This is the bi-weekly visible open thread (there are also hidden open threads twice a week you can reach through the Open Thread tab on the top of the page). Post about anything you want, but please try to avoid hot-button political and social topics. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit – and also check out the SSC Podcast. Also:
1. The next virtual SSC meetup will be May 10th, 10:30 AM PDT. Scott Aaronson of Shtetl-Optimized will be giving a talk on a quantum computing topic to be decided later, followed by discussion. See here for more information, especially variations on the theme of “because [last meetup] someone came in the form of a dachshund the size of a small apartment building, I have instituted a rule that you cannot have an avatar larger than an SUV”.
2. The SSC podcast (no extra content, just somebody reading posts) is now available on Spotify at this link.
3. Highlighting some good comments from the Amish health care system post: Sam Chevre’s brother is an Amish/Mennonite deacon and gives us some better numbers. ConstantConstance is also a Mennonite and gives her perspective. Bhalperin is an economist and discusses evidence around what fraction of per capita health spending can be explained by the rise of health insurance (answer: some papers say half, but check the caveats). Matt M on the incentives leading to the rise of health insurance in the US (the 1940s and ’50s had very high taxes on income, so companies tried to find untaxable ways to compensate workers). It was awkward for me to postulate that health insurance made people stop trying to limit their own health care costs, so thanks to those of you who came out and admitted that your health insurance made you stop trying to limit your own health care costs (1, 2).
4. And also some great comments on the uric acid post! Emil Kierkegaard has access to an unpublished study of 4450 Vietnam vets and finds “no relationship of gout to IQ, income, education, and no interactions either.” Yashabird discusses related issues in Lesch-Nyhan syndrome and Tourette’s. Ambimorph is an expert on uricase and refers us to her paper and talk. And testosterone elevates uric acid and seems relevant to questions like who becomes an ambitious executive.
5. Unfortunately, not all comments have reached this level of excellence. Some of the problem is a predictable consequence of the blog getting more publicity because of a few popular articles. But I want to catch this before it gets out of hand. In particular, I’m worried about the thing I see on Twitter, where everyone feels so threatened by people attacking their ideas in really exaggerated ways that they preemptively respond in kind and the temperature goes up and up forever. I’m going to be a little stricter for the next few months to reverse a trend toward that happening here. The first set of victims, some sample offending comments, and the length of ban are:
– Secretly French (1, 2, 3, 4), indefinite
– Jermo Sapiens (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), indefinite.
– An Firinne (1, 2, 3), indefinite.
– HeelBearCub (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), six months.
– Brad (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), six months.
– EchoChaos (1, 2), six months
– HowardHolmes (1), one month
– Clutzy (1), one month
– Alexander Turok (1), one month
This is only about 10% of the people I secretly want to ban, but I am trying to show restraint. People who are on thin ice: Nybbler, Plumber, Le Maistre Chat, ThisHeavenlyCongjugation. You can avoid being banned by consistently following the rules on this page, by trying not to make broad hostile generalizations about groups that contradict their own understand out of nowhere (eg “the only reason to be a Republican is that you hate the poor”, “Democrats say they’re trying to help people, but really they’re just after power”), and by making a common sense effort to keep this a friendly and high-quality place.
Feel free to discuss these bans, but keep in mind that the way I ban people is by putting their screen name into the censorship filter, so you might want to put their name in Pig Latin or stick some random characters in the middle if you mention it in your post.
I’m a huge Ring cycle fan (much more so than of Tolkien’s ripoff :-)). I don’t know if this means that I’m the right person or the wrong person to be explaining this to you.
In the mid-to-late 19th century the classical music world was split among a few axes. Wagner was polarizing on many of them.
In the world of German music, the central question was what to do in the wake of Beethoven – when his third symphony unleashed the 45 minute symphony, and the 9th symphony said you could throw a chorus into the orchestra if that’s how you needed to express yourself, the question became what *can’t* you do? In this context, Brahms was seen as the defender of the conservative view – keep writing symphonies and concertos in standard forms (maybe with an extra movement in the piano concerto, and with big orchestras, and longer development sections) and keep it mostly within tonal harmony. Wagner was seen as the progressive – after Beethoven’s 9th, the distinction between symphony and choral work was no longer important, and as development sections get longer, you can push dissonances harder to increase the power of the eventual resolution. You can venture farther from the standard forms – Beethoven and Brahms still have the standard (two theme exposition; development; recapitulation) form for their first movements, and the standard theme-and-variations or rondo form for later movements, while Wagner and Liszt abandoned these traditional forms entirely, thinking that the music should take on forms that express ideas or passions. (A few decades later, Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg wrote influential music and criticism that showed how Brahms had a progressive strand as well, and suggested that the romantic melding of musical form with ideas made Wagner actually more conservative than a rigorous formalism could be.)
In the world of opera, the bigger conflict was between Verdi and Wagner, with their associated Italian and German nationalisms. (This was the period of unification of both nations, and the word VERDI even became an Italian nationalist catchphrase, as the acronym for “Vittorio Emmanuele, Rei d’Italia”.) Somehow this played out primarily in the Paris opera houses. Verdi treated opera in the traditional way – it provides a setting to show off each of the arts, with the singers getting nice encapsulated arias with a pause for applause afterwards, while the dancers have a fancy ballet at the beginning of Act II, and the set designers get an exotic setting to design. But Wagner treated opera as a “Gesamtkunstwerk” – a total work of art. All of the artists – the singers, the dancers, the set designers – had to subject themselves to the unity of the opera as a whole. Parisian nobles were scandalized when they showed up late to Tannhäuser and realized they had already missed the ballet, which Wagner put early in Act I for dramatic reasons, rather than keeping it as a separate spectacle.
In both of these divisions, the central issue was the same. Wagner disliked formal constraints and wanted the music to serve the work as a whole – I would say it serves the story, but for Wagner even the story is in service of some greater expression. (Maybe it’s socialism, maybe it’s the importance of love over law, maybe it’s anti-semitism, maybe it’s German nationalism – all of these are central themes of the Ring Cycle, and I love the cycle, even though I don’t really approve of any of these messages.) So where Brahms would write a four movement symphony with a sonata allegro, a slow theme and variations, a scherzo, and a rondo finale; and where Verdi would write an opera with the right number of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass roles, an aria for each, a few duets, and a ballet; Wagner would write a weird sprawling thing with no formal organization to follow.
The way Wagner dealt with this was through the Leitmotiv. Once you learn to recognize the different leitmotifs, you can see how Wagner is composing the whole opera. Probably the easiest to recognize motifs are the ones for the sword, Siegfried, the Valkyries, the horses, Valhalla. There are less recognizable ones for the Ring, the gold, the denunciation of love, forgetting, fate. Once you start listening for them, you can understand much more of what is going on. When Wotan crosses the Rainbow Bridge into Valhalla, you can hear not only the castle and the rainbow bridge, but the defeat of the Giants, and Wotan’s sudden idea to create a sword that a hero will wield decades from now to get the Ring back. When Brunnhilde is punished by Wotan for breaking his command, the music plays for you not just the magic fire that Wotan is using to lock her up, and the law that Brunnhilde betrayed, but also plays for you the love that Wotan has for his daughter, and the tension between that love and the law, and also plays the sounds of the hero without fear that Wotan eventually agrees can rescue Brunnhilde from the fire in the future. My favorite specific motif is one that appears only twice over the entire four evenings of the cycle – once in the second opera, when Brunnhilde defies Wotan to save Sieglinde and the child she will some day bear, and once at the very end of the cycle, when Brunnhilde takes the Ring and jumps with it into the flood of the Rhine to destroy it and its curse while Valhalla burns in the background. I think this is the theme of “the triumph of love over power”.
The motifs aren’t just sequence of notes that bring forth images either – they are rigorously musically related to each other in many ways. The motifs of nature (the Rhein, the Earth, the Rainbow) all emphasize octaves and perfect fifths. The motifs of magic and treachery emphasize minor thirds and chromatic steps. The motifs of the horses, travel, and related concepts share a dotted rhythm. The triumph of love over power is the inversion of the denunciation of love to gain power. The sword, the hero without fear, and the hunt all emphasize the major triad.
But this composition by leitmotif does end up meaning that most of the melodies are simplistic and/or disjointed, and you don’t have a clear sense of when one song ends and the next begins, because you’re hearing snippets of the same stuff in different mixtures for several nights. It’s not like listening to Brahms (where each movement has its own themes to expose, develop, and recapitulate) or Verdi (where each singer gets their own songs to show off their voice).
So what I recommend for someone who wants to give the Ring Cycle its fair attempt, is that you should do some study of the leitmotifs in advance. Then when you actually attend a production, you can properly understand the music on its own terms, rather than seeing it as just unstructured post-Beethoven “stuff”. (You’ll also appreciate how much more sophisticated Wagner’s use of these leitmotifs is than John Williams, though Williams does use a lot of this technique to excellent effect.) I’m sure you can find many discussions and examples on YouTube, but when I was learning this stuff a few decades ago, I found this amazing two-CD set where Deryck Cooke explains the motifs and then plays samples from the various operas that demonstrate those motifs. He starts by describing a bunch of the motifs, but later starts showing how they are transformed and related to each other:
https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Ring-Nibelungen-CD/dp/B00000424H
I think Das Rheingold is the most approachable – like The Hobbit, it was intended as a story that could stand alone, even though it’s the prequel to the trilogy that follows, and it’s also a lot shorter and more mythological than the later ones. But Die Walkure could also be a good one, given its number of great moments (the twincest duet, the Ride of the Valkyries, and the magic fire music that ends it). I only tolerate Siegfried because it’s part of the whole series, and Gotterdammerung is a great ending, but not a good way to try to get into it.
Would just like to thank you for a high-quality comment!
Does Scott Alexander actually read all the comments on this blog? And if so, is this including on the older posts?
I am just wondering because I am fairly new to reading this blog seriously, and would like to comment on some of the older posts, but some of the comments would probably only be helpful to him.
In any case, since I’m making this comment anyway, so even if it’s just shouting into the void, I might as well say something:
I love this blog. There are points that I disagree with, but usually they are small points and they don’t detract at all from my enjoyment of this blog. I have been following pretty closely for the past few months, and I have read a lot of the older posts as well.
I love Scott’s ability to treat issues with all the seriousness that they deserve, while also keeping things light-hearted and even laugh-out-loud funny at times. I love that the posts are so clearly full of empathy for everyone, even those Scott strongly disagrees with, not just understanding their logic and reasons, but understanding their feelings as well. I love that he can break questions down and put arguments together with such clarity.
It’s said that one of the definitions of brilliance is the ability to say something and have the people around you immediately know that what you said is true but never have thought about it that way before. A lot of the posts on this blog did that for me. I particularly like Toxoplasma of Rage in this respect.
I love the fiction pieces–they are hilarious and jaw-droppingly brilliant, and afdnaskgh;f–I just can’t. I think my favourite of the shorter ones might be A Modern Myth, though the ones with the pills was also amazing. And also the Proverbial Murder Mystery. And the one with the blue eyes. Just so many of them, honestly.
And Unsong. OMG UNSONG. [Possible spoilers for Unsong in this paragraph and the next!] Unsong was so great. I loved Uriel and Sohu. And Erica and Ana, and just everyone. Even the terrorists–they were hilarious. Even the Peter Thiel stand-in–in the end even he was just trying to do what he thought was best for the world, and I definitely did not expect to like him. Heck, even the Biggest Bad was just trying to do some good in the end–he did just enough bad to make the universe exist.
I actually stayed away from Unsong for a very long time, because I thought it was Rationality Fiction which I’m decidedly not a fan of. And maybe Unsong is Rationality Fiction, maybe it’s not, but I think what really sets it apart for me is that almost all the characters are written with love. Sometimes a teasing and snide kind of love, but palpable love nonetheless.
I actually first learned about this blog when I was pointed here by some older feminist posts, pointing out how wrong this blog is about stuff, but I feel like even at its most fire-y and anti-feminist, this blog is just so open and understanding, and also humble in a way that so many blogs are not–there’s just a tacit understanding that some things are hard to understand, and just because you can’t understand them doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with them, or you. That kind of humility is so hard to find on any side of pretty much any argument, but especially about topics like feminism.
As a fairly feminist woman in STEM (though not as much of a firebrand as I used to be), I’m sorry that Scott took so much shit from feminists–people like my younger self, for sure, though many without even the excuse of youth. It’s admirable that despite everything Scott can keep such an open heart and maintain a high level of discourse.
Anyway, to sum things up: thank you to Scott for a large number of hours of enlightening reading, entertaining stories, eye-opening ideas, and an example of a level of discourse so rarely seen anywhere.
Scott doesn’t read them all. But he reads here and there.
You won’t be able to comment on old posts. April 8th’s OT doesn’t allow comments but April 5th’s does, suggesting a one-month life time. (This is a common anti-spam strategy lots of blogs use, since spambots would post on year-old posts on a bunch of blogs to create links. I dunno if it’s still needed with modern Google spidering or not.)
Thanks! I figured he wouldn’t, haha, he has so many comments on his posts, and so many of them are so intricate. Also thanks for explaining about why we can’t comment on older posts. That makes a lot of sense.
Thank you so much for the kind words.
You can’t comment on older posts because they auto-lock after thirty days to keep out the spambots, but you’re welcome to post any thoughts about older posts on an Open Thread.
Wagner was an extremely innovative and skilled user of harmonic tension. Consider the overture to Tristan und Isolde. It only consists of chords that in would have been considered dissonant in Classical musical (Mozart etc.) theory. In Classical music theory, such chords would be resolved with consonant, pleasant sounding chords. What Wagner does is that he teases the resolution, but then resolves the dissonant chord to another dissonant chord, sort of like musical Penrose stairs.
But Wagner does not do this as an avantgardist experient of chord resolutions, he he uses it in conjunction with melody. You can identify a clear melody in the overture to Tristan und Isolde, that by itself is quite simple, you can hum it along if you now the tune. Yet this melody is related closely to the complex chords underneath it.
But Wagner does not stop at music. Wagner is the only notable opera composer who wrote his own librettos. This means that the music and the play that is staged in the opera are far more interconnected then in other operas. Wagner is able to associate every concept and every character in the opera with musical elements, which helps the storytelling of the opera immensely. Compare this to something like The Magic Flute, which has a libretto that is the 18th century equivalent of Avatar (before you complain that the Magic Flute is full of Freemason symbolism: Yes, it is, but it’s far from the only opera from that time to feature magical instruments and a battle between good and evil. Consider “Kaspar, the bassoonist or: The Magic Zither”).
There has been quite a bit of discussion about whether this lockdown will mean more students will start homeschooling after having tried the experience, but so far, it has all been from the parent’s convenience perspective.
Marginalrevolution linked this essay by an eigth grader. She writes very maturely for her age, and you can see that she knows how to manage her own time with distance learning.
Kids younger than 12-14 obviously need the babysitting, either by parents or teachers. But could kids who like learning, after having experienced this online schooling heaven, nag and pressure their parents into enrolling them into some kind of distance high school? The parents may not be willing to do the work with homeschooling, but if all the work is done for them, they might let their kids have their way. That would mean that, in cases of families where both parents work outside the home, kids are left alone at home, but as long as they’re as mature as this girl seems, I don’t think it’s that bad.
I’d be careful generalizing the middle school student population to the level of that girl.
I saw that article a couple days ago and my bullshit detector went off, since the average eighth grader isn’t going to have her rudimentary-to-mediocre(I mean this as a complement, it’s great for her age) grasp of adult opinion piece composition. It turns out she’s an actual human who probably has the skills to write that piece(at least with adult assistance), but she got them here, at an upscale all-girls camp of the kind that has a full-fledged dance and gymnastics program, an indoor natural-grass soccer field, and a journalism program. It’s in MA and costs $13k to attend.
This doesn’t tell us everything about the child, but it tells us she has an unusually high level of parental support and that her parents have the kind of resources that enable one to send their children to a camp that costs as much as a semester of graduate school tuition at ASU.
It’s probably not a good idea to use an affluent tween journalism-nerd as the standard for “would distance learning work for an unsupervised child”, since the remaining 99.9% of children aren’t necessarily similar. A child doesn’t absolutely need those kinds of resources and personality to successfully school themselves, but it helps, and that’s before we start analyzing what kind of resources she has access to at the kind of schools her parents are likely sending her to when she’s home for the year.
