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In 1930s America, Murder, Incorporated was an organized crime business specializing in homicide for other mobs, as well as general enforcement for New York Jewish boss Louis “Lepke” Buchalter. Founded by two other New York Jewish mobsters, Meyer Lansky and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, it was largely composed of Italian-American as well as Jewish gangsters from the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Brownsville, East New York, and Ocean Hill. Mob bosses all over the United States could call up Murder, Inc. to hire a hitman. The killers were paid a regular salary as retainer as well as an average fee of $1,000 to $5,000 per killing. Their families also received monetary benefits
What a (morally) bad business model.
So this is interesting: $3000 in 1935 US dollars is ~$56000 in 2019 dollars. Meanwhile, the average price of a hit in Australia in 2002 is ~$12700, or ~$13,300 in 2020 US dollars. Law enforcement has gotten substantially better at its job, which should have made prices go up even further, but instead they’ve actually declined substantially in real terms since the 1930s. Is that because Murder Inc kept prices high by acting as a union for its members? Or did some other factor depress prices?
Perhaps demand has gone down?
I think that the improvement in law enforcement has eliminated skilled, professional hitmen. So the modern average is for incompetent part-timers, and so not comparable.
If the Australian “hitmen” in question are comparable to their American counterparts, then definitely this. “Murder Inc” was an extreme outlier; criminals who specialized in killing strangers for money have always been unusual and are now extremely rare; usually the job is given to a thug whose specialty is scaring strangers for money, and often they botch the killing part.
Would be interesting to know the rates for non-Murder-Inc contract killings in the 1930s; that would be a better basis for comparison.
Article (Google search result to avoid paywall) on how companies use the environmental excuse for their penny pinching.
One of the things I like about penny-pinchers like Lidl and Ryanair is that they don’t pretend they do it for the environment. Lidl always charged for plastic bags; they never said it was about the environment. Ryanair’s refusal to print tickets for free, to give meals or drinks during flights, and other things they do to increase flight efficiency, by cutting weight and increasing the number of passengers they carry, is about money, although they probably do help the environment (no more plastic glasses, printed tickets, more passenger miles per litre of fuel, etc.).
The version of this that always amuses me is the sign in a hotel, generously offering to not change your towels and sheets every day — as a way of protecting the environment.
I don’t want them to change my towels and sheets every day — I don’t at home, after all. But it’s something that saves them money being offered as evidence of how public spirited they are.
The US Space Force may not have much, but they do have a Twitter account:
https://twitter.com/SpaceForceDoD
This pleases me because it’s Proper Futurism. All the SF I ever read promised me that in the far-flung days of the 21st century we would have a Space Force as well as flying cars and colonies on other planets.
We may never get the flying cars but at least we have a Space Force and finally I feel like I am living in the proper kind of 21st century that I was promised! 😀
A space force that wears woodland camo uniforms. Jokes about invading Endor aside, uniforms promote institutional identity, and if you have your Space Force wear exactly the same uniforms as the Air Force, you are blatantly signalling that your “space force” is really just a branch of the Air Force without even the separation that sort of exists between the USN and USMC.
Also, I’m guessing that there will be no provision for enlisting or commissioning directly into the USSF, and “space force” officers will be rotated into Air Force roles (and vice versa) whenever it is convenient to the service.
Give them a little while. It took two years for the US Air Force to get its first uniforms distinct from the Army, and another year or two before airmen were actually wearing that new uniform.
I guess the question is what color would be appropriate. The navy has dark blue, the air force has medium blue, meaning the only remaining blue range is light blue, which might look odd. Earth tones like green and brown aren’t really appropriate. White would be a cleaning nightmare. Black would be very appropriate, but the twentieth century happened.
So what does that leave? Gray maybe?
Gray digital camo, to blend with the cubicle walls that will be their primary operating environment for years to come. The dress uniforms can be black, so long as we call it something like “space force gray”; seems to work for the Navy
This is why we need to get them capes ASAP. Also why we can waste no time in re-titling General Raymond as Sky Marshal Raymond.
In the world of tomorrow, will a Sky Captain be an O-3 like the Air Force or an O-6 like all those SF settings that cut & paste the Navy into space?
It’s captains all the way up, from ensign captain, to lieutenant captain, to sky captain, to major captain, to commander captain, to colonel captain, until you hit the marshall rank range.
And now “Captain” looks misspelled to me. 🙁
And in any case, what’s the pay grade of an Earth Captain, a Water Captain, a Fire Captain and a Void Captain?
The Void Captain gets nothing, naturally.
Sounds like a job that literally sucks.
The Air Force also has no logical reason to wear woodland camo. From what I’ve read, the idea is to have the entire military wearing similar uniforms to remind them they’re all on the same team.
I thought it was because the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines all fielded new uniforms at around the same time. (I don’t know about the Coast Guard. IIRC, the other two uniformed services use dress uniforms only so are not at issue.) Then three of those services all went back to congress looking for more money to replace their ghastly abominations all at around the same time. Congress was kind of pissed off about it and required any new uniform to be used by all the services.
I don’t know off hand whether the Marines actually did manage to stick to MARPAT “like a hobo on a ham sandwitch,” I believe the quote was.
Has anybody told the Navy and the Marines? Because they seem to be sticking with their own service-specific uniforms for the indefinite future.
@bullseye
Not really. Any drive for standardization among the services is primarily a money thing. From the 80s until around 2000, everyone was wearing BDUs. The Marines started the stampede for unique uniforms with MARPATs, which at least have the virtue of looking good, and were justified as making Marines feel special. The other services started to do the same. Somehow, the Air Force has recently ended up switching to the Army’s uniform from its own uniform. Not sure what the story there was. The Navy has recently replaced the rather absurd blue NWUs with a green-pattern camouflage uniform, which at least doesn’t look idiotic. I wish they’d stop pretending to be a land service, and go with something like the RN’s No 4s, which look good and apparently work very well. They can borrow MARPATs or whatever for anyone who actually needs camo.
The Coast Guard has its own blue working uniform, which the NOAA and PHS both borrow.
