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“It’s over, Sandor! I have the high ground!”
Some of it is having my expectations lowered, but I liked the episode a lot.
I was OK with Arya being the viewpoint character in the city because I like Arya, and Maisie did a great job, and it called back to her flight from the city and across Westeros in the first two books.
I liked Jaime and Cersei dying well enough that I don’t mind breaking the Valonquar prophesy. On the other hand, now I like Jaime sleeping with Brienne a *lot* less. If you’re going to have him be this tragic perversion of knightly love at the end, keep him true to it throughout, and have him turn down Brienne because his heart belongs to Cersei.
Overall, the episode was much more believable than I thought I would be, and having Jon regretfully kill Dany and Drogon seems like an emotional ending, if a little unearned.
What I didn’t like as much:
On reflection, it’s hard to believe Dany would burn the city, but in the moment, I was OK with it just being the logic of war – that once you start, it’s hard to stop. But yeah, after some thought, she was burning down the city she hoped to rule because the people didn’t independently overthrow Cersei? Unless she went full on crazy, it’s hard to explain.
I still don’t like that Jon does very little actual commanding of his troops. I would have liked it much better if he had offered those Lannister soldiers terms before they dropped their weapons. Also, he doesn’t keep any kind of discipline over the Northern troops. Stannis would take back his approving head not if he could – it would have been much better to show Jon using his command responsibly, as opposed to looking pensive and shanking the occasional dude.
Note that the show deliberately took out the Valonquar prophesy, since you never actually see Cersei’s third question to Maggie the witch. So in the show, Jaimie not killing her is not a plot a hole. Moreover, in the books i’m expecting that if Jaimie does kill her, it’s to save her from a worse death. It’s a major part of both Jaime and Tyrion’s characters that they love Cersei despite the fact that she doesn’t appreciate their love and routinely mistreats them, so if she’s killed by her younger brother, it will most likely be as an act of love.
The prophecy is that she dies with her brother’s arms around her neck, right? That’s what happened.
As Lillian points out, the show left the last sentence out, but unless the rocks fell just the right way, the show didn’t meet the terms of the book prophesy, so I assume it doesn’t track the book ending for Cersei.
PS – I was also disappointed that Qyburn and Harry Strickland went out like such toadies. Have Harry die facing the enemy, and let Qyburn try to abandon Cersei when it’s clear all is lost.
I know it’s thematic for Qyburn to die to his own monster, but I would much rather have seen him flee, then have Jaime and Cersei find him trapped in the skull chamber.
It’s easier for moderns to romanticize cavalry charges and sword fights than “death from above” burned bodies, collapsed buildings, and survivors covered in ash, and where I thought the episode was in showing the fruits of war in a way that would resonate with a modern audience.
I have my quibbkles, and if they had done the whole episode from Arya’s point of view it would have been a better 85 or so minutes, but what they had was still stunning.
As a work of art, on it’s own, considered seperately from the rest of the series, it was a far better episode than I expected.
As an aside, I just went over to r/freefolk to read the spoilers. I figure I don’t care anymore, this show can’t get much worse, so I should at least prepare myself.
It gets so much worse.
I haven’t watched. Can someone explain why people are so upset about the bells?
The bells where a signal of surrender. Tyrion convinced Dany to let the city surrender, and she agreed. When the soldiers enter the city and they meet part of the Golden Company, and they surrender (by throwing their swords to the ground).
Dany is in the city walls, and she’s looking at the Red Keep, and she goes full Mad Queen when she hears surrender bells. Instead of going to the Red Keep and torching it, she goes in a criss cross pattern burning all the city, actually giving Cersei a chance to escape. The Unsullied then procede te butcher the soldiers who have surrendered by throwing their swords.
It isn’t just cruel. It’s stupid. If she wanted to burn the city, fine; but why not start with the Red Keep?
Re: Game of Thrones S8E5
Well, that was dramatic.
Daenerys can go a bit loopy when someone defies her. This seems like something the writers should have been signalling for a long time. I don’t remember anyone talking about it until S8, at least about Daenerys specifically. Other Targaryens had some mental problems, sure. But were there signs earlier about Daenerys?
She did have a couple of people locked in a vault in an early season. (S2?) And she nailed some of the Kind Masters to posts, after they nailed a lot of children to posts. (And really, who wouldn’t?) Anything else?
I still don’t see a good reason for burning the city. Daenerys had already won. Burning the city at that point was just a waste.
Dany is obviously ruthless, but she went from Machiavelli to Hitler really fast. The “inside the episode” suggested it was because seeing Red Keep just stirred up all these violent emotions and made her crazy. Uhhh…I guess?
I prefer Comfortably Smug’s headcanon on Twitter: Dany made a calculated decision. The truth about Jon Snow will come out. And the people will love Jon Snow. But their fear of Dany will forever be greater than their love for Jon Snow.
But the thing is, fear would keep her in power if she kept her strategy of only burning those who don’t kneel to her. Now that she has shown she is capable of burning anyone, including some of her own soldiers, what’s the point of fearing her? If you’re gonna die, might as well not die kneeling.
It didn’t make any sense, and it isn’t any kind of calculation.
Yeah, that was why Jaime originally became the Kingslayer–because the king he slayed (Daenerys’ father) was about to burn the whole city to the ground.
The writers wanted to make her “Jump off the Slippery Slope” in order to justify Jon turning against her in the next episode.
They could have gone for a more ambiguous finale, where the battle was less one-sided and Dany caused high collateral damages in order to prevail, but then didn’t engage in gratuitous mass murder. Then Jon either overthrew her or stood by her side, in either case ending we would have been left wondering whether it was the right choice. Instead they just made her the fire-based version of the Night King to be slain in order to achieve the happy ending.
A wise man once said:
“If you think this is going to have a happy ending…you haven’t been paying attention.”
“Dramatic” in the sense of dramatically arbitrary and stupid. Scorpions that could bring down dragons in flight at several miles are now useless, and dragons that were uselessness are now invincible, because there’s only two episodes left and Danny has to beat Cersei right now. Danny has to burn King’s Landing even when everything is going her way, because the Showrunner Gods have decreed that plot point. Nobody needs more than fifty IQ points if the plot is in their favor, and nobody is allowed more than fifty IQ points if a smart move would derail the plot.
Whic in another way makes not to the least bit dramatic, because they’ve managed to make it so that I no longer care what happens to any of these people. Without caring, there is no drama.
Varys answered that. When a Targaryen is born, the gods flip a coin. Hers came up “madness”. It was not a rational decision.
Incidentally, I claim a minor prediction success, though perhaps deducting something for it not being the final battle (which is now Jon v. Danerys). You see the remains of the Iron Throne on the ruin of a wall after the collapse of the vault Cersei and Jamie are in, just before panning down to Arya.
(and I second the complaints about the Scorpions suddenly becoming useless and the dragon again invincible)
Sure. But we’ve been following this young woman now for almost eight seasons. If she’s a bit crazy, we should have seen it a long time ago. And if she just suddenly went crazy without having been crazy before, there should have been something really big that pushed her over the edge. And there wasn’t, really. Certainly the revelation of Jon’s heritage was nothing compared to, say, the loss of Drogo and her unborn son.
We’ve seen she likes to execute people by burning them to death with dragons. And the Masters (who, granted, deserved it). And she failed to show mercy to Mossador, starting an entirely predictable riot against her. Not to mention burning all the Khals to death.
But no insult was needed to push her over the edge. The madness was in her blood (or genes, as we would say). If there was a trigger, it was just the opportunity to strike, not recent harm done to her.
But that’s sort of the point. Until now, virtually everyone Dany has had killed has either deserved it, or at very least been an unrepentant enemy – either specifically and personally or as a combatant in fair and open battle. Any inclination she might have had for the mass slaughter of innocents, she has usually been talked out of fairly easily. There is no precedent or support for slaughtering a city that has just surrendered, particularly not for ignoring the Red Keep long enough for a hypothetical not-insanely-stupid Cersei Lannister to have escaped because look, all those innocent civilians to burn, let’s ignore our actual unrepentant enemy to burn innocent civilians!
That was wholly arbitrary, and the attempt to shoehorn in support for it in the last episode was too clumsy to count. We’re really down to, as B&W seem to be claiming, Dany having a Magic Kill Switch in her brain that automatically turns her into a rampaging killbot if she sees the Red Keep.
So, OK, why should I care about the moral arc of a character who has no agency, no internal consistency or development, who will do whatever is dictated by the flip of the Showrunners’ coin?
Yeah, I think they had done an OK job of setting up “Dany will kill a lot of innocent small folk and sleep well that night because she thinks the collateral damage is necessary”
But we got “Dany slaughters thousands for the lulz because Mad Queen”.
It would have been a lot better if the burning of King’s Landing had been done as a more organic escalation of what was already going on. Say Daenerys’s forces taking the city by storm, and she has to keep Drogon back because of the ballistae on the walls. After a bloody fight much of the walls are taken, but the fighting continues as brutal street to street combat. Cersei decides to commit her reserves and Danaerys sees them streaming through the roads toward the fighting near the walls, so she decides to swoop down and incinerate them.
That’s how she starts burning the city, in the effort to take out an enemy unit. Seeing this, some of the city’s defenders give up hope and the city’s bells start ringing. The Lannister soldiers try surrendering, but in the frenzy of battle their enemies simply keep killing them, and start slaughtering civilians as well. Meanwhile Danaerys just keeps burning shit without stopping, until the city’s wyldfire stockpiles start catching fire and eventually her own troops are forced to retreat to avoid being immolated as well.
This way it would feel like everyone just got caught up in the moment, which is more natural than Daenerys randomly going, “Nope fuck it, killing everyone.” A lot of real life cities were destroyed that way, without any concious plan to annihilate them. Like nobody gave the order to burn Magdeburg and slaughter its inhabitants, the Imperial army was simply sacking the city when a huge fire broke out, and the civilians were unable to escape because there were hostile soldiers in the streets.
Tolstoy wrote about that in War & Peace. His argument was that fires happen regularly in cities anyway and without an organized firefighting brigade, they grow into big fires.
It is some people’s opinion that Danaerys has been built up as a blood thirsty tyrant for a very long time:
(This is a second hand quote from some Discord chatroom i’m not in, so i can neither link to nor credit the original.)
I am not a book reader. Regardless I have hated this season. My Lady is a book reader, and hates this season for entirely different reasons. I can only conclude that hatred of the new writing is related to badness.
Oh yeah, i hate the new season too, but like the person i’m quoting, i’ve long thought Danaerys is a bad person. Anyone who walks the path of conquest has forsaken all claim to righteousness, for they have chosen to tread upon the lives of others and sup on their blood. That’s not to say i don’t like Danaerys, i love her, i love conquerors in general, my first crush ever was Alexander the Great. That doesn’t change the fact that they’re all bad people.
I’m very much on board with this. Like, Dany is just Cersei 2.0. She’s spent her whole career slaughtering. Why stop now? Khaleesi is a Dothraki word, after all.
She’s certainly been portrayed as a would-be and later actual tyrant almost from the beginning. But there’s a line between Danaerys Tyranna and Mad Queen Danaerys. Westeros could survive and perhaps even thrive with a tyrant; it seems to be the normal state of things anyway. With the Mad Queen, it degenerates to chaos.
That doesn’t sound mad. More like ruthless.
Even then, though, it wouldn’t put her outside the Overton window for ruthlessness amongst historical rulers. As the person you quoted said, Daenerys did try less pyrotechnical means of victory first. “Try the nice way, and if that fails, strike with overwhelming force” is by no means unusually tyrannical by comparison with either Westerosi or real medieval rulers.
Does Westeros have a concept of/analogous to the Divine Right of Kings? If so, I don’t really think it counts as megalomaniacal for the lawful heir to the throne to claim divine mandate for their rule.
Dany wasn’t ruthless, she was sadistic. Her rampage was unnecessary, destroyed the very prize she wanted to capture, gave Cersei a (slim) chance to flee, and endangered her own troops.
I’m actually ok with Daenerys burning King’s Landing. It was dumb as hell but it felt like her kind of dumb. Up until now she has always basked in the adoration of her underlings, whether as Khalessi or as the Mother of Dragons or as the Breaker of Chains, but ever since she got to Westeros she hasn’t gotten her fix. Nobody worships her there and she just can’t stand it. “It’s fear then” indeed.
Other miscellaneous notes:
Jumping off the deck of a ship continues to have a 100% survival rate. At this point there’s no reason to actually sail anywhere, just hop off and you’ll be swept to shore wherever you needed to go no worse for wear.
Jaime Lannister has a golden hand but not as many people knew about his golden kidneys until this episode. Lucky thing or getting stabbed there on both sides might have prevented him from climbing up several long flights of stairs.
It’s a pity Qyburn only made the one Frankenstein. Maybe if he had given the whole Queensguard the Mountain treatment they wouldn’t have been killed off like punks in twelve seconds. Then again they clearly have some design flaws…
How many death fake-outs did we get with Arya this episode? I swear to God every time they cut back to her she had miraculously survived something falling on her. Those scenes would have been much more tense if it had been Davos or someone else who could actually die running around.
The Golden Company ended up being a shaggy dog joke after all. They couldn’t have fought even a little bit after a whole season and a half of buildup?
Who the hell was Nora? Why does she get a name? I had closed captioning on and the random mother Arya kept running into until she was slashed and barbequed had an actual name. For a while I was racking my brain trying to remember if we had met her before. It’s not actually pathos to name a character if that name only shows up in the closed captioning and end credits, it’s just random as hell.
In the post-episode the showrunners said that they focused on Arya because she’s the audience favorite so the viewers would be more invested, but I don’t think it worked because at this point everybody knows that Arya has plot armor, no way she was going to die crushed by some rubble or stampeded by the crowd. A less plot-armored character like Davos who could actually die would have made these scenes more tense.
Yep. And why were they even outside the wall? I guess the writers don’t understand the purpose of fortifications.
Had they put up a decent resistance, it would have sort of justified Daenerys resorting to firebombing the city, instead of she just going postal after the battle was already won.
I’ve also noticed it, I think it was an error in the subtitles, since they never name that character in the dialogue. Possibly in some earlier draft she had a bigger role which was cut and they forgot to change the subtitles after the scene was shot.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
True, Arya had as high a Constitution as Danny Glover’s character in Predator 2.
Inside the episode quote by the showrunners perfectly sums up the post book series
https://youtu.be/5W8j6wOvxuo?t=406
“we’ve always wanted to see these two face off again, and they finally did”
Could you imagine GRRM ever saying something like that?
Hey, people have been hyping Cleganebowl for years now. It would have been a crime against humanity not to have it. The series even kind of lampshades it, since Qyburn’s cause of death is basically, “Tried to stop Cleganebowl.”
I think this was my point (not sure how tongue in cheek you are being).
As soon as something is hyped, and people need/want to see it, and it becomes what is ‘supposed’ to happen, that is when GRRM would not have it happen. Without him, the writers seem to be giving the characters the endings they are ‘supposed’ to have.
I was really disappointed Sandor didn’t have to see someone else kill his brother, or at least be alive after he killed him. Instead they did the most uninteresting thing possible.
There is nothing in the world that could have possibly been more interesting than Cleganebowl, except a longer Cleganebowl.
Am I the only one that always found the Clegane brothers quite boring characters?
Gregor, no. Sandor, probably yes – c’mon The Hound has been excellent in the show.
The biggest issue with Cleganebowl is I feel like we got about 75% of a good explanation for Sandor being hellbent on killing Gregor, but we get zero motivation for Gregor being equally obsessed with killing Sandor.
I don’t even remember the books doing much to flesh him out – Gregor was just a cruel bully to his younger brother. Cruel, but not “obsessively murderous”.
the only thing more interesting than Cleganebown would have been a more interesting Cleganebowl.
Consider 3 options
1. Sandor, you’ve devoted your entire life to hating and wanting to kill your brother, and now you had to watch Arya kill him instead of you, how does that feel?
2. Sandor, you’ve devoted your entire life to hating and wanting to kill your brother, you’ve now done it, so what do you live for?
3. Sandor, you’ve devoted your entire life to hating and wanting to kill your brother, you’ve done it, but died in the process so there is no need to reflect on anything. It’s all tied up. The people got to watch you pointlessly slash at your brother and cheer, and now it’s over. What a journey!
Option 1 would have been horribly unsatisfying, and Option 2 is not viable because there is only one episode left. There is simply no time for Sandor to ponder the meaning of life. Certainly if the show’s ending hadn’t been horribly rushed for no good reason, it may have been interesting to see how Sandor copes with attaining his goal in life, but as it is the Hound and the Mountain both dying is the best way to tie it up.
Just my opinion, but it is the unsatisfyingness of option 1 that makes it so satisfying (if that makes any sense).
Option 2 not viable? They get to decide how many episodes and how long, so I don’t see how that is a defense. Like you say, the ending was horrible rushed *for no good reason*.
As it was, the fight was so inconsequential as well. It didn’t change the outcome of anything; they could have sat there and did nothing and they would have died from the structure collapsing.
I took the Clegane showdown to be a commentary on the worthlessness of vengeance. Like, in all the ways that mattered it was over when the Hound denounced it to Arya. We got a cool fight scene after that, but the only participant we cared about had already explicitly denounced it.
Would have been better if right as Gregor blinded Sandor a giant rock crushed his head. Then we have blind Sandor and dead Gregor, with Sandor having failed yet again and having to live on.
Whether or not it made sense plot or character wise, watching King’s Landing burn was glorious. A full on wall to wall firestorm. The screaming, the flames, the merciless slaughter. Beautiful. Of course, now Danaerys damned herself, there is no coming back from this, no apologies or amends that can be made, and with it she has doomed her crown. Nobody will surrender to her after this, no Westerosi will trust her not to murder them on a whim. She has destroyed herself and her reign just as surely as she has destroyed King’s Landing. Danaerys Stormborn will not be queen, not even of the ashes.
While I agree that the filming was gorgeous, especially the dragons, after the letdown of the battle of Winterfell, it just didn’t feel real.
It feels rushed, because it is rushed. I hope GRRM gets around to finishing the series (I won’t read it until he does), and gives a more satisfying ending. Or at least builds up to it.
Where did the Dothraki come from? I though most of them died, and only the Unsullied were left. Did I miss anything?
Bad writing mostly.
It’s not the first time that armies are all but destroyed just to show up in full force shortly after: e.g. Stannis’ army is almost wiped out at the Battle of Blackwater, yet he has enough units to turn the tide of the Battle of Castle Black two years later, the Northen armies almost annihilate each other in the Battle of the Bastards, yet two years later they still have some 10,000 men to garrison Winterfell at the Battle of Ice and Fire.
The Dothraki appearing in significant numbers at the Battle of King’s Landing after having being wiped out just two episodes before, without any possibility of reinforcing, is the most egregious example though.
To be fair, the Dothraki were hardly “in full force”. The shot of the army assembling showed them kind of scattered among the troops rather than the separate horde we saw at Winterfell.
There’s a scene in Ep4 where they’re looking at the counters on the war table and say they’ve lost half of the Dothraki, and half of the northern troops. Anyone who saw Ep3 would be skeptical of that, but apparently that was how it was.
Anyone want to take a stab at naming the point where GoT jumped the shark? S8 has plenty of problems, and even S7 was often criticized for being rushed. But was there a specific episode that marked a boundary between good stuff with occasional problem and bad stuff that occasionally exceeded expectations?
when they ran out of GRRM plot in season 5, more or less. The show’s terrible handling of dorne, and the ludicrous sand snakes in particular, might be a good marker.
Honestly I kind of forgive them for Dorne (forgive, not excuse) because Dorne was the most bloated of Martin’s many, many shaggy dog side plots that a TV format was never going to be able to support. I think the show runners realized this and just pulled the ripcord awkwardly. Their big mistake is in not making that call earlier and never introducing the Sand Snakes in the first place.
Pretty much on board with this. There was no way they were going to do Dorne right. GRRM can’t even do Dorne right. Just don’t do Dorne.
I love Dorne, but B&W were never going to be able to do it justice. That said, the Bron and Jaime road show was an awful way to short-circuit it.
If the goal was to kill Myrcella, just have Elia and one or two Sand Snakes show up in King’s Landing and kill her, then let Cersei get her revenge. (Better yet, have Elia try to talk the Snakes out of revenge and then have Cersei kill Elia AND the snakes).
Nitpick: as I recall, the Dorne plot was a deliberate revision of the book plot, so it’s not that they ran out exactly. People just ended up hating their version of Dorne even more than the book’s. But in retrospect, with how badly they’ve screwed up writing their own ending to the show, it was a big sign of what was to come.
That was really what I was trying to say, drone showed how badly things would go when d&d struck out on their own initiative.
But I think it was different because they were trying to include a streamlined version of Dorne as a middle ground between GRRM’s bloated Dorne and in Dorne at all. But he middle ground was worse than either.
This. The Dorne subplot in Season 5 is the moment I ceased enjoying the show.
Not only was the plot itself bad, but there was a significant problem where too many subplots being pursued at once, to the point that the show bogged down and the plot hardly advanced from episode to episode – and then now we get here and everything feels rushed.
They spent their screentime on all the wrong things since Tywin Lannister took a crossbow bolt to the gut.
Season 5 was poorly executed and boring as hell. There was some really fantastic stuff, like Hardhome, but mostly “meh.”
Season 6 I think was “Jump the Shark,” in the sense they abandoned GOT 1.0 and replaced it with D&D 4E. Dany torching all the Khals and instantly becoming the head of the Dothraki. Stupid Battle of the Bastards. Terminator Waif vs. Arya. Varys teleporting across the ocean. Jorah’s highly contagious Greyscale not affecting anyone other than himself. Most of these weren’t that bad, but those were obviously a departure from prior seasons, and an indication that all was not well.
There was also the explosion of the Sept. I think once that happened, there was a lot less political intrigue in the story, and more D&D4E as you say.
I think the explosion of the Sept was a significant turn for the worse as well. Though understandable, I generally didn’t like the simplification of characters and factions and plots in the TV series, and yes, obviously, that got even worse after the High Sparrow and his supporters, as well as key Tyrells, were all killed in the sept explosion. It didn’t have to be that way; the death of the High Sparrow could easily have prompted the rise of hordes of religious fanatics seeking to avenge him, and there doesn’t seem to be any good reason why the army that almost put Renly on the throne or the largest fleet in Westeros (both canonical Tyrell resources) couldn’t similarly have been used by somebody (surely Olenna could have found somebody, even if she’s not one for leading armies herself?) But instead the showrunners used it as an excuse to shelve those factions and, as you say, drastically reduce the possibilities for intrigue.
Imagine how much more rushed this would all feel without the sept explosion taking out half the characters. Plus that sequence was one of the best in TV history.
The tradeoff was supposed to be a more thoughtful, deliberate plot with those that remained. But, well, no.
The sept explosion was an amazing fifteen minutes of storyline, but the endpoint (after Tommen committed suicide) was that Cersei should have been almost powerless–she’d alienated all her allies, blown up/burned up a big chunk of her own city, and destroyed a church and killed a revered religious leader in the city. The next scene with her needs to be her fleeing the flaming ruins of Kings Landing for Casterly Rock or some other place.
Cersei thinks she’s more clever than she really is. Her big advantage over other people is that she’s so shockingly ruthless that she’ll do things nobody else would imagine doing, like blowing up a church full of her allies in her own city to remove several rivals for power. But that has consequences and the only one we were shown was Tommen’s suicide.
I liked the Sept explosion. Instead of a long plot arc, Cersei blows all of her enemies to Kingdom Come because she knows about the Self-Destruct switch.
The consequences are that Cersei loses her most powerful allies (the Tyrells) who immediately side with Dany and bring an invading army to Westeros. The small-folk got pushed to the side a long time ago, only the Sparrows themselves represented the small-folk fighting back, and their leadership is all dead.
I don’t see the Lannister soldiers or the Kingsguard are going to shed a tear over the High Sparrow and his followers. They would probably see a “return to normalcy” as a winning proposition for them and Cersei as the only contender to provide that. And I do see a leadership void for anyone inclined to resist her; that’s not a role Lady Olenna can provide on the ground in King’s Landing.
So I don’t object to Cersei being able to effectively hold power in King’s Landing and solid Lannister territory. But you’re right that this would not plausibly be as solid a power base as it is presented for the remaining seasons.
There has been a constant decline since season 5, but I’d say the series really jumped the shark between season 6, when the Sand Snakes publicly murder the ruling prince of Dorne, his heir and a royal princess and somehow this results in Ellaria Sand becoming their ruler instead of being hanged for treason, and season 7, with Littlefinger’s show trial where he doesn’t even attempt to talk his way out of the unsubstantiated accusations they were throwing at him, and of course the ridiculous zombie hunting party.
I don’t know that I dislike it the way other people here seem to, but if I had to identify a point, it’d actually be S1E1. The problems in Season 8 stem from the fact that at the pace the show (and the books!) were moving, it’d take like 17 fucking seasons to finish the story. If they had sacrificed storylines further and simplified things they’d have had time to wrap things up, instead of “rounding” the action to the nearest thing that moves on to the next plot point. Of course, if they had done that in early seasons, it probably wouldn’t have been as big a hit as it was.
That’s also why I’m not quite as down on it as others–I’ve got some nerd quibbles with individual plot actions, but I also can’t see huge changes the writers could be making to fix that fundamental problem: finish the story, but only do it in one season.
I don’t think that’s fair. The first few books moved plenty fast—it was four and five, which were originally intended to be one novel, that bogged down. And five was an even bigger problem here than four, since it introduced so many more plots and didn’t even include the major battle it was supposed to end with, the Battle of the Bastards.
If we imagine a world where 4 and 5 were one book ending with the Battle of the Bastards, and no Dorne plot or Brienne travelogue or Young Griff or Oldtown teaser or Iron Islands kingsmoot (a plot I actually liked 🙁 ), we wouldn’t be in this position.
A man attempted to determine this scientifically, by showing GOT to his normie wife, and came up with the following answer: S7E6 Beyond the Wall. This answer fits to me, because while the show started having problems in Season 5, there was still a lot of good stuff to be had. It’s during Beyond the Wall that magic breaks, and it’s stayed broken for most of Season 8.
The Red Wedding. After that the show just kind of wandered aimlessly for a while. Then they rushed a finale.
That was the point that the books jumped the shark for me. Killing Ned was gutsy, but doing it again got rid of all of the characters I cared about, and dropped most of the story I’d been invested in up until that point. I know a lot of people love it for subverting expectations or whatever, but my feeling was that we were just being led on and he wasn’t going be able to draw the whole mess to a satisfying conclusion.
Given that that was a decade ago, and GRRM has conspicuously failed to draw it to any sort of conclusion in the time since, I’m pretty good about that judgement.
More like continuing the show’s by then well-established tradition of actions having (plausible) consequences. Betraying Walder Frey by marrying the common hottie, and then failing to respect Walder Frey as a mortal enemy with no reason to be bound by oath or honor, is the sort of mind-numbingly stupid action that usually leads to “…and they lived happily ever after because Twue Wuv conquers all”, and I was surprisingly glad to see the more plausible outcome and the end of an annoying idiot.
But I was never that interested in the Honorable Starks as the One True Faction in the Game of Thrones. I still cared about Sansa and Arya as effectively orphaned ex-Starks, about most of the players at or north of the Wall, about Team Dany, and about Tyrion and Varys and in a negative way about Cersei and Jamie. So I thought Martin (and B&W) still had the materials they needed to round out a good story. My bad.
That is clearly spot on, but I’m surprised you say the Red Wedding killed all the characters you cared about. If I remember correctly, the only POV character who died is Catelyn
I was interested in the War of the Roses. Nearly the entire first book was oriented around that, and that’s the one that drew me in. IIRC, they also burned down Winterfell around the same time, essentially ending the primary plotline with “and they all died.”
I never cared much about Daenerys’ subplot; she had basically no interaction with the main characters at this point. I felt like I could have cared about the ice zombies had they been split off into a different book, but again they had done very little at this point in the story, so I mostly considered that to be just bloat which was getting in the way of finishing off this story. So that left Arya and Sansa, and Sansa was insufferable.
I guess it boils down to me being interested in the War of the Roses, and GRRM just using that as an intro to the story he really wanted to tell, even if he never got around to telling that story.
Is it bad if I still love the Bran story and think Bran is the greatest thing? The creepier and more cryptic he is the more I love it.
Ugh. Bran’s story is an interesting concept but it’s basically gone nowhere. His only contributions as “The Three Eyed Raven” have been confirming things people already know (Sam had figured out who Jon was, Bran confirmed Littlefinger’s crimes but only after Sansa and Arya had begun to suspect him, and Bran helpfully notes that the Night King is going to try to kill them all).
What’s his big moment that pays off all the dragging him around poor Hodor had to do?
I’m not sure the shark-jumping model really fits. After the Ramsay Bolton Show there was nowhere to go but up.
There were a lot of bad moves in S6 that foreshadow shark-jumping, and I’m going to particularly call out the Battle of the Bastards in that regard. But there isn’t anything the story couldn’t have recovered from, and doing so wouldn’t have required more than the quality of writing we saw in the better episodes of S6.
The nerfing of Tyrion and Varys in early S7 was the shark-jumping point for me. The earlier missteps had at least been true to the characters as we had seen them up to that point; this wasn’t. And more than that, it was a clear indication that they had written themselves into a corner where they could not reach even half the Great and Shocking Moments they had planned without resorting to complete idiot-plotting. Which required making all the formerly smart characters with power or influence into idiots, and which the writers were clearly not capable of doing with any tact or skill.
It was all downhill from the end of Season 4, but it didn’t start feeling like a waste of time to me until episode 3 or 4 of Season 7. That’s around the time when characters started jumping around the map with no justification for the sake of a dramatic scene, and when the battles started feeling like pure spectacle with no real stakes and no in-universe strategic logic behind them.
I started feeling acutely disappointed sometime in Season 6 — if I had to pick a moment, it might be when Bran walks into a Dungeons and Dragons skirmish featuring Harryhausen skeletons — but there was enough good there that I could ignore it, and the show’s internal logic still mostly made sense. Not in the next season.
I’m a sort of casual watcher. I’ve never read the books or rewatched an episode, but I do talk about it a lot with my coworkers, some of whom are really big fans. There are a few scenes that stick in my memory as approaching and eventually jumping the shark.
It’s no longer the same show:
Season 5, episode 10: Stannis loses the battle against Ramsay. First result of a battle that’s plot-driven and not the natural outcome.
Same episode: Elaria Sand kills Myrcella. First time someone acts ridiculously out of their established character for shock value.
Approaching the shark:
Season 6, episode 2: Ramsay kills Roose Bolton. The actual murder makes sense, but there were no consequences. This is the first symptom of the bad habit that the show has had since of making the villains’ actions have no consequences.
Season 6, episode 10: Cersei destroys the Sept. Again, destroying the sept is fine, but it’s never even mentioned after that. Wouldn’t there be riots? Wouldn’t the common people turn against Cersei? Shouldn’t the other septs fund a different claimant to the throne?
Jumping the shark:
Season 7, episode 6: The mission to capture the wight was so stupid that I couldn’t suspend my disbelief any more. It was especially stupid because the Night King used the dragon he captured to break through the wall. Apparently the underlying theme of the series isn’t “humans are tragically disposed to petty power struggles even in the face of an existential threat,” but “just ignore existential threats lol.”
Going to a combined aquarium/trampoline park:
Season 8, episode 3: The battle for Winterfell wasn’t only stupid, it also served no narrative purpose. The Night King only came to kill Bran after everyone was already dead. The army could have literally just waited in the south and everything would have turned out exactly the same. Why even have Jon and Dany there?
Ramsay, that perverted bastard, having won any battles, and being able to command any loyalty, especially after killing his father, doesn’t make any sense at all. He is not as smart as he thinks he is; just pointlessly cruel. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have tortured Sansa, the woman who gave him the legitimacy he needed as a bastard.
I also thought Cersei was finished after destroying the Sept. They spent all that time showing how much influence the Sparrow had achieved, how we was popular and loved. And now that he becomes a martyr, people go back to normal?
The thing with martyrs is, as history has taught us, after a certain point, the worst thing you can do with a political/religious leader is killing them. If they live on, they will eventually do something bad that at least tarnishes their reputation; if they die, they can’t do anything to ruin their own image. It doesn’t matter if the Sparrow was really after power; once he died, he was this saint who cared for the poor. His death having no consequence makes no sense whatsoever.
Yeah, I think Ramsay’s the sort of character who, realistically, should have been murdered by one of his own underlings many years ago.
Regarding the sept, I think it’s likely that Cersei played it as an accident / rather definitive act of god.
Remember that everyone who died was Cersei’s (or at least the King’s) nominal ally. We know that they were actually all engaged in deadly scheming against each other and Tommen was not a strong king but the pawn of three factions, but the public face was that they were all one big happy family. (The Faith and the Crown were both maneuvering to use each other for legitimacy). And there were rumors of lost stores of wildfire, which would have been confirmed by Blackwater…
She wouldn’t need to convince everyone, just enough to avoid a general riot. And everyone for opposition to cling to, not to mention the Faith’s true belief squad, was dead.
A better show would have taken the time to show Cersei play grieving queen reluctantly taking power to pick up the pieces from a horrible tragedy, slyly noting that clearly the Seven had judged harshly the extremism of the High Sparrow. Lena Headey would have done it brilliantly.
Season 4 Episode 10 “The Children” with the fireball throwing magic children. There was a steady stream of weird/magic stuff you had to accept before that, which was fine, and then they did something so stupid and spectacle based it showed they had lost what made the show good forever and the second version had begun.
The world where Game of Thrones stayed a syfy level show that’s mostly people talking and never became a CGI monster showcase was the better one. If every big battle was setup like the one where Tyrion just gets knocked out right when it gets too expensive to shoot like in Season 1 I would not have been happier.
It was that early? Huh, I could have sworn that happened a season or two later.
But yeah, that’s as good a place to put the shark-jumping as any. The weird thing is, the books probably have more magic than the series does; it’s just subtler, more prophecy and skinchanging and generall spookiness, fewer fireballs.
John Schilling’s prediction is not looking good. Sorry, man.
I dunno, given how many people survived Battle of Winterfell despite being completely buried in Wights, maybe Dany only killed, like, 10 people. That’s not bad!
EDIT: Plus, Arya might bring people back to life. It was totally overshadowed: why do you think she says “Death” all the time? Subvert expectations!
Dany only has to die if the Good Guys(tm) have to win.
My money is on Dany killing Jon. She’s far more ruthless and has the dragon. I doubt Dany will trust him at this point. Of course that doesn’t settle everything, his sister is the best assassin in the 7 kingdoms and the writers favorite. Who does that leave in the end? Either Sansa or Tyrion, and Sansa seems the more willing to rule. Sansa was my prediction in the beginning of this season, though I never would have guessed this route.
That’s why I expect that the series will end with Dany killing Jon and Arya, probably Sansa and possible Tyrion, and sitting on the Iron Throne, the message being that all the fighting and bloodshed has been for nothing because now they’ve just ended up with a Mad Queen instead of a Mad King.
That would work for a decent bittersweet ending. Robert and Stannis both said they didn’t want the throne, and it killed Viserys. (And Robert, Stannis, and Jeoffrey, I guess).
Sad Jon sitting on the throne because it’s his duty, after killing the woman he loved out of duty, with Sansa as the winner of the Game of Thrones (the North is safe, and the dragons and ice zombies are all gone), would IMHO be an OK ending.
It would tie into Ygrette’s death, and Nissa Nissa, and it would be sad for Jon, and maybe hopeful for the realm, at least if Davos is still around.
Jon plunges Longclaw into Dany’s heart. It comes out flaming. He takes Drogon out back and Old Yellers him. He gets in a rowboat, bound for the North to live out his days with Tormund and Ghost.
Sansa “wins”
Sansa has no claim to the Iron Throne, and no ambition towards it, it seems. At this point Jon’s claim is also questionable even if he survives: oops, the Targaryen queen turned out to be as mad as her father, let’s try again with her nephew and hope for the best this time.
On the other hand, if we accept the Baratheon-Lannister dynasty as legitimate, as every lord in Westeros (minus the North) did until Cersei started to blow up people and Dany showed up, then Tyrion is the actual heir to the Iron Throne, or whatever is left of it.
A reasonable finale would be Tyrion king of everything south of the Neck and Sansa queen in the North. But at this point I’ve lost hope in a reasonable finale.
@vV_Vv,
Gendry Baratheon, who Danny conveniently legitimized a few episodes ago, would be a much more plausible claimant than the queen mother’s dwarf younger brother. Which is why he spent several seasons running and/or rowing away from the various factions who wanted to kill him over his bloodline.
If Jon somehow manages to avoid sitting on the Iron Throne at the end of the next episode, Gendry is the only one left with a claim. Either that or we end up with King Bronn first of his name or something equally absurd.
Is there a Catch-22 in Gendry’s claim? In order for him to be legitimate, he would have to recognize Dany as Queen, which would imply there is no longer a Baratheon claim.
Honestly I don’t think anyone would really care one way or another.
They need an ass on the throne, because as long as it stays empty the entire continent is going to be ravaged by war. Gendry’s ass isn’t an ideal fit but it’s probably close enough for an already war-ravaged Westeros to accept as an excuse to stop killing each other and try to survive the next few years of winter.
@Meh – the Baratheon line inherits if there are no eligible Tagaryns, which is why Robert was King and Renly and Stannis thought they ought to be King. (Well, maybe not Renly).
Gendry’s claim is a little thin – basically, “Dany was the legitimate queen, then she was deposed/killed, but before that she legitimized me, and Jon died/abdicated, so I’m next in line.”
That’s thin, but it’s hard to see anyone left alive with a better claim. The Prince of Dorne doesn’t even have a name, after all, and it’s certainly more plausible than “Yes, I took my Night’s Watch vows for life, but then I died and was resurrected, so now they don’t count!”
not saying it is wrong, but what is the law that says Baratheon line inherits?
also, are there no trueborn Baratheons left? Are they the only house that doesn’t have 8 million cousins?
Legitimacy? Legitimacy is what the people with the most firepower say it is (Was it Cersei or Tyrion who made a similar point? Certainly Bronn did). And a lot of lords who might have been a bit conservative about bloodlines and such are dead now. Suppose Dany and Drogar get killed. Jon holds on to the armies of the North and at least temporarily holds what remains of the Dothraki and Unsullied. If he rules as Jon Stark he shouldn’t face too much opposition in Casterly Rock (with any luck they’ll accept Lord Tyrion as their leader, as the best of bad alternatives. As he would say, at least he has a cock), or the Reach (which is without a leader), or Riverrun. Dorne is almost certain to claim independence regardless. I expect Renly Baratheon’s old territory will get in line as well.
The interesting part of that scenario would be Sansa; she may be unwilling to bend the knee to Jon, and what would that do to the Northern armies? The Iron Islands don’t matter; whether they bend the knee or not they’ll continue to raid. And I don’t know about the Eyrie; they’re leaderless at the moment. If Sansa were to bend the knee I expect they’d go with Jon, but otherwise they might also claim independence and hole up behind that gate of theirs.
If Jon were to try to rule as Aegon Targareyan, after what Dany just did, it’s just more bloody war until he’s killed. Unless Drogo survived, in which case he could rule as Mad King Aegon until someone (probably Sansa) had more Scorpions built.
Tyrion’s an obvious alternative except the whole dwarf thing. And past that, Sansa would never bend the knee to him so there’s no chance of keeping the North in, unless Jon were to be willing to challenge Sansa (which I don’t see). Gendry with Tyrion as Hand might be a possibility.
King Bronn, First of his Name, Drinker of Ale, Tosser of Dwarves, isn’t looking so bad.
In which case the obvious answer is for that ass to be attached to Daenerys Stormborn of the House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, etc, etc, etc, Mother of Dragons, because she’s probably done with ravaging if nobody pisses her off again and I count at least three types of ravaging lined up if anyone tries to take her place.
I can see the showrunners imagining that Good Queen Sansa ruling the Seven Kingdoms would be a suitable ending for the show; that would be mind-bogglingly stupid for reasons already enumerated, but here we are and I’m not ruling it out any more. But if we go there, note that Good Queen Sansa will have taken the throne by an act of outright treachery that lead to the destruction of King’s Landing and probably the death of her own beloved quasi-brother.
Gendry, yes, if everybody agrees that he should be king and that nobody should try to depose the king, he can be king of a peaceful Seven Kingdoms. That’s tautologically true, and just as true of absolutely anyone else down to Random Urchin #3389 barely surviving the destruction of King’s Landing. Including the bit where some people nobody has any reason to trust can say “trust us, we have secret knowledge that Random Urchin #3389 is really the true heir of the last legitimate king”, which is all Gendry has going for him. Again, the showrunners have decided that plausibility is out the window, but it’s a long shot that they’d go that particular route.
At this point, the plausible-in-story outcomes are Queen Dany, King Jon, or prolonged anarchy and civil war. And King Jon is a long shot, but if he gets the critical Drogon endorsement he could probably pull it off.
Wait, she did at one point literally marry him; that’s kind of like bending the knee. And there was a bit more of a reconciliation between the two than the Winterfell storyline really required. And everybody is clearly willing to entertain “someone told us they saw a record of that other inconvenient marriage being annulled” as the basis for royal claims. A Lannister-Stark royal marriage might actually work, now that I think about it.
I don’t think the showrunners respect the character of Tyrion Lannister enough for them to go that way, but that could be just clumsiness on their part.
Funny I just thought of the same nasty idea. Someone ends up on the throne — Dany or Gendry with someone backing him, perhaps — and to cement the North’s place in the Seven Kingdoms, we get a Lannister-Stark marriage. Tyrion and Sansa. A literal royal marriage between King Tyrion and Queen Sansa seems even less likely, as it means Sansa has to relocate to the remains of King’s Landing and I don’t see her being willing to leave the North. Perhaps that could be avoided, first while it’s being rebuilt and then once she’s had an heir and a spare and one more (to cover Winterfell’s heir), there’d be no need.
Or there’s Tyrion and Arya, but I think that’s just a short joke.
I’m not sure if the show got into this much detail, but Robert’s grandmother was Rhaelle Targaryen. Assuming you accept Dany’s legitimacy order, then under the Targaryen succession laws, Gendry really has the best technical claim to the Throne after Jon.
(If I recall correctly, the show at least had the scene where Robert tells Ned that Ned should have taken the Throne after the Rebellion, and Ned says that he couldn’t because Robert had the superior claim.)
I stopped following the world a book or two after this happened. I remember hoping that they would stay married and help round out the other, a bit of tyrion’s savvy for the princess and a bit of the princess’ hopefulness–and legitimacy–for the Dwarf.
But it didn’t seem to come to anything.
The issue I have is that the subversions in the past always felt obvious in retrospect – shocking at the time, but in the cold light of day they were the inevitable outcomes of their characters’ personalities and choices.
With Dany the problem isn’t with the result, it’s the lack of care spent getting her there. I mean, they literally resorted to adding weird flashback voiceover to the Previously On… to try to sell her Mad Queen turn. Even the show runners clearly realized too late it wasn’t really sold!
Agreed. Mad Queen Daenerys needed more support earlier in the series. Varys and Tyron should have discussed this issue many times before, whenever Dani did something a bit severe.
I think the best option would have been for Varys to go along reluctantly with this new claimant to the throne, mostly because he saw no better option. But when word of Jon’s heritage reached Varys, and Jon had proved his fitness to rule, Varys could have withdrawn his support of Dani. I think that would have worked dramatically. But it may have required changes way back into the early seasons of the show.
I prefer to think not that they were ‘obvious’, just that the characters didn’t have to act stupid. Ned’s death, and the Red wedding didn’t require characters being stupid to happen.
Ned’s death was all about Ned being stupid. Varys and Cersei and Littlefinger even rubbed it in.
The Red Wedding required Robb to be stupid. Robb marrying Talisa before the war was won, and Robb executing Lord Karstark and thus requiring the support of the Freys.
Well, it’s degrees of stupid. It was stupid in a much more believable way, or even more naive than stupid. Nothing too short-sightedly stupid.
1. Ned’s death was actually Joffrey being stupid; Cersei and Littlefinger though he would take the black. Joff is a kid so is allowed to be stupid. Maybe Ned was stupid in the events leading to his capture, but I think more accurately he was naive. He trusted Littlefinger to get the gold cloaks, and though his letter from the king would stand. What choice did he have assuming he would always keep his honor to the king?
2. Robb’s actual death was not stupid. They had taken the Guest right, and thought they had re-negotiated the alliance. Nothing too obviously stupid in assuming you are probably safe there. As to events leading up to it, Robb is 15, so yeah, he is going to be stupid when it comes to a girl. Karstark is debateable, who knows what would have happened if he let him live. He may have turned on Robb anyway.
Right. There is “believable stupid” and then there is “The Idiot Ball”.
GRRM was good at exploring the former and not letting plot armor protect characters from it. And he usually avoided the latter.
I wasn’t surprised.
Like, the line that the Hound gave to his brother was also to her. “Yeah, that’s you. That’s who you’ve always been.”
Like, the woman who crucifies prisoners is a dirtbag. The woman who uses collective punishment when she can’t figure out who is guilty is a war criminal. The only reason that the woman who burned the Dothraki leaders to death ever had any sympathy at all was that she was surrounded by monsters.
But the thing of it was, she wasn’t burning the rapists and slavers because they were rapists and slavers. She was burning them because they didn’t love her. She didn’t teach the Dothraki to become farmers, she used them to slaughter her enemies. She didn’t free the Unsullied to become civilians with lives, they became her army to, once again, slaughter enemies.
Her heroism with the Night King was real, but it was also ‘cheap’, in the sense that even Hitler would have fought the Night King. Fighting together versus a genocide fiend isn’t a test that is impossible to fail (hat tip Cersei), but it is as close as you are going to get. Once it was over we got to see the last Targaeryan among the people we actually like.
As soon as you put her somewhere where the people around her were remotely sympathetic she was going to be hated. How could she not be? She’s just Conan, just another turn of the wheel she lies about breaking. Tyrian’s ‘tens of thousands of innocents’ are just words to her, and she parries right back with talk about how by teaching the world that hostages don’t work she is saving future innocents. Like, w/ever brah, I can say stuff too! The person who was real to her was Missandei, who loved her and obeyed her. She told Dany to burn down the city, so that’s what will happen.
But Missandei loved her because she freed her. She did it to use her, but she still gave her something.
You don’t get loyalty and love for nothing, not when you are burning people alive.
There was no way she would earn the love of slavers, but she did have a chance of earning the love of Westerosis.
I feel like ‘earning’ love is not really a thing. You do what you do and people love who they choose.
Dany’s go-to move is to burn the top off a hierarchy.
In Essos, the hierarchies are the worst of the worst, vile slavocracies and such. The survivors love and follow her for saving them from their tormentors.
In Westeros the hierarchies aren’t quite so bad. The survivors of the Loot Train battle don’t throw her up on their shoulders and chant ‘Mother’, when she burns their general and his brave son.
Missandei loved Dany and Samwell did not. That’s not to say she didn’t do enough to ‘earn’ his love, just that his dynamic with his abuser was different than hers with her owners.
Yeah, Dany has never managed to earn the loyalty or alliance of anyone except through miracles and sex. (She has slaves that fight for her because she freed them through trickery, Dothraki who fight for her because she murdered their leaders and survived through magic, and a bunch of male advisers who are loyal because they want to get in her pants) She’s a horrible diplomat, and not naturally inspiring of loyalty the way Jon apparently is.
I think Meereen was legitimately won (including the loyalty of most of its citizens) by mundane strategy, tactics, and leadership. I don’t recall any miracles or sex involved, and the dragons were still too small to be of much use.
Of course, Meereen’s population was IIRC the only one to support a rebellion against Dany after she had taken up as Queen, so you may be on to something.
In the books, Dany is kind of an Alexander figure – she confronts a series of military obstacles in Slavers Bay, and solves each one by synthesizing the counsel of her advisers, then being smarter and more creative than anyone else on the battlefield.
She then discovers that actually governing a conquered population is difficult, as she tries her best to mediate between the former elite and the new revolutionaries, and to transition the area away from a slave trading economy. By the end of the books, she is beginning to think that it would be easier to just burn everything down and start again, but hasn’t yet transitioned to burning.
The popular theory among book readers is that Martin is intending her to have a shift from Marshall plan to fire and blood as she heads to Westeros, and that B&W are telling a simplified, less compelling version of that.
Burning the City was so unnecessary, though.
Burn the Red Keep to slag if you want – that’s what Aegon the Conqueror did to Harrenhall, and he had a decent reign. Burn every collection of Lannister troops, surrender or not. That’s ruthless, but OK.
But at the end, Dany was just burning the smallfolk, and for what?
Missandei (her last friend) asked her to? Like, I think she didn’t ask ‘why’ so much as ‘why not’? These people are nothing to her. Burning them might make her feel better, might inspire the fear she intends to rule with a little better.
Not to be too much of a lawyer, but Missandei was ambiguous about who specifically should burn. I can’t believe she meant “burn the small folk.”
She didn’t specify the target, so Dany made sure to get everyone she might possibly have meant.
It seems like nobody is that interested in Varys death. Anyone have any thoughts?
Predictable, boring, and deserved.
The worst part of that was Dany seemingly knowing everything before Tyrion told her; how would she know, unless she has an independent set of spies (which haven’t been shown)?
I was assuming a dream, but that’s a lot to leave off-screen.
To me it looked like she’s didn’t expect Varys to betray her, but she knew someone would. She knew Jon would tell Sansa and Sansa would tell the people most likely to betray her, but she didn’t know her advisors well enough to know who would stay and betray. Since Tyrion decided to rat, she knew it wasn’t him. Her next thought was Jon, but since Tyrion name did Varys, she didn’t have to guess further.
I think he kinda always knew he’d go out this way. Like dude said to Jon, he’s seen them come and go. One day one would get sick of him.
Varys was the only one amongst them all who had what we might call a modern view of politics. With everybody else, it’s all about who reigns, but with Varys it’s all about the nation being reigned.
I didn’t like it. He used to be clever, sneaky, and cowardly. He was executed because he was engaged in poorly movitated, poorly executed, and extremely risky plotting. About the only way it could have been more out of character would have been if he’d tried to assassinate Dany himself instead of trying to enlist others in his schemes.
Epistemic status: I read the books, watched seasons 1-3, then skipped the rest because books 4-5 were so dull and then heard the writing got still worse after they ran out of Martin’s stuff. But then last week I was with some friends still watching the show so I caught up on all the spoilers.
Yeah, my memory of Varys was that he was very clever. He didn’t tell you his plot, he didn’t tell you what he wanted you to do. He read the motivations of the people around him, and then told them secrets and information that he was reasonably certain would get them to act the way he wanted, while the actor thought the actions were their own idea. So the idea of him trying to convince Jon to do something is silly. He should instead tell Jon horrible but true things about Dany that will make Jon decide to overthrow her on his own. It seems the problem is that Varys is very smart, and the writers are not, and cannot very well write characters smarter than they are.
Writing characters smarter than you are is fairly easy, after all you control the world they live in and can make any of their predictions come true. The difficulty is not Mary Sue-ing them to death, or not diminishing other characters by making them perpetual puppets of the brilliant character.
Fine. The point is Varys was an interesting character because he was smart and cunning. He died by being stupid and brazen.
I think the show has become an unusually bad example of the syndrome where you decide on the ending in advance, then the show runs for a long time and evolves to the point where the ending no longer fits, and you stay in denial about that until the last minute and then jarringly switch back onto the main track. I’ve seen the same critique of How I Met Your Mother, Battlestar Galactica, Lost, and the Harry Potter epilogue, but this is the first time I’ve really felt, ahem, burned by it.
The main problem with Daenerys’s turn is that they leaned in to the discontinuity because they think Diabolos Ex Machina is part of their brand. If they’d treated it as a problem that she’s supposed to become a Dark Lord but has been learning too many lessons about the dangers of indiscriminate violence and the value of empathy, it’s pretty solvable even without changing the ending–just give her a brutal choice between ruthlessly burning the city or abandoning her destiny, and have her choose wrong and commit to the decision. But instead they treated it as an opportunity for a shocking swerve, which superficially adheres to their brand, but doesn’t leave the same kind of aftertaste because it’s not a case of realism beating story logic; whoever heard of a genocide gene? Maybe they’ll walk it back somehow next episode (this was all a Bran vision, not the true future? Or Bran telepathically told Dany this was the only way?) but I doubt it.