Sure, but even getting 0.1% of 59 million is a lot.
And improving the status of online education/homeschooling among those types of parents in general increases the status of homeschooling.
IMO, every kid saved from the jail that is school is a great thing.
Your point is absolutely valid, but playing off ana53294, it would be awesome to make distancing education more convenient for those high achieving and/or aspie kids it suits.
I was homeschooled until 9th grade and the idea of wanting to do this weird “socializing” thing rather than focusing on learning was kinda weird to me when I started highschool. I believe I wrote a couple 15 page papers with loose guidance in the context of a charter school class. I look some of the amenities kids have now that would allow younger me to learn stuff he was interested in without navigating weird the weird sociopolitical minefield that is in person education and I’m like damn.
Counter-anecdote:
I hated elementary school and mostly was fine with high school. Despite being in the social environment I mostly avoided socialization stuff until I left highschool or college, really.
In retrospect I *really* wish I had known how important that would be and to have spent a lot more time/effort trying to get good at it when I was that age. It’s fairly easy for me to keep learning as an adult if I’m interested. But it’s really hard to catch up on social dynamics.
Knowing that it’s important doesn’t mean you’ll learn it, though. And when you’re a teenager, all your feelings of shame and inadequacy are amplified x100.
It’s easier to learn social skills when everything is not the end of the world. And when you can get embarrased by trying something (say, ask a pretty girl out), without that being the bane of your existence for your entire high school life.
As an adult, you can always leave any company. That means you have wider range to experiment and test what works for you, without making your life unbearable.
It’s a common concern that kids won’t learn to socialize if they are home schooled. Useless anecdote, I had pretty much no friends and no social life from elementary school to high school. I had lots of close friends in college and didn’t find socializing particularly difficult or stressful. Now that I’m an adult with a fairly successful career, I’m back to having no social life and the thought of going to social events with coworkers makes me groan. I don’t really have a good hypothesis to draw from this. Perhaps – social skills are weird, not very transferable and it might be more important to actually be around people that you find it worth socializing with. Curious to hear other perspectives on this.
Kids who are home schooled and have little interaction outside of the family will learn social skills within that bubble, but the family culture may be quite different from what they encounter later. That’s a disadvantage, balancing what some families see as an advantage of home schooling, the superiority of their family culture to the culture of the school.
But home schooling families can, and often do, arrange for lots of non-school socializing. A home schooled kid could join the Boy Scouts, attend SCA events with his parents, socialize with other home schooled kids in one of their houses or a public park. Our son ran a weekly D&D game, with participants of a range of ages.
A kid going to school may still fail to develop an adequate level of social skills. I think that was true of me. I identified much more strongly with my family culture than with the school culture, continue to be bothered by the failure of many people I interact with to behave in the ways my family culture would imply and doubtless offend people by not behaving in the way their culture would expect.
As Tyler Cowen would put it, the status of both teachers and home schooling parents is going to go up because of this.
Kids that are high on conscientiousness will do great on distance learning. Those with ADHD will get destroyed by it.
I think it is kids without parental support who get destroyed. Kids with ADHD might do better at home than in a classroom. Classrooms are not flexible to the needs of kids with ADHD. Learning at home can be done in a much more relaxed and flexible manner and different types of learning can be employed that couldn’t in a classroom with a bunch of kids.
Iono man, I feel like for some kids inattentivity is a socially reinforced behavior. That’s how it was for me anyway, and I’ve seen that with students.
If you aren’t especially fond of German singing and big orchestral forces, I think one of the best ways to get into Wagner would be to listen to Siegfried-Idyll. It’s twenty minutes of beautiful ”pure” music for chamber orchestra, and it has everything I really love about the late Wagner – except the glorious German singing 😊 :
* seemingly unending melodic lines
* subtle counterpoint
* subtle but startling harmonic shifts
It’s a music made of many contrasting small elements, but all blended together horizontally and vertically until you can’t clearly recognise where one thing ends and the next begins. Tristan und Isolde is just the same thing on a very much bigger scale.
(of course Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht or Strauss’ Metamorphoses take it very much further – Siegfried-Idyll seems pretty clear and easy in comparison.)
There are many types of solitaire (card solitaire, patience) out there, with Klondike being the most common one. Unfortunately Klondike it has a couple of problems. There are rarely any real decisions to make, and the game is frustratingly difficult to complete. What are some better types of solitaire?
I rather like Golf. There seem to be more decisions to make, between stringing together sequences of cards in the current round and trying to set up sequences in following rounds. And the chance of completing a hand is just plain higher than in Klondike.
I’m a fan of Gaps, or rather AisleRiot’s version of it which might actually be one of the other Montana variants. But it sounds from what you say about Klondike as though you’d dislike Montana even more; there’s only a few strategic moments per game and the completion rate (for me, at least) is only about 20%.
There’s a variant of Gaps called Kings End I like a lot. The completion rate is higher, and you can pursue different strategies.
Golf’s a good game, but my favorite is Four Seasons: interesting decision-making, reasonable winning chances, and the starting layout sets up quickly.
I’m a fan of Calculation and Kings End.
I’m a fan of FreeCell. Good amount of decisions to make, full information, and near-guaranteed solvability.
I actually hit one of the unsolvable puzzles on an online version. 😀
I play a lot of Free Cell on my phone, but I impose a handicap. I don’t allow myself to send any cards up to the finishing piles until I’ve got them all sorted into four stacks from King down to Ace in the main board. I can’t quite tell if my successful completion rate with this handicap is more like 10% or more like 50%, but it makes it a much more interesting challenge. Sometimes, if I get pretty far into the development of a board but then get stuck, I will send one or two aces up, and that strategic use of these extra spaces usually lets me solve the board. (I make very liberal use of the “undo” or “back” button.)
Hands down, freecell is my favorite. Much has been written on the difficulty, the summary of which is that almost every (~31999/32000) deal is possible, but otherwise, there’s a nicely linear progression of difficulty. It’s definitely less tedious to play on a computer.
I’m a fan of Spider Solitaire. The strategy is a lot deeper than it first appears: there are very consequential choices to be made with which stacks you bury and which you clean out. Without undos, you can win ~70% with 2-suits, and ~25% with 4 suits. Some fraction of the games are easy wins or quick losses, but enough games feel “close” that it stays engaging for me.
If you really want to tax your brain, FreeCell is perfect information. You can win approximately every game, but that requires exceptional planning. If you’re trying to win, you might just stare at the screen for 10 minutes, planning out the game, before you make your first move.
Only Mozart could make singing in German sound pleasant 🙂
It’s the old joke about Wagner, and I do think he has some wonderful pieces but the effects he was striving for and his theory of what opera and music should be means a lot of BIG HEAVY ROMANTIC NOT CLASSICAL NOW BABY!!! playing.
That being said, the Liebestod is genuinely marvellous. But for sublimity, it’s still going to be Soave Sia Il Vento and Wolfgang rather than Richard for me.
I remember that I´ve read few years ago that there is some economics study claiming that recessions following financial crises tend to be longer and generally worse than other types of recessions. Of course this is very relevant to the current debate about the costs of lockdowns, since it is evident that they are causing the mother of all financial crises, defined as households and firms mass defaulting on their obligations.
Intuitively it makes sense. According to a standard keynesian (or just standard without k-word?) framework, recessions are usually in some sense caused by the fall in demand for capital. When fall in demand for capital goods falls, their producers respond by curtailing production, thus resulting in unemployment and associated fall in demand for consumption. But people know that recession will end eventually, with demand for capital goods rising again.
So when demand for capital falls because e.g. stock bubble bursting, demand for exports falling, or central bank driven credit tightening, someone with money at hand would want to buy up loads of capital goods at a discount, thus putting a floor on its price decline. But banks that provide money for that are themselves dependent on payments from debtors. With mass defaults, banks don’t have money (in financial jargon, liquidity is lacking), so prices of capital goods fall much further.
It is an appealing story and I am inclined to believe it, but at the same time there is an obvious confounder that with worsening recession defaults will increase, so perhaps causality runs in an opposite direction.
With regards to The Bans, I´d like to plead for restoring commenting of HBC and EC. HBC is one of the few of us regular left-leaning commenters and there was an affirmative action policy for leftwingers, so we do not feel overwhelmed by an effect of a rightwing echochamber, right? And EC was banned quite selectively for two mildly sarcastic jabs. I feel that I could find many a worse dunking on outgroups from not-banned regulars, although I am not quite willing to go through an unedifying job of digging them up. In addition I had consistently found him to be not only actually most polite but also most interesting from reactionaries regularly commenting here.
I don’t know much about EC, but I agree that HBC should be restored — perhaps not immediately, if he did indeed post something super offensive, but in a reasonable amount of time.
Agreed on EC, but example 5 for HBC was a straight-up attack on a fellow commenter, so I’m hesitant to agree.
I’m not sure I agree with the Great Dino Hunter (AT) ban if the the given comment was the only example.
I’m ~75% sure that, at this point, this doesn’t count as a financial crisis in this context. Banks are doing okay, there aren’t runs on deposits or anything like that. Nobody thinks their cash isn’t safe.
Exactly. The 2008 crisis was specifically precipitated by certain financial instruments (mortgage-backed securities) being discovered to have a lower value than expected (because of correlations in the underlying mortgages that weren’t appropriately calculated). The current crisis may end up causing problems for financial institutions, but is about as non-financial as it is possible for an economic crisis to be – certain real services just suddenly lost a lot of value because they are ways to transmit a virus as well as the underlying experience.
I’m not a finance expert at all but here in NZ the unemployment is going to result in a lot of home foreclosures. Is that not a problem in the US, or is that not generally a big problem compared to 2008?
Has the New Zealand government not imposed a moratorium on foreclosures, or a bailout to individuals who have lost income? My understanding is that most developed world governments have done one or both, though there are still likely to be a spike of foreclosures and bankruptcies that go through anyway (but hopefully a much smaller number than in 2008).
The Us has instituted some forbearances on mortgages but that is simply a pause in the payments, not a reduction and many people are in line to have to pay the full amount that they have missed in a lump sum once the grace period is up. Further the US can only force forbearance through federally backed loans and while some non federally backed loans have allowed forbearance I believe it is for a minority of privately held mortgages.
The mid April estimate for the US was that 5.5% of mortgages (~3.4 million) were in forbearance.
My takeaway from the bannings is “If you argue with someone who is uncivil, you are 9/10ths the way to incivility yourself.”
I disagree.
If you only interact with those who are civil, what is your civility worth? Keeping your civility while those around you are losing theirs is a very great feat indeed. It is effort and takes work. I would suggest that work of this kind is the bread and butter of spiritual development. Avoiding it is like a monk hiding from the difficult world in their cell, yet claiming to be a Christian.
Seems like it would be worth a great deal to people who have generally civil forums and are trying to keep them so. If civil people interact only with other civil people, then by process of exclusion the uncivil people are interacting only with other uncivil people, easily recognized (see any EC/HBC back-and-forth) and excluded. And if some of these people are intermittently civil, engaging them only when they act in a civil fashion encourages them to respond in kind, whereas engaging with their incivility mostly just encourages them to score cheap points.
If the idea is that behaving in a civil manner towards the uncivilized will by its example encourage them to join your civil society, congratulations on having discovered the basic principle of the missionary. Who usually does his best work by going out to the uncivilized parts of the world and engaging with people on their home ground – not by inviting the uncivil into the civilized world without even remedial education in civility, and pretended we all don’t care about their incivility.
So take your particular brand of virtue, and go someplace where it is needed. We’ll still be here when you need some R&R.
OTOH, there is a long history in the US and other places of bringing the uncivilized (for some value of uncivilized) into a working culture and more-or-less assimilating them to mainstream culture. The US has managed this with many waves of immigrants who often came from very poor rural backgrounds, though the process went both ways (US culture changed some), the huge waves of Irish, Italians, Poles, etc., largely assimilated to mainstream US values and became Americans with some grandparents who speak another language.
This continues today–we get immigrants from El Salvador or Guatemala or wherever, and their kids usually assimilate to something like US culture. There are underclass gangs among the kids of those communities, too, and I think that’s been historically common (Italian, Irish, and Jewish mafias definitely existed). But I think over time most of the kids and grandkids become Americans with slightly darker skin and relatives further south.
@John Schilling
I’m sorry my thoughts about civility irritated you enough for you to wish me to take my particular brand of virtue and go someplace where it is needed.
Surely civility is, to a considerable extent, in the eye of the beholder. We often perceive sarcasm, snarkiness, put-downs etc more often than they are intended and so temperatures rise and civility dissipates.
My point, which I may have expressed poorly, was that simply to disengage when there is a perceived lack of civility is missing the ethos of this blog. I had David Friedman, as well as Scott himself, as examples of people who go the extra mile in engaging with others who could easily be seen to be interacting aggressively or uncivilly.
The charitableness that Scott talks about is something that I think requires a great deal of effort. And it comes into play the moment another’s comment seems lacking in civility. It might only be a first step – I’m not recommending missionary zeal or fawning subservience to anyone – but isn’t that what characterizes civil discourse from the usual chaos and mud-slinging we see all over the internet?
I think you have to go all-in with him, surrendering to the conceits that, yes, you really have to stay put for five hours for the Real Experience and for the musical arc to make sense, and, yes, you should take all that over-the-top romantic bombast completely seriously, but once you do that, his music can really assume an immense amount of emotional significance.
Highlights:
Prelude to Act III of Tristan und Isolde
The minor-key reprise of the Transformation Music in Act III of Parsifal
Tannhäuser Overture, as FrankistGeorgist said
First two are better if you listen to the preceding parts of the operas first, Tannhäuser Overture stands on its own more. In general, any short snippet of Wagner is likely to sound too heavy and bombastic unless it’s situated in the middle of three hours of that stuff to make the heaviness and bombast the norm, so you actually need the “terrible” half-hours for it to work.
I should note that the only opera I’ve watched is Parsifal (that was live, and amazing); all the others I’ve merely listened to, so I’m speaking mostly musically here. I know most of the plots but have not directly experienced most of the operas as narratives.
Also consider that basically all major modern films are a refined version of what Wagner is doing. Modern film music, and the way it relates to on-screen action, owes a lot to him.
There is no pun on this week’s Open Thread which is sad, because 153 is such a nice number: “Better Thread than Dead”, though.
I just learned that one of the medications I take has a $7.98 copay for a 30-day supply, but is $24.00 for a 90-day supply — which is what the prescription is written for — without insurance. Insurance won’t cover the 90 day supply.
So I’m saving 6 cents at the cost of picking up my prescription three times as often. And I’ve been on this medication for more than a year and only now learned about this. And only because they accidentally tried to fill it twice.
Sometimes I can’t even.
I work in a pharmacy. It would be much easier if it were possible to get a clear idea how much insurance charges ahead of time. But the only way to find out how much it will cost is to bill it, which means that exploring the various prices requires us to bill one way, reverse the claim, bill the other way, possibly reverse the claim and bill the third way, etc. It’s a nuisance, and we’re short on time because few pharmacies staff enough people to really meet demand properly. The margins are too tight.
I suspect what happened in your case was that the tech who got the script tried to bill to insurance for ninety days, got a big old NO result, switched to thirty days, saw it went through, and moved on to the next script in her big backlog pile. Depending where you get your script filled and what software they use, she might not have even had access to the default price. We do at my store, but we understand that the “cash” price is pretty much BS in most cases, which is why discount cards are a thing. We pay more attention to our own costs.
That’s fair. And even if the software were looking for the cheapest price, well, that would be the $7.98/month over the $24/3 months. I will just have to be more proactive in future about asking about prices when I’m buying generics.
Is there a way to find out the details of what products a pharmacy carries other than to phone them and ask really annoying, detailed questions? For some of the medications I vary occasionally use, I prefer individually-wrapped versions rather than loose units. As an example, I know that albuterol solution is available in unit-of-use packaging (it’s what I use on the ambulance). But I’ve also seen the gigantic bricks which get supplied to people with a prescription which probably should be discarded after having been opened for a while. Which is a gigantic amount of waste and makes it difficult to carry around a single unit or two.