@bean
the number 4s are nice, but we need to find the monsters that keep convincing military services that berets are acceptable headgear.
the USN has any number of nice looking uniforms, and that’s the trouble. There are… a dozen or so of them? that’s not counting male/female differences which seem more prominent with the navy. It’s absurd and costly and the navy leadership has bigger problems to deal with than playing dressup. I don’t go quite as far as this man does but I will say that:
(A) the basic principle that far too much time, effort, and money goes into uniforms is correct and we need to stop this nonsense.
(B) each service should have 2 basic uniforms, service and dress. You can vary the camo pattern and cloth weight to meet various climates, you can vary it by rank, and some MOSes will need specialist gear, but two is the goal. Sexual differences should be minimized, and no soldier that isn’t Scottish should ever wear a skirt.
(C) Soldiers should dress like soldiers and dress uniforms should only be worn on ceremonial occasions. And no, congressional testimony does not count.
(D) Once the new system is set up, we need legislation mandating that any future changes to uniforms that are not tactically relevant must be funded entirely through gofundme.
I think that goes a bit too far. First, tradition is important to military units. We know this, and uniforms are a part of that tradition. Second, two uniforms isn’t enough. Camo in offices just looks stupid. Let’s go with dress/service/working uniforms. Sure, we’ll cut down some on when you need to wear dress uniforms to roughly match modern suit etiquette, but they have their place. We can look at standardizing working uniforms to some extent based on function (there really isn’t a need for everybody to have their own camo) but those will always be looser.
Broadly with you on berets, definitely with you on unisex uniforms.
@bean
camo in offices is silly, but it’s not intrinsically sillier that bright primary color uniforms. I’d be absolutely fine if we could go back to the pre-ww2 tradition of soldiers on desk jobs in DC wearing civilian clothes, but that will never happen, so in lieu of that, I just want to cut things down to manageable levels.
Related: Mike Pence’s speech announcing the creation of the US Space Force with the Halo theme tune added.
So, the army has soldiers, the air force has airmen, so what will the space force have? They haven’t decided yet. The obvious answer would be spacemen, but that would suggest that they’re actually in space; also I feel like they’re going to go for a word that isn’t gendered.
Relatedly, they haven’t decided what the names of the ranks will be. I figure they’ll use the same rank names as the air force, except for the ranks that include the word “airman”.
Spacers?
I like it!
Espatiers is linguistically correct but good Luck selling it to the American public
It probably makes sense for the Space Force to distance itself from the Air Force, if only because they will tend to be conflated if they don’t. That suggests they need to invent completely new ranks or borrow from either the army or the navy. Of the two, I’d probably go with the army ranks, since some of the middle and senior enlisted ranks of the navy sound kind of silly. “Master Chief Petty Officer”? “Rear Admiral Lower Half”? Really?
This does not mean an Admiral’s butt, but rather indicates the Navy wanted a whole bunch of ranks in the Admiralty and ran out of creative names like “Brigiadier” and “Marshall” (which the land forces got to first). “Rear Admiral” meant (historically) the Admiral that commanded the ships in the rear of the squadron, and “lower half” just means they’re one rank step lower than a plain old “Rear Admiral” (sometimes called “Upper Half”, which again does not mean their torso and head)
“Commodore” is a perfectly good and creative name for the O-7 rank in naval service. The United States Navy seems to alternate between that and “Rear Admiral Lower Half” every second generation, for complicated and nigh-inscrutable reasons.
https://www.federalpay.org/military/army/ranks
You think the army ranks are any better?
“Specialist”, “First Sergeant”, “Sergeant Major”
E-1 being a “Private”, with E-3 being a “Private first class”, yet O-8 “Major General”, O-9 “Lieutenant General”, and O-10 “General”?
So this will sound weird. I am thoroughly impressed by the research you put into this and I also agree on most of your substantive points (one thing I take issue is Pinker ́s and apparently Keegan ́s contention, that without Hitler, there wouldn’t be WWII), but my opinion that Wilson was an abysmally bad national leader remains unchanged.
As an aside, you didn’t defend any nonWWI related bad things that Wilson did, so let ́s list them again. He was a champion of racial discrimination. He nearly brought US to war with Mexico for stupid reasons (wikipedia page on Tampico incident is unfortunately listed as unreliable, but I do not have better source at hand). He signed on to authoritarian and unnecessary curtailment of civil liberties in the form Espionage Act of 1917.
There are also more rightwing reasons to dislike Wilson, like that he signed on to creation of central bank and of income tax, and also rightwing critique of League of Nations is slightly different from mine. To be clear, I think that income taxes and central banking are good things, but they exist in almost every developed country and momentum for their enactment in the US preceded Wilson. Also structure of Federal Reserve that Wilson sign on was dysfunctional and totally failed in its task of solving financial panics (see Great Depression).
So, we are agreement on
1) Wilson should not have brought US into WWI
2) The US was far from the only country that rushed into WWI recklessly, and Wilson´s decision for war had broad bipartisan support
3) Treaty of Versailles was not a sole cause of WWI.
4) That Treaty was not a sole creation of Wilson, it was a compromise between victorious powers, and if it would be solely dictated by the French, it would be much more punitive towards Germany, whereas if it would solely dictated by Wilson, it would be much more lenient,
5) Wilson should have, instead of pushing for his utopian scheme of League on Nations, spent his political capital on an issue of easing the burden of war debts in exchange for less harsh terms on Germany.
To that I might only add two bits of context.
First, it wasn’t like everyone important in the US was clamoring for war, antiwar sentiment definitely existed. For example Wilson’s Secretary of State and obviously important Democratic Party figure William Jennings Bryan resigned in protest over Wilson ́s ultimatum to Germany delivered after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. Wilson almost brought US into war right there, if not for the fact that Germany backed down.
Second, while Treaty of Versailles wasn’t sole cause making WWII inevitable, it was certainly one of its most important causes (I mean of WWII in Europe, of course).
Where we probably disagree is that overall I think that those facts taken together make Wilson pretty disastrous US president, in fact the worst in the 20th century.
