I Pity Them And Am Perfectly Willing To Forgive Them Of Their Sins, But I Also Want To Democratize Their

Laws against feeding the homeless remind me of a recent conversation I had about the "Nordic model" of prostitution where Johns/customers are arrested but the prostitutes are left unpenalized: it's breathtakingly hypocritical, and the moral contradictions within bourgeois liberalism are evident. Apparently lawmakers believe that a woman is not oppressed when she is forced by circumstance to sell herself on the street to pay for rent and groceries, but only when the proper individual oppressor (a man) buys her services. (What about woman who hire female prostitutes, or male-on-male sex work?) Similarly, a person is not oppressed by homelesness, exposure to the elements, or the likely accompanying drug addiction, mental illness, and despair, but God forbid we violate any hygiene laws while feeding them!

You know what makes me mad? I used to work at Pizza hut and everyday we would have to throw away perfectly good pizza or potato wedges or garlic bread in the bin because it was the wrong order or the customer had changed their mind. They made us bin the whole thing. We weren’t allowed to put it aside to eat from or take it home (we all earned minimum wage so it’s not like we culd afford pizza that expensive a lot). But what makes me even madder is that they could easily give that to the homeless or poor. Like, if a homeless person came into the store, we could have easily given him one of the 20 or so pizzas that we would be binning every single day anyway. Imagine all the pizza hut stores in the world. Imagine each and every one throwing away on average 20 pizzas a day. Imagine how many people that would feed. Fuck corporations man.

Property ownership itself is a system of authority. If you own all the farmland in an area, I have to work on it in order to survive, or I will starve. What gives you the right to control a resource and demand that I subordinate myself to you for my daily bread?

When we abandon cooperation and democracy as a means of conducting economic activity, solving ethical questions, and relating to each other, life becomes nothing more than a nightmarish struggle to death as you have described. Without a system of authority to protect your property rights, who will stop your stronger, smarter neighbor with more friends from taking your property at gunpoint and enslaving your family?

By your own logic, there will always be someone capable of dominating you and willing to do so. You will not survive the world you wish to create.

It *is* a good argument; the point is to force the theist to acknowledge that their god is just one among thousands, none of whom have any persuasive evidence for their existence. What argument can Catholics offer me for the existence of God that are any different that that of a pagan and their "idol"?

I also think the analogy with Communist leaders is telling: regardless of your thoughts on Mao, Lenin, Che, etc., there is indisputable proof (often video evidence) that they all existed and said/did the things their followers claim they said/did. Rejecting them is a matter of political opinion, not denial of their factual existence. The second poster assumes the same of God; the facts are not in dispute, atheists are simply *rejecting* God, whose existence is as certain as Leon Trotsky.

"we're both atheists, I just believe in one god less than you" is rarely a good argument.

it is never a good argument when used to compare a pagan idol to the Lord.

There is a reason why neopaganism comes at a time of uncertainty and rests on either the reinvention of paganism or on irrationalism.

The last paragraph is the worst part. It's chilling that anyone would be impressed by-and offer a job to-someone so manipulative and deceptive.

Welcome to the tech industry, where cruelty, dishonesty, and callousness are rewarded as long as they're innovative enough.

The Tinder Hacker

When I asked Sean about his hobbies, I wasn’t prepared for what he said.

tl:dr: Guy writes a script to connect two men together on a dating app, both of whom think they are talking to a beautiful women. Many seem to like a woman as sexually forward as they are, some are confused, more still are thrown off by the not-so-great pronoun-switching part of the script.

He turns it off before things go too far. We learn some things about men (maybe), and about online dating.

Thoughts?

Costs can't easily be predicted for every decision, true, but arguably a lot of costs can be estimated with a fair amount of accuracy for straightforward production decisions. I feel confident in our ability to predict how many more cows, farmers, and milking machines it would take to double milk production. But yes, the cost of innovation is hard to estimate. I guess the cost of uncertainty/confidence could be factored into calculations- "we can (with 100% certainty) achieve a 2x increase by simply working twice as hard for cost x, or we can double output by funding a bunch of new research which could cost anywhere between .5x and 5x, with probabilities/confidence values for each scenario."