But going up to every pharmacy and asking if they have (or can get) $DRUG in $PACKAGING is time consuming. Doing it over the phone saves the trip but leaves me in hold-music hell.
Does their website list perscription only stuff?
I can’t recall ever seeing the big bricks you describe. It’s always either individual packets or five-packs inside the boxes, at hospital and retail pharmacies.
I love Wagner (and opera in general), but in its unabridged form he’s not for everyone. He can be tediously long-winded, and was clearly too in love with his own ideas. It’s interesting that you mention soundtrack, because I see a clear lineage between Wagner and much of modern film scoring. “Beowulf libretto cosplay” is both an entirely fair criticism and one of the things I personally very much dig. Wagner is like the Return of the King Extra-Extra-Extended Edition of the opera world, but for me, his high points are epic in a way that other opera composers rarely reach. Tannhauser, Gotterdamerung, and Tristan are my favorites, though I do love Das Rheingold. The vorspiel and the Donner-summons-mists / rainbow bridge / Wotan sings about Valhalla sequence are highlights of the Ring cycle. FWIW, I hate the recent Met staging with “the machine”, and didn’t care for Bryn Terfel as Wotan, though he is fantastic in Mozart.
I loved the “Americana” staging that the San Francisco and National operas did a decade or so ago. It’s a little hokey in Das Rheingold, with Alberich as a ’49er and the gods as Gatsby partygoers (and a croquet mallet as Thor’s hammer!), but it was great in Die Walkure (Valhalla as the boardroom at the top of the Empire State Building, and the movements of the Valkyries punctuated with photographs of American soldiers who had died in Iraq and Afghanistan).
As far as I can tell, “monetary policy”, as commonly thought of by educated people these days, is nonsense. Yet, intelligent people like Scott Alexander seem to believe in it.
CHALLENGE: Provide a brief description of what monetary policy is and why it makes sense as a way of steering the economy.
When have I ever expressed any opinion on monetary policy?
You made a recent post quoting Scott Sumner who thinks monetary policy is all that is needed to steer the economy. That’s what got me thinking about the subject.
Do you mean the Open Thread where I included the sentence “Economist Scott Sumner, an expert on the Great Depression, wrote a great post explaining exactly how Hoover was vs. wasn’t to blame”?
yes
Dan,
Scott quoting Scott Sumner on Hoover in a long form blogpost is not an endorsement of Market Monetarism.
Also that’s not a very accurate reading of Sumner nor Market Monetarism.
Edited for grammar
At what level of detail? I think a description like “manage fiat currency so that it keeps a reasonable value – avoid deflation and hyperinflation” is not nonsense at the very least…
@uau
I agree that your description is not nonsense. Good job.
Having said that, I would prefer a bit more detail, such as how monetary policy works to manage a fiat currency.
Monetary policy is managing the money supply to keep prices stable. It is needed because demand for money is not stable.
It does not steer the economy.
@uribe
Thanks for the response.
How does monetary policy keep prices stable? My view is that it doesn’t. Rather, fiscal policy and banking regulation are the main factors in keeping prices stable (or making them unstable). Monetary policy involves only tinkering with interest rates, which is generally insignificant. Occasionally, “monetary policy” gets into buying private assets such as mortgages, but is that really “monetary”?
I’m no economist or expert, so I’ll give you my simple understanding and say no more.
My simple understanding is that (other than the overnight rate) , the Fed manipulates the money supply and changes in interest rates are the result of that.
Only that’s not really true. Since the Fed can change the money supply, it doesn’t need to. When the Fed says it’s raising or lowering rates, this is mostly a *threat* to change the money supply, a threat it can credibly make since it has the power to change the money supply. It’s like holding a gun in a movie. People just do what you say after that because maybe you will shoot them, but usually you don’t have to.
So it’s not about tinkering with interest rates. It’s about threatening ,implicitly, to change the money supply.
Feel free to correct me if I am wrong.
@Uribe,
Thanks again.
My understanding is that the central bank doesn’t manage the money supply. It manages interest rates by exchanging time deposits (government bills and bonds) for demand deposits (checking accounts). Both are forms of money.
So what exactly can the central bank threaten to do that would affect the economy?
@detroitdan
Bills/bonds and checking accounts are not equal forms of money though. At the end of the day, banks need to pay their bills with their checking accounts. When I go to the ATM, I expect cash to come out, not TBills!
When interest rates are lower, banks are incentivized to turn their TBills into cash, which they use to lend or invest, which expands the money supply. When interest rates are higher, banks are incentivized to lend less and hold TBills instead, contracting the money supply.
(Interest rates are only a crude tool for controlling money supply, and so when times require it, you’ll see central banks reach for other tools as well, such as quantitative easing.)
This is all really oversimplified, but it’s directionally correct. Bank funding is somewhat complicated, and bank regulations also play a critical role in all this (particularly, what reserves a bank needs to hold is a hard restriction on what lending a bank can do). I don’t know the best resources to learn this stuff, but you could do worse than reading some publications by the Fed, e.g. https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/monetary-policy/
FWIW, I’d love to read a Scott-authored article on monetary policy; not because of any kind of “CHALLENGE”, but just because I think it would be interesting.
To be honest, I don’t think Scott understands money very well. My understanding is that Modern Monetary Theory is not just a theory, but rather a very accurate description of how the modern monetary system works. But most others, including Scott I’d guess, seem to think that it works through fractional reserve banking and loanable funds.
This was my reaction as well – who is coming here to hear financial/money policy advice from Scott? I’m struggling to remember times he’s talked about money, and all I’m coming up with is one time when he mentioned that it was weird to him to find out that some people have trouble affording dependable cars. He doesn’t exactly present himself as Adam Smith.
@Atlas
Yes, the school of economics known as Modern Monetary Theory understands money very well, in my opinion. Please see MMT Brief Description.
@GearRatio
“Who is coming here to hear financial/money policy advice from Scott?”
My perspective is that Scott is an intelligent and well educated person who doesn’t understand money and banking, and that this is typical of our society. People come here to discuss the state of knowledge in society, and to look beyond the conventional wisdom.
The issue with MMT is not what it describes but what it leaves out. Including the pretty important concept that what matters for most desirable areas of government activity is not the money per se but the transfer of real resurces: teachers for example need food and shelter, paying teachers in money is merely a convenient way of enabling that transfer of real resources.
@ReaperReader
ReaperReader– What you say is not left out of MMT. Au contraire, MMT is quite clear that real resources provide the major constraint on a government’s ability to manage the economy. I don’t know where you got the idea that MMT is oblivious to real resources.
Anyway, thanks for the response.
Well, here was I thinking that Scott was just the tiniest bit heavy-handed with the banning, when up rocks yourself with your pet hobbyhorse to flog, and once again I find myself in agreement that the Rightful Caliph may do as he wills on his own blog.
Stan Magic Money Tree all you like, but can you please not insult other commentators who are replying in good faith to your questions, or the host of this blog?
Yeah, that comment fulfills none of the three criteria. I think most of the comments were protesting the length of bans of established posters who have a history of providing thoughtful comments, even if sometimes they engage in CW. This one seems much less familiar, and a lot more personal.
According to a small subset of economists who think MMT is correct.
Lowering interest rates can steer the economy by forcing money out of bank accounts and into riskier investments? Off the top of my head?
Is your argument whether the effect exists, or whether it can be known/predicted in advance?
@Belisaurus Rex
I think you’re basically correct. Monetary policy is all about the risk free rate of interest in the economy. If the risk free interest rate is negative, for example, then the theory is that people will go to extremes to find riskier investments. In practice, it doesn’t seem to work that way as interest rates around the world have been stuck around zero for more than a decade.
So the effect doesn’t seem signficant.
I don’t have time to do an effortpost on how monetary policy works. So for a quick take on where I believe you are mistaken:
Risk-free rate: this is entirely theoretical and does not exist. Do you mean the FFR? These are not the same thing.
Interest rates: “interest rates” are an effect of monetary policy, not the policy lever or cause. You have cause/effect backwards. This would plausibly need an entire effortpost to explain.
Prices: the price level is due to monetary policy. Banking regulation has nothing to do with economy wide prices. Are you thinking of demand effects based on consumer access to credit? Not sure where you’re going with that one.
Steering the economy: I’ve never seen anyone make this claim. Are you extrapolating from the idea of NGDP level targeting?
Fiscal policy: does not impact the price level, since it is set by monetary policy. If CB x targets price level Y, there will be an offset due to any fiscal policy undertaken to keep price level at Y.
Currency: the value of a currency is set by supply and demand
Can you recommend some reading material on this subject in general?
Jliw,
Market monetarism is a further technical refinement of the already brilliant insights of both Milton Friedman and his wife Anna Schwartz. Note this great leap in economics is orthogonal to all of the political and ideological debates that surround Dr. Friedman, so any ideological or political priors can safely be laid aside.
If you have an undergraduate or master’s degree in economics, skip straight to Monetary History of the United States. Then read Sumner’s further technical development of their insights.
If not, it’s a bit of a slog. To understand where they’re coming from it’s easier of you are fully knowledgeable in basic macro, the IS-LM model (Hicks-Hanson), and the disagreements between Neo-Keynesian and Neo-classical econ.
Easiest route: Mankiw Macro, one of many Money and Banking or Financial Economics textbooks, and then Monetary History.
Prof David Friedman can probably steer you in a better direction?
Edited for @DavidFriedman
My father was married to Rose Director Friedman. Anna was his long term collaborator, not his wife.
Oooof.
Apologies
@Skeptic
Obviously, we subscribe to totally different schools of economics. Here’s a brief description of mine:
There are 2 aspects of MMT:
1. MMT is an improved (much clearer and more straightforward) description of how existing monetary and banking systems work.
2. MMT proposes a government job guarantee (employer of last resort) as a tool to reduce unemployment and act as an automatic fiscal stabilizer with regard to inflation. (Note that we already have valuable automatic fiscal stabilizers in the form of income taxes and welfare benefits.)
#2 is substantially untested. #1 is unassailable as it is just a description of how things work.
Here’s a chart I drew showing the evolution of selected economic schools, with MMT being the focus: Evolution of Selected Economic Schools
Note that MMT draws from institutional economics (recognizing the role of large institutions as well as classical markets), chartalism (the basics of fiat currency), Keynesianism, financial instability considerations, and a sectoral balance perspective (accounting based economics).
I also wrote something of a The National “Debt” for Dummies — not intended to be condescending but rather to be easy to understand: The Socrates Show, with guest Pete Peterson.
The best textbook presentation of MMT economics that I have seen is Eric Tymoigne’s Money and Banking.
@detroitdan,
Would you please reply to the arguments in this post or perhaps this article or this one by providing a reference to empirical evidence which supports the MMT ideas regarding inflation?
The reason why interest rates are stuck at zero is not because they don’t work, but because they’re fighting against some very strong opposing effects.
In particular I’d highlight the increased reserve requirements for banks. Post-2008 regulatory changes reduced the leverage available for banks. This would’ve caused a substantial contraction in monetary supply were it not counteracted by all the central bank efforts.
So what were the issues prior to the 2008 changes that lead to decreasing interest rates? The federal funds rate has been decreasing since ~1980, with lower lows and lower highs for every cycle, and the FFR effectively hit zero in 2008 before these requirements came into play.
If we’re using a moving vehicle as a metaphor for the economy, I think “steering” the economy is nothing any Western central economist/banker really expects to do, or at least not well. Private capital chasing returns plus entrepreneurs plus technology advancement are the engine *and* the steering, and the economy ‘steers’ wherever technology/entrepreneurs can find returns.
But continuing the vehicle metaphor, I think the idea of monetary policy and monetary stimulus are in the vein of a) keeping the wheels on and, if you get fancy, b) greasing/improving the wheelbase. If you allow currency inflation/deflation, or credit crunches / rate uncertainty so acute that they freeze existing sectors of the economy, that’s the wheels coming off. E.g., it was reported that a result of the 2008 crash was a period where regular people couldn’t buy cars on credit, and car sales tanked, for a multi-month-long period. Effects like that play forward through the economy, e.g. no car sales means more people not going to work, a lot of car salesmen not making money, a lot of car manufacturers sitting on extra inventory, and this effect hit several other sectors allso, and all of them were tightening belts to avoid liquidity problems, and that tightening caused further hits to other sectors… those shocks can pile up and cause a ‘crash’, rather like if the wheels on the front couple train cars came off, and the rest of the train started crashing into itself all along its length. Monetary policy is very much not a controversial thing, from what I was able to gather as an undergrad econ major at an Ivy League 10 years ago. The *limits* of monetary policy are very much in doubt, and where it interacts with things like long-term employment/unemployment, or whether government savings displaces private savings–there’s tons of things that aren’t clear. But it’s clear that access to credit, low/stable inflation, and stable interest rates (and more I don’t know about) function sort of like ‘wheels’ in an economy-as-train metaphor.
Fiscal policy, and ‘fiscal stimulus’ are more controversial ideas. Does government savings displace private savings? Does government borrowing affect the interest rate that private borrowers pay? Should the government borrow aggressively at the start of a recession, in order to spend aggressively? One obvious thing that often happens in recessions is local and state governments see tax revenue and other revenues drop precipitously, and consequently lay off double-digit fractions of their workforce, potentially accelerating the train-car-pile-up problem. Should local governments attempt to save for rainy days, and avoid layoffs or even try to boost their hiring during crashes? Here the arguments range much more widely, and with less clear data or logic, and many more places where political philosophy creeps in.
I agree with that. In recent years, because monetary policy has become political, there seems to be this notion among some that monetary policy can goose the economy. I suppose if the wheels are falling off the train with sparks flying, securing the wheels amounts to– relatively speaking and to mix metaphors–goosing the economy.
@yodelyak
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
I was hoping for something a bit briefer, so I won’t have time to respond to everything you wrote.
Many if not most economists seem to think they can steer the economy using monetary policy, but I agree this is not possible as monetary policy in modern economies just consists of buying and selling government debt in order to tweak the risk free interest rate.
Fiscal policy, in my view, is much more powerful thought limited by the ability of the government to collect taxes and mobilize resources.
Can you state a source for this? Monetary neutrality is a topic of live debate in economic theory. (Of course “many” is a vague term).
@ReaperReader
1. Are you saying that monetary policy cannot be used to steer the economy? If that is correct, then what is monetary policy good for? (perhaps we are in agreement that it’s not an effective policy tool for managing the economy)
2. Regarding monetary neutrality, here is a post with detailed consideration of the matter: Money is not a Neutral Veil. The short answer is that money is integral to capitalism. Specifically:
I have to say, calling Scott a monetarist is the funniest attempt at an insult I’ve heard. I mean that seriously: I laughed.
Anyway: Monetary policy is the government’s policy towards the money supply. In our system, the government has created a central bank (the Federal Reserve). Lending money is equivalent to creating money, so the Reserve creates money. Private banks do it too but are required to have a minimum reserve, while the Federal Reserve doesn’t. This means that banks can run out of money to lend but the Reserve can’t, so when the other banks hit their limits they can go to the Reserve. Likewise, the Reserve can buy or sell open market assets. Monetary policy doesn’t steer the economy, for example TARP was a treasury program and thus was a fiscal policy. So is the CARES act.
@Erusian
I guess I don’t know much about Scott’s views of the monetary system. My impression is that he doesn’t understand it, but I could have missed something.
Thanks for taking me up on my “challenge”. I agree with your first two statements.
“Lending money is equivalent to creating money, so the Reserve creates money”. I don’t think this is quite right. The central bank (Federal Reserve) creates money to buy government debt. That is not really lending money as commonly understood.
“Private banks do it too but are required to have a minimum reserve, while the Federal Reserve doesn’t.” Yes. But private banks can acquire (borrow) reserves as needed to satisfy minimum reserve requirements. Other countries with comparable financial systems, such as Canada, do not even bother with the reserve requirements.
I mostly agree with the rest of what you wrote. Basically, countries have unlimited supplies of money which is provided by central banks. The money is spent into the economy via fiscal policy (and taxed out of the economy via fiscal policy). Monetary policy is just the mechanism by which fiscal policy is implemented.