How large is the American “grey tribe” ? (Just looking for a general estimate)
From earlier in the thread: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/15/open-thread-145-25/#comment-842465
Scott’s narrative on “Grey Tribe” was a lot more than libertarian and some of the other characteristics were a lot more obscure. I mean filk?!? I had to look that up, and I have at least one post in rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan.
Okay, then the OPs question may not be answerable.
About a third of the population won’t identify tribally at all, as the concept of “tribes” is outside of their personal Overton window. So this also comes down to whether tribal membership is based on self-claim, others (who are tribally inclined) lumping you into a tribe whether you identify or not, or some other criteria.
Regardless, any claims as to numbers are going to be argued about quite a bit.
Yeah, I only know of filk thanks to an author’s note by C.J. Cherryh (and I used to participate in an email group for Raymond Feist’s novels). I think Scott likely meant these as examples, and not keystones.
@Purplehermann says:
Alright, from our host’s list of “tribe” attributes in his I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup post (with numbers and line seperations added by me):
For individuals meeting all of @Scott Alexander’s “typified” Red-Tribe traits, as a rough guess I’d say 15% of Americans, so millions of people, and for those with at least half of the traits?
I’d say that easily the majority of Americans have at least half of Scott’s “Red-Tribe” traits.
For individuals meeting all of @Scott Alexander’s “typified” Blue-Tribe traits, as a rough guess I’d say 5% of Americans, so millions of people, and for those with at least half of the traits?
I’d say that nearly the majority of Americans have at least half of Scott’s “Blue-Tribe” traits.
For individuals meeting all of @Scott Alexander’s “typified” Grey-Tribe traits, as a rough guess I’d say about 20 friends of @Scott Alexander, and for those with at least half of the traits?
Still uncommon, maybe a million people have at least half of Scott’s “Grey-Tribe” traits?
Frankly other than our host confessing his social isolation I’m not sure what good his concept of “tribes” is, from later posts it seems a confused jumble of socal class, regional differences, and partisan affiliation.
TLDR, did you include Wilson’s support of racial segregation and specifically black inferiority in the US in the calculation? Presumably such support had some effect on US domestic support for Nazi racial policies and racial fascism, which would have lent support for the growth of the same in Germany.
Suppose you qualify for a subsidized student loan but don’t need it. Is there any reason not to take the loan anyway, use it to pay for educational expenses then take the money you would have used to pay those expenses, invest it conservatively, and then achieve one of two outcomes:
1. If Warren or Bernie cancels the debt, walk away with all the money.
2. If not, take it and pay it back six months after graduation in full,(there are no early payment penalties) pocketing any interest accrued.
So for this to make any sense, you have already be committed to going to school. Or, I guess, to investing a sum money equal to whatever those school expenses would be.
1) You have to have the discipline to do this.
2) Even conservative investments could lose money.
I doubt many students are actually in that position, though, except the scions of the very wealthy.
The scions of the very wealthy wouldn’t qualify for subsidized loans.
They can declare themselves independent students, though this has tax consequences for their parents.
I’m not seeing how it only applies to the children of the wealthy.
Who has the money to pay for college without getting loans? Only the children of the wealthy (who might have to engage in shenanigans to get subsidized loans… but shenanigans are not entirely unknown among that set).
Children of the middle class who go to in-state schools and don’t go into fields that expect people to pay for their own postgraduate education.
To add to what John said, particularly if they have a prepaid college program. In my state when your kid is born you can lock in current college tuition rates and pay a small amount per month until they’re 18.
I was such, but
1) If I’d gotten loans, my parents wouldn’t have ponied up the money for me to invest
and
2) In-state tuition was roughly $2100 ($4280 in 2019 dollars); it was $10,770 in 2019. I think this kind of increase is pretty typical. So it’s quite a bit harder for a middle class family to pay.
I was thinking non-traditional students — i.e. adults who’ve been in the workforce and decide to go back to school.
@Well…
I had to reduce my hours from 40 to 35 per week. The sub and ubsub student loans helped make up for this reduction in hours as well as the increase in expenses, though even then I was still using credit cards too.
Perhaps some people can go to school while working and have enough to cover it without loans. But if this is the case, why do they feel they need to go to school anyway, and why would they qualify for subsidized loans (assets count in qualification for subsidized loans)?
I can only see this as applicable to a non-working spouse, but then would they even qualify for subsidized loans without not actually needing the loan money to pay for college and college expenses?
In that case, a fair number of people get their employers to pay for their continued education. The most obvious example being the military, but it’s not rare in the civilian sector.
These loopholes are in the process of being plugged, but until then: https://www.propublica.org/article/university-of-illinois-financial-aid-fafsa-parents-guardianship-children-students
I doubt there are a lot of people for whom the choice is no loans or lot of loans, but there definitely might be some people who are evaluating how much debt to take on, who could take the debt now instead of spending earned/other money.
Where are you getting this other money?
If it’s from a job, then you’d probably be better off quitting the job and spending the extra time taking a larger load of classes (graduating earlier, or with a dual degree or double major), studying more, or volunteering in your major. If, as The Nybbler says, you have the discipline to do so.
If its from your parents or some other similar source, then you probably don’t qualify for subsidized student loans. (And wouldn’t your parents be investing this money anyway, likely in a tax-sheltered 401(k) or IRA?)
I’m pretty sure that you don’t actually get the money yourself when you get student loans – it gets disbursed to your school.
The extra funds not immediately used for tuition get “refunded” to your bank account.
This’s quite intentional; it’s designed for students to buy course supplies like textbooks and laptops, as well as basic living expenses.
Has anybody got a source for US mortality data including country of birth? It’s just occurred to me that tracking raw life expectancy in a country that had a more than 14% immigrant population wasn’t actually all that meaningful in a statistical sense, for which eternal shame upon me. Alas, I don’t work at the place with the billion-record database of health care admin data anymore.
Why isn’t there more (any?) environmental activism against junk mail? How helpful is banning plastic straws compared to banning a sizeable stack of paper from being delivered to every mailbox in the country every week?