To a lesser extent I think Jaime suffered from the same phenomenon, and also kind of Sandor–if the Hound’s only desire for all those years was to kill his brother, he did a really bad job of maximizing his expected utility.
As a depiction of war the episode worked.
It’s a shame they were saddled with these legacy characters though, they really detracted from what was shown, most of the dialog could’ve been well dispensed with, it would’ve been better if it was all from Arya’s P.O.V., or even better would’ve been to follow the mother and daughter (who Arya and “the Hound” push out of the way as they desperately try to get into the Red Keep, start with them or any other “small folk” hearing of the rumors of what’s coming to the city, briefly show Arya Stark and Sandor Clegane getting into the Red Keep, definetly show the crowd screaming and begging to ring the bells signalling surrender, only show the dragon and it’s rider from ground level, then show the P.OV. characters trying (and ultimately failing) to survive the destruction of their city, and only in the last minutes cut to Arya and the rest of the main cast amid the destruction.
That would’ve been a better set-up for whatever will be the finale of the series.
Having what actually happened be ambiguous am not knowing who made what decisions is a really great idea for going into the finale.
@cassander,
Thanks!
Yeah I agree that would be a really interesting and engrossing way to tell the story.
@Conrad Honcho,
Thanks!
I appreciate that!
I was thinking of stuff along the lines of some scenes in WW2 setting films like Atonement, Hope and Glory, and Saving Private Ryan.
I loved this episode despite some of the real dumb plot and tactics moments. At that moment that Jon Snow lost any control of the situation on the ground and the fighting turned to pillaging, the episode took on a very different feel to anything before in the series. It all had a feeling of tragic resignation. It’s very rare in movies and TV to have an all-out battle like that with the good vs. evil stripped away, so that we see the real tragedy of war.
Other notes:
-Kit Harrington and Lena Headey did a brilliant job. I actually felt sorry for Cersei in the end.
-I never understood the anticipation of Clegane bowl. Gregor doesn’t talk so how was that ever going to be more interesting than any other fight on the show?
-The music was fantastic, just as in episode 3.
Annnd now there’s a petition to fix season 8.
Happy mother’s day!
@Scott Alexander,
I notice that
hasn’t been crossed out in the Comments thread despite it now being 5/12/2019.
In Defense of Trolls
I think this is one of the greatest blogs ever, and love that it has attracted such a brilliant readership. The open threads reflect the quality of the blog, to a degree, and I like how smart and civil the comments are.
That said, speaking for myself, I miss the ability to troll on the internet. I was a great troll back in the day. Wouldn’t think of being one here because it wouldn’t work. My trolling style was to say something really dumb and then defend it at all costs. The fun was in the reactions you would get. If people believed you believed your crazy positions, you won, in a way.
You can’t do that on the interwebz these days, and I miss it. Used to be fun to have fun with people. Such fun required a rude commentariat — another reason a troll couldn’t succeed here — because the ruder the comments the better. It was such fun to make dumb arguments and have people not only take them seriously but take such strong issue with them that they give crazy angry responses.
That was the webz I knew and grew up with but it is all gone now and I miss it. I miss trolling. Used to be, you could do it anywhere. Now I don’t know anywhere on the webz where you can do it, not really, where others would take it seriously or where you wouldn’t get banned immediately.
Make no mistake. I’m not complaining at all about SSC. Even if there were no moderation, you couldn’t troll here because the readership is too smart not to see it for what it is.
Anyway, I just miss the more anarchistic days of the www when it could be very fun to troll a crowd.
@Uribe,
When was that?
I won’t claim to miss trolling.
But I will say I would take the era of Trolls, Geocities, Webrings, IRC Chatrooms and the like over the current age of the Google/Facebook/Twitter borg omniplex.
I don’t see any actual defense. Just the statement you got joy out of making other people upset and a bunch of superfluous ‘z’s.
To be fair, sometimes trolls could be a lot of fun. If you recognised (or thought you did) that so-and-so was trolling in the hopes of getting “crazy angry responses” then it was fun to react in the faux-wide eyed innocent “Oh my, I don’t know if I’m getting quite what you mean, can you tell me more?” style and get them trying to get a rise out of you with ever more outrageous outrage, and/or answer in the po-faced chin-stroking “Well you raise a very interesting point there, let’s dig into it” style and haul out as deliberately boring and obscure facts’n’figures as you could, to see if you could bore them into defeat 🙂
Trolls are usually looking to get a rise out of you, or, that failing, to waste your time, so I don’t think being the one to go out and do research is helpful. Playing the doe-eyed naif, on the other hand, is very great fun.
It’s true that sometimes people can get an Albert and Castello routine going. Everyone knows what’s going on and everyone is having a good time. I don’t take that to be what the OP is talking about. From what he wrote it appeared other people being upset was the fun part for him.
Meta-troll?
Yeah, I see nothing good in being a troll. Maybe it is fun for the troll, but not others. It keeps conversations from advancing in any way. And I don’t really understand the “fun” even from the troll’s point of view. At best, it is a sense of power over those you fool, which is a pretty mean way of achieving pleasure.
This is some next level trolling
Meta-trolling, if you will.
“Trolling” is “being an asshole, but ironically.” Which is difficult to distinguish from plain ol’ “being an asshole,” because in practice the main thing distinguishing you from someone who really believes [badthing] is that you lack sincerity. And basically, the joke is that you aren’t really a horrible person, but you’ve managed to convince other people that you are. Those suckers! Actually believing you’re an asshole, when you’re really just someone who aggravates others and disrupts conversations for fun! Ha ha!
Uribe, trouble was, even back in the Wild Wild West days there were people out there that it was genuinely difficult to distinguish “Troll or Legitimate Nutter?”
About ten years ago, on a now-defunct blog where I used to hang out, there started a discussion women/feminists couldn’t just condemn The Patriarchy for all the violence that befell women because women were plenty complicit in being horrible to other women (this was on a hugely majority as in nearly 99% female space, just so you know). This involved discussion of FGM (female genital mutilation) as one form of violence that women did to women and maintained and upheld.
Anyway, a guy slid into the discussion and started off fairly reasonably. Yes, terrible, but what about male genital mutilation? Oh, didn’t you know that’s what circumcision is? So we argued a bit around that, and then it got onto rape (nobody takes account of men being raped, prison rape, etc.) and domestic violence (ditto) and while we were conceding on some points (yes, men too are victims of domestic violence, yes, male rape victims don’t get the same support) he kept circling back to circumcision.
This was the first time I had ever encounted the idea of intactivism, and he never mentioned it by name, but his positions and arguments and, frankly, demands got weirder and louder and nuttier until it made me look up “who the hell is so exercised about circumcision?”, which is how I found out the movement existed.
There were calls from some to ban him, and others defended his right to participate in discussion, so we basically gave him enough rope to hang himself.
He eventually got booted off when he had failed to get us all grovelling at his feet about how he was so right, men were so oppressed, and circumcision was a ploy of feminists to castrate all men and take over the world (no, really, he went there: all women are ‘feminists’ and all ‘feminists’ want to literally not metaphorically castrate men, hence circumcision). And he was not joking about that, he wanted us to admit that yeah, basically, us women wanted that.
Troll or Nutter? Even those of us arguing “troll” at an early stage had to admit by the end, no, this is a genuine 24-carat whackjob!
One side effect of this is that in a forum where there’s a lot of trolling, the most natural assumption to make when confronted with a weird point of view is that it’s someone trolling. That means you tend not to be willing to engage with weird points of view, which probably means that correct-but-weird-sounding ideas have a hard time getting a hearing from sensible people.
Are the comments at Marginal Revolution moderated?
If so, not very well.
Trolling is alive and well on the subreddit.
Also: aren’t there plenty of other places where you can troll? Twitter, for example (as long as you stay away from certain topics)?
I guess the hard part is finding places where 99.99% of people aren’t trolling so that your trolling will have its desired effect and not get lost in the noise of all the other trolls or, worse, be automatically recognized as trolling (as on 4Chan or something).
Places where 99.99% of users aren’t trolls stay like that by ruthlessly banning every troll and troll-adjacent creature.
You can’t see your audience, and your audience may contain a fair number of children, crazy people, extremely gullable people/natural followers looking for a cause to follow, etc. So it’s really hard to know how much harm you’re doing as a troll, to weigh against your fun.
I have an economic question I’d like to bounce off you guys. It’s in regards to non-market transfers (gifts, ect), economic value, and specifically how it relates to the velocity of money. Me and Controls Freak have been having a near-month-long debate over a variety of subjects, this being one of them, that has finally come to a sputtering and bitter end. But this one question is lingering with me, specifically, that I’ve been googling for the answer but its difficult to find.
Let’s say I buy an item for $20. This means I must value it at more than $20, and thus economic value is created when I purchase it. However, as a gift, I then give that item to someone who did not buy it. Because the recipient of the gift did not buy it for $20 dollars, they must have valued it for less than $20. If this is the case, does this type of non-market transfer actually produce negative economic value? Since I, who valued it at >$20, have now given it to someone who values it at <$20, is the difference not economic value lost?
If this is correct, then can an increase in the level of non-market exchanges actually create a negative velocity of money, and therefore negative GDP?
The fact that someone didn’t buy something doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t value it at more than its price. It just might mean that the transaction cost of buying it, plus the cost of the item, was more than they were willing to pay. In other words, they might want the item, but simply not want to waste time buying it. Even in the age of online shopping, you often still have to do research on an item before you buy it. Another possibility is that the gift recipient didn’t know about the item in question.
Also, the fact that I bought a gift for $20 doesn’t mean I thought the item would provide $20 of value to myself. I’ve bought plenty of gifts for people that I wouldn’t enjoy myself: toys for kids, clothes I couldn’t wear, and so on.
Basically none of the assumptions here are right, so the only answer is mu.
Right, but the recipient could value it for less than its price. I agree that in gift-giving scenarios where the giver is essentially just covering the transaction costs, my reasoning wouldn’t apply.
Isn’t the value gained from the enjoyment of gift giving already covered in the $20 you spent, though? Like, if I would value $10 for the item for myself, but $20 for the item for someone else, then the value from the enjoyment of gift giving is that extra $10. I don’t get that $10 of value again when I give the gift.
This is the correct answer.
Just to clarify, I’m not wondering whether gift giving always produces negative economic value, but rather whether it can.
My guess is that if you just count the utility of the gift-receiver, the value is way less than the purchase price on average. There is a whole lot of bad gift giving out there since most gifts are socially mandatory.
Does satisfying a socially mandatory requirement provide utility to the gift giver that you’d add on to the total utility of the purchase? I guess, in which case you’d make a judgement about the social requirement being wasteful, but the actual purchase has economic value.
The idea of mandatory gift giving reminded me of mooncakes. I believe in China it’s considered something of a requirement that gifts of mooncakes be exchanged around the lunar festival.
I wonder if any economists have studied this in any sort of rigorous manner.
If no money is exchanged, don’t see how that could produce a negative velocity of money. Perhaps returning a gift to the store would be a negative velocity of money, but at most it would reduce the total transaction to zero.
Yeah, it doesn’t seem like this could produce negative velocity of money. At worst, we are allocating money in a way that doesn’t align perfectly with preferences, but we already don’t do that and it isn’t obvious to me that it would necessarily be bad for the economy for this to happen as long as the money keeps moving.
This is what I initially thought as well. But then when I considered that the velocity of money is measured as [price level*real value of transactions / total amount of money], to my naive eyes it looks that any changes in the value of transactions (whether the transactions involved money or not) would effect what we call the “velocity of money”.
This is highly out of my intellectual comfort zone, so if this sounds like nonsense I apologize.
Is that actually the right formula? I can’t find anything suggesting that as the calculation to get velocity…how are you (or your source) defining “real value” of transactions?
I’m getting the formula from the Wikipedia page.
Another line of thinking, that Controls Freak brought up, comes from the equation of exchange [ total money * velocity of money = GDP]. Since we aren’t affecting the money supply, then surely for example trading an apple for an orange, resulting in each recipient having a higher-valued item than they began with, must constitute a “velocity of money” increase, since it increases the GDP.
The puzzle is why we gives gifts in any form other than money. There are at least three possible answers:
1. You believe that, in this particular case, you know the recipient’s interest better than he does. You are buying him a book that you are confident he will enjoy, but since he, unlike you, hasn’t read the book, he doesn’t know that.
2. You have an objective other than the recipient’s utility. You are buying him a book that you believe will change him in ways you want him to be changed, not necessarily ways he wants to be changed.
3. In order to buy him a gift that he will like as much, or at least almost as much, as he would like what he would buy with the same amount of money, you have to know quite a lot about his utility function. Your gift is signaling that knowledge.
Why do you want to do so? One reason comes from Gary Becker’s analysis of altruism. You are an altruist with regard to him, meaning that his utility is an argument in your utility function. That makes it in your interest to learn about his utility. It is in your interest for him to know you are an altruist with regard to him, because that affects his incentives in ways that benefit you. I explain the logic in the discussion of altruism in a chapter of my price theory text.
4. You believe that gift giving itself has a value beyond the gift.
I know that when my girlfriend gives me a gift it usually has a utility value much less than I would pay for, yet the love/thought expressed in the gift has more value than that.
The value of a gift is in the emotional expression not the material exchange.
This has nothing to do with altruism unless the gift is to a stranger. Gift-giving to friends is symbolic. I don’t want to over-analyze the psychology of it, but to a first order approximation the value is equal to the amount spent. A $20 gift is worth $20.
But why do you give a $20 gift instead of a twenty dollar bill? That’s the puzzle.
One especially weird thing is the phenomenon of buying someone a $20 gift card instead of giving them a $20 bill. For weird social reasons I don’t begin to understand, giving a $20 bill seems less thoughtful than a $20 Starbucks gift card, even though the $20 bill is strictly more useful (even if you don’t like Starbucks, you can use it).
Buying someone a gift signals that you put some thought into their wants and needs and have gone out of your way to try to fulfil one of them. Buying someone a gift card is a lower effort version of this, it signals you at least know where they like to shop. Just giving someone money is has no signal above and beyond the value of the money. You don’t need to know anything about anyone to know they’ll appreciate a $20.
As my gang got order, we slowly got to the point where birthday presents to some people have insignificant monetary value to them. A socially reasonably collective gift might be $1-200 – so what do you get somebody that won’t notice if he misplaces the same amount? Giving the cash amount is obviously less then useless. And you can’t up the amount, because part of the gang won’t afford it.
Turns out there are at least three distinct reasons to continue gift giving:
– the enjoyment of buying and receiving the gift – the thrill, the surprise etc
– the effort invested in finding a gift the recipient will use – time in particular is not easily bought with money, so just the act of researching which motorcycle gloves to buy has value distinct from the price of the gloves, and is much less affected by the wealth of the recipient
– the feeling of belonging you get when people make the efforts above.
How would you change gift-giving societal norms to be less wasteful?
How would you change gift-giving societal norms to be less wasteful?
Do like the Hobbits, and circulate unwanted gifts around (who knew they invented re-gifting?)
There are many arguments about the utility and symbols gift giving has. But my main objection is that money giving is tacky, and bad manners. It devalues the gift, strips it of the care and love, and makes it seem like a monetary transaction.
I think giving money is only acceptable when you give money to kids.
There are social messages in gifts, and gifts are a way to say some things non-verbally.
If a man gave me 20 euros after a date, I would get offended and never talk to him again. It would be rude. If he gave me a flower bouquet worth 20 euros, I would be happy and think he must really like me to give me such a nice bouquet (if I like him back; otherwise it would be burdensome).
The point of the flower bouquet, and many other such gifts, is that it’s not fungible. The bouquet says that the man values his date’s presence in at least the 20 euros he’s willing to spend, but it doesn’t imply that he is buying her presence for the 20 euros, because the woman is not getting 20 euros.
In any friendship where the economic levels are vastly different, a gift of money will offend the person who has less, because they can’t reciprocate, and it makes it seem as if their friendship is for sale.
A poor person can spend the time researching the nicest gift they can make for their budget, and compensate the lack of money by making a really really nice gift.
A rich person can just go to the ATM, and stuff the approppriate amount of money in a cash envelope.
It just doesn’t seem the same.
The puzzle is why we feel this way, why money payments feel somehow more base than payments in kind.
Giving money to adults being tacky and bad manners is not something for just the middle class.
Poor people* will get very offended if you gift them money.
I remember I read a story in the New York Times about a guy who got stuck with a flat tire, and his jack got broken. A Mexican illegal immigrant family stopped by, helped him, and even gave him some tamales, and absolutely refused the gift of money he tried to give them. I am sure he had a political angle there, but it does sound true.
If you get help on the road, or somebody helps you, gifting money will be very, very offensive. But if you give a box of chocolates, or a nice bottle of whiskey, sometimes they will accept it. Frequently they won’t, but they may sometimes accept a gift in kind, whereas they would never accept a gift of money.
I don’t know if it’s the same in all cultures. I know it is like that in Europe, it seems to be like that in America, north and south.
The only place where it’s not bad manners to gift money is weddings, where guests gift money. I heard in the US they have gift registries so people buy stuff from a list, which is quite close to giving money. I have heard that in China they give big sums of money as gifts in weddings.
*At least poor working blue collar people will get offended.
The fact that economists have a hard time accepting that this behavior is actually part of how the world works is a problem for economists though, not really a problem for the world.
Its not actually an economics puzzle at all, a gift is both a gift of monetary value and time value. If I find a gift that I think you would spend $100 on and buy it for you then the economic value to you is >$100 as the cost of you finding the gift and then buying it exceeds $100.
Thus gift cards are a good gift for people who like shopping and a terrible gift for people who hate shopping.
To put it very simply a well thought out gift is a gift of money+time+knowledge but cash is just money.
Gifts that don’t require much thought or knowledge (liquor, chocolate, flowers, wine) are still valued more highly than money. There are many social situations where chocolates would be appropriate where money wouldn’t.
@DavidFriedman
It’s because a transaction is not the same as a gift. People often prefer not to have social bonding mixed with their business transactions; nor to have their attempts at building social bonds be undermined by people creating a business transaction.
This goes both ways. Have you ever paid for a colleague in a canteen or such, after they forgot their money, where they were clearly very insistent on paying it back, even though you are fine with letting it go and indicated such?
Gifts like these are typically aimed at personal tastes, or situation specific (ie flowers to a person in a hospital), and still contain the time element.
This reminds me of a plot I used to see on TV a lot as a kid: a family/group of friends is trying to get the perfect gift for someone’s birthday or the perfect gifts for each other. Since I’ve never observed this sort of thing happening in real life, I can only conclude it’s the sort of thing we’d get up to in a post scarcity future. These Disney channel or Nickelodeon characters are usually wildly well off, so they’re living in a post scarcity utopia already.
The ‘real gift’ is the portrait. Someone giving you something is also giving you their impression of what you like. Whether or not I like the gift itself, I am always glad to know that my family think I’d appreciate an X.
This strikes me as insane.Who’s to say what something is worth? Only the buyer and seller. I don’t believe economics is perfect in how it values things, but what’s the more objective alternative? It’s the best estimation we got, that’s all.
The economist who thinks Christmas gifts are wasteful doesn’t understand what Christmas gifts are about. Hint: They are mostly an expression of love.
You’ve never received the proverbial fruitcake at Christmas?
By which I mean a gift that you don’t want, and the gifter didn’t particularly value.
It’s not like there is nothing to this question.
I don’t know about negative velocity of money (because I don’t know about velocity of money) but the answer to the question about economic value is obviously yes.
Let’s say I buy an item for $20. This means I must value it at more than $20, and thus economic value is created when I purchase it.
I’d stop at that first step – why would you value it more than $20? There are many items I’d buy at price X which I would not buy at price Y, so plainly I don’t value them at price X+.
Gifts are tricky, anyway, since there are several reasons you could be buying a gift: an engagement ring, which is meant to be valuable and which the other party is not meant to buy for themselves; you could be giving a gift of money or property now rather than leaving it as a bequest in order to get around tax liabilities for both yourself and the recipient; you could be putting the property in your wife’s name as an act of love instead of as a dodge to get around bankruptcy so your creditors can’t seize it (ahem).
You wouldn’t bother trading a $20 bill for another $20 bill. So it’s assumed that anything you do trade a $20 bill for is worth more than $20 to you.
You wouldn’t bother trading a $20 bill for another $20 bill.
But if I had $20 in change, or two $10 bills, I might. The convenience of having one bill instead of a purse full of change, or obliging someone by ‘breaking’ the bill for them, means I’m giving 20 for 20.
There’s intangibles there, and while I think most cases are covered by “I’m paying $20 for this saucepan because I need something to cook my food in/I’m paying $20 for this pair of socks because my old ones are worn through and I need a good warm pair for winter” so the convenience is ‘baked-in’ to the exchange, I don’t think you can get too fine-grained on it: is the ‘good warm’ quality worth $5 to you? $10? $1?
As I said, if I’d buy it at $20 but not at $30, then whatever extra value it’s worth to me above $20 may not be all that much – I might not judge the quality of the product to be worth $30, or I don’t want/can’t afford to spend that much on product X for purpose Y.
As other people have noted separately, it can go either way.
If the gift is a dud, the recipient may well value it less than the money that was spent on it.
However, the act of giving can increase the gift’s value in the eyes of the recipient. A gift can be a symbol of the giver’s affection toward the recipient. I think this is the origin of the idea of money being a bad gift; giving something other than money requires the giver to think about the recipient.
The gift might also be something the recipient didn’t have an opportunity to buy, perhaps because they didn’t know it existed.
I think you’re mixing up some concepts.
For the purposes of simplicity, let’s say your neighbor just moved in, and you buy and gift him a $20 bottle of wine to welcome him to the neighborhood. If you just gave him $20, he would use it to buy a different bottle of wine that believes he would like better.
1) Velocity of Money: Does you buying a gift and giving it to someone who wouldn’t willingly have purchased the item reduce the velocity of money? As I understand it, no. You gave $20 to the store, who now has $20 to spend. Roughly stated, the velocity of money is how many times that same $20 bill gets spent in a year, but for the whole money supply. What you do with the item doesn’t affect the velocity of money.
2) GDP: Does the fact that you gave the gift to someone who doesn’t value it at $20 reduce GDP. Again, no. Assuming I understand correctly, GDP is a measure of the total amount of stuff produced, valued at its market price. Someone produced a widget, and you bought at the market price of $20. The GDP measurement for that widget is $20 whether you keep it, gift it, or hammer it into scrap.
3) Total Utility: Here we go. This is the Christmas paradox – did you reduce total utility by giving the gift to someone who we assume doesn’t value it by $20? Arguably you did, but maybe not.
a) First, we can assume that you get at least $20 of utility out of giving the gift, or you wouldn’t do it. Compare if you had bought a cream pie to throw in your neighbor’s face. Even though he might get negative utility from being cream pied, you still bought the pie. This transaction gets you the >=$20 in utility that you bargained for, plus whatever utility he gets.
b) He may get more than $20 in utility. Maybe you have superior information and you buy a wine he hasn’t heard of that he likes better than the one he would have bought. Alternatively, maybe he gets $16 in utility from the wine itself, but also some utility from the positive feelings he gets that you are signalling you are a thoughtful guest who cares about his welfare.
c) In the worst case, he can always sell the wine, or re-gift it, although there may be some dead-weight loss.
What is the most right wing theory for why Argentina is so economically stagnant? Policy? National IQ?
What is the most left wing theory? Geography? The IMF?
Disregard this post, I mixed up my troubled South American countries. Left below so the reply makes sense.
———————————-
“Communism”.
“American imperialism” (Maduro’s claim)
What does Maduro have to do with Argentina? Are you confusing Argentina and Venezuela?
Ah, yes, I was not reading carefully. “Most left wing” answer (except parenthetical) doesn’t change though, I think that one works for any problem in South or Central America. Since I know nothing of the situation in Argentina I don’t know the right wing answer.
This pretty much works for any country. Even if its policies are close to what you would advise, you can still always say that they just aren’t capitalist/socialist enough.
Off the top of my head:
Right Wing: A combination of the Peronist welfare state and Peronist protectionism of local industrial interests, combined with run-of-the-mill corruption.
Left Wing: Severe income inequality, coupled with the aftereffects of unfair debt restructuring facilitated by US banking interests. Also, run-of-the-mill corruption.
Interesting two-part video series on Youtube about the behind-the-scenes Brexit negotiations from the EU side. A Belgian film-maker got access to the meetings involving Guy Verhofstadt, who is the co-ordinator of the negotiation team for the European Parliament.
First, it’s interesting in how Verhofstadt was insistent that the Parliament would be involved and secondly, how frustrating it was (and is) dealing with the British, who tried the usual tactics of going around the committee, divide-and-conquer, and spin in the press and thirdly, how surprisingly united the EU side was (is) despite internal divisions. Honestly, I would have expected that the divide-and-conquer thing would have worked better because of those real splits between member nations, but it’s also true that the memory of the long European history of wars and the ideal of the EU as a post-war union to prevent ever going back to that state of affairs looms very large in the organisational memory of the EU.
Part one and part two links.
The unitedness of the EU supports the populist claim that a globalist, rootless* elite are running the EU.
The latest Dutch populist like talking about the party cartel, that keeps out outsiders.
* The ‘everywheres’ vs the ‘somewheres’
@bean @John Schilling:
The plot becomes (potentially) a little clearer on the 737-MAX issue.
According to the The Seattle Times
To me that looks like it explains some of the confusion in the Ethiopian Air transcript. The pilots were surprised that the electric trim stabilization was non-functional with the cutout switch off.
Good catch, and that may explain some of the Ethiopian Air crew’s otherwise baffling behavior.
They should still have been able to fly under pure manual trim control, and I’ll be disappointed if the resolution of this whole mess doesn’t address that. Maybe that means changing the gear ratio on the manual trim control, maybe it just means changing aircrew training, but that capability should remain functional and useful in the event that some other problem (e.g. a short in the wiring harness to the yoke switches) requires it.
However, it does look like Boeing removed an option that would have made it much easier for the Lion Air and Ethiopian crews to deal with this particular problem. I can’t see what advantage they thought they were gaining by the change, and I in particular can’t see why they didn’t explicitly document the change. Some of the comments seem to suggest a philosophy that “pilots can’t be expected to deal with two different switches in a trim runaway, so let’s take that away and not worry their tiny little minds with telling them about it”. In which case, shame on Boeing, because EA 302 starts to make sense as a crew who, from their NG experience, understood that there should be two different switches, one of which gives them back the yoke control while still cutting off the autopilot. Then, in trying to find that useful but quietly removed functionality, inadvertently gave control back to the known-bad MCAS.
I think you are speaking loosely here, but I find your choice of words interesting, because when we first discussed this I (paraphrasing from memory) asked if “cutting off the auto-pilot would prevent runaway trim?” Now, this isn’t precisely that, but more like you used to be able to cut out auto-trim, and can’t anymore?
No, both the old and new configuration allow the pilot to cut out auto-trim.
On the pre-‘MAX’ system, the “STAB TRIM AUTO CUTOUT” switch disconnected the autopilot from the trim control, which both cuts out auto trim(*) and disables the autopilot as anything but a yaw-steering device but leaves the thumb switch on the yoke capable of controlling trim. “STAB TRIM MAIN ELECT” cuts both the autopilot and the thumb switches.
On the -‘MAX’, both switches now apparently cut both the autopilot and thumb switch sides of the circuit, completely disabling all electric trim and leaving just the hand crank.
So either switch on any version of the 737, completely kills auto-trim. It’s just that prior to the ‘MAX’, you had one setting that still allowed the pilot to use the thumb switch to control trim without having to use the more cumbersome hand crank.
* All of the automatic trim functions including MCAS should run through the autopilot’s wiring harness even if the autopilot isn’t flying the plane.
@John Schilling:
I think you slightly misunderstood where I was going.
Boeing essentially removed a feature that used to be “cut out the automated stuff and let me fly the plane (electrically)”. Now, the only way to do that only lets you fly the plane mechanically.
It’s in the same problem space as my previous question about auto-pilot. It removes control from the pilot by preventing them from maintaining full control of the plane electrically. In essence, they did remove the capability to “turn off the auto-pilot”. But they did it in the opposite way, by saying “the only way to turn off auto-trim is to turn off electrics”.
According to the article linked, it is apparently documented in the flight manual, although I suppose that’s one detail in some hundred pages, and the switches look the same except for a change in the labels, so the pilots might not have been aware of it.
Anyway, this change reinforces my hypothesis that the 737 MAX flies strangely, and possibly unsafely, without the MCAS: they wanted to make sure that nobody used the autopilot stab trim cutoff switch to disable all the automated things outside a true emergency and find out that the aircraft started to do weird things, which could have lead to a FAA investigation.
I’m not seeing any evidence of that anywhere, and I don’t think it is a reasonable suspicion. Using either of the switches on the old -NG configuration would effectively disable the autopilot, which nobody will be doing outside of a “true emergency”. Among other things, since 2005 autopilots have been required to fly above FL290 (roughly 29,000 feet) in the airspace of any ICAO nation, and the cruising altitude of a 737 is pretty much always going to be above FL290.
I’m unclear on why the cruising altitude is important. Can you explain that a little bit?
Below FL290*, atmospheric density is high enough that fuel consumption per mile starts to increase noticeably and/or cruising speed has to be reduced to keep fuel consumption per mile constant. Airlines don’t like either. Between FL290 and roughly FL410 is the sweet spot for maximum efficiency for a fast subsonic aircraft – above FL410, the optimum airspeed pushes up against Mach 1 (or beyond, the Concorde cruised at up to FL600), and that’s associated with entirely new sorts of drag and inefficiency. Unfortunately, above FL290, atmospheric pressures are low enough that barometric altimeters start to become coarse and inaccurate, and pilots flying airplanes manually cannot be expected to control altitude to better than +/-1000′ and ATC has to separate crossing traffic by at least 2000′. That used to be OK, but airspace is more congested in the 21st century. So the new rule is, 1000′ separation, so aircraft have to control altitude to +/-500′, which above FL290 is only practical with an autopilot. If you’re not using an autopilot (with the right paperwork), ATC will restrict you to the lower altitudes with the thicker air and the higher fuel consumption, and if you’re working as an airline pilot, your boss’s boss will be mad at you when he sees the fuel bills. If you cheat and fly above FL290 without using an autopilot, ATC will be mad at you when they see your altitude wandering dangerously close to other planes.
So, the theory that pilots were or were expected to be quietly hitting the auto-trim kill switch because they didn’t trust the automatics, and Boeing wanted to stop them from doing that, doesn’t work – hitting any of the kill switches on any version of the 737 disables autopilot pitch control (which works only through trim) and results in a noticeably off-nominal flight that will have somebody mad at you if you don’t have a good explanation.
* A “flight level” is defined by atmospheric pressure but corresponds to 100′ of altitude under standard conditions.
John Schilling,
Worth noting that I believe that the 737 is the only Boeing airliner that still comes with a manual trim wheel.
One of the bonkers things about that change to the switches: why have two switches then if they both now do the same thing?
Another note: does this mean that the only way the crew had to disengage MCAS while still being able to use electric trim would be putting some flap down?
It looks like the logic was that older 737s all had two switches and the first-order emergency response was “hit both kills switches!”, with some fine print about how you could then re-enable yoke trim, and Boeing wanted to keep the cockpit layout and the first-order emergency response because they didn’t trust the pilots to read the fine print.
I think that would work, but that’s a bit of cleverness that requires the pilots to read the fine print and Boeing is deprecating the fine print.
After the Lion crash, would most 737 MAX pilots have been aware of that? We really need a 737MAX pilot to come and answer some questions here.
One of the things you should know as a pilot is all the possible ways to disconnect autopilot on your machine. Typically that’s something like 1) overpower yoke 2) yoke disconnect A/P button 3) panel A/P button off 4) A/P circuit breaker pull 5) activate yoke electric trim etc. I would think that after Lion Air, 737 MAX pilots would try to have a similar list for ‘ways to disconnect MCAS.’ But I don’t know how forthcoming Boeing was with all that info and I haven’t read the AD that came out after Lion Air.
The AD’s not going to tell you much. ADs themselves never do. They’re essentially containers for other documents, usually prepared by the manufacturer. I did look at the LionAir one, and it basically said to follow trim runaway procedures if the MCAS gave you trouble. The trim runaway procedure is in the flight manual somewhere, and finding a copy of that might be tricky.
@ bean:
Looks like it was reproduced on page 28-29 of the Ethiopian report here. It doesn’t look like the procedure would call for only one switch to be thrown, but it doesn’t sit well that the option was taken away.
Oh boy, the gift that keeps giving.
First the AOA sensors disagreement light that was present but disabled unless the airline purchased a special upgrade, except that the airlines didn’t actually know that the light was disabled.
Now, the change to the logic of the cutoff switches.
The 737 Max will end up in safety engineering textbooks as a case study of how not to design something. How could a reputable company like Boeing produce such a failure?
… A light? They turned on a light if the sensors disagreed? And that only if paid extra? If the sensors disagree, you know for a fact that at least one of them is wrong. At which point, the proper behavior of automated systems that require accurate input is “I am turning myself off now, PILOT, PAY ATTENTION”.
Depends on where the light is. Having a section of the panel that is nothing but annunciator lights that stay off or green unless something that requires immediate attention is happening, and trusting the flight crew to notice a red light suddenly appearing in the sea of green, is generally considered adequate. An audio alert would also be helpful, but at that point may be just a buzzer indicating that the pilot should look at the annunciator panel.
Why is all this sounding uncannily like the various updates to Microsoft Office where they turn off or remove the bits you are accustomed to using and find actually useful, but put in new bells and whistles you never asked for and which you have to hunt through all the non-obvious* menu options to find before giving up and Googling (as Microsoft online Help is no earthly good to man or beast) to find out “How do I get back the commands I need to use and have always used up to now?”
*Because putting it in the obvious place with the obvious name would be a waste of the time of all those highly-paid engineers and designers if their hours of work re-tooling just meant any idiot could pick up the new changes by simply looking, right?
OK, I’ve generally been a strong defender of Boeing, but the bizarre design/documentation decisions are starting to pile up to an alarming degree. That is indeed a good explanation for what happened with Ethiopian Air, and I’m really wondering where Boeing’s human factors people were in all of this. (Or maybe they’re just all terrible. This would explain some things…)
Scott, (if you don’t respond here I’ll ask at the next OT, since this one is kinda old), I just ordered a printed copy of Unsong. I want to make sure it’s a decent copy, but once it comes, would you be ok with me posting a link to buy it on here? I wouldn’t be making any money, though the printer (Lulu.com) obviously would be. My inclination is to ask people to donate the price of the book to your blog when they purchase, but that’s totally up to you and I’d have no way to enforce it anyway.
Sure, go ahead.
What’s the best way to have a second phone number?
I’m about to take on a community volunteer position where it would be helpful to give out my phone number to anyone who asks, but also helpful to keep it separate from the number I give to my friends and family in case of harassment, or allowing me to turn off calls from one line when I’m on vacation, or for whatever reason.
I do already have an android phone that accepts a second SIM (OnePlus 5T). Do people have any opinions on getting a secondary voice/text SIM from a cheap provider vs a virtual number (Google Voice or something)? Most helpful feature would be auto-switching outgoing calls based on something in the contacts. WhatsApp functionality would be nice, but not essential.
If it’s important not to make a mistake, keep it very simple: get a separate phone.
Especially if you’re just using the 2nd phone for calls/SMS…it can be a cheapy with a cheap plan (or a shared plan with your existing phone).
I’ve had good luck with the Burner app — which isn’t free, but is cheaper than getting a second phone will be. Only caveat I’d offer is that the need for this sort of thing often lasts longer than you think it will.
Google voice is easy and cheap – it will get you a separate number and voicemail box, and you can point that number at different phones. For outgoing calls, if you place calls with the Google hangouts app instead of your phone app, the calls should come from your Google voice number, but I’d double check.
A woman adopted an abused pit bull from a kill shelter, even though he was aggressive to her. It took her seven months to figure out that the unconditional love of a sibling would practically instantly turn him into a good dog (that is to say, a perfectly average dog).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQFTXP9DGhw
“There is the great lesson of ‘Beauty and the Beast’; that a thing must be loved BEFORE it is loveable.” — G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
This Twitter thread makes the claim that a huge amount of the rise of the social justice media and online community is due, ultimately, to venture capitalists funding online media based on metrics, discovering that this was the kind of content that maxed out the clicks, and then a subsequence boom and bust in those online outlets (with all kinds of horrible societal effects).
I’m not sure whether this is right. However, it tracks with another story I have heard–that a lot of the most outrageous online right-wing world arose originally as a kind of in-joke in certain online fora, and then expanded until people took it seriously.
Societies and social dynamics are complicated. People have a hard time being individually rational given some (maybe most) social dynamics–especially where there’s tribal conflict and beliefs become tribal markers. I don’t think anyone in the world knows enough to predict how all this stuff will play out, or what the media/online world of 2030 will look like.
Is this substantially different from cable news resorting to the dumbest, most outlandish stories / personalities to generate ratings? The feedback / outrage cycle is just much faster online, and faster still on social media in particular.
Albatross when you say ‘outrageous right wing media’ do you mean right wing as in ‘TheBlaze’ or right wing as in something like the Daily Stormer.
I’m thinking Daily Stormer, not Fox News.
Well i can say that a lot of right wing memes are inside jokes, including things from the daily stormer, but the underlying content is genuinely sincere in terms of the meaning. That website’s creator has stated on a few occasions that the point of making the content so over-the-top and edgy is that the seeming lack seriousness is a more effective propaganda tool.
The other thing has to do with diffusing negative propaganda value. So making jokes about hitler causes people to take accusations of naziism less seriously.
Right. I think there’s a general phenomenon, where the in-the-know folks make in-jokes about one-way helicopter rides or ZOG or the sinister pizza parlor or something, and then the gullable, young, stupid and crazy types take it seriously and run with it until it starts having some power in the world. Most people judge which beliefs they should take seriously largely on social proof, so if there appears to be a large set of people around who believe X, then X must be a reasonable sort of thing to believe.
There’s a parallel on the left, where in-the-know types make some pretty nasty jokes about the evils of white men or the patriarchy or drinking white peoples’ tears or something, and then the gullable/young/stupid/crazy on their side take that and run with it.
My main lesson from this is that it’s a lot more important to be honest and clear in what you’re saying than most people imagine. Verbally clever put-downs and snark and jokes are great for showing off, but online, you can’t see that there are people in your audience who didn’t get the joke and took your crazy/horrible thing literally.
This reminds me of how the Flat Earth Society was a joke for a decade or so, yet now there are hundreds of thousands of people who earnestly believe the Earth is flat because they didn’t get that it was all a trolling competition.
My favorite part of the Flat Earther thing is still No Forests on Flat Earth.
Oh man, that’s beautiful. Gaia was alive (or Tiamat, as the author points out), not just in a panpsychic way or worse a metaphor, but as a giant colony of trees of which Yggdrasil would have just been the tallest.
… then apparently it goes off into nonsense about an invisible technological civilization mining our dead Earth and a nuclear war in the 19th century.
There used to be, perhaps still is, a very entertaining flat earth web site with some clever arguments. My guess was that it was a joke, but I wasn’t entirely sure.
This sounds like “wet streets cause rain” thinking. Why was the SJW outrage content the one that generated more clicks?
We’ve had some other boom-and-bust cycles from changes in Facebook’s algorithm – the “life-affirming” sites like Upworthy and the “pivot to video.” In all cases there’s probably some underlying “natural” demand for this stuff, but it’s being greatly magnified and distorted by whatever metric Facebook has decided to optimize for this week.
Can it not be that they were saying more extreme things than anyone else did at the time, and so they had the Alex Jones-esque clickbait factor?
You could click on the rightie saying laws are good and border-hopping is bad, you could click on the leftie saying that poverty is bad and regulations are good, or you could click on the neon-haired whacko saying that farting in public is rape and snowplows clearing the road to the hospital before the one to the day care is sexist.
Interesting idea. At a personal level, I don’t participate in any social media where the algorithm that decides what I see – or what of my work other’s see – is anything other than “what they asked for”, where that includes “the n most recent posts from this group of posters”.
This means that by modern definitions, I don’t participate in “social media” at all, since ancient, well behaved media have been forgotten by just about everyone who uses that term. (I remember being surprised when I first found that answering “yes” to the social-media question on surveys got me a list of things I’d never been on, as choices for which social media I used.)
I feel unsure about the timing.
So far as I know, ideas very like social justice were common enough on campuses for decades earlier, but got out into science fiction fandom in 2009 (racefail), which happened mostly on livejournal– a site which doesn’t monetize clicks.
I’m realizing I don’t know the trajectory which went from fandom (and possibly other sources) to the mainstream.
I think this is tied in with what Scott was talking about re: PETA vs. sane activists, or controversial police brutality cases vs. open and shut ones.
Controversy is king on social media. Social Justice outcompetes regular concerns about injustice, because no one has anything to say about the obvious, but everyone can produce a hot take on a borderline case.
Does anyone know the exact word count limit? I’m putting together my next effortpost and can’t figure out what it exactly is. I’m pretty sure it’s in the 1800-2000 word territory. Some quick searching of the site hasn’t helped. I’m hoping I’ll be able to cut down my post to fit, rather than break a subject into two.
Make a top level comment and immediately reply to it?
I thought of putting the first chunk (mostly uncontroversial stuff about historical background, summary, etc) in the main post and the stuff people will ask/argue about in a reply. It can’t be done the other way around, because of the flow of the writing. It’s a possibility, but the major problem there is that replies will hit the lowest level quicker, which makes it harder to read.
I’ve targeted 1500 words in my effort posts; a few went a bit longer than that and went through when I posted on “let’s see if this works, if not I’ll edit more” attitude. So if you’re at 1800-2000 and think you can cut it some more, try that and see. If it doesn’t go through, then I second rlms’s plan of splitting it into a top-level post and reply. That’s what I did in my first Diplomacy game report, which worked nicely as the replies then wound up sorted by which part they were replying to.
Suppose some far future archaeologist find these comments, or some fragments of them, and is trying to build a picture of the “entities” and “community” that existed here.
How badly could they mangle your identity?
I might not exist to them.
I doubt that the syntax and formats will be properly “translated” in time – even things like archive.org sometimes has problems displaying pages, and then my username may very well be seen as sort of a general boundary phrase for a new idea or message. For example, for example, ., desu.
And thus, my posts might be combined with those above or below, my own individuality and existence nowhere to be seen.
My name being in lower case might trip them up, though I don’t know if they would have any guesses as to its meaning.
I’d have the same problem. That being said, comments begin with “X says:“, so as long as future archeologists understand 2010s English, they should be able to separate usernames from comments.
I hope they find archives here and think it’s representative of the general population.
“What is it with people from the 2010’s and battleships?”
Speaking as a historian, I’d happily bet that one school of thought on this would be based round the consideration that the normal comment thread round here will display awareness of climate change, a lack of ability to grasp scale of change and a major conflict (the Culture War) with increasingly fractured and inward-firing alliances. A lazy historian might therefore hypothesise that a war was on, and it seemed to threaten all our society; further, as the sea level was perceived to be rising fast, obviously many combatants were involved in trying to develop their naval capability.
Clearly this would involve cherry picking data, but if there’s one sin history as an academic subject has not faced up to, it’s our love of cherry picking!
To be honest, I think you’re forgetting the significant faction that wants to fight the navies of the world from SPACE, using all different kinds of techniques and weapons to defend themselves from the problems of living in a vacuum. Another significant faction is just going to cut their own heads off and freeze them to hope they get resurrected in the future, while several others attempt to convince them to join either of the other factions because “Do you want to live forever?”
OK, so would this 21st century Earth with its factions make better grist for a game or a TV series?
porque no los dos?
Like really, if you’re digging through SSC for inspiration, you should do both.
Game, definitely. Multiple factions with different styles of waging war is the perfect setup for an RTS. Maybe something in the vein of Tom Clancy’s Endwar?
Archeology in antiquity has the problem of incomplete data so whatever sources exist are generally known by experts in completeness but the task becomes interpreting their significance.
SSC comments exist in a sea of forums and archeologists would likely have a problem of ‘TOO MUCH’ data to work with. In which case The archeologist likely studies and publishes the findings because the SSC comments tell a good story. [i.e. cherry picking]
The fast sea rising theory is supported by the popularity of the Naval Gazing thread.
That was the joke. Why else would we spend so much time talking about naval warfare?
Depending on what comments were recovered, they’d know I’m not a mineral from Alpha Centauri, at least…
@helloo
As long as the mangling is consistent, which it is very likely to be, parsing the comments should be fairly straightforward. If anything, you can just take the bit before “says:” as the name of the poster, and everything afterwards until “Reply Hide” as the comment.
Then they can do whatever state of the art text analysis they have at that moment.
The issue is more whether they will care about our community in the first place. They might if the singularity happens and we, with our high percentage of programmers and people who are involved with singularity research, end up producing some significant actors. For example, future people may want to research the origins of dictator John Schilling, who took control of a world in chaos, with the same skills that allowed him to dominate the Diplomacy games.
I’d probably be OK identity-wise, so long as there’s no discussions of the opera (yes that’s the plural of opus) of Alan Moore or Harper Lee preserved.
Are we assuming the fully rendered HTML is going to be archived, here?
Things change quite a bit if instead they are having to mine mysql databases for the records.
As long as the database was done reasonably, they should be able to reconstruct threaded discussions like these with (say) the columns comment ID, replied to ID, username, timestamp, and comment text, right? I don’t think the particular way we display them matters.
Depends a bit on what technology they have. Do they have a modern copy of mysql, or do they just have the data files stored on a disk somewhere?
Also, this:
is doing a lot of work here 😉
Haha, in fairness, the data for the comments can’t be that complex, so I feel like it’s hard to screw up. It’s not like we’re talking about a bunch of many to many relations—though I’m sure I am leaving out a bunch of columns like gravatar ID, email….
Does it reconstruct the icons? By my count, there are at least 4 people (past and present) here going solely by the name “Matt”. I am the orange-icon Matt.
You should each have separate identifying IDs?
Yeah, I imagine the column is an email address and it’s using that to get the gravatar. Isn’t a gravatar literally generated using an MD5 hash of one’s email or something? If they have email they could show that in their modified reconstruction, or show it in place of display name/gravatar, or whatever they want.
I wonder whether people who post under what look like ordinary names will seem to be peculiar. I think we’re very much in the minority.
How might future archaeologists parse the Reign of Terror?
Will this thread turn out to be useful for them?
The inhabitants of the Slate Star were a vicious lot, who often fantasized about running over people with trains. They occupied much of their time with constructing ever more elaborate scenarios with which to justify these multiple murders.
Sometimes they would even fantasize about placing dust specks in the eyes of 3^^^3 people, which our moralogists have proven to be one of the most objectively immoral acts possible.
As a serious answer, though not sure if that’s what you’re looking for, with a lot of software, most of which is in the domain of what we call AI (though probably just specialized and very very good).
So they’ll probably be able to guess more than we currently know. We can already tell with some confidence if the author of a text is a man or a woman, and Robert Galbraith was confirmed as JK Rowling based on text analysis. So they’ll know with better confidence the authors of multiple accounts, plus things, like sex, orientation, education, background, place of birth etc. It’s reasonably easy (with current technology and a bit of effort) (and this comment just got scary) to construct profiles for each poster and collect pieces of information from each comment. Connecting alt profiles from different sites is less easy but still in the realm of what’s currently possible, automatically.
So yeah, it’s not like you’ll exist to them. It’s more like how good a simulation they’ll be able to reconstruct. My personal guess… your parents would be fooled.
Does anyone have a good recommendation for substituting imitation crab meat? It was $6/lb at the grocery store, which is way cheaper than crab, but considering it’s starch plus fish paste, seems awfully expensive and quite carby.
Context: Made my own version of crab rangoon using pizza dough that was lightly fried then baked, but am trying to think of what to replace the imitation crab with.
Thanks!
Tilapia marinated in crab broth?
Doesn’t seem like that would be the right consistency.
Do you have a friend with access to a wholesaler? Imitation crab is less than half that price at any restaurant supplier.
@DragonMilk
Once you start substituting the substitution, shouldn’t you just give up and make something else? Surimi is already really crappy, so accepting a lesser product for even less seems silly.
Crab rangoon is just fried wontoons with crab filling & you can fill them with other things that are cheaper.
I suppose the proper question would have been, what are some other possible substitutes for real crab – wasn’t intending to downgrade from surimi, haha
1) What kind of grocery store was this? Asian stores may have a wider selection, and with a better handle on sourcing, they may have better pricing.
2) There’s a chain here called “Grocery Outlet,” and while their product lineup is unstable, when they do have crab in, it’s heavily discounted from regular store prices. Find a similar chain in your area.
3) Maybe really thinly sliced cooked nopal? Jackfruit?
Shop&Stop in Greenwich, CT 🙁
Yeah, I would definitely try some of the local ethnic stores. Imitation crab showing up in American groceries in the first place is relatively recent, so they may not sell enough of the product to lower their price (since most people looking for it probably already go to the ethnic shops).
All you really need in there is cream cheese, but some minced onion and garlic would go well.
Yeah, at that point, some shredded chicken or pulled pork would get you the texture of the crap bits, since the cheese/onion/garlic would dominate the flavor.
Seems like there’s an opportunity here for oyster rangoons, too…
Is it possible that some alcoholics are better off being alcoholics than if they weren’t?
It’s sometimes said that drunks or stoners are “self-medicating” to treat an underlying mental illness. Perhaps frequent heavy drinking or smoking dope wards off depression for some people. Isn’t this possible? Perhaps for some people, it does a better job than any prescription medication meant to treat depression. Has this ever been tested?
Consider it from this point of view. Imagine a world in which, for whatever reason, almost nobody drinks alcohol, but alcohol is nevertheless available. Wouldn’t it seem kind of intuitive, given the strong effects of alcohol upon mood, that it would be an obvious drug candidate for treating depression or anxiety?
Or no?
There are plenty of alcoholics who are more tolerable while drinking. This isn’t saying that alcohol is the best choice for them. This is saying that the underlying causes of their alcoholism need to be addressed, so that self medicating in a self destructive way is less desirable. I don’t think there are people for which alcohol is the best solution to their problems, but I do think it’s an easy to obtain solution. If you want to eliminate alcoholism, making other solutions easier to obtain is the best method for making alcoholism less prevalent. That said, I’m not certain what the better solutions are, so maybe I’m dead wrong about the efficacy of other solutions.
To the extent that people are using alcohol to self medicate for mental health issues, one solution would be for licensing bodies to not require disclosure of mental health treatment, so people would be less reluctant to seek it. One source describes a mandatory program for physicians who disclose mental illness as “expensive, degrading, and time consuming.” (page 20 of the PDF). Likewise, attorneys are required to disclose mental health issues (specifics vary by state), and uncertainty about what a licencing body will do could dissuade people from getting treatment (can’t be required to disclose a mental illness if you have’t been diagnosed with one!). I understand that the licensing bodies are concerned that a professional will have some sort of psychotic break and blow something for a client, but they don’t seem worried that someone diagnosed with high blood pressure will have a heart attack or stroke and blow something for a client (eg lawyer not showing up for crucial court appearance due to being rushed to the hospital with a heart attack).
I have relatives whom I’d classify as highly functional alcoholics–folks who’ve had a full and successful life and career, but who seem like they’d have had a very hard time getting through their days without a fair bit of alcohol. This involved a few times where their drinking visibly caused them some serious problems, but nothing that they couldn’t route around. I’m not sure they’d have had better lives up until now without alcohol.
The trope-namer for addiction+functional life is nicotine addiction–if smoking didn’t cause a big bunch of nasty health problems, the only issue with the nicotine addiction would be the cost. (Vaping probably gets rid of most or all of the health risks, I think.)
The funny thing is that the cost is a completely artificial problem, at least around these parts. Smoking is expensive because of taxes.
Currently in Poland, taxes constitute 80+% of the price of cigarettes, and the way the law is constructed, they increase every year.
The cost problem could literally be solved overnight by getting rid of nicotine-specific taxation.
The health risks are a completely separate issue, of course, but mostly irrelevant it seems. The legislative thrust is towards taxing alternative nicotine-based products exactly the same way as tobacco. Given that nicotine taxes constituted around 9% of Poland’s budget income in 2016 (taxes and prices have gone up since), I’m not surprised.
