sale and can deny you at any time based on criteria they don’t even have to reveal. They use this power to protect their monopoly, but this can make it very risky to innovate as you have to develop the entire app and submit it for approval and only then once the entire development costs have been paid will you find out if Apple will let you sell it or not.

Then of course if you make something amazingly brilliant and lots of people buy it, Apple take 30% of your revenues in exchange for doing absolutely nothing :|

The app store itself is a terrible piece of software, but you can’t make a better app store and charge more competitive rates as Apple won’t let you.

Basically if the tech giants were states they would not be very good ones.

monopolists are not kept on their toes because they use their glut of market power and collude with related monopolies in order to destroy or consume all newcomers. tech startup culture is about getting your company valuable enough for one of the agglomerates to notice you and perform extend-embrace-extinguish on your products in return for paying back your investors and yourself. the only exchange of value is in currency between the capitalists; the social value of the product is lost and even corrupted against the consumers.

the lifecycles of these giants are on a continental scale, they do everything they can to ensure that they themselves survive. all selective pressure has been lost, and these are in fact worse than the government because they have political power and simultaneously answer to none but their owners.

companies aren’t selected for market freedom or perfection, they’re selected for survival. the free market is an unstable equilibrium. at the very best you have different monopolists and monopolies at the helm, and that is not better.

IP, IP, IP

Those companies would be in a lot more precarious position if the state didn’t send PoliceMob after anyone who “violates” “ownership” of numbers.

And excuse me, but I’ve got to be the one to say this: not all startups

Some of us are actually trying to bring down some giants for being so shitty. The freedom of dying starving wolves is just a nice bonus compared to the livestock complacency of being a corp drone.

(via metagorgon)

3 weeks ago · tagged #yes i went there #my goal is to overshoot 'shamefully embarrassing' so hard #that it wraps right back to 'sincerely inspirational' #future precariat billionaire · 100 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

sinesalvatorem:

socialjusticemunchkin:

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

sinesalvatorem:

socialjusticemunchkin:

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

There’s been a recent trend of How I Got A Rationalist Social Circle posts going around, and I’ve noticed that most of them begin with “I was too nervous to talk to anyone but then I talked to @sinesalvatorem and she was super nice, and then I made a bunch of other friends!”

I mean if we’re going to have an Official Rationalist Welcome Wagon Alison’s probably the right person for the job

I approve of being the official welcomer. Anyone who wants to be initiated should totally hit me up.

Actually, tbh, your talents are being underutilized.  Too bad The Rationalist Community isn’t the type of organization that has marketing pushes to Recruit More Girls.

We could put you in a sexy outfit and have you dart around the edges of the Blue Tribe, enticing young girls to follow you into the Forests of Rationalism like some kind of gay will-o-the-wisp.

What!? Why would I prey on innocent Blue Tribe girls and turn them into My People??? *nervous laughter as I close my OkCupid tabs*

…why wouldn’t we be the type of organization to have a marketing push to Recruit More Girls? The rationalist community is what we make of it, and I don’t see any reason not to make a girlsmoreofrecruitment drive of it. We don’t have a rationalist czar telling us _not_ to do it.

As someone who grudgingly matches the description “girl” (at least by people who don’t know that my brain wants to belong in the “totally made-up category” of “N E O T E N I C androgyny” instead) and who perfectly matches the description “I was too nervous to talk to anyone but then I talked to @sinesalvatorem and she was super nice, and then I made a bunch of other friends!” I wholeheartedly endorse this approach.

IDK. I’m kind of off-put by pushes to recruit members of $DEMOGRAPHIC. Social communities thrive based on shared interests and values, and efforts to attract more people of a given demographic usually trade off against that.

I am all for recruiting more people with rationalist interests and values. If they’re female, great! But targeting women specifically would almost certainly mean compromising some feature of the existing community dynamic.

I enjoying being around members of my demographic as much as the next person, but if aiming for women means less Tolkien in textbooks, or aiming for Caribbean people means raising the level of acceptable homophobia, then no thank you.