Different audiences. The preferred audience for banning plastic straws are perfectly decent people. Educate them on the ILLS and DANGERS of plastic straws, and they’ll not mind a ban so much.
The people sending junk mail likely know what they are doing and aren’t going to stop anyway. A long lost cause if there ever was one.
But looks like most of the Americans use plastic straws, and only very limited number of them are interested in sending junk mail, everyone else don’t need any convincing they’ll be happy to see it banned. Although those interested represent many large corporations – are you saying it’s basically lobbyism? Even so, there’s strong movements against many things backed up by lobbies – factory farming, oil industry, personal data collection to name the few.
You’re giving me an answer to a different question here. I couldn’t say why it is or isn’t banned, but most activism is aimed at the large mass of people, not a small minority of them. Drinking from plastic straws(or smoking, or what have you) is something many more people are involved in than sending junk mail. Why it’s not banned is a separate matter from what the activists care about.
The people who send junk mail profit by it and care a lot. The people who use plastic straws care very little. Hence, the first group is more politically powerful.
Which is why I’ve decided to care VERY STRONGLY about plastic straws to compensate!
(but in all seriousness, paper straws are !#$% ineffective *&^%$# garbage and I hate everything about them and everything they represent*.)
*To me, they represent the triumph of visible self-flagellation over actual impact analysis.
You’re preaching to the choir. I will absolutely vote on this issue, and there are literally dozens of us who care about the issue that much!
Plastic straws aren’t such a big deal, but plastic bags are. Getting groceries is going to suck even more now. Thanks environmentalists; when I’m dropping all my stuff on the way to the car, I’ll think about you.
Hey Nybbler. They still sell (10 cents) plastic bags. And these are far heavier duty than the easily ripable plastic bags of yore.
Or you can shell out some money for heavy duty synthetic cloth bags with pretty pictures on them (or the cheaper ones without the pretty pictures).
Now everyone has got an excuse to carry around a pretty bag without being considered effete. 😀
https://www.zazzle.com/art+reusable+bags
https://loqi.com/collections/bag-collections
I’m never going to remember to carry the reusable bags with me. Even if I remember to put them in the car, I’ll forget to bring them into the store. And paying 10c per bag will make me feel like I’m being cheated and it’s my own fault (for forgetting the bags), so I won’t do it.
Well I guess this is why you can’t have nice (pretty) things.
The few times I *now* forget to take the bags from the car to the store I just repack the cart and unpack the cart into the bags at the car.
The few times I forget to take the bags from home back to the car, I pay the ten cents.
I buy those heavy duty 10 cent bags that will last 10 times longer in the environment every time and then immediately throw them away. This is what most people do.
Carrying my own bags everywhere is a pain in the ass. I will not do it. Nor will I participate in any other self flagellation ritual we’re supposed to perform so the environmental gods will show favor to us. It’s too bad groceries cost a dollar more now, but most supermarkets have razor thin margins so it makes sense that they would lobby so heavily for this extra dollar.
Yea, the bag thing is among the worst legal development I’ve seen in my lifetime when it comes to causing hassles. Makes checking out like 50% longer. And its not like a learning curve, tellers havent adjusted in the 3+ years since we implemented it.
Plus, from what I understand, given how consumer habits work, the new bags are as bad for the environment (also they cause a lot of disease if you don’t use them in a way that is worse for the environment) .
Very true. I show up with a shopping cart full of groceries and before they scan one item up they ask me how many bags I want. I want however many bags it takes to hold all of my groceries which I unfortunately won’t know until we stuff the groceries into the bags and see how many it takes. Nor is it worth the cognitive real estate to develop good estimates of what this may be every time, especially since the person helping you bag tends to put radically different quantities of groceries in each bag each time. The worst are the ones who treat the bags like a precious resource and overstuff them so they break open on the way up the stairs into your house.
Right so this is literally how crime and punishment works: you just make it illegal to send unsolicited mail. Bam. Maybe it won’t end, but it will diminish and negative externalities can be offset by the fines or whatever.
But that’s not how representative democracy works. You don’t just pass a law, you have to, well, you know. And, particularly at that “stuck in committee” part, what matters is the integrated commitment of the people who support and oppose the law. There may be a hundred million people who would like to see junk mail banned and a hundred hundred who oppose it, but the average commitment of people in the latter group is literally a hundred thousand times stronger – it’s the core of their very lucrative business model, compared to a minor annoyance for the recipients.
They’ll pay good money, and lots of it, to make sure you all are distracted by e.g. a campaign to ban plastic straws instead. And you’ll, what? Seriously, having determined right here and now that a law banning junk mail would be a good thing, what are you going to actually do to make it happen?
Yes! I knew it would be that video!
Yes John we all know the standard argument for fascism, and I’m glad you’re on the same page as me here. You can spend your money on whatever you like, or we can turn up in brown uniforms, redact you, and then spend your money for you, on whatever we like. Don’t act like it never happened, and don’t act like it could never happen again!
@Secretly French,
No need for to go full fash. Just get rid of committees.
https://alexanderturok.wordpress.com/2019/12/03/a-simple-reform/
Junk mail is sent not by people, but by marketing departments. These last aren’t susceptible to emotional appeals, and you haven’t got their mailing address anyway.
Bitcoin should be even more controversial, and it isn’t. There are reports it consumes ~0.5% of the energy of the world per year, or about Switzerland’s expenses. Shows you how much enviromentalism is about signalling and lowering the quality of our lives (get rid of cars, flights, meat), than it is about actually preventing actual harm to the environment by a mostly useless activity.
It’s ridiculous to base estimates of the carbon emissions Bitcoin is responsible for on the energy estimates. You can mine bitcoin anywhere you want, including in places that have the potential for renewable energies that would otherwise not get used.
And plastic straws can be disposed of in a responsible manner that poses no environmental risk, yet here we are.
You can theoretically do a lot of things. What matters is what actually happens in the real world.
Actual carbon emissions of Bitcoin production are still ridiculous, though.