The health risks are, roughly, the reason the taxes exist in the first place. Absent the the heavy health risks, the tax wouldn’t have been nearly so attractive. Compared to another sin tax, alcohol taxes, the tax on cigarettes is much higher.
You seem to have missed the subsequent sentence about alternatives – where the science isn’t in, yet – being taxed in exactly the same way as POT (plain ol’ tobacco).
I’m willing to put dollars against peanuts that the main reason taxes are so high aren’t health risks, but that smokers are an acceptable target – that is: the non-smoking population supports tobacco taxes (and similar taxes on alternatives).
I’m acknowledging that “sin taxes” exist and are based around the idea of something “sinful”.
The question I’m addressing is why cigarettes are so attractive for extremely, absurdly high sin taxes. The vape taxes you are pointing at aren’t particularly good counter evidence. These products aren’t completely divorced from the ones they are replacing, especially as their explosive growth is driven by the same companies who are looking to replace cigarettes.
There’s something strange about how we use the term “alcoholic”. Take what the average Brit drinks, and have an American drink that much, suddenly they’re an alcoholic. The connotation of the term is that the person has an underlying need for alcohol but I’m not convinced that applies the majority of the time. Take your average person labelled as an alcoholic and put them in a tense, stressful scenario over the course of a week where they are constantly doing some activity and have little time for themselves. How many “alcoholics” would be craving alcohol so much in there that it seriously affects their performance? Maybe I’m typical minding here, but it seems that most addictions are more psychological, in that you could go about your business without it but the mere act of thinking about addiction is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Take what the average Brit drinks, and have an American drink that much, suddenly they’re an alcoholic.
I’m surprised to learn that–I thought the average Brit drank only slightly more than the average American (from here). Do you have a source?
The averages may be similar, but there is little doubt that many drinkers who are considered “alcoholic” in America would not be given that label across the pond.
That chart also doesn’t give the complete story, because not all liters of alcohol are created equal, and also “everyone 15 and older” is too broad a demographic to draw much meaningful conclusion about “typical lifestyle”.
Breakdown by age, alcohol type/abv, and maybe gender would be more informative. Also important (given some definitions of alcoholism) would be some kind of frequency thing (3/day every day vs sober 5 days a week and 12 drinks on Friday).
That said, I agree that the biggest part is probably a wider range of tolerance for people outside the average.
If I’m not mistaken, those numbers are given in pure alcohol equivalent — that is, they adjust automatically for stronger vs. weaker drinks. If they weren’t, the average adult American would be drinking about 27 beers a year, which is obviously far too low — but an average of 450 beers/year at 6% ABV sounds about right, accounting for non-drinkers.
@Nornagest
You are correct…I should have actually read through that instead of glancing at it.
Consider that point retracted, I’ll revert to just supporting Uribe’s point.
Well, I do think that looking at more specific demographics would be informative (25-40 year old men, etc).
I have no sense for British drinking culture.
I’ll agree–what you really want is a “how much does the average drinker drink, on the average day they drink”; having a younger-on-average population, hence more kids who haven’t started drinking, or having a significant group of teetotallers, doesn’t tell you much about alcohol use among drinkers. I was hoping someone had a source better than wikipedia (and that used a helpful measure, not the “units of alcohol”/”drinks” measure that’s really confusing because a British unit is half an American drink.)
FWIW, 6% would be unusually high for a British beer (4% or so would be more normal), so if American beer is generally stronger than British, that might explain why an American drinking X pints would get labelled an alcoholic, whereas a Brit drinking the same amount would not.
I think the British unit is defined so that a small shot of typical spirit is around 1 unit; most drinks will contain more.
One difference is that Britons presumably start drinking earlier than Americans on average.
Earlier in age, or earlier in the day?
Mass-produced American lager is usually around 4%, but craft brews are typically higher — most often somewhere between 5 and 7%, though 8% or higher isn’t unheard of for double IPAs and the like. There’s been a trend back towards low-percentage session beer in the last couple years, though.
Most of the beer sold in the US is probably still macrobrew lager despite the craft brewing renaissance. Honestly, I just picked 6% because it’s more typical of what I drink.
Maybe both! (But I meant age)
@Nick
British drinking age=18, and it is legal people aged 16 to drink beer, cider or wine with someone 18+ when eating a table service meal, and it is legal for people 5+ to drink in private homes. Contrast with the US, where some jurisdictions threaten parents with jail time for hosting parties in private home where people under 21 are allowed to drink and car keys are confiscated.
I drink a glass of red wine or sometimes a beer almost every evening, justifying it as being on the left side of the curve where drinking is beneficial to your cardiovascular system without exceeding your liver’s ability to process: studies say that’s 1 serving/day for women and 2/day for men. Is a man who limits himself to 2/drinks a day but is consciously self-medicating for crappy stuff in his life an alcoholic?
Both the British and American laws are honored in the breach, so looking at whatever the law says is absolutely laughable.
Since the internet (and a previous Open Thread) is full of people ragging on the tactics used at the Battle of Winterfell, I thought people might be interested to watch somebody who argues the tactics were actually good.
No. 18 minutes is not for me.
Same here. 18 minutes isn’t nearly long enough to make an interesting and detailed argument about something like this. 🙂
The fact that it is minutes and not pages is enough for me. We invented writing for a reason.
This. I am so, so tired of everything being a vlog, or a podcast, or what have you.
I can take in a lot more information, and do more with it, via written text and images. Save the videos for how to stuff and the like. If you’re going to expect me to sit there and listen to you talk for 15, 20, 30 minutes (god forbid going into the hours range) you better have something pretty darn good to say.
The “pivot to video” has been one of the worst things ever. I am so glad the ancients did not have cameras.
Podcasts at least have the advantage of not requiring your visual attention.
I’m guessing the issues are a) many people are terrible writers and know it but think they are great conversationalists b) setting up a camera and blabbing is easier than writing a coherent, well formatted article and c) YouTube is higher profile than available text blogging platforms.
I’m not actually convinced a lot of these people are great conversationalists. But it is lower effort than writing a good article, yes.
I think if Youtube channels like Markiplier have shown anything, it’s that most folks are always looking for more content. More, more, more. That inevitably means less polish on the content itself, with the transition to uploading six hour streams the epitome of this. Nobodies like us who ain’t got time for that are just too small a share of the market.
@albatross11
You can use machine reading on text these days that I think is pretty good, especially for non-fiction.
I would much rather write 15 minutes’ worth of text than talk for 15 minutes into a mike, and I’d much, much, much rather read it. Partly because it’s faster and easier to review, but mostly because I don’t want to take fifteen minutes out of my day to listen to nasal nerd-whine.
The most annoying thing about listening to something is transcribing it, because I’m a stickler for getting it all right, and I mostly don’t trust myself to paraphrase.
This method is nice, but it hit its practical limit when I did the Zizek-Peterson summary. I took a few quotes from that, but doing it for everything I paraphrased would have taken many, many hours.
I also have a strong bias against “consuming” video. Something has to be much more highly recommended and/or unique for me to watch it, as compared with reading it, or even listening to it.
There is one thing that SSCers of all stripes, ideologies and nations are united by. Our hatred of people using video or audio when text would work better.
Youtube’s corporate headquarters in San Bruno is only a few miles from the sea. How long will it take to get Iowa ready for a short cruise up the coast, and where did you stash that last batch of 16″ HC?
@bean,
Preach it!
I like podcasts for information that I can absorb while doing something else that needs my hands and eyes, like cooking, driving, doing dishes, walking on a treadmill, etc. I wish all podcasts had transcripts, and also that all long-form written things had podcast versions. Video is better for stuff that’s visual–watching someone work a math problem or fix a machine, for example.
This sometimes comes out in hilarious ways. Like when that one holocaust denier guy that got a ton of pushback because he wanted everyone to watch a two hour video “proving” the holocaust didn’t happen, went away for weeks to transcribe it, and then promptly got banned after posting the transcript.
They worked.
A lot of things work if you have the author on your side.
This is the difference between fiction and RPGs: in the latter, you can’t have a Idiot Plot. “They won or lost because the author said so” doesn’t satisfy anyone, even if it’s the PCs idiotically winning.
On the other hand, authors, even if they are on your side, will also tend to throw a bunch of unlikely obstacles in your way, give your allies the idiot ball, etc, in order to make sure you only succeed at the last second by the skin of your teeth, because well-laid plans that go perfectly tend to be boring.
Is it just because I’m old and crotchety and perhaps contrarian that when they’ve got their plan together and it’s obvious that it’s going to work because they’re the good guys (and it might even be a sensible plan), I get really bored by all the last minute obstacles they throw in to make the success only happen at the last second?
Mild spoilers below:
Based on the fact that despite being completely overrun they somehow only lost half of their troops, I would be forced to agree.
What frustrates me about the poor tactics is it lets the wights take center stage in the battle. Wights are boring. With the armament the defenders had (and consistent rules in worldbuilding when it comes to the flammability of wights) they should have been more than capable of holding off the wights, forcing the Night King to commit his white walkers to the battle. The White Walkers facing off against heroes in the battle would have been intense, and with Valyrian steel and dragonglass the defenders may have been evenly matched. Instead, the white walkers didn’t do anything except be useless bodyguards.
But that wasn’t the story they wanted to tell. Game of Thrones is trying for an idiom where armies matter more and heroes less than in higher fantasy – having the whole thing boil down to one hero with a fancy knife stabbing the enemy general was already a step away from that; centering the episode around heroes vs white walkers rather than an army of the living against an army of the dead would have been a much bigger one.
If so, they’ve utterly failed. The only battle that went anything like that way was the Battle of the Bastards.
The argument is premised on the assumption that the living couldn’t possibly win the battle. If that was the case, the night king should never have exposed himself the way that he did. for the living plan to make sense, they have to at least be a threat to the army.
He’s right that they needed to attack, and their goal should be killing the night king, but nothing they do actually seems to be designed to achieve that. they didn’t even have Arya hiding in the heart tree above bran.
“Need to attack” and “can’t win a fair fight” point to skirmishing and harassment tactics, not an impetuous frontal charge by light cavalry. And after that one frontal charge, the Living didn’t attack.
And as you say, if the one chance was to sucker the Night King into a weakly-supported attack on Bran in the Godswood, then they needed a lot more coverage of the Godswood. Arya, yes, and two dragons not wasting their time torching irrelevant zombies, and a few squadrons of Dothraki cavalry in reserve, and a prearranged signal to summon those reserves, and delaying obstacles and traps, and a spider hole for Bran to crawl into that the Night King would have to work at prying him out of, etc.
Beyond that, if there’s a transcript I’ll read it, otherwise this guy’s got the wrong format for whatever case he’s trying to make.
I agree with this. Partially. The idea of baiting in the Knight King is valid. To do that you have to demonstrate that his wights are useless.
The only method for doing this is Fire Trebuchets behind walls/trenches/treval de frises with dragons protected by infantry behind a fire trench. So, you make a fire trench. You shoot lots of fire artillery into the wights until they get to fire trench. You torch it and they all die. then if they try to get past the trench you burn them with dragons and do an orderly retreat to trench 2 (all the trenches you can make should have siege machines with fire and various fire traps to activate on retreat). Repeat up to the Walls of Winterfell. The primary purpose of calvalry here should be as harassers/archers to prevent excessive flanking which would nullify lines of defense too early before dragonfire can burn wights.
This is how you draw out the Night King. The proposed plan is 100% idiotic. The Night King only lost because of pure arrogance, and hes basically a robot as far as we know.
The story indicated that the Night King could be most effectively baited by just dangling the Three-Eyed Raven somewhere within reach, which is pure mythobabble but OK part of the premise so we’ll buy it. But in that context, wights are not useless. They can at very least be used as meat shields against anyone who tries to interfere as the Night King moves against Bran, and possibly a large force of Wights under lesser Walker command could have been tasked with delivering a hogtied Raven to a Night King safely in the rear.
To win, the Living needed to convince the Night King that his Zombie Horde was more useful somewhere else than in accompanying him while he went after Bran. And ideally annoy and provoke him to the point of not thinking straight in the process. Deploying the Living army in a manner tough enough to require the full attention of a Zombie Horde to overcome but offensive enough that it can’t be ignored, is a good approach for that.
I’ll give the Living and their writers credit for at least a clumsy attempt at the first part of that. But if their only offensive plan was the Dothraki frontal assault, that’s a bad plan.
I just remember Sansa asking the obvious question about how they were going to feed this giant army Dany had brought north, and thinking “Don’t worry, after the impending battle you won’t have so many mouths to feed.”
Here’s an article discussing the tactics from Robert Farley at Slate.
I think Farley makes some decent points addressing some of the most common complaints about Team Living’s tactics (many of which John Schilling laid out well in the last thread on the episode).
The Dothraki charge was heavily criticized, and Farley doesn’t fully excuse this but makes a couple of partial rebuttals. He raises an interesting possibility that a frontal charge with cavalry against undisciplined troops could have been an effective way to punch through to the leadership (the White Walkers) and decapitate the army, a la Alexander at Gaugamela. Farley does note that the best thing to do with the Dothraki would have been to use them for hit and run skirmishing against the dead in the days leading up to the main assault, but this could have exposed them to devastating attacks from Viserion.
As for the use of dragons, Farley argues they were hampered by knowledge of the Dead’s effective anti-dragon weaponry and the need to preserve the dragons for use directly against the Night King. Of course Qnal orvat fzneg nobhg nagv-qentba jrncbaf jnf qrohaxrq cerggl uneq va gur ynfg rcvfbqr, ohg znlor Wba jnf erfcbafvoyr sbe guvf ovg bs gur cyna. The Living were also in a position where the Night King hitting Winterfell with dragon fire would have been devastating, so they had to keep close in to defend until he was on the field. And of course the blizzard was an unexpected factor that put a wrench in the works.
In general, I think the living overestimated the degree to which their fire and dragon glass weapons would turn the Dead into basically just a very large but undisciplined mob. In reality, the reasons that shock cavalry and disciplined heavy infantry tend to tear up mob infantry is because of psychological factors – but the dead don’t run, and were quite willing to throw themselves into the fight as a devastating and overwhelming zombie wall. Jon didn’t learn the right lessons from Hardhome – the dead weren’t just numerous and immune to plain steel, but a fundamentally different foe.
The problem with this is that, had Team Dead formed a big circle around Winterfell for a siege, Team Alive could have torched it or blown wide holes in its ranks with the dragons. A siege also would have taken a few weeks to succeed, giving Team Alive many chances to fit during the daytime on various days.
Also, why would anyone assume Team Dead would try siege tactics? Did they ever do that before?
At the time of the Dothraki charge, Team Living didn’t know where the White Walkers were. If they wanted to use the Dothraki as a decapitation force, then once they located the White Walkers, they should have blasted a lane through the wights with a dragon (or artillery, but their artillery was not effective enough for that) at a point outside likely ice-spear-throwing range. A blind frontal assault supported by inadequate artillery wasn’t smart at all.
Team Alive didn’t actually have to worry about a prolonged siege, since they had reliable intelligence that the Night King was definitely going to take a shot at the Three-Eyed Raven as soon as he could. You’d think Death would be more patient.
Team Dead’s tactics weren’t great either. But there were lot of dead, they never have morale problems, and they’re quite replaceable. The biggest mistake was that they knew they had a serious Achilles Heel: lose the Night King, the war is lost. So by all rights the Night King should have simply stayed in the rear. Either have the wights finish off everyone else first and walk in and kill Brandon unopposed, or send in some of the White Walkers (preferably some who haven’t raised a lot of wights) to kidnap Bran and bring him to the Night King. After searching him for dragonglass and/or Valerian steel.
In psychology, what is the favorite term-of-art for the behavior of going against received expectations of oneself?
For example, a black teenager who grows up hearing that black teenagers are scary/antisocial/criminal/etc. and so he rebels against this stereotype by making himself approachable/friendly/productive/studious/etc.
Or for another example, a white computer programmer who is on a team developing a facial recognition algorithm and knows there is an expectation that because of his unchecked privilege he will only feed it a learning input dataset (or whatever it’s called) that includes white faces, so he makes sure to introduce a dataset in which a racially diverse set of faces are well-represented.
To restate: in psychology, what is the term for the behavior the people in these examples are displaying? (Bonus points for links to abstracts/papers in which the term is operationalized.)
Sounds more or less like “reactance” (found by reading the Wikipedia page for reverse psychology).
That could be it, although from perusing Google Scholar it sounds like reactance is something people do sort of automatically in response to a perceived trespass upon their freedom/independence; I’m interested in times when people make a more deliberate choice to contradict expectations of or stereotypes about themselves, arising more from a personal tendency to be deliberate and independent. (Maybe I’m wrong and reactance still describes this?)
There’s also the Legally Blonde/Any Martin Lawrence movie where you lean way in to the stereotype just to stick it in the eye of the person judging you when you show that you are also a better lawyer/cop/whatever than they are.
OK, confirming now:
If someone who selects the most contrarian answers to these questions is meant to be demonstrating “reactance”, then reactance is not what I’m looking for. (Besides, it seems like a truly “reactant” (?) person would Lizardman a test like this.)
Is there a reason psychology would have a specific name for this?
Consciously avoiding stereotypes is probably how I would word it. I don’t think reactance is right.
It might not, in which case I’d hope a psychologist or psychiatrist who reads this blog (surely there must be some, right?) will speak up and say:
“[Here is an accurate picture of my credentials as “someone who would know whether psychology has a specific name for this”, and] as far as I know, we don’t have a specific name for this.”
You’re basically asking for the opposite of stereotype threat, right? Where being told “girls can’t code” makes you say “I’ll show you bastards who can code.”
That would be one example, yeah.
Compensation?
spite
I watched a bad movie last night, and you get to read me rant about it.
I don’t mean bad directing or cinematography or other movie words that I couldn’t define or judge well. No, morally bad, or at least tonally dissonant. It was moderately interesting, at least, and I’m not actually disrecommending it, though I don’t hesitate to spoil it here.
The movie was Andover, which I saw according to my custom of watching quirky sci-fi movies on Amazon when my wife is gone, usually things having to do with memory or time-travel. Andover is about cloning. It’s kind of science-fiction; the technology hand-waved at best and there isn’t any discussion of the wider impact of the novel technology, in this case cloning, but the plot does require the sci-fi element.
The main character is a geneticist who loses his wife, and so he decides to clone her in secret, which he apparently has the facilities to do at his university job. Hi-jinks ensue.
Which is the problem. The ensuing plot would work fine as a dark examination of grief, or a horror movie. But it plays out like a romantic comedy with an unusually high body count.
Smartly enough, the clones don’t emerge fully grown from the clone vat, but as babies. And since the protagonist is looking to slot his wife back into her old role, he gives the clone accelerated growth. First clone dies in a matter of minutes because he overshoots the growth and forgets to turn it off. Oops!
Second clone, he apparently dials that in better, and gets one that he can raise as a daughter in an ambiguously short time. After she zooms into her adulthood, he discovers that he has paternal feelings for her.
Well, duh genius! What did you expect? I don’t recall what happened to that clone; maybe she got hit by a convenient car or else he let her age into an early death. But the cavalcade of clone death carries on, undeterred.
The next clone his assistant raises so he doesn’t have these feelings, but strangely this woman doesn’t accept her destiny of being given to a stranger as a bride–this isn’t surprising, since emotionally she should be a few weeks old. She may have the brain development of an adult, but she’s had the experiences of a couple scenes (and no other character ages appreciably throughout the film). This clone has the courtesy of slitting her wrists, and soon there’s another urn in the attic.
This is where I acknowledge that the film could well be saying the character is being driven to rash behavior by his grief, and we aren’t supposed to root for him. Or else it is a dark comedy. But the tone doesn’t line up with these interpretations, imo. It plays it more like a rom com. He’ll get the girl, he just has to figure out how to ask her!
He realizes that he needs to raise the clones exactly like the wife was raised if he wants her to come out like his wife was and thus be amenable to falling in love with him. Well congratulations on not being a bio-determinist straw-man, but besides the laughably short list of her life events–a few notes scrawled on one sheet of a legal pad–there’s the obvious and glaring problem that his wife didn’t under go accelerated aging. Even if you posit that that could happen without trauma, it’s a far more radical departure from her childhood than “didn’t have braces” or “didn’t have a prom”! But the movie doesn’t even lampshade this.
Speaking of “doesn’t have a prom”, the next clone gets to relive the prom of her (is there an english word for this relationship?) original self. With the same man, who conveniently never got over her. Guess what? Of course this time she falls in love and doesn’t want to leave him. So the protagonist proceeds to blackmail the rapidly aging woman into coming back to him or else die of old age in a few days. She refuses, and dies. Another urn in the attic.
Remember, these are the recreations of the woman he loves so much he can’t let her go. But he’s okay seeing them age to death before his eyes, over and over again.
Bah, I’m not going to detail every other plot point, such as the casual murder and replacement of the insurance investigator, or his assistant cloning him and attempting to seduce the very childlike version of the main character. In the end, he realizes his happiness lies in being with the assistant and he shouldn’t try to cheat death any more, the last surviving clone goes off with the clone of him, and they all live happily every after. No comeuppance–or even acknowledgement of casually throwing away all those lives.
So, as a reward for reading this nonsense, a question for you–what book or movie best handles the ethics of cloning, acknowledging them as human beings that deserve protection and equal rights? Or alternatively, convince me they aren’t and don’t.
I take your word for how the movie reads when played, but on paper, I don’t see how the movie you describe could be anything other than a dark comedy. It sounds like it should be played as a double-bill with The Reanimator.
Right, this sounds like it definitely had to be a dark comedy take on romantic comedies. Keep in mind a dark comedy isn’t necessarily grim. In fact, the unnaturally upbeat nature in the face of what ought to be incredibly dark material is…kind of the whole thing isn’t it?
I’ll assume it was meant to be a surface level comedy that turned disturbing when you think about it, but failed to be thought provoking or funny enough to justify it.
Usually there’s some kind of tell that the film maker is in on the joke, but it comes off as “he got rather carried away, but isn’t it sweet, and it’s not like anyone really got hurt, because clones with short life expectancy aren’t people, except that the entire premise is that he can use cloning to get one specific person back.”* I’d think it was trying to say something about abortion or reproductive technology or something if the message wasn’t so muddled. And it was far from a realistic depiction of what the average person would think in that situation–unless we’ve gotten much more crass about dying bodies.
Here’s how a USA today reviewer described it:
Pretty similar to how I found it. Also this:
*We should have a quotation mark that signifies a paraphrase. That wasn’t an actual quote.
As always, the answer lies in the works of Arnold schwarzenegger. You need to watch The Sixth Day.
The above is facetious of course, but it honestly sounds better than the movie you are describing.
I’m not going to say bad or good movie qua movie, but I did enjoy articulating the dissonance even if I’m not sure whether or not it was intentional.
Parts of the Vorkosigan saga, starting with Brothers in Arms, get this about right. Miles Vorkosigan was born the son of a high-ranking hereditary nobleman of the Barrayaran Empire, so a group of anti-Barrayaran extremists took a chance and commissioned an illicit clone to exploit any opportunities that might show up a decade or two later. No magic insta-grow clone-babies here; they only get to be adults the hard way. The very hard way in clone-Miles’s case, because actual-Miles undergoes experiences like a crippling biological warfare attack in infancy that have to be duplicated if the clone is to pass. Plus being raised and trained from birth as a one-trick expendable secret agent for a group of fanatics.
Completely independently (and several books earler), actual-Miles rebels against and then reconciles himself with his hereditary destiny in ways that would be awkward to explain in polite company So he invents the alter ego of “Admiral Naismith”, a cloned duplicate raised to impersonate Miles but rebelled against his handlers and took up as a mercenary adventurer. All the stuff that can’t be admitted to but can’t be covered up, “Admiral Naismith” did that. Anything the Barrayaran Empire needs doing but a proper Vor lord can’t be seen doing, “Admiral Naismith” can get that done. So there’s plenty of entertaining wackiness when clone-Miles shows up at the same time that actual-Miles is switching between his two identities as part of an intrigue.
But there’s also the bit where clone-Miles has the genetic predisposition to rebel against and then reconcile with his assigned destiny. And the bit where actual-Miles responds to this with a quite proper “Holy crap, I have a twin brother who has been horribly abused“. Enter Mark Vorkosigan, as an accepted member of the family but with no easy path to recover from everything he has been through to get there. Does things like gorge himself to obesity because Miles is a skinny guy and Mark is Not Miles.
He pretended to be his own clone, then met the clone of himself he was unwittingly pretending to be. Nice.
Reminds me of Cable, the Marvel X-men characters, son of Cyclops and a clone of Jean Grey who was taken to the future to be raised, because he was infected with an engineered disease that was slowly turning his flesh into metal by an immortal villain. A clone of infant Cable was made in case the original died, but it was captured by that immortal villain and raised as his son; he became the villain Genesis.
Cyclops and the real Jean Grey, after marrying, were mentally taken to the future and placed into cloned bodies of their closest descendants (which doesn’t make a lot of sense, as without significant inbreeding, after a millennia, no descendant is terribly close) to raise their son.
That’s needlessly complex in a comic book fashion, and does take the unfortunate tack of having all the clones turn out to be villains or disposable. But it probably takes the award for the most mentions of clone needed in a character’s origin story.
+1
Also, watching Mark interact with Cordelia, Aral, Ivan, Simon, and the Koudelka girls is fun.
Early-to-mid-career Bujold had an amazing talent for taking plot devices that really should be just ridiculous (teenaged Miles fast-talks his way into running a professional mercenary organization– twice; Miles gets captured and just happens to run into the disguised-and-AWOL Emperor of Barrayar in a coincidence of cosmic proportions; Miles has a cloned assassin set upon him at the exact right/wrong time that it can be used to shore up his secret identity) and turning them into books that are simultaneously great fun and emotionally affecting.
This seems like a good occasion for me to put forward my “This, but unironically” horrible moral theory that, not merely are clones not people, but sufficiently similar people aren’t people.
OK, that’s maybe a bit hyperbolic, so I’ll start from the reduction ad absurdem that led me to the broad position. I read a sci-fi book, Century Rain by Alistair Reynolds, where some unspecified galactic hyperpower for some unspecified reason duplicates the Earth, and so Earth-1’s Star Trek explorers become quite confused when they warp into this distant solar system and find a thriving Earth-2. (For nitpickers, specifically it’s 2200s Earth-1 finds alt-1950 Earth-2, but it got me thinking about the case where one literally duplicates identical Earth’s with identical people.)
So say you have Earth-1, which represents X utils, qualia, vitrueons, or whatever metric your preferred ethics uses to quantify “It is good that this thing exists”. Then you make an identical copy Earth-2. The problem (“”problem””?) is that I feel rather strongly and for not easily articulable reasons that Earth-1 + Earth-2 does not sum to 2X utils. You don’t have 7+7=14 billion people with morally relevant inner lives; you have 7 billion people with morally relevant inner lives, instantiated twice. Blowing up Earth-2, I feel, is a lot less bad than blowing up a UNIQUE 7-billion people world.
But if we march along that logical path, that people’s moral worth is mediated by the novelty of their experience, then quickly I find myself at unpalatable positions. I’ve read esoteric Less Wrong papers which agree that EXACTLY identical clones have less/zero moral worth but the moment the first quantum fluctuation sets in they step-function from 0 to person hood as “unique people with unique experiences and all the moral calculus that comes from that”, but this seems like an obvious cop-out – come on, it’s one quantum fluctuation, it can’t take you from zero to one in Planck time. I’ve read a Bostrom paper where he thought-experiments about a sentient machine made of copper wire and you start slicing bits of the copper wire lengthways so certain pieces of the consciousness subroutine *physically* run twice but certain bits don’t, and this constitutes there being a non-integer number of sentiences. But he doesn’t really examine the moral implications, he just sorta goes “Hey you can have non-integer numbers of sentiences isn’t that cool”.
When you DO examine the moral implications, however, I end up at the 4chan-but-unironically position that normies deserve the rope because unless a person has radically deviant thoughts he’s just a Ctrl+c Ctrl+v NPC.
So, in conclusion: if you thought the movie was morally bad because the scientist was mistreating clones of a woman he allegedly loves and mistreatment is not love, fine. But if you thought the movie was morally bad because “Clones are people too”: no they’re not, fite me.
Put up your dukes, good sir!
By what basis are experiences, let alone unique ones, the sum total of morality? When you pass, all your experiences are gone, or reduced to mere shadows as written or video replicas of such, without your emotional relation to the experience. Indeed, I’d go farther–a few hours later, the experience is gone; memory is a pale imitation of experience.
Maybe you suppose that experiences change a person such that once they are sufficiently different they have increased worth because they are now a unique entity; but any clone is going to rapidly–immediately–develop uniqueness in this manner. If I put a dozen copies of you in different environments, they would react similarly to how each other would have, but they would all be experiencing their own lives, no less real or relevant than the originals.
The ending point of that unpalatable path maybe logical given the axioms–indeed, I was tracking with you, wondering how much really significant difference there is between any two given people from similar backgrounds? If you’ve met one [insert random profession here, I don’t care to risk the offense at the moment], haven’t you met them all? But there’s no reason to start with those axioms.
I think you need to separate individuality from uniqueness. You can in fact be an individual, just like everyone else.
In the end, you’ve chosen to bottom out your metaphysical valuation of human beings on this one quirk, but it’s no more objective or fundamental than a belief that human souls or consciousness.
Appreciate the interesting response
I kinda see it as a moral (meta-moral?) Catch-22 situation.
If you think utils are generated by “Quality Adjusted Life-Years” then you open yourself up to a Pascal’s mugging style situation where a guy comes up to you in 3000AD and says (truthfully) “I am currently running 2 identical Matrix simulations of Earth-2000AD containing 6 billion sentiences each, give me 500 Space Dollars or I’ll turn one of them off”, and this goes on day after day until every “qaly-maximising” ethicist is penniless.
But if you’re a “Only sufficiently novel qalys generate utils” ethicist, your response to the mugger is “Lol I don’t care, in fact turn both of them off because even the first Matrix simulation is just an approximate re-instantiation of person-moments that occurred already a thousand years ago”, then you keep your 500 Space Dollars. BUT when you’re faced with a trolley problem of 30 school children from the same class vs. 15 school children from different classes you are obliged to mow down the lower-varience group even though that doubles the number of deaths.
Neither of these seems correct. But then if you’re not going to maximise qalys OR novel qalys, what ARE you going to maximise?
Clones are people too! A clone of me is of no less moral significance than I am! But yes: the two of us together aren’t as good to have around as two more diverse people (e.g. you and I instead of my clone and I). But on the third hand, even once cloned, neither I nor my clone any individually are any less morally significant (e.g. half) than you. (In general the total goodness of a world cannot usefully be expressed as sum_over_individuals( “value”/”utility”(individual)).)
And that’s because of your ‘diversity of experience’ idea, which I don’t believe is quite on target, but points in an important direction. (I also don’t believe this line of thinking necessarily leads to abhorrent places, but came easily become abhorrent-adjacent)
From the instant of the duplication, Earth 2 will start to diverge (lots of chaotic systems whose behavior is determined by exact positions of molecules, which can’t be perfectly copied/duplicated thanks to Heisenberg), and within a year or two will be quite different from the past of Earth 1. Find Earth 2 in its version of 2000, and global civilization is centered on the Southern hemisphere, since North America and Europe and much of Asia were wrecked in WW3.
Schlock Mercenary touches on this trope in a couple of ways. Several early arcs involved “gate-clones” – people who were copied while going through a wormgate. The Gatekeepers didn’t consider clones people – they created clones, interrogated them for useful info, and then killed them – but the rest of the galaxy considers gate-clones to be their own people.
(Although they do squeeze out some jokes from the concept before the legal system catches up. One guy ends up killing his gate-clone in self-defense, which a police robot describes as “attempted suicide.”)
More recent story arcs have used clones as resurrective immortality – if someone dies and their body isn’t recoverable, you load up their most recent backup and put it in a cloned body. This isn’t quite as big a can of worms (since only one of them is alive at a time, there’s no practical issues with letting the clone use the dead guy’s identity), but they still consider the dead guy to be a separate person at the moment of death (since the clone won’t have any memories of whatever killed them). In short, people aren’t eager to die just because they know a backup will survive.
Tagon gives a great speech on his relationship with his dead original here.
Question: if it’s true that the Bank of Japan can print any amount of money, use it to buy real world assets, and not cause inflation to reach 2% or higher, how could this power be used productively?
Could Japan cut taxes and just start paying its government obligations with printed money? Alternatively, could Japan just mail a big packet of banknotes to every citizen?
The problem is not that they can indefinitely print money. The problem is that if they start printing money, they may first get 0-1 % inflation, and after a certain point, inflation jumps to 4%, without ever* being 2%.
EDIT: *to clarify, it may go very quickly from 1% to way over 2%, and it may be hard to stop at 2.
Thanks!
So is the theory that if the BOJ says “any time the inflation rate is below 2% we’re going to buy assets, and any time it’s above, we’re going to sell assets” and then they start buying assets, they can really get stuck at 4%, or is the concern that inflation will just be spikey between periods?
I mean if inflation is 4% every other quarter an 0% every other quarter, does that cause many problems that a smooth 2% doesn’t?
The real issue isn’t so much 4% as 30%. Inflationary increases can be sudden and dramatic and that’s catastrophic.
The more I think about the hypothesis that Japan only has two options: 20% (for example), the less likely it seems.
1) As I understand it, the reason people believe that Japan hasn’t reached 2% inflation yet is that the market doesn’t move for money supply changes that are widely believed to be temporary. This is the Bank of Japan – if they say “we’re going to take action if the inflation rate rises about 2.25%, are we saying markets won’t believe them?
2) On top of that, given sticky wages and a largely salaried employed base, what’s the mechanism to get 20% annualized inflation between one quarter and the next? Are we hypothesizing that people will refuse to work if they don’t get an immediate raise?
While possible, it seems like you likely still pass through the 2% inflation point to reach 4%. So it’d have to be that you can’t measure inflation fast enough. Which is reasonable, but I doubt anyone really knows where that cutoff is.
If you haven’t managed to exceed 1% inflation for so long despite supposedly trying really hard, maybe it’s better to risk overshooting. If you’re engaging in level targeting, shouldn’t you overshoot your target if you’ve been undershooting it for decades?
Why would you have to pass through 2%? If you have a store and raise prices do you first have to raise them 1% to then raise them 2% or can you just raise them 2%? Why can’t you just raise them 10%, 100% or 100,000,000%?
True, but if you control the printing of money, you have a strong amount of control over how much money is added to the economy no?
Obviously if you increase the money supply 1000000 fold inflation will jump a lot. But I see little reason to believe that if you commit to increasing the money supply each month until you measure 2% inflation and track how prices respond each month that there should be some sudden step function between 1% and 4% or 2% and 30% or whatever. No one ever points at a model that would have this result.
Maybe I’m missing some important empirical knowledge and countries with low unemployment, strong economies, and multiple decades of low inflation have suddenly jumped to hyperinflation despite only increasing MX (pick whatever you can change by central bank operations) by a few %.
Yes, but inflation isn’t just a function of how much money is added to the economy, but of how much money other people believe you are going to add to the economy in the future. And that is a function of unstable group-think, not an averaging of independent opinion.
So “we will print enough money to produce 2% inflation!” is a lie, and an obvious one. You can’t read minds and you certainly can’t control them, so at best you’re going to make an honest guess and overstating your confidence. And since everybody knows you are lying, they’re going to make their own guesses as to which lie you’re telling, which will collapse into an end state you can’t really predict unless you target one of the extremes.
For the past few decades, everybody has assumed that when the Japanese say “we want 2% inflation”, they really mean “we would prefer 2% inflation but are really really paranoid about going over that so we’ll probably undershoot”. They’re probably right about that, but either way they expect Japan to print about enough money for ~1% inflation and to no one’s great surprise Japan experiences ~1% inflation.
If Japan were to shift gears and either say or do things that cause people to believe the new underlying truth is “at least 2%, no matter the cost”, they’ll assume Japan is going to overshoot the 2% target. And no matter how much or how little money Japan prints, they’ll probably see a spike to say 5% inflation.
And then a bunch of Japanese pensioners on fixed incomes start complaining, and everybody thinks the Japanese government is lying when it says it values its inflation targets more than it does its pensioners’ well-being, so inflation goes to 10%. Then the Japanese start actually printing enough money to inflation-index the pensions, and now it’s 20%.
Or it could do something completely different. It’s an unpredictable system because it depends on human group psychology, and in parts of the phase space it is a chaotically indeterminate system.
Sure overshooting 2% to hit 3% or 4% for a year is plausible and expectations matter, but has anyone ever actually managed to spike their inflation to 20% without greatly increasing the money supply, a supply shock, or doing something crazy?
The claim that there’s 1% and then 20% inflation even if you commit to a level target of 2% on average relies on levels of irrationality occurring in a specific manner.
It’s an extreme extrapolation to say “No one expects the Japanese to have more than 1% inflation therefore if they print any different amount of money ever it’s straight to double digit inflation.” Up the frequency of price measurement and commit to your level target. It is worse to average 2% going 3, 1, 3, 1 or is it worse to permanently be stuck near 0?
Lots of places with higher yet not hyper inflation than Japan exist. The just-so story being told basically claims that monetary policy is nigh impossible to change once you make a decision for a few years. And yet there are places with higher inflation that have had their inflation change over time. The U.S. has had fairly different rates of inflation from decade to decade and hasn’t had a year of 20% inflation that I can find in any random dataset I’ve checked.
@ quanta413
To sort of address everything at once-
The first point to note is that the current monetary system is new, 40 years old or so, meaning that the lack of similar situations happening followed by an inflationary collapse (or just difficult inflation) isn’t particularly indicative.
The second point, and the major one, is that the Fed is not independently free to manage the money supply. Consider what choices the Fed would have to make if inflation jumped to 5% next year. What is happening to the banking system in this situation? One plausible path would be
1. Inflation jumps to 5%
2. Interest on deposits rises a significant amount, say to 4%.
3. A great many banks are now on the path to bankruptcy, they have large portfolios of loans yielding 3.5-4.5% for long term fixed rates, and have to cover them with deposits which are now paying out similar amounts. With costs of operation some of them are going to quickly be in the red.
4. Housing prices might drop significantly in this environment as higher interest rates = higher payments = more difficult to make payments at higher prices. Declining prices + higher cost of capital = financial crises on the horizon.
There are many potential forks here, but I will try to keep it simple. One way out for banks is to increase their loans by large amounts under the (supposedly) higher interest rates to maintain solvency. Typically increases in loans are seen as inflationary, taking some of the control of the MS out of the Feds hands.
Alternatively the Fed could increase its IOR rate, and functionally pay banks not to lend, but the Fed would literally have to create money to pay the IOR rate once it was above its earnings from the balance sheet, again taking a portion of the MS out of their control. Speaking of the balance sheet of the Fed, all of the loans/Treasuries that they hold would lose market value, meaning that selling them back to contract the money supply would have a lesser effect than it would in the current environment.
The Federal government will likewise have issues of independence. If the Fed is paying its earnings to banks for IOR then there is immediately an $80 billion increase in the deficit. The last I looked the average maturity for Treasuries was ~ 5 years, so they are rolling over ~ 10% of ~ $16 trillion in public debt every year, adding another 16 billion in interest for ever 1% in interest rate increases in the first year, and every year that inflation stays high. You then have to do this calculation over for every government contract that has an inflation adjustment to it, Social security, Medciare/Medicaid payments, union contracts, TIPS securities, etc, etc. In all likelihood the deficit would jump 200-300 billion in year 1 from a 3% increase in inflation and more each additional year if major measures (spending cuts/tax increases) weren’t instituted.
Its fairly safe to say that the Fed knows all this, the stress tests they put the banks through after the 2008 crisis would have revealed some of these issues on their own, and they likely understand that a jump to say 4% inflation would require them to quickly slash inflation back to under 2% or accept higher inflation for multiple years and tackling those problems as they arose. This likely explains their highly conservative moves over the past decade, far more so than the overly simplistic monetarist explanations.
Likewise for Japan.
They could e.g. build a city on Mars, in no more than a few years. I mean, sure, that seems impractical on account of it being extravagantly expensive to send even a few small robots to Mars with current technology, but a Falcon Heavy can deliver ~3.5 tons to the Martian surface using existing lander designs, at an advertised price of $90E6. So if you need a hundred million tons of tools and materials on Mars to build your city, just have Japan print two hundred and sixty trillion dollars (OK, twenty-nine quadrillion yen) and tell SpaceX to go ahead and provide those 2,860,000 Falcon Heavy launches next year. Since I am told that inflation won’t exceed 2% no matter how much Magic Japanese Money is used to buy how many real non-magic assets, it will always be possible to buy one more Falcon Heavy launch in the current fiscal year for no more than $91.8E6 and this should work. Same goes for everything else they’ll have to buy for the project.
This is a thing Japan can do under your stated conditions as I understand them. If it isn’t the answer you are looking for, restate your conditions.
Well, I’m getting some clarification on what people understand it to mean that the BOJ is trying to create inflation and failing, which is very helpful to me.
(If the problem is that they can’t create 2% inflation and that their only choices are < 1.5% and catastrophic, that's less interesting as a fun question, but maybe more interesting on the why question).
So the big question remains- is the BOJ actually buying real world assets? Do paper assets = real world assets? Your mortgage is not the same things as your house after all.
What the Fed (I’m substituting the Fed here because I am way more familiar with them than the BoJ) started quantitative easing they were printing money to buy treasuries and mortgage backed securities. Now does it particularly matter if one bank holds your mortgage or another? Why would it matter if the Fed swapped out some cash for some securities that otherwise would have been held by a bank?
That meant there were more dollars in the hands of the former owners of those assets that could be used for other stuff, hopefully some of which was productive and valuable stuff that gave people jobs.
Not really, they are paper assets swapping for paper assets. A mortgage returning 4% vs cash returning 2.5% when parked at the Fed are highly fungible assets, and you shouldn’t expect large changes in behavior from the people/institutions holding the new money.
Yes, they could just mail a big bag of money to each citizen. Maybe some of them will have to mail it back to the government for taxes, maybe with some extra money in it. Quantitative Easing is normally done to banks, but it has been proposed to do it for individual citizens too. Dunno if cutting taxes dramatically is a solution.
I guess that the best thing Japan could do with its money printing power would be to try to attract young foreigners to revitalize the population, but there are problems there that simple money printing can’t solve. But they could do the Quantitative Easing thing to foreigners who agree to go there to work.
Hi folks,
I’ve been around the block a few times with psychiatric treatments, and it’s gotten to the point where a few mental health professionals have suggested (some more gently than others) that I consider ECT and ketamine treatments. I’m concerned about long-term effects, but I’m not sure how many options I have.
Is there a resource where I can find more information about the long-term effects of these interventions? I’ve checked Cochrane and a few other places, but I’m having trouble putting things in relative terms.
For context, in the past, I’ve been diagnosed with MDD, GAD, type II bipolar (which I think was in error; in retrospect, I think, and some MHPs have agreed, what was previously considered hypomania was something else). It’s also been suggested to me that I may have BPD.
To be clear, I’m not looking for medical advice. I’m just trying to find places to learn more about this, because I’ve had a huge amount of variance in the perspectives I’ve gathered from MHPs.
Any resources or insights are welcome. I’m also open to suggestions for other interventions. I’ve also tried several psychiatric medications (more than 10), done outpatient treatment, and done TMS multiple times. Thanks.
I don’t have anything useful to say re: long-term effects.
I just want to say I have a sibling who was in a similar boat (10+ psychiatric medications, TMS many types, ECT a few times) and ketamine was incredible for them. Nothing else even came close.
South African election results seem to be firming up, and while the overall result is in line with expectations, there are surprises: The ANC won, with a diminished share of votes as expected, declining from about 62% to 57%. This is almost certainly because of the innumerable corruption scandals surrounding ex-President Zuma.
However, the main opposition parties seem to have capitalized on this much less than you’d expect: the Democratic Alliance only seems to have gained a fraction of a percent over 2014, and while the radical-left EFF gained from 6.35% in 2014 to 9.58% they were projected for 10-14%, so if things stay on track, this is a bit of a disappointment for them as well.
None of the other smaller parties seem to have gained much either, except the Afrikaans Freedom Front +, who seem to have tripled their share of the vote from .9% to 2.7%. I’d guess this is a result of Afrikaners frightened by the prospect of land reform in particular, or maybe the rise of the EFF more generally defecting from more centrist parties like the DA.
It seems that voter turnout fell, suggesting that most voters were turned off by all their options: rejecting the ANC, but not particularly enthused by any of the other options.
Overall, it seems not much will change then: the ANC even looks like it will hang on in some closely contested provincial legislatures like Gauteng, where it had seemed they might be ousted by a coalition. However, the big concern is that a weakened showing by the ANC will strengthen the Zuma holdovers in the administration against current President Cyril Ramaphosa, and take away the momentum from his current campaign to root out the worst of the corruption from the Zuma years. It will be interesting to see who makes Ramaphosa’s cabinet, and what that portends for the internal battles inside the ANC.
Semi-related question: how does one reduce corruption in a given institution? Is there any empirical work on this topic?
I believe the best method for reducing corruption historically has been war. National existential threats motivate a desire for meritocracy.
It’s been said that corruption is high in South American governments because, mainly due to geography, they haven’t fought many wars.
I don’t know what the second best method is.
Black markets usually spring up after war rationing efforts. The existential threat has to be just strong enough to encourage the normally corrupt to sacrifice without being so overwhelming that they just make merry today because we die tomorrow. South Vietnam stayed corrupt after the U.S. pulled out.
Actually losing a war to the point a corrupt government is replaced might be a way to reduce corruption.
Enforcing the law. I believe this is credited with clearing up much of the illegal corruption in US politics?
More generally, there’s a whole field of literature on this in international development studies.
Yeah, but if the government is corrupt, then enforcing the law isn’t on the table in the first place.
My instinct is that “burning it all down” is the only solution that works, at the minimum in a Ship of Theseus way, enforced by an external force sufficiently long for a new generation to come up under the new norms with little to no contact with the old ones.
With great difficulty. Usually it’s easier to start over from scratch. But if you have to, take an inkblot approach. Carve out small areas that lack corruption (you can steal what you like but not from district 10!), then try to expand them over time in the hopes of eventually reaching a cultural tipping point.
A funny Onion piece about how the patriarchy harms women by making men tell them about their feelings too much, unlike women, who apparently don’t tell their male partners about their feelings and issues.
A bunch of random thoughts:
– Because of the atomization of society (maybe?), it does feel like I know more and more people, male and female, whose only friend close enough to confide in is their romantic partner. If you’re not comfortable processing your deepest traumas with your parents or siblings, and don’t have a therapist or a minister, who’s left?
– It’s probably broadly true that more women have a close friend they can meet and discuss their problems with then men.
– On the other hand, one easy response to this is men’s groups – fraternal societies like the Elks or the Knights of Columbus, or church prayer groups. (I do endorse them if you can find a good one, FWIW).
Why take responsibility for your own flaws when the system can be blamed for everything?
Is that what’s meant by the phrase ’emotional labor’?
The phrase seems to be overloaded. I’ve heard it to mean that, but I’ve also heard it to mean executive and administrative responsibilities in a social or household context: keeping track of appointments and schedules; identifying the need for chores and errands and deciding when, how, and by whom they should be done (and following up to make sure they get done); choosing gifts and writing cards; etc.
This can get confusing, since the two different definitions are only very tangentially related.
IIRC the oldest definition was “emotional self-regulation required by the labor market”, e.g. your cashiers or waitstaff being required to smile and act chipper even when they actually feel awful.
So that’s three definitions, no pair of which are closely related, despite all being natural interpretations of the same phrase. I’m not sure whether the newer definitions were misinterpretations of or deliberate expansions of or unintentional collisions with the older uses.
I think you are right it is used this way, but that’s a bad use of the term. The problem with that labor isn’t that it makes you feel sad any more than digging a ditch does. Administrative tasks fall more into categories like “working memory labor” or “cognitive drain labor”. Having to remember a large number of tasks is a mental task, not an emotional one.
Okay, so this is SSC, and obviously we know emotions are mental (and hormonal); let me refine that and say that having to remember things is taxing a different portion of the brain than is called on when required to be empathetic.
Also, it’s used inconsistently depending on the sex of the emotional labourer. A wife who decides which chores her husband does, and when and how he does them, is shouldering a burden of emotional labour and her husband’s a bad person for making her do so; a husband who decides which chores his wife does, and when and how she does them, is controlling and misogynistic and generally a bad person.
Yes, this.
That makes it sound as if genuinely symmetrical situations are being described in radically different ways, but I’m not convinced. My impression is that the two things that commonly occur are:
(1) Wife does the great majority of the chores. Without intervention by the wife, the husband would do approximately none of them, but there are some he will do if reminded, so the wife keeps track of when they need doing and reminds him. Some people complain that the wife is shouldering a burden of emotional labour and the husband is bad for making her do so.
(2) Wife does the great majority of the chores. Without intervention by the husband, she would do approximately half of them, but if pushed she will do more, so the husband pushes. Some people complain that the husband is being controlling and misogynistic.
Those complaints don’t seem unreasonable to me, and the two situations aren’t symmetrical. The actual symmetrical equivalents would be ones where the husband does almost all the chores and (case 1) would have to do even more if he didn’t keep track of the things his wife has said she’s willing to do, and make sure they get done, or (case 2) would rather split things more equally but is pressured by his wife into doing much more. Neither of those situations looks at all common to me.
I am not claiming that situations 1 and 2 are necessarily bad overall; e.g., perhaps the husband is doing much more paid work than the wife, and having her do almost all the chores is actually an equitable division of labour overall. I’m sure husbands in these situations very often think it is, rightly or wrongly.
(Full disclosure: I am married, I do much more paid work than my wife, she does most of the chores, I do need frequent reminding to do the chores I say I’m willing to do; I think the division of labour probably is more or less equitable overall but my wife certainly does more keeping track of household admin than I do. I was extremely bad at keeping track of such administrative stuff before I was married, so when I say we do it this way because she’s better at it than I am I don’t think it’s strategic incompetence. I wouldn’t myself use the term “emotional labour” for the household-admin stuff; I suspect it gets called that just because both are things that tend to fall disproportionately on women and that get underestimated by men.)
Well that’s an unfortunate last name for a journalist.
I assume she gets that joke a lot, but it was new to me!
You joke about it being an Onion piece, but that opening paragraph truly sounds like satire. Granted, the problem is Hamlett’s article, not this one.
Re the latter part of the article, I’m going to raise the point I’ve raised fifteen million times before: the problem for close male friendships isn’t as simple as “internalized homophobia.” This wasn’t a problem before gay relationships were normalized but after, because two boys getting it on wasn’t a live possibility before. How many boys sixty years ago were saying “no homo”? And this “homophobia” is going to be a problem for so long as having a close male relationship implicitly takes a guy off the market. Jimmy might love Tommy, but he really likes Susie, and he doesn’t want to give her the wrong idea.
Yeah, I don’t think it’s homophobia. It’s more, IMHO, performative masculinity.
A modern man isn’t supposed to spend a lot of time complaining about his problems. I have a lot of close male friends, but outside of prayer groups, it’s hard to imagine someone talking about his problems much except for as jokes or as technical discussions.
Maybe that’s part of the problem too – stereotypically, if you tell a man about your problems, you’re likely to get a response that’s has a higher ration of proposed solution/sympathy.
This is a big chunk of what feminists mean by “toxic masculinity,” the stoicism. It’s what Onion is getting at when she says older boys are socialized to, well, you know, man up. I’ve always been really irritated by the term, and especially the (intentional or not) implication that men are just so goshdarn evil they’re even oppressing other men, but there’s a kernel of truth there: if the stoicism isn’t working, then it isn’t working. That’s why I’m entirely open to proposals that don’t lead to men being friendless losers who can’t talk about their problems except with their girlfriends or (for those without girlfriends) anonymously on reddit. Onion seems happy to throw traditional masculinity out the window entirely, though, and I wonder whether there aren’t better or more realistic proposals out there.