No, it doesn’t. The Federal reserve doesn’t magic money up out of nowhere and pay it out to make purchases: it takes on debt to make the purchase. The literal operation is usually that every bank owes the Reserve money, so the Reserve takes the government bonds from the bank and in exchange gives a credit on its loan. It’s like forgiving a loan payment in exchange for some in-kind consideration.
Knowing that you’re going full MMT: What happens when the bank no longer owes the central reserve anything? What happens when the government can’t even create the debt to buy because no one is buying it?
Yes, but those are loans, meaning there is a limit and it’s unwise to do so if the loan will not be productive. This is true even without a reserve requirement. (Also, Canada does, iirc, have capital requirements, which effectively serves the same purpose.)
Nope. Not even close. I know that’s where MMT wants economics to go but it simply doesn’t go there.
Countries don’t have an unlimited supply of money: they have a finite supply of money but can create more. There are important implications to this on savings and price levels. If the money supply rapidly expands, you see effects on both.
Money is not created in a centralized manner but created and destroyed by economic operations in the society. When I let someone buy a piece of art I made with a promise to pay installments, I have just (personally) created money. The Federal Reserve’s unique superpower is that it can do so until the US dollar collapses, but anyone can do it.
Money isn’t “spent” into the economy. It’s created through debt. This means that the US deficit actually creates money when the US borrows. But this is the same mechanism as how mortgages create money. You could equally have a government where government spending doesn’t create money, by having a balanced or surplus budget.
Money is not taxed out of the economy by fiscal policy. It would be if the government taxed the money out and put it in a giant Scrooge McDuck vault, but the government spends every dollar it takes in. This means the money does not exit the economy: instead it’s reallocated. The social worker gets paid and spends the money. The government takes a tax bite but it spends that money too. The only way to take money out of the economy (other than by reducing debt) is to save it without investing it. And by “not investing” I mean stuffing it under your mattress.
Monetary policy and fiscal policy affect each other. I do tend to see fiscal policy as more important but monetary policy is independent, or at least its own thing.
You could have a fiscal-driven monetary policy, where the government creates money by taking on debt and destroys it by taxing it and then effectively eliminating the money. It’s not obvious to me what the advantage of this would be. It wouldn’t inherently enable more government spending: the government would have to not spend money it taxed in proportion to the debt it took out in order to not cause runaway inflation.
@Erusian
” The Federal reserve doesn’t magic money up out of nowhere and pay it out to make purchases: it takes on debt to make the purchase.”
This is factually wrong. The Fed credits bank accounts with money and takes possession of “debt” in exchange. They sway demand deposits for time deposits.
No, I’m afraid this is one of the few topics I do know something about. You’re misunderstanding what “credits their account” means. It doesn’t mean they send the bank money, it means they decrease the balance the bank owes them. In other words, they add a credit to their account at the Fed. If the bank needs actual cash from the Fed, it borrows it at the discount window.
The Fed then owns the debt (and the interest payments etc), which it gets in exchange for the bank not owing the Fed as much money as it otherwise would.
Full disclosure, I am not an MMT adherent. Question for you, you say
“The only way to take money out of the economy (other than by reducing debt) is to save it without investing it. And by “not investing” I mean stuffing it under your mattress.”
Wouldnt debt default also take money out of the economy? Or bankruptcy for that matter? Or is that what you meant by reducing debt?
@bonewah: if someone loans you money, you have more money and they have less. If you repay the money, you then have less money and they have more. If you default instead, that means you keep the the money and your lender doesn’t get it. (This is ignoring subsequent transactions, e.g. if the reason you defaulted is that you gambled away all of the loan at your local casino then obviously the casino keeps the money.)
Yes, debt default would take money out of the economy. So would a bankruptcy. So would paying off a debt normally. Money is destroyed every time you make a credit card payment.
Think of it like this. Let’s say I have two dollars. How much money is there in the economy? Two dollars. I want to buy bonewah’s delicious Bonewah soup. Normally it costs a dollar but you agree to let me have it on credit: I can have the soup now but I have to give you $.10 a month for the next twelve months. I take the deal. I still have one dollar. You have a debt which is worth $1.20 (ignoring time value of money for simplicity). How much money is there in the economy? $3.20. Okay, I pay you back $1.20. How much money is there in the economy? Well, I now have $.80 and you have $1.20, so two dollars.
We have just created, then destroyed, $1.20.
Money is debt. The origin of paper money is literally as debt slips: you gave the bank some gold or whatever and they gave you a piece of paper saying they owed you a relevant debt. This remained the case until 1973. Since 1973, this debt is against the income of the government of the United States (or whatever relevant country).
Bank money is debt. Specie money, which though admittedly rare nowadays is still money, is not debt.
Specie money’s value is a combination of its inherent value (i.e. the value-for-other-uses of the metal) and its ‘agio’ (the additional value it derives from its convenience as a money, as a result of being assayed and weighed with a trusted stamp). The agio is what provides the seigniorage that pays the coiner for the effort of coining; thus for privately produced monies, supply and demand will balance the circulation at the point where the agio matches the marginal cost of coining (I think? I haven’t worked through that argument carefully. A further complication is that the value of the specie is increased by the demand for its use as money, so some of the agio shows up there rather than in the price difference between bullion and coin). Governments sometimes set the seigniorage lower to encourage uptake of the coin for reasons of public policy, but this also encourages the melting down of coin (so they have to ban that), and possibly clipping.
The value of specie-backed bank money is the value of the specie, minus the risk of default, plus the agio; the additional convenience of paper (or electronic) money over a lot of heavy, fiddly-to-count coins means the agio is larger. (Also, calling it “debt” rather than, say, “warehouse receipts” feels like it might be the lead-in to a noncentral fallacy, even if it’s technically true.)
The value of fiat money is all agio; it’s not meaningful to say that a dollar is “a debt against the US government” when the only thing you can redeem that debt for is… another dollar. (Exception: you can use that dollar to cancel a debt to the IRS. By denominating taxes, fines etc. in its fiat currency, a government gives its citizens an incentive to use that currency for everything else as well to reduce the need for conversions. Whether this counts as a form of agio is a definitional question I’d rather not take a side on.)
It’s possible for a non-government-backed money to derive value purely from agio too; this seems to be the case for some cryptocurrencies (although for others there may also be value derived from e.g. “using ETH gives you a claim on a fraction of the processing pool to execute your smart contracts”. I’m not by any means an expert on cryptocurrency, so this parenthetical might be total bollocks).
@Erusian: you are assuming that all debt is money. That is a very broad definition of ‘money’, compared to the standard ones of M0 to M4.
To take your case of
@Bonemwah may have your debt, but whether it is worth $1.20 depends on how trustworthy you are thought to be, and on the market’s discount rate. It is entirely possible that @Bonewah may only be able to sell your debt for 10 cents, or for nothing, not $1.20. (No disrespect to you personally, the market valuation is necessarily made under limited information).
What’s more, let’s say @Bonemwah manages to sell your debt for $1.20, then you default (for simplicity let’s assume you default before you make any payments, again no disrespect intended). So you have the soup, and your $1.20. Bonewah has the $1.20. The purchaser of yur debt is down $1.20. The net effect is the same as if you just defaulted on your debt to @Bonewah directly.
All money, including paper bills on the gold standard money, is debt. This doesn’t necessarily HAVE to be the case, but de facto it is today and for the past few centuries. That said, I concede that you can design a system (such as a specie system you describe) where the money isn’t debt.
I will also point out that MMT does not advocate anything like a specie currency standard. Some right wing economic theories do but I’m not talking about that.
M0-M4 is meant to measure the total money supply. Debt is not included in the count because it would involve double counting. If you take out a loan for $100,000 and put it in your bank account, that means there’s $100,000 more in M1.
You’re complicating a scenario I admitted I simplified. I admit the scenario is simplified. Yes, there are good and bad debts. Does this meaningfully change my point in some way? Because I’m not advocating a Bonewah soup based economy.
Yes, and? Again, I don’t see what lesson this complication of a demonstrative toy model is meant to gesture towards.
Erusian:
The Krugerrand is (famously) legal tender in South Africa today; the British gold sovereign circulated widely before 1914 (which is only one century ago) and, similarly, is still legal tender in Britain today (although its face value is such a small fraction of its metal value that it would be very strange to use it in that way). Specie money was the norm until the early 20th century (the silver standard was probably more widespread than the gold standard; cf pound sterling); it mostly went away during the Great Depression when governments made laws banning the ‘hoarding’ of specie, being replaced by government-issued specie-backed fractional-reserve money, which in turn was replaced by pure fiat money when Bretton Woods collapsed in 1971.
Really, painting specie money as some kind of weird aberration is wrong; it’s our present pure-agio fiat system that’s historically unusual. It’s lasted for just 50 years at this point, and IMNSHO it and the Bismarckian welfare state it props up probably won’t last another 50.
Of course Magic Money Tree doesn’t advocate specie currency. You can’t print your way out of fiscal trouble if people will only accept hard currency! That, in turn, is a large part of why the economic schools you refer to as “right-wing” do advocate it (or, as in David’s article, privately-issued commodity-backed fractional-reserve money).
Thanks for your replies everyone.
If I hold a $1 bill right now, whose liability am I holding? In what way is it against the income of the US government?
@Erusian: of course I’m complicating it, the rule is “make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler”, not “make it as simple as possible Full Stop”. We could equally well say that you’re complicated it by bringing in the issue of debt in the first place.
Yes, yes. I’ve already conceded other systems are possible and have existed in the past, though while specie coins may circulate they’ve been a small part of the money supply compared to paper notes on the gold standard for at least a few centuries. Still, I am being descriptive, not prescriptive.
Because the US government will be required to provide goods or services in exchange for that bill. Likewise, if I were to hold a contract that someone would deliver me such and such amount of salt pork it would be a liability. Now, granted, it’s a strange liability because the government is sovereign: the government’s “liability” in some cases is an inability to arrest you for tax evasion. But it still is. (There is some debate on this point as ec429 says. But if you want to argue paying taxes is not a value, then you can always subscribe to the petrodollar theory or whatever pleases you. Or you can advocate a return to specie currency. But again, I’m simply trying to be descriptive.)
I can tell you why I simplified it outside of a general principle: I was trying to show how money supplies could be increased through debt. What principle are you trying to demonstrate or discuss? I don’t see how it contradicts my point that debt is how money is created. Of course there’s bad debt that doesn’t create money. I never denied that. I just don’t see what you’re trying to illuminate.
Which goods and services are they required to provide? At what price?
This is, and always has been, a completely ridiculous position. Taxes are neither a good or a service, and not everyone who receives dollars in exchange for goods and services is required to pay US taxes. The US government can demand that I give them my dollars under threat of imprisonment, which actually makes it a liability for ME, but not for them. In short there is no reasonable definition of liability that applies to the US dollar. Actual US dollars (right now) function in the same way as specie currency from this vantage point, they are assets only, and not liabilities.
What’s your definition of liability? Because the US does not tax the mere possession of dollars, so I think it’s a very non-standard usage from an accounting perspective.
No.
Money is something that can be conveniently used to make payments. Bitcoin isn’t debt. A gold sovereign wasn’t debt. And lots of things that are debt are not money.
As I have clarified several times, I am describing the system as it currently exists for dollars. This is because I am discussing MMT proposals for how to handle the current US budget, for which that is the relevant discussion.
I am not describing eternal rules of economics and I have repeatedly conceded as much. You are right there are several systems where money isn’t debt. None of them are the US system. If I am wrong about the US system, please tell me, but I don’t think I am.
I am well aware that money can be specie currency or cowry shells or bitcoin or giant stones hauled on ships from a different island. Money is just a medium exchange and store of value, whatever the society happens to choose for it. But bank notes, even bank notes on the gold standard, are a kind of debt. This is a choice our society has made, and we could have made others, but it is what we have done. Again, I am being descriptive not prescriptive. (At least on the matter of money, I’m being fairly prescriptive in that I don’t think MMT makes sense. But strangely no one is pushing back on that.)
Or am I mistaken even with how the current system works?
@Erusian: I don’t think your repeated mantra that you are “being descriptive, not prescriptive” squares with broad phrasings like “Money is debt”. You now seem to be saying that all you were ever saying was “US dollars are debt”. Which claim baconbits9 has engaged, and I think he has a point, but it’s at least something we can meaningfully discuss. But “money is debt” has a distinct baileyish feel to it, and I think that’s why we’re still hammering on this point.
(I agree that bank notes on the gold standard — what I referred to as “bank money”, mainly because (IIRC) that’s what Smith means by the term, though it appears modern usage is different — are debt in the sense you define it; I never disputed that. But by your “just talkin’ ’bout the US nation” representation, that’s as irrelevant to your position as specie money, so why do you still bring it up?)
As for “the US dollar is debt”: what US government office do I take my dollars to, and what (specific and enumerated) goods and services are they obliged (subject, of course, to their sovereign ability to default on their obligations) to exchange them for? I may not have taken a position on whether value-qua-tax-tender is agio, but I will take the position that it’s not a strong enough peg to hang an argument like “the dollar is debt” on; legal tender just means it’s guaranteed to be accepted against a debt, not that it’s a debt itself — the taxman will probably accept specie (and maybe even a cow) as payment-in-kind, but I don’t see you claiming that cows are debt.
You are. Currency, bank notes, are not debt, since they are not redeemable. Arguably silver certificates were, and there may be a few still circulating, but not many.
What’s my bailey then? This is what I have repeatedly asked for clarification on and failed to receive. A motte and bailey fallacy is switching between two positions to obscure some indefensible but desired position. The thing is, my only desired position here is that MMT is wrong, something you’ve explicitly agreed with. I have not made any arguments against specie currency. And there’s no way to get specie currency to support MMT, which is why this seems like a strange hill to bring up.
I’d be happy to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of specie currency. I agree with you that saying money cannot escape being debt would be a bad argument. It’s not relevant in an MMT discussion though and I haven’t discussed it. My protest is that your comment is irrelevant. Imagine two people discussing MMT in the US. One says the government creates money by spending it. One says money is created by taking out debt. And you say, “Well, in other systems people have non-debt money!” It’s a non-sequitur: we aren’t discussing other systems and specie currency is not a feature of the current or MMT system.
Again: What’s my bailey? What belief do you think I’m pushing that I’m obscuring by now retreating from “the money supply is debt” to “the US money supply is currently debt”?
Redeemable, as I was taught, meant you can exchange something for goods, a discount, forgiveness, services, etc immediately. Obviously that can’t be your argument because that’s trivially false. Dollars can be exchanged immediately.
Or are you saying debt necessarily has a maturity date? Such that, for example, a government issuing a perpetual bond is not issuing debt? Here’s a question: what are accounts payable?
A liability is something (generally) that confers an obligation. If I earn $100,000 then I have an obligation (under threat of penalty) to convey some of that $100,000 to the US government. IE earning US dollars comes with a very straight forward liability for US residents, which is literally called a tax liability.
No, it taxes that transfers of dollars which doesn’t change anything about the set up.
Yes, transferring money sometimes creates tax burden. That is your liability. We’re talking about how it’s a liability to the Federal government, so that’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is that the dollar is a liability to the government, which can no longer arrest you or compel you so long as you give up a sufficient number of those dollars. (Whether that’s legitimate is a separate question. But that is how the system effectively works.)
Do you know what someone else’s liability to you is? An asset. Thus your tax burden is an asset to the Federal government, just as a dollar is an asset to you and a liability to the Federal government. The Federal government must accept the money, it’s literally printed on the bill.
If you want to imagine this system sans state power: If I give you a coupon for a free massage then you have an asset (the coupon) and I have a liability (the necessity of giving you a massage). This is true even though the coupon doesn’t incur interest. It’s true even if you trade the coupon for a sandwich and the massage never gets claimed. It’s true even if you get the massage and then I pay someone else for something else with the coupon. It’s true even if you trade in the coupon for something other than a massage to me.
(And for the specie money crowd: This system isn’t necessarily the way it has to be set up. But it is how it is set up right now.)
It doesn’t tax the transfer of dollars in all cases, just some. So yes, there’s a pretty major gap there. You’re using sophistry: switching between the legal and conventional definition of liability. Yes, the fact that you’ve entered into the Leviathan of the US government means things might not turn out well for you. But from an accounting perspective, that’s because you’ve come into an asset.