And Bitcoin, unlike a plastic straws, are much less useful. They don’t help disabled people drink. They are even less useful than using plastic straws to avoid removing lipstick, considering it’s mostly used by criminals.
Besides, even clean energy is not 100% clean. At some point of drilling wells for geothermal, producing and laying cable for offshore, or making a nuclear station, the parts that go into making these things, produced CO2. So anything that increases energy use, even clean energy use, will in the end increase CO2.
There aren’t that many places that regularly produce a surplus of clean energy. Yes, Germany does it, but the energy is too unstable to reliably run a server farm. Countries just don’t increase energy production over what they could potentially use.
And even if Bitcoin farming is done in a country with very clean energy, like Iceland’s geothermal energy, it would still be pushing out other, actually useful uses of energy, such as alluminium production, which, when done in Iceland, would reduce CO2 production in comparison with producing it in a country with dirtier energy.
Most of the world’s Bitcoin mining is done in China, which generates >75% of its electric power by burning coal.
I believe, and can rationally defend, the view that governments have no business regulating my consumption of chemicals that have a lower risk profile than many legal substances. I buy these chemicals on the darknet using Bitcoin.
My point? I don’t think it’s remotely obvious that Bitcoin have no value, and that citing use by ‘criminals’ is merely point-and-shriek behaviour.
Lodore:
+1
Look, everyone mining bitcoin and doing any other arguably-unproductive thing with energy is paying for that energy on a market. If the price of energy is too low to force its users to consider the full costs of their actions, there’s a pretty obvious solution. This solution is actually general and doesn’t involve either activists or Congress trying to decide which new technologies should live or die.
Can we at least agree that a carbon tax would help address this question?
As usual, everyone in the thread takes it as given that CO2 production has a net negative externality.
Warming generally has positive effects when and where it is cold, negative effects when and where it is hot. Effects on weather are very uncertain — at least one expert concluded that hurricanes would probably become a little stronger and substantially less common. The only two unambiguous effects I can think of are sea level rise, negative but small, and CO2 fertilization, positive and large.
Suppose, however, that you really do want to reduce CO2. Bitcoin mining has one unambiguous superiority to almost all other uses of energy. You can do it anywhere–transport costs for bitcoin are essentially zero. So if there are places (or, more plausibly, times) where renewables are in excess supply and you let prices reflect that, bitcoin miners have an incentive to do their mining with that cheap power.
@DavidFriedman
Can you link to a source that argues against that claim in aggregate? Before seeing any data, I would assume that while there is that calculus, on the whole the positive effects aren’t even close to the same scale as the negative.
Arguing that dumping additional energy into a very complicated system will have net-positive effects on the welfare of the fragile creatures within that system is an extraordinary claim, and demands extraordinary proof. At the very least, the precautionary principle says that relying on warming to have net-positive effects is a bad idea.
Would you say the same thing for removing energy from the system?
The precautionary principle is a general argument for stasis and should be discarded with great prejudice. If humanity had followed it in prehistory we’d just be another extinct species of savannah-dwelling ape.
Less of this, please. I’d appreciate it if you’d try to debate honestly instead of attempting to set rhetorical traps for your opponents.
@broblawsky, it’s a rhetorical trap, but not a dishonest one, like “have you stopped beating your wife?” It’s intended to determine which of these is your claim:
1. Greater levels of energy is inherently bad, in which case global cooling would be beneficial.
2. Both global cooling and global warming would be harmful, due to people and nature’s adaption to this temperature level.
@broblawsky Global warming having huge net externalities is insufficient to accept carbon tax as a good idea. Not at all. Any tax at a level high enough to make a substantial difference (say, change a +2 degree trajectory to +1.5) is likely to also cause substantial changes to the world economy and its growth. Those are overwhelmingly likely to be negative and quite likely to be on the order of magnitude of the damages of the global warming itself (at least, the difference in damages between 1.5 and 2 degrees). In fact, IIRC, a number of analyses working with the “consensus” IPCC data found that the damages from the tax are likely to be higher than the projected differences in damages from the climate. They may well be wrong, but I’d say you have to provide at least some support for that claim.
I’m still not interested in having a conversation with someone who’s trying to trap me rather than express their ideas and have an honest exchange of views. I’m not here so you can score points off of me.
I was unable to find any specific study that you’re referring to, so I have to ask: does that assume that the money gained from the carbon tax isn’t invested productively? Because if it’s assuming the money is just being thrown into a big pit, that study seems like a rather dishonest analysis.
Regardless, the specific question I was trying to address isn’t the question of whether carbon taxes are net-positive for society, but rather that carbon taxes could help address the negative externalities of undesirable economic activities like Bitcoin mining without requiring a flat-out legislative ban.
@broblawski
Here is one. It uses the climate change economic model of Nordhaus, who recently got a Nobel prize for it. I don’t pretend to understand much beyond the very basics, but the cited numbers are directly from the IPCC report. I doubt they made econ 101 mistakes to argue against a carbon tax.
One thing worth noticing about Nordhaus’ results as summarized in the Murphy piece just linked to is how small the costs of the various alternatives are. A benefit of three trillion dollars from following the optimal policy instead of doing nothing sounds like a lot of money — until you realize that it is spread out over the entire globe and a century or so.
The U.S. government alone spends roughly that amount every year.
@broblawsky: I’m kind of baffled as to why you think Alexander Turok is trying to “score points off of [you]”, though I suppose that’s your business.
The fragile creatures in question currently live successfully across a range of climates much larger than the projected changes over the next century from AGW. Their ancestors coped with larger climate changes than those projected, although probably slower, with no technology more advanced than fur and fire.
If you take the precautionary principle seriously, which nobody does, it forbids action to prevent AGW. After all, we are in an interglacial period that has lasted for quite a while, and it is at least possible that AGW is all that is preventing the next glaciation. Hence it is at least possible that doing things to slow AGW will put half a mile of ice over London and Chicago and drop sea level by several hundred feet, leaving every port in the world high and dry. That’s a rather larger catastrophe than anything as plausibly conjectured in the other direction.