I’m fine with saying if stoicism isn’t work, then let’s get something else that works better. In my personal experience, however, if I’m not being stoic, it’s cause for alarm and panic. Me coming home from a hard day at work and not being serene and ready to help, no matter my feelings, is not ok. I get far more leniency to express my frustration at the world and life from the men I’m merely acquainted with than with my partner whom I live with. In my great and overwhelming experience, women do not actually desire men to have feelings. Men having feelings is treated as wrong. What they appear to desire is a soft and tender side for them to rest in. If you have feelings of anger, sadness, frustration, anxiety, depression, or any other negative emotion, you are not having the desired feelings and are now a burden.
Maybe the term has just been co-opted, but I always associated “toxic masculinity” more with “bro culture” which doesn’t really overlap with the above.
When I say friendless losers, I mean specifically in the sense that they don’t have close male friends (I get that this is very much not what most folks would mean by “friendless loser,” but I think it was rhetorically justified). I think the stoic thing is absolutely a component of the usual critique of toxic masculinity. Wiki:
Toxic Masculinity is a term older than any present usage dating to the Myopic Men’s Movement and is used in wildly inconsistent ways by everyone today. I hear people rail against it because men shouldn’t be stuffing their feelings, but I also see men being called toxic for being angry (the wikipedia article even states that being angry can be part of Toxic Masculinity).
The problem is: sometimes men are angry. This isn’t a problem, this is normal. By treating men as toxic because a negative emotion exists, you are literally saying “You are not allowed these feelings.” What then is someone in that position supposed to do? Being stoic is harmful, being angry is harmful. If you are having a bad day, it is literally abusive to tell someone that having that bad day shouldn’t bother them. I believe the term for this is gaslighting.
So I suppose the real question is: when is the world going to be ready for men to actually have feelings, good and bad? Are people like Ms Onion ready for men to express their anger? Or does she just want a quiet refuge from the world with soft joyful reassurance and compliments? Because I’ve done that. I’ve done it by being stoic. If we want men with emotions, then you need to be prepared to listen to them and let them express their actual feelings.
Ah, ok I can get on board with that.
Unrelated: using prison as an example seems weird. Prisons of either gender are just…toxic in general. Like, I guess it provides an extreme example of traits that would be considered toxic masculinity, but…I don’t think the problem with prisons is that the men aren’t willing to open up to each other.
I like stoicism, and dislike calling it toxic; I think it is a very healthy ideal.
But, I do notice a parallel situation where I have become somewhat more sympathetic.
Being able to act according to your rational desires rather than emotional impulses is a lot of what makes civilization possible, and an important part of masculinity as I see it. But it’s not always easy to just do it. Similarly, being able to pass on taking seconds at dinner, fast the occasional meal, and turn down sugar is a good step towards keeping weight off. But “eat less”, while absolutely useful if followed, is not often useful advice to give. And it’s worth looking at other factors at play, such as food reward, peer influence, reliance on prepackaged food that is designed to taste good but isn’t sating, hormone regulation, whatever.
“Man up” is a good attitude (imo), but it’s worth examining society or one’s life if it is difficult advice to follow, and actually making positive changes rather than gritting teeth and pushing through.
That’s a shame. But, to offer a likely wrong, stereotype informed explanation, women look to men for strength. Ideally, your wife will see the relationship as a partnership and seek opportunities to help you; but emotionally your feelings may be sending her messages that she can’t rely on you, agitate her, and lead to conflict.
Possibly you can work through this and she’ll change–but possibly you will just need to develop male friendships elsewhere you can get emotional support there while putting on a strong facade at home. Hopefully the romantic relationship provides you enough other benefits.
@woah77
Is this actually nicer for you than being alone? I don’t think I could deal with this tbh.
@Randy
There’s a version of this that’s extremely *eyeroll,* which is “men who have feelings are inefficient and that’s terrible.” Who is civilization for if not you?
“Me” is the rider, not the elephant. There’s nothing wrong with having feelings, but getting carried away by them does me no favors, however right it feels to the six-ton pachyderm.
That keeping one’s emotions firmly controlled is also a lot better for keeping civilization running is a nice bonus, but it’s not why I try to do it.
Yes, you are right, one should avoid exaggerating things into parodies.
I accomplish more of what I want when I’m able to act despite anger or boredom or curiosity about what’s been posted on SSC… wait, hold on, gotta go do stuff.
@Randy M
I’m glad somebody here is standing up for stoicism. What’s with all this pressure to be more emotional? Plenty of us men are stoic and like it that way.
If Le Maistre Chat were here she’d be standing up for stoicism too (it’s not just for men!). And for the record, I definitely don’t think stoicism should be tossed out entirely. My concern, again, is that close male friendships are in trouble. Maybe I should have said “if the stoicism as currently practiced today isn’t working…” above.
@jaskologist
Let’s say I’m sort of squatting for it. It’s a healthy ideal, but I don’t assume it is easy or judge people too harshly for failing it.
I wonder if part of the problem of lacking “close” relationships (which seems usually to be used as a proxy for relationships where personal details can be shared) has to do with the greater risk of breach of privacy.
Gossips have always been a thing, but it used to be if the wrong person gets the wrong juicy tidbit “everyone” would know. Now, if the wrong person gets the wrong juicy tidbit, everyone will know. I don’t think this is the whole story, but it seems like it could be a contributing factor.
My point is that stoicism can be healthy only insofar as it’s not orthogonal to the things one actually wants in life. Personally, I’m a lot happier when I’m not repressing my emotions, and not for reasons that have to do with the “payouts” of doing so. The part where I’m not repressing my emotions is what makes me happy.
I’m pretty sure there are multiple definitions of stoic in use in this conversation.
@albatross11
I’ve said before in other open threads that All Debates Are Semantics Debates.
I think several topics in this OT demonstrate that fairly well.
That’s my fault, I guess, having been the one to use the word. The characteristics I have in mind are:
1) not showing emotion—especially negative ones like anger, frustration, and sadness, but also the wrong sort of affection, of course
2) not showing vulnerability—though anonymously, I understand, is an exception for many men
This is related to an ethic of self reliance and reliability—also good things, if you ask me—but not quite what I meant.
My big problem with pinning this stuff on male stoicism is simply…are men more stoic now than in the past? If anything, the social pressures to be stoic are smaller than they used to be. In fact, the article that started all of this is complaining that these men aren’t being stoic enough. So then it only makes sense if somehow men are being pressured into being even more stoic around other men but not around women. I need someone to show some work on this because I just don’t see the pressures to remain stoic in the face of whatever being higher now than they were 30, 50, 100 years ago.
This is why I’m looking for other suggestions, like having a higher threshold for high-trust relationships due to the ease with which such trust can be (quite publicly) violated.
Or even something like: Men aren’t actually more stoic, they’re the same or maybe even less stoic than before, but stoicism isn’t as good a tool for dealing with modern stresses as it was for the historical stresses of past generations.
Or something.
Hot take: Men are less stoic than in the past, and that’s the problem. Stoicism actually does work pretty well for the reasons put forth by the original Stoics.
I think the women want the men to be emotional, just not around them.
Here are a couple of random ideas I’ve just thought of off the top of my head, and which are therefore almost certainly wrong, but I thought I’d see what you guys think anyway…
(1) Lack of spaces for all-male bonding. Men bond differently to women, and men behave differently in all-male groups than they do in mixed-sex groups. The ability to bond with other men and feel like one of the boys is probably important (I don’t have much evidence for this, but it seems plausible). But nowadays there aren’t many men-only workplaces left, and men-only social clubs and societies get publicly shamed and pressured into letting in women as well. So now there just aren’t many environments where men can bond with other men in an all-male atmosphere, and this has a negative effect on their emotional connections and wellbeing.
(2) Carrot and stick. Men in times past were shamed for showing emotion, but they were also given respect when they acted stoically, acted as a dependable provider for their families, and successfully fulfilled other masculine roles. Men nowadays still get shamed for showing emotion, but unlike in previous generations, men who fulfil traditionally masculine roles are more likely to get called out for promoting “toxic masculinity” than praised for being stoic and dependable. So whereas in the past getting respect from society for being stoic would (more than?) compensate for not getting to express your emotions, nowadays there isn’t really that compensation any more.
I think it’s a matter of revealed preferences. Women kind of vaguely want men to be more emotional, but when the rubber hits the road their innate (?) preference for stoic and dependable men wins out.
(I guess it’s the same kind of phenomenon as women who say that they want to date a kind and sensitive guy, but actually spend their time going out with confident arseholes.)
My perception is more that male-only clubs for the powerful men, that bring prestige and the opportunities to network a good job, are shamed.
If you make a geeky club where everybody builds model planes, and allows anybody who wants to build model planes, and it just coincidentally happens to have no women at all, then that’s OK, as long as the members of the club are not CEOs or something.
And if making a club about geeky technical stuff is not enough to scare women, make it geeky, dirty and physically taxing (building live-size steam engines?).
But it is exceedingly unlikely to have no women at all, for even the most manly and/or nerdy hobbies, and having any women at all changes everything. Forty years ago you could post “no girls allowed” signs, and twenty years ago you could say “OK, but this space runs according to Guy Rules so deal with it”, but neither of those really works any more for anything that has any formal or institutional existence.
My impression has always been that when women don’t want to hear about your feelings, it’s because they’ve already decided what your feelings are and don’t care to be contradicted.
@Nick:
Oh, hi.
Well yeah, the Stoics had some strong arguments for why emotions ought to be controlled. But break down how it could be harmful:
1) The Stoic truth claims are imperfect, and somehow men are hitting up against where it’s false.
2) Men aren’t taught to practice the real Stoicism of an Epictetus, but a bastardized version (see also: colloquial cynics vs. Diogenes, or idealists meaning “believes the material is an illusion” vs. “has high ideals, not a political realist” 😛 ) with harmful flaws.
3) Stoicism was perfect for men in a patriarchal society with lots of male-male bonding opportunities, and never suited the average temperament of women (who gravitated to Platonism when smart enough to be philosophers) or a de-masculinized society. This is the point I least credit, but my female psychology is atypical…
@ana53294
Sure, but the men in that model plane club are not actually allowed to bond as men.
One of the most basic components of healthy intrasexual bonding, for men and women, is to complain & commiserate over issues with the other sex. Interacting with partners and potential partners, produces some of the strongest emotions and frustrations in people. So if you really want to bond with the same gender in an open manner, you need to feel free to express these emotions and frustrations, including in politically incorrect ways.
Venting provides a catharsis that liberates and communicates things that cannot be said openly. The text may be crude, but the subtext is loving. The explicit meaning is A, but the implied meaning is A, B, C and D.
A man calling his wife his “ball and chains” for demanding something that he prefers not to do, is communicating a frustration with the price he has to pay for her companionship, but is not implying that he wants a divorce. There is an assumption of love and mutual benefit that is not made explicit.
Such venting allows men and women to establish norms and standards, in a subtle way. For example, if Bob and Jack vent over not being allowed to get a motorbike, then John knows that if his partner objects to him getting one, she is not being overly demanding (or even abusive), but making a demand that is considered fairly reasonable by their (sub)culture.
A major issue with modern society is that men are no longer allowed to do this, as it is considered misogyny, while women are allowed, without it being considered sexist.
So the end result is that you can have (offline) spaces with men, but not really ‘male spaces’ where proper male bonding is possible.
@Acymetric
The problem with *all* of these terms is one of motivation. Someone can say that they’re not actually opposed to X, just ‘bro culture’ — but whose to say that what gets said between two males isn’t bro culture if it isn’t being properly supervised?
Co-opting is a natural and inevitable effect of different people having different motives and also being aware that other people aren’t willing to carry things as far as they can, hence the frequent reliance on motte and bailey language.
I’m not a deep student of Stoicism, but I’m pretty sure there was more to their teachings than “don’t show negative emotions.”
@woah77:
That is either a skilful sideswipe, an unfortunate mistype or a society I should consider joining.
This is a real issue, it just isn’t a gendered one.
Remember when the complaint was that men were emotionally unavailable (which, of course, was also a complaint some men had about women they dated anyway)?
Friends covered this all 20 years ago. If I recall correctly, Rachel regretted getting Bruce Willis to open up emotionally.
Phoebe also dumped Alec Baldwin for being too cheerful, so it’s a narrow emotional window to date a Friend. Based on who the three women end up with in the series, I take it they’re looking for neurotic, funny, and not too afraid of commitment.
Hmm – Joey, Ross and Chandler aren’t necessarily prizes, but they are willing to tell each other about their problems. Maybe Ms. Onion is on to something!
Some of these women need to realize the problem is that the guys they dated sucked and they should’ve dumped them sooner.
Like what is up with the guy who doesn’t want to talk deeply (which is fine if you prefer that) and keeps breaking furniture (which is very bad)? That’s really, really far from being normal behavior. That was a married couple though, so a little late to easily unwind that relationship.
Another possibility is some couples tend to bring out bad parts of each other, but it’s not necessarily that either person sucks individually. They just suck together.
Also this quote from the article linked to by the one you linked
If that’s your thing, don’t tell me and don’t get too handsy. But at no point grappling with someone have I thought or felt, “trying to twist this person’s arm is really a great substitute for a hug!”.
Maybe some of these dudes could use pets? I’m pretty sure it’s socially acceptable to hug your large manly hunting dog even among the most repressed of Americans. Dogs are also great listeners. They’ll sit there looking at you, they don’t talk back, and they can’t tell anyone what you told them. That’s half a therapist right there, but they’re cheaper and you can play tug of war or fetch with them.
I also wonder how gendered it really is.
As far as I can remember, every woman I’ve been in a serious romantic relationship saw me as their primary emotional confidant. They probably had more secondary confidants than I did (at least before I joined a men’s church group), but my impression was always that I did more therapy and offered more sympathy than I got.
Yeah, it doesn’t ring true to me either. I’m 100% certain I spend much more time doing “therapy” than my partner does, and have for every relationship I’ve had. Often I’m the sole person giving therapy for my partner and receive active resistance to the idea that maybe they should make some friends. Articles like this that suggest that men are taxing on their partners do not level with my experience in any way and I end up reading them very defensively as a result.
I’ve been in relationships where I and the other person were both sometimes a hot mess (usually at the same time), and relationships where we are both pretty content and talk to each other often but it’s not therapy. We’re not excavating past or current traumas or whatever.
I can believe some people keep ending up in a particular type of one-sided relationship without realizing why (I don’t think it’s likely to be dumb luck if it happens too many times in a row although that could happen). Unfortunately, if you conclude that most men (or women) are whatever way and the solution is to change everyone else, you’re very unlikely to solve your problem. It’s better to either change the type of partner you choose or learn to accept that trait in your partners.
It could be the women are overcorrecting against the more typical problem (men not being willing to share their feelings) and ended up with the basketcases as a result. Or there’s no trend, just a strong selection effect on responses; that paragraph is, what, a bunch of Twitter responses to the Hamlett article?
It certainly doesn’t reflect my personal experience, either – quantitatively anyway.
However, I am a pattern recognition machine and I can’t help but notice a marked similarity to the NYT article discussed elsewhere.
The common thread is women complaining about the men in their life and how they aren’t everything the woman would like them to be.
I work in a female-majority firm and I hear my co-workers discuss their husbands’ failings often enough to know that this is a perfectly typical thing.
It isn’t even anything particularly new (that’s a 1950 vintage, folks).
What is new is that it’s being published – in all seriousness, apparently – in the (inter)national press.
My question thereto is this: would the ladies like to read more about what men have to say about the failings of their significant others? (Nobody’s perfect, after all.) I’m sure it would be educational.
I’m fairly sure this kind of thing has been the staple of supermarket tabloids decades. The same outlet is likely to publish a story about how men are emotionally unavailable and won’t discuss their feelings with their partners, without demonstrating the slightest awareness of the dilemma this creates. It doesn’t deserve to be engaged with, it deserves to be dismissed out of hand.
Ah. I can see my problem right there!
However, that would imply that the NYT and Slate are becoming supermarket tabloids, which seems sad, in a way.
As a side note: how do depressed men or men with other mental problems act around the wife? Do they keep a stiff upper lip, do they withdraw to brood by themselves, or do they talk to the wife about it? Which works best for relationships and mental health?
Same question but instead of depression let’s say it is a very bad week at work. How do people here interact with the wife and family?
Can anyone explain to me why some organic compounds are much, much more expensive than others? I’m specifically interested in LiTFSI, but a general explanation would be great too.
Most likely, the synthesis is that much harder.
It’s a combination of supply/demand, difficulty of synthesis, and supply of precursors. The more steps synthesizing the compound takes, the higher the price, and the cheapest organic compounds are those that are a) widespread in industry (so they have high production and highly efficient industrial processes to be made), and b) made from a cheap or unwanted precursor. The price will also depend on the difficulty of purification, and on the purity you need. To a lesser extent, you also have to consider the stability and storage.
In practice, you can get just about any small molecule if you’re willing to shell out for it. I hear there are labs in China that will custom-synthesize a large variety of molecules.
I don’t know much about LiTFSI in particular but just from a glance, the high price is probably due to:
a) Fluorination being difficult and dangerous and requiring really specialized equipment (you have to work with fluorine gas or hydrogen fluoride)
b) The recent interest in lithium battery research and also ionic liquids.
Interestingly, the sodium salt is even more expensive. I didn’t expect that.
Out of curiosity, why are you interested in LiTFSI?
I’m a battery scientist. I’ve been reading some really interesting papers about water-in-salt/superconcentrated electrolytes and I wanted to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations about how much cheaper a 21M LiTFSI electrolyte could be in practice.
The first part of the answer is that some compounds (organic or otherwise) are much, much harder to synthesize (or extract from natural sources) than others. Sucrose, for example, is dirt cheap because there are domesticated plants which make it for us and it’s relatively simple to extract and purify it. Similarly for ethanol, which is made for us by yeast fermentation of any of a number of sugary/starchy vegetable/grain mashes and readily purified by distillation and filtering. There are other organic molecules that occur naturally (e.g. hemoglobin or insulin) but in much lower concentrations and in company of other molecules that make them relatively hard to purify; my two examples here are further complicated because they’re long-chain polypeptides (proteins), which limits options for purifying because heat and many solvents will denature them and make them useless for the purposes we want to use them for. And then there are molecules that aren’t produced by biological systems at all and must be synthesized, and difficulty of synthesis tends to go up with the complexity of the molecule (methane is very easy to synthesize, but a custom protein-like molecule is extremely difficult) and the amount of energy that goes into the molecule’s chemical bonds.
The next part is quantity and economies/diseconomies of scale. Things that have lots and lots of uses (or a few uses that have demand for large quantities at plausible prices) tend to get produced in quantity, which produces economies of scale, but at extremes may run into bottlenecks (e.g. chocolate is more expensive than it would be at lower demand because we’ve saturated the areas where cacao cultivation is commercially viable). Whereas a specialized chemical only used by research chemists in minute quantities have little or no opportunity to benefit from economies of scale and research into how to produce it cheaply in bulk.
And then there’s “what is it used for”, and complications stemming from the answers to that question. Just about everything will produce at least trace levels of impurities, and depending on what the impurities are and what you’re using the thing for, the acceptable quantities of the impurities will vary wildly. And if you need a very low level of impurities (because it will interfere with a reaction you’re trying to feed with the compound, or because it’s a deadly toxin in a compound you want to use as food or medicine), then that means you need to do more work to purify to a higher level and do more quality control (testing impurity levels, then dumping or reprocessing batches that don’t meet standards), which runs into money.
And some uses run into legal and regulatory complications. In particular, pharmaceuticals are heavily regulated (see many, many articles Scott has written about this for a start), and some organic compounds (e.g. cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine) are outright illegal for their main uses and governments go through a lot of effort and expense to suppress their production and distribution, which drive up prices.
I can’t help you on LiTFSI in particular, since I’ve never heard of it before today. My guess is that 1) it’s probably fairly specialized, with little economy of scale, and 2) it’s moderately complicated (not a protein, but not methane or glucose), doesn’t look likely to occurs naturally at reasonable concentrations, and has several fluorine atoms (fluorine compounds tend to be hard to work with, since many forms of fluorine and fluorine compounds are highly toxic, highly corrosive, massive fire hazards, or in some cases all three).
I did notice that your link lists several different variations of it, with order-of-magnitude differences in prices for the same compound. The difference there is that the different LiTFSI products all specify different levels of purity and different types of acceptable impurities. Part of the price difference is likely driven by the costs of manufacturing and certifying the material to a higher standard, and part of it is likely price discrimination (people who need the higher guaranteed purity are likely to be less price sensitive because the costs of a bad material are likely higher for them).
Thank you, that’s very helpful.
Organic chemist here: Basically there are two factors in the price. The first is difficulty of the synthesis, which is based on how many steps you have to take and how difficult they are to execute in terms of setup, purification, availability of starting materials/reagents, etc.
The second factor is supply/demand. If fewer people want it, economy of scale is working against you, so you have to pay more for it to be worth it to them to make the thing.
LiTFSI is also not particularly expensive as far as specialty chemicals goes; that’s pretty middle of the road. 10G for ~US60 is far from the cheapest, and far from the most expensive thing I’ve ever ordered.
Alternatives for daily news?
For years, I have been a subscribing reader to the NY Times. I just ended my subscription because I can no longer tolerate the editorial perspective. I was wondering what other SSC readers use as a main news source or how you build your news reading from multiple sources. This would be for core news, not specialty subjects. Can you list what you read? Has there been a thread on this in past, if so, can you link? Many thanks!
My main go-to is Reuters. It’s a news wire service, so things are pretty brief and to the point. Not too much editorial stuff, aside from their deeper pieces.
I find too much news to be a bad thing, so I just listen to NPR’s Up First podcast (70% US Politics) and read The Economist’s Espresso app (a mix of world politics and business) and consider that sufficient. Both present natural stopping points, so there’s no psychological question about how much news to consume on a website or in a newspaper.
Took me awhile of trying different sources but I have settled on Reuters as well. Seem to resist the clickbait style headlines and generally keep editorial perspectives out.
My main site is the BBC, even though I live in the US. I chose it because it’s less attached to US politics, and has more world news than I’d get from a typical US news source.
I supplement this with Apple News, which selects from a broad range of sources, giving me a potential check on BBC biases and blind spots.
And I listen to enough CBC podcasts to become aware of major Canadian news issues – beyond the very few that make it into world news. (I’m Canadian.)
I read Google News. It selects from a substantial range of sources.
Same. When a story has multiple sources showing up on Google, I’ll frequently seek out the WSJ (specifically for news, their opinion pieces are sometimes terrible) or Bloomberg.
Daily news is bad, incentivizes hot takes. I’d like it if all news was obligated to a 5-day delay.
I’ve promoted The Week’s print edition before (their web articles are garbage hot takes), as they compile the news to get you reactions from various sides on each story. The cool down from having to wait to publish helps get perspective and additional context, not getting thrown by Brand New Twist Information. Waiting for a week also allows them to filter to what’s actually important, instead of need to puff up some fluff to make the daily quota.
Ignoring the news (outside of a controlled less frequent update) is great for mental health.
The news is what happens when a bunch of English and Acting majors get together and put on a show where they pretend to be experts on everything. I recommend avoiding journalism products as much as you can. In fact, the whole notion of “being up to date on what’s going on in the world” is overblown, and is really just a dressed up form of gossip, with a weird status signalling aspect mixed in.
“But what about important things that might affect me?”
The more a given event is likely to affect you, especially if it’s something you can take action in response to, the more likely you will find out about it in other ways. Same goes for if the event is of global importance.
“What about staying up to date in a given area of interest?”
There probably was a time when the news was critical for this, but now we have access (via the internet) to so many communities of people who actually know what they’re talking about, there’s no reason not to go there instead. There are forums, discussion groups, and direct sources through which you can get a constant feed of the information you want.
BTW, sometimes someone will link to a journalism piece, and it’s OK to go and read/listen to/watch it — sometimes you even get lucky and you find a rare instance of genuinely high quality reporting — but having a default of “no journalism in my daily life” will (IMO) help give you a more critical eye toward what you’re consuming in those cases.
I recently came across The New Paper (thenewpaper.co/r/?r=e95206), which is (at least for now) free, terse, and fairly even-handed:
I also am subscribed to Geopolitical Futures.
@Keilone
Besides reading SSC?
The times when I have most avidly followed the news this last decade was for when Obamacare was being voted on in Congress and during the Presidential primaries.
I’d recommend checking out the polls from Gallup and Pew research.
Mostly I just go to the snack counter at the building where most of my Service Orders are and look at the front pages of the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, and buy a copy if anything looks interesting (they used to also have the Wall Street Journal as well but not lately). Online I regularly read the opinion columns of Ross Douthat and Paul Krugman (who I suppose both serve to confirm my biases), and follow the links from there, a little less regularly I follow David Brooks and Thomas Edsall (both NYT), E.J. Dionne Jr., and George Will (both Washington Post). Based on previous SSC recommendations I sometimes remember to look at Vox.com, and I sometimes watch the PBS Newshour, and there’s what I catch from the radio when I commute, and sometimes at lunch the crew at work puts on local TV news instead of game shows.
Usually two to three days after “breaking news” starts being discussed at SSC it gets to newspaper opinion pages and the radio (if it ever does), unfortunately SSC commenters often seem to assume prior knowledge of the “breaking news”, when I asked “Where did you learn that?” the answer was usually “Facebook”.
(With hyperbole) I’d break down the “breaking news” discussions I see and hear as:
Guys at work: “What about that [latest grisly crime]?”
SSC: “What about the actions/statements of [‘SJW’ I’m ignorant of]?”
Ross Douthat: “Maybe this time abortion will get banned? Otherwise birthrates will plummet and we’re doomed I tell you DOOMED!”
Paul Krugman: “The Republicans are lying stealing liars I tell you, and if we don’t stop them we’re doomed, DOOMED I say”.
Radio: “What till you hear about what Trump just tweeted!”.
Local TV news: “Latest grisly crime and stories about ‘Apps’ that you don’t care about!”
I think I get pretty balanced reporting overall.
The problem of getting broad information is it generally requires consulting multiple sources and having to filter through an enormous amount of hysteria and punditry, since no one source is willing to provide all key and relevant information.
Even sources that try to report in a non-hysterical way have a habit of omitting important details because they often share different priors from the you [or the reader]
I can liken it to judge judy, for a given case you [judy] know what key facts are relevant to come to a sound judgement whilst the plaintiff/defendant are both attempting to derail you with tangential but ultimately irrelevant details.
Also, when there’s a coordinated PR push on some story, it’s often really interesting to see how that story is reported in, say, NPR and the Economist. The payload is the same, but the villains/good guys/reasons why are often rearranged to suit the audience. (Is the villain the prison guards’ union or the private prison owners?)
My normal news diet is NPR for headlines and articles, WSJ for some in-depth stories. As others have commented, most day-to-day news is about things that are *urgent* but not *important*[1]–very often the latest scandal/outrage/Thing We’re All Supposed to Care About. I will sometimes read something on BBC, but it seems like it’s about 50/50 split between news and clickbait at this point. When I’ve got time, I try to read some articles in El Pais, and about half of my mornings, I’ll at least watch the headlines from TVE in Spain–this is partly to get more information about the world, and partly to practice my Spanish.
I get a moderate amount of news from reading Twitter feeds, and reflecting on it, I think they’re about 90% bad for me–things that get me angry or engage my tribal circuitry, rather than things that inform me about something worthwhile. I am going to try to consume less Twitter overall, though there are some people whose feeds are pretty worthwhile. But the medium rewards snark and hot-takes and omitted context, so the most successful people there are the ones who do those things, and even the high-quality people there are incentivized toward those things.
Podcasts are a big part of my long-form news intake, for some value of “news” that mainly involves in-depth discussions about serious issues and deep dives into some areas of biology. But the ones I’m listening to focus on *important* and usually ignore *urgent*.
There are also very high quality reports put out by The Pew Center(summaries of polling), the Department of Justice (crime statistics plus summary and explanation), CDC (mortality statistics), etc. In my experience, you can often learn way, way more about the world from spending 30 minutes reading one of these reports than from reading news coverage. Also, it’s a bit shocking, at first, how *different* a picture of the world you get looking at actual data/statistics from what you get when reading even pretty serious news coverage. Journalists are very much herd animals, and it shows in their stories. OTOH. the Washington Post’s police shooting database is a wonderful resource–spending 20 minutes making queries and looking at results is worth more than reading a dozen articles on the latest questionable police shooting.
I’d love to see other recommendations for high quality information sources that are more-or-less nonpartisan /non culture-warry and are also more focused on important things than urgent things.
[1] I find this distinction very useful in my life. Important things are things you’ll care about in a year or ten years; urgent things are things that need a response right now. Some things are both–if someone’s having a heart attack, it’s important *and* urgent. But most news is focused on the urgent stuff–the latest plane crash or mass shooting or political gaffe. A steady diet of headline news, especially, is likely to be all urgent and seldom important.
I was really surprised to see, further down this thread, what seemed to be a general consensus that austerity (in the economic sense) was foolish. I also think austerity is bad, but I didn’t expect you guys to think so.
My bias is that of a left-winger in the UK. In the aftermath of 2008 pretty much every political party seemed to agree that austerity was the way out of our economic problems. There was a debate in my party, the Labour Party, about it, with the left fringe (including me) being opposed to austerity and the right fringe being in favour. One of the big shocks of Jeremy Corbyn being elected Labour leader in 2015 was that we finally had an anti-austerity politician at the forefront of British politics.
So that’s one reason why I’m surprised: if the right, the centre and even the centre-left in the UK are in favour of austerity, the right-wingers who comment on SSC should certainly be! (I realise this is somewhat naive, but to be fair to me, “the SSC commentariat will agree more with David Cameron than Jeremy Corbyn” is a pretty good rule of thumb most of the time.)
The other reason is that to me, austerity looks more capitalistic and less social-democratic. It’s basically been a decade of cuts to public services and welfare. Isn’t that what believers in the free market should be in favour of?
I guess my confusion probably comes down to not understanding what austerity really means and how it’s different from free-market capitalism. I’d be grateful if somebody could help me understand this.
@fion,
Paul Krugman has noted that congressional Republicans stop calling for budget deficits to be reigned in once a Republican is President.
As Vice-President Dick Cheney once said “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter“.
Just as democrats stopped criticizing deficits when Obama got into power. Remember when he was promising a net spending cut? Politicians are mendacious, news at 11!
@cassander,
Obama himself is supposed to have come close to a “grand bargain” with Boehner for austerity (which if he had would’ve killed Democrats electoral chances).
And I recall that “blue dog democrats” were more “fiscally conservative” (and they were overwhelmingly voted out in 2010 leaving only liberal Democrats in congress), on the Republican side the rise of Trump killed any “fiscal conservatism” there (a few Democrats complained about the tax cuts driving up the debt, but the majority response has been “If they can do it so can we!”).
“Fiscal conservatism” never had broad electoral support, as that spending is high voters acknowledged, but where most spending already is most voters didn’t w ant cut, the only thing that most voters ctied as what should be cut (“foreign aid”) was already a small part of the federal budget, and where most Federal spending is (checks to the elderly, their hospitals and their nursing homes, and the military) most voters didn’t want cut (“The Federsl government is an insurance company with an army”).
A deal he didn’t want and ultimately pulled out of, ruining his relationship with Boehner. I tend not to rate highly the things people almost did when they tell a different story than the things they actually did. And given the fate of democratic party since then, an austerity deal could hardly have been worse for their electoral results.
I agree completely. Meaningful fiscal conservatism is not popular among voters. A small number of republican lawmakers like Paul Ryan actually believe in it, but are invariably powerless to act on it in the face of actual opinion. What is popular is the idea of fiscal conservatism free of consequences, hence the popularity of beating the party in power over the head with charges of reckless spending.
I’m not a democrat, but I do think they have the better of this argument.
Usually the criticism involves tax cuts in the face of an already existing deficit, enacted by people by who claim to care about deficits. You don’t need to care about fiscal responsibility to have cause to criticize someone that doesn’t care about fiscal responsibility. And since the bush years involved both tax cuts and spending increases making such criticisms is fairly easy.
My recollection of 2008-2016 was you had a one time stimulus bill, and thereafter a slow down in the growth of spending enough to gradually shrink the deficit.
Of course this outcome was probably only made possible by a split-government gridlock.
The only *really* mendacious part is the misleading of voters into just how much deficit reduction narrowly focused tax increases would provide, since most deficits most of the time are driven by year after year spending growth. (As a single tax cut in absolute terms don’t usually cost you 1-1 year over year)
Everyone cares about deficits….when they aren’t in power. ANd no one cares when in power.
A slow down in spending that was opposed by the obama administration and decried by his party.
there’s also a fair bit of mendacity around how much various proposals will cost, be it tax cuts pay for themselves, the ACA reducing the deficit, or the million other examples. I’d say the democrats are worse about this, but only because the lying is generally far worse for spending proposals than tax cuts.
Does that imply that the Soviets lost the cold war because they couldn’t run a budget deficit?
They couldn’t run as large a budget deficit, in all likelihood. Military spending was already a large % of USSR GDP iirc.
I believe Cheney wanted to be understood as saying that deficits don’t matter as long as the country in question isn’t overwhelmed by the interest payments associated with the debt.
That seems tautological, no?
Incurian – perhaps, but the implication is that deficits can in absolute terms either remain or grow but as long as interest payments relative to tax outlays remain flat [or shrink] the deficits can continue indefinitely.
Large increases in spending or increases in interest rates will usually violate this condition.
I thought Cheney’s comments were about deficits not mattering for re-election.
Krugman has the most famous deficit flip-flop I know. His explanation, as I understand it, is that Democrats can be trusted to have only temporary deficits that are well-targeted to grow the economy, and certainly will turn to fiscal virtue in a while, unlike Republicans who are greedy mendacious knaves and probably smell bad.
More generally, I think everyone agrees that deficits matter at some amount, the question is at what amount, and if you’re sailing too close to that amount, does that limit your ability to respond to crises that arise in the future?
There’s also the less mendacious explanation that he was just wrong in 2003, and acknowledged his mistake, which is what the bottom link of that article says.
Right, but he didn’t “acknowledge that mistake” until seven years later, when the dangerous incompetent spendthrift president racking up debt was safely out of office and the wise prudent responsible president could use Krugman’s seal of approval to start investing in America’s future.
“Acknowledging a mistake” counts for a whole lot more if you do it when the targets of your mistake are still in a position to benefit from the acknowledgement.
As opposed to his Republican opponents, who are despicable knaves.
there was no austerity in the UK. Government spending rose from 40% of GDP in 2008 to 45% of GDP in 2012, and only very gradually fell back down to 40%. Spending in actual pounds, of course, grew every single year, even accounting for inflation.
Government welfare spending was just over 7% of GDP in 2010, just over 5% now. It was just over £120B (in 2005-£) in 2010, just over £100B now. It was £2000 (in 2005-£) per capita in 2010, £1500 now.
No austerity, my arse.
(Total government spending doesn’t show that clear decrease, but “austerity” in the UK typically refers specifically to welfare spending, something the Conservatives have always been keen to reduce.)
What of all spending? What portion of the total budget is welfare? Does Welfare include schools and healthcare?
I have no idea what they are counting in “welfare” spending, but given that it that doesn’t seem to include pensions and healthcare, I suspect it’s substantially unemployment spending, which would of course fall when unemployment did in 2012. And if you look, those curves seem similar.
So if welfare spending fell as a % of GDP but overall spending did not, what other category of spending rose to take the place of welfare?
To answer the various questions and comments:
1. Those links take you to a tool that lets you experiment for yourself: you can switch between “welfare”, “total government”, “pensions”, etc., switch between “%GDP”, “2005-£”, etc., look at different time periods, and so forth. I already provided three different views of what seems to me the most relevant figure for measuring “austerity”.
2. Total spending is about £12k per capita (in 2005-£) and has gone down only modestly since 2012. Welfare spending has gone from about £2000 of that to about £1500, which actually isn’t so different from the total decrease. Pensions have gone up by about the same amount, education has gone down by about the same amount, other things have stayed roughly the same.
3. Yes, unemployment is some of it. I assume it also includes tax credits (for people who are employed but poorly paid), income support (ditto), disability living allowance, housing benefit, etc.
(Having said all of which, comparing the numbers in those graphs from the ones in the government statistical reports they say they get their data from, it’s not obvious how one corresponds to the other — e.g., the term “welfare” appears not to be used in those government reports at all; make of that what you will.)
“Austerity”, used to mean more taxes and less government spending, is “deficit hawking” over on this side of the Atlantic. Supporting it is a sucker’s game, because the politics of compromise mean you don’t actually get it — instead, your opposition gets all the funding for programs they want, you get funding cut for programs you want, and the blame for the tax increases.
Most of the complaints downthread seem to be about monetary contractionism, which isn’t the same thing as all. Fiscal austerity can take the form of either tax increases or spending cuts, and so (as we have been seeing lately) needn’t have any particular political valence.
A lot of the right-wing people on SSC are Americans, and ‘austerity’ as such isn’t really a term Americans generally use; Americans discuss the budget deficit instead. Partly, this is in reflection that ‘austerity’ is a politically loaded term. One definition of ‘austerity’ is ‘enforced or extreme economy especially on a national scale‘; that might be an apt description of, say, the rationing and other measures taken by the US and UK during the second world war. However, it’s come to be used when discussing government to mean any attempt to reduce spending. If the government planned to spend $12 million to upgrade the furniture in an undersecretary’s office and the budget is reduced to $11 million, this is an ‘austerity measure’; true austerity would involve the undersecretary put off the furniture upgrade until the government has excess money.
Austerity also implies that any cuts are a temporary measure required until the government’s coffers are full again or the revenue is back in the black. To most libertarians, almost anything the government can put off is something the government shouldn’t be spending money on in the first place.
Finally, “capitalism” only indirectly connects with government spending. Free-market thinking tends to be far more concerned with the costs of government regulations than with government spending. It’s perfectly possible for governments to spend money in ways that do not interfere with the economy under all but the most broad definitions. Of course if the government throws enough money around there will be economic distortions and advocates for government spending are almost always advocates for government regulations (and vice versa), so there is a political correlation, and at the most basic level a dollar/Euro the government is spending is a dollar/Euro that the public can’t spend on what it wants. Still, most advocacy for “austerity” or government spending reductions is not based on its effects on the market but on the government’s waste of money that could be better spent elsewhere.
Austerity, or “budget cuts” in American, is when this year’s furniture budget is $11 million, and would have gone to $11.5 million, but instead is only increased to $11.2 million.
Thanks for this explanation.
I’m an SSC right-winger who will defend austerity, sort of!
1) If the argument against austerity is that it will cause a recession as a Keynsian market reaction to the reduced spending (similar to arguments that the US economy would take a hit when we shut down WWII spending), then I think that argument is almost certainly wrong – it’s pretty clear that if your monetary policy responds, you can avoid contractionary effects. Tim Worstall and the articles he links summarizes it.
2) In addition, it’s often unclear how much austerity there actually is in practice – in most cases, government spending continues to increase under an “austerity” budget, just not as much as the anti-austerity people would prefer.
3) On the other hand, if the argument is that austerity cuts spending that shouldn’t be cut, that’s a policy discussion, and really depends on the cuts.
I am not really sure you can conclude that the SSC right-wingers are opposed or are in favor of austerity based on simple comments to the below thread. I expect that most SSC right-wingers actually believe one or a combination of:
1. Western governments aren’t seriously engaging in austerity, by and large
2. Counter-cyclical policy is a fool’s game
3. Counter-cyclical policy done by the government is largely ineffective
4. Counter-cyclical policy done by the government is an excuse for permanently largely government
5. Counter-cycical policy is best handled by the Fed through monetary stimulus, not the government through fiscal stimulus
I suspect that most right-wingers here are not going to agree with Krugman et all on the center-left, that suggested we needed a 2nd stimulus of comparable size to the 1st stimulus.
Also, I don’t see “austerity” as having a direct relation to “free-market economics.” There’s also a difference between austerity in the sense of “The government should spend less money on social programs” vs austerity in the sense of “Government needs to tighten its belt during the recession.”
My biggest bias is that the 2008 meltdown seems to me to have demonstrated that the serious macroeconomists who were driving and advising policy knew a lot less than they claimed, and similarly that the companies full of smart financial analysts and traders making big investment decisions were less smart and understood less than they claimed. I feel like one result of watching that is that I have a great deal less faith in pronouncements by experts in macroeconomics, beyond really simple stuff.
Let’s talk division of labor in the home, SSC!
I was prompted by this op-ed from the New York Times. While men took up a more equal share of responsibilities at home in the 80s and 90s, that has since leveled off, and women still do 65% of the work. Researchers have concluded it is because men continue to resist doing an equal share. The writer, a mother, says that when she became a parent with her progressive husband, she expected they would fall easily into an equal division—but that hasn’t happened, and other progressive couples face the same. She concludes that men have to accept that the world has been built for their needs, comforts, and desires, and that they have to “stop resisting” when their wives tell them things are unfair.
This is the Times, so they do bring up male perspectives on the discrepancy in the latter half of the article. And this is the Times, so a lampshade is being hung. Our writer, Lockman, interviews several couples, with fathers suggesting explanations for the discrepancy. Three are proposed but go unexplored:
1) mothers take over certain tasks because fathers do not share the same priorities about when to do them
2) mothers do certain tasks that fathers feel are valuable but unnecessary
3) mothers do more because they feel a need to do more, as a matter of personality
It would be really easy for Lockman to provide some data for (3); she doesn’t. For example, are women more conscientious, as far as Big Five traits? That may explain the feeling of greater urgency/desire to keep working. I believe there are studies indicating women have higher conscientiousness; how reliable are those? Do they explain the discrepancy, or is the effect too small, or am I misunderstanding the trait?
The article mentions another bit of research: that wives “who view their household responsibilities ‘as unjust are more likely to suffer from depression than those who do not'” (quoting a study). If the explanation is a discrepancy in Big Five traits then this is really a complaint about, like, discrimination against high conscientiousness folks or whatever. This is grounds for a funny image of the next big social cause. Maybe in 2025 folks will be explicitly writing op-eds about Big Five discrimination, shaming low conscientiousness people for making us do all the work, shaming low neuroticism people for making us anxious all the time, shaming extroverts for dragging us to everyth—wait, hold on, I agree with that one. *cough*
Anyway, the research question is interesting, but so is anecdata. How equal is your own division of labor, couples of SSC? Does your wife or husband grumble about doing all the work? How equal is it for same-sex couples here? I’m single and live alone, but I hear this sort of talk at the office all the time; a major topic for married men in male environments is complaining about their wives. Not having the other perspective on this, I take these things with a grain of salt, but at least complaints about unfairness can be found on both sides!
I sit around with my feet up while my girlfriend does all the chores, because my chore is “Paying the rent”.
I feel this is unfair on me, as the 50% of the rent that she doesn’t pay is substantially more than the cost of hiring a professional maid to give the place a regular clean, but what can I say, I’m a man, Jedi mind tricks DO work on me.
It is astonishing to me that she would occasionally grumble about this arrangement, but, nevertheless, she does. On such occasions I offer to switch her from rent payment in kind to rent payment in cash, which tends to lead her to rapidly reconsider the topic of conversation.
Anecdata point.
I think our division of labor is pretty equitable. M/F couple with one toddler and hopes for a second if the stars ever align. I’m the F. We’re ‘older’ parents – he was 38 and I was 34 when kid was born.
I cook more and research parenting things, because I like those things. He takes the car to the garage, drills the occasional hole and researches household appliances, because he likes those things. We take each other’s advice on the things we researched and have similar values anyway. Neither of us win any prizes in terms of keeping the house spotless, but it’s definitely not a pig sty either. I’m a Pareto cleaner who gets the whole house ‘done’ in two hours, he’s a perfectionist who gets fewer things done but leaves them cleaner than I have the patience for.
We both work 4 days a week. We use Google Calendar and Google Keep to maintain schedules and shopping lists, so there’s none of that ‘oh, what do you mean there’s no school tomorrow’ shit going on in our house. On daycare days, he does the drop-off and I do the pick-up or the other way around. We have fixed days for that but adjust as needed. He works a 20-min drive from home and I have a home office, so that’s all really convenient. Daycare has his phone number as first contact, just to push back against the culture of ‘but can’t your wife pick up sick baby from daycare?’, but his office building is where cell signals go to die so they usually end up contacting me anyway.
We do grocery shopping as a family. When one person cooks, the other entertains kiddo/enlists kiddo to do some cleanup. We both do laundry/dishes/etc and toss in at least one load of laundry on each of our free days. (He’s got Wed, I’ve got Fri.) The one who does daycare drop-off is usually also on dressing and breakfast duty – on ‘my’ days he leaves early to beat traffic, on ‘his’ days I occasionally sleep in. If we try to put an item of cloting on baby and it turns out to be too small, we toss it in a box. Every now and then one of us will say ‘that box is getting kinda full, let’s go clothes shopping for kiddo,’ and put ‘baby clothes’ on the shopping list. Neither of us judges the other person’s outfit choices for baby. We both do about half the bedtimes; if the other person is at home, they take that time to clean up dinner and reset the living room.
We do have a Roomba, which I credit for about half of our marital satisfaction, since we both hate vacuuming but also hate sandy floors.
He has his weekly nights away, I have mine. On my nights away, he cooks simple meals but I really couldn’t care less about that – he’s better about making fruit and veg for kiddo than he is for himself. (And besides, I also cook simple meals when he’s away now – baby is in a picky phase so there’s no point in being fancy.) We both try to let the other have their way of doing things anyway, though he’s kind of a busybody (see also: perfectionist) who is often halfway through taking things over before he even realizes. I do grumble about that; he is getting better at sitting on his hands.
I used to want to be the kind of Independent Woman who would ALSO drill the holes and take the car to the garage and what have you, but the older I get (and definitely after baby), the clearer it became that that only works if you marry an Independent Man who ALSO cares about food and reading all the parenting books and what have you. I didn’t, and ain’t nobody got time to do EVERYTHING. He’s taller and stronger, he can drill the damn holes. He is the one who takes the car to work – he can swing by the garage.
One source of inequality in our relationship is that he IS better at just deciding to do something and then doing it without checking with me whether I’m actually in a spot where I can watch baby for the next hour. He’s very reasonable if I go after him, so I can’t hold that too much against him.
Sounds in many respects pretty similar to my marriage, except in your case it seems to work. Possibly, because if the man is the perfectionist, he nevertheless doesn’t nag all the f***g time.
Ohhh he nags. In this insufferable male way of saying ‘it’s not that I WANT this to be done X, it’s simply more logical that it be done X.’
I just made that my hill to die on and push back on that a LOT. I was nagged half to death by my mother as a kid and made a solemn vow not to nag myself, and I’m definitely not going to take it. On the other hand (and despite this hard line, ha), I’m a pretty agreeable person so if he wants something done he can just say ‘could you do me a favor?’ or ‘hey, can we brainstorm something about this thing that’s annoying me?’ After almost 2 decades of a relationship, we hardly ever fight about that anymore, ha.
Do you need to Roomba-proof your house? We got a robot vacuum as a gift, saw that the instructions said “no cords on the floor, and no fringe rugs” and have literally never taken it out of the box. Do people with Roombas not have floor lamps?
Not really. We don’t have floor lamps, that’s true. Nor fringe rugs. Thick cords don’t tend to be a problem, and we hide them/stick them behind furniture anyway. The Roomba can tackle my office with four computers and six screens and a bunch of audio equipment with no problem.
It does tend to do a worse job underneath the kitchen table because chair legs, so every now and then we put the chairs in a cleaner spot. And it gets stuck on this one chair, so we put something on the spot that it gets stuck on.
Did the article mention the division of outside-the-home labor?
Dammit, when I wrote that at home I could read the article incognito fine, but at work it’s auto hidden. Maybe they’re trying some sort of scattershot approach against nonpaying readers now. Sorry; if I’d known this would be a problem, I’d have put it in pastebin or something.
ETA: Try this. I added the links in, too. She mentions early on that both her and her husband work. She later produces research that men not picking up the slack impacts women’s earnings and health. She doesn’t mention any discrepancy between how much men and women work outside the home.
Here you go. Working men spend an average of 5.6 more hours per week on the job than working women. Not counting commuting, which is another 0.9 hours per week for the men. Harder to quantify is the greater propensity for men to work physically demanding jobs that require longer post-work recovery periods.
I think we actually need the discrepancy between how much men and women work outside the home for all men and women, not just those couples where both work.
People who don’t work, don’t work outside the home. And labor force participation rates by gender should be easy to find. But the original article is talking about a couple where both parties are employed, and that’s really the only place where it at all interesting to discuss domestic labor participation. “Should a non-working domestic partner do a disproportionate share of the housework?” is trivial and boring.
…But the original article is talking about a couple where both parties are employed
I submit that these statements from the article are not specific to couples where both are employed.
Try this:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-enable-google-chrome-incognito-mode-detection-blocking/
@albatross11,
Indirectly, in that women married to conservative men also don’t have an equitable childcare distribution but do not consider that unjust/do not get depressed about it. That may be because they both think the man should work outside the house and the women inside of it.
Still, many women take a step back from work because they can’t keep up with working full time while also doing the lion’s share of childcare (on top of the lion’s share of housework? that tends to get conflated but are two different things). So cause and effect may be difficult to determine.
An EconTalk episode indicated that when summing up paid work and home production time, women work about an hour more each week than men. Close, but a slight edge to women.
So in my house, I go to work and she stays at home. She probably does close to 80% of the chores, especially on a weekly basis. I do dishes, laundry, cleaning, etc, if asked (which annoys her, but she has a schedule and plans and such, and I’m not inside her head) and we share in taking care of the toddler when I’m home. Of the unusual/infrequent work, I probably do closer to 80%, things like lawn care, car maintenance, assembling the new thing, etc. One of the biggest issues we’ve had is that I spend 10 hours out of the house every day (between commuting, lunch and work) and have no idea what the state of the house is when I get home. I’m not insensitive to her needs for various tasks to get done, but she has a lot of anxiety about asking me, and if I don’t know it needs to be done, I’m not going to realize it on my own very quickly.
My wife and I like to approach the issue as if the main unit is the family, not the individual. We don’t have any kids yet, but we try to do what we are best at, with the flexibility to pick up the slack when the other isn’t feeling well or needs extra help. In practice this means my wife cooks most dinners, though I help with prep, and when I cook I just make Trader Joe’s frozen meals; but I do the dishes either way. My wife cleans constantly during the week, and I help her about every other weekend for a deep clean. I do the laundry, and she folds it, and I put it away. I make phone calls, she send emails. She drives, but we do groceries and shopping together. I assemble furniture, either of us drills holes unless she has trouble reaching. I work 45 hours a week at a desk job, she tries hobbies that are currently a net loss, but has the potential to turn into a profitable business one day. She walks the pets while I’m at work, I walk the other times. She keeps them clean and entertained and I clean the litter box. With a division of labor like this it is impossible and indeed harmful to calculate what percent of the work each spouse is doing. Some chores are harder for others, some people are better at other things. Calculating it would only create unnecessary resentment.
“With a division of labor like this it is impossible and indeed harmful to calculate what percent of the work each spouse is doing. Some chores are harder for others, some people are better at other things. Calculating it would only create unnecessary resentment.”
This +1. I recall reading somewhere that in every relationship both of the partners thinks they are doing 70% of the work.
Disclaimer: I am not trying to play Devil’s Advocate here, but something close to that. I certainly don’t dispute that there are issues related to traditional gender roles and distribution of household responsibilities. I just want to highlight some things that I think may make it appear worse than it is (for the “typical” case, not looking at the extremes where something is clearly wrong).
I don’t have access to the paper cited here, and my thought is so obvious that I have to believe it is addressed, but this quote implies a causation of unjust responsibilities leads to depression. Isn’t it fairly possible, even somewhat likely, that it could work the other way (that someone suffering from depression would be inclined to see their situation as unjust regardless of whether that was objectively true)?
More importantly, it seems that a lot of the issues brought up about household responsibilities are the exact same issues that non-romantically involved roommates have with division of labor, but since marriage is involved people try to bring gender roles into all of it instead of focusing on the places where it is actually a key factor (like child care).
Gender roles definitely aren’t just a key factor in child care. You can have different gender roles in childcare, like ‘moms do arts and crafts and dads take kids to the batting cage’ or ‘moms kiss booboos and dads give lectures’, without creating unequal workloads.
The causality of depression & injustice doesn’t seem that much more obvious the way you put it. In most cases, these are straight, married couples who had a ‘just-seeming’ division of labor before kids that only started feeling ‘unjust’ after kids.