To see the distinction, think of winning the lottery. You’ve suddenly come into a massive asset (a bunch of money) which is nevertheless statistically likely to get you killed.
This doesn’t fit any definition of a liability at all. If I pay my mortgage then the bank can not foreclose on me and take possession of my house, so my mortgage payment is a liability of the bank once I have sent it in? I’ll answer that one- not it is not. Not in any way that leaves the term ‘liability’ with any meaning. Additionally this alleged ‘liability’ has actually nothing to do with me holding a dollar. If the dollar is explicitly backed by gold then I can take X dollar bills into a government office and demand Y ounces of gold. Those bills would be a liability, however if I earn $100,000 and pay my $30,000 in taxes then the $70,000 that I have left over represent nothing to the US government in terms of liability. How can this be if US dollars are a liability to the government?
I’m sorry that you think this, but this is actually because you are jumping around without actually nailing down what you mean and I am responding to you. This is one of your original claims
I ask you again, how is the US dollar ‘against’ the income of the united states. What definition of liability are you using here?
Yes. That does not mean that every asset is someone else’s liability.
No. Just because something is an asset to me does not make it a liability for someone else. Watch
You have $100. Total assets $100.
You lend me that $100. You have zero dollars now, and an IOU worth $100, and I have $100 plus a liability worth $100. Total assets $100
Now I pay you back that $100. The liability is gone, it is zero, the IOU is gone, it is zero, the $100 is now in your hands. Total assets $100.
I make $100,000, I owe the Government $30,000. I have assets of $100,000, and a liability of $30,000. The government has an asset of $30,000 in terms of the debt I owe it. I pay the government $30,000 and its assets are now $30,000 in cash rather than in debt held, and my liability is extinguished.
I still hold $70,000, how is that money a liability for the US government? You can’t even claim that it represents the inability to imprison me for tax evasion here* because that was extinguished by the $30,000. You cannot claim that the US dollars I hold left over represent any liability for the US government, and so you cannot make the broad claim that US dollars are a liability of the US government.
*still a ridiculous position, again my bank doesn’t incur a liability when I pay my mortgage in any sense of the word, legal or colloquial.
This article seems pretty much like what you want: https://slate.com/business/1998/08/baby-sitting-the-economy.html
@Telemythides
Thanks for the reply. I’m not a fan of Krugman as I’ve found he obfuscates more than he clarifies, from my perspective.
OK, my turn:
Monetary policy is the practice of adjusting the circulation of money (crudely speaking, “printing just enough money”) to meet economic demand without adverse side effects. One possible failure mode is, crudely speaking, printing too much money so that we not only facilitate desirable economic activity but incentivize foolish economic activity by people with more money than they know what to do with and along the way generate inflation. Another possible failure mode is, crudely speaking, to print too little money so that desirable or even necessary economic activity cannot occur, and along the way generate deflation. In addition to the above-describe failure modes at the margin, either of these failures if pushed beyond modest levels will result in economic uncertainty that impedes long-term planning and investment. A third possible failure mode is to cleverly outsmart yourself and imagine you’ve come up with a way to avoid the fundamental constraints associated with steering between the first two failure modes.
Economists are, qualitatively, very good at identifying the things that are functionally equivalent to “printing money”. They are, qualitatively, very good at identifying the factors that increase or decrease the demand for money and thus the amount of monetary circulation we need. Quantitatively, they are tolerably good at putting numbers on all of this at the margin, for small deviations from the neutral setpoint made slowly enough to watch the results and apply feedback. The quantitative accuracy decreases rapidly with the magnitude of the deviation or the timescale of the planning. And economists are no damn good at all at coming up with Extreme Cleverness that negates these constraints.
And since you’re going to bring it up, Modern Monetary Theory is an alternate way of characterizing the relevant parameters and interactions that results in much the same predictions at the margin but offer little in the way of true insight and is much more likely to have you outsmarting yourself if you try to push them very far afield. In ways very predictable to those of us who don’t subscribe to MMT.
@John Schilling
I’ve been commenting here for a long time, and very much respect your evident capacity for stringing together a set of effective sentences on topics like foreign policy, hiring policy, or rockets/space.
I think this is the first I’ve seen you say something that seemed really interesting about economics, and I would really like to know more. If you picked one place that isn’t paywalled that I could read, or one book I could get with a library card, to see what a non-MMT view of monetary policy looks like, what would you pick?
Also, if at some point you wonder if people appreciate your effort, in effort posts and otherwise, here’s a disembodied–or platonic ideal, if you prefer–+1 of appreciation for you.
@John Schilling
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
I would disagree that monetary policy is about “printing just enough money”. Money is created by:
1. Fiscal deficits
2. Private sector money creation
The government does regulate private sector money creation, and that should be an important aspect of monetary policy. In practice, the central bank buys and sells government “debt”, exchanging demand deposits for time deposits, to set interest rates.
I agree that MMT is an alternative way of characterizing the relevant parameters and interactions. IMO, it’s much clearer and straightforward than the conventional description.
Anyway, thanks for the feedback.
@detroitdan
I don’t think educated people think monetary policy is nonsense. (If you mean that people think “modern monetary theory” is nonsense, then I think many do, but that’s not what Sumner advocates.) (Warning: I’m probably getting some of the details on Sumner wrong, so if you want to know what he believes, read his blog.)
In general, Sumner’s position is that monetary policy (the amount of money the federal reserve makes available and the fed’s other decisions that affect monetary velocity) has a substantial impact on the economy, and that the fed can do great damage to the economy, or, in some cases, help the economy. I don’t think many people think this is nonsense.
Sumner also generally opposes the idea of trying to make short term adjustments to the economic cycle by changing government spending, (I.e. “People didn’t spend enough money this month – build more roads!. Wait, now they’re spending too much – stop building that road!”), in particular when the federal reserve is taking action to counter the effect of fiscal policy on the economy. I would think his factual premises are the mainstream view, but at the very least, they’re not absurd.
Sumner’s specific policy proposal is that a superior governing mechanism for the Fed would be in place of issuing varying guidance, the Fed should announce that it’s targeting a specific value of NGDP, and it should create a futures market to assist it in targeting that value. That proposal is interesting and quite possibly superior to the fed mechanism we have now, but it’s pretty specific to ask Scott (Alexander) to defend.
ETA: Sorry, I guess I completely misunderstood you. I though you meant that educated people thought monetary theory was nonsense, but you meant that you thought that monetary theory, as it is understood by educated people, is nonsense. Apologies!
To the extent that you’re arguing that conventional monetary theory is nonsense and Modern Monetary Theory is correct, I’d look for some real world evidence – if some other country could implement MMT and MMT’s predictions hold true, that would be interesting.
@J Mann
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
“To the extent that you’re arguing that conventional monetary theory is nonsense and Modern Monetary Theory is correct, I’d look for some real world evidence – if some other country could implement MMT and MMT’s predictions hold true, that would be interesting.”
Conventional thinking is that central banks control the money supply by adjusting interest rates. Low interest rates boost private investment and generate higher inflation. High interest rates do the opposite. This has been demonstrated as nonsense in recent decades. Japan is the prime example, with Europe and the U.S. close behind.
As another example, conventional economists predicted that monetizing the government debt would lead to hyperinflation. This has become standard central bank practice for more than decade (under the confusing name of quantitative easing) and has had no such effect — not even mild inflation. The reason is because government “debt” is essentially just time deposits — money that pays interest but is not immediately liquid. Exchanging demand deposits for time deposits doesn’t change the money supply in any significant manner, and this is most of what monetary policy does.
Sumner has addressed this explicitly. He agrees that the idea that the government controls the money supply by moving interest rates is incorrect. It is this error that leads people to think that high interest rates mean tight money and vice versa.
One interest rate is what is most commonly used to change the money supply by the Fed but overall interest rates are set by the market based on inflation and growth expectations.
Until Abe Japan had tight money for decades despite low interest rates. Sumner has addressed that many times.
Sumner consistently advocated for quantitative easing during the great recession and the whole reason he began to blog is that he saw policy makers not understand that tight money was the cause of the great recession and wanted to advocate for looser money to end the recession. He has never predicted hyperinflation and has consistently taken central banks to task for failing to provide enough inflation during the first couple years following the great recession.
Which is the same thing as Sumner believes that CBs functionally control growth and inflation expectations.
Which makes Sumner a hypocrite because he never back explains policy prior to Lehamn, if he had any intellectual credibility he would be writing about how the Fed was to loose in the year leading up to the Lehman brothers collapse, and should have penned blog posts about how the Fed was courting inflation by lowering interest rates while inflation expectations were rising above 2.5% in early 2008.
So, what do you think the educated people think of as monetary policy?
FWIW, Sumner’s views are lot more consensus than they were when he started blogging. Back then, most “educated people” (which ones are we talking about?) thought “interest rates are zero, there’s nothing more monetary policy can do, policy is maximally loose!” Sumner basically says:
1. There is a lot more monetary policy can do
2. Low interest rates are not an indication that policy has been too loose, it’s an indication policy has been too tight. High interest rates are an indication policy has been too loose.
Money has a dramatic effect on overall demand in the economy, because we pay for everything in money, and we save in dollar denominated assets. Managing the money supply is essential to adjusting to demand shocks. I don’t know if this is what you mean by “steer the economy”: the Fed does not directly determine housing stock or sewer investment or margarita mix purchases.
@A Definite Beta Guy
Educated people, as evidenced by most of the commenters here, think that monetary policy controls the money supply. But central banks don’t control the money supply. They just manage government interest rates by buying and selling government bills and bonds. In other words, they exchange demand deposits for time deposits.
The money supply is actually determined by:
1. Fiscal deficits
2. Private sector money creation
Private sector money creation is and should be regulated by the government.
At this point you’re not disagreeing with the large group “educated people,” you’re disagreeing with the small group “Federal Reserve Chairs.”
The Federal Reserve does not directly set money supply or demand, but they have tools that can impact both. It’s well-known that the Federal Reserve may not have all the tools that it needs to drive additional money supply. However, the Federal Reserve CAN reduce money supply relatively easy by setting interest-on-reserves and unloading its massive balance sheet (which is quite a bit larger than government bills and bonds: that’s about a decade behind the time).
The problem with this position is that there is no ‘money supply’ in the economy that can be defined and measured in a meaningful way outside of market actions. Treasury Bonds at a 0% coupon are supposedly indistinguishable from from money, which directly implies that the money supply shifts according to market conditions. In fact anyone can create a dollar liability for themselves, and a dollar asset for someone else, by promising to settle a contract in dollars, these actions simply get folded into the term ‘velocity’ since they can’t be directly measured or controlled by the CB, but they function to expand or contract the MS just the same for all intents and purposes.
Yeah, but that’s a bit different than saying the Federal Reserve cannot affect the money supply and it’s all created by fiscal deficits. They have imperfect tools that they use to achieve price stability and full employment, those tools acting on and through the monetary medium. Don’t really know what you call that if it’s not monetary policy.
@baconbits9: we also can’t measure the value of any ordinary economic activity, such as growing wheat, in a meaningful way outside of market activities.
@A Definite Beta Guy
“the Federal Reserve CAN reduce money supply relatively easy by setting interest-on-reserves and unloading its massive balance sheet (which is quite a bit larger than government bills and bonds: that’s about a decade behind the time).”
How does “setting interest on reserves” reduce the money supply?
Yes, the Federal Reserve can sell government bills and bonds, and thereby convert demand deposits to time deposits. One effect is to pay interest and thereby increase the money supply. Yes, demand deposits are different from time deposits, but they are quite similar and in fact time deposits (government bills and bonds) can be easily exchanged for demand deposits as that is a very liquid market which is backed up by the central bank itself since they prioritize interest rates rather than which type of money is held.
You are right in that the central bank can hold mortgages and other private assets. But this is not conventional monetary policy. Rather it is fiscal policy (private sector bailouts) masquerading as monetary policy, in my view.
You could measure the quantity of wheat in terms of weight which is independent of the price for that weight as changing the price of wheat doesn’t change its weight. This isn’t true for money, if you grow 10 tons of wheat last year and 11 tons this year then you can say something about your wheat production without knowing the price (obviously knowing the prices will give you more information).
@baconbits: sure you can measure the quantity of wheat without markets. But not the *value*, which is in economic terms the more important thing. E.g. If there was a bumper rice crop this year then the same quantity of wheat is less valuable than if the rice crop failed.
One way to measure the value of the wheat would be to take the weight of wheat sold against the price of wheat per weight. If you don’t know one or the other then you don’t know the value of wheat. With the money supply there is no independent variable for ‘amount of money’ that functions in the way the ‘amount of wheat’ functions, so you can’t actually get a ‘value’ for the amount of money you have.
On the contrary, people value things all the time without having an independent volume. E.g. “healthcare spending” lumps together everything from administering standard childhood vaccines to risky experimental surgeries.
@DetroitDan:
Am I correct in thinking that you regard a government bond as part of the money supply? It isn’t a close substitute for currency.
@DavidFriedman
Yes, you are largely correct in assessing my thinking. It is true that government bonds (time deposits) are not the same as central bank reserves (demand deposits), but the government bond market is highly liquid and the central bank can and does exchange one for the other as needed to maintain their interest rate targets. So they are close substitutes from my point of view. Certainly, government bonds are more like money than they are like private debt.
So how is private debt less like money than government bonds?
By custom and common practice. If you owe someone a million euros, they will generally accept a million euro-valued bundesbank bond as payment without negotiation nor objection. They are not legally obligated to do so the way they would be a million euros, but in practice, potato pothato, the bond will be accepted, while a million euro bond issued by BMW cannot be quite so cavalierly substituted for cash.
Are there any good introductions to all this monetary theory stuff?
My current understanding doesn’t go much further than ‘Weimar Germany, Venezuela and Zimbabwe are kind of bad at it’.
Preferably something that teaches the controversy about MMT.
Everyone’s talking about the BoE inflation targets and the Fed and that skyscraper in Frankfurt that looks really pretty in the sunset. But IDK how it all actually works.
@Lambert
Here’s something I wrote: MMT Brief Description. It really is brief, but references a good textbook on money and banking as well as some other resources.
I don’t think there is, short of “do a degree in economics with a focus on monetary economics”.
The issue with MMTers isn’t what they say, which is typically pretty orthodox stuff but what they don’t say, and what said ommissions imply to people who don’t have that background training in economics. E.g. they talk a lot about the government being able to print money to fund its activities (if the country has a sovereign currency), and ignore that what is needed isn’t money per se but real resources, the money is just an efficient way of transferring the desired resources from the private sector to the public (or from one household to another, as the case may be).
@ReaperReader
Au contraire, MMT is focused on real resources. Thus, if the government spends too much money, it will cause inflation as there will be too much money chasing the limited real resources. This is MMT 101.
Notice that even here you are talking about money and inflation, not about real resources.
(By ‘real’, I mean something like “not money”: it is hard to rigourously define “money” but luckily our everyday intuitions work for most cases).
Not an economist, but this is my view:
To understand monetary policy, you need to understand money. Proper money is something that has value, yet has zero or low utility. In other words, people should ideally only keep money in their possession temporarily to facilitate complex exchanges of goods/services. Money can be used to be able to do trades long after or before they produce value for others (savings & loans), but this ideally should be done through a bank, so the money is not removed from the economy.
Inflation works as a tax on exchanges and saving, while it is a subsidy for loans. Existing contracts that define exchanges (like work contracts) typically don’t automatically account for inflation, so it is also a tax on the side of the contract that provides services and gets money.
Deflation has the opposite effects to inflation. The subsidy on savings means that money gains utility as an investment vehicle.
There needs to be enough money going around to facilitate the way money is used and mechanisms to reuse money. For example, if Bob loans $300k to buy a house from bank A, while Jane deposits $300k as pension savings, then once both transactions are done, no money is actually being used. Of course, in reality, loans and savings are never going to balance out perfectly.
The money supply should be sufficient to allow people to keep money in their possession temporarily to facilitate complex exchanges of goods/services, to take care of mismatches between savings and loans, as well as to facilitate the money that is not saved in a bank. It should not be so high so people start making very risky investments or stop valuing it (too fast).