So according to the precautionary principle …
+1
Environmentalism is mostly about signalling ones’ respect for some groups(the men in white coats) and lack of respect for other groups.(Middle and lower-middle class white people.) Thus, California is considering banning gas-powered lawn mowers, no one is considering banning cryptocurrency, which is associated with techies, a group which environmentalists show at least some respect for. Only the socialists are talking about banning private jets, because how else are billionaires supposed to get to Switzerland where they can signal to other billionaires how much they care about the environment?
Is bitcoin/other cryptocurrency mining more environmentally destructive than mining for other valuable commodities (e.g., gold/silver/platinum/etc.)? There isn’t some central bitcoin company polluting to mine new bitcoins, it’s all dispersed. A lot of the coverage I see of cryptocurrency these days all mentions the massive energy expenditure.
This seems like a problem that will solve itself in a few years (with respect to bitcoin specifically), as mining bitcoins becomes that much less efficient over time, unless the costs of computation fall or price of bitcoin rises fast enough to compensate.
Given how long laws take to pass, it doesn’t seem worth it.
Junk mail is a very important business for the USPS. It was ~50% of mail volume in 2012 and contributed $19B of revenue in 2015, probably around 25% of total revenue that year. I would guess its share of USPS’s overall business has only increased since then given the secular decline of first class mail.
Banning junk mail likely represents an existential threat for the USPS. Losing half of your volume and a quarter of your revenue could be a mortal blow on its own. Forcing the remaining first class and other volume to shoulder the entire fixed cost base of the Postal Service could trigger a cascading spiral as increased costs (translating into higher prices or more subsidies) accelerate the decline of first class and other mail. In addition to the fiscal and social consequences of a USPS collapse, there would be substantial political repercussions, as the Postal Service represents 600,000 relatively attractive government jobs spread across the country. It’s a critical jobs program in many areas, representing one of the top employers in some states.
So you might not see lobbying or activism against junk mail because it would be ineffective, given the political and other objectives that the USPS serves and the consequences of banning junk mail on the USPS.
I worked for the post office a few months a couple years back and can confirm that, at least internally, everyone is very conscious of this. They didn’t even really like to call it “junk mail” at my training/office, and the phrase “BBM pays your wage” was uttered more than once.
What is BBM in this context?
Big beautiful males? Big Bulk Mail? Big Bulk Male…I don’t know, none of this sounds enticing.
Noah,
Business Bulk Mail
And yet junk mail just makes the world a far worse place in pretty much every way. The impact on landfills isn’t actually very important–the world has plenty of places where we can dig new holes and bury waste, and paper can mostly be recycled anyway. But in terms of attention and annoyance and hassle, it’s just another category of spam, and that stuff is a net loss for mankind everywhere it exists.
Except for the one good thing it does, which is allows otherwise self-interested companies to subsidize a free communications service for everyone else.
USPS mail is not free, it’s just subsidized.
Right, this makes me respect the post office less, not junk mail more.
@smocc–Maybe the solution is to sell ad space on stamps. Just make them bigger.
I’d at least like to see plastic junk mail banned. E.g. the bogus membership cards included in my daily delivery of rubbish advertising products from companies that regard my time as existing solely as something for them to use to acquire money. I sent a serious nastygram to my credit union a month ago after one of their partners sent me a plastic card of this kind – they promised to rebuke the partner, and also not to share my contact information with any more of their partners.
As a Canadian, I don’t worry about the paper itself – that will either have come from farmed trees, or possibly recycling of previous paper. The carbon cost of (air) delivery to the appropriate city may be noticeable, but the cost of delivery within cities is dwarfed by the cost of one or more members of each household driving an individual car to work every day.
But if we’re going to ban single use plastics – or better yet, most use of plastic where there are good alternatives available – we should ban all of it. There’s no point requiring me to use a paper bag to carry home products wrapped in 3 layers of plastic, and a bit of irony in requiring me to use paper straws if they are allowed to be sold packaged in plastic wrapping.
I completely do not understand the priorities of my so called allies, environmentalists who focus on symbolic causes like this, but show every sign of being statistically innumerate.
@AlexOfUrals
There is in The Netherlands. Firstly, you have to understand that there is a self-regulation system of advertising in The Netherlands, where the rules are negotiated between the advertisers and the Dutch Consumer Association.
These rules have for quite a time included the provision that advertisers have to obey no/no and no/yes stickers on or near the letterbox. The no/no sticker bans the delivery of unaddressed printed advertising, as well as free local papers. The no/yes sticker bans only the former.
More recently, local governments have been reversing this, where instead of having to opt-out, you have to opt-in (yes/yes stickers). This resulted in several court cases, as this is expected to have a major impact on the number of houses where unaddressed printed advertising can be delivered, increasing costs for this kind of advertising a lot. The opt-in system has been upheld in all court cases. This is all very recent, with many local government waiting for the final decision, to prevent having to pay damages.
I have a first-grader who is interested in learning chess. I’ve taught her the names of the pieces, how they move, how they’re set up on the board initially, and what the basic objectives are. She’s retained maybe a third of all that. I’m not confident in my ability to teach her properly beyond that, and I don’t have the time to anyway.
What I have in mind is some kind of app I can put on a tablet for her, or maybe even a standalone electronic device. Books might be acceptable too, though books that are meant to accompany a physical chessboard might be stretching her focus abilities too far.
And I’d say my budget is around $25.
Can anyone make some recommendations?
I once bought a game of “solitaire chess” for my nephew. It’s a little set of puzzles where you set up a bunch of chess pieces on a mini-board, 4X4, in a specific configuration, and try to have the pieces capture each other in turn until there’s only one left. You have to capture with every move and every setup has only one correct solution that leaves you with only one piece remaining. Don’t know if that’s what you’re looking for, but it does help one cultivate an eye for the pieces’ movesets.