There are definitely similarities with roommate household negotiations, except that with an annoying slob of a roommate you can much more easily move, hoard all your silverware in your own room/locker, kick them out, play a game of housework chicken etc.
I said “like childcare” because childcare is an easy example. I did not say “only and exclusively childcare” and I didn’t say that on purpose.
I’m not saying it is obviously the other way. I’m saying it is plausible either direction (more to the point, that in practice it can and does happen either direction, but to imply as the article does that the causation is always in the direction that matches the viewpoint of the writer needs some support). Incorrectly identifying the cause of depression to a person can be actively harmful to them, so I think this is important.
Didn’t I specifically say that division of labor as it relates to kids is one of the main places to look for problems that are clearly gender-role related? I don’t think anything I said contradicts this. That said, the quote related to that study didn’t mention kids at all, so while what you say is certainly a thing that happens, that isn’t what the article was saying. Again, I don’t know what the actual study said because I don’t have access…maybe the study does say or address difference between pre and post kids.
Yes, it is a harder problem than a typical roommate situation, because it is harder to get out of. No, that doesn’t mean that any time an issue like this arises it is always related to gender issues/gender roles. Of course sometimes it is, but not always. Pretending otherwise makes it harder to actually address real issues with gender role imbalance. Also, worth noting that it isn’t even always necessarily the man who benefits and the woman who is harmed by the imbalance, it can work the other way.
I think we can find common ground in that there are problems with gender roles in society and in long term relationships specifically. I am totally on board with that. I just making that the root of anything that involves people of different genders confuses the issue and makes it harder to actually make positive cultural changes.
Sure, the imbalance can be harmful both ways. I definitely know some scum women.
And I guess I consider the difference between ‘division of labor after kids’ and ‘division of labor as relates to kids’ and ‘division of childcare labor’ very significant, while perhaps you don’t.
It depends on what conversation we’re having, and what our goal is in terms of division of labor. If we just want “equal amount of labor” generally it is less important. If we want “equal amount of labor for each type of task” (50/50 baths, 50/50 cleaning, 50/50 lawn mowing, etc) then the distinction is definitely important.
In other words, if we’re looking at “who does more work” it is less important. If we’re looking at “who does more of x type of work” the distinction basically is the conversation so it isn’t just significant, it’s the central matter being discussed.
Maybe we’re in agreement, and were just having different conversations?
Or perhaps people suffering from depression are likely to do things slowly, and that increases the time spent doing domestic work. With a job and kids, there is not much time left, so an extra hour a day can make a great difference.
In case of more serious depression, you also have to consider the time spent in therapy, and the fact that the money spent on therapy cannot be spent e.g. on babysitting.
I don’t think the issue requires a whole lot of inspired guesswork. Going by the quoted passage it’s wives who view their household responsibilities as unjust that are a depression risk.
Let’s try to break down what’s being said here:
1. Someone thinks their life is unfair,
2. Someone is subsequently depressed.
Sounds like a paper I wrote a while back, entitled “Duh!”
The fact that people who aren’t satisified with their lives are at risk of depression is so stupidly obvious, that words fail me.
However, “someone’s household responsibilities are unjust” does not follow from “someone views their household responsibilities as unjust” – which the article seems to assume implicitly.
It gets even funnier when we realize that “someone views their household responsibilities as unjust” doesn’t follow from “someone’s household responsibilities are unjust”, either – someone may very well be perfectly content with their unfair burden, for other reasons.
Those people, presumably, aren’t at risk of depression.
So I pretty much fully agree with this, maybe this is a better version of what I was trying to say, except:
I’m just pointing out that this may be correlation as opposed to causation. The paper may actually address that, but the article appears to just assume it.
Person is depressed for Reasons. Person (or people around said person) identify cause x as the reason for the depression. That doesn’t mean x actually caused the depression…depression is complicated and people are often wrong about these things!
Are people who view their household duties as unfair at higher risk for depression, or are people who are depressed more likely to view things in their life as unfair in an attempt to pinpoint why they feel the way they do? I could believe either way, but if someone is going to claim one or the other as correct I would hope that would be supported by someone (or else acknowledge that it is just unsupported intuition).
Why not both?
The point is that this is not, in any way, an unanticipated result.
More importantly, however, it tells us nothing about whether the division of labour is in fact unjust – which is the only thing the article cares about (the thrust being “it’s not just unfair, it’s a health risk, too!”)
If it helps, the pastebin link I gave albatross above has links to all the research that the article gave. Just awkwardly inlined because pastebin is plaintext. Here’s the paper; I don’t have access to it, but some people here probably do.
@Faza
At this point I think we’re actually in agreement and either I’m not writing clearly or you misread something.
“Why not both?” Exactly. My complaint is framing it as one-directional (feels unfair leads to depression in all cases) when likely the opposite is also true (depression leads to feelings that x is unfair) in at least some, and probably a significant number of, cases. I’m also not attributing that framing to you, it is a gripe I have with the article. I agree with the article’s general premise but disagree on the specifics, analysis, and presentation.
@acymetric
This is a claim that I did not actually make.
My claim is that if someone has a reason for emotional distress (they feel stuck in an unfair situation), it is not surprising in the slightest that they may become depressed. It is not impossible that the causality goes the other way in some cases, but I’m not convinced that this is a useful line of inquiry when considering the big picture (when we’re looking at individual cases, definitely!)
The difference as I see it in differentiating between the two lines of causality is as follows:
1. If perceived injustice causes depression, we would expect to see some people who perceive injustice become depressed,
2. If depression causes the perception of injustice, we would expect all (or rather: most) people who perceive injustice to be depressed.
I realize this sounds like I’m stacking the deck in my favour, because of a more rigorous demand made for 2. (depression tends to be the result of numerous factors), but this is because of the nature of the proposition. If the feeling of injustice is the result of pre-existing depression – a plausible line of causality – we would expect a much tighter correlation between depression and perception of injustice (people won’t be perceiving injustice unless they are depressed) than when perception of injustice is a contributing cause of depression (which is the claim made in the article, and taken up by myself) – which also happens to be a good enough line of causality for politics (again, individual cases should be examined and treated individually).
@Faza
I know you didn’t make it. I even said you didn’t:
I attribute that claim (or at least implication) to the article.
As far as the rest, I don’t think your point two necessarily follows.
This is backwards. If depression causes perception of injustice, we would expect depressed people to be more likely to perceive injustice. There are lots of other reasons to perceive injustice other than being depressed, so it doesn’t really follow that most people who perceive injustice would be depressed. For an analogy, consider that drunk driving causes car crashes, but that does not mean that most car crashes are the result of drunk driving (they aren’t) because lots of things cause car crashes.
I think we agree that the causation could plausibly go either way. I think we probably even agree that it does work both ways in practice. We just disagree on the ratio between the two. I think it is probably relatively balanced (not necessarily 50/50, but not like 90/10 either). You seem to think it is heavily weighted towards #1.
I don’t think we’re going to be able to hash that out using our competing intuitions, and I don’t know that there is good data readily at hand to get an actual, scientifically sound answer. At the very least, I think even if we’re not on the same page we aren’t exactly miles apart, either?
@acymetric
I think we’re as close to being on the same page as is possible (si duo dicunt idem, non est idem).
To be clear: I don’t disagree with anything you wrote. My position here is mostly based on Occam – it’s simply unnecassary to posit the reverse causality (depression->perception of injustice), because the intially proposed explanation is perfectly sufficient.
Having gotten that out of the way, I’d like to ask you why you think an examination of that angle is important, looking at the big picture?
This being the internet, I want to stress that I really am interested in what you think. In a previous comment you mentioned concerns about misdiagnosing the causes in an individual case – concerns that I share – but we aren’t looking at individuals here. We’re asking whether a specific social phenomenon has implications for mental health in society at large, what those are and why do they arise.
Do you see what I mean?
Mostly from the angle of “depression is a Big Deal.” Depression is frequently attributed to the wrong things, both by the people suffering from it and the people around them. If the cause of the depression is a sense of unfairness around the household, then either correcting the imbalance (if the unfairness is real) or correcting the perception (if the unfairness is imagined) is a good course of action.
If it is the other way, though, and we assume the sense of unfairness is causing the depression when in reality something else is causing the state of depression, efforts to fix the situation by dealing with the sense of unfairness directly are likely to be unsuccessful, and maybe even counter-productive.
Hard to think of something worse for someone with a good home life/family/partner who is suffering from depression than saying “you know what your problem is? Your husband.”
Your clear distinction between “perceived unfairness” and “actual unfairness” alleviates this to a great extent (though not fully), but when I wrote my original post I wrote it with the idea that not everyone would make that distinction (which I think is true, although obviously you yourself did make it).
And I’d wager that articles with the premise of “Household chores still not shared 50/50! Women hardest hit!” are probably on net spurring more depression and arguments than they are a more harmonious balance of chores.
It’s also plausible that there are couples where the distribution of labor is unjust (for some definition of unjust), and those against whom it’s unjust are more likely to be depressed, even though, based on the statistics cited above, the division of labor is not significantly unjust on average (measured in time worked).
My situation
I married a woman with 3 kids and a career. When we were both working, I did all of the traditionally ‘male’ chores / maintenance / heavy lifting, and we split the other chores about 60% her / 30% me / 10% kids. How much the kids help with these tasks is a bit of an issue between us – she insists that they need time to do homework and participate in sports. My position is that if they had more ‘skin in the game’ they would grow up to be more responsible.
She has been laid off now for a couple of years, and I do less now, with she and the kids (mostly the girls) picking up my slack. The oldest child, my stepson, used to take out the trash and recycling, but he couldn’t really be relied on so now I mostly do it to make sure it gets done.
One of the girls is a fantastic cook, and is always helping my wife out with that. She also keeps her room clean. The other two have to be nagged into doing pretty much anything, but my wife would rather nag them until they do the chores than set expectations and punish failure to perform.
One of the compromises I made when I married a woman with 2 teenagers and a preteen was that she would set the tone on that sort of thing, so mostly I try to resist taking up the tasks she won’t assign to the kids. Except the trash.
2a) Mothers do certain tasks that fathers feel are an utter waste of time but don’t want to fight about.
Does this study control for the fact that men on average work longer hours at job? If the wife is a stay-at-home mom or a part-time worker, while the husband is a full-time worker, it would be very myopic definition of fairness to expect the husband to also do 50% of all domestic work.
Let’s do some math:
For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume the day has 24 hours, everyone spends 8 hours sleeping and 16 awake. That gives you 16×7 = 112 awake hours a week.
A full time job takes 8 hours a day, plus 30 minutes of lunch break, and let’s say 30+30 minutes of commute to+from the work. That makes (8+0.5+0.5+0.5)×5 = 47.5 hours a week. Let’s round it to 48 hours.
Child-care is most time costly when the kid is too small to attend school or kindergarten. But even if the child is of school age, this calculation can describe days when the child is sick (at kindergarten, half the time), or during school vacation (two months a year). Then you need 112 hours of child care a week.
So, if the man works full time, and you want to split child care equally, the man has 112/2 = 56 hours of child care and 48 hours of job (plus lunch and commute) a week. That is 56+48 = 104 of 112 awake hours; in other words, he has 8 hours a week left for everything other than job and kids. — That includes his fair share of domestic work (half of shopping and cooking and cleaning and washing and …?), duties other than job (random pleasures of life such as doing taxes), self-care, social life, and reading Slate Star Codex.
Now, these numbers are not exact. For example, kids sometimes sleep after lunch, that time interval does not require babysitting. On the other hand, sometimes both parents do child care at the same time: a family dinner, a trip; or the time when you need to do different things with different kids. You can pay for babysitting, or sometimes grandparents do it for free. Some people have shorter commute, some have longer. Some people work more than 40 hours a week (and then they are expected to work on their GitHub portfolio during their free time, heh).
Is this part of that post-scarcity utopia everyone keeps talking about? 😉
Right? My own sleeping habit is closer to 5-6 hours a night, if I’m lucky. Once in a while (like once a month) I get closer to 8 hours. But that’s anomalous, not the rule.
You should make an effort to achieve that. It’s good for almost everyone.
I put this advice in the same bucket as “You sould make an effort to be fabulously wealthy too, that’s good for almost everyone”.
Justified true beliefs that X is good does not, alas, translate to getting X.
Oh, for sure. I was just making a joke about how most of us don’t.
I figured, I just wanted to push back a little against the normalization. 🙂
The linked study is here. I don’t have access, but others might.
I do basically everything. My Wife helps somewhat with laundry, occasionally irons, and cleans the bathrooms. I’m not really sure yet about whether bathroom cleaning chemicals can have an adverse effect on pregnancies, so I’ve been picking up bathroom cleaning.
My wife will clean prior to someone coming over, and when she has an occasional spurt of productivity. She sometimes takes on a project, like putting in some edging in the garden, or painting a small room.
This is not really a gender role issue, all the kids on my in-laws side are shockingly lazy. Like, “I will put dirty dishes back in the cabinet before I clean them” level of lazy.
We both work, but my hours are more flexible and I am more capable of working from home, so I tend to do a lot of the day-to-day stuff, especially during the week: I cook most weeknight dinners and do the dishes plus the necessary sweeping and cleaning to keep the place livable. On the weekend though, she tends to do more thorough tidying up. I’d say maybe that I clean and she tidies: she does major organizing and putting stuff away where it properly belongs, while I wipe down the surfaces and vacuum and sweep.
I probably end up doing a little more, but it’s hard to be certain.
Some of this reflects our preferences as well: I don’t mind washing dishes and she hates it, while I find tidying and organizing to be absolutely excruciating, while she thrives on it, but stuff like cooking I think is just a matter of what’s more convenient.
Regarding your alternate explanations, I think they explain part of it. That’s standard roommate politics – unless there’s a specific agreement, the roommate who prefers a cleaner common space almost always does more cleaning work and resents it.
And IMHO I don’t think the resentment is unreasonable. If one person prefers a cleaner home, there should be a discussion that takes into account the difference in priorities and comes to some kind of resolution. It’s not fair for Felix to make Oscar clean the house to Felix’s satisfaction, but it’s also not fair for Oscar to shoulder Felix with all the cleaning – presumably, you can reach some agreement in the middle, or that compensates somewhere else.
Our home:
My wife and I both work full time. She works from a home office and I commute, so my guess is that sort of evens out – the extra time I spend commuting is balanced by domestic stuff she does like getting the kids snacks, picking them up when necessary, letting the dog in and out, etc.
During the rest of the time, most of our division is based on comparative advantage and preference. I do most of the cooking, grocery shopping, repair, finances, de-clutter when I notice it, and mow, and other services as requested. She does cleaning, laundry, organizes the calendar, school paperwork, gardening, and most of the kid transportation.
Still, my guess is she probably does 60-70% of the actual domestic work, and that spurs me to clean more than i otherwise would. We should probably get someone to do the light cleaning.
The answer I’ve had, for quite some time, is you can tell me a task and let me do it, or you can supervise me and tell me how. You cannot expect me to both take the initiative to do a task you’ve made me aware of and to do it your way. Either I own the task, or you are going to be involved in the task.
Obviously it’s only unreasonable if their standards are unreasonable–ie, different from mine 😉
Its easy to outline obviously unreasonable behavior that is held by someone–ie, leaving dirty dishes on the table overnight for the bugs to enjoy vs insisting on dusting every surface daily.
The sweet spot is going to vary wildly, though.
As an example of this variance: my roommate complains about dog hair and dishes (these are fair, although somewhat exaggerated, complaints).
On the other hand, when I first moved in (he had lived there for a couple years) the bathroom was like 90% mold which I think is a much bigger deal.
Some combination of #1 and #3 are major causes of issues in a lot of marriages.
My wife does more work than I do in total, her time at work + time with the kids + chores exceeds my time. However there is no individual thing, or set of things that I can realistically do to reduce the amount of time she works, she rejects my offers to take specific chores (ie putting the kids to bed is the most common) off her plate about half of the time. If she came home and the house was in literally perfect order she would go outside and work on one of the projects in the yard.
Simply put I cannot, due to her personality, work situation and the nature of the universe, cut her sense of responsibility down. The only thing I could do in the near term is simply take on her personality and priorities and put the same number of hours in as she does. This was a reasonable position when we were less financially secure years ago, and what I did for a short period, but now that would simply be a one sided sacrifice.
We are still working this out, but there can’t be literal equality between us because aspects of our personalities are so different. Either we work different amounts or one of us has to swallow their preferences and match the other, perhaps in a few years we will be in a place where she can cut back her working hours and then her home chores will feel more like leisure to her.
I make enough money that I can pay for rent in a major city, utilities, insurance, a car, etc on my own. And I can afford weekly maid service and a few other regular services. I also have a Roomba. So household chores basically consist of walking my dog twice a day and cooking. And the irregular stuff.
My feeling has always been that means there aren’t that many chores to do in my house to begin with. But my general rule has always been that if my girlfriend contributes half of upkeep, then we split it evenly. If she contributes less than half, we split it fairly (leaning towards her) but I have preferential option to say that work calls or that I need to work instead. If she doesn’t pay in anything or almost nothing then it’s mostly on her as effectively a stay at home.
I have a relatively small sample size, naturally. But my experience is that feminist women with unimpressive or activist careers (even if those activist careers are impressive) tend to object most strongly. Women who would describe themselves as not feminists with impressive careers, even if those careers pay poorly, tend to have the fewest issues with this. Usually not at all. Though I do bias the sample by breaking up with any woman who insists I foot the entire bill and split the chores 50/50. I could tell you of some truly absurd fights, including one woman who accused me of treating her like a maid while the actual maid was recleaning something because she wasn’t satisfied with the maid’s work.
What I’ve concluded is that it’s mostly a self-esteem thing. Women who derive their self-worth from independence or feminist credentials will see it as an issue. Women who don’t, or who actually derive their self-worth from fulfilling traditional gender roles, won’t.
I haven’t read this specific article but a lot of similar pieces in outlets like the Times end up reading like “I’m unhappy with my relationship so I’m going to tell everybody in the world about it while generalizing my specific relationship to everyone’s.” Remind me to never marry a journalist.
I’ve been living with my wife for 15 years, about half of that with no kids and then an increasing number of kids. Roles shift all the time based on current situation. At the moment there’s a lot that just doesn’t really get done because it’s hard for us chasing after multiple young kids and keeping up with cleaning and such. We have a large yard now and ended up paying a mowing service who are much faster and much better at it than I am when I tried to do it myself. As the kids start to get older they’re getting involved more. TBH right now I’m handling most things myself, but when I think something needs to change, I talk with my wife about it rather than writing an article in the Times.
I don’t know how much we should count–we are single income, and live in an apartment. So there is less chores and more man- (or at least woman)-hours. Though she’s not exactly stay-at-home; much of the day time is used for various activities for our homeschooled trio.
My wife often makes me breakfast and lunch in the mornings, though I try to let her sleep in if she doesn’t wake on her own for it. She’ll do shopping and make dinners, unless she’s running around to an activity, tutoring (a side job) or just wants me to grill the meat. I usually do breakfast on the weekends.
She does the laundry, partly because we use her mother’s facilities. In return, I make liberal use of the smell test on my own clothes before tossing them into the hamper.
Whoever notices the dust or remembers the company first will do the vacuuming and ‘straightening up.’
Children do the dishes.
When we had babies, we both did diapers (including rinsing the cloth); she breast fed. There was much more work from both back then, of course.
Occasionally I’ll nag her (and children) about clutter on their desks and surrounding areas, as I find the visual mess irritating. I track the finances.
She does most of the interaction chores–buying gifts, scheduling appointments, and so on.
edit: Oh, and we both contribute to putting children to bed, but I don’t consider that a chore–it’s vital relationship building that perhaps we weren’t in the mood for at the moment but brings satisfaction long term. Okay, fine, maybe that’s a lot like a chore.
So while I’m really not concerned with ‘equality’ in such matters, we make up for it in concern for each other and haven’t argued about it much to date.
My fiancee and I work roughly equal amounts. She’s the brains and handles more of the long term planning like vacations, moves, our wedding, etc. She also does more of the occasional cleaning. We go grocery shopping together. We split the bills currently, but the bills will all be mine soon since she’s going to get another degree while I work. We might switch years from now although I’d just go part time and take over more housework; I never want to get another degree. I try to do more of the daily chores like cooking, dishes, cleaning the kitchen countertops, and laundry because I’m so bad about long term plans. But it varies a lot from week to week depending on who is busy. At best I’m probably getting to 55 or 60% of daily chores instead of 50%.
My wife does the lion’s share of housework but she’s mostly a stay-at-home mom. I go to work every day to pay for everything. She hasn’t complained, and if she did I would do more (but not 50% because come on, I’m not the one home all day).
She’s about to apply for a full-time job (it’s really right up her alley, and the pretty soon the kids will all be in school), so we’ll see how that changes when we’re both working.
Our division:
My wife does almost all of the planning and organizing, because I tend to be flaky. That conversation where I’m surprised the kids are off of school today has totally happened in my household, despite a shared google calendar.
I manage the money, because I’m cheap and that way we get to have nice vacations.
I do most of the laundry, because I don’t like how my wife folds or hangs stuff.
She does most of the tidying up, because she’s less tolerant of ambient mess than I am. This reverses when we’re having company, as I have a very strong “clean up for company” imperative from my childhood.
Dishes are, I think, mostly even.
Time with the kids is even, I think. (Bed, bath, reading, homework) Maybe shading towards her, but not egregiously so.
In general, I’m satisfied with out division of labor. I think she is too, though it’s probably worth a conversation.
My wife and I often drift into lifestyles where she’s doing too much of the household labor, due to a combination of her having higher cleanliness standards and me being selfish/negligent without noticing. I think there’s a lot going on there: gendered differences in social desirability bias/preferences, difference in conscientiousness levels that might be gender-correlated, and just random different preferences (my brother’s much neater than I am). I don’t believe in justice as an end goal but I value my wife’s happiness and effectiveness equal to mine, and my wife does believe in justice, so I basically just try to be extra conscientious about the chores that I do value and cheerfully pitch in with the ones that I don’t.
Right now we’re in a phase where division of labor works out pretty well because we have a new chore, walking our loud excitable dog, that I enjoy and she often hates, so I can just always be the one to do it when we’re both home, and currently we’re on similar schedules so that’s almost all walks.
It is my opinion that this article, and all similar articles are typically built on a bed of lies that they incorporate into assumptions (and they often ignore pay and commute disparities). But I have charitably assume they are the first ever to do this methodology correctly and will directly address the main points.
Probably true. But its also likely that this is most likely because of time shifting of when a hobby/entertainment must be done. Its not great to go to the gym or play pickup at 10 PM after the kids are asleep. Also related, lots of women seem to do working out/hobbies in the middle of the day, even if they work full time jobs. Spin classes are the common example. So, yes, obviously if the dishes need cleaning, the man gets back an hour later because he did his hobby/exercise after work instead of midday, and sports TV is the only thing you gotta watch live, then yes he has greater time preferences. Not understanding that is being dumb.
A concept I’ve referred to as the Chore-Hobby duality. Any chore overly done is actually a hobby (some hobbies are never chores). I will personally say in our household, I consider a majority (no kids) of the “chores” done by the other person to be mostly useless. For instance, she bakes, takes care of plants (that produce no food!), and decorates. In other households I know some wives vacuum daily, or more than that. Those are hobbies! We dont give a man credit for the 5th hour he’s spend repairing his motorcycle that day. If I did some woodworking and made a bunch of weird statues to display in the house no one would count those hours!
Probably true in 2 spaces, cleaning and childcare. Cleaning is a neuroticism thing which most men are lower on, and childcare I think is a thing where its evidence that having a man and a woman in the household is usually good for children. There are 2 parenting techniques, and they are both needed.
@Nick
(Full disclosure: I didn’t read the linked essay, as it didn’t seem like it’d be anything new, and I’ve seen other essays on that topic over the decades, women do more hours of hoisework, men die or get crippled at work more, what else is new?)
Anyway, I work outside the home and driving to and from the job and home is a blight I deeply resent (a bit less hours at work would be nice as well, but it’s the driving that frustrates me more).
My wife is a “stay-at-home-mom” and she resents how much of her time is soent doing childcare (after are second son waa born and my job looked more secure I started bringing home more take out so she resents cooking less now).
Last night when I came home she expounded for many minutes about how hard it was looking after our almost 3 year-old son (especially now that our older son is taking more classes) while I tried to look like I was listening and sympathetic, but within an hour the little guy said something cute, and she smiled and said “I always want a little kid in the house”.
Aa to who has it better or worse I can’t tell, when part of my day is soent at Lefty O’Doul’s I’d say I have it better, but when part of it us spent pulling hair out of the drains in the autopsy room I have to bite my tongue to keep from saying: “You think you have it hard, let me tell you what I did today”.
Mostly, I don’t think we resent each other for not picking up more slack, it’s fate we curse and/or are grateful to.
Are you unclogging the drain at Lefty’s, knocking back a pint, or both?
@Randy M,
Just corned beef and cabbage for me, and that was some years ago when the crew was mostly born in either the Philippines or the Soviet Union, about twice a year we’d go together and have a meal, it was a left over tradition from when the crew was of mostly Irish descent from which only one guy in his 60’s was left by then.
In some ways we’ve come full circle as now most of the Filipinos are retired, as are half of the Russians, unlike five years ago most of my co-workers are now U.S. born (thought their paremts are immigrants), and both the blue-collar new Superintendent is Irish-American as is the new white-collar Manager (one to direct the trades, the other to interact with the “tenants” which are the cops, courts, et cetera. In theory they’re of co-equal status), though now we go to an Italian restaurant twice a year instead.
I think that I’ve mentioned this before but, even though the plurality of city staff is now of Asian descent, celebrations are still had at the Irish Cultural Center, and the Italian Athletic Club – just like when those were the dominant ethnicities fifty years ago.
If you’re temperamentally conservative I highly recommend government building repair work, as unlike the private sector resistance to change is normal despite “new initiatives” from the white-collar side, in my bosses words “Take those new computers they issued us and put ’em in you’re lockers and leave them there, what we do works and we’re not changing anything”.
Don’t feel bad; it really wasn’t anything new, although the explanations proposed by the men interested me. I mostly wanted to see anecdata from folks here.
Another anecdote. I’m the M half of a M/F marriage, American, in our late-20s. We don’t have kids yet.
Our split is about me 75%, her 25%. It works.
Some notes for context:
-We both work full-time, white-collar jobs. I have a more demanding job and a longer commute, so I am usually home ~2 hours later than her on weeknights.
-Since we don’t have kids and don’t entertain during the week, we push off our major housecleaning items until the weekend. During the week, I do close to 100% of the housework, which is mostly dishwashing every night and doing the trash on trash day.
-Why do I do ~100% of the dishwashing? My wife has a relatively small appetite and eats very small portions, which means she cooks infrequently. She skips breakfast and eats lunch at her work cafeteria, while I always make a big breakfast and take my lunch to work. I cook dinner ~2-3 times per week, too. Add this up and 80% of the dirty dishes are mine. When we moved in together, it felt awkward to nag my wife to wash the 1 plate she ate dinner off of and her tea mug when I was washing a sink full of dishes that I soiled. In the time it would take for me to ask her to clean up after herself, I could just wash her plate since I was already standing in front of the sink. (She does 100% of the cleaning of cooking utensils, pans, etc. when she cooks, though)
-When we clean during the weekend, we split the division of labor evenly. I take some of the more masculine-coded (“gross”) chores like cleaning the shower or toilets, while she vacuums.
-I’m more of a perfectionist, so I do more of the tidying up during the week too. Still, we have a similar tolerance for messiness, which is an underrated component to having a harmonious relationship. As a side note, I seem to enjoy housework more than my wife.
Overall, I’m fine with the arrangement. I would prefer to do less — who wouldn’t? — but I am responsible for most of the messes I have to clean up.
Our dynamic is that my wife spontaneously does most of the work and then is exhausted by it and complains. Meanwhile I always try to do my fair share, always fall short and feel guilty about it. It’s the perfect system.
It’s not that there is a big pile of dirty dishes waiting to be washed – if there was I’d just do them to lighten her load. Besides, we have a lady come over and clean up twice a week (she also does school drop-offs and pick-ups for our two daughters). It’s just that when a child needs new shoes, my wife is always the one to remember about it. When we’re going on vacation she always insists that she packs the bags because I would forget something important (I wouldn’t). Any school and after-school activities for the children, doctor appointments, etc. – she’s on top of that. This stuff adds up.
There are several reasons for this state of affairs:
– partly it’s because I’m lazy and not proactive enough about those things.
– Partly it’s because for her it’s a compulsion. Like – out of her own free will, unprompted she spends time online researching home decor until late at night. Not because she enjoys it, just because she feels she has to do it.
– for children-related chores a big factor is the fact that she feels guilty about working full time and not spending more time with our daughters. So she compensates by being extra conscientious about child stuff by and attending every school non-event
– in a small part it is because I’m making more money than she does and if one of us needs to take time off work it makes more sense for it to be her (especially since I’m self employed). But this is more an excuse than a reason. If anything, causation may be in the other direction. It’s not a big deal anyway. We could afford for both of us to take the day off when a child is sick if we wanted to. I always volunteer that I do it and she always refuses.
Late-40s MF couple, one school-age child. I (husband) work full-time, my wife works from home ~50% time. I’m paid a lot more than her per hour so this sort of division makes sense. My wife does a lot more of the chores than I do. Analysing exactly why is difficult but I assume it’s a combination of (1) that’s reasonable since I’m out working when she isn’t, (2) she cares more than I do about (e.g.) tidiness, and (3) sexism. (I try to avoid #3 but I dare say not perfectly.)
More specifically, my wife does almost all the cleaning and tidying, most of the cooking (weekday evening meals are hers, weekend meals are mine), almost all the childcare, a minority of the gardening (I do all the mowing and most of the weeding; other garden things are roughly equal), about half the shopping, most of the admin, approximately none of the DIY (not that we do very much of that), approximately none of the car/bike maintenance. Note that the things she does more of are the things that need doing more often and take up more time on net.
I don’t think either of us feels terribly hard-done-by, on balance. I don’t complain about her to others; whether she complains about me to others, I don’t know :-).
M in MF marriage, one kid, both spouses have demanding full-time jobs. I think we end up splitting approx. 50/50 overall, but the big caveat is that we outsource a lot of traditional housework (we have a nanny and a weekly cleaning-and-laundry service and eat takeout a lot) which we are lucky enough to be able to do because of said demanding full-time jobs. I do most non-outsourced dishes and laundry; my wife probably does about 2/3 of the non-outsourced cooking. We try and split the day-to-day non-outsourced childcare (kid transportation, bath and bedtime routine) equally, but my wife ends up doing most of the kid project management (buying clothes, planning parties, playdates etc) while I do almost all of the home repair project management. One of the glaring omissions in the article’s analysis is any discussion of how level of outsourcing (which of course depends largely on income) affects division of non-outsourced work.
Once again, China surges past the US in a STEM field, and this time it’s… literal wireheading?
On the one hand, yes, the opiod epidemic is a modern scourge, and novel approaches to combatting it are good. On the other, China’s historical lack of respect for human rights, and ethically atrocious medical procedures involving prisoners. And also the literal wireheading.
I wonder, in a future where you’d prosecute and shoot people for this, what would the charges be?
Woah, this seems like a really big deal. I didn’t realize that such things could be real so soon.
Based on Wikipedia, wireheading is not new at all, though specific emotions other than pleasure might be.
@tossrock,
“I have seen the future and it works” – and it’s terrifying!
A quote from one of my favorite authors–Lincoln Steffens. (I recommend his autobiography frequently.)
While doing one of my deep dives into obscure topics, I discovered these remarkable descriptions of what getting a degree from Oxford was like in the late 18th century:
These come from from the 1852 report of a royal commission on reforming the university’s then 300-year-old statutes. I find the rest of the report pretty interesting too – it shows how this ancient guild of scholastics started to look like a modern place of higher learning. The report comments that, following an early 19th century reform that made the examinations meaningful again, it was found impractical to examine all students on all subjects, so the B.A. degree was divided into “classical” and “mathematical” examinations. The commission suggested adding further subdivisions, and of course now you can get a degree in any subject you can think of.
The other thing I’d like to note is that it shows what a university looked like before the introduction of the Ph.D.: there were very few graduate students, and higher degrees were a formality. Notably, only a handful of students took medical degrees, as they were not a requirement to practice medicine at the time (but that’s a whole other post). The other doctorates were in divinity and civil law, only useful for attaining higher offices in the university and the church, and only granted to those who had already proven themselves worthy of those higher offices. Today the “LL.D.”/”D.C.L.” are common designations for honorary degrees in America, in a link back to the time when the great English universities had entire faculties in a legal system that their country has never used.
I am intrigued by the use of ”bed-maker”, as that term has survived, though usually shortened to ”bedder”, in Cambridge where it is used to refer to cleaners in student accommodation (who do not make students’ beds). In Oxford the same people are called ”scouts” and have been since at least the 1930s- one is a character in Dorothy L. Sayers’ 1935 mystery novel Gaudy Night, set in a fictional Oxford college modelled on the one she attended from 1912 to 1915.
Always hard to tell with these terminology and other oddities, if the difference is 19th/21st century, or Britain/America, or Oxbridge/everywhere else.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/05/08/heroic-details-emerge-colorado-school-shooting
Very excited to see people abandon the “hide and wait to die” lockdown model as a response to rampage attacks. The people who rise up and fight against the monsters aren’t just saving the lives of the people around them, but also reducing the number of future attacks by making them less advantageous.
There’s a three-day rule against politicizing tragedies here.
I’m not talking about this specific shooting, but the larger pattern. And I thought this piece was a retrospective on a recent one, not today’s, but the edit window is passed
Taking advantage of the fact that people are focused on a particular instance of tragedy, to promote your policy of how people ought to deal with the larger pattern of similar tragedies, is pretty much the definition of “politicizing a tragedy”. And it is tactically effective in the short term, which is why every mass shooting is followed by countless newspaper stories and editorials about how we as a nation ought to deal with the larger pattern of mass shootings. But it tends to short-circuit rationality and it erodes civility in the long term, which is why we generally don’t do it here.
Anything that’s not politicizing a tragedy, works just as well next week as this.
Tell us about the active shooter situation where you behaved bravely & nobly
Never been in one. I can only hope that I would have the same level of courage as displayed by some of the heroes in recent events.
But that’s really outside of my point.
@hash872,
I can’t, but there’s been a couple of times that I’ve been stunned and stupid when shots were fired:
Twice in the ’90’s I’ve been near gunfire on city streets where I could see muzzle flash, once when I was in a car with my wife at the corner of Ashby and Sacramento in Berkeley where she yelled for me to drive through the red light, and once when I entered the parking lot of the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland at night, several shots were fired, I saw the large mass of taxis waiting there take off fast, and I briefly considered walking to the next BART station, but I was really tired after work, so I just waited in the lot without getting closer to where the shots were fired for some minutes until impatience got the best of me and I walked the rest of the way to the station.
The only times that I can think of that I acted anything vaguely “nobly” around guns was when I was a child in the 1970’s when our dog got loose, and I went to fetch him and found him barking at a neighbor keeping him from coming down the stairs, I tried to lead our dog away and the neighbor announced that “I’m going to get my gun” and I hugged our dog and begged and cried for him not to shoot it, the second time was when I was a teenager in the ’80’s snd I was in my room reading and my brother came in and looked up to see hom pointing a rifle at me while smiling, later that night our father said “Don’t mess with the guns in my closet, they’re loaded”, and I didn’t tell on my brother.
Thankfully I’ve only had a gun pointed directly at me once more in my lifetime (by a police officer who pulled me over).
hash872, I think he is approving of a change in policy/strategy rather than questioning the courage of past victims.
Yes. The decades of “active compliance” and “passive resistance” have resulted in mass shootings and high-crime areas, and people are starting to ignore the Official Advice because it’s so obviously wrong. It’s not the fault of the people who reacted according to what they were taught, but of the people doing the teaching.
Well, you want to comply if you believe the crime in progress is about something other than the violence itself. For example, if what’s going on is you’re being robbed, give them the money, and they are extremely unlikely to shoot you. If they just want to kill you, well then, it’s time to go to no quarter.
Personally, my ex-military father gave me and my brother active shooter training, complete with mock exercises, and advocated providing similar training to all high schoolers after Kent State, but I’m sure I’m in the minority. If I remember right the teachers called his suggested mandatory training dystopian. Note he actually was in favor of repealing the second amendment, he just thought training high schoolers was more realistic. Instead we just locked down the schools and put at least one armed officer at every school at all times. Much less dystopian.
Aristides remember that at one point students in school were taught duck and cover. And more recently most schools have some form of lock-down drill. And of course fire drills are a thing and have been for quite awhile. Mind you these are all different kinds of tail risk.
My old place of work had a learning module on ‘active shooter’ situation — something like ‘run, hide, fight’ [in that order] but no drill associated with it.
I don’t think most young people can be relied upon to defend themselves in a situation like this, even if they were trained to do so. Teaching them how to quickly barricade themselves will probably have a more reliable outcome but that only buys time. It does no one any good unless there’s someone armed willing and able to engage the shooter.
Kent State is…kind of a weird example isn’t it? Very different from “typical” active shooter situations.
Agreed, that was probably the one where active shooter training would have helped the most, but more recent shooters are much more sophisticated. I’m not sure what the best policy is, though I think some training would be useful. Run, hide, and fight was basically my training from my father and workplace, but I don’t know how effective it is. It’ll at least be more useful than duck and cover.
aristides,
What specifically should the students have done differently at Kent State?
Niven’s first law would have been appropriate there, both parts.
More generally, if there are men with guns promising violence, and you aren’t prepared to win a gunfight or die a martyr, try really hard to Be Someplace Else. AFIK, nobody at Kent State was stopping students from individually or collectively leaving. Not sure how many of the students were trying to die as martyrs.
I am an idiot. I got Kent State confused with Virginia Tech. I’m glad I looked up a citation before giving my explanation. I think my comments will make more sense for Virginia Tech, and probably don’t need as much of an explanation as to how active shooter training would have helped there. Though now that I read the after fact reports, it actually looks like the narrative I heard from the media was wrong. I heard that the students lined up against a wall when threatened, but it looks like that was inaccurate. I’ll have to do more research some time.
Honest mistake, no problem. And yes, the standard active-shooter doctrine would probably have been appropriate at Virginia Tech.
I didn’t.
When I was living in Philadelphia, about 1975, my then wife and I were witnesses to a shooting at the corner where our house was. I was outside for some reason. The shooter ran down the street towards me. He waved his gun at me and I got out of the way.
I think the prudent decision under the circumstances.
Yeah, unarmed people shouldn’t go chasing down armed murderers fleeing a sense. Rampage killers are very different.
It seems like for an overall strategy we should lavish huge rewards on anyone who acts heroically in these situations. At the very least their name should be in all the headlines about the incident instead of the shooter’s.
The one thing I’m pretty sure of is that the shooters’ names, faces, and manifestoes should not be trumpeted by news outlets. Ideally, you’d bury the f–kers in an unmarked grave and never mention them again.
I have a vague feeling we are turning the corner on this, ever since New Zealand.
(Ironically, there were attempts to criminalize the possession of the killer’s manifesto/livestream, and attempts to use government force to censor people on the Internet who made it available. Which is completely the wrong response. I sort of wanted to mirror the manifesto as a fuck-you to the censors.)
But, at least the media wasn’t playing his livestream 24/7 on the news networks.
Yeah, suppressing and censoring information is a terrible idea, and I’m completely opposed to it.
But there’s something crazy about having all the high-prestige voices in the society announce that if you take a gun and murder half a dozen strangers, they will devote a week or two to making you famous and publicizing all your grievances, all the injustices done to you, and your most controversial political and social views.
I suspect one thing that’s going on here w.r.t various attempts to censor footage/manifestos/etc., is an attempt to get ahead of a race-to-the-bottom. There’s always an incentive to run with the most outrageous, sensational, horrible thing you can find. The latest spree killer’s blood-curdling pre-massacre pictures posted to Facebook and his unhinged manifesto are industrial-strength clickbait. If the big news sources refuse to run that stuff, but the Buzzfeeds and Enquirers do run it, they may make a ton of money and increase their standing until they’re also the big boys. For that matter, Twitter users / Youtubers who want a wider audience have a similar incentive. I have no good idea how to push back on that, though I agree that putting the state (or a coalition of tech companies) into the role of deciding what anyone’s allowed to read/watch is a really bad idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWgI8NuEXik
Well, I posted a followup to my music theory discussion from last thread, but I DEFINITELY tripped some spam filters by accidentally including markup by using (less than)-(greater than) to indicate an unordered pair, noticing this wasn’t displaying correctly and trying to edit, not seeing the post show up at all afterwards, then trying to repost twice because I didn’t see it after the first time. I don’t know if it’s in some sort of moderation and maybe it’ll get approved and show up later, if it just got swallowed I have it saved and I could try reposting later.
For greater-than and less-than signs:
> – >
< – <
(These comments just use html, I assume with some kind of security stuff to make sure you can’t just use script tags, etc; those are just html entities for characters which have special meaning in anything XML-based.)
Yeah, right as I figured that out the post started disappearing when I tried editing it…the downside of my ‘try random changes until you stop getting compilation errors’ coding style when applied in production I suppose.
I posted a sort of music theory puzzle in the last open thread, but I guess a bit late in its lifecycle; in short form, white keys on a piano are a major scale on C, black keys are major pentatonic scale on F#, meaning in general the complement of a major scale is a major pentatonic scale rooted a tritone away. Why would that be, and does this have significance for the relation between the scales? Some people got some really good analysis of it, and I actually hadn’t visualized constructing the scales as filling in the circle of fifths before a couple people analyzed it this way. Since that thread is superseded, I’ll put a cap on it by pointing out something about transpositions which I didn’t see mentioned.
Distance along the circle of fifths is the best measure of ‘distance’ between keys, and you might think that the best argument for this is that keys adjacent on the circle share 6 out of 7 of their notes, the maximum without the scale just being identical. If this were the only justification, then only the most distant key on the other side of the circle should share the smallest amount of notes, but the smallest possible overlap between two sets of seven things chosen out of a possible 12 is 2, and three scales will share that: the one a tritone away, and the two a fifth away from that on either side, e.g. for C major, F#/Gb B and Db major all share two notes. However, if we treat the modulation as a transposition of each note, we can see a difference. When you transpose by one half step, there will be two notes which map onto notes already in the scale, because each scale has two half steps in it (in C these are B->C and E->F). However, when you modulate a tritone away, the two notes that are shared are the only two in the scale that are a tritone away from each other, and these map onto each other. So, if we wanted to come up with a distance function for keys which would assign a greater distance between C and F#/Gb than between C and B, it could be: the number of unordered pairs of notes which map onto notes already in the scale when you move from one to the other; to make it run the right direction and map mostly to the shared notes, just use the 7 minus the number of unordered pairs for the distance. Because the pairs are unordered, BF and FB are not distinct, and so the transposition C->F# has one unordered pair while C->B has two (BC and EF). Note that these two keys MUST be a tritone apart because a tritone, as 6 semitones, bisects the 12 ordered notes, and thus is the only interval that inverts to itself (if you’re not familiar with inversion, a major third (four semitones, e.g. C->E) inverts to a minor sixth (8 semitones, e.g. E->C), according to the formula inverse=-original mod 12).
Anyway, what does this mean for the relation of the scales? Well as @Anatoly mentioned, the tritone is a good interval to avoid in constructing a pentatonic scale. If I asked you to construct pentatonic scale by removing two notes of the heptatonic scale, and you wanted more consonant intervallic content, you’d quickly realize you wanted to get rid of the tritone; of course, this realization only implies that you should choose ONE of the two notes which form the tritone in order to eliminate it; the implications for choosing other second notes and calling THAT the major pentatonic scale is a good exercise to work through. I found it cool to approach this again with the method of selecting the notes by filling in the circle of fifths; also note that both of the notes in the tritone are parts of one of the two pairs of notes a half step apart in the heptatonic scale. But in any case, take it as proven that to form the major pentatonic scale, we will remove the two notes a tritone apart in the major scale.
So, given this and the discussion of distance between scales, we can see that the two notes which are shared by C major and F# major are also the two notes which would be removed to form either of their major pentatonic scales, thus the complement of C major pentatonic + F# major pentatonic is the two notes which overlap between C major heptatonic and F# major heptatonic, and this is a consequence of them being the most distant keys along the circle of fifths, a tritone apart.
Hopefully that is somewhat interesting to mathematically inclined musicians, which I think are probably represented here at least more than mathematically uninclined musicians. I’m going to take this as fulfilling my promise to keep rambling about music theory last thread, but if anyone had questions or something specific they wanted to discuss, I’d be happy to do that.
In a recent discussion about sports it was noted that athletes from East Africa dominate sports that are quite different from those that athletes from West Africa (or ancestry from there) generally excel at. I know clusters of high achievement (e.g. Hungarian high schools) is a topic of interest at SSC in general. So it seems like someone here might know the answer to something I’m curious about: spelling bees these days feature a disproportionate number of students with South Asian backgrounds, but is it more specific than that? That is, do the spelling bee champions tend to have their family background in a certain region of the subcontinent? Or a certain caste? Or is it something about the schools they attend after immigrating to America?
I would guess that spelling bee winners cluster within certain higher castes. Anyone familiar with the spatial and caste geography of Indian surnames could collect lists of spelling bee winners and make pretty good guesses just from last names. This seems like obvious Steve Sailer bait.
Although of course you then need to compare it with the surname distribution in Indian immigrants to America to see whether part of that effect is because people from certain castes/regions are more likely to immigrate in the first place.
I’ve read that some European countries don’t officially recognize titles of nobility anymore, but the families still keep track of who has what title. To the best of my knowledge this has not happened in the U.S., and I’m American.
I figure we never had as many lords as England, and the ones we had would have been mostly Tories (and therefore encouraged to relocate), but surely somebody stayed. Did they just stop claiming the title? Or maybe they do still claim the title but they’re very quiet about it and don’t associate with the likes of me?
There are also parts of the country that seem like they might have French or Spanish nobility.
The only example I know of is the royal family of Hawaii, who from what I understand don’t claim any title but do keep track of who would have had it.
The US takes a very dim view of titles of nobility. The US constitution bans the government from giving them out, and there was nearly an amendment added that strips you of your citizenship if you have one from a foreign country. So you can see why people would give up on tracking who has what title.
I think that’s just a matter of years? Like eyeballfrog says, the U. S. has decided around 1788 that they don’t want heritable nobility titles. In contrast, in Hungary they were abolished only after world war II, so there are still a few people alive who had the right to wear a title before that. The United Kingdom still has nobility titles as far as I’m aware.
The UK still does have titles of nobility, though in practice new hereditary titles are not granted to non-royals (though old ones continue to be inherited). I think the only European countries still creating new hereditary titles are Belgium and Spain.
In Spain new titles are given, but inheriting a title means a taxable event.
How does this work? Is a title of nobility assigned a monetary value and taxed with the rest of the estate, or is there a fixed inheriting-a-title tax?
Given that I assume titles can’t be sold, does the title go extinct if the heir can’t or won’t pay? Or does it go into abeyance until a new heir pays to claim it?
According to Wikipedia, the title does not pass automatically, but must be claimed by the heir (though only the heir can make a claim, apparently). There are large fees for claiming a title (presumably for, among other things, the expenses of verifying that the claimant really is the heir), and apparently if a period of 40 years goes by without anybody claiming the title, it becomes extinct.
When the possessor of the title dies, their direct progeny have to claim it. Primogeniture is still a thing, so the eldest child (they removed the gender requirements), claims it and pays the tax. If the rightful heir does not claim it within a certain period, the title is declared vacant, after what other heirs can claim it and rehabilitate the title. If 45 years have passed since the title was last used, the title is declared extinct.
When the previous Ducchess of Alba died, she split her 46 titles among her children, so primogeniture is not an absolute requirement. But if the current Duke of Alba did question it, it could lead to a very long court battle.
There are three types of taxes, which depend on whether the title has a Grande de España attached to it, or whether it’s a grandeeship alone (superior to any title except the duchal one without grandeeship).
A title with Grande de España: 2,775.39 €
A grandeeship: 1,968.14 €
A title without grandeeship: 807.25 €
These are taxes for direct transmission; from ascendants to descendants, or between siblings, as long as their parent held the title.
For transversal transmission, the tax is higher. For rehabilitation, it’s even higher.
The tax is paid once, when the title is acquired, and no more tax has to be paid.
The ability of the holder of multiple titles to split their subsidiary titles among their children during their lifetime is another major difference between the UK and Spain.
They weren’t subsidiary titles. They were duchies and other full, independent titles.
@ana53294- In England, a subsidiary title is any title held by a person with more than one title, other than the most senior one. For instance, one of the Duke of Norfolk’s subsidiary titles is Earl of Arundel. This is a full, independent title- in fact, it has existed for longer than the Dukedom of Norfolk has, and there have been periods of time when the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Arundel were separate people.
Oh yeah, that part must have been pretty much automatic. Bestowing new nobility titles is something that usually only monarchs do. Since there was no king of Hungary after 1920, I presume that no new titles could be created.
The British government do not care where a peer lives, it does not affect their ability to inherit the title. For instance, the current (12th) Duke of Atholl has lived his entire life in South Africa, as did his father the 11th Duke, who inherited the title from his second cousin once removed.
So if there was somebody in America with the right to a British hereditary title, and the relevant offices were aware of their existence, they would have the title, even if they chose not to use it (as many peers resident in the UK choose not to).
The numbers may just be smaller than you think, though. Peerages do become extinct. While there are about 800 living hereditary peers, a great many of them hold titles created after American independence.
EDIT: On checking, there are people in the US with British hereditary titles. The Earl of Wharncliffe is a construction worker in Maine (though that family were first ennobled in 1826) and the heir to the Earldom of Essex is a retired grocery store worker in California. But in both those cases they have an ancestor who emigrated to the US after independence. I think there simply weren’t enough (or any?!) peers in the colonies who stayed.
Just found one, at least in the past. The Lords* Fairfax of Cameron (as in Fairfax County, VA) were American for several generations.
Thomas, 6th Lord Fairfax, was apparently (per Wikipedia) “the only resident peer in late colonial America”. He inherited huge amounts of land in Virginia in 1719, and moved there in 1747. His lands were confiscated by the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1779, and he died in 1781.
There were other relatives of the Fairfax family in Virginia, including Thomas’s cousin William who acted as his land agent in Virginia from 1732. As both Thomas Fairfax and his brother died without heirs (the latter in 1793), the peerage passed to William’s son Bryan. Bryan, when in England in 1798, claimed the title but then didn’t use it again.
The 9th, 10th, and 11th Lords Fairfax appear to have lived in America all their lives and never used the title. Albert, the 12th Lord Fairfax (Bryan’s great-great-great-grandson) decided for some reason to move to England and become a naturalised British citizen so he could sit in the House of Lords. The current Lord Fairfax is Nicholas, 14th Lord Fairfax, Albert’s grandson.
*They are Lords of Parliament, a Scottish title equivalent to an English or British baron- baron in Scotland being a lower title. This allowed them to sit in the Scottish Parliament until it abolished itself in 1707. They then had some right to sit in the British House of Lords, either as Scottish Representative Peers (until 1963), automatically (until 1999) or as representative hereditary peers (currently).
Adam Smith claimed that the Spanish tried to maintain a hereditary aristocracy in their American colonies, while the British did not, and that this accounted for the much greater wealth of the American colonies. This historical tidbit certainly highlights how dramatic the difference in policies was. And the name made me check, and this was a the same Fairfax family as the Thomas Fairfax who was for a time leader of the Parliamentary faction in the English Civil war. So the only resident peer in late colonial America was from a family with a history of Puritan and pro-democratic sentiment.
I thought of the Lords Fairfax as well though I was under the impression they moved back to England earlier than that. Thanks for pointing out that history.
Thank you, that is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.
Skepticism about technological growth thread!
Here’s a hobby-horse: Bolt Threads. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-03/a-bay-area-startup-spins-lab-grown-silk
This is an article from 2015 about how Bolt Threads was really close to making spidersilk textiles a reality. In 2017, they apparently started selling some knit ties (like, men’s neck decorations, not any other meaning of “tie”) that, I don’t know, maybe they feel good? There don’t seem to be any magical properties of them. I just visited their website again (https://boltthreads.com), and they seem to have pivoted to making faux leather from mushrooms. The result of that product is a Kickstarter for a limited run of 135 $400 tote bags.