I mean, a lot of the reason pushes to include particular demographics exist is because there are lots of people who are part of the demographics in question who would totally love to be part of the rationalist community, but there are other factors preventing members of the demographic from joining.

For example, despite loving Luminosity I initially avoided the rationalist community because I had heard that a lot of members were unusually hostile towards women. This has, for the most part, not been my experience. If Rationalist Recruitment Teams were a thing it would have been very helpful if one of them had said to me, politely and not in a Gotcha You Evil Assumption-Making SJer way, “hey, actually, most of us don’t hate women over here, check out all these high-status women in our community”.

 the point of campaigns like this should be to find people who would totally belong in the community but are staying away because they’re worried about hostility

I am totally in favour of that! I would like people who are afraid that we’ll be hostile to feel welcome. I am personally willing to roll out the welcome wagon.

because like no ones suggesting you pull random women off the street and press-gang them into being nerds or rationalists or whatever

Um, we have obviously seen very very different recruitment campaigns. In my experience, as a black person who has been active in a bunch of disproportionately-white internet groups, the average campaign leans more toward grabbing random people off the street and trying to integrate them into your group than toward targeting actually interested people.

I mean, the things I saw ranged from patronising (“We’ll get more black people if we talk about hip hop a lot!”) to actively destructive (”Our comic forum is going to ban discussions of any comics that don’t have at least one black character”). Have you seen a bunch of white guys desperately screaming into the void about hip hop in the hopes that their black senpais will notice them before? It’s the saddest thing. Three-legged puppies with cancer are more cheerful.

As my OkCupid activity indicates, I’m perfectly happy proselytising to women. I do it a lot! I tell people about the gospel of bednets and transhumanism and glowfic automatically. I’d be happy to join black student groups at Stanford and encourage anyone who’s a good fit to join us. Just from the fact that I like being around other women and black people, I’ll probably do more than my share of converting women and blacks.

But the moment someone says “You know what would attract black people? If we stopped talking about [heresy of the month]”, I will be the first person to say “Fuck black people. We don’t need them anyway!”

Yeah by “no one is suggesting” I totally meant “I am not suggesting/no one in the rationalist community is suggesting”, I have definitely seen really terrible demographic-based outreach campaigns.  (My absolute favorite are the ones that are like “hey girls!  You don’t have to be an Icky Nerd to be a programmer!  You can totally be good at computers and ALSO perform femininity, you don’t have to be like those gross girls who DON’T perform femininity!  Empowerment!”).  

What I’m getting at here is that we shouldn’t decide not to do a thing entirely just because some people are terrible at doing it, especially if a well-executed version of the thing could do a lot of good.  And also that there should be more well-executed versions of the thing.

Good demographic-based outreach campaigns would be a great idea. I’m just not sure how to stop them from degenerating into really bad outreach campaigns. Most of the bad campaigns I’ve seen started off super reasonable, and then they collapsed in on themselves.

I don’t know how to do the thing in a way that I can be sure won’t end with egg on my face, so I’m hesitant to start now. If I learn more about what makes campaigns go sour first, then I might be less averse to trying.

Suggested datapoint for a good demographic-based outreach campaign: you doing the thing you are doing, exactly as you are doing. Sexy outfit optional but probably situationally useful sometimes.

Someone should run the data on this but I suspect that the best and reliablest way to fund a demographic-based outreach campaign for the community would be to pay your bills and arrange other things done so that you could fully focus on your comparative advantages of being an awesome person to talk to and introducing people to other awesome people.

Of course, it could be that my personal biases have simply led me to rationalize why we should let an Alison loose on the internets and meatspaces without being constrained by boring things, but out of all the things to rationalize I don’t think that one is anywhere near the worst.

This was actually basically my plan for working for Effective Altruism Outreach. Then that may or may not have fallen through.