Hmm, looked it up on Amazon, and it says 8 and up. Might be good for a bright 6yo? There’s an edition available for $17, though: https://www.amazon.com/ThinkFun-Brain-Fitness-Solitaire-Chess/dp/B07PPXRP1S/
An app is the wrong choice. Find her someone she can play with, instead – personal connection is vital to getting people interested in abstract pursuits, in my experience. There will at least be plenty of high school students who know about chess and are willing to teach young children in exchange for $25 and a letter of recommendation; this is plenty for any first-grader who isn’t a Hungarian space-alien genius.
Electronic stuff is hit or miss. My son loves video games and loves chess, but has almost no interest in playing chess via computer. He’ll play all day with other people though.
So, Well…, if you get her an app and she’s not interested in it, that doesn’t mean she’s not interested in chess.
I’m sure there are other kids who are just the opposite, and don’t want to bother with people face to face and prefer playing with a computer.
I know she’d be happy either way. Some of the main advantages of a virtual game would be not having to set up pieces or worry about accidentally knocking them over (or be knocked over by a sibling), being able to easily pause and resume where she left off, being able to see available moves highlighted, etc. Also, a (presumably) vetted learning program might be more effective than some unknown high schooler who maybe isn’t used to working with young kids.
The Fritz & Chesster series is often recommended.
My first grade son has been doing competitive chess for about a year and a half now.
1) Have her join the chess club at school. They will certainly at least teach her how to play, and she’ll have other kids to play with. In my county, the chess clubs at the schools cost money ($125/year), because they’re not just run by one of the teachers. They have an actual chess coach come in and help the kids.
2) Conrad Jr. also has a private chess coach, and he recommends they use an app called “Chess Kid.” It uses random, sanitized names with no communication between the players so you don’t have to worry about pervs on the internet (although I don’t that’s a big deal). This matches kids up on the internet to play with each other using a ranking system. Basically kid-friendly lichess. The app itself is free for matchmaking and basic vs. AI play, but then there’s advanced features you can unlock like more advanced AI opponents and chess puzzles. They charge $50/year for that simple stuff, but they get it because parents are suckers.
3) The book series CJ’s chess coach has him on is called “Learn Chess the Right Way” by Susan Polgar. Instructions and puzzles.
Hope that helps.
What would a new religion look like?
Before answering that question, I should specify what I mean by “religion”. There are three components:
1. It has to have to some kind of supernatural force that is at the core of it. So no, liberalism, capitalism, communism, libertarianism, social justice, etc. are not religions. I don’t particularly care about how other people decide to define it, but for the purposes of this question, they aren’t. “Supernatural” is hard to define, but I’ll say it’s something that works outside of our universe and/or doesn’t adhere to the laws of physics.
2. It needs some kind of rules. They can be moral or they can simply involve proper rituals. The important thing is that they constrain behavior in some way or compel us to do something we might not otherwise do.
3. It needs to have a sense of reverence. This is hard to pin down clearly so I’ll have to trust you understand what I’m getting at.
And by “new”, I mean something that isn’t just an offshoot of a previous religion. What counts as an offshoot should be stricter rather than looser. Having similar ideas is not enough to be an offshoot. Having the same symbols and gods is.
With all that in mind, what would a new religion look like? It’s hard to imagine. People don’t take divine revelation seriously anymore, especially of an entirely new God. So if you want people to take it seriously, they would probably have to use some kind of philosophical/mathematical proof or supposed empirical evidence. It doesn’t have to be something everyone understands, it just needs plausibility. The problem is connecting this thing to a set of rules. It would have to be in our best interest to follow those rules. If you ever watch Star Trek, they have plenty of episodes dealing with this problem, with the solution being, of course, that they won’t follow this entity, regardless of its power. And any new religion should have some features that mesh well with the current culture. It would be pointless to have a prominent Snow God arise on the equator.
Here’s an idea of what this might look like. Take the simulation hypothesis and from that you get that whatever created the simulation is our God. Use it to explain something like the Fermi Paradox or our incapability of finding a Theory of Everything. We can call this entity something like The Great Coder or just The Coder for short. Robin Hanson speculates that in the simulation world, we would want to be as “entertaining” as possible, to keep the simulation from being shut down. You could get a lot of mileage out of this possibility. Maybe the Coder wants us to be entertaining. Maybe he wants us to aspire to Greatness. Maybe he wants us to expand as far as possible. We don’t know. We could even speculate that the Coder interferes with our lives, and is trying to steer us in the right direction through multiple religious events. What I would do is have the goal be to somehow break out of the simulation. Once we reach the other side, then we will experience something that is basically heaven. What do you think? Do you think there is something more plausible?
Just for clarification – was Islam a new religion by your standard, or an offshoot of pre-existing Christianity and Judaism?
By the standard I’m proposing, it’s an offshoot. They both believe that the Bible had some truth, that Jesus was an important teacher and as far as I know, Muslims believe themselves to be worshiping the same God. I want to avoid people saying something like “Christianity but with warp drives”, which isn’t that implausible but is too obvious.
Is Christianity a new religion, or an offshoot of Judaism? Is Buddhism an offshoot of Hinduism? Is Hinduism one religion, or several religions?
Scientology.
New Age mysticism leaps to mind for me, although it might count as an “offshoot” too.
UFO cults.
Come to think of it, I don’t know of any religion, other than UFO cults and Scientology, that isn’t an offshoot of an older religion.
Right. In previous millennia, it wasn’t that hard to get people to accept completely different new religions. And even today, people with more “traditional religions” are more receptive. But followers of the Axial Age religions are more culturally resistant to new religions. They’ll do their own offshoots(Mormonism) or they’ll become more secular. UFO cults/Scientology seem genuinely different, but they haven’t really caught on, although that could possibly be that it’s too soon. There does really seem to be some kind of psychological wiring for religion, but once people go atheist, they don’t often go back. So I think as far as the future of religion is concerned, there are three options:
Either I’m overstating how much people are wired for religion and/or it’s growing pains, in which case, we’ll just all become atheists.
One of the older religions(or one of its offshoots) makes a comeback.
Or something new comes along which is more satisfying.
Wasn’t it?
There are, by your standards, only a few “completely different new religions” ever.