Automation! https://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2017/11/12/forrester-predicts-that-ai-enabled-automation-will-eliminate-9-of-us-jobs-in-2018/#11bc369312b0
So this report, from 2017, predicted that 9% of all US jobs would be eliminated in 2018 by automation (okay, net 7%). In actuality, unemployment fell (and total workforce participation) rose steadily from the creation of that report to today.
Driverless cars!
https://www.driverless-future.com/?p=678
Here’s a cool article from 2014 laying out a then-future timeline of how driverless cars were going to work. Some highlights:
2017 Major road infrastructure projects are downsized because autonomous and connected vehicle technology have reduced the expectations on future transportation demands. (ed: That’s a weird claim. Driverless cars would increase road infrastructure usage. Drastically.)
2017 Google moves their autonomous vehicle operations into a subsidiary which then merges with Uber and starts to roll out local autonomous vehicle mobility services in many more US cities.
2018 Experience with autonomous vehicles shows that they are indeed much safer than the average human driver. People feel safe and comfortable in fully autonomous vehicles and there is no longer any question of user acceptance. No phenomenon similar to the ‘fear of flying’ can be found among users of self-driving cars.
2019 Autonomous vehicles now operate in over 50 cities worldwide.
2019 Rapid growth for autonomous trucks on specific routes. In many countries, truck drivers protest but this can only delay their adoption slightly.
I’m picking on this guy, but honestly I don’t feel like his views were terribly unusual in 2014. I remember a lot of people saying things like, “Automation fully solved in 2-3 years in 2014-2015.” Certainly not everyone was, but automation is moving a lot more slowly than the broad middle of observers of the industry expected. In 2017, Ars Technica reported that Google going to launch a no-driver-in-vehicle service in Phoenix by the end of the year. Nope!
In 2017, Kevin Drum says in this article https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/you-will-lose-your-job-to-a-robot-and-sooner-than-you-think/ that “Consider: Last October, an Uber trucking subsidiary named Otto delivered 2,000 cases of Budweiser 120 miles from Fort Collins, Colorado, to Colorado Springs—without a driver at the wheel. Within a few years, this technology will go from prototype to full production, and that means millions of truck drivers will be out of a job.”
Here’s my favorite RPG.net thread ever: https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/necro-ten-year-technology-forecasts.37562/page-5
It was created in 2003, asking for people to make predictions (in the context of an RPG) for the then-future of 2012. I revived it in 2012 and asked people for predictions about 2022. It’s got a lot of interesting stuff — mostly wrong, but some quite correct and helpful for remembering the zeitgeist of, now, 7 and 16 years ago.
Those people sure seem to over estimate a decade.
I mean, they were also, at least initially, trying to provide grist for a game. Going larger-than-life is pretty normal.
Never forget that we’re in a competitive game, so low hanging fruits are picked. Best insight on the issue is that technology keeps evolving even in ways we don’t see, so there are no big advances, just a constant wave that keeps averaging around 1.5% growth per year for a century or so (huge, considering human history).
As for driverless cars, that’s the new AI. It works, but it’s such a bad case of Dunning–Kruger that you probably have to be way deep inside the industry to grok how difficult it is. Uber was a very low hanging fruit compared to that, it was practically ripe and dangling.
I enjoy contrarian takes, but this is kind of weak. Sure some people were wrong about what tech would be big in 2018, but that’s the same every year.
I actually remember a lot of skepticism about self-driving cars by people who thought that the legal obstacles were insurmountable. I guess maybe I live in a skeptical bubble? I agree that the self-driving folks got some very rich people very excited, but that’s not new either. There’s a fine line between visionaries and scam artists.
I agree that more “long bets” threads would be entertaining, and probably hilarious in a few years. People always overestimate short term change and underestimate long term change.
The October 1st, 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas has come up in /TheMotte/ a few times, with people commenting and speculating about it. These discussions are frustrating to read because nobody in them seems to be aware that the full report by the Las Vegas police is freely available online, but i cannot be arsed to make a Reddit account just to point that out. However since many posters there also read and post here, i am providing the following public service announcement: The full report by Las Vegas police on the shooting is freely available online.
Pretty much everything there is to know about the shooting is there. There is a full and coherent timeline of events, there are pictures of Stephen Paddock’s room, there are pictures of all the guns, pictures of the van he used to get them to the hotel, and pictures of him moving large numbers of suitcases over multiple days. It lists and shows every single gun he had with him, including the make, model, serial number, and how many bullets he fired out of each one. It has the full autopsy report on Stephen Paddock, as well as all relevant background information on him. There are diagrams of the layout of the hotel floor, and pictures of the event ground from multiple vantage points, including Paddock’s. Hell they included the full records of the electronic locks on the room doors.
Just about the only detail i wanted to know the report didn’t answer is what kinds of bullets he used. That and his motivation. The only person who could answer why he did it embedded a pistol round into the inside of his skull, but the evidence does suggest Paddock simply wanted to go down in a blaze of infamy.
Thank you for sharing; it’s important that primary sources be as accessible as possible.
De gustibus non disputandum est
What is your preferred birthday cake?
Carrot cake, as it is for all occasions that call for cake.
Ugh, the only way this could be a worse answer is if you used frosting with shredded coconut in it.
Red velvet cake is a good choice. If I’m allowed to with non-traditional options, cheesecake.
Red velvet cake is utterly whelming. Carrot cake is the only cake that really makes cream cheese frosting shine.
It would be better without the carrots.
Sounds like you might like my wife’s Cream Cheese pie.
Signs point to yes.
Red velvet is definitionally diluted chocolate cake.
German Chocolate cake is an excellent answer to the original question.
On the traditional side, Black Forest Cake.
If I may deviate, Key Lime Pie. On the tart side, please.
Key Lime pie is an excellent choice. Yum.
I would like to attend johan_larson and acymetric’s next birthday parties.
Chocolate Cassata, to the Schilling family recipe.
Ice Cream Cake is the only correct answer. Everyone else has wrong opinions.
😉
This is the right answer. My only demand on my birthday is to get an ice cream cake. No presents or anything else is necessary. I would probably also get an ice cream cake every other day of the year if I was willing to go to 400 pounds.
+1.
I’m not a cake guy, although certain other cakes people have mentioned are delicious, but ice cream cake is the correct answer to the question in the OP.
+1. Specifically, Cold Stone makes much better cakes than any other mass produced ice cream cakes that I’m aware of. Cold Stone >> Baskin Robbins >> Carvel and others that use cookie crumbs for the cake layer. Oddly, the predefined Cold Stone cake flavors, while great, are not as good as what most people would come up with themselves as custom cakes with a couple of tries.
Huh? Dairy Queen’s cakes have the cookie crumb layer and that’s the treasure in the middle that takes it to the next level.
I don’t think I’ve specifically tried DQ’s, I’ll keep an eye out for it. Carvel specifically also does a bad job IMO with the icing – I’ve had some other cookie-crumb cakes that I’d put in the middle tier.
My best birthday cakes were all ice cream cakes. I don’t think that’s the only correct answer, because some people have their birthdays during winter, and an ice cream cake is less pleasant then.
Have your birthday in Australia. Problem solved.
Pineapple upside down
But I prefer sweetened fruit toppings to frosting.
Favorite cake is strawberry angelfood, but that wouldn’t be great for a birthday.
Chocolate. With extra chocolate. And additional chocolate. GIVE ME CHOCOLATE!
My wife’s very rich chocolate cake.
Chocolate Texas sheet cake with chocolate frosting, ideally with a little bit of vanilla ice cream. No other cake ever really satisfies in comparison.
German chocolate cake
Apple pie or peach cobbler.
A layer cake with firm chocolate outside, chocolate buttercream mortar, and yellow cake layers.
My favorite birthday pastry is a Bossche bol: a large profiterole filled with whipped cream and covered with high quality chocolate. It’s two of the nicest sweets, where the whole is even better than the sum of its parts. It’s almost impossible to eat in a dignified way, but the best things in life require a willingness to get dirty.
Runner ups:
Crumb pie: a streusel-topped vanilla pudding pie.
Pie with milk rice filling: rice pudding as a cake.
The only reason i ever liked cake was as a vehicle for frosting, and because i’m now an adult i can just buy jars of frosting for myself. Therefore i demand a tart, preferably cheesecake, specifically every single cheesecake in the Cheesecake Factory menu. Yes all of them, i intend to take a sample of every one, and i wish for my guests to be able to do so as well.
Try cake frosting on saltines.
I think using a cookie, maybe a sugar cookie, would work better. A saltine doesn’t sound appetizing.
Trust me and try it. Worst case, you’ll be out about $2.
Tried it, not bad. The crackers give the frosting more body, and the salt takes some of the punch out of the sugar, making it less overwhelming. Not the way to go if you just want to be orally assaulted by creamy sweetness, but an interesting hack for highlighting the flavour.
That’s not very weird. Only the best of cakes can hold their own vs other desserts.
Y’all with your “favorites” nonsense. Diversity is where it’s at! A different cake for every event! Multiple selections at one event!
Cheesecake! Sticky cake! Mooncake! Eight treasure rice! Salted egg yolk layer cake!
Also, pastries and baked buns are superior to cakes, anyways. Smh at this pie erasure.
Apple cinnamon, though I usually make them as cupcakes so I can share them.
Duncan Hines butter cake is my backup option, for when I’m lazy and want to use a mix.
You have an alien calculator. It can add, subtract, multiply, and divide, and you know which button does which operation. It contains the digits 0-9; however, both the display and the keys use alien symbols, and you don’t know if the keys are arranged in numerical order. How can you figure out which symbol is which digit?
The catch: you can only do a maximum of two problems, and each problem can only include two numbers (no (A + B)*C or anything like that), though of course the number you use can have more than one digit. If you accidentally divide by zero you can get a do-over.
The solution: Svefg, qvivqr nal ahzore ol vgfrys gb qrgrezvar juvpu flzoby ercerfragf gur ahzore bar. Gura zhygvcyl bar uhaqerq ryrira zvyyvba, bar uhaqerq ryrira gubhfnaq, bar uhaqerq ryrira ol vgfrys. Gur nafjre jvyy unir gur qvtvgf bar guebhtu avar yvarq hc va nfpraqvat beqre.
My question for you guys: Are there any other possible solutions?
Can you use the result of the first calculation in the second?
Yes.
How many digits wide is my display? As wide as I need it?
Yes.
I might be able to do it in one go, but I have not finalized that yet.
Here is a start:
Glcr rnpu qvtvg sbhe gvzrf[1]. Nqq vg gb vgfrys.
0000777788885555222299993333444466661111 qbhoyrq
0001555577771110444599986666888933322222
Jr pna qvfgvathvfu 0-4 sebz 5-9 orpnhfr 0-4 jvyy abg “biresybj”[3] gb gur yrsg, naq “5-9” jvyy. Jungrire vf ng gur evtug-zbfg fvqr trgf ab biresybj, naq vs jr ner yhpxl rabhtu gb cvpx 5-9 sbe gung, jr trg bar rkgen cvrpr bs vasbezngvba.
0 fgnlf 0. Vg orpbzrf “1” jvgu na biresybj sebz gur evtug.
1 tbrf gb 2, be “3” …
2 tbrf gb 4, be “5” …
3 tbrf gb 6, be “7”
4 tbrf gb 8, be “9”
5 tbrf gb 1, jvgu “0” jvgu ab biresybj sebz gur evtug.
6 tbrf gb 3, jvgu “2” …
7 tbrf gb 5, jvgu “4” …
8 tbrf gb 7, jvgu “6” …
9 fgnlf 9, jvgu “8” …
Orfvqrf gur yrsg- naq evtug-zbfg frg, jr pna bayl gryy vs *obgu/arvgure* bar frg bs ahzoref naq gur frg gb gur evtug biresybj, be *whfg bar*. Ohg jr pna fraq va rnpu frg zhygvcyr gvzrf va zhygvcyr beqref:
883300449922667711552299007755448866331100992288336677554411 [2]
Fvapr jr pna gryy vs gur evtug-zbfg frg vf va 0-4 be 5-9, jr pna, jvgu bar tb, qrsvavgryl oernx rnpu ahzore vagb gur tebhcf 0-4 naq 5-9 jvgu bar ernyyl ovt ercrngrq ahzore.
Guvf zrnaf jr pna qrsvavgryl gryy jung vf 0, naq jung vf 9. Jr unir n 9 jvgubhg biresybj, jvgu tvirf hf 8, naq 0 jvgu biresybj, juvpu tvirf hf 1. Fvapr jr abj unir 8 naq 1, jr pna trg 6 naq 3. Fvapr jr unir 6 naq 3, jr pna trg 2 naq 7. Fvapr jr unir 2 naq 7, jr pna trg 5 naq 4. Naq gung jencf hf nebhaq pbzcyrgryl.
[1] Lbh pna cebonoyl trg njnl jvgu zhpu srjre guna 4.
[2] V gevzzrq qbja gb 2 qvtvgf sbe ernqnovyvgl.
[3] V fubhyq unir pnyyrq guvf “pneelvat” ohg V’z gbb ynml gb rqvg guvf pbzzrag.
If you have a computer, and the calculator display is reasonably sized, I’m pretty sure you can do it in one go? Like, there are 10! possible arrangements of characters, but if you mash in two random 30-digit numbers in and multiply them to get a 60-digit number there are 10^60 possible outputs. Pick two long numbers at random, feed them through a computer algorithm to verify that the output will be different for each of the 10! possible permutations of digits (if not make your numbers longer and try again), feed them into the alien calculator, and look up which permutation of digits gave that result?
Yeah, I was wondering about that myself so I asked in a previous open thread . Tl;dr: no, it cannot be done, because there are combinations of pairs of numbers for which the digits will be rearranged the same way to get the product.
I might be missing something, but as far as I can see the answer there is referring to pairs of numbers which contain each digit exactly once. So if you type:
‘ABCDE * FGHIJ’
and get out
‘BFCHHGICAI’
either of these is possible:
21367 * 90584 = 1935508328
64812 * 73905 = 4789930860
But that is somewhat unsurprising. There are 10! possible arrangements of digits, and 10^10 possible 10-digit outputs, so it is unsurprising that there are a few duplicates. If you instead enter
‘ABCDEFGHIJ*BCDEFGHIJA’
you are expecting an output with around 20 digits, you have squared the space of conceivable outputs to around 10^20, but you still have the same 10! possible permutations of digits.
It’s possible that 10-digit numbers aren’t enough, but if your calculator has no size limits it would really really surprise me to hear that you could not get an unambiguous result by multiplying two sufficiently large numbers together. I’ll see if I can get a script to give me some example inputs, but no promises.
I’m not a mathematician/statistician, so I could be wrong about this, but I think using longer numbers would give you more duplicates, not fewer. Longer numbers give you far more possible combinations of numbers to multiply. If multiplying 5-digit numbers like in the original thread somebody found >300 pairs of pairs that satisfy the prompt, I would expect far more hits for multiplying 10-digit numbers.
Of arbitrary length?
Here’s some quick Python code for the base6 case (sorry about the pasting of code here, not sure if there’s a better way):
With the two lines commented out, this tries all permutations with ABC*DEF, and does indeed find a duplicate. With the two lines uncommented, it tries all permutations with ABCDEF*ABCDEF, and finds that all outputs there are unique.
I’ll tweak and run the base-10 case, but will take a bit to run because 10! is a lot bigger and my code isn’t exactly optimized.
(Any less lazy programmers than me are welcome to explain in great detail how I could get a four-orders-of-magnitude speedup and be done the base-10 case in less than a second)
And on reflection if you really have no limits of size you can make life much simpler if you use addition, since addition is mostly local. Create a number by concatenating all pairs of numbers:
AAABACADAE….BABBBCBD….
Add this 200-digit number to itself.
The resulting number has 200 or 201 digits. If 201, A is >=5. If 200, A is <5.
The digits in the same position as any given character in the original number (e.g. all the digits in the positions that held 'A' in the original number) contain exactly two characters: one is 2A mod 10 (when there is no carryover from the digit after A), and the other is one greater than that (when there is carryover).
Since we know whether A is >=5 or not, we can figure out which of each pair of numbers involved a carryover and which didn't — for example, if A is <5, the numbers in the positions that used to contains Cs are now either F or G, and the number in the position that used to contain a C followed by an A is F, this lets us know that G=F+1.
This should let us work out all numbers in a way that doesn't involve a computer (but I think it will require more space on the calculator than the multiplication option).
You can optimize your method by dividing ABA/AB. This is guaranteed to find you the digits 1 and 0, but if you happen to choose an AB with a long enough repeating decimal, you might get all digits at once.
Here’s the start of a method that doesn’t use the divide button:
Multiply AAAAAA x AAAAAA and note the pattern
A: A = 0
ABCDEFEDCBA: A = 1
BCDEFGHIFEB: H = 1
BBBBBCDDDDDE: B = 1
BCDEFGAHCBFH: B = 1
BCDEFGBADHIA: G = 1
BBBBBCDDDDDA: A = 6, B = 4, C = 3, D = 5
BCDEFACGAHE: G = 1
BCDEFEABGHII: E = 1
AAAAABCCCCCD: D = 1
If you know 1, then you can get them all from the method in your post. If you have A = 6, then you can use 6543^2 = 42810849 to get the remaining digits.
If A = 0, there’s *probably* a pair of numbers X and Y whose digits are only 1s and 0s such that for each possible digit B, B^2*X*Y gives a unique digit string for each B and enough unique digits to determine the remainder of the symbols, but I’m having trouble finding it.
Now for the big challenge: what’s the fewest number of operations without being allowed to use the multiplication button?
you didn’t specify that we know the aliens order of digits, you assume left to right biggest, next biggest, … smallest.
Number systems don’t have to be that straightforward. Hell look at human dates and times.
3:34:22 05/09/2019
order counting from smallest:
3:2:1 5/4/6
with varying bases… even if the digits are all 0-9
You also don’t specify that you do know the alien symbols for add, subtract, multiply, and divide
I did though!
Also, you can think of it as a human calculator from a foreign country if that makes more sense.
Can’t you do it in 1?
Just have a really big number with a format of ABC * AAAAAAABBBBBBBBCCC… with all possible neighbors of digits. It’s long enough so that there are chains with digits equal to the sum of ABC * X. (Has to be ABC as A or AB could just be 1 or 01)
There’s probably enough tricks to then find the individual digits.
For example, 0 should be easy enough by finding a chain of itself in the products.
Following that you can check out all the XXXX000 products and in the product Y0000 to find out which digits are even, odd, 5.
I will give you a mathematician’s answer. It is probably useless in practice, but might be interesting.
It is possible to do it in 1, if you are allowed to use arbitrary long numbers. I will show this by adding a large number to itself.
The key points I want to prove:
1. Your requirements allow us to do the equivalent of simultaneously adding arbitrary many numbers to itself and see the answer, not just two.
2. If 1. is given, you can even do the subsequent additions with the knowledge coming from the previous additions, ie: the additions can be sequintelly processed and not necessarily simultaneously.
The key observations:
Adding numbers is a very local operation. The maximal carry possible is 1 and because of this, if you have two zeros anywhere in the number, the zero on the higher place will stay zero.
Proof for the first key point:
Symbols:
capital letters are the alien symbols
X([captial letter]) is the additions I want to make separated by two [capital letter], for example
if I want to make the additions AC+AC and BD+BD and BB+BB, then X(E) is: ACEEBDEEBB
Construction: I add this number to itself: AAX(A)AA BBX(B)BB CCX(C)CC…
Why does this work? One of the alien symbols will mean zero, and I can easily find which it is, because of my previously mentioned key observation: after doubling, it is the only number which will stay the same. After I get the answer, I first find which alien symbol is zero, then I ignore every X([capital letter]) part, except the X([capital letter meaning 0])
With this I’ve proven my first point. Now only the second point remains: If I can do simultaneously arbitrary many additions, it is possible to do them sequentially using what I learned in earlier operations.
Easy: just do every possibility. Eg if you have an addition which will give you the information that A is 1 or B is 1 depending on the result, and then you want to add 1 to 1, then add A to A and also B to B simultaneously and choose the correct branch and ignore the other after you get the answer.
Now what remains is to show that you can solve the problem with using arbitrary many sequential doublings, which is pretty easy and I won’t insult your intelligence by showing one such solution.
Furthermore it is even possible to do arbitrary many sequintial additions (not necessary adding a number to itself), but it was easier to explain the method by only using doublings.
Made a mistake:
False, the 9 on the higher decimal place also stays 9 because of the carry. So to separate 9 from 0, append my large number with this 20 character: AA BA CA DA EA FA GA HA IA JA
Because A is the symbol on the highest decimal place, you can decide from the answer whether it is greater (or equal) than 5 or less than 5 (less if there is no new digit). So you know whether there will be a carry when adding A+A.
0+0+no carry=0 -> same symbol
9+9+no carry=8 -> not the same symbol
0+0+carry=1 -> not the same symbol
9+9+carry=9 -> same symbol
This means that you can differentiate between 0 and 9 with the help of the new 20 symbol in the case of A>=5 and also in the case of A<5.
I’m pretty sure you can do it in 1 : add AABBCCDDEEFFGGHHIIJJ to itself.
First determine which letters correspond to numbers between 0-4 and which correspond to 5-9 by looking at whether there are carries.
Then you can know what the doubles of the numbers between 0 and 4 are (since there are no carries), and you can identify which is which (0 is its own double, 2 is both the half and the double of other numbers in 0-4, 1 is half of 2, 4 is the double of 2, 3 remains). Also you can find 6 and 8.
You can finish by looking at the double of 8 with a carry (which will be 7) and the double of 7 with a carry (which will be 5).
Example : you get BBFFIEEEGFDJAHHACCJD.
J and D are different, so J>=5
C and C are the same, and we know there was a carry for the second C, so I>=5
H and A are different, and there was a carry for the A, so H=5
F=5
D>=5
C<5
B<5
A<5
So A,B,C,F and H are 0-4. We also have
2*A=B
2*B=F
2*C=I
2*F=D
2*H=H
so H=0, B=2, A=1, F=4 and C=3.
From that, we can find that I=6 and D=8.
The double of D with a carry is E, so E=7, and the double of E with a carry is G, so G=5.
Only J remains, so J=9.
Very nice! This is the first solution using only one addition which I would actually type irl.
If we are going for the shortest solution and we don’t care about how elegant it is, I would omit the first A in your solution, because you can still decide whether A carries or not from how many digit is your answer.
If A is carrying (>=5, ie there is new digit), then you have it easy, because you may only lose a not really important information: what is the double of A with a carry. You can get 0-4 the same way as before, and then you can get the rest by inspecting what you get by adding a digit to itself. For every digit you know either what you get from doubling without carry or what you get from doubling with carry. Ie: first you get 5 (its double is 0 or 1), then 6 (its double is 2 or 3), etc…
If A is not carrying (less than 5), its a bit trickier: You may lose one information which is important: what is the double of A without carry. 0 is the symbol which has the same double, if there is no such number, A is 0. Then you have your chain of numbers in 0-4: 1->2->4. If you can’t decide these, then A is either 1 or 2 and you know A’s double with carry, else you are finished, because you can do the same thing as before. In the remaining case inspect whether A’s double with a carry is in {0-4}: If it is in there, A is 1, else it is 2. If A is 1, you can see the 2->4 chain and you are can do the same as before. If A is 2, then you know which symbol is 1: its double is A and you also know which symbol is 3: its double’s double with a carry is 3, so you are finished.
What does the calculator display for a division that results in a non-integer? e.g. 1 / 3
or 2 / 999999
Do people have general thoughts around our present combination of job growth, high economic growth, and low inflation? Specifically as it relates to inflation, which has been the scary boogeyman that policy makers/central banks have been terrified of since the 80s.
There is/was a whole belief system around x amount of economic growth leading to inflation, and also the ‘natural rate of unemployment’, below which wage growth and inflation would supposedly spike. Even doves like Yellen believed this. And yet, it seems like this belief system has been or is in the process of being debunked now?
General thoughts I’m thinking these days:
Developed countries were terrified of inflation, and may have shot themselves short in terms of job creation and overall growth to avoid it (wasn’t the 2008 crisis aided by a rise in rates to ward off inflation?). How much higher could economic growth have been in the past if we weren’t so afraid of inflation?
Is believing in a ‘natural rate of unemployment’ sort of like austerity- a pointless, self-destructive & punitive belief system that harmed nations and workers for- no reason whatsoever? (Sociological note- are these self-flagellating belief systems just a holdover from US/UK Puritan influences on culture? A la Weber, etc.)
Why is inflation so low in developed countries overall? I’ve heard arguments ranging from the weak bargaining position of labor, to Amazon and other hyper-efficient retailers driving general prices of ordinary goods down.
Are Powell’s rates decisions a triumph of data-driven wonkery over macroeconomic theory? As a non-PhD economist, he supposedly (according to the media, I dunno) makes decisions based on data and not ‘theory says we have a natural rate of unemployment so I must do x’, as even Yellen was doing. Which is why his decision making has jumped around a bit during his term. (Full disclosure, I have a kinda low opinion of rigid macroeconomic theory, which I once called ‘astrology for dudes’ on this site, though I was kinda being tongue-in-cheek. I have noticed that many SSCers really believe passionately that macroeconomics is like an actual empirical field instead of a bunch of models programmed with whatever assumptions the model builders wanted to put in there)
What are the long-term consequences to society of perma-low inflation rates? Asset bubbles? Something deeper?
Keynesian economics is completely wrong but everyone relies on it because it justifies central power? Just a guess.
I could be wrong, but my impression has been that the Fed under Powell has not made any significant deviations from what the Fed would have done under Yellen.
Powell’s decision to pause rate hikes is rank cowardice, IMHO, and one that history will judge him harshly for.
You think he should *raise* rates now? When inflation is 1.3% or whatever? Why?
The whole point of my post was to question the idea that we have to raise rates because OMG teh evil inflation is just around the corner. What if…. we can have economic growth and job growth and low inflation all at once?
What exactly do you think is going to happen?
I think we’re going to end up in a recession with no ammunition to use to dig ourselves out, at least without going to negative interest rates. (Note that I am not making a specific recession call, just saying that one will happen eventually.)
There seems to be one school of thought that says ‘interest rates should go up because they’ve been low for a long time’ and another school of thought that says ‘if the fed is targeting inflation, if there’s no sign of inflation the fed shouldn’t tighten’
Has anybody pulled this off without continuously increasing their debt-to-GDP ratio?
Why would it increase debt? I mean, the US is certainly on that path, but in theory one wouldn’t have to be- unless you mean that the deficit spending is what’s driving both growth & low inflation
Right. Deficit spending to drive growth is about the oldest trick in the book; doing it without concurrent inflation requires some skill but is definitely easier than growth + full employment with neither inflation nor debt.
I was of the impression we were talking about Powell and the Fed. The fed only indirectly affects the US deficit via interest rates.
Though you use the term ‘deficit spending’ and when I read your first post I thought ‘debt to gdp ratio’ may have meant the overall level of indebtedness not just US Gvt debt. (so includes credit cards, student loans, etc)
One would think that deficits at some point either raise real interest rates or raise inflation. In the US at least this has failed to materialize. It’s always been a mystery since there’s no constituency for balanced budgets and its not like reasonable assumptions of growth could outgrow reasonable assumptions of debt growth.
Not true, the Fed has remitted significantly more to the US treasury since the beginning of the GR than it would have done before it expanded its balance sheet. It has literally kept a few hundred billion in debt off the books for the Treasury.
What baconbits says, but more importantly: If you’re talking about “job growth and high economic growth”, you’re talking about more than just the Fed. All of government economic policy gets stirred into that pot, and an awful lot of non-economic policy as well.
Interest rates have been low because wages were fairly stagnant, and/or inflation hasn’t been showing up in the CPI because almost all the “inflation” is going on in Tuition, Medicine, and Housing prices.
Wages are currently increasing in the US, but are increasing along with productivity, so it shouldn’t have much of an affect on inflation.
Inflation rates are ultra-low in part because most developed nations have made credible commitments to fighting inflation. Inflation is in part an expectations game, so as soon as you decide “eh, let’s have some inflation,” you are unanchoring pre-existing expectations and setting yourself up for God Only Knows in the future.
I would not describe the natural rate of unemployment as quackery akin to austerity. You can see here wage growth clearly starting to rise in recent years:
https://www.frbatlanta.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker.aspx
And an increase in your prime-age workforce employment:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060
Also, while PRIME age workers have returned to their pre-recession levels, overall civilian-employment dropped from 63% to a bit south of 61% right now. We were at 64% prior to 2000. Granted demographics are different now, but there’s still a lot of additional labor you can add from 55-70, or 16-25.
I’d say we are too paranoid of inflation, but I did not live through the 1970s. I’d rather not have to deal with getting credit in that kind of economy.
As a side-note, I have no idea why you would think either austerity or natural rate (or NAIRU or whatever) are linked to Puritanism. Europe is way worse on this than the US. And Natural Rate theories gain more credit after Stagflation: it isn’t Puritan thinking driving it. Even if they got the theory wrong, they are responding to a perceived reality, not a desire to self-flagellate. I would not describe Lerner or Friedman or Modigliani as “Puritan,” even if certain political commentators and pundits might more closely match that description.
Stagflation was a child of the oil crisis – Suddenly, a huge portion of the actual wealth produced by the economies of the west / wealthy world had to be shipped to the middle east in exchange for a good which had previously been much cheaper. That, in real terms, made the west poorer. Which showed up as inflation. Less goods/services to go around, same monetary base.
Note that this is an inflationary impetus which is predictably going to go away – Rising productivity will eventually reach a point where shipping cars and blue jeans to arabia no longer means the west has to wait a bit longer between purchases, and the previous growth should resume. Faster if we had made moves to replace opec oil with cheaper solutions. Except… inflation was stopped by deliberately inducing unemployment before that could happen, which is just straight up self sabotage, and the west has paused every few years to shoot itself in the foot ever since. And yes, europe has been doing that with larger caliber weaponry.
Getting economic theory wrong is catastrophic.
Are you assuming that there is a tradeoff between inflation and unemployment in the long run–that by maintaining a higher inflation rate one can maintain a lower unemployment rate? That was the orthodoxy c. 1960, as per the Phillips Curve, but I don’t think many serious economists believe it now.
Inflation is primarily a monetary phenomenon, i.e. the size and velocity of the monetary base. Everything below is a little simplified, but AFAIK, accurate. If David (who I’m somewhat quoting his Dad, here), or another “real” economist, wants to correct me, they should feel free, I’m just a well-read amateur, but I like attempting to explain because it potentially exposes holes in my own understanding. 🙂
More money chasing the same amount of production equals higher inflation. More production being chased by the same amount of money equals lower inflation. (You can derive the other similar related statements pretty easily).
A central bank like the Fed, with control of the related levers, can make inflation pretty much whatever they want it to be. Recently, they’ve generally stated they wanted it to average 2%, but acted as if they wanted it to stay under 2%.
Jobs
It doesn’t matter for inflation what job growth is, the speculated interaction is reversed, meaning that if you have deflation, it has been speculated that sticky wages (tougher to reduce people’s pay than to just fire someone to save the same amount of money) causes more unemployment than would otherwise occur, but you might be suspicious about that once you start talking about nominal vs. real inflation.
Economic Growth
The interaction with economic growth is the “more or less production” mentioned above. If 2% more is produced, ideally you want to also have about 2% more money available to chase the results of that production in order to keep inflation level. As the Fed can effectively cause the size and velocity of the monetary base to be whatever they want, if growth is 2% and they want 2% inflation, they just increase it by 4%. So you can see that while this sort-of affects inflation in theory, in practice, whatever the Fed decides is really what affects it. There is no tie between what must happen with inflation because of X amount of economic growth, because the Fed is there deciding what really happens.
There is a theory out there that increasing government spending/lowering taxes (i.e. expansionary fiscal policy), can cause higher inflation (because now there is more money out there chasing the same production). Again, in theory, perhaps, but back in reality, the Fed still decides in the end. If more money is dumped into the economy by fiscal policy, their monetary policy wins and removes the monetary effects leaving a net of whatever inflation level they decided it should be.
Nominal vs Real?
Final note for understanding it all… inflation is a nominal effect. Nominal effects can impact real effects (i.e. people don’t like getting a wage cut, while they’re okay with a regular wage increase, for example, or with steady inflation each year people find it easier to adapt expectations within contracts which last longer time periods), but mostly they don’t. So outside some well known examples, the inflation level doesn’t otherwise normally affect how the economy is doing for real, in terms of economic growth. If the real economic growth (actual production in the real world) rate is 3%, then the nominal rate will be that plus the inflation rate. So inflation 3% = 6% nominal growth, but inflation 10% = nominal 13% growth. The key is that the latter doesn’t imply any additional real wealth existing, just that in the 10% case (vs. 3%) you have 7% more dollars which are worth about 7% less in real terms.
Why target the inflation rate with monetary policy?
Inflation also affects various prices of stuff at differing speeds (remember the wage example… deflation on wages is perhaps the slowest effect), which is the main artificial distortion effect on the real economy (and economic distortions are almost always a bad thing), so the ideal is for everyone to know in advance what the inflation rate is going to be and for the inflation rate to be relatively stable over long periods of times. Thus minimizing the impact inflation has on the real economy because “everyone knows” what to expect. That’s more important than if the Fed is targeting 1%, 2%, 5% or 8%. When you get wild swings or very large increases in inflation, that causes additional negative impacts to the real economy, because now no one wants to hold money, they want buy something with it as fast as possible to avoid the effects of inflation, so that leads to people making financial decisions they otherwise wouldn’t and we’re back to one of those negative distortions of the economy.
Hopefully you can see now why if the Fed has led everyone to believe they will create an average of 2% inflation every year, then they actually deliver between 1.5% and 2% (because they never let it go above 2%, even after it’s fallen below 2%), more sophisticated economists will start complaining they aren’t doing their job right, but there are also lots of people who lived through the 70s and are afraid inflation will rise way too fast (leading to that negative scenario above), which influences the Fed to be a bit paranoid and end up undershooting their target. The inflation issues in the 70s were somewhat caused by the Fed not understanding what to do. They were corrected relatively quickly by the Fed under new Chair Volcker in 1980-83 when he sucked money out of the economy and the inflation rate dropped like a rock (relatively speaking).
I deliberately left out of this post a discussion of the tools the Fed has available to it to accomplish monetary changes, because that’s actually a much larger discussion and a subject of more debate along the edge cases. The important part for the purposes of this discussion is that the Fed is the “last mover”, meaning it gets to make adjustments to the inflation rate after everyone else (government, private businesses, individuals, banks, etc…) have all had their effect, so the inflation rate over time ends up being whatever the Fed decides by its actions to make it end up as.
This seems to be central to your thesis here, but I don’t see how it’s even remotely true. Japan in particular is the great counterexample- they’ve been struggling to get, well, any inflation for years now. It’s been an entire massive program, Abenomics. Europe is stuck at 1% or lower inflation. The US Fed has openly discussed his frustration at below 2% rates.
No offense, but it seems like you’re mostly reiterating Economics 101 theory stuff. My point is that actual IRL evidence in developed countries in the 21st century seems to be contradicting those theories
It is mostly Econ 101, or maybe 201 stuff. That’s an argument that it’s widely accepted as accurate by economists, not the opposite. 🙂
Now nuanced, it’s not as nuanced, perhaps. I went out of my way to avoid controversial explanations. As I stated, I deliberately left out a discussion of the monetary policy tools available to the Fed and how they work because there is certainly some debate around that. I’m happy to discuss monetary tools as well, but that wasn’t the question I was originally answering.
In terms of Abenomics, here’s some good analysis, by someone who has made the issue one of the pillars of his career. Not being willing to hit an inflation target (because you want something else more, like to target interest rates for some reason) isn’t the same as not being able to hit an inflation target.
To get started in general, here’s a recent working paper on the topic of how choices in monetary regimes affect the available tools.
Its not. First off Keynesian models typically limit the Fed’s ability to control inflation at ZIRP, which is a large portion of the macro community right there. Additionally even among those who believe it there are major divisions, Neo-Fisherians believe that you have to raise interest rates to push up inflation, not lower them (oversimplified).
What is near universal is that the Fed has some control over the economy, but there is avast amount of disagreement within the Macro community of how much control they have.
@baconbits9,
Sure, there is a view that a central bank can’t manage inflation solely using interest rates. That’s Krugman post-2002 (pre-2002, when it was the BOJ and not the Fed under discussion, he claimed a different view). I don’t think there is an internally consistent view out there that that a central bank can’t manage inflation by using every tool available to them.
Say what you want about models, but in terms of Keynes, you’re talking about an argument which is over:
To repeat what I stated earlier in this thread, there is a difference between not being willing to hit an inflation target and not being able to hit an inflation target. If you think hitting an inflation target will cause negative effects to your employment target, or your interest rate target, or whatever, then you’re just prioritizing something else, not making an argument that if even if you wanted to, you couldn’t hit an inflation target.
Even when the BOJ is apologizing for pushing back its inflation target, the bank Governor still:
Unless you’re arguing that a central bank can’t continue to print more money and purchase assets (bonds, stocks, foreign currency, the whole world of available assets out there), then they have at least one monetary policy tool still available to them. They may not choose to use it (for “reasons”), but that’s not the same as not having it available.
No, what is over is the simplistic argument of ‘does the CB 100% control inflation or does the fiscal authority’, not the nuances of what happens at ZIRP and if monetary offset is partial or full, and a whole slew of other issues.
There is no evidence that purchasing paper assets boosts inflation, logically this makes a lot of sense given basic economic theory. Furthermore the position you describe does not depend on a CB being able to create more inflation than it currently does, it depends on a CB being able to create a precise amount of inflation. The latter does not automatically flow from the former.
Occam’s Razor is that none of the Central Banks actually want higher inflation, especially in the case of Japan. Them complaining about not being able to reach their inflation target is like me complaining about not hitting my weight loss target.
They can’t exactly set their target at EXACTLY what they want, but Central Banks are traditionally risk averse entities, so if they aren’t hitting their stated inflation targets, it’s probably because that inflation target is really a limit, and not actually a target.
No, Occam’s Razor is that CBs cant control inflation, not that they can, say they can, say they want to do x, but really don’t want to do x.
ADBG – as I understand it, the conventional wisdom regarding Japan is that a permanent increase in the money supply would be inflationary, but an increase that’s expected to be temporary won’t, and that while Japan is starting to get traction, they’ve had a lot of trouble convincing the markets that increases are permanent.
The simplest hypothesis is that central banks are bad at arithmetic.
The natural rate of unemployment is not a thing. We know this from the “30 glorious years” where unemployment to a first approximation just did not exist, and labor participation kept growing as more and more people were mobilized into the labor force.
So yes, exactly like austerity. There is some limit, which you can prove by the reduction to absurdity where firms are scouring retirement communities and grade schools to find more labor, but the only way to know you have hit it is to wait for wage driven inflation to actually be a thing.
As for whether it is some kind of data driven Triumph.. No. It is Trump. It seems to me that what is actually happening is that conventional economic wisdom is just wrong, and you are getting correct policy entirely by accident on account of having a current government that routinely ignores all expert advice.
… And yes, it is by accident, not because the republicans “understand economics” or whatever – The very people who are signing off on the present monetary expansion were hysterical inflation scolds under Obama in the middle of a major economic crisis flirting with deflation.
As it turns out, FRED has some data for the tail end of the Trente Glorieuses
Unemployment was not zero. It was a bit over half the current US unemployment rate, though it’s likely the figures are not strictly comparable.
The natural rate of unemployment is not refuted in the historical record. The NRU is the level of UE that a country will hit at full employment, ie when the only issue left is the friction people face in matching employees with employers. It clearly exists conceptually and in reality and the 30 glorious years doesn’t refute it at all. Perhaps you meant that ‘full employment’ isn’t correct as you (iirc) have previously stated, and the 30 years would be a small piece of evidence that might be the case, but hardly definitive as FE is defined by the conditions of the economy and the post WW2 world was highly dynamic.
A highly dynamic economy should have higher frictional unemployment, not lower.
All right, let me put it more bluntly. The natural rate of unemployment is irrefutable as a concept – clearly, some number of people will be unemployed, just because they are currently riding their bike from the proverbial buggy whip factory to the space ship fabrication yards.
But in actual practice, the concept has been extremely frequently used to argue that whatever the current rate of unemployment is, is the natural rate. Even if currently ten percent more of the work-force is unemployed than last year!
That is not a theoretical example. The Baltic nations went from “very low unemployment” to “OH my merciless goddess” and back to low unemployment in really rapid succession as a result of the global financial crisis, and all the pundits were, in the middle of a mass unemployment caused by an entirely external shock arguing that “15 % of the work force involuntarily unemployed is the structural unemployment rate of the Baltic”, and that clearly their previous much better performance was a sign of an overheated economy.
And none of that economic “wisdom” got reconsidered when those “structurally unemployed” workers got back to work.
So, I started just utterly discounting it as a concept. It is a buzz word designed to induce learned helplessness in governments everywhere.
“The natural rate of unemployment is zero” might not, strictly, be factual. But it is a lot more factual than the way it usually gets used, and it is pithy.
No. The NRU is a function of job turnover plus duration of UE, a highly dynamic economy could easily have higher, lower or the same rate of NRU as a less dynamic economy, there is no reason to default to higher frictional UE.
No, you have it backwards. Institutions like the Fed use their estimates of the NRU (among other things) to set monetary policy, of course they say stuff like that, if they thought it was different they would have a different policy stance.
… again, central banks are pulling these estimates out of a dark and dank cavern. It is, in practice, nothing but a rhetorical excuse for inaction.
This might be clearer from a european perspective because on this side of the ocean we have so many central banks pulling this con.
Pre crisis: “This is the natural rate”.
The us banking sector explodes all over the place: “No, that was too optimistic, this is the natural rate”.
Economy eventually recovers, no thanks to central banks: “This is the natural rate”.
The estimate appears to be nothing more than “Last years unemployment”. If the bank is really conscientious, perhaps the average of the last two years.
And at no point does any introspection happen.
No, the natural rate is different, not ‘that was too optimistic’. What would you expect to happen during a financial crisis?
Clearly you don’t know what you are talking about. Here is the UE rate minus the NRU, and here is the natural rate of UE. The NRU never breaks above 5.1%, up from 4.8%, despite the UE rate jumping as high as 10%, the natural rate will get pushed up under extreme circumstances, but it is not simply ‘last year’s UE’, not even close.
The US had a similar but smaller unemployment spike, going from 4.5% to 10% and back as a result of the financial crisis. And while it was high you had pundits declaring this the “new normal” and the previous low unemployment some sort of fairy dream. All this proves is there’s plenty of bad pundits out there, not that the opposite of the theories they were misapplying is true.
Most likely explanation is imho that inflation accelerating level of employment exists, but it is much higher than Fed thought.
Decline of unions also likely has some effect – theoretically it should mean lower inflation with given level of employment, since it gives employers more power to supress wage growth.
This only applies to the US, eurozone is a land of very tight monetary and fiscal policies, no more explanations needed.
There are some misconceptions in here.
No, in the US the Fed started cutting rates in July of 2007 and cut them well into 2008, check out the federal funds rate and check out 5 year inflation expectations. The claim that is most commonly made is that the Fed didn’t cut fast enough, that the pause in rate cuts in mid 2008 was a major causal factor which is different from the Fed raising rates to fight inflation.
I wouldn’t characterize economic growth as ‘high’, its moderate for the last 30 years and low for the last 70 which changes the discussion quite a bit.
There is no real reason to believe that higher inflation would have lead to higher growth during the GR.
Figure it out and you can go collect an almost Nobel Prize.
It’s been highish for a developed country, late Obama years through now. Hitting 2.9% in a couple of years there and 3ish in some quarters is pretty good. I dunno, typing that out and looking at it makes me think maybe our expectations are just low. Anyways, I guess Europe & Japan have had some similarities (extremely low inflation/flirting with deflation), but without the economic growth the US has had.
I guess I meant overall, not just post-2008- that the Fed has been too quick to take away the punch bowl in fear of inflation, when we could have had economic growth & higher employment a number of times. I think it’s kinda indubitable that the Fed has prioritized the inflation part of their mandate more than the ‘full employment’ piece- and even Yellen openly discussed NAIRU, which is now not looking so hot as a concept
That is sort of my point, its high for the last 10 years, but once you are taking the last 10 years as your marker you are building all kinds of other assumptions in.
Its possible, but seems extremely unlikely to me, the Fed has been lowering rates, conventionally ‘loosening’, on average for almost 30 years now, and there isn’t a lot of consistency between these explanations and reality. The worst excesses of the housing bubble occurred while the Fed was raising rates, not lowering them, not holding them constant, and the collapse didn’t come until after the Fed had been cutting rates for a year.
What time period prior to September 2008 counts as the Fed taking away the punch bowl? How about prior to the 2001 recession?
I agree with Sumner on this. His views have stood the test of time and argumentation very well, to the point where he seems to be winning over the Central Bankers. At some point, some public policy economists seemed to temporarily stop believing their own textbooks, for no apparent better reason than it wasn’t convenient to their other views.
As the above article quotes from Mishkin’s monetary economics textbook, “It is dangerous always to associate the easing or the tightening of monetary policy with a fall or a rise in short-term nominal interest rates.”
Stop focusing on interest rate changes. You can’t reason from a price change that way.
Decreasing interest rates is, compared to not decreasing them, conventionally loosening. Sumner even recognizes this, his position is that you cannot tell that policy is to loose or to tight based in interest rates which is a different position from the ‘taking away the punch bowl’ crowd.
Sumner’s track record is poor when he discusses real word events. Take his archive and his posts on Japan and Abenomics.
Japan’s GDP deflator has been flat since that period, but the employment rate has continued to grow as has the labor force participation rate, both of which started their uptrends in the 2012/2013 period when the GDP deflator was falling, and has continued with the short term increase in GDP deflator, and then the flattening.
In short there is no correlation between employment, lfpr, hours worked and the GDP deflator in Japan* between 2010 and 2019. This is trivially obvious when looking at the data, and is a major empirical hole in SS’s argument.
*The increase in GDP deflator during this period is almost certainly due to a sales tax increase instituted at the same time given the size and timing matches very closely.
Following from the discussion of architecture in OT127, I thought some might be interested in this discussion between Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman, which touches on some of what was being discussed there: Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture
Eisenman is very much of the architect-as-rockstar school of thought, and he seems to defend a point of view whereby ‘disharmony’ and discomfort in buildings is justified as a response to disharmony in ‘the cosmology we live in’. Christopher Alexander is much more of the architect-as-craftsman school, and seems much more humble in his aims and in his view of the architect’s role—he seems merely to want to create comfortable, human spaces.
Christopher Alexander is of course well known to programmers as the author of A Pattern Language, in which he created the concept of patterns which was later borrowed by the programming community, in the Gang of Four’s Design Patterns and ever after (though if you ask me, the concept as programmers apply it has only a little to do with what he was talking about.)
It’s a fascinating discussion.
I wrote a big summary of this discussion for last thread and ended up not posting it. It is interesting, but unfortunately it doesn’t go anywhere; while it’s very revealing of Eisenman, if you ask me, I would have liked to hear more about the clash between these cosmologies, and in the end Alexander just couldn’t do that.
…Was he the intellectual model for Steinman?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LroGw9nCjXw
(Note: Adam is not a person, but an organic compound that allows for extensive genetic modification while cementing genetic instability in the user)
https://www.washingtonian.com/2019/05/05/what-happened-after-my-13-year-old-son-joined-the-alt-right/
This story is quite the Rorschach blot.
I’m a conservative, so it probably doesn’t surprise that I see the school and the mom as the worst parts of this situation.
Well, I think the school is pretty clearly painted as a villain, and the mom by her own admission at best made significant mistakes…I’m not sure your take requires being conservative.
I get the school – they, the reporter-bait Nazi, and the nazimongler reporters come off worst to me – but why the mom? Is it the (visibly biased) tone? She came off as a good parent to me.
His peers will know him from this story. His behavior throughout gives off ‘kick me’ vibes. They will oblige.
Justify this conclusion, please.
Also, the premise needs to be justified. How many of his peers will even have read this article? Of those, how many will have bothered to figure out the identities (which I’m sure will be made public somewhere but are obscured in the article)?
The stuff in the story is super identifiable to anyone who knows ya boi, right? Like “no, it was the other kid who had to publicly apologize and then spent a few months as a nazi”.
Then she wrote down stuff about how he ‘curled up next to’ his mom, stuff about how he’s ‘sobbing’.
“Why would adults want to do that?”
“All I wanted was for people to take me seriously.”
Like, these are absolutely the last lines a teenage boy would ever want to emit. When you read them, the voice in your mind sounds like the ‘leave Britney alone’ meme. They were voiced to his mother, in private. He’d have been shot before he said that in front of his friends.
And she wanted some money, so she sold that moment to the internet.
Look. Dude could come back from a nazi phase. That’s whatever. He was strong for the wrong team. S’all good. It’s 2019, everyone is on the ‘johnny was the REAL Karate Kid’ kick, yeah?
But this is unfixable. You can brush off evil, you can brush off hateful, but there isn’t a redemption narrative for this flavor of transgression.
Edit to respond to Acymetric: One figures it out, it goes on the group text. Everyone will know.
If those kids are reading The Washingtonian, and are sufficiently sociopathic that “locked in a room for 6 hours and forced to write a false apology” inspires anything other than fear, (Writing off sympathy “because kids”) maybe.
Also “I was 12” is a pretty strong defense even in high school.
If they are kids, they are sufficiently sociopathic. I’d bet the biggest risk is the mom’s friends and family sharing the article on Facebook around and the kid’s friends seeing it, but pace Walter I’m not sure that’s terribly likely.
@Walter
That seems like a pretty wild stance to take, tbh. Kid comes off as having gone through enough to earn those tears to me, you know? Like nobody thinks less of a kid who cries about his dog dying.
@Hoopy:
We probably won’t be able to bridge this inferential gap, suffice to say that we have different views on how reasonable high school peer circles are.
I mean, if his peers can recognize him from the story they probably more or less already know it, in which case the kick me sign is already firmly attached. Apparently he’s got a friend group despite that.
I think you are overestimating how bad high school peer circles are on net (people can have some truly bad experiences, but kids typically just aren’t actually that bad). And this is coming from someone who caught absolute hell through most of high school.
I think Walter means because of the implied condescension toward the son. Like I said below, it sounds to me like she learned a lesson here too; I don’t think she’s a bad parent for it, but it sounds like she was treating his political interest unfairly.
ETA: Okay, never mind, I was wrong about what Walter thinks. What I get for trying to read minds!
She comes off as a pretty decent rich-to-middle-class parent, yeah.
Thing is, she and her husband laughed at their son’s anti-feminism, laughing him off as a dumb kid when “feminism is a bad, harmful ideology” was a perfectly cromulent explanation for his experiences. She comes off as more concerned with maintaining her social status (which in part derives from holding the
rightleft opinions) than supporting her child.Kids that age mostly have dumb political opinions that change weekly. Her reaction is not unreasonable, if a little inconsiderate.
She pulled him out of school, was ready to drive him to a the_donald meetup, and let him go to a right-wing rally. The worst she’s guilty of is not arguing with her son enough (because her variant of [-ism] obviously isn’t as evil as he’s inferring) because he thought he needed to feel accepted more than he needed to feel respected. Her telling of the story is self-aggrandizing, sure, but I don’t know how you can claim with a straight face that she wasn’t consistently trying her hardest to do right by the kid.
Well, yes. Ceteris parabis, you should laugh off your teenager’s political opinions. Phronensis is a thing. All wasn’t equal here, but it’s hard to call her a bad parent over the mistake.
@Hoppyfreud:
She was consistently trying to do right by him, yes. Good parents still make mistakes due to cognitive bias.
@Le Maistre Chat
Then would you still say that
?
@Hoppyfreud: I think successful Blue people have cognitive biases that generally serve them well in society without being true. It does not surprise me that a good Blue mother would do the best she can by her son short of examining those. I think it’s bias, not a mercenary calculation of the trade-offs.
@Le Maistre Chat
Can you point to which cognitive bias the mom was guilty of? Obviously the bias of “my kid’s political opinions are not significant” which I think was just successfully hashed out, but I don’t think that is a particularly Red/Blue bias so much as a general Adult vs. Kids bias.