But, like, if anyone wants to found Less Wrong Outreach and hire me, I’d definitely consider it.

Okay, I’m publicly committing to funding Degenerate N E O T E N I C Bonobo Rationalist Cuckfest Outreach once I make enough money that it’d be less expensive than my GWWC pledge, on the condition that I get to call it the Degenerate N E O T E N I C Bonobo Rationalist Cuckfest Outreach at least informally on tumblr. Additional funders to push that limit down are welcome.

2 months ago · tagged #future precariat billionaire · 110 notes · source: inquisitivefeminist · .permalink

Incorporating a promethea: part 1

TL;DR: youvegottobefuckingkiddingme.png

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.

2 months ago · tagged #laissez-faire used to mean _stop trying to help us_ #promethea's adventures in business land #future precariat billionaire #bitching about the country of birth · 3 notes · .permalink

sinesalvatorem:

blastfarmer:

sinesalvatorem:

cinefeminism:

quasitree:

sinesalvatorem:

From the latest SCC links post:

Freddie deBoer writes a white paper supporting standardized testing in colleges. His position is that private colleges need to be held accountable and we need proof that online courses don’t work, but American Interest points out that it might break the power of education-industrial complex if people who go to less prestigious institutions have an objective way to prove they’re just as good as people who went to more prestigious ones. And I will add that it might incentivize colleges to admit based on something vaguely resembling merit if they want higher test scores. Overall this would be amazing it it happened.

Um, but… We already have this in the Caribbean? Because we’re halfway civilised? Do you mean to tell me Americans are barbarians who let random colleges do whatever? If you don’t test your colleges, what are they even for? How can you know how a student at one college compares to one at another? WHAT IS THIS MADNESS???

I think I’ve determined the main trade-off between the Caribbean and the US: Sure, we’re poor; but when we design an institution, it isn’t fucking stupid.

I know I’m biased as someone who is, I think, reasonably smart and capable and does v poorly on standardized tests, but the idea that more standardized tests will force institutions to admit based on merit is ridiculous ime. Like with subject GREs, it will give schools an easy but inaccurate metric so they can avoid actually judging merit or potential.

As someone who does well on standardized tests, I also think that they are pointless as actual assessments. IMO the things that may make me successful in academics are exactly the things I had to learn to suppress to pass standardized exams. Logic, analytical skills, creativity. I think @quasitree is just not as good at suppressing her brilliance / perhaps her brilliance surpasses mine (the latter has always been my theory).

…Are your standardised tests really really different to mine? Like, as far as I can tell, logic, analytical skills, creativity, and depth of knowledge of the subject area are what I’ve been tested on?

Like, typical chem question would be something like: “You run a laboratory and have been given samples X, Y, and Z to identify. Their characteristics are [description]. Your budget is limited, so you can only devise one testing regimen to apply to all the samples. You can use some or all of [list of apparatus]. Design and justify an identification process with explanations of the principles behind each stage of chemical testing, cost effectiveness, the trade off between accuracy and efficiency, and the level of confidence you can expect for your identification.”

[cue me furiously writing four pages while cursing several deities]

I mean, if building and justifying your own experiments from scratch isn’t evidence of understanding chemistry, is their literally any observation you could make that would give you information about someone’s chemistry proficiency? If not, I still have to wonder what colleges are for because, for all we know, they aren’t teaching shit and no one can tell.

This response is based on one year of high-school chem with an above-average teacher in a 30-person classroom, and one semester of college-level intro chem in a 350-seat lecture hall (twice-weekly lectures, with a corresponding twice-weekly 30-seat ‘recitation’ period to explain the lecture and a once-weekly 30-seat lab period). This is also drawing on years of PSAT and SAT tests, and on the AP Calculus AB test.

In my experience, in the US, standardized tests are designed to make the jobs easy for the graders.