You're right that this would be an inherently political process, even in a post-class society I would expect the different parties involved (SOEs, coops, scientists, laborers, etc) to have differences of opinion, and to support the budgets that favor them. As naive as it sounds, I would hope that any disputes about costs and tradeoffs could be resolved through boring old debate and compromise. I don't envision the planners' role as binding; their only job is to present accurate information so that the public can make an informed decision. They can't dictate to the public, and I wouldn't want to prevent the public from trusting someone else's calculations, if they had lost faith in the government's ability (although hopefully the professional planners would be a reliable institution.)

So I think we agree about revealed preferences: whatever the system, let people buy/vote for what they want, and let the firm/state provide a quote. If people agree to the cost but balk at the price afterwards, maybe the planners could factor that into their calculations ("plenty of you talked a big game about reducing transit times by working double overtime shifts at the railyard, but from the timecard data you seem to value your free time more. That will be our assumption on future similar projects.")

I think this vision of socialism is actually quite conservative, in a way- by shifting the important allocation decisions from an elite few to the public at large, it forces them to take responsibility for their own decisions, inputs, and outputs.

a sketch of a socialism

mutual here wanted some specifics to hang on anticapitalism, something more concrete than vibes, nicer than AES, more feasible than fully automated gay luxury space communism. this is a sketch of that; parts can be expanded as desired. this is meant to be messy rather than elegant; if you hate one part, other parts could often do it’s purpose, and the exact implementation would be a matter of dispute between political parties, on the boards of firms, and so on, just like today

(this was the effortpost that I wrote earlier, rewritten with less art because rewriting is less fun than fwriting the first time.)

short version

nationalize big firms; small ones become cooperatives. tax income to create an investment pool and subsidize prediction markets to guide investment. crappy jobs to anybody who wants them, better-paying jobs if you can convince an SOE or employer to take you on

new pareto inefficiencies this creates

reduced ability to pass on your wealth, reduced ability to hand over control of an institution in a way that can’t be taken back, weaker labor discipline, less ability to choose your own marginal propensity to save. I think these are all analogous to the pareto inefficiency of not being able to sell yourself into slavery or to sell your vote - a good trade-off for long-run freedom even if they introduce some friction, and probably good for growth through institutional integrity in the long run

I’m mentioning these at the beginning because I know there’s going to be a tendency to say this is just capitalism with more steps, and because it’s worth noting possible costs

normal consumer markets

you get money from your job/disability check/Christmas cards and go to online or in-person stores, where you spend it at mutually agreed prices on magic cards or funyuns or whatever, just like today 

prediction markets to replace financial markets

financial markets do two useful things: first, they pool people’s best estimates of future prices and risk profiles, and they direct investment towards more profitable (and, hopefully, more broadly successful) endeavors. 

the core socialist critique of financial markets is that they require private ownership of capital. but you can place bets directly!

in order to marshal more collective knowledge, everyone could get some “casino chips” each time period and cash them in at the end for some amount of cash, which they could then use in consumption markets. public leaderboards of good predictions could both improve learning and incentivize good predictions, although at the possible risk of correlating errors more. the same could apply to allowing financial vet specialist cooperatives that place bets for you for a fee. these tradeoffs, and the ways to abuse this system, are broadly analogous to tradeoffs that exist within capitalism, just without a separate owner-investor class.