Scientology started as a bald pseudoscience self-help method in the fifties or thereabouts; it later took on the trappings of religion to try and dodge taxes, win approval, and hide from the wrath of the FDA. It’s had its heyday, but it’s made a lot of enemies over the years, and it wasn’t the same after LRH died. Now it’s hemorrhaging members. The general consensus of CoS-watchers seems to be that eventually it’ll just stop being viable and David Miscavige (the current “pope”) will scurry off under a rock with as much money as he can stuff in a suitcase.
Religions in general aren’t made of whole new cloth. Schismatics and syncretists have too many advantages over people making it all up from scratch.
I don’t know if it counts as a “new” religion rather than riffing on an old one, but the religion of Humanity from R. H. Benson’s Lord of The World could point in the direction:
There’s a documentary about just such an occurrence running on (and off) Broadway right now. If you have the opportunity, attend a showing of The Book of Mormon.
Or you could read the book! It is not that long, and the Church of Jesus’s Christ of Latter-day Saints will send someone to give you one for free, no strings attached.
But if Islam doesn’t count as a new religion, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (colloquially, “Mormons”) definitely don’t. We have some quirks relative to mainstream Christianity, but nothing that differentiates us as much as Muslims.
That wasn’t exactly what I was getting at, but thanks for the offer 🙂
Gigantic, massive spoiler for The Book of Mormon, do not decode if you ever want to see the musical because comedies should definitely not be spoiled: Va gur raq, gur Zbezba zvffvbanevrf jvaq hc univat nppvqragnyyl perngrq n arj eryvtvba. Fb zl pbzzrag jnfa’g nobhg Zbezbavfz orvat n arj eryvtvba, vg jnf nobhg gur cebprff bs perngvat n arj eryvtvba nf qrcvpgrq va gur cynl.
Cannot recommend the show highly enough, though. I was dying laughing.
Does anyone know what Mormons think of the play? It’s somewhat offensive, but I think in mostly a good natured way. Probably about as offensive to Mormonism as Dogma was to Catholicism, but I still thought Dogma was funny.
Am a Latter-day Saint, but haven’t seen it. I have Latter-day Saint friends who have seen it and liked it, and friends who have seen it and didn’t like it, and friends who are offended by the whole concept and won’t ever see it.
My personal take is that I don’t have time for it, in the same way I don’t have time for South Park. I’ve never thought that brand of humor is funny, and it’s certainly not going to add to my spiritual life, so I don’t really see the point. From what I can tell they’re not even making fun of what missionaries are really like; they just kind of made up a caricature and then made fun of that. Where’s the fun in that?
When I’m in the mood for a quirky, humorous take on the life of missionaries I re-watch Nacho Libre. Jared Hess served as a missionary in Mexico and it shows, both in its underlying morals and in its goofy but loving depiction of rural Mexico.
Mormonism is polytheistic, whereas Islam is at least monotheistic.
That makes Mormonism very different from Judaism.
Old school Judaism, or that new stuff that came about after Moses (and again after Solomon)?
Because the old school Israelites weren’t that monotheistic.
I’m sure you know what you mean by this but it is an incredibly misleading statement and I hope you will stop repeating it in such a simplistic form. The word “polytheistic” conjures ancient religions like Greek polytheism or Hindusim, with many gods that each have domain over different, limited aspects of the world and whose interests may conflict and who often disagree and work against each other.
Latter-day Saint theology has three beings who are so completely unified in purpose and intent that they may at times be referred to by a single title “God.” They worked in unity to create the entire universe. The Son is a distinct person from the Father but is so aligned with His Father’s will that he shares equally in His glory and power. The Son has said that He can’t do anything of Himself, that only that which he has seen The Father do.
That is so far removed from any other polytheistic religion that using the same word used for it without at least some clarification starts to feel like it must be a deliberate oversimplification or slur.
@smocc: The doctrine of eternal progression strikes me as more like polytheism than any theological differences regarding the Trinity.
What Dacyn said.
@Dacyn Okay, but the concept is still so drastically different from what people think of as “polytheism” that to describe it that way without any clarification is irresponsible. The Greeks didn’t believe that they could become Olympians when they died.
Maybe not on the level of Zeus, but divine honours were commonly paid to exceptional individuals in the Graeco-Roman world.
But this all strikes me as a red herring. Whether or not Mormonism is similar to other polytheistic religions, the idea that God started out as a mortal just like us, with his own God, is at least as big a difference from Christianity as any Islamic doctrine is.
Nor do Latter-day Saints think that they will become Olympians. Jesus prayed that his apostles would be One even as He and the Father are One. If Christ being God by virtue of being perfectly unified with His Father and sharing His glory isn’t the problem, what’s the difference with the Saints who are joint-heirs with Christ being God through the same reasons?
It’s different than Nicene Christianity, but it’s far more different than ancient polytheistic religions.
If I am testy about this it is because there absolutely are people out there using “Mormons are polytheistic” as a propagandistic slur, even if you yourselves are not doing it.
As far as relative differences between Islam and Nicene Christianity and LDS Christianity go, sure LDS beliefs about eternal progression are perhaps a radical difference. But a Latter-day Saint could profess the Apostle’s Creed without reservation (except for the Catholic church part) whereas that doesn’t make any sense for a Muslim, I think. Which is a bigger difference? Eh.
You will see Latter-day Saints often get sensitive about being excluded from “Christianity.” Maybe too sensitive, given how a big part of our claim is that all the other Christian sects are wrong. But misrepresentation, especially the deliberate misrepresentation that happens frequently, is frustrating.
I’m thinking that Gerald Gardner‘s Wicca qualified as a new religion by these standards, back when he first wrote about it. He got many of the ideas from others, and some of the symbols from archaeology, but while he claimed a historical background, that was clearly a mix of misunderstanding, wishful thinking, and outright lying.
It features a Horned God and Goddess, whose names are secret (initiates only), required rituals (20 or perhaps 32 per year), nudity during those rituals, and a host of other practices. Its theological innovations include the idea that everything works in gendered pairings – a concept probably derived ultimately from Hegel’