Your “typical chem question” would be the end-of-test essay question, and would be preceded by 25 to 50 multiple-choice questions requiring you to regurgitate facts about various compounds and their properties. Then, there would be around 25 multiple-choice questions where you would solve chemistry-related math or balance chemical equations. These two sections would all answered by filling in the bubbles on scantrons. If there is a short-form free response series of questions, (if!) then there will probably be no more than 5 of the free-form response questions, and your answer must fit within the designated area on the form. Your final answer (if it is a math problem) must have a box drawn around it: This is a standardized test. Priority is placed on the graders’ ability to grade your test.

Finally, there is the longer essay, which is again limited by space. When I took the SAT, the writing space available for the essay question on the writing section was about equal to one and a half single-sided pages of college-ruled paper. It was not a lot of space to write a 1-3-1 essay, and if your response wasn’t in the 1-3-1 format, if you were taking space to explain your arguments and to back them up with knowledge not included in the test form (this practice is encouraged), then you are more likely to run out of paper. If you write large, you’re more likely to run out of paper.

In the AP Calc AB exam, there was still a lot of bubble-filling. But there were more free-form responses, and at the end were six word problems, of which you were allowed to choose three. Each response was allowed to take up half a page of the printed workbook. You could use scrap paper to work, but all logic required for your response needed to be in the workbook.

The chem course I took in college was the not-remedial intro-to-chem course. You were expected to have memorized the speed of light, and you were expected to use 300,000,000 m/s as an acceptable substitute, because it would simplify your calculations and allow you to finish the test faster.

About half the class did not finish the average exam. The average exam grade was 75% correct, a ‘C’. ‘C’ is a grade in the middle of the scale from the top scores, marked ‘A’, to any failing grade, marked ‘F’. ('E’ is skipped for legacy reasons, except where 'E’ is used in place of 'F’ because 'F’ hurts children’s feelings. I’m not kidding.) (Letter grades are still tabulated from point scores in order to convert point scores to GPA scores, which are a 0-4 scale that is used in college admissions, in inter-school comparisons, and in entry-level job placement.

That chem course was explicitly designed as a weed-out course, to deflect people from the Chemistry department’s majors.

In comparison, my high school: with ~65 people taking the course in three sections, the (delightfully sadistic) teacher didn’t use scantrons. (It would not be cost-effective at this scale.) There might be 10 multiple-choice or true-false questions at the start of the text or exam, but the remainder of the test was all short-answer or essay questions, where you were expected to explain your reasoning. If there was an extra credit question, you were expected to be creative in your response.*

This teacher’s methods would not work in standardized testing, because this teacher’s methods required effort on the part of the grader. The grader would need to understand the question, the solution, the student’s answer and the student’s reasoning behind their answer.

Your “typical chem question” can’t be scaled up to deal with ~10 million students per year.

And thus, why standardized tests suck.

* One Intro to Engineering final exam was one question, whose prompt was as follows**: You awaken to find yourself in a locked room the size of this classroom (25 feet by 75 feet). There is a door in one corner. At the opposite end of the room is a weighty metal desk. On the desk is a cardboard file box containing one (1) fully-disassembled AK-47 and one round of ammunition. Next to the box is the AK-47 user manual, printed in Swahili. In 15 minutes, a hungry Bengal tiger will be introduced to the room through the door. Explain how you will survive the tiger and escape the room.

** If you recognize this teacher, go say hi! He likes hearing stories of our adventures.

For college-level standardised tests in the Caribbean, there would be two separate papers per subject area, plus a portfolio.

For the first paper, which receives lower weight in your grade, you would have to answer 60 multiple choice questions. If this is chem, they’ll be split between chem math and “what would you expect to happen if [chem thing] were done?” type of stuff. This is generally ~25% of your grade. It’s not thought too highly of and mostly exists as a check on the other bits. If you do really well on one type of assessment while flunking the others, someone calls your school and asks what’s going on.

Paper II would have 2-3 questions of the type I described, plus 20-30 (depending on subject) short-answer questions that would definitely require creativity to figure out. This would be ~35% of your grade.