People who want money to be backed by gold or such believe that money can only have value if it can be exchanged for something with real utility. This ignores that money can pretty much only function if people value it more than the actual utility value. So even for a gold-standard currency, people have to accept that they can never all exchange the money for gold with equal utility value. However, it turns out that in high trust societies, people are willing to accept money with zero utility value (nigh-worthless paper or bits in a computer).
Modern ‘no-intervention’ economics uses inflation as the measure of how large the money supply should be. Close to deflation means that the supply is too small, too much inflation means that it is too large.
There is a certain amount of leeway before things go wrong, which can be used to steer the economy somewhat. For example, decreasing the money supply can curtail overinvestment/bubbles and spending, while increasing it can boost investment and spending.
However, monetary policy cannot (fully) control certain variables, like:
– how good the investment opportunities are
– the impact of age on savings/loans (people tend to save for their old age during a certain period in their life and ‘unsave’ that money later)
– the culturally determined level of ‘spendiness’ of the population
– productivity improvements
Also, trying to reduce the trust that people have in the value of money is very risky, because it is inherently also trust in the institutions that set the money supply. If you go too far to reduce trust, it is hard to recover from it & there are various side effects.
You can get into a situation like Japan has, where increasing the monetary supply has relatively little impact, unless you substantially decrease trust in money.
> People who want money to be backed by gold or such believe that money can only have value if it can be exchanged for something with real utility.
Nit: That may be the view of some people. However, there are others who support that idea because a currency “backed” by something is thus unable to be manipulated by the government. If a dollar was to return to being by-definition 1/20th of an ounce of gold, the only way the government could print more money would be to dig up more gold. It prevents fiat currency debasement. This can be viewed as a positive from certain perspectives. It provides more certainty – the amount of currency is unlikely to change in value over the term of major plans. It reduces the ability of the government to spend via back-door taxation – if every dollar is reduced in value, they’ve been taxed while not having the numbers in the bank account change.
Maybe there are claiming weaker version? Debasement has a long history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement
Debasement has a long history of being a thing that rulers knew would bite them in the ass in the long run but would help them through a short-term crunch, and for a while “long run” could plausibly mean your successor has to deal with it. As the world became more connected and information technology more sophisticated, the “long run” became much shorter.
I can’t think of any significant post-telegraph examples, and I can’t think of any period from the introduction of fiat money on where the “debasement” of paper wasn’t far more common than the debasement of coin.
The argument for a commodity standard is that it results in a behavior of the money supply that gives a stable value for the commodity and so stable prices, as long as the price of the commodity relevant to other things doesn’t change too much.
That doesn’t require a government issued money. Scotland in the 18th century, when Smith wrote, had privately issued fractional reserve money based on silver.
I have an old article discussing alternative forms of money online. Some may find it of interest.
“This can be viewed as a positive from certain perspectives. It provides more certainty – the amount of currency is unlikely to change in value over the term of major plans.”
The prices of a commodity is variable. So while a fiat currency may have a higher ceiling on uncertainty, its floor is lower. My guess would be that the price of gold has varied more in the last 20 years than inflation has.
That is not correct.
Inflation is a tax on holdings of currency — if you have paper money in your wallet it’s worth less. It doesn’t raise the cost of exchanges or of saving.
Unexpected inflation transfers from creditors to debtors. Expected inflation doesn’t, since it gets built into the terms of the loan.
It doesn’t have to be paper money, just money that is liquid.
The more you trade (in value), using money, the more value you need to have in monetary form and the greater the cost of inflation. For example, imagine two farmers. Farmer Bob produces $2 worth of milk a day and gets paid 1 week after delivery. He also buys $2 worth of milk products from the same company he sold the milk to. The $2 of that second transaction has 1 week’s worth of inflation less buying power than the $2 he got for his own milk. I consider this an inflation tax.
Farmer Jane is autarkic. She also produces $2 worth of milk a day, if she were to sell it. However, she produces milk products for herself at the same efficiency as the milk company that Bob sells to (or at least, when accounting for their profit margin). So she never pays the cost of inflation and gets more milk products for her $2 worth of milk than Bob.
Or another example: imagine a completely stable market for purely decorative items called Yiops, that come in 5 colors. So when adjusting for inflation, Yiops are always the same price.
Scott buys a red Yiop and enjoys it for the next 10 years. In contrast, Mary sells her Yiop every year and buys one in a different color. The period between getting cash for her old Yiop and exchanging her money for the new Yiop is exactly a week each time.
During those 10 years, Mary has made 2 x 9 transactions that Scott didn’t make, each pair of transactions costing her a week in inflation.
Inflation is a tax on liquid cash and you get and/or need liquid cash to trade with money, which in turn means that if people do the rational thing and scale their liquid cash holdings with their trade volume, more trade means a higher inflation ‘tax.’
I do agree with your criticism that loans price in the expected inflation and thus unexpectedly high levels inflation subsidize loans, not high inflation itself.
As per your final comment, if the inflation is anticipated then the payment a week later will be adjusted accordingly.
The tax is only on cash balances. It isn’t even on checking account money since, in a fractional reserve system, those accounts are backed mostly by real assets or monetary assets (loans) whose terms take account of the anticipated inflation. So if inflation rates are high, the checking account will pay interest accordingly.
It seems very rare for contracts to anticipate inflation, where the payment is higher for future deliveries/services. Typically, there at most is an evaluation moment (usually once a year or less often), so then at least a year of inflation is not accounted for.
The only alternative would be for people to price future inflation into current prices, but then you have inflation right now and not in the future, so I don’t see how that can work, because then expected inflation couldn’t really exist. Once people expected it, it would disappear into the current prices and only unexpected future inflation could exist.
So doesn’t the existence of expected inflation require nominal rigidity?
“For example, if Bob loans $300k to buy a house from bank A”
You appear to have the terms “loan” and “borrow” confused.
“This ignores that money can pretty much only function if people value it more than the actual utility value.”
That seems like a clearly false claim to me.
What an odd complaint. “Monetary policy” is a fairly complex, non-intuitive, part of economics. Most educated people don’t have degrees in economics of any sort, and those who do don’t necessarily recall much about monetary theory, therefore it’s not surprising that what educated people commonly think of as “monetary policy” is nonsense. Same is likely true of any specialised area.
Incidentally, the people who do specialise in monetary policy seem, to my uneducated eye, to mainly think that today’s monetary policy is nonsense (whatever the date of “today” is). I may be suffering from sample selection bias though.
@ReaperReader
If you read the comments above, many people here seem to think that monetary determines the supply of money. My contention is that monetary policy determines only the risk free interest rate. Educated people have a basic misunderstanding of how the monetary system works, and go to great lengths to work around their misunderstanding. It’s comparable to religious dogmatism, in my view.
Scott Sumner represents an extreme parody of common sense when he says that monetary policy involves the central bank threatening to do things and that’s how the system works. Somebody above actually referenced that Sumner theory.
Sounds like a definitional problem then, most people are using the term “monetary policy” to mean a different thing to what you are using it for. What do you call policies affecting money that affect things other than the risk free interest rate?
I generally agree. Same is true of any complex system, e.g. how the internet works on a technical level. It’s not possible to be a master of every topic. To take the field of economics, most educated but non-economists don’t even know about marginal utility or general equilibrium, let alone the much more specialised area of monetary policy.
I think this is rather optimistic. In my experience most people, including myself, are quite lazy.
Ah yes, “arguments from my opponent believes something”
So if I’m introducing someone to Wagner I usually go with the Tannhauser Overture. My suggestion is to listen to it on good headphones in the bath, eyes closed and imagining it’s a film score. It rises and falls and builds and builds and builds, with horns and strings that start with opposing melodies and then merge and get more complex. Maybe it’s totally unaffecting, but it really works for me.
The other thing I love is Tristan and Isolde, which I first saw in a really weird Paris production which was all black box except for a bunch of slow-mo projections of like, fire and water and people stripping naked. Total avant-garde absurdity and honestly one of the best things I’ve ever seen. The Met version, in contrast, is the opera-but-make-it-vaguely-1920s-fascy-post-apocalyptic which is one of theater’s 3 ideas for staging. The definition of stodgy. I would probably have preferred rubber swords and bucklers. However, I appreciated the tension of the Tristan chord and how it keeps shifting back its resolution until the final love-death even before I knew that that’s what was happening. I think I learned that from a Stephen Fry documentary on Wagner, which is as much “study” as I’ve ever done into what’s “going on” in Wagner’s music.
Go nowhere near Meistersingers. Also, if you don’t feel something when hearing Ride of the Valkyries I don’t know what to tell you. Even if what you feel is a desire to crush the world beneath your boot. There’s a reason that one’s iconic.
Everything bad said about Wagner is true though, wonderful moments and terrible half hours, plodding, nationalistic, drippy. Although he was some kind of anarchist in his youth, and the death of the gods in the ring cycle is also the death of old orders/power structures/bourgeoise/something or other. Haven’t seen it though, couldn’t say.
“wonderful moments and terrible half hours” is the most accurate description of Wagner ever. That’s great. (With the Flying Dutchman Overture perfectly emblematic of that)
Musically, the only parts of the Ring I liked were:
1. bits of the opening Mermaid singing from Das Rheingold
2. The percussion pipes representing the hammering of the dwarves in Das Rheingold
3. Ride of the Valkyries, duh
4. Gotterdammerung finally paying off all those leitmotifs
But that’s, like, a half hour of music worth remembering, out of 12 hours of runtime.
Couldn’t get through Tristan and Isolde, Parsifal, Tannhauser, or Meistersinger. But I do still love that Lohengrin prelude.
The thing is, Wagner isn’t the greatest artist ever in isolation, but he was massively influential, and for the good. Hollywood was at its best when it enthusiastically internalized him. ana mentioned not liking him because he’s so leaden and not joyful, but Wagnerian structure was used to good effect in such upbeat Hollywood productions as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Disney’s animated Sleeping Beauty (1959). By accepting Wagner, a top-tier creator of visual-music drama might be able to achieve a higher percentage of minutes worth listening to than he did. But they must accept him: the pop song soundtracks by Hollywood directors who don’t go see or respect Wagner are far far lesser in comparison.
And the iconic Disney castle? That’s just Wagner’s royal patron’s castle Neuschwanstein.
Plus nearly everyone in the Western world considered the Lohengrin Bridal Chorus joyful enough to get married to IRL.
He does have his moments. But that’s what? Like 5 minutes out of a four hour opera? Most modern atonal, microtonal and whatever composers* don’t even have those moments, but my favorite composers have many more moments, and the quality is more even.
*I’ll readily admit that Wagner is better than most of the post 1930 stuff I’ve heard, with the exception of Stravinsky and
Don’t leave us hanging! Who’s the other good composer?
Shostakovich*. Couldn’t fix the comment, the edit window was out.
I really tried to scratch my brain for others, but most of the composers who I could think of were ones that died before 1950 (Gershwin, Prokofiev, etc.), and I wouldn’t say they are post 1930 composers, since most of their work was before.
And all microtonal and atonal music is a horrible thing pretentious people listen to to claim status. I’ve shared my opinion about monkeys in classical operas. I have provintial middle-class square tastes, and I like what I like, thankyouverymuch.
*For some reason, they’re both Russian. Maybe the awful modernity took longer to get to Russia?
@Le Maistre Chat
This is assuming Wagner is the only one who’s doing the influence. I think we’re fine without him when you’ve got, say, Richard Strauss providing a lot of the similar good stuff, without the swaths of wasteland stuff. Why is it uniquely called Wagnerian structure? Other people can leitmotif.
@ana53294
Do Bernstein and Copland count? And then there’s some good stuff from Latin American composers, making up for less melody with more interesting rhythm. Poulenc is pretty great, too.
@ana53294, @AG
What about Rautavaara? (born in 1928 and pretty great if you’re after non-atonal modernity !)
“This is assuming Wagner is the only one who’s doing the influence. I think we’re fine without him when you’ve got, say, Richard Strauss providing a lot of the similar good stuff, without the swaths of wasteland stuff. Why is it uniquely called Wagnerian structure? Other people can leitmotif.”
Richard Strauss was very self-consciously following Wagner and Liszt. And it’s fair to call the Leitmotiv stuff “Wagnerian structure”, because he theorized it and invented it, even if other people started doing it after him.
The thing is, musical excerpts from Wagner operas that often get highlighted tend to be the “easier” bits. The Ride of the Valkyries, the Rheingold prelude or the Tannhäuser overture have tremendous orchestration, but they’re nowhere as harmonically challenging or thematically complex as most of Tristan or Meistersinger. To really get into Wagner, you have to like this kind of complexity, and harmonic ambiguity (or at least develop an interest in it).
(the Lohengrin prelude is a good starting point IMO)
“Challenging” and “complex” are not inherently good things. Management of tension/pacing is what the non-accessible parts of Wagner fail at. Sure, the opening bit of Das Rheingold of the same note going on for forever is interesting in some respects, but one only has to look at Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to see how you can have challenging and complex that nonetheless knows how to have proper timing, not overstaying its welcome.
Well, now I must confess I find Stravinsky pretty tedious, especially The Rite of Spring… I find it more intellectually and historically interesting than actually enjoyable (and I heard it several times at the concert hall). De gustibus…
Anyway, my point wasn’t to praise complexity in itself. Of course there’s no shortage of extremely complex and dull pieces in the history of western music. I only wanted to say I don’t find the excerpts mentioned above characteristic of the kind of complexity that makes Wagner’s music appealing to me (and I don’t think I would be half so much into Wagner if he had died in his forties).
I just learned that in 1601-1603, a volcanic winter induced famine killed ~30% of the Russian population. That’s a pretty horrifying impact, and yet I’d never even heard of it before.
Whenever people talk about how globalization has increased the risk of the pandemics and the like, it’s important to remember just how much more resilient our society is thanks to modern technology and logistics. The current pandemic is bad because our standards are so much higher than in the past.
I had to check, and this is different from the European “Year without a Summer“, 1816, which may have also been caused by a volcanic eruption–in freaking Indonesia.
So, what are we doing to prepare for the mega eruption of 2030 or so?
Getting my eaves cleaned.
I ain’t been droppin’ no eaves, sir.
Growing my hair out to shield my eyes from volcanic ash.
I’ve been wondering this ever since the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_travel_disruption_after_the_2010_Eyjafjallaj%C3%B6kull_eruption
As an academic with a number of friends and social contacts that regularly travel between Europe and North America for conferences and other academic business, it was shocking to me that people spent 8 days stranded on the wrong continent, with a worry that it could have extended longer. The global air travel system has really only existed 60 or 70 years (if that), and while everyone is prepared for a snowstorm to strike O’Hare, very few people were prepared for that volcanic disruption or the similar (and much more massive) coronavirus disruption to the air travel system. When you add up all of these disruptions (as well as smaller ones due to the Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts), it seems like the global air travel system really only has something like 99.5% uptime, which is shockingly low – but the disruption mainly comes in the form of multiple weeks of massive global events every decade or two.
Had you heard the term “Time of Troubles” before? That was just a really bad decade for Russia, so much so that they couldn’t individually keep track of every single little thing that killed 10-30% of the population.
One of the unexpected benefits of COVID-19 is that I now get to teach history to my kids, using my own curriculum. This afternoon’s lesson on World War I: “Now, a lot of people will tell you the war wasn’t Germany’s fault. But I’ll let you in on a secret…the war was Germany’s fault.”
On a related note, I’m currently re-reading Dreadnought by Robert K. Massie, which I highly recommend to everyone here, especially for its analysis of Kaiser Wilhelm’s character. An insecure leader with a giant chip on his shoulder commanding a massive war machine…what could possibly go wrong?
I’m not sure how much nuance and detail you go into, so no disrespect intended. Summaries are generally meant to be pithy and simple. But sans context that summary sentence strikes me as the same type of anti-useful as the old saw about “you learn the (American) civil war was about slavery; then you learn it wasn’t; then you learn again that it really WAS”.
With the Civil War, there were a crapton of factors involved that, yes, ultimately boil down to influence of slavery as a system on American society, manifesting in a multitude of interesting ways. It was emphatically NOT “The Union declared war to free the slaves”, which is what elementary school students come away with from the phase 1 lesson.