almost any measurable outcome can be made the subject of a prediction market in this way, including questions not traditionally served by financial markets

lending/investment decisions

cooperatives and SOEs looking to expand production would be able to receive capital investments from the state. like loans under capitalism these would be a mix of automatic and discretionary, including:

investment proportional to prediction markets’ guesses about room for funding, or about the succcess likelihood of new cooperatives

discretionary investment by central planning boards, especially into public goods

loans at fixed interest rates

“sure, take a shot” no-questions-asked funding for people starting a cooperative for the first time

the broader principle would be to keep the amount of resources under different people’s control broadly proportional, while investing in promising rather than less promising things and not putting all your eggs in one way of making decisions

because no individual has the incentive or opportunity to personally invest their income in a business, an income tax would raise revenue for the investment fund. for the typical worker this would be slightly less than than the “virtual tax” of profit at a capitalist workplace (which funds both investment and capitalist class consumption). the exact investment/taxation rate and how progressive it would be would be a matter of political dispute

bigger firms as SOEs

big firms relying on economies of scale and having multiple layers of bureaucracy would be owned by the state. like a publicly traded corporation, these corporations would have a board of directors at the top, which could be set by some combination of:

rotating appointment by the elected government, similar to the supreme court or fed 

appointment by a permanent planning agency

sortition by proxy (choose a random citizen and they appoint the board member)

prediction market guesses about who would perform best in terms of revenues - expenses or some other testable metric

election by the employees’ union or consumer groups

direct recall elections on any of the above by citizens

and indeed you could have some combination of these, with the goal of having a governing body that is broadly accountable to the public without being easily captured by any one clique

smaller firms as cooperatives

if you want to start a firm you can go into business with your friends. you would get money from the general investment fund and govern the business together.

cooperatives would have a “virtual market capitalization” determined by prediction markets concerning how much they would be worth under state ownership, and as the ratio of this to your member base grows over and above the general investment:citizen ratio, the state (who’s your sleeping investor) would buy you out, similar to how wildly successful startups are purchased by megacorps. (most cooperatives most likely would be happy to be small.) there could be additional arrangements where you rent capital from the state rather than owning it, if you want to keep local control. 

to preserve the cooperative nature of the enterprise it wouldn’t be necessary to start arresting anyone for hiring non-employees; people could simply have the right to sue in civil courts if their goverance/profit rights as presumptive cooperants werent honored. there might still be some manner of hush-hush hiring under the table but the wage premia for keeping quiet seems like an adequate recompense for this

universal jobs

if you want a job, the state will give you one at a rate that is a little below the market rate but enough to live on, whichever is higher. people would have a right to at least x hours of work in whatever they’re most immediately productive at (in many cases menial labor) and at least y hours of whatever they insist they is their god-given calling (poet, accordionist, data scientist, whatever.) x and y would be a matter of political dispute, but with steady economic growth and automation, x could fall over time. much y time would be “fake work” but (1) of the sort that people would find meaningful (after all, if you feel it’s not, switch into something that would be) and (2) present a lot of opportunities for skill development, discovering what you’re good at, and networking 

cooperatives and SOEs would have access to people working basic jobs, maybe according to some sort of bidding or lottery scheme. movement between the two is meant to be fluid, with basic jobs workers having the opportunity to show their worth on the job and direct state employees/cooperants being able to safely quit their job at any time

state ownership of land

blah blah blah georgism blah blah blah you can fill out how this could work in a market socialist context. maybe carve in an exception for making it harder to kick people out of their personal residences

My maternal grandfather is an incredibly sweet man who has never raised his voice to me and has always been generous with his gifts and advice.

He also spent my mother's childhood mocking civil rights activists, making racist jokes (such as referring to MLK Day as James Earl Ray Day) and indoctrinating her with racist and neo-Confederate ideas, as well as voting for groups and politicians in the Deep South that aligned with his views. He also did extensive contracting work with the military, which may or may not strike you as evil depending on your perspective, but I view it as such.

Will I be sad when he passes away? Yes, because he was kind to me personally. But I will also be relieved, because the world will be, on net, a better place without him in it.

I mean, I really hope the people in their 70s now will die eventually, since theyve had a stranglehold on politics for years. I don’t think this observation is remotely similar to advocating for genocide (or gerontocide?).

Anon, you’re eagerly awaiting others’ deaths just because you want the reins of power? I’m hoping you’re just not noticing how messed up that is.