Finally, there’s the School Based Assessment. This is a portfolio of projects that the Caribbean Examinations Council required you to do as part of your class during the year. In the hard sciences, this is mostly a write up of labs (some of which you design). In the social sciences, a research paper. In Computer Science, code. This was the final ~40%.

Then, at the end of the year, your school ships all this stuff to CXC head quarters. Additionally, since this is the summer vacation, some of your professors will also get shipped to CXC head quarters. There begins the super labour-intensive multi-week process of grading every exam paper and portfolio.

The papers are divided up and distributed among the graders. Physics professors get the physics papers; lit profs get lit; etc. Everything is broken up into pieces and assigned a serial code so you don’t know whose paper you’re grading.

If you are confused by an answer or find it ambiguous or think it doesn’t fit the rubric, you flag it as such and a panel of other professors in your field will look it over and come to a consensus grade. A couple of the grades you give will also be randomly submitted for review to make sure you aren’t grading too far out of line with the rubric.

After all this is done, the grades are distributed to the colleges. Then the colleges hand grade slips to the students. Then the professors are allowed to go home. I have been told that, if the review panels think you’ve been marking unfairly, they drown you in the caves in Barbados and you never see your family again. However, I’m sure that’s just a myth…

And this, of course, can only be done because the body that tests every college has been officially elevated as the Education Tsar by each Caricom government. This is one of those areas where I am kind of doubtful about a private corporation being able to do it. No one but the government is allowed to exile all the professors each year and drown them in the caves if they fail. The only rule of survival is don’t go into the caves academia.

Accred Inc. starts with a significant capital investment. It devises this kind of a testing regime, offers it for a four-digit price per student, and conducts a lot of studies on how the test scores predict things like “will this person actually know how to do their job”. The testing regime is optimized for predictive power. Accred pays good money for people from the academical precariat to get sufficient expertise for the review process.

Blind review is utilized, and a lot of ~statistics~ is run on the answers to see if people can eg. recognize the characteristic style of some institutions, or the race or gender of the person answering, or any other irrelevant characteristic, because it can introduce biases. The aim is to have the answers be completely statistically indistinguishable when controlled for quality, so that the reviewers can’t cause conscious or unconscious favoritism. Reviewers are scored on their adherence to the consensus and those who deviate are dropped like uber drivers; reviewer scores might also be automatically adjusted so that if #526 tends to give everyone half a point less than the consensus the system gives it back if doing so improves the predictive power of the standardized testing.

Now, everyone who cares about work performance has an incentive to use Accred. Employers can hire equally skilled workers from less prestigious institutions; a cheap college + Accred fees saves students money compared to an expensive college; and expensive colleges need to prove they are worth the money.

Accred can use the fuckload of money it starts with to prove the superiority of objective standards in the media, it hires some really smart people who figure out how to spin it into a social justice issue (protip: it should hire me) of evil rich people pushing down competent poor people while simultaneously presenting it as “hey businesses, here’s a way to get free money by hiring smarter than the competitors” in a clever left-right pincer movement.

It clashes with the established education-industrial complex but thanks to ~free market magic~ it inevitably comes out as the winner because ~incentives are aligned~ (read: the VCs funding it pull some strings behind the scenes with their buddies) and it can use data to discredit any cheaper competitors who try to use less stringent standards for easier grading, and becomes a precarious monopoly which is profitable but must keep up with the demonstrable objectivity so that someone else doesn’t figure out how to do better than it.

One issue I can immediately perceive is that if Accred is cartelled out by prestigious professors and institutions and gets a reputation as a second-rate service for second-rate students, but even then a brutal focus on predictive power could show that even less prestigious graders can do a good job, and prestigious students could be offered money to defect and get tested and show that their credentials are less important than their score.