With WWI, there were a crapton of factors involved, and yes most of which can be boiled down to the history and national character of the German Empire and its interactions with its neighbors etc etc in a multitude of interesting ways. But it was emphatically NOT “Germany declared war on everybody cuz it wanted to rule the world” (like it was with WWII), which is what elementary school students come away with…
Just as a semantic point, I didn’t say tell my kids Germany declared war on everybody, just that the war was Germany’s fault. There is a slight difference.
On my reading of history, it really did come down to Kaiser Wilhelm’s personality. The guy was looking for a war, and he got one. Until I started my reread of Dreadnought, I had forgotten what a fascinating character he was (and how closely related he was to the British and Russian royal families).
As for the proximate cause of the war (addressing Scoop’s comment above), that’s entering into the game later than I had intended. I concede that Russia may have borne immediate responsibility for the outbreak of hostilities, but events were set in motion years before that by Wilhelm and the German military.
Yep, a slight but important distinction. It’s a particular bugbear of mine to take umbrage with lazy history painting the “Second Reich” with the same brush as the 3rd (e.g. Wonder Woman movie).
For my own summary: everybody* wanted a war, Germany wanted it most, Germany did the most to bring it about (both deliberately and incidentally); nobody thought they would get the war that they got, it was a watershed of awfulness for everyone involved; propaganda written by the
winnersleast-losers sticking all the blame on Germany is a large part of how we got WW2: Electric Boogaloo. Importantly very very messy and not subject to the same The Good, the Bad, and the Commies dynamics of the second war – and attempts to cast it as such are anticonstructive revisionism.Anyway not meaning to argue, just a topic that gets my hackles up :p
Austria, or at least the general largely austrian policy, wanted war more than germany did.
Then Dreadnought painted you a misleading picture, because Kaiser Wilhelm II did not have as much control over the German government as he is generally ascribed. The man was by nature weak and indecisive, and his opinions subject to mercurial shifts, so it is trivial to find him adopting just about any given position at some time or another. The actual course of the German Empire took was decided not by him, but by the rest of his government, who would lean on his authority when his opinion was in their favour, but actively sabotage it when it was not.
For example on July 26th, when it appeared that the Serbians would capitulate to the Austrian ultimatum after all, Kaiser Wilhelm changed his mind on the war for which he had been agitating only days previously. Instead he proposed that the Austrians accept Serbian capitulation and go no further than occupying Belgrade. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg deliberately sabotaged this offer, redacting parts of the Kaiser’s proposal and instructing the German ambassador to Vienna that he must not give the impression that the Germans wanted to hold Austria back, even though that was exactly what the Kaiser wished to do. Meanwhile the German Foreign Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow actively instructed his diplomats to simply ignore the Kaiser’s offer. Then at the end of the day General Erich von Falkenhayn bluntly informed Wilhelm that he no longer had control of the situation and demanded he stop interfering.
Prior to this, Kaiser Wilhelm had gone on his annual North Sea cruise to try and preserve the illusion of normalcy. In the recollection of shipping magnate Albert Ballin, when he inquired with the German Foreign Ministry whether the cruise should not in fact be cut short so that the Kaiser could better deal with the crisis, they flatly replied that they did not want him sabotaging the course of affairs with his pacifist ideals. Keep in mind that at this time Wilhelm was still in favour of the war, his Ministry just knew well enough that his opinion would change should the Serbians prove at all accommodating, which in fact it did.
Frankly, to suppose that anything at all in Europe happened because Kaiser Wilhelm II really wanted it is to profoundly misunderstand both the man’s character and the character of the German government. Which is not to say that said government was eager for a general war. Some figures in the military were, but things did begin to spiral into a world war the German Chancellor and Foreign Minister suddenly began to frantically attempt to pressure the Austrians into accepting the very same proposal from the Kaiser that they had previously sabotaged. They were unsurprisingly met with silence because by then it was far too late for regrets.
came upon thus pretty late but thanks for the interesting comment.
Disagree. Russia was pushed into backing Serbia because Austria handed Serbia an unreasonable ultimatum, which they did because they had German backing. Germany is the one here who can most easily make a meaningful difference by simply saying “no, keep it reasonable”. Instead, they chose to deliberately court a war, essentially for domestic political reasons. (At least if you believe Fisher, which I more or less do.)
I’m not disagreeing that it was an act of war on Serbia’s part. But to call the ultimatum “generously mild” is not supported by an actual reading of the document. It basically demanded that Serbia stop saying anything Austria-Hungary disliked, fire anyone that the Austrians asked them to, and generally subjugate themselves to Austria-Hungary. It is undisputed that the ultimatum was intended to be so harsh that Serbia wouldn’t accept it, so it could serve as a pretext for war. If it’s “hand over Vojislav Tankosić and stop arguing over that disputed territory”, then they’d have probably gotten away with it, and Russia would have stood aside.
I already lost this argument to local expert bean once. 🙂
But I must admit, I didn’t fully get an understanding of how Fisher’s argument works.
My personal opinion, which seems to be rather unique since I have yet to see anyone else voice it, is that the July Crisis was the time period in which the Austro-Serbian War of 1914 became the First World War. The winning move for Austro-Hungary was to declare war within days of the assassination of Franz Joseph. By not immediately doing so and faffing about with international diplomacy, they effectively conceded that the matter was not one worth going to war over. This meant that their ultimatum on July 23rd was not judged in comparison to a declaration of war, but in comparison to other more reasonable ultimatums they could have otherwise issued. It also gave weeks for France and Russia to talk and agree that they would back each other.
If Austria had instead declared war immediately, all the Great Powers would have understood this as a reasonable response to what was, by any measure, an act of war on the part of the Serbians. This would have also radically shifted the context of the situation, and all diplomatic energies of Europe would have instead been turned into trying to broker a peace.
No, it really wasn’t. If they’d handed over an ultimatum in early July asking for Tankosic’s head, then they’d have gotten it. If they’d gone to war in early July, they’d probably have gotten away with it. (The declaration of war, military success is a different matter.) But delaying meant they were seen (quite rightly) as schemers instead of as the wronged party, as well as giving other nations a chance to prepare themselves.
It may not have aged well, but it was hardly unique at the time. Also, you’re ignoring the geopolitical angle. Serbia is a Russian client, and letting your clients get taken apart is not a good thing. As far as I see it, Russia largely didn’t have a choice about it. From their perspective in late July, all the other options were far worse. Germany had a choice in how much to encourage or discourage Austria, and they chose to go full speed ahead. They could have said “be reasonable”, and it wouldn’t have really cost them anything. (Well, at least not immediately. Fisher’s theory is that they expected their actions to pay dividends domestically, but that’s not exactly encouraging.)
It’s my understanding that the Russian response to the Austrian ultimatum was to tell the Serbians that they could offer nothing beyond moral support, and to advice them that they should capitulate. The reason why the Russians ultimately mobilised is because they were under the impression that the Serbians did capitulate, and the Austrians declared war anyway. It remains a matter of some dispute whether or not the Serbians really did give in to Austrian demands and to what extent, but the point is the Russians thought they did and consequently the Austrian declaration of war was utterly unwarranted.
Also with respect to the blank cheque the Germans gave to Austria, they chose to do it because giving their full support to the Austrians had worked tremendously well a few years prior during the Annexation Crisis of 1908. They were of course unaware that the Russians had decided they would not let the Austrians walk all over them like that again. Yet nonetheless, thanks to Serbia’s culpability in the assassination of the Archduke, they almost did so anyway.
My general view of the matter is that the Germans had no goddamned idea what they were doing. In another post I describe how the German government sabotaged the Kaiser’s attempts to shift towards a negotiated agreement in late July, yet it must be kept in mind that they were not doing this because they wanted a general war. Both the Chancellor and the Foreign Minister were very emphatic that they wanted to avoid a world war, they just for some reason were very keen on having a local one, apparently utterly unaware that they could not have one without the other. Indeed once matters began to spiral out of control they suddenly began to frantically try to pressure the Austrians into accepting the Kaiser’s proposal after all. The very same proposal that they had sabotaged only a few days previously, but they were met with silence because by then it was far too late.
@Scoop, actually I would say France is the worst actor not Russia. Unlike the Germans, who had not the faintest clue what they were doing and wished to avoid a general war, the French knew exactly what did everything they could to ensure there would be such a war. They made a conscious, deliberate, and concentrated effort to escalate the situation into a full on world war so they could get their rematch against Germany. Note for example that the initial Russian response given to Serbia with respect to the Austrian ultimatum was that they could offer no more than moral support, and advised them capitulate and accept the terms. Yet only a week later the Russians were ordering a full mobilisation to come to Serbia’s defence. What changed? The French backed them up and egged them on.
My own layman’s impression of WWI was that the political situation at the time turned into a powder-keg supported on a foundation of a house of cards with the Sword of Damocles overhead, so any tiny little spark would’ve ignited it. But it’s very likely that I’m wrong; I’m not a historian by any means.
More like when Daffy Duck swallowed gasoline, gunpowder, nitroglycerin and uranium-238, then put a lit match down his throat. “Girls, you better hold on to your boyfriends!”
The First World War was everybody’s fault. Kaiser Bill didn’t help things by pushing really hard because he was jealous of his English cousin’s empire, but everybody else was playing the game as hard as they could and trying to pull advantages out of the house of cards.
Russia meddling in the powderkeg that was Eastern Europe with Pan-Slavism was just as bad. The Major Powers using the minor ones and local squabbles as means to extend influence and do down both allies and rivals meant that any one of the dominoes getting tipped over would result in a bad outcome.
I agree with this one more than anything else in this thread. The European model of international politics at the dawn of the twentieth century was one of cyclical crisis and brinkmanship. While this was surprisingly successful, the political engine also had a one in a hundred (or heck maybe one in five if you’re being cynical) chance of throwing the entire continent into a general war every time it revved up. Austria more or less pulled the trigger in our timeline it really didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things that they did. The war would have ended up being much the same if the Spanish had been the belligerents, or the British, or the Ottomans, whoever. In such a culture its hard to blame the instigator, you might as well blame someone for stepping on a landmine.
I will also say in the defense of the people at the time that it should really be emphasized that no one had any idea how bad things would be. The last big European war I believe was the Crimea War and even though that was bloody on the ground it came no where near the scale of The Great War. I think a lot of people, strategic planners included, expected it to be the Second Franco-Prussian War and over very swiftly in a war of maneuver. The trenches were an abhorrent collapse of everyone’s plans and the resulting slaughter a tragic side effect rather than the initial aim.
given how badly austria fucked up the war against serbia, I think that outcome is unlikely. Without russia, serbia still likely pushes back the initial austrian invasion, leading to an extended crisis that almost certainly ends up (A) with more countries getting involved and (B) higher demands from austria for the eventual settlement.
Oh, the austrians definitely would have won, but after the humiliation of the first repulse, their demands for peace would escalate in order to save face. A quick victory, new government, and minor border adjustments would towards substantial annexations, which makes it harder for russia to stay out. And once russia is in, then france is, so then germany is, and then probably the UK as well.
All of the major participants in WWI had a choice about whether to get involved or not (much as their leaders tried to pretend otherwise), and each of them, individually, regardless of the choices of the others, should have chosen not to. That does, of course, include Germany, but there is plenty of blame to spread around.
Belgium didn’t have a choice. I guess you don’t consider them a “major participant”, but once they were invaded, Britain didn’t have much of a choice.
If you’re going to blame Germany for the war you should also give them credit for staving it off. Europe was a powderkeg, and war was virtually inevitable; it was only a question of which particular spark set it off. If not for the efforts of Otto von Bismarck and the intricate system of mutual alliances and balance-of-power diplomacy he orchestrated in the late 19th century, the war would probably have come a generation earlier.
I wonder how different Europe would have looked if the ‘Krieg-in-Sicht’ crisis of 1875 had erupted into full-blown Franco-German war?
any war that happened before 1910 or so would have been much, much shorter and far less deadly. WWI was the bloodbath it was because the combination of modern artillery, railroads. and vast armies made it extremely difficult to achieve decisive results on the battlefield. But before 1910 and the invention of the haber process, the killing would have been limited by the inability to produce ammunition on the scale we see in ww1. A pre-1910 war sees one side or the other simply run out of ammunition a year and a half into the war.
WWI was the bloodbath it was because the combination of modern artillery, railroads. and vast armies made it extremely difficult to achieve decisive results on the battlefield.
I was under the impression that it was the invention of the machine gun that gave such a huge advantage to the defense that, at the point the armies had run up against each other, nobody could gain much, and all the generals could come up with was throwing more meat into the grinder. Artillery, railroad and the size of armies sped up the consumption of lives, but were not the prime cause, imo. Had tanks that were able to overcome machine gun defense been introduced early in the war, what course would WW I have run?
They effectively all worked together. Fortified positions can be flanked/encircled/avoided/bombarded depending on the situation, a fotified line like trenches are usually penetrated by concentrating forces in narrow range and punching through. Trains allowed for much faster reinforcement for areas under attack which muted the strength of this strategy, and punching through could then mean being surrounded by the strongest point of the enemy rather than rolling up the weaker points.
Machine-guns alone is simplifying it a bit. Certainly the biggest issue was that defense had won out over offense but this was a complicated interweaving of factors. If there was one technology I’d put above all others it was Europe’s well developed railways and heavy industrial sectors.
The main problem every army on the Western front was faced with after 1914 was that any offensive push was an order or magnitude slower than defensive reinforcements. Defenses were certainly made stronger by the advent of new war technologies but they could be broken and broken decisively as they were in 1914 and in the 1918 spring offensive. However, all breakthroughs required follow up assaults and all of these were funneled through a brutalized territory carried on the back of men and beasts. In some areas you were lucky to walk through at more than a mile per hour and take a non-trivial amount of casualties doing so. Moving heavy artillery across such terrain was essentially impossible and let’s not even begin to consider the difficulty moving the supplies for the troops posed. Worse still, the lack of radio or telegraph lines means that all messages are being passed back to HQ by hand through this territory or by very unreliable signaling, so the Generals rarely had any idea if an assault is successful or whether everyone was dead.
Meanwhile the defensive force had well prepared fallback locations, ample supplies being brought in by rail, were operating within their telephone network and was more or less out of range of bombardment by the enemy’s heavy guns. Even if overwhelmed, reinforcements would arrive swiftly by train and take up positions in established defensive locations to meet the follow up assault, or even consider a counter attack.
You can see the opposite of this on the Eastern front. A lack of heavy rail and good supply networks meant that siege warfare on a continental scale could never develop and so the maneuver war persisted until 1917 and surrender.
The invention that killed trench warfare was definitely the motorized truck. It allowed attackers to regain offensive mobility in WW2 and field fortifications once again became merely a supporting element rather than the all consuming focus on WW1.
Fibio has the right of it. Armies of the time could move 100 miles a day by train, but only 10 miles a day on foot. So let’s assume that you get wonder woman to wipe out a whole sector of the front, you break through, and advance. What happens? Well, at the end of the day you’ve moved 10 miles. Meanwhile your opponent has been bringing in fresh troops from quiet sectors of the front 100 miles away. They’re arriving rested, well supplied, and in good order, and in the morning they’ll attack your guys who are are strung out and exhausted from spending all day hauling food, guns, and ammo forward then digging hasty trenches. That fight isn’t going to go well for them, so, stalemate.
In 19th century warfare, armies were still small and short ranged enough that they could be surrounded and forced to surrender. The french forces at sedan fit into an area maybe 5 miles by 5. The WW1 era armies were large enough that this couldn’t be done by men and horses, at least not where the force density was high, like on the western front. What eventually restored mobility to the battlefield wasn’t tanks, but trucks that were capable of moving men, guns, and supplies rapidly without exhausting everyone involved.
In WW I, half-decently executed tank assaults were able to break through the defensive lines, but then ended up having to withdraw due to lack of follow-up by infantry. However, infantry itself proved highly ineffective at breaking through solid defenses in the first place. Trucks are also limited to roads.
Anti-tank defense improved over time, where the best tactic to defeat strong static defenses that couldn’t be evaded, was often a combined arms assault (for example, artillery to disrupt and suppress the enemy, smoke to prevent enemy units on the flanks to participate effectively, many tanks to quickly smash through the kill zone and take out/weaken anti-infantry defenses, infantry to deal with terrain the tanks can’t deal with well and such & strafing by planes to prevent reinforcements from being brought in).