Kids mostly have dumb political ideas, but if you hope for them to have better ones later, you probably want to actually engage with them. (And also, they’re likely to come to different conclusions than you do, and that’s ok. Nobody’s going to put any 14 year olds in charge of running things, so even if their ideas about how to run things are silly, there’s not much harm done.) And it’s worth noting that in the story (who knows how accurate it is?), his big turnaround came from an interaction where his mom went with him and honestly engaged with him.
ISTM that this kid got massively kicked in the nuts by the respectable liberal world (his old school and old friends), and not unreasonably figured that this meant that he should look for honesty and support somewhere else. And indeed, he was right to recognize that the people who kicked him in the nuts were not good people to look to for honesty or support, it’s just that he found some other not-so-great people to look to for support online.
Agreed, she is a pretty decent parent, just made an easy mistake. She underestimated how observant her son was that she was dismissive with his opinion and underestimated how much of a void was in his life after leaving school. Her son needed to have someone respect him after his entire school was against him, and it wasn’t his parents, or even another social group, it was the internet. I would also argue she overreacted to his opinions changing, but that’s probably my politics. Good parents make mistakes, and this is a good example.
“In an out-of-body moment, I imagined that this very episode would be cited by some future cultural critic on the limits of liberalism”
Mission accomplished, I guess.
But this part…
“He texted more with classmates than with online strangers, and every few weekends I drove him to sleepovers with other kids. ”
…could use a bit more elaboration. It’s treated as something that just automatically happens unless something is horribly wrong, and really as something that should have just automatically happened to set things right after things did go horribly wrong in the first act, but that’s not how it works. That’s how parents and school administrators all too often want it to work, so that they don’t have to involve themselves in seeing that it does work out that way, but it clearly didn’t happen for Sam at his old school and it didn’t happen when he started at his new school.
I think understanding why that is, and how it did eventually get fixed in this case, is the most useful insight that could come out of something like this. Instead, we just get a near-tautology about how the ostracized kid joins the pathetic group that at least offers him respect and friendship that he isn’t getting anywhere else.
Well, the article suggests that it was that way, until it wasn’t (as a result of the harassment accusation) and then was again. I think it was fairly accurately used as a sign of a return to “normalcy” after a period of turbulence that (at least according to the article) stemmed from the problems at the original school.
It is true that this doesn’t occur for some people, and that is certainly a conversation to be had, but that is kind of a separate conversation.
If it had happened anywhere near the beginning of this story, there wouldn’t have been a story. Because it didn’t happen at the beginning, this story or something worse was pretty much inevitable. And only because it happened at the end, does this story have a happy ending.
How is that a separate conversation?
It seems to me to be implied that it happened before the story (i.e. that he had a “typical” social life before the incident with school administrators turned things sideways and resulted in his isolation from his peers/previous friend group). The story starts when things went wrong, at which point the social life also went wrong. Are we talking past each other or am I missing something?
Sam apparently had a normal social life before all this, yes.
Then one student and the school administration accused him of Badness, and his friends apparently all desert him. If this hadn’t happened, there probably wouldn’t be a story. And since there is no general rule that teenagers ostracize one of their own just because adult authority decrees him to be Bad, it seems kind of important to understand why that happened here.
So he transfers to a new school, and he apparently doesn’t find any friends there. Easier to understand, I think – but again, if it doesn’t happen that way, there’s no story beyond “Sam’s principal was a dick so he had to change schools”.
Then he finds a different set of friends, and later finds that they are a bunch of pathetic losers.
Then he finds a new set of friends at whatever school he is going to at the end of the tale (same one as #2), and because of that the story has a happy ending. Otherwise he probably drifts back to the alt-right, or goes Antifa-level hard left, or winds up an opioid overdose statistic or something.
Are we on the same page on all of this?
It seems to me that every part of this story that matters, is driven by whether or not Sam’s classmates du jour are sharing texts with him and inviting him to sleepovers and the like. The bit where, when he is ostracized by his classmates, he finds pathetic loser friends elsewhere, is boring and inevitable. That those friends happened to come from the alt-right this time, seems irrelevant.
Unless of course someone is particularly interested in figuring out why teenagers might join the alt-right, e.g. because they want to stop that sort of thing. In which case, the only place they’ll find any actionable lesson in all of this is in figuring out why teenagers sometimes find themselves unable to make friends among their classmates and why that sometimes changes.
Ok, I get what you’re saying now, but don’t agree with your conclusion. You want an article about a root cause, this article was about the outcome and subsequent turnaround. There is plenty of ink spilled on the former, I don’t think it is a problem for an article that just looks at the latter or that the article is intentionally avoiding it in some attempt to hide something (I get the feeling that you have some agenda/view on the situation that you feel was being intentionally avoided by the article, maybe I am mistaken).
In other words, not every article needs to be all things to all people.
The article doesn’t say that Sam’s friends deserted him (aside from anything else, one of the school instructors “overheard him talking to friends and called me to express concern”, so apparently he had at least some even after the incident), but that the Kafkaesque ordeal the school put him through traumatised Sam and made him depressed and withdrawn. Whilst his friendships would doubtless have suffered, that would be more because Sam was withdrawing, not because his friends were ostracising him.
That kid has some real steel. He’s going to be something when he gets older. His mom isn’t terrible. Everyone else in the story makes me wish Hell existed.
Assuming the description of his old school was correct, his old school’s administrator needs to be doing some other job.
Good God, that school. It seems that boy and mom both learned some lessons from the whole thing. Surprisingly balanced article.
Having IRL friends is going to socialize a person away from taboo politics, most likely, but the ending confused me:
“I still think about his words a lot, especially when alt-right figures headline the news. But mostly, I wonder how I could have tried so hard to parent Sam through this crisis and yet tripped up on something as basic as not making my own kid feel small.
Thankfully, Sam moved on. By the fall of tenth grade, he seemed at peace for the first time since he’d stepped off the bus almost two years earlier, face puffy from crying, to inform me he’d broken the law.
That’s why my fears came roaring back when Sam and I heard on the radio one day that another Mother of All Rallies was taking place on the Mall that very weekend—and Sam asked if we could go. Together.
My breath caught. He must have seen my face change.
“As counterprotesters?” he asked, eyes gleaming.”
How does someone go from Alt-right to AntiFa in 2 years? I suppose it makes some sense given a 14y/o probably isn’t going to have very strong beliefs to begin with.
_____
I also think there’s a false hope here. Presumably this person is going to college in 2 years, he’s going to be subjected to a much more rigorous variant of the moral code that got him in trouble in eighth grade, he’s going to have to terminate a lot of friendships he made in high school and attempt to find new ones in whatever school he finds himself in.
I doubt he went Antifa, and converts are often the most zealous. I would expect a kid realizing the group he looked up to were a bunch of hateful losers would be opposed to them, instead of just walking away.
It takes a special someone to want to join a counter protesters. Of course we don’t know what kind of counter-protesters are involved. I’ve come to associate counter-protester with someone who tries to instigate violence to hopefully wrack up as many arrests as possible. So I suppose I tend to assume if someone wants to counter-protest some white nationalists or whatever they would need some deep attachment to the cause of diversity; it’s not enough to think that certain people aren’t cool.
Your problem is that your perception of counter-protesters is a caricature that only describes a small fraction of them. The majority of counter protesters are just there to hold signs saying “these guys over there are wrong”. This isn’t surprising, because the caricature version is vastly overrepresented in media reports since it is “more interesting”.
Don’t take this as an endorsement, because it’s not, but most counterprotestors at contemporary alt-right rallies are not violent, nor are they consciously participating in tactics designed to spark violence. Most of them are just there because they want to Do Something, and the default Thing to Do is to march and wave signs.
Antifa, which is consciously and explicitly violent, is its own thing, and was around long before counter-protests started making the news.
Antifa… was around long before counter-protests started making the news.
Antifa is relatively new. Counter-protesting is probably roughly as old as protesting itself.
Should have said “this round of counter-protests”; counter-protesting as a concept is ubiquitous but in recent years it was usually left out of the news until the 2016 election cycle started. Antifa isn’t that new, though; it goes back to the aftermath of WWII in Europe (some groups claim continuity with Depression-era ones, but I’m skeptical) and at least the early Eighties in the US, though in the States it was closely linked to punks and skins for most of that time.
1 – there’s a difference between counterprotesters and antifa. See: the #brave guy the mom cries about in the article. Presumably it’s something more like that.
2 – basically nobody anywhere will do anything near as bad as that school did. And if they try, he’ll know his rights. Reread it and ask yourself if he’s likely to ever experience anything like that again.
I wouldn’t assume this as a given. He was falsely accused of a fairly minor crime, forced to publicly apologize at threat of expulsion. Bad, and a travesty of justice, yes, but not something that can’t happen in college, at a job, or in a court later on.
He could probably have the same exact thing happen at college, only also be out the semester’s tuition.
After all,
Such training is certainly not restricted to this local middle school!
That said, no, it isn’t likely.
I straight-up don’t think this can happen outside of (k-12) school. He will have the vocabulary and legal grounds to demand better treatment than this bullshit.
Which one? No where else will try this, or it won’t succeed against him again because he’ll know the magic words?
You have a point that intimidating him into staying inside a room is something a child is uniquely vulnerable to.
Also, I don’t recall any stories along these lines recently. Maybe things have changed a bit recently?
There are legal grounds to demand better treatment from e.g. a college or an employer than “we’ve had a complaint of sexual harassment, we #BelieveAllWomen, grovel or GTFO”? Pretty sure that’s not the case.
@Hoppyfreud: Plausible, but the more he exercises foresight for a university treating him like this, the more anti-feminist he’ll be.
I found really interesting the part where he was interviewing people on the Mall and calling them “intellectually inconsistent” for being Anarchist Nazis or failing to prove that liberals have deprived him of any liberty.
So he’s not going to grow up to be a Jewish Nazi, but going back to his mom’s ideology would be to ignore any possibility of a repeat in college.
@John
There are grounds to expect better treatment than being held in a room and threatened with prison unless you confess your guilt, yes. He will get fired at worst, and if he does he will know who to complain to about it.
@Le Maistre Chat
Given that his mom appears fully capable of recognizing the injustice of his treatment, why would her ideology preclude that?
@Randy M
It is highly unlikely that someone else will try this, simply because while this kind of thing does happen (it shouldn’t) it doesn’t happen very often. This kid will also be uniquely prepared for dealing with it should lightning strike twice for him, because I would guess he has become quite familiar with the relevant laws/policies.
Also, college students are much more predisposed to say “shove off” to school authority attempting to assert itself in this way than a typical 13 year old.
Who is that, exactly? It is I believe extremely rare for any court to rule, “The accusation of sexual harassment that was your reason for firing [X] was insufficiently supported; give him his job back or give him lots of money”. With at-will employment (the rule in most states) the issue doesn’t even come up, and “people falsely accused of sexual harassment” is not a legally protected class for employment purposes. That is not a useful avenue of complaint.
If there is someone else you imagine a person fired due to false accusations of sexual harassment could usefully complain to, I’d like to know who that is.
@John
OK, we may be cross-talking here. When I say, “know who to complaint to about it” I mean that he’ll probably have a better support network than the_donald, not that he’ll be able to keep his job. I’m saying that if anything like this happens again, it won’t be as bad, and also that if anything like this happens again, he won’t turn into a miserable Extremely Online, depressed alt-righter.
@acymetric
If the argument is just that two independent uncommon events happening to the same person is uncommon^2, fine. Maybe Hoopyfreud was simply refuting the narrower point that this guy will have a repeat incident later.
He did seem to me to be going beyond that to arguing that this kind of pressure, denial of confronting accusers, not getting a chance to argue one’s own side, getting punished without due process, and so forth is absent in other contexts.
On the point of holding him for six hours against his will, I’ll grant that’s probably confined to the public schools, but holding you for six hours against your will is kinda the business model of public schools, so one can understand why the administrator thought that within his purview.
I’m arguing that the wirlwind Kafka trap won’t work again. All the individual elements may recur, but I don’t think it’s possible for the pressure, confusion, or pain of that situation to be worse for anyone other than a child in that situation (well, getting that treatment from your parents would be worse, obviously, but that’s already precluded for this dude).
Like, do you guys remember how fucking scary the police were when you were kids? Or how little you understood about the authority that institutions could hold over you? I’m not nearly as anti-school as some people here, but it’s really fucking intense.
That’s not been my experience with people who have been fired for dubious accusations of sexual harassment or the like. Most adults have a large overlap between their social and professional circles, and even if their former colleagues want to support them, the fact that they are physically separated and out of the loop on major events makes that hard to implement. Most of the rest of their first-tier social support comes from family, and living at home with loving parents should be about as good as it gets in that category. And if e.g. a church were going to fill that role, I expect it already would have.
It is certainly possible that future!Sam will have e.g. a wife who loves him as much as his mother did in this story but is better at turning that into actual support, but it could just as well go the other way.
I’m not really sure that he learned anything about how to avoid or disarm these situations, should he find himself in that thankfully unlikely circumstance again. Ultimately, he gave in, avoided more serious administrative discipline, but grew depressed and cynical at the humiliation of it.
Yeah, kids are especially unaware of how the world works and lack the perspective to see how things usually get better so there’s no need to panic. By virtue of maturity and life experience, he’ll be better equipped to handle unjust persecution.
But in this particular case, I missed the part where he learned what he should have done to short circuit the interrogation or get out of the laughable charges.
Maybe you mean he learned that the police won’t be called just because someone allegedly says something mean (in the USA)? True, though there are real charges he could be threatened with in more savvy contexts, and in any case, losing a job or enrollment in a college are more serious consequences that having to move to the High school one town over.
I was considerably less afraid of the police or other authority institutions as a child than I am now. And I think that’s an accurate judgement. As a child, I was largely shielded from the full authority of the police, justice system, or other people in general (besides my parents). Now I’m an adult. This has been a great improvement, but one of the few downsides is I have considerably more to lose now if the weight of the world comes crashing down on me specifically (but not my parents) than it did then. My parents can’t shield me now.
Losing friends for a year is crappy, but not nearly as bad as winding up unwillingly unemployed for a year.
John Schilling is right and a lot of you are just-worlding here.
The college accusing him of something won’t lock him in a room, no. They’ll tell him, however, if he leaves he is immediately expelled, forfeits all tuition and/or scholarships, and must leave campus immediately, not so much as returning to his dorm to get his stuff. They may or may not have a campus police officer escort him off premises if he calls them on this. What’s he going to do at that point? Sure, he can call his parents. What’s their response going to be?
A) “Oh no, those unjust school authorities are picking on my boy. Let me call my friend the Senator/Regent/Mossad agent and get it all straightened out”
B) “AGAIN? What did you do THIS time, boy? I hope you have some plan for the rest of your life, because WE won’t be supporting you. And we’ll be expecting you to pay back those loans!”
Unless his name is Huffman or Loughlin, “B” is going to be closer to correct, at least for the initial response. The usual response from parents when a child is punished by school authorities is not to back up the child.
As for work, if he gets fired for unjust accusations of sexual harassment, he does indeed “know who to complain to about it”. If he’s got the money, he can pay a mental health professional to pretend to care. Otherwise, he’s best off talking to a stone wall, or basically anything that can’t repeat the story, so he’s got a chance of gainful employment in the future.
They were a lot scarier when I was an adult being arrested.
(However, I should probably register my suspicion that the original article is basically a creative writing exercise)
These parents, having gone through it once already, have an almost 100% chance of going with option A. And also suing the school. And getting several hundred thousand dollars from the school in settlement.
Having gone through it once, he’ll be in a better position to weather the charge and survive it. Even if he is let go, he can find another position somewhere else, especially since modern businesses won’t even talk about good employees for fear of lawsuits.
Reality isn’t just, but it’s also not grimdark.
We aren’t just-worlding, we’re just saying things aren’t quite as bad in American colleges as is being suggested (not that these issues are imagined, just that they are being exaggerated) and emphasizing that the control/power dynamic is very different between a principle/SRO and a 13 year old vs. a Dean of Student Affairs (or whatever) and a college student.
Take it from someone who was threatened with legal action by their University (which was preposterous) and also faced potential expulsion/loss of full ride (which would have been an overreaction but not entirely unreasonable). That process is nowhere near as intimidating, and does not involve any involuntary confinement.
These descriptions of what could happen to him in college do not match the actual processes (even for actual sexual assault) at colleges.
This whole situation is basically only possible at public K-12 schools, unless you are actually arrested (the police can obviously do the same or worse).
Nope. Probably not only go for Option B, they’ll reconsider their judgement of the previous school based on the reasoning that the common element between the two situations is the kid.
Seriously just-worlding here. At best they could get a settlement which allowed the kid to return. Even in cases where there was blatant and recorded misconduct on the part of the school, going for a judgement results in years and years of hearings and appeals to get a decision that provides no monetary compensation.
Under what legal theory or cause of action, and based on what evidence?
I will agree that a lawsuit is unlikely.
I’m also not suggesting that he wouldn’t end up expelled over some accusation (although I think it would need to be a much more serious accusation than what drove this incident).
I’m certainly not suggesting that certain policies at the university level aren’t draconian (they are), just that they aren’t as draconian as is being suggested. Also that regardless of the policies, universities simply don’t have the same physical control (real or perceived by the student) as school officials/SROs at the middle school level.
There is not a single “university process” because universities each handle issues differently. There are a number of open lawsuits right now from the ridiculous Kangaroo Courts constructed by some universities for their sexual assault proceedings.
And, no, the existence of some lawsuits does not mean all universities can be held to account for their crappy processes, anymore than some rapists being in jail means all rapists are held to account. You don’t know how many people were soft-pedalled or managed out or otherwise harassed out of university, and didn’t make any sort of case out of it. For instance, you wouldn’t know about THIS case, but for the fact that someone wrote an article about it.
Courts are not some magic “instant win! Collect Money now!” button.
Fire’s won several cases on contract law. I think they’ve won some cash settlements as well, but I can’t remember the details to find it.
https://www.artforum.com/uploads/upload.001/id10750/article_large.jpg
I find it interesting that people are throwing around accusations of Just World-ing by providing unsubstantiated just-so stories informed primarily by the axe they have to grind with given institutions (blue tribe, public schools, universities, parents, mean kids, etc.).
This article is basically the perfect storm for the audience of this blog.
@Hoppyfreud:
“Those online pals were happy to explain that all girls lie—especially about rape. And they had lots more knowledge to impart. …
Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. For kids today, that means Googling stuff. One might think these searches would turn up a variety of perspectives, including at least a few compelling counterarguments. One would be wrong. The Google searches flooded his developing brain with endless bias-confirming ‘proof’ to back up whichever specious alt-right standard was being hoisted that week. Each set of results acted like fertilizer sprinkled on weeds: A forest of distortion flourished.”
She sounds like she didn’t update her political beliefs at all after this experience, and admits to training herself to make a facial expression to falsely convey “it would seem as if I’d actually considered his perspective.” Never anywhere in her writing does she reflect that #believeallwomen could hurt other boys like her son, that while she might have been devestated by the 2016 election, the climate under President Clinton II could have doubled down on Kafkaesque trials of male students…
I’m not sure what the Zizek meme is about, but certainly you have heard the bit of folk wisdom “If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”
Nowhere in the article is there anything that would even suggest the author is #believeallwomen. Not being interested in entertaining the idea that girls lie about rape all the time is not enough to make that assumption, nor is the fact that the mother is blue tribe. In fact, the only evidence available (that she did not take seriously the accusation that started the whole thing) suggests exactly the opposite.
This seems like choosing a pet narrative and then making giant assumptions or unwarranted inferences to make the story in this article fit them.
Zizek? Oh! I thought that was Luke Skywalker complaining about the new Star Wars’s writing.
Sure, she could definitely be more moderate than that. But everything she says indicates someone invincible against updating her beliefs, however humanely moderate they might be. I mean, her family almost literally got mugged by reality!
What belief do you feel she is failing to update on? You seem to be assuming what she believes, and assuming that she has failed to update those beliefs, neither of which are supported by the article. This all basically sounds like “boo, outgroup” to me.
You’re also cherry picking the one viewpoint mentioned in the article that would be reasonable to update on. It is hardly surprising that she (a Jewish mother) would fail to engage in a discussion about or update her beliefs on Jewish conspiracies, right?
@The Nybbler
It means that this is the most purely refined ideology I’ve snorted in like the last week.
Acymetric is making the nice version of this argument, but the abrasive version is: this sounds like a paranoid ideological fantasy with nothing behind it. It’s literally just an assertion that this mother will throw her kid to the wolves, despite her not doing that. Your model for this is prima facie implausible for human beings and implicitly relying on it to do the heavy lifting for your argument drags the level of discourse down. If you don’t show your work when you make a claim like that, expect to be dismissed.
@ RalMirrorAd I think he just changed friends, and his political views went with it. He’s upper middle class or rich, Jewish, and goes to a private school, I’d me shocked if his friend group was anything but liberal, and that will probably continue for years.
@Hoopyfrued I would estimate that far right news sources post a story equally as bad as this on a weekly basis while college is in session. Now the base rate is 16 million college students, so it is highly, highly unlikely to happen again. If it does, it is likely he goes back to his old ways, but that should never be an assumption.
@Aristides
I will happily update my estimation of the awfulness of current college administrations if you can bear this claim out, but I’m not seeing it.
Uh, yeah, this. I have no idea why RalMirrorAd is rounding off the one to the other.
1. Makes sense enough
2. The schools actions were rare but not unique. There are universities that take the ‘Always believe the victim’ mantra seriously and some have been involved in false rape or sexual harassment allegations. It’s obviously the tip of the spear and so we don’t expect many people to be subjected to it.
What’s not rare is that he as a college student is obliged to be taught the moral reasoning behind the kind of treatment he got in middle school. It’s going to be taken very seriously by his instructors and peers and if he doesn’t take it seriously he’s going to find himself in a bad situation, albeit not with the law.
See the passage I quoted above. His college won’t lock him in a room for 6 hours and refuse to explain anything, and won’t try to convince him that that kind of stasi shit was justified, because it’s cartoonishly evil.
I’m not saying they won’t go further than is reasonable, but your characterization is histrionic.
And if they do, he’ll be thinking about how he’ll spend his lawsuit settlement, not thinking about how he will survive prison.
If we’re dealing with the ability to detain someone for a long period of time and convince them that they might find themselves in trouble with the law, then you’re probably correct. I can’t imagine a university having the same legal power over someone as a public school.
I’m thinking more broadly about the ability of an institution to take a sexual harassment allegation at face value and then retaliate against the accused, in the form of removal or expulsion. (What Randy M describes)
I’m also thinking in terms of, those things that happen in college are more likely to permanently affect a person’s economic prospects then things that happen prior to high school. Even though something that happens to someone before high school is going to be more psychologically damaging because the person is younger and therefore more vulnerable.
His high school almost certainly didn’t lock him in a room for six hours either.
And it’s not illegal and probably not actionably tortious for e.g. a college to say “What you did is illegal, the police are coming to arrest you, and even if they don’t we’re going to expel you and cast you into economic oblivion, and there’s nothing you can do about it but maybe we’ll reconsider if you do everything we say, now go sit in that room.” Possibly this is a lie, but the “we’re going to expel you unless you do everything we say” part may not be. Either way, I doubt there’s a winning lawsuit in it for Sam.
There’s a good chance that the issue simply doesn’t come up again, of course. It usually doesn’t.
@John
Accidental report, oops.
There may not have been a lock on the door, but I’m certain that the school would not allow him to leave. That’s how most schools treat children IME. In the future, he will at least have the option to walk out of the room. He almost certainly won’t be threatened with arrest (because that’s the sort of thing only a kid will believe).
I’m not saying he’ll be immune to unjust persecution; I’m saying that he won’t be subject to anything more (or even as) rigorous or miserable than what he’s already seen.
I’d be surprised if any teacher or administrator would have laid a hand on him to stop him if he’d walked out, because that way risks lawsuits once he’s big enough that “make him stop by force” risks injury. And I don’t recall any mention of school police or security being present for that part of the tale. So I expect “not allowing” him to leave would be implemented only by threat of life-ruining levels of punishment for disobedience coupled with trained obedience to authority.
Which is something any college or university can do, to anyone who has internalized our society’s nigh-unanimous message that you’ll starve in the gutter if you don’t get a degree from a Good University. And if he’s an undergraduate, there’s a good chance that he’s living in campus-owned housing anyway, giving them an avenue of control not open to high school administrators.
She did say Resource Officer, which at my high school was what they called the police officer who stayed on campus. (OK, we said Student Resource Officer, but I read that and thought “police”. But who knows how middle schools in DC work.)
Good point, so provisionally retracted on my part.
Resource officer definitely connotates “school police”. They aren’t technically police offers, but do have some of the same authority and middle schoolers probably don’t draw much of a distinction there except for the ones that are particularly saavy regarding law enforcement.
That said, that a school administrator won’t make physical contact to restrain a student is not a safe assumption (and that is partly what resource officers are there to do, so that the teachers don’t have to) just because they shouldn’t do that.
Also, how big was this kid at 13 that restraining him risked injury. Even typical athletes at that age aren’t all that big/strong yet.
People seem to be mixing their ideological complaints about various institutions here.
It is easy to believe that a 13 year old would fall victim to being inappropriately detained by school officials.
It is only easy to believe the same would happen to a college student if we assume the student is among the most meek/naive subset of college students. I certainly don’t think this guy will fall into that category at this point. A majority of college students are predisposed to resist that kind of imposition from authority by that time in their lives (more so than the same student would be even a short 5-10 years later post-college).
SROs are uniformed police in schools. It’s just a euphemism.
This is a thing? Commonly? Really?
From Wikipedia (so grain of salt, but a decent ballpark)
Keep in mind, many of these schools have more than one resource officer (my highschool with a little over 2,000 students had 3, plus occasional presences actual on-the-job police officers as well).
3 years later those numbers are almost definitely higher by a decent amount. 52.9% is actually lower than I would have guessed.
My high school included a police substation. We had two Resource Officers, who were uniformed, sworn police officers armed with handguns. One of them taught a one semester elective I took. I can’t remember the exact name of it, but it was something like “Law Studies” or “Law Enforcement Studies.”
I don’t see anything weird about this. High school students do dangerous and illegal things on campus, like fighting or selling drugs. If there’s a physical confrontation involved, isn’t that better handled by police than a teacher?
Most high school students don’t do those things, except for fairly minor levels of “fighting”. In olden times, the problem of the minority who did was best solved by removing those students. Which, yes, sometimes required the equivalent of “resource officers” in the reform schools where those students wound up, but normal students and teachers didn’t need full-time armed guards to protect them from that sort of crap.
Now, it’s probably best dealt with by telling parents that if their children’s school has a “resource officer” then it offers nothing better than an old-time reform-school excuse for an education and if they care about their children they should do whatever it takes to get them into a different school that doesn’t come with armed guards. Preemptively, rather than waiting for things to find a way to blow up on them. This should achieve the same end result, though the way we currently go about it will involve a lot of overpriced residential real estate transactions.
Most people don’t commit violent crimes. Yet we have police officers to deal with the small percentage of people who do.
Most high school students don’t commit violent crimes. Yet we have ROs to deal with the small percentage of students who do.
My kindergartener goes to the nicest, newest elementary school in the best part of town in a cozy red state suburb, and there’s an armed police officer on campus. So I don’t know where you think I should send him, except maybe Catholic school.
Are you suggesting that this is true, or that we try to spin it as being true so as to change behavior?
I’m pretty sure plenty of quality schools come with a police officer: my high school from ~10 years back had (and presumably still has) one, despite being an upper-middle-class environment, a fairly quality education, and to the best of my knowledge no important reasons to actually have a police officer around. If my parents had moved school districts over that, I don’t think it would have positively affected my education. I’m not even sure there were significantly better school districts in the state.
And when you’re proposing fairly significant costs in relocating, I’m not sure parents are going to bite without strong backing data that not relocating is going to cause harm.
I guess maybe now there’s the potential for the Stasi-esque stuff that prompted this thread with the added sting of “and you can’t just leave, because police”, but I’m not sure that’s going to correlate with having a police officer in the school: I would not be surprised at all to see the exact same behavior without the police officer. Because as you mentioned upthread, the school has effective enforcement mechanisms beyond physically preventing you from leaving.
Having a cop in an elementary school is either Potemkin safety or where the school dumps their discipline problems. Either is bad.
Yes, and we don’t permanently assign police officers to churches, office buildings, movie theaters, etc, or have special church-police, office-police, movie-theater police forces to protect those buildings. What is it about schools that should make them an exception to this pattern?
I don’t know if I’d call it Potemkin safety. While I think fears of another Sandy Hook are blown massively out of proportion, a visible* police officer standing watch every day while the kids file in might persuade a would-be shooter to pick an easier target.
* an invisible police officer would be awesome, but probably not as good for deterrence.
Children who can’t defend themselves, or choose not to attend? Also, even at my upper middle class high school fights were a weekly occurrence (usually among the non-upper middle class portion of the student body). No one at my office, church, or movie theater has ever gotten into a fight.
I think a resource officer at an elementary school is more there to deal with unwanted visitors than problem students. The purpose shifts towards dealing with students in middle school and especially high school.
This is probably getting more and more common as a (probably unhelpful) response to school shootings.
I do. I tried looking up what percentage of schools here have permanently stationed police officers, and I can’t even find the statistic; people mostly seem to agree it’s just not a thing. I’m certainly happy that it’s not, because the police isn’t generally lacking for things to do and having an officer stationed at every school(or even half) seems like a very irresponsible use of their manpower.
This isn’t really a criticism of the US; whatever you people want to do with your police officers is up to you. I’m just happy this isn’t an issue over here.
High schools have a high concentration of the 16-24 year-old males that commit most of the violent crime.
This was just over 30 years ago, but back then my public high school with more than 2000 students got by just fine with zero cops permanently assigned to the school. Count me as one of those with serious doubts that our trend toward making schools more like prisons has made things better in any way.
Most hotels don’t have a police officer. Most restaurants don’t. Most office buildings don’t. Many (most?) schools do.
The usual approach is to have police officers somewhere in the city and send them out when there is a problem, not to station them in each building on the assumption that problems requiring their attention will be common enough to make that worth doing.
My concern with putting cops in schools is that power that is available tends to be used. This means that some problems that might have been dealt with through ordinary disciplinary measures (detentions, suspensions, expulsions) will be dealt with through arrests. Arresting someone is a very serious matter,, because the agents of the criminal justice system have extremely broad discretion, and can impose severe penalties with life-long consequences. We should not welcome such an institution into any domain of life unless it is obviously needed and all less severe measures have failed.
I can easily picture my kid getting into an argument with another student, and if both of them are hopped up on youthful masculine vigor both double down repeatedly, so words turn into posturing turns into shoving turns into punching and suddenly one of them is bleeding on the ground. Something is called for, and that is probably a scolding from a vice principal and a suspension. But because a cop is present and cops do what they do, both parties are arrested. And because someone was actually injured, the prosecutor decides to prosecute for felony assault and succeeds. So now my kid’s a felon and probably got kicked out of the middle class for life. Great.
I’m really late to this discussion, but as someone who works every day in a public school, y’all are blowing the SRO thing way out of proportion.
I grew up and now work in a couple of the nicest, richest, suburbiest schools in the state. And those districts have literally always had an SRO. The fact that everyone is baffled by this is confusing to me, because I’ve never been in a school without one, and I’ve never had cause to believe that Missouri is unusual in this (in fact, per the statistics listed above, it’s not).
The SRO is not an “armed guard,” forbiddingly looming over the students like the SS. He’s just another member of staff. In high school, he usually dealt with before and after school traffic, taught classes on things like safety and not doing drugs (DARE was big then), and occasionally rousting miscreants out of the parking lot and other minor disciplinary issues.
At my present place of work, we get one on loan from the local municipality’s police department, rotating every few years. He splits his time between the middle school and the handful of elementary schools we have, and does mostly the same thing – minor disciplinary things, traffic management, teaching a few seminars on law & crime related topics. Got his own little office in the administrative wing, nice guy.
Basically, the weird dystopian image of schools conjured in this thread bears no resemblance to my day to day reality. I felt it was worth momentarily ceasing lurking to point that out.
Count me in as one of the people who find the orwellianly named “Resource Officer” concept to be a bad sign, and a good indicator of a sick society.
My public school experience spanned over a dozen different schools over three states, and there were *NO* “resource officers”.
I can totally believe this, actually. I have a teenage relative who got into the alt-right in mid-2016, then maybe a year and a half later he suddenly swung around to being really far left, and now he’s drifting towards anarchism. I attribute it to teenagers being very volatile.
Breaking News!
This pretty much hits the nail on the head. “It’s just a phase” has become a bit of a cliche, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a real thing.
It’s entirely possible that the events between mid-2016 and the present might have changed his mind about the consequences of policies supported by the alt-right.
One of my friends in high school used to oscillate between fascism and communism, although TBH I always got the impression that this was mostly just about being edgy rather than seriously wanting to bring about a fascist/communist utopia.
I very much doubt that kid is ever going to be easy fodder for any variant of #believeallwomen.
Going from alt-right to center-left inside two years is believable; people, especially 14-year-olds, convert like that all the time. (I thought I was some sort of anarchist at 14, IIRC.) But the bit about a meeting with a counterprotester turning his politics around doesn’t ring true to me. Anyone who spends as much time in a political forum as this kid does, has antibodies to that kind of thing.
It does say that change was slow after that, though, so I expect he just fell in with some new RL friends and adopted their politics, and the mother wrongly identified the counterprotester episode as a turning point after the fact. If it happened at all — it’s got a Hallmark-moment ring to it.
I didn’t get the impression that there was a direct connection implied between meeting that protester and the change, but maybe I need to re-read the article. I did get the impression that the kid was interested in “studying” attendees from both sides, which I thought was the main point of that part.
I thought your second paragraph was more or less exactly the explanation posited by the article.
It’s also worth remembering the kid is Jewish; the alt-right can’t have been an easy fit for him ideologically to begin with.
I think it depends on the definition of the alt-right being used. “Alt-right” was coined by Richard Spencer circa 2007 as a rebranding of white nationalism to disassociate pro-white advocacy from anti-other advocacy (KKK, nazis). No one cared because identity politics weren’t as big a thing then, and definitely not white identity politics. The term floated around a little and people took it to mean “right, but not mainstream.” I first heard the term in 2015, applied to Death Eaters.
By the time Milo Yiannopolous wrote the article about the alt-right on Breitbart in 2016 the term had expanded to be “literally everyone rightish who is not a GOP neocon.” So that was right libertarians, paleocons, edgy internet memsters, and yes, neo-nazis. But then immediately after the election Spencer did his “heil Trump” thing, the definition collapsed back down to “just nazis*” and any e-celeb who wasn’t a nazi who had ever claimed to be alt-right backpedaled hard (Paul Joseph Watson, Cernovich, etc). Now due to rhetorical effectiveness and/or outgroup homogeneity bias, liberals like the mother in the article group everyone who doesn’t hate Trump under “alt-right.” But so long as we’re not talking about the “nazis only” definition of alt-right then there’s no problem with a Jewish kid being a paleocon or a libertarian or an edgy internet memster (what this guy was). After all, Milo is Jewish.
* Eh, even after the “heil Trump” thing it was possible to extend charity to the alt-right as people who were “advocating for the interests of white people, but not hatefully against other people.” That ended at Charlottesville, though, when they had David Duke and literal Klansmen and Nazis walking around unchallenged. If the goal of creating a new label is to distance yourself from Klansmen and Nazis, you have to actually distance yourself from Klansmen and Nazis.
Good description.
Well, the kid was peddling in Jewish conspiracy theories, so that informs us a little bit as to which brand of alt-right he was engaged with.
Yes, edgy internet memster. There might be a whiff of two of jewish conspiracy theories on 4chan I hear.
Also, it depends on what exactly he told his mom. It could be “Jews are disproportionately represented in [high intellectual achievement field]” and mom interprets that as “the Jews run the world.” She said he spent almost all of his time on reddit, and I don’t think there’s much spencer-esque alt-right on reddit. The sub she’s probably talking about is /r/The_Donald which is as pro-Israel as Trump (who is very pro-Israel).
I think there are a fair number of Jews who fit broadly in the human b-odiversity world. This fits the usual pattern–it’s an intellectual movement, so the ethnic group in the US that’s a standard deviation smarter than the average tends to show up a lot. Similar things apply to libertarians, socialists, objectivists, neocons, rationalists, etc.
Also, the rally mentioned is the Mother of All Rallies, which was a pro-Trump rally featuring:
Gays for Trump
Patriot Prayer
3 Percenters
American Guard
Oath Keepers
Proud Boys
This is not Spencer/WN stuff. I don’t know what “American Guard” is but the rest of these are either basic right-wing or e-celeb stuff. Given his interest in anti-feminism, I’m guessing he probably most identified with the Proud Boys.
The quote on Jews was:
If the statement is “some Jews run global financial networks,” then the fact that the mom doesn’t know them isn’t evidence, but if it’s “all Jews run global financial networks,” then presumably young Sam could determine it was false by self-reflection.
Without the actual statement, it’s hard to judge, although it sounds like there were a fair number of idiots among Sam’s new friends.
Yeah, even controlling for mom’s bias, they didn’t sound like a good group. Based on the list of rally groups Conrad gave, Proud Boys stuck out to me, but there’s a bunch there I don’t recognize, and if they really were the Proud Boys I’d expect more “we built Western civilization and should be proud of it” in his #brave truthtelling.
Tangential, but for me the interesting thing about the folks he fell in with is that it’s much more outgroup than fargroup, you know what I mean? Like, when we hear about someone’s 14 year old anarchist phase, we find it adorable. When we hear about someone’s 14 year old antifa phase, we are (rightly) Concerned. I wonder if it’s sheer bad luck that he fell in with this crowd rather than a fargroup mom would have seen as harmless; mom seems to think this is a serious problem right now, but what if there’s 9-1 odds he became a disgruntled abolish-the-department-of-education libertarian instead?
My takeaway is someone should have introduced the kid to SSC.
Wouldn’t let me edit…
Anyway, looking at that list we can rule out “Gays for Trump” (she probably would have mentioned if the kid came out as gay), Oath Keepers (not a former police/military), 3 Percenters (she would have mentioned if he got super into guns and joined a militia). I don’t know what “American Guard” is but it sounds like something that’s probably something like 3 Percenters so same logic applies. Maybe Patriot Prayer (pro-1A) but given his experience with feminism and his desire to make (masculine?) bonds, it’s almost certainly Proud Boys that he fell in with. And they’re not alt-right, and definitely not Spencer/WN alt-right. So I think the author is using “alt-right” as a stand-in for “fringe internet right-wing stuff.”
ETA: @Nick that’s a good point. I’ve thought for awhile that the “edgy internet right-wing nazi LARPers” thing is the modern version of the 14-year-olds in my high school who sat in the back of the class, dressed in all black, drew pentagrams on their notebooks and pretended to hail Satan. When the preachy social group in power is all about Jesus and how the Devil is evil and everywhere, kids are going to LARP as Satanists. When the preachy social group in power is all about Social Justice and how evil Nazis are everywhere, kids are going to LARP as Nazis.
I had a few of those at my school. One engaged in a bit of performative racism, the sort where he’d say the n word or something loud enough for his classmates to hear but not loud enough for the teacher to. This didn’t work on me, so he used Plato’s theory of forms instead, since I was already a dyed in the wool Aristotelian. Another was an obnoxious atheist who carried about Mein Kampf and, when prompted, would say “he was a great leader.”
And don’t tell anyone, but I had an anarchist phase in college too. I was a little more self-aware than most, I, uh, hope. It was basically Dorothy Day distributism meets James Scott’s two cheers for anarchism.
This is either a very good joke or you had a very weird high school.
It’s a very good joke the universe was playing on me.
Most people can’t do statistics or probabilistic reasoning. This leads to the two classic errors:
I tell you that men are taller than women on average. (Maybe I leave the “on average” implied.)
a. You decide that I must be wrong because you know a tall woman and a short man.
b. You decide that anyone who claims that there are tall women or short men must be wrong or lying.
Error (b) is common among the human b-odiversity adjacent, who will sometimes make some goofy comment about how blacks can’t be physicists because they’re not smart enough, or that women can’t be engineers because they’re not spatial enough.
Error (a) is common among people responding to the human b-odiversity adjacent.
The problem is that most people just don’t have the concept of a statistical distribution in their head, nor the difference between a population, the average of the population (mean, median, mode, whatever), and an individual drawn from the population (who may be an outlier). And while a person of normal intelligence can reason his way past that lack of underlying concept, most people find this much harder when they’re reasoning toward an unwanted conclusion–whether that’s “there really are reasons why women and men compete in different sports brackets” or “Neil DeGrasse Tyson really is smarter than me.”
Nick:
+1
OTOH, I’m not sure introducing a geeky smart idea-driven kid to the rationalist movement is the *optimal* way to improve his popularity at school….
Principal: What are you in the office for *this* time, Johnson?
Kid: Ms Saunders didn’t like it when I said her definition of social welfare was a motte-and-bailey.
Principal: Weren’t you in here last week for accusing the religion teacher of employing the dark arts?
Obviously there’s no problem with a Jew being a member of the alt-right; there was a notorious article a while back, and I believe the term alt-right derives from Richard Spencer’s mentor, Paul Gottfried. And, as I pointed out below, even full-blown Nazism can still attract Jews.
But it’s also pretty clear that hanging out with the alt-lite would’ve meant bumping up against the more hardcore alt-right, and it shouldn’t be surprising if a 14-year old was willing to be an edgy meme-lord for a while but formed little lasting attachment to the movement if around the edges of the movement there was plenty of real antisemitism, and if a good portion of the edgy memes were targeted against people like him.
@Conrad:
+1
This mom has the cognitive bias that anyone who doesn’t hate Trump is a Nazi, so when her victimized son replaced his eighth grade sociopath peers with r/thedonald, it feels like her son is becoming a Nazi. When she describes him meeting Nazis face-to-face, he comes across as a smart kid looking for internal inconsistencies in them.
Him parroting claims from the internet that Jews run the world speaks against that, but she owed it to the god of intellectual honesty to unpack that. After all, their family is Jewish, and a kid this smart shouldn’t have been telling her something like “all Jews are a conspiracy of the richest percent or two of the population.” If he made a truth claim like “a conspiratorial oligarchy of billionaries run the world, and more than 50% are Jewish”, well, uh… maybe? That data may not check out, and people generally take it as a prior that conspiracy theories are false, but her counter-claim doesn’t even mention that, just “well I’m sure not in the conspiracy.” That’s talking past her son with Red Herrings and such.
@Eugene:
+1
I can easily see this kid starting with anti-feminism, moving to the larger Trumpenproletariat, taking a deep dive into Anonymous right-wing meme culture, and then outgrowing that phase in part because the antisemitic memes feel hurtful.
@Nick:
What school was this, the School of Athens?
Plato: points up Forms!
Aristotle: karate chop hand Them’s fighting words!
@Le Maistre Chat 😀
This is really quite a lot to impute to the mom based on…very little, as far as I can tell? We already have her word that her son’s “biggest Reddit hero” was a Nazi; if we’re willing to believe she’s accurately characterizing this guy’s views, then that seems like a not unreasonable basis for her belief that her son is becoming influenced by Nazis.
More generally, it may shock you to learn, but upper-middle class Jews in big cities almost certainly know many people who not only don’t hate Trump, but even support him, whom they do not consider Nazis. It is certainly possible that the mom is biased, but this sort of caricaturing, armchair psychology of a person based on essentially nothing is not particularly useful.
EDIT: to add one more thought, that the assumption that the kid was hanging out on /r/the_donald seems to be based on Conrad’s assertion that there isn’t much real Nazi stuff on Reddit…but this would have been in mid-2017, before October 2017 when Reddit banned such subreddits as /r/nazi which I presume was a bit more spicy on the WN front than what remains. It’s possible the kid was on one of the milder forums that survived the ban, but I don’t know if we can be certain of that without more info.
His mom wrote that the subreddit he was on gave him a going away gift for camp and implies (although it’s not clear) that they knew it was a Jewish summer camp. I think it’s really unlikely he was hanging out on the nazi subreddit for that as well as other reasons.
I dunno if it would have been /TheDonald or something else. I’m guessing something edgier. But Jews being edgy about anti-Jewish things is unremarkable. Or past edgy into deeply critical.
You’re leaving out the part where she said a “black nazi.” That seems like some kind of troll in it for the lulz, not an actual Aryan National Socialist.
None of the groups attending the MOAR were ethno-nationalist types. If he’d wanted to attend Unite the Right, absolutely, but none of the Unite the Righters were at the MOAR. I think we can safely assume he was “alt-right” like Ben Shapiro is “alt-right.”
Also, if he were in with the WN type of alt-right, he wouldn’t have stopped at “Jews run global financial networks.” He would have mentioned stuff like “ZOG” (the Zionist Occupied Government). Also Horrible Banned Discourse. Also wouldn’t have been interested in a pro-Trump rally. The WN alt-right does not like Trump, who is the most philosemitic president ever. The WN shooter who attacked the Jews at the synagogue a few weeks ago in his manifesto called Trump a “zionist traitor.”
.
As I’ve already pointed out, while it’s unusual, there are indeed people from surprising demographics who become Nazis. What’s more, even if this guy was a troll, he may not have presented as one, and even further, the kinds of forums on which playing as a Nazi counts as “for the lulz” is very plausibly still the kind of forum where you’ll run into actual Nazis.
Unless you count the guy with the swastika flag and the black Nazi from Reddit.
The fact that he’s Jewish probably would have inoculated him against the most extreme anti semitism, and anyway, there are absolutely white nationalists who are open to Jews, including if I understand correctly, Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor.
This is not to say that we have to take the mom’s word at face value about the crowd he fell in with, but we really aren’t given much information beyond what she says, and the idea that we can decide that no, actually, he was just an ordinary Trump supporter and then use this as a basis to psychoanalize the mom is just nuts.
I’d like so find out what kind of truth there is to that last part, or if its the kind of thing only people constantly on alert for Nazism see. These special dog-whistle experts find it everywhere despite the total lack of objective evidence. Like, at a Cubs game; at a congressional hearing; in Andrew Yang youtube videos; crappy jokes; and just about everywhere. I don’t have much faith in such assessments without evidence.
For what it’s worth, this also doesn’t appear to be true: American Guard was at both rallies, in particular Brien James. So too were Proud Boys, and the associated Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights though I’m not sure if any notable individuals from these groups attended both rallies.
Just to follow up on this: at MOAR were:
3 percenters, American Guard, Oath Keepers, and Proud Boys. In fact, all of those groups were present to some extent at Unite the Right.
Another group whose members were present at MOAR, though not at Unite the Right, was Aryan Terror Brigade who seem to be pretty unambiguous neo-Nazis.
In short, while MOAR was less definitively tied to the alt-right than Unite the Right, there seems to have been plenty of presence by people who felt comfortable at UtR, and at least a few open white supremacists; I don’t think we can conclude from his attendance at this rally that the kid was only interacting with the alt-lite.
@Clutzy
I don’t understand what you’re asking: are you suggesting I’m wrong that forums where Nazism is acceptable as a joke are more likely to be forums where actual Nazism is present? Or are you suggesting that even the attempt to identify this guy as a Nazi is suspect?
Let’s be charitable, perhaps Aryan Terror Brigade just want to peacefully stand against the more radical claims of the identitarian left!
Proud Boys aren’t “alt-right”? I don’t think that can be correct, as McInnes publically attempted to distance the group from the alt-right in 2017 (meaning they were associated at that time).
And their stance is explicitly endorsing themes of “Western” supremacy, as well as explicitly endorsing political violence. They claim this has nothing to do with “race or ethnicity”, but … that looks very much like the same thing gussied up.
OK, I’m trying to look up what the Proud Boys endorse through Wiki-walking that article’s citations. The article claims they explicitly endorse political violence, and it’s not [citation needed]. So I’m looking:
The Guardian
I think we should believe the leader of any organization over what the Southern Poverty Law Center says about them, because the SPLC is just the cult of Morris Dees and whichever of his friends he likes enough to give high-paid non-profit jobs to. This has been extensively documented as far back as 1994!
“Montgomery Advertiser (Volume 167 Issue 45). The Advertiser Co. p. 1A. ‘Some who’ve worked with Mr. Dees call him phony, the television evangelist of civil rights who misleads donors into thinking the center desperately needs their money.'”
Next link is the National Review, which manages to do better:
So it looks like McInnes considers violence a sometimes food (most charitable guess: only in self-defense). With the Proud Boys being as decentralized as they are, it’s likely that there’s a consensus of endorsing political violence just like Antifa that McInnes couldn’t stop when he feels like eating vegetables instead.
Im saying there is little evidence for assertion 1, and there is massive evidence for assertion 2.
Again, the way the Proud Boys are doing it is with a wink and a nod. They say they are for something, then claim they have been taken out of context. Their hazing initiation seems to involve being “beaten in” . There is an embrace of violence that seems intrinsic.
We can also look at McInnes’ own words:
This in an effort of distancing himself from what he perceives the group has become. He disavowed the Unite the Right rally, but when he left the new chairman is someone who did attend but now claims “they didn’t
inhaleparticipate” in the really bad stuff.To me this looks like the desire to walk right up to the line and mock people as you put one foot over, pull it back and then claim you weren’t ever over the line.
@HBC: That seems a fairly accurate appraisal.
Le Mastre Chat:
My not-so-informed take is that SPLC labeling someone a racist or purveyor of hatred is approximately as meaningful as the John Birch society labeling someone as a communist in, say, 1970.
I thought the Proud Boys were basically the right-wing version of antifas, and typically both groups showed up at a protest to get into a fight with one another. Which would be fine if they didn’t get other people caught up in it, but of course, the kind of guys who show up to a political rally looking for a fight usually aren’t going to be careful about whose head they bash in.
Antifas and proud boys both seem like exactly the sort of people we employ policemen, prosecutors, and jailers for.
I actually had no idea until this thread that the Proud Boys engaged in violence. I thought they were a more ideologically focused alt-right group who engaged in “it’s okay to be white”–type lib-bait. TIL, I guess.
I’m not terribly informed here–this is my impression.
I stand corrected. I did not know Proud Boys were right-wing antifa.
I can’t stand McGinnis but I don’t think that’s fair. As far as I know, the Proud Boys only show up to events branded as “right-wing” to beat up Antifa that try to attack the event. That’s entirely defensive behavior, and largely the opposite of Antifa.
After reading the whole thing it strikes me as a little far fetched. The characters (especially the school & alt right) are painted in broad strokes, the turnaround is so immediate, and of course it wraps up with the son firmly committed to the correct cause. The way it ends especially reminds me of the tweets where someone’s 4 year old says something profound. It just rings false to me.
The story of him being at the protest is the only part that strikes me as absolutely ridiculous. Yeah, I am trying to be cool, so I brought my Mom to the Protest and bonded with her. The bullcrap meter is off the charts on that one.
I’m willing to believe that the broad strokes of the story happened.
But this definitely didn’t. I can buy “cult”, but not “hostage”.
That reads really weird. If he actually said it, I wonder if he’s fishing for his mom’s approval.
I strongly suspect that the original sequence of events that led to this article have been transformed to make it a better story.
@paulharvey165
That was my take as well, maybe there’s a kernel of truth lodged deep, but it just read too much like a narrative rather than a report, and I just found it too hard to credit much of it.
You are quite correct that it is suspicious. But it could both be true, and suspicious anyway, so I’ll assume it’s legit until evidence suggests otherwise.
It all read true to me until the visits to the protests. Everything after that seems like wish-fulfillment and their are a few very suspicious bits that are totally out of character for a young teenager:
-She clips out a bunch of articles detailing how he was suckered in by a cult, and he laps it up. If you know a teenager who you think needs some advice, try this and report back.
What kid would want to talk about this every day for weeks?
They talked every day for weeks about this, but this part never came up?
He’s now in 10th grade, and he wants to go with his mom to a protest? This comes across like the closing line to a Lifetime movie or after-school special.
I think the mom thinks this is exactly what happened, but is wrong on the causes. He changed his mind because he changed his friends. Once the Redditors knew he was a kid, they treated him differently, and he didn’t get the same respect. Some probably started to bully him. Then he made friends with very liberal, private school friends, and changed his politics to match them. It’s the peers that is important to the story, not the mother, the mother just thinks she is responsible, as most parents would.