The biggest problem might be if the ~cathedral~ declares Accred evil and racist (~completely unlike~ the big name schools with their legacy admissions for incompetent whites and affirmative action aka. asian quotas) because black people score worse on average, and it gets regulated away like IQ testing. To pre-empt this, Accred needs to play the SJ card in its opening salvo, “we didn’t cause black people to test worse, the System is failing them but we developed a method to measure it so that now we can find out what actually helps with the achievement gap”, and put the establishment on defense. (protip: hire me to help with it) Furthermore, sufficiently reliable blind testing could reduce biases in employment when test scores can be given more weight than subjective evaluations. Self-taught people could test against those with degrees, and credentials could lose their importance in favor of measurable competence.

I totally see how it could possibly be done as a private enterprise, as long as it starts with enough money to afford the initial investment in proving its effectiveness with data. Anyone got Peter Thiel’s phone number?

3 months ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower #future precariat billionaire #ambitious trans girls · 113 notes · source: sinesalvatorem · .permalink

I am literally a corporation

…soon!

Got denied every single form of personal welfare because the social bureaucratic illfare state is unable to comprehend my situation (come on, I’m simply learning skills while ignoring credentialist bullshit, it shouldn’t be that hard to understand even for socdems), and the advice at the social security agency was literally “beg from friends, then take your tax money somewhere more deserving when you start making it”.

The obvious solution is to register myself as a corporation, because corporate welfare is far more generous than personal welfare around here (it wouldn’t be too much of a simplification to say that every single cent collected in corporate taxes goes back to politically favoured businesses in subsidies and deductions; this is defended as “keeping the important sectors afloat” aka they are literally and blatantly taking money from the successful entrepreneurs and businesses and distributing to cronies and unsuccessful ones who serve the bureaus instead of the markets).

If I start a holding company that sells my “unpaid” labour to other businesses and creates profit to its owners, I can not only apply for startup subsidies (basically a modestly-but-sufficiently-sized basic income for 6-18 months!) but also avoid a lot of taxes later on when I actually start earning money and routing it as dividends instead of wages (no payroll taxes for pensions, unemployment insurance etc. for redwashed rentiers; this worker won’t let the holders of political capital steal their surplus value). The risk is simply that entrepreneurs are totally and utterly ineligible for any personal benefits at all (save for rent subsidies which simply mean I’m paying effectively 95€ a month for housing instead of the nominal 320€), which is already exactly my situation so I have literally nothing to lose here (except some money for the paperwork).

In addition, it’s so unbelievably the æsthetic.

4 months ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog #future precariat billionaire #i am worst capitalist · 6 notes · .permalink

Anon-ish hate-ish mail yay!

I got some fan mail from a superhero who got lost on their way back to Bizarro World. Anon has a name, actually, but using it here would be too mean unless I seriously toned down the snark and I’d rather not tone down the snark because it amuses me more this way.

> (this is in reference to your long post about That One finnish feminist website.) I don’t understand how you could realize you were being mean and brainwashing people and silencing people and still be proud of it, and this really bothers me.

It would be far too easy to just point out that “I’ve mellowed a lot since then” part and note that I’m simply refusing to sugarcoat my past actions or pretend that “evil”, or especially “dubious, unfair and simultaenously brutally effective”, never pays. It does, that’s why it’s able to exist in the first place.

In the x-rationalist community there’s a standard thought experiment regarding sunk costs: “imagine you’ve been magically teleported into this situation, now what do you do?” When the having-iternalized-the-advantages-of-civility and feeling-sufficiently-high-status-to-not-get-easily-defensive-threatened you is teleported into the position of someone with a history of aggressive actions having led into a really powerful position, do you hold onto that position while using your powers for good, or do you just throw everything down the drain and let entropy revert things into the standard white neurotypical cisfeminism that usually dominates everywhere? If you choose the latter, well congratulations you’ve effectively protected the world from being taken over by you. That’s what makes things outside the window the way they are. Nice job preventing unbreaking-of-it, hero.