I have a knee-jerk disgust reaction to the Tweet, but it's because Israel cannot credibly claim to even value the lives of its own people, so I interpret any claim to the contrary with maximum uncharitability: "If you really wanted to save families, you'd declare a ceasefire. You value your citizens solely to the extent that they can provide cannon fodder or victims to motivate the cannon fodder."

Hey what do you mean the Israeli government is actually harvesting sperm from the corpses of IDF soldiers.

If I were a state run media outlet, you would have to waterboard this out of me. They just fucking tweeted it. Publicly. On Twitter.

There's a problem here in that if we give socialism a broad meaning to the point where it can be applied to any political program involving state planned/owned/regulated economy, we end up with "socialism with Chinese characteristics". On the other hand, when I try to give specific, concrete examples of what I want socialism to look like or what I think it would grow into given sufficient organic development and trial-and-error experimentation, my definitions are so narrow I quickly end up looking like just another special snowflake whose own personal definition of socialism has never been tried, etc.

It's great that we discuss and debate our terms but I fear that leaving them too vague means we get bogged down in semantic infighting and our political results follow suit.

Kaiser Health News

How Political Maneuvering Derailed A Red State’s Path To Medicaid Expansion

When Kansas elected Laura Kelly as governor, Medicaid expansion looked like a shoo-in, with seemingly broad support across state government.

The impression I have is that while the poor rural voters may want Medicaid, the land/business owners who gerrymander their states to hell and back will stonewall them, as in the article. You can blame the poor for being demoralized, but many of these people also voted for Obama as recently as 2008, so maybe they currently don't have any good local liberal/left candidates to throw their weight behind.

Your stupid villains might be on to something

It’s a genre we hated since it’s inception: the right-thinking reporter descending into some godforsaken poor white corner of rural or rust belt America in order to find out why they won’t vote like the author thinks they should. Unsurprisingly, the author finds character flaws and racism at the heart of the issue. The right finds this condescending, the left doesn’t consider the opinions of the unwashed unworthy absent intersectional demographic cover. Wash, rinse, repeat.

This Monica Potts NYT number fits the bill, right down to borrowing some racial material from someone else’s work to round out all the elements. Potts, a former Arkansan, heads back home after being away for two decades and finds the community both economically decimated and deeply suspicious of any government spending. The article is pegged on the county library, which became the subject of a local controversy when it wanted to offer a raise to a librarian. It’s a neat encapsulation of the perspective of the author: the smart ones (like her) moved away and all that remains is an angry, anti-intellectual rump who views any attempts at improvement as useless taxation.

Potts’ perspective can be challenged in two ways. One of which, she lays out clearly: Van Buren County, where this story takes place, had a natural gas boom during which it spent a relatively large sum of money on a library that it now has trouble paying for, to the point at which the sales tax had to be raised to pay for it. The librarian, though her salary would have been commensurate to her education, was far above the county median. Libraries are good, but not every library expenditure makes sense, especially to a community that just sunk a lot of money it didn’t have into one.

The second one is the Facebook group where the revolt started (see the graphic above). It got a little nutty after the article ran, but scrolling back, you’ll see one conspiracist nutter posting, but mostly it’s unobjectionable community stuff. Most interesting to anyone trying to parse the Times article is a controversy over rising water bills. Dig into the comments and you’ll find that a large water treatment plant was built for a chicken processing plant that has since closed, leaving nobody to pay for it but regular rate-payers, who are watching their bills balloon.

The library and the water bills create a pattern. Due to small populations, rural areas are much more susceptible both to the boom/bust cycle and to white elephant projects that can shred government budgets for years. Van Buren County, unlike these federal government, can’t print more money. It also has few of the fixed, immovable amenities that allows a community to make demands of richer corporations and people. Overspending during booms leads to both real constraints during busts and a “once bitten, twice shy” mentality when it comes to spending.

Urban liberals live with the notion that there is an unlimited pool of money that we could spend to solve all of our problems if we could just claw it away from the rich. The people of Van Buren county disagree.