Wait, who let Judith Rich Harris into the discussion?
It’s reverse conspiracy theories, basically the same thing he’d lapped up in the first place (“the normies are misleading you”). Might work.
Yeah, that was my reaction too. I suspect that what actually happened was more along the lines of him getting some actual friends at school and spending less time online (and therefore less time parroting stuff he’d seen on Reddit), but that didn’t make a good enough story so the mum reworked the ending to make it more pat.
That’s actually a really good point. I hadn’t considered that maybe the whole thing is fabricated, but I could definitely see it. Very plausible.
The mother seems to be losing her mind over this, and I wonder if the kid really was in danger of ending up as a Nazi or was just falling amongst very right-wing types. It’s hard to tell.
The school needed a good kick up the transom, and I’m surprised the parents rolled over so easily – maybe it was for the sake of “don’t rock the boat or you’ll get tagged as a troublemaker, just get out quietly”. But good God, my late mother would have eaten their hearts raw if we were accused without cause (if we were in the wrong, she’d have supported the school, but if the school was blaming us for nothing then she would not have backed down like this).
So if you’re thirteen, you’ve been railroaded on a fake charge, and your parents are imitating doormats instead of defending you yeah I think it’s very likely you’ll turn to other sources of validation and support. And maybe those other sources won’t be nice.
EDIT: All that being said, I agree with the other people saying the story is a little bit too neat and tidy in some aspects; I wonder if it’s more fiction than reality in order to make a point (if Mommy is a freelance journalist looking to get her foot in the door being commissioned for articles, then this is the kind of irresistible clickbait as an “Anonymous Washington Family This Totally Happened To Them, It Could Happen To Your Kid Too!” angle). I’ve read some articles where I’ve had the reaction “yeah, that happened” because the situation described was just too pat.
Though maybe I’m unsympathetic becaase people who go about constantly finding it “hard to choke out the words because I started crying” when they see “hand-drawn heart” on home-made posters just rub me up the wrong way.
The only real way to fight against the school in this case would have been to do so very publicly through the media. It is fairly easy to see why that might not have great appeal, especially without any assurance that the media would even portray the family and their plight in a positive way.
The parents said “F you” and left the school. I think you are underestimating the potential toll that actually taking the fight to them could have had.
Based on some of the views mentioned, there was at least an openly “Nazi” element to the groups he was in, even if the groups weren’t explicitly or unilaterally Nazi across the board.
Yeah, in the US schools are basically invincible.
Legally they are from actual liability, but their suspension/expulsion choices are constantly questioned, oft delayed, and commonly overturned.
The problem, quite frankly, is the parents failure to respond with overwhelming rage at the administrators, and the child anticipated this meekness, and he did not respond with the appropriate vigor in defending himself. If the kid was a proper shit, he would likely have walked over the admin. These mini tyrants who are jealous of their fiefdoms are paper tyrants.
EX: In HS a bunch of us got called in for egging, the quiet kid was treated similarly put in a room for several hours, two other cheeky asses and I were back in class before the period ended. Had it gone further my dad would have laughed at them for wasting his time.
The father walked out of the meeting with the administrator, leaving his wife and son. That is 100% inexcusable. His son was being threatened with criminal prosecution, and he just walked out! They needed to absolutely get a lawyer and refuse to say anything until they had legal representation for him.
It is an extremely important thing to teach your kids: if you’re put in a situation like that, get your parents there to help. Only really works if your parents are smart enough to understand when they need legal representation though.
The old blog ThisIsIOZ (now defunct) had some important advice:
If you’re being questioned by some authority and they tell you you don’t need a lawyer: get a lawyer. If the authority tells you that “you don’t want to bring lawyers into this because that’ll make this confrontational,” you are being railroaded and you ABSOLUTELY need a lawyer.
+100
Walking out *with his kid*, however, would have been entirely reasonable. “We’re done here. Any further conversation on this matter will happen through our lawyer.”
albatross11,
Yep, totally. As soon as he feels the admin is not being reasonable, then it is time to get out of there and get a lawyer involved.
The world is only nice to an elect. The rest of us have to fight for everything we have. 2019 America is more like Cobra Kai than Blue people are raised to/want to believe.
This seems like a non-sequitor…what does the quoted portion have to do with red vs. blue ideology?
(I will also re-register my objection that the parents didn’t “lay down like doormats” and that any fight against the school system on this would almost certainly have been worse for the kid)
So if you’re thirteen, you’ve been railroaded on a fake charge, (in the name of feminism) and your parents are imitating doormats instead of defending you yeah I think it’s very likely you’ll turn to other sources of validation and support. And maybe those other sources won’t be nice.
What it has to do with ideology is who hurt him. If he’d been railroaded on a fake charge in turn-of-the-20th-century Prussia and his parents hadn’t fought authority harder, I’d expect him to join one of those Marxist/anarchist/nihilist/etc. sitting room societies out of Oscar Wilde’s Vera.
Well sure, I don’t disagree with that line of thinking at all, but you said
and I swear I’m not being intentionally obtuse but I don’t really see the connection between that statement and the quoted one above.
Yeah, responding by saying “Screw this, we’re pulling you out of this school and moving you to a private school where they’ll treat you properly” doesn’t sound like imitating a doormat, it sounds like a very sensible thing to do. The alternative would have been to take their kid out of the meeting and do all further communication with the school admins via a lawyer, but that’s likely to cost a ton of money and end up with a “victory” where your kid gets put through the wringer.
@albatross
The “screw this” came far too late. The minute their kid is being interrogated he should have been conditioned into “screw this” mode by his parents. His parents should have come in and threatened everything (it works mostly, unless your kid is documented groping other kids). This tactic works even for guilty kids most the time.
Given his alleged ostracism, the kid probably didn’t have any real friends. If we are being charitable and assuming the story isn’t false or grossly exaggerated, this would explain it all. The girl felt comfortable accusing him because he is a creepy kid that the kids already thought was creepy. The school put him in a room because he was unable to articulate any defense because he lacks any self confidence. His parents didn’t know what to do because they also lack any awareness of how to deal with social conflict, so they ran and hid. Then he didn’t make new friends quickly because, creepy. He made online friends instead, this appears to have increased his assertiveness all over, thereby developing friends at the new place because he’s not as creepy anymore.
This is a very good point. I miss having DrBeat here to tell us “everything is popularity.”
Oblig. “All Is Lost.”
I don’t think assuming story is true is “charitable”. That is just “the default position in absence of contrary evidence”.
Someone else at some point mentioned that it may have been less that he was ostracized and more that he withdrew as a result of depression/emotional distress/whatever.
People are also underestimating how common it is to lose or become distant from friends who were legitimately friends at some point in the past. It can even happen without any major catalyzing incident.
@acymetric
It’s one thing if you lose touch over the summer and get put in all different classes the next year, but from the sounds of it this happened in the middle of the year, sometime during first semester, hence the mid year transfer. I think that’s a much stranger time to suddenly lose all one’s friends.
The theory that he withdrew from them is a good one, though; it didn’t occur to me when I first read it.
This is my read as well. It is, in particular, a basically unheard of turn of events in males. The complete opposite, a bunker mentality, is what you would expect. I’d also consider a friend group schism if there was an insider snitch, but unless middle school kids have turned into a new species losing a popularity contest to a snitch is a nuclear level event. There was a kid at our sister school who basically lost personhood and was known solely as, “the snitch”.
Let me try to clarify my thought process: there are affluent Blue people who have the moral luck, or whatever X factor, to go their whole lives without the Powers That Be kicking them in the balls/ovaries hard enough to mess up their life. Others get victimized and don’t see it coming, like this Jewish family. Others might get so woke they know they’ll go broke (like the opera singer whose child shamed her into giving up her career). There’s an elite that navigates the progressive hegemony of our society successfully, maybe by a combination of skill and dumb luck, and then there’s the Blue tribe’s broken ones, and then the Red tribe.
Howard Zinn, Heather has two Mommies, Tucson Unified Mexican American Studies ring any bells? Hell, within my lifetime, in the 21st Century, whether or not everyone should shift to having totally racially integrated proms was a live issue.
You are deeply, sorely mistaken if you think trying to explore Blue Tribe values in school systems isn’t a constant struggle, or if you don’t think that a core part of being Blue Tribe is recognizing nothing is as fair or just as the myths and legends you were taught about your society when you were younger.
I think there’s a conflation going on in Le Maistre’s comment between blue tribe and upper middle class blue tribe. The blue/red tribe split is crappy terminology anyways though.
I’d say a lot of the upper middle class whether blue or red tribe has a stronger belief in the niceness of the world to them and people like them than is probably accurate. A blue tribe person who gets railroaded by a purity spiral or office politics and suddenly realizes that being white, moderately successful, and having the right politics is not a magic shield against spurious accusations seems like a similar realization to a red tribe person who gets laid off during a recession and suddenly realizes that working hard, being moderately successful, and having the right politics will not guarantee a good life in the market economy.
Most people are too busy or lazy to do the first thing to others much fortunately. But when the eye of sauron hits you, boy…
Getting laid off is probably a more common experience, but that may mean people are a little more prepared for it when it happens.
Yes, this. Upper middle class people assume life will be fine, the Powers That Be will never crush someone like them.
Well yeah, but that isn’t unique to the blue upper middle class folks. That’s upper middle class folks generally. Which dangers/risks are underestimated might vary by political leaning (although I’m pretty sure it makes a nice Venn diagram with lots of overlap), but if you’re going to suggest that blue tribe people are uniquely vulnerable to this among the UMC generally you’re going to need to show your work.
Also worth remembering that Blue/Red tribes are not monoliths, and the fact that someone is aligned with either does not mean all the varied beliefs held by various people along that spectrum are held by a given individual.
In summary, this seems like the worst kind of strawmanning/weakmanning to me.
Those African American Nazis are getting to be a real problem.
(Seriously, what?)
I mean, they’re a thing in Call of Duty: World War II. Though it’s easier/funnier to be a black Nazi there than in real life…
I assumed this was someone doing a first-rate job of trolling, assuming it described some real person instead of someone made up to create a better story.
I’ve mentioned before the two most well-known Jewish Nazis; it’s obviously unlikely and bizarre, but America is a big place, and you should expect at least a handful of weirdos to end up adopting ideologies completely at odds with their background.
Yes, America is a big place, but the article wasn’t “my son was caught up in the alt right by very unusual circumstances which probably wouldn’t have happened to anyone else in the whole country”. It was clearly trying to say that that wasn’t an unusual thing.
Trying to be, but failed.
I’m talking about the black Nazi albatross and the others mention upthread, not the kid himself: he gets only a single mention in the article, and there is no suggestion that he is anything other than unusual.
I’m assuming a black nazi would be one espousing the benefits of National Socialism for black people, and not one extolling the superiority of the Aryan race.
Having some agreement on ideas or theory of government with Nazis is not all that uncommon. (I think you can find some black nationalists whose ideology isn’t all that distant from ideological Nazism.) Adopting the trappings and symbols of Nazis (which signals “scary evil nutcase” in modern American culture) is much, much more rare. For good reason–most people don’t want to be taken as scary evil nutcases. Also, the real Nazis and most of the people who now adopt those trappings and symbols hated/hate blacks, so black Nazis aren’t even going to get the few allies that those trappings might otherwise have won them, to make up for the enemies.
But really, this guy was probably putting on an act for attention/lulz. It’s possible he was sincere, but that’s not the way to bet.
I ran into a bizarre little corner of Twitter where it seems that there are Somali Nazis, or at least Fascists. Fascists capitalized, because they carry around pictures of Il Duce.
Apparently there’s some nice Fascist/Futurist architecture in Somalia and Ethiopia, and some nostalgia for the Italians.
Bizarre racial theories weren’t anywhere near as central to Italian Fascism as they were to Nazism, so that’s not quite as weird as Somali Nazis would be.
There are Slavic Nazis, though, and that’s not far off.
Fascism as a theory of government doesn’t need to have any racial basis, and there’s no reason at all it would be exclusive to whites.
The article says the African-American Nazi was a reddit hero of Sam’s and posed with him for a selfie at the Mother of All Rallies.
Is there any evidence that there’a black nazi redditor, ideally one who attended the MOAR? You would think the guy would stand out.
There could be MOAR news stories mentioning him (though it sounds like the media was more interested in the guy dressed in swastikas).
Precognition is hard, okay? Typically we only get advance notice of statistical information, and it’s usually weird statistical information at that. But according the the National Center for Esoteric Intelligence, it is likely that something very bad will happen in the US in 2025. We know this because in 2026 and for several years thereafter, more people will move from the US to Canada than the reverse. Typically, net migration is the other way. The question for you worthies is, simply, what is going to happen?
There’s a lot of America, and as much as we might sometimes not like each other much, it’s probably easier to find another part of the country that is more agreeable than the hassle and transition of moving to another country, and even a change in political leadership doesn’t change this much, not quickly. So you’re probably looking for something that would tend to affect the whole country, or a huge part of it.
Maybe something happens to make NYC uninhabitable, and nearby Canadian cities are inviting to refugees, being similar in culture (… somewhat?) and climate. Also, there’s no longer any Canadian immigration to Canada. Maybe terrorists have poisoned the water or something?
There’s the obvious yellowstone super volcano, but this would probably negatively affect Canada as well.
So, politically, maybe there’s a war with China or Russia or another major power which leads to a draft. During vietnam, about 100,000 Americans emigrated to Canada.
Or perhaps there’s refugees from the resistance when Trump declared himself God-Emperor for life.
I thought about a medical outbreak, but that seems like Canada would close the border if it got so bad that large numbers were fleeing. Maybe they’re too nice? “Come on in, but make sure you use the hand-sanitizer at the border, eh?”
But let’s be optimistic and assume it’s something nice for Canada, like massive global warming* from a sudden solar warming or something similar opening up vast areas of tundra to settlement while making the US coastal regions largely uninhabitable.
*I’m not entirely sure massive global warming will be an absolute boon for Canada, but relative to the US, it seems to benefit.
A disaster in the Northeast is an interesting suggestion. What about Alaska instead? Maybe an ecological catastrophe requires people to steadily leave the Anchorage area, and a big fraction decide it’s easier to settle in Canada than Washington.
It is helpful to know what kind of numbers we’re dealing with. The numbers I found are somewhat dated, but we only need in the ballpark of a net change of 30,000 people give or take (little over 70,000 going from Canada to the US, and a little over 40,000 doing the reverse per year). Of course, this number fluctuates a lot, but Nick’s suggestion of Anchorage probably gets us there without any other changes.
This also doesn’t require “vast amounts of newly opened land” or anything like that. If the change was reasonably well distributed across all major/semi-major cities in Canada it probably wouldn’t even cause much of a blip in housing supply.
Following on Randy’s final suggestion, one should consider that it may have been something good happening to Canada rather than something bad to the U.S.
I think it likely that Canada will benefit by global warming. Sea level rise at current rates will have a trivially small effect. Warming due to the greenhouse effects tends to be greater in cold times and places than in warm. So I can easily see the effective northern border of Canada moving north, making considerably more usable land available.
But I can’t see it happening to a significant degree by 2025.
The only thing that strikes me as plausible that fast is some sort of political breakdown in the U.S., such as a disputed presidential election in which neither side will accept the other’s verdict. Or an expansion of the recent pattern of using law enforcement machinery in political conflicts.
Suppose the incumbent party charges the presidential candidate of the out party with something and arrests him or her. I could see the outs viewing that, not unreasonably, as a power grab and some of them leaving.
Three possible options, with 30,000 net change being our goal. Trump wins re-election, and Congress goes red, and they pass a comprehensive immigration law, that severely curtails immigration across the board. Same number goes from US to Canada, but we let less Canadians in.
Boeing is worse than we think, and their CEO, and Board of Directors, and all of upper management knowing broke safety regulations and are, in an unprecedented move, convicted of manslaughter on all the plane deaths, and the entire company goes bankrupt. Washington States economy tanks, causing an exodus to California and Vancouver.
Congress never passes any healthcare law, and the health care premium death spiral is worse than projected. Health care premiums double once again, and less Canadians want to move here and more Americans consider leaving.
Trump sworn in for 3rd term.
A depression.
Those are contagious. It would hit Canada too.
Makes total sense. After the total collapse of the EU, we needed somewhere to put all those refugees, and the best places available were the recently annexed Northern Provinces.
Nothing bad, just a uranium rush in Saskatchewan.
Something that renders big chunks of the US uninhabitable, I guess? If it was just a question of a city being destroyed, people would just move to other parts of the country. A dirty bomb being detonated seems likely.
A grand political bargain is struck: Canada needs US assistance to push back against Russian and Chinese encroachment on territorial claims in the Arctic; in return, Canada takes some pressure off of the thorny question of illegal immigration by offering permanent residency to individuals who were covered by DACA. The president gets to trot out a compassionate resolution that avoids the land mine of amnesty. Canada gets a way to maintain immigration targets as more applicants from mainland China start getting rejected due to deteriorating relations with the PRC and domestic anger over real estate affordability in the competitive 905 ridings around the GTA.
Or, more realistically, a very anti-business president gets elected in a post-Trump backlash and a few big companies move their headquarters across the border each quarter as the spectre of punitive regulations and taxes becomes more and more imminent.
AOC lost in the general election. To Trump Jr.
A huge economic boom in Canada fueled heavily by immigrant workers from the US?
Global warming makes the US unbearable and Canada temperate.
The media hounds on the precog’s impending disaster narrative to such an extent that a plethora of Americans make plans to move to Canada, a long arduous process which only came to fruition around 2026.
And thus the prophecy was fulfilled.
I’m guessing the only time in history that this has happened was during the Vietnam war, so I’d bet on history rhyming than some other event: War with China.
That would be dramatically different war. Even if both sides agree to fight without nukes, it would be World War III.
Yeah, I was just thinking about that myself. I amend my answer. The war would be a proxy war with Russia in Venezuela.
After another term for Trump, Yang wins 2024 and introduces UBI for US citizens. The economy takes a hit, while at the same time there is a massive price hike in all basic amenities of life, food, rent and stuff, and many illegal immigrant or non-naturalised legal immigrants move on to Canada.
Second American Civil War. Next question? (Timing suggests you’re looking at “Trump wins 2020, Democrat – quite possibly AOC – wins 2024, and the most extreme sectors of the American Right go full Second Amendment Solutions immediately thereafter”.)
Nationwide, tailgate partiers primed for “Super Bowl LIX” (Panthers vs. Jaguars, no less) are justifiably upset when the NFL opts to instead refer to it as Super Bowl 59, to avoid the obvious connotations. The resulting riots combine with ongoing unrest in the wake of the 97th Academy Award nominations to form the biggest Culture War since MarvelGate in ’23.
South Bay Meetup:
We are having another one in San Jose this Saturday, starting at 2:00.
My friend Muriel Curtis spent ten years as a high school teacher, then ten years as a sailor on tall ships. For the past nineteen years she has been running Station Maine, experiential education, teaching kids to go out on the Atlantic in oversized rowing boats.
She has now, with some help from me, self-published a book about Station Maine, what is wrong with how we bring up kids and what to do about it. Since I’m not the one selling it I assume this doesn’t count as a classified ad, and I think people here would find it interesting.
Come to Oars: Experiential Education on the Coast of Maine
And there will be a kindle of it as soon as I can figure out why Calibre is choking on some of her photos.
As a high school teacher who wishes I could go sail tall ships, I should probably read this, huh?
Yes.
SSC, what is a genre you wish would get more love? In books, games, whatever.
I’m a fan of Lost Continent/Beneath the Earth stories. Alas, the age of exploration and modern science have largely vanquished them. They’re a part of the science fiction genre’s heritage, but I’m actually not sure how much we produce lost, uh, planet stories these days. I can’t remember the last one I’ve read, anyway.
Alternate question: what genre mashup do you wish was a thing? Tell us all about the historical theological detective novel that should have been.
I guess I just like stuff that doesn’t care if I like it, but only if I like it? I dunno, that’s super paradoxical, but show me a self confident weirdo of a series, one that is just its own thing and doesn’t give a flying flip if I read/watch it, and there’s like a 50% chance I’ll fall in love.
Give me more anime like Kaiji.
More books like the Terra Ignota series.
More web comics like Homestuck.
Just, I dunno, more content creators doing the stuff that they feel like doing, not the stuff that looks like what is currently most successful.
I hear you for sure. Recently I decided to look into Umineko no Naku Koro ni because it sounded more or less like that and was rather disappointed. =/ Though I did the anime and not the games, so maybe it’s an adaptation problem. It’s got me wanting something really well done in its genre—the murder mystery where the storm has taken out the bridge and the phone lines, with a hefty dose of the apparently supernatural and competent discussion of logic/rationality.
FWIW, the old scuttlebutt I heard is that the Umineko anime is one of the worst anime adaptations of the last couple of decades (as in, I’m not sure the people who are both Nasuverse and When They Cry fans would actually consider the Umineko anime a worse adaptation than the Tsukihime one, but they’d have to think about it); even the manga has something of a bad rap. So I’d have higher priors on adaptation problems than usual.
Seconded. It’s nice to see a story that just wants to be its own thing.
On that note, have you read/watched Golden Kamuy? The plot itself* is pretty good but half the show’s time is devoted to the writer geeking out over military history or hunting or life among the indigenous peoples of Japan and Russia. There’s a serious story about war and trauma in there somewhere, but the series never takes itself very seriously and doesn’t feel dark at all. It’s super underrated (imo) and if you like idiosyncratic shows you might like it. (Manga is superior to the anime.)
*Russo-Japanese war veteran helps an Ainu girl find a huge stash of gold, the location of which is encoded in tattoos on the backs of 24 escaped prisoners. And along the way they go hunting and fight lots of bears and get drawn into all sorts of drama because other people are after the gold too.
True story: I was reading just now some reviews by Ted Gioia, and I came across this description,
I wonder if this is not what you’re getting at too. In which case the books Gioia mentions might interest you! I can’t speak for Heidegger, Joyce, or Pynchon, but I did like House of Leaves, and based on reputation, Gravity’s Rainbow is probably the most accessible of the other three. And I rather like the “ambition to dominate the reader” description regardless.
Already done – The Name of the Rose.
I kind of miss the relatively optimistic “Atomic Age” sci-fi genre. This covers a moderate amount of ground; for example The Incredibles has a bit of this, the Golden Age (some transition to Silver Age) feel. But I also miss the civilizationally confident stories where the solution is “I mean, X threat is dangerous, but it’s nothing that a nation fresh off kicking butt in WWII can’t handle with more guns.” As an example, compare the original 1950’s “The Thing” with the 1980’s remake (ignore the more recent one). Both good movies, but the second one is much more bleak about humanity’s prospects.
I also agree with missing the “explorer / lost civilization” genre as a casualty of modern maps.
I wish there were more slice-of-life type movies. It doesn’t have to strictly adhere to some formula, I just think there isn’t enough movies that represent day to day life for people and the things they concern themselves with. Take something like Ingrid Goes West, which perfectly encapsulates the social media landscape over the last couple of years.
Also, straight up adventure movies, like The African Queen. How many movies like that still come out?
We need way more adventure movies
Boyhood was the most “slice of life” movie I’ve seen probably ever. Some people really liked it (including me), others hated it.
I liked it too but like I said, I’m also looking for more regular movies to just talk about current concerns. Movies shouldn’t be so relecutant to “date” themselves in some way. If you watch a tv show from the early 2000’s, you will not hear one character utter the words “9/11”, even though it permeated that time. You can’t go a day without hearing someone talk about Donald Trump today but you wouldn’t know that by watching our movies. And sure, politics influences our culture to an extent that you can see influences in movies that aren’t nominally about politics, but those are abstract enough that if you don’t already know about our culture, you wouldn’t have guessed it.
And yes, directly talking about Donald Trump would be very controversial so I understand why they don’t do that. There’s also the fact that people want a little escapism and are trying to get away from Trump. I get that. But there are so many other things they could say that are less controversial but they don’t.
It would have to be done in an extremely tasteful, delicate* way, and I think few are capable of collaborating with such a result. Hollywood, at least as much as most other big cities, is a place where it’s hard to amass a large collection of specialized artists who all agree on where a timely controversial theme belongs in the importance-hierarchy that naturally grows out of controlling an audience’s attention.
*Delicate in the sense of being artfully woven into the movie so it isn’t a distraction from the intended direction of the movie, not in the sense of walking on eggshells.
I wish “unashamedly off the wall (fake?) deep sci-fi brooding with a ridiculous premise played straight” got more love, honestly. We’re getting Death Stranding soon, so that’ll be nice, but yeah, like, give me more Dune (book and movie) and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and Texhnolyze and Kill Six Billion Demons, please.
You might enjoy Alejandro Jorodowsky’s Metabarons series, which is an offpring of his failed attempt to adapt Dune into a movie. It is absolutely, over the top, balls to the wall crazy, played completely and utterly straight. Also gloriously epic art by Juan Gimenez.
You might also enjoy the manwha Tower of God. Frankly just look at the introductory preview, if you feel any spark of interest, then give it a couple of pages. If it grabs you by the eyeballs and doesn’t let go, then you’re in for an epic wild ride.
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I want to see more stuff along the lines of Vance’s Dying Earth books, or Gene Wolfe’s New Sun stories, or William Hope Hodgson’s Night Land. A smattering of examples came out in the Seventies and Eighties (Wolfe’s the most famous one, but there’s also, for example, M. John Harrison’s Viriconium), but there’s very little more recent material.
Sword-and-planet stuff needs more love too, but there, at least, there’s plenty of older material to read.
I’ve read Viriconium and New Sun and enjoyed them both, would you recommend Dying Earth and Night Land?
Dying Earth, absolutely, although be aware that it’s more on the fantasy side of this subgenre. Night Land is… a bit of an acquired taste. It’s a staggeringly imaginative setting, but the characters are pretty flat and the plot’s nothing special. More importantly, Hodgson in his infinite wisdom decided to use a kind of creaky pseudo-17th-century prose that most people find difficult to excruciating, though some think it helps instill a sense of alien-ness.
I’d say give it a try, and if you bounce off, you bounce off. There’s also a retelling in more standard prose floating around under the name of “The Night Land: A Story Retold”, or you could try starting with some of the fanfic for it — which is surprisingly abundant, sometimes professionally published, and probably more consistently good than for any other work I’ve seen. Might have something to do with the fact that it’s a book you only hear about if you’re already a pretty serious genre buff.
Another possible option for historical theological detective stories, depending on whether fiction written in the past about the author’s present somewhat counts as historical fiction: the Father Brown stories. (If you haven’t read them, do; they’re good.)
Bouncing off what Hoopyfreud said, I like things like Kill 6 Billion Demons and Dune, science fiction (probably fantasy too) that uses its own lore a lot, where the characters are strongly based in their own rich culture (or at least culture that’s not western, K6BD seems to have a lot of Hindu and Buddhist influences, imho).
If you’ve not read Lord of Light and like K6BD I highly recommend it.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Too broad a construal; there’s a lot of stuff that fits this bill, like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or (even more loosely) The Man Who Was Thursday. Both of which are very good, but don’t scratch the same itch as The Name of the Rose. And Borges was a big Chesterton fan, and I feel like he might have done some things in this vein too, but all I can think of is “Death and the Compass.”
More Thief / Deus Ex style “immersive sims.” And in a similar vein, more realistic-ish stealth games, like Splinter Cell.
1) Post-post-apocalypse stories (a la the last couple of seasons of The Walking Dead), where survivors have to start rebuilding civilization.
2) Medical mysteries (a la House, MD). There’s plenty of murder mysteries with doctor protagonists, but not many where the mystery is the diagnosis itself.
3) Dimension-hopping (a la Sliders). Lots of stories of people stuck in specific alternate dimensions, but not many people stuck constantly hopping to new ones.
4) Secondary World Urban Fantasy. I don’t get the hang-up here; lots of people think that Urban Fantasy is definitionally in “our world” and find the idea of a secondary world with modern technology shocking and revolutionary.
This premise give the creators so much, too. You take your sci-fi anthology series like Black Mirror or Twlight zone, and you add a recurring cast that also functions as audience surrogate viewpoint characters. Plus, your portals offer pre-paid Deus ex-Machina for any suspenseful situation you can’t write a good escape from.
One of the most fun sets of RPG campaigns I’ve ever run in used this as the basis, and I would love to find a group interested in that sort of campaign again.
The basic premise is as follows: a very Doc Brown-esque good natured mad scientist has a portal mechanism capable of reaching alternate realities and needs to test it out (and hopefully make enough money to keep researching it). One character traditionally was the mad scientist’s much younger and far more adventurous nephew (leading to the campaigns being dubbed the ‘Uncle campaigns’), who was almost always a recently discharged veteran (to explain the combat skills). The game is easily capable of being run one on one, with multiple players the others can be the nephew’s friends or hirelings of Uncle. The dimensional portal has GM defined limitations: can only be opened every so often or on a schedule, can only transport a certain amount of stuff, etc.
What this allows the GM to do is throw anything and everything at the party; when I was a player, the worlds we explored included a dinosaur filled lost world, a steampunk alternative history, and a zombie apocalypse world. When I had a turn at GM, I threw at them a traditional fantasy dungeon, a post-post-apocalypse cyberpunk dystopia, and a dieselpunk world of adventure.
Two things I vividly remember from the series of campaigns: as a player, I successfully blackmailed the steampunk world-dominating Science Council with a biology skill check and a PowerPoint presentation. As a GM, the players bribed a faction of the post-post-apocalypse cyberpunk dystopia into backing their plan to technologically boost one of the nations in the dieselpunk world of adventure, which led to such interesting research dives as ‘would it be possible to modify a DeHavilland Mosquito airframe to carry a modern anti-ship missile?’
There are some drawbacks to this as a campaign. First, it requires a good generic system that can handle just about anything you can throw at it. Second, it gives a lot of power to the players to choose to deeply interact with (or completely ignore) anything you created. Some stuff I spent a lot of time working out got ignored, some things I figured the players would ignore got a lot of focus time.
Post post apocalypse stories you say? An author I know recently released some books that are in that vein. It’s a bit post-rebuild, but the strains of the apocalypse are still very apparent. The book series in Black Knight and the first book is Awakening, by Christian J. Guilland. I highly recommend them.
A good example of a post-post (or maybe post-post-post) apocalypse story is SM Stirling’s _The Peshawar Lancers_. The premise (no spoilers) is that some kind of large comet/asteroid impact wrecked most of North America east of the mississippi, and shut down the gulfstream + induced nuclear winter for several years, leading to starvation and collapse in Europe. 150 or so years later, the dominant power in the world is the British Empire, with its seat moved to India, and other major power centers in South Africa and Australia. Technological progress stalled for quite awhile when the whole Northern hemisphere underwent a massive die-off, so the high end of technology in the story is steampunk-ish.
The story takes place 150 years after the apocalypse, but the whole world is still massively shaped by it.
And there are lots of nods to fun bits of literature, from Kipling to Flashman to John Carter.
I suppose the Wheel of Time series works as a post-post apocalypse story–the whole history of the world in which the story takes place is shaped by a major civilization-wrecking apocalypse (the war of power + the breaking of the world), as well as a fall-of-Rome level apocalypse (the rise and fall of Hawkwing’s empire).
A very different take happens in _A Deepness in the Sky_. There, the main characters are interstellar traders spending decades or centuries traveling between stars with ramscoop ships and coldsleep. These traders witness the rise and fall of planetary civilizations all the time–humans get to the limits of our technology, get stuck, and sooner or later they collapse–sometimes back to the stone age, sometimes sterilizing their planet.
And another take on this comes in _The Mote in Gods Eye_, but explaining the details is spoiler-laden.
Science fiction on TV. We’re starved of this, particularly the running around the galaxy sort, even though it’s been pretty conclusively demonstrated it can be done well on pretty limited budgets. Where’s the modern babylon 5 or BSG that takes advantage of modern CG and online distribution to tell the sort of stories that didn’t used to be possible on TV budgets?
Answer: I’m waiting for it too.
Ditto, but televised science fiction (as opposed to space fantasy) has always been a rare thing, and I’m not sure we’re any more starved of it now than we were at any point in the past. We had some good incarnations of Star Trek, and we had Babylon 5 and Stargate and the good B*G, and I think we had Babylon 5 overlap one of the good incarnations of Star Trek for a while, but did we ever do better than that?
Here and now we have The Expanse. And we’ve got Discovery doing a half-assed attempt at carrying on the Star Trek name and The Orville doing a quarter-assed attempt at carrying on its ideals. And I wasn’t terribly fond of Nightflyer, but it counts, and we had Altered Carbon and Counterpoint for terrestrially-based Science Fiction last year, and we’ve got The Foundation Trilogy and Patrick Stewart’s Trek spinoff coming up.
The Foundation Trilogy? Neat.
I see with a quick search it’s by Apple. What do they produce content for? Is this yet another streaming service to subscribe to? Almost makes one miss the old days of TV when you didn’t have to buy each channel individually. But then, buying channels individually was what people wanted out of Cable TV for awhile.
Sure, but it also used to be really expensive to do space fights, plausible aliens, advanced technology, etc. Now it’s pretty cheap. And yet we had more in the late 90s/early 2000s than today.
I’d reverse those ratios, myself. Discovery isn’t just bad star trek, it’s straight up bad.
And we’ve got Discovery doing a half-assed attempt at carrying on the Star Trek name
Oh gosh, I keep wanting to like it and then they keep pulling silly stunts. I’d like it a whole lot better, to be honest, if they junked all their original characters (can I see Burnham ending up falling into a black hole, pretty please?) and kept the TOS characters that their “we’re gonna do a totally different Trek – oops, looks like we need to include iconic canonical characters to make this mess watchable” show had perforce to include – keep Pike! Keep Baby Spock Teenage Rebel! Do unspeakable things to Tilly so I never have to see or hear her again!
Just do it over, forget about “original” characters (because they made a steaming mess of that aspect and really poisoned the well for me on that idea) and give us the first voyages of the Enterprise under Pike, okay?
Pike is a great captain. I don’t quite understand what he’s doing on discovery, it’s like he was transported there from a different, much better, show.
Starfleet must desperately have been looking for somebody, anybody who isn’t secretly from the mirror universe.
You can’t swing a dead cat on Netflix without hitting a crappy scifi show. Not many are actually worth watching though, which may be more a problem now than in the past.
Has anybody done a good Plinkett-style postmortem on BSG yet? I’ve never been so badly burned by a show, and I still feel like I need closure.
Hard to do one, because the individual episodes of BSG are all good up until the end, it’s just that the writers had no idea where they were going with the overall plot so the whole things just feels like a giant shaggy dog story, making it immensely unsatisfying.
The cracks in the overall narrative were getting pretty hard to ignore from at least New Caprica onward, and just got worse with the discovery of Earth, and the reveal of the Final Five. The gap in quality between the individual episodes and the overall story is part of what makes it so maddening.
Any idea why the original planning of the show didn’t map out some kind of baseline reality and story arc? It seems like that would be a lot better than making it all up as you go along, and like that should have been obvious up front.
@albatross11
My impression is a lot of shows do this. I think it’s common to have a story bible, but not necessarily a very complete one. Part of it is that the show maintains some flexibility, perhaps, since unlike some other media a show could lose an actor suddenly or between seasons, or get canceled or have its episode count shift. I think Babylon 5 is a big exception, having a five season plot mapped out—it but lost its lead after the first season, had its fifth season compressed awkward into the fourth, then had to scrap together a surprise fifth season.
Some notable episodic movie franchises don’t even map out their plan from one film to the next 😉
@albatross11
Nick is basically right, long range plotting of stories is very unusual in american TV and was more so back in 2003. there was a story bible for BSG, but it was more about defining the setting, tone, and aesthetic than plotting. Also, there was a writers strike in the middle of the show’s run, which definitely threw things off but I think it’s questionable how much that mattered in the end.
What’s less suprising is that more shows aren’t doing long range plotting now, in the golden age of television. At best, we’re getting season long planning, but babylon 5 remains a stunning exception in terms of plotting a whole series.
I think that’s in part due to the instability of the format. Shows don’t know from the outset how many seasons they will be renewed for. Or how many decades later they’ll get to make those seasons, Arrested Development.
The best approach would be an expanding onion of plot–each season ends satisfactorily, then the next reveals some deeper mystery or drama that at least appears to conclude at the end of that season, without actually undoing what came before. But that’s not trivial, especially when the show runners themselves can be replaced if the producers want.
“Battlestar Galactica” didn’t need a detailed plan outlining the story arc of every character over the N-year run of the series. It just needed the Cylons to have A Plan. That’s explicitly what was promised, and that is what was needed.
The Cylon plan doesn’t have to work, and it certainly doesn’t have to work by having every expected event come perfectly to fruition like an elaborate clockwork mechanism. The Cylons, like all real planners, can improvise and adapt and make things up as they go. But if there’s a page in the series bible that says “This is what the Cylons really are, and this is what they are trying to accomplish, and these are the resources they have available and this is the tentative plan they had to accomplish their goal with those resources at the outset”, then whatever the showrunners come up with as they improvise and adapt and make it up as they go will be coherent and internally consistent.
Believing that they could make up everything as they go and it would be retroactively coherent and consistent, was hubris that lead to tragedy. And not the dramatically satisfying sort of fictional tragedy that would have been worth watching.
‘And they have a plan’…
No they did not! The credits LIED to us!
And it still pisses me off. Since then, I just don’t have interest in mytharc-heavy shows that haven’t ended yet, because I don’t trust them. That’s also why I never watched Lost.
They did, but it didn’t survive contact with the enemy. 😉
I liked New Caprica pretty well, and I thought the idea that there were divisions among the Cylons was great. After that, though, the mythology collapsed, and the final five was a disappointing mess.
“The credits LIED to us!”
I binge-watched the first season then stopped because this had become apparent. A pity: what might have been…
I just read this final season interview with Ron Moore, and it made me very angry.
A couple gems:
He has similar sentiments in the director’s commentary of BSG. Ron Moore was always thinking in terms of what made a good episode rather than what made a good season/show. And it’s a huge shame, because he’s really good at making good episodes. He just never seemed to realize that that wasn’t enough.
I came here seeking closure, but instead I’m filled with more nerd rage than ever.
*dons internet armor*
I actually liked BSG up until the second half of the final season, and I liked the Final Five reveal.
*runs away popping smoke*
You can’t just throw something like that out there and run away. But I don’t even know how to argue with it beyond “it doesn’t make any damn sense.”
Really, the whole idea of an Earth where hyper-advanced humanoid cylons existed, forgot how to breed, and then made robocylons which killed everybody didn’t make any damn sense. Having most of the main cast turn out to have been ancient cylons was just the icing on that cake. Also, Tigh was an ancient cylon but also a veteran of the First Cylon War? How does this timeline fit together?
@Nick,
Well right now I’m in the mood for a cold war era spy thriller film (especially if Helen Mirren is in it, she was great in The Debt!),, something like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Funeral in Berlin, North by Northwest, or From Russia With Love.
The recent Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy with Gary Oldman was okay, I watched a few episodes of The Americans, but I just couldn’t get into it (nor could I get into Breaking Bad, so maybe I just don’t have the patience for maxi-mini-series).
For contemporary spy thrillers Casino Royale was okay, but the subsequent Bond films were more forgettable, I saw Sicario (which bored me) the same night as ’71 (which I really thought was good, maybe the best movie that I’ve seen in years), so I seem to clearly prefer cold war era settings for my thrillers, preferably not taking place in North America.
I thought Tinker Tailor with Oldman was excellent. You may want to check out The Night Manager with Tom Hiddleston. The Man from UNCLE was good, but fairly mainstream.
All in all, I think I agree that the genre is less supported than I’d like.
@Hoopyfreud,
I was ignorant of that film and series.
Thanks!
I dunno if you can tolerate superhero stuff, but Captain America: The Winter Soldier is often described as being a homage to 70’s style spy flicks.
@Walter,
I’m isually not into Marvel movies, but a glance at the Wikipedia entry on Winter Soldier said “A major influence” was Three Days of the Condor, so thanks!
You should watch Counterpart on starz. Captures that spirit in a modern setting.
@cassander,
I’m not a subscriber to Starz, but I’ll keep an eye out for DVD’s at the library.
Thanks!
Solid historical naval fiction. Modern stuff wouldn’t go amiss, but there doesn’t seem to be much in terms of WWII stuff going on.
Actually, what I really want is a big-budget miniseries version of Morison’s History of the United States Navy in WWII.
I’d set the framing story as the 10-year reunion of the Annapolis class of 1936. Take a group of friends from that class who lost touch, and are running into each other for the first time in a while. The obvious subject of discussion – “What did you do during the war?” They went into different fields, and did different things. Work out plausible careers for each man, and drop them into minor roles in the big battles. One was a surface warfare officer who spent time hunting U-boats in the Atlantic, then was on Washington at Guadalcanal, and went on to command a destroyer off Okinawa. Another was a carrier pilot who fought at Midway and the Philippine Sea. A third was a logistics officer who bounced all over, which lets them shine light on the various minor theaters. “We fought in the Aleutians?” There was one of their number who went into submarines, and was lost with his boat, but enough details got back to one of them that he can tell the story. This also lets the framing story analyze what’s going on for the viewer’s benefit. Particularly if their wives are around. (Which lets you tell home-front stories, too. From my perspective, that’s annoying, but probably necessary.) Depending on the man, his story is either an episode or a couple of episodes. And you could easily have other people drift over if you want to keep going.
Hey, Bean, this seems like a good thing to ask here: any thoughts on Red Storm Rising?
An excellent book, probably the best WWIII novel ever. Early Clancy was really, really good. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to keep up the quality up in later years.
I remember Red Storm Rising having the feel of being a novelization of a fairly elaborate tabletop wargame.
@Albatross
IIRC it was
@Hoopyfreud
Not quite. A lot of the novel was gamed out in Harpoon, but the story elements were pre-plotted. They certainly didn’t sit down and write whatever the game turned up. The most famous example is “Dance of the Vampires”, when the Soviets attacked the US carriers, and they knew the good guys had to lose, but not get totally destroyed. I suspect it was more useful as a means of keeping track of who, what, and where when Clancy needed that data for the text, and of avoiding plot holes. I could see myself doing something similar with CMANO if I was writing naval fiction.
Bean, that sounds fantastic. Sounds like it would go fairly well within the Band of Brothers / The Pacific series, as long as some of the stories went across multiple episodes.
edit: I would consider contributing to a kickstarter for the novel as per below.
I think I came up with the idea while watching Band of Brothers and trying to figure out how a similar series could be done at sea.
If you are determined to make this series happen, the best thing you could do is to write up the stories, put them online, build support, and hope someone in the entertainment industry notices. The print equivalent of a ten-part miniseries is a 500-600 page episodic novel. It’s a hefty project, but plenty of people manage to write novels. This is essentially what the author of “The Martian” did.
While I don’t hate the idea, I am not really in a position to do it today for a couple reasons. First, the blog soaks up a lot of time, and this would compete directly with that. Second, it requires a lot of specialist knowledge. Yes, I know where to get after-action reports and deck logs for the parts on ships, but I’d need to figure out where to get a bunch of softer info, like the culture at USNA of that era. I could sort of make that stuff up, but I hate doing that. I’ll put it on my idea list, though.
For WWII stuff, I can’t think of any widely-recognized genre classics that are later than the 60s. Stuff like the Cruel Sea and Run Silent, Run Deep doesn’t seem to be written any more. Some of this is the obvious result of veterans dying off, but O’Brian proved you don’t need to have that experience to write well about it. For that matter, The Hunt for Red October proved the same thing.
I would love to see this. My pet project would be the history of the Royal Navy in the Seven Years’ War told through the framing device of Captain Arthur Gardiner and HMS Monmouth.
There is an entire roleplaying game dedicated to Dieselpunk: Mutant Chronicles. The third edition came out a few years ago with modernized rules. It also had a movie in 2008(?) so you can watch a film too.
100% agree on the pseudo-genre of the exiles/remnants of a fallen order. I don’t know that I’ve ever found something that exactly scratches this itch, but I really like the idea of it.
1. As alluded to by Nornagest, I think dying Earth, or more broadly, dying civilization stories are really neat. This probably also links up with Atlas’s suggestion of exiles from a fallen regime. I’m reading Pat Southern’s history of the Crisis of the Second Century right now, and while I’d hate to live through it, there’s something that really captures my imagination about the idea of a collapsing order looking back on a past full of unattainable glory.
2. Not really a genre, but: work in the style of Russian Cosmism. I like the scientific optimism, tempered by the weird mystical/spiritual overtones. And aesthetically, there’s something that really appeals to me about Nicholas Roerich-type art, whose feeling I’d like to have captured in more works of fiction.
3. I think as we learn more about prehistoric humanity, there’s a great opportunity for a revival of Hyborean-age-type sword-and-sworcery based loosely on historical fact. I think deep-prehistory stuff is interesting in general, but we are learning so much, so quickly about ancient humanity that it really deserves a good fictional retelling: a world populated by modern humans, and neanderthals, and denisovans, with a setting in Sundaland or somewhere like that, I think would be really neat.
This could also probably tie in well with lost continent stuff, if you wanted a modern-day setting but to still have the story driven by our encounter with our deep prehistory.
4. Historical fiction/fantasy set in niche eras/locations.
5. Theological/metaphysical mystery stories rule. There’s nothing like having someone start off investigating a simple murder, and end up investigating the nature of the cosmos as a whole.
Lost planet stories are hard to do, because any explanation of how they got there will be contrived, unless your story takes place in a world far enough in the future that you can have lost colonies, in which case the general tone of the story probably won’t be much like a lost continent story anyway.
Real time strategy video games. StarCraft 2, fine, but whatever happened to C&C and Red Alert and Age of Empires and all that? Total Annihilation? Supreme Commander? Warcraft without the World Of? There used to be a half dozen major RTS franchises and they’re pretty much all gone.
EA happened to them. (At least for the most part).
While EA is indeed The Debil, you can only blame them for closing Westwood Studios. Ao[E|K|M] was Microsoft, SC and WC are Blizzard/Activision, TA had nothing to do with EA, and neither did Supreme Commander.
Warcraft 3 is still online and is being remade right now. TA and Supreme have been dead for decades. AoE was always kinda niche even in RTS.
I hear you.
Say, there’s a turn based tactics game on switch featuring mario and some other franchise I don’t know anything about; have you tried it? (If you don’t know what I mean I’ll look it up)
Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. I bought it for my son and wound up addicted to it. It’s excellent. It’s XCOM, but with Mario and Rabbids. Challenging, too. And the score performed by the Prague Philharmonic is very good and very catchy. Highly recommended.
Really? I heard disappointing things. That said, this was from the X-Com (and not the XCOM) crowd, so I can’t say that they’re reliable for more mainstream enjoyment. TBH, if you haven’t taken a look at the Open X-Com community, do so, because some of the original work done with that engine is amazing.
Purists gonna purist? I don’t know what criticisms one could make of the game besides it not literally being X-com/XCOM. The characters are fun and funny. The graphics are standard colorful pretty Mario graphics. The sounds was great. The weapons/moves/tactics were fun. The only complaint I could make is that for a game you would think is aimed at kids, it was surprisingly challenging and unforgiving (your health only recovers at certain checkpoints, not between each battle, so if you do lose too much health in one battle you might not be able to beat the next, meaning you need to backtrack and try to improve the first battle which is frustrating for kids). It’s pretty cheap now ($20, or $25 including the expansion pack), so if you have a Switch and like Mario, Rabbids, and/or XCOM, pick it up.
Number one complaint I heard was it was even more boardgame-y than XCOM 2, which was a chief complaint about XCOM 2 in that crowd. Also, that the power curve after WOTC was wack. Gotta say, that second complaint is entirely legitimate. Rangers in XCOM 2 went from good before WOTC to “Can’t Touch This” after it. Their swords were just obscene.
@woah77
What do you mean by board-gamey?
You and the enemy have very well defined tactics that operate in generally predictable ways, based upon the fate of a die roll. Each character has a list of powers governed by his type of piece and functions in a very predictable way. Basically XCOM/XCOM 2 are closer to chess than they are to X-Com:UFO, as the latter had no restrictions on weapons/abilities and was very much a turn based simulator for troops, while to former had several well defined pieces with very predictable patterns of behavior for each.
What do you mean by “based upon the fate of a die roll?” The only things random in Mario + Rabbids is % chance of critical/effect and damage range. One of your guns might be “150-170 damage with 25% chance to knockback.” But the way you move and where you shoot the weapon is entirely determined by you.
Is it a hyper-realistic combat simulator? No, absolutely not, but it is a good tactical combat game. And entertaining, and Rabbid Peach is hilarious. Maybe watch some game play videos on youtube and judge for yourself.
ETA: Oh, and partial cover is 50% chance to block.
@Conrad Honcho
My comments about the die roll are referencing XCOM 2, not Mario + Rabbids.
I’m sure it’s a fun game, but when looking for a tactical strategy game, I’m personally enjoying Phoenix Point.
Sure, that looks good, but…Epic timed exclusive…grrrrr…
I backed it way back when it was a Fig campaign. The game itself has yet to disappoint me. I get the frustration with EGS, but this isn’t a new ploy in the industry, and Steam has many more exclusives because it’s the de facto provider of PC games.
Perks of Phoenix Point: Bullet physics, free aim, Time units instead of 2AP, everyone can use everything, vehicles, cannons, crabmen.
I think Warcraft died to a combination of the lore problems of advancing the same universe with two different game series, and Blizzard not wanting to be competing with itself on RTS games. They are remastering Warcraft 3, and I don’t really trust them with making a new game anyway, so that may be for the best.
Microsoft steered Age of Empires into the online free-to-play model with Age of Empires Online in 2012, and I suspect kind of gave up on that for a while. Age of Empires 4 is supposed to be in development as of 2017, although it’s being made by Relic so I’m not sure if it’ll stay true to the roots of the genre. They did also remaster Age of Mythology, which is by far my favorite incarnation of the series.
The best version of AoE was made by Brian Reynolds and called “Rise of Nations”.
To the general point, apparently a lot of the air was taken out of the RTS genre by MOBAs.
A recent RTS though that’s pretty good is Northgard.
you’re forgetting Age of Mythology
I love Rise of Nations, but I wouldn’t call it an Age of Empires game.
It’s more like RTS Civilization, with a lot of focus on border placement, developing technology, and varied routes to victory.
And now I really want to play it again.
I like real time strategy games, but I don’t want more than we have. Back in the 1990s, there had to be a lot of these released because we didn’t yet know how they were supposed to work. But eventually game companies figured out how to make sufficiently playable, variable, entertaining and well-balanced games. Those games, Starcraft and Age of Mythology are deep enough that we have been playing them for decades and we’re still not bored, they count as classics. There’s very little room for new ones, such as Starcraft 2. It’s better to stick to the existing good games rather than mix it up with different franchises, until someone figures out actual improvements to the genre rather than just chance for the sake of change or selling new merch.
There have been some hopeful contenders, but they’ve all fallen a bit short of good. Grey Goo and Planetary Annihilation both come to mind.
Genre TV/film musicals
Most TV shows just toss off single episodes where their characters are contrived to sing their feelings, but I want a full immersion into both genre and musical form, where no one remarks on the fact that they’re in a genre or musical.
Like, the old “dance with props” numbers of classic musicals are great, often pushing the special effects technology in their own right (such as Royal Wedding’s spinning set to allow ceiling dancing years before Inception), and music videos have plumbed some wild concepts, so I want a film that takes the ability of the musical number to really push the bounds of visual imagery…except that it is also actually happening in the world they’re in, an interaction with their setting and not just a dream sequence.
The closest we have to this has been “idols as superheroes” anime in the Macross vein, though Symphogear is the actual closest to what I’m getting at.
In live action, The Greatest Showman had good integration of music video techniques, and Baby Driver kind of did modern noir, but imagine the wonderful absurdities you could accomplish with a magical or sci-fi setting.
Hopefully the DVDs for Anna and the Apocalypse are available soon. (It’s a zombie musical Christmas film!)
Crazy ex girlfriend has been scratching this itch for me for the last few years.
Yeah, I plan on checking CEG out now that it’s complete, but I also want to see musicals in an otherworldly context, and without historical-ish settings resorting to the operetta style.
I want cool visual world-building through musical numbers. What does Singing In The (Grimy Cyberpunk) Rain 2049 look like?
Repo! The Genetic Opera?
For an anime musical you may want to look at Nerima Daikon Brothers.