Also, I’m always amused at how everyone treats TOFC as the entire world and acts like exclusion from one community is equal to perfect ostracism everywhere ever. No it isn’t. Even many of my best friends and people I admire the most would be perfectly ineligible for its membership.

> Hopefully you won’t take this as an insult, given your tags, but my first impression (DISCLAIMER: I haven’t binged your blog, so uneven reliability) of you from that post is that your actions are those of a real-life supervillain in terms of morals and not just aesthetic.

I’m also the person who talks communists into privatizing the atmosphere. Just saying that you really should judge things by their content, instead of their superficial resemblances, because superficial resemblances just lead everyone to shitty conclusions. If we look at the extent of my supervillainy, I’ve advocated unscrupulously saving millions of lives, and taken control of the SJ overton window in one country to effectively no-platform the bad kind of SJ. I’m just going to assume you haven’t realized the actual content of my actions because it’s a more charitable interpretation than the alternative that you’d consider such actions evil.

> You seem to be objectively pretty smart though

I’m glad we’re on the same page here, at least.

> and you’d definitely be a Hitler/ISIS and not a Mao/Stalin dictator in the event that your life plans succeed.

You do realize that one category of those managed to piss off pretty much the entire world and tried to eradicate some of the most productive parts of their population for basically shits and giggles and got their asses utterly whooped as a result and discredited their ideologies; while the other two ruled with relative success till the ends of their lives, oversaw dramatic development and victories at a terrible human cost, and have inspired hordes of apologetics among the downtrodden that to this day probably number in the millions, despite being arguably responsible for far greater humanitarian tragedies, right? Right? pleasesayrightohmygod…

Some people have seriously claimed that Mao, even without any sugarcoating, might have been the single most effective altruist in the world. That’s what smart and successful supervillainy looks like. Not the obviously evil antics that are basically little more than the geopolitical equivalent of gluing a “kick me” sign onto one’s buttocks.

I’m pretty certain anon might actually be some kind of a bizarro world superhero who’s kind of amateurishly trying to manipulate me to being less effective in my supervillainy from the perspective of us both.

> On behalf of all us humans made of flesh and not steel, I hope that doesn’t happen, though. (not in the ask box because it’s not really a question, hope that’s okay?)

No need to worry, politics is ugly, violent and ineffective. My supervillainy will happen on the free market. Bwa ha ha, I’m going to invent something that creates value to people and then capture some of that value if I can! Behold my evil plan of fulfilling people’s desires in voluntary interactions! I’d be way less of a supervillain than John Galt because I believe in open source and empowering the miserable to become formidable and to uplift them from the ugliness their environment forces them into, instead of just contemptuously looking down upon them from my glass towers where I hatch dramatic speeches that utterly fail to recognize the complexities of the world.

Or if I somehow end up the dictator of whateveria I shall abolish corporate welfare and lots of coercive and hurtful laws, and institute an UBI and cost-effective services even to the disprivileged parts of the population. Mwa ha ha ha, my evil plans are so horrible mere mortal minds can’t even comprehend their true nature! But yeah, a libertarian dictatorship would be an interesting sight. (The consensus seems to be that I’m some kind of a libertarian, but the exact left-right-top-bottom subtype classification is as reliable as a dyslexic 4-year-old’s directions in navigating a confusing central european old town’s street network for the first time using only a pre-ww2 map with all street names removed. All *I* know is that the website which measures how much people side with Bernie Sanders considers me a “left-wing laissez-faire small government deregulation capitalist” who should generally vote socialist, but favors libertarian on the economy and republican on the environment. And obviously matches Sanders in 90+% with a generous two-digit margin to any others. Your guess into how the fuck that happened is as good as mine; they didn’t even offer UBI as an option anywhere!)

4 months ago · tagged #support your local supervillain #win-in is my superpower #boxes don't work #i am worst capitalist #future precariat billionaire · 3 notes · .permalink

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.

4 months ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower #future precariat billionaire #i am worst capitalist #boxes don't work · 82,147 notes · source: steviemcfly · .permalink