So what they really needed was lots and lots of Carriers? How good a Carrier could WWI-era engineering have built, and could they have produced anything like the numbers required? (Considering what the Mark IV was like to operate, I’m not optimistic. But it’s an intriguing what-if.)
@ec429
I don’t think it could have been done at the time. remember, mass production of cars is just getting started at this point. Henry Ford would make more model Ts in 1916 than there were cars in europe. But a model T weighs 1,200lb, has a 20hp engine, and was 2 wheel drive. The standard US truck of ww2 weighed 8,800lb and had a 100hp engine, more powerful than most aircraft engines in ww1.
A truck/halftrack sufficiently powerful, reliable, and off road capable to be useful on the battlefield was a stretch for the technology of the time, and the mass production of hundreds of thousands of them even more so, particularly the engines. I do think that such a program might have been feasible not too much later. US car production in 1923 was 40 times what it was in 1909, and 10 times what it was in 1913. But 1914 was just a little bit too soon. Had the war started after 1920 or so, I think you would have seen crash mechanization programs and a far more decisive war.
@cassander: I’ve just gone looking and it turns out that later in the war the idea did occur to the British, but they only managed to build three Mark IX infantry-carrier tanks before the Armistice, and it’s debatable whether they would have been any use operationally.
There was also the Gun Carrier, first used in August ’17, which were apparently pretty successful, but only 48 were produced. And if it had occurred to anyone to use the GC as an open-top infantry carrier, it’d be a closer Universal Carrier analogue than the fully enclosed Mark IX, and maybe would have avoided the latter’s big problem: after being inside a WWI tank for any length of time, you’re in no condition for infantry fighting, what with the heat and the noise and the smoke and the carbon monoxide…
But 1914 is indeed too soon, even if somehow someone had managed to come up with tank-like ideas before seeing trench warfare in action.
@ec429
I’d point out that having APCs wasn’t the key. WW2 had basically no APCs. What was crucial was trucks that could move when and supplies when not in combat. it was the deuce and a half that made the difference, not tracked APC/IFVs.
@cassander: according to Wiki, 57,000 Universal Carriers were built by 1945; and the first sentence of the ‘Operational history’ section uses the word ‘ubiquitous’. Which I’d say is not consistent with “basically none”.
Yes, trucks mattered a lot more than Carriers in WW2. But then, WW2 was fought along roads, not rails, and certainly not across the vast mudbaths of WW1. Now, maybe that’s because the trucks existed, idk; the Heer was much less motorised than their propaganda led people to believe (and less motorised than either the French army or the BEF), and yet still fought the Battle of France largely along the roads with great success. (Shirer’s Berlin Diary talks quite a bit about this and is my main source here. I know much less about the Eastern Front; though I’m sympathetic to the argument that Lend-Lease trucks were the key to victory there, that could just be my well-known anti-Soviet bias at work.)
But once you’ve got trench lines in muddy fields, trucks become a lot less useful. So there’d need to be enough trucks from the start to stop that happening, and for no combinations of command blunders on both sides (from commanders to whom all these motors and machines we’re discussing would be an alarmingly novel thing, not to be trusted) to let it happen anyway. Carriers would make some kind of difference — and it’s not just infantry they carry, remember, but heavy weapons too. As I said earlier, it sounds like the Gun Carrier Mark I was quite the success operationally.
@ec429
there were 57,000 carriers, and there were two and a half million trucks made just by the US. And my understanding of the universal carriers is that they were used mostly as machine gun and mortar carriers, not as APCs.
@cassander
Yes. Like I said, trucks mattered a lot more than Carriers in WW2. I’m not sure what position of mine you think you’re arguing against.
You’ll notice that I haven’t been using the term ‘APC’, and have been talking a lot about things like Gun Carriers.
Infantry is hard to move across a WWI battlefield without a tracked vehicle. But heavy weapons are even harder, and they’re a more concentrated form of force. If 1914!BEF had had a bunch of primitive Carriers, even if originally designed for infantry, I think they would have quickly discovered the same wide range of uses that the Bren Gun Carrier grew into in WW2. If your infantry who have just slogged across the Flanders mud to take a position are quickly reinforced by MGs and artillery pieces (and resupplied with ammunition and rations) delivered by Carriers, their position gets a lot more tenable than if the only way to get that stuff through to them is man-and-beast porterage.
Would it have completely changed the pattern of the war? No. But nor would trucks; as Aapje pointed out, they’re limited to roads. It takes a combination of factors (trucks, tanks, Carriers, planes, radios, the doctrinal innovations to make use of all those and doubtless more I’ve not thought of) to get you from WW1 trench warfare to WW2 mobile warfare.
I kinda want to see an AH where the Second French Empire is a bit less crap and they manage to halt the Prussians before Sedan. Trench warfare with needle rifles and mitrailleuses.
WWI was the bloodbath it was because the combination of modern artillery, railroads. and vast armies made it extremely difficult to achieve decisive results on the battlefield.
Exactly this. They were fighting with 19th century tactics and expectations in a war where, for the first time, technology would have a meaningful impact. They had to scramble to adjust to the sheer scale of destruction the modern weaponry could inflict, and that meant a huge change in tactics, strategy, everything.
I think everyone expected something along the lines of “The Germans will roll into Paris yet again, after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing we’ll drive them back out, and Poland will get carved up yet again, then it’ll all be done and dusted”.
That was not how it shook out.
@Deiseach
The destructive ability of the weapons of the day was both under- and overestimated. They underestimated how much casualties an advance through open ground would bring, especially if the ‘open ground’ had a lot of barbed wire. They overestimated how well the artillery would be able to suppress or kill entrenched soldiers.
The technological progress during the war also had relatively little impact, as the offensive innovations were either not large enough or not used well, so defensive tactics got to catch up each time.
Technology has always had a meaningful impact.
Now I got a shiny new ‘IMO’. Thanks!
Of course, such a war would likely not have had such a profound effect on the psyches of the combatant countries — having the equivalent of WWI in the time-frame of our WWI does not seem precluded.
I do not know what your kids have in standard curriculum, but as multiple previous commenters have noted, blaming war squarely on Germany is wrong. German government of that time bears fair share of guilt, but so have many other participants.
I basically like all the really famous classical composers before 1920 or so (after that, Stravinsky and Gershwin; nobody else compares to the classic), but I’m with you on that. I never liked Wagner, even before I learnt about the more problematic aspects of his work and life.
The problematic nature of Don Giovanni, Carmen, Madam Butterfly and other such works does not stop me from enjoying it, because the music is just so good. So it’s not even whether a work has elements of misoginy or statutory rape and xenophobia, but his music is just not joyful. Technically it may be interesting, but it’s just depressing and heavy in a way even Bach isn’t.
May I suggest you picked the wrong opera? Das Rheingold can be hard to like, all the more if you’re not used yet to Wagner’s musical idiom. You definitively should move on to Die Walküre, it’s chock full of gorgeous melodic lines and tells a really moving story (if you can accept the mythological trappings).
That said, I don’t really understand what you mean by ”evil / disturbing”… (the Wagner stereotype I’m familiar with would be ”awfully boring noisy German thing”, but I guess it’s apparent I don’t come from an English-speaking country) Is it the singing style? Or the harmonics?
He’s a misogynist anti-semite, basically. And it shows.
Yeah, Alberich is pretty hard to excuse. I like the Ring Cycle in general and think Das Rheingold is actually one of the more dramatically and musically compelling parts, but its messages are not actually noble.
The messages are rather more mixed. The central message is that the sacrifice of love for power is the source of evil in the world, that can only be redeemed by returning this power to nature. It’s unfortunate that he then goes on to identify this sacrifice of love for power with the construction of laws and bargains and this 19th century stereotype of Jewish power. But I think it’s notable that Siegfried isn’t really much more of a sympathetic character than Mime, and Loge (despite also being the tricky Jew) is in many ways the most sympathetic character of the whole series except maybe Brunnhilde.
“I just can’t listen to any more Wagner, you know…I’m starting to get the urge to conquer Poland.” — Woody Allen
Anti-semite, yeah, ok, he published some pretty anti-semitic stuff. That’s well known. Where do you get the misogynist piece? I’d like to really know. To me, Wagner’s characterizations of women are actually much more positive than what’s found in the rest of opera.
Parsifal is actually quite good too.
Anybody have any thoughts or knowledge on reusing masks? Specifically, is it better to leave an N95 untouched a week between uses and reuse it, or to use a fresh medical mask every time? My father pointed out that coronavirus only survives a few days the other day, and preliminary googling seems to bear him outlink text. My wife and I have a fair number of N95s that her family gave us, but we have even more surgical masks, and we would like to give some more of our PPE away.
The best possible is to use a fresh one. But that’s not always an option.
The most high-risk I thing I do each week is go to the grocery store. I have 1 N95 mask. When I get out of the grocery store and outside into the sunlight, I spray the outer surface with Windex. Then I take it off. (Wear goggles or glasses instead of spraying Windex in your own face!) I leave it lie outdoors in the sunshine for a few hours on each side, and then put it inside unused.
I combine this with a lot of handwashing when I get home.
I don’t let anyone else use this mask. I assume the inside is completely covered with my own germs and while my technique would probably have any existing virus die off the inside, I just don’t bother with that.
Consider if you are wearing them to (1) stop you from being infected (2) stop you from infecting others (3) both.
I spent about $20 on a UVC bulb from eBay, put it in a plastic tub that I lined with aluminum foil, and put a turkey rack on (to elevate objects inside and get full coverage). It’s been my go-to for sterilizing things (including masks).
Followup question; given that the size of coronavirus particles are smaller than standard N95 masks catch, has anyone actually got a study handy showing that the masks help?
> smaller than standard N95 masks catch
From what I’ve read, the 0.3 micron size is selected because it’s the hardest size to capture. Larger stuff is obviously captured mechanically. Maybe smaller stuff is captured electrostatically?
Is this better than just waiting for the virus to die? I read that UV destroys the mask after perhaps 3 uses.
Eyeballing the charts in this paper suggest that even just a regular surgical mask gives a notable reduction in detectable emissions of coronaviruses, and a slightly smaller reduction in emissions of influenza viruses and rhinoviruses, in infected people who are coughing.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0843-2
Does anyone have any work organizing tips for an unorganized person? Any other unorganized person ever find some sort of “Organizing 101” strategy that helped them sort through things?
I got a new job about two months ago, and I now have more work than I’ve ever had before — a lot of different projects over varying timespans requiring a lot of input from a lot of different people. I get a lot of emails. I am not doing that well in managing it — I’ve missed a couple important emails because I get so many every day and I just skim them, and don’t see the important part intended for me.
In the past my jobs were pretty straightforward, so I just kept all emails in my inbox and never sorted them to folders, saved everything to My Documents, and half the time didn’t even have a to-do list and instead just kept it in my head. This isn’t working now.
Funny. I asked a very similar question the other day, re keeping a planner in general. I was recommended Bullet Journal, which I have just started and so can’t give advice on. Good luck though! Hopefully smart people will come out of the woodwork for you as they did for me!
Where did you ask this, on SSC? if you got multiple answers I’d read all of them…
I asked it on the last SSC hidden thread.
Sort your emails and make a to do list! That’s the most I’ve ever required to stay organized. One thing that I think is also important is to appropriately sort new messages and enter things into the to do list as soon as you become aware of them. You don’t have to handle them immediately, just get them indexed so that when you are working, what needs to be done is already laid out properly. Not doing this requires you to do additional preliminary work before you can even start actually working.
That “immediately” thing is, I think, a big part of what I’m doing wrong. Sorting through 40 emails is much more mentally taxing than sorting through 5 emails 8 times. Thanks.
Do you use filter rules, to auto-sort into folder for projects, correspondence partners, categories, keywords, whathaveyou? Setting them up (and tweaking them now and then) is a time investment with high returns!
Most definitely not. I will look into this, thanks.
Also The Hamster Revolution has some easy to implement but effective tactics. Recommended.
ETA
If you expect to need large numbers of documents at hand with powerful search and auto sort, and if you don’t mind being locked into the Mac ecosystem, then DevonThink is worth some time exploring the demo.
1. Identify your deadlines, and put them on a calendar. Make up intermediate milestones (action items) as more deadlines. This gives you a better sense of what you need to complete when, which guides what you should be working on at any given time. Basically, you’re plotting your to-do list over a timeline.
2. Figure out what the recurring predictable tasks are, and block out scheduled time to do those tasks.
The bullet journal is the most effective thing I have done in organizing my life in the past 3 years. I am on bullet journal number 5.
But as for organizing emails, I use gmail and sort everything into two piles Starred and unstarred. Starred things need me to do something, unstarred things don’t. Unstarring things is the equivalent to crossing them out in my bullet journal.
The number one reason people are disorganized, in my experience, is they are not motivated to be organized. So, before doing anything else, add a habit of visualizing the difference between you-as-disorganized-and-wasting-your-time-and-money versus you-as-paragon-of-achieved-efficiency. It’s a huge difference, even when you imagine a single day’s effect.
If you’re a mathy person, this might also help: .99 ^ 365 = .02. 1.01^ 365 = 37.8. At the end of a year of getting slightly more organized, where you really do it every day, but just a 1% improvement, has you 37.8/.02 = 1481 times more organized than you if you get slighly more disorganized every day.
As for systems of organization, I’d recommend reading “Getting Things Done” by David Allen, and keeping the stuff that works for you, especially w/r/t/ finding some system for ensuring you don’t need to keep to-do items or ideas to revisit in your mind, since minds are many times more efficiently used as engines for coming up with ideas, versus as reservoirs for holding them.
Check out Trello if you want a web/phone platform.
Thought that made me laugh but that might actually be relevant for discussions of UBI:
Mass technological unemployment happened a long time ago in the US, but it only happened to children.
Yes it’s sort of true, and while not wanting to squish the joke, all I can see is that we’ve found numerous ways to fill the void.
But I wouldn’t say this necessarily made them better people.
Of course, children happened to commute into this country from the benevolent semi-autonomous miniature dictatorships they lived in, whose rulers were generally willing to provide the children with UBI in the form of goods and services, if not actual money.
Helping on the farm or being an apprentice–yes, I can see that.
Working as a chimney sweep or in a factory, eh, not so sure. Hard to feel empowered when you have trouble breathing and so on.
Childhood unemployment seems a necessary (eventual) aspect of industrialization.
It’s also possible that “contributing substantively to family farm / craft” > “school” > “sweatshop / chimneysweep”.
There’s an anecdote I can’t properly remember along the lines of a researcher interviewing kids who drop out of school to work in factories and being told something like “yeah working in the factory isn’t great, but school is _hard_.” Now I need to look this up.
I think it’s subtly wrong. The usual phrasing for technological unemployment implies the unemployment is involuntary, and caused by technology.
The disappearance of child labor is driven by a mix of:
1. increased household incomes (having children be unproductive until adulthood doesn’t cause starvation anymore).
2. vastly increased returns to schooling (we can’t send the kids to the factory for full shifts if they’re going to school).
3. laws banning/restricting most forms of child labor (so to the extent there are people for whom the first two reasons won’t stop them from looking for work, employers are enjoined from offering it).
1 and 2 aren’t involuntary, and 3 is legal, not technological, in nature.
Sure, 3 is legal. But laws banning things don’t usually have a tendency to pass until technological alternatives are feasible. It’s much easier to ban slavery in an industrial society than in a plantation agricultural one, and it’s much easier to ban fossil fuel use for purposes that have good alternatives.
What? That’s very counter to my experience with children. While many see school as pointless, I’ve never heard of a child complaining of the lack of meaning and purpose in playing and hanging out with friends. I’m sure it happens, but it’s a cultural trope that that feeling sets in in one’s early twenties.
Yes, both in my memory and in the common trope as I see it, the problem is almost the opposite and everything is TOO significant and meaningful to teenagers. They think no one else has felt unrequited love in the way they do, or that their football team winning the conference offers them significance, or that this finals week will determine their future. Then, when they’re older, they realize everyone is always getting divorced and in the scheme of things they sucked at football.
https://twitter.com/mugecevik/status/1257392347010215947
A collection of a bunch of test-and-trace analyses. Bottom-line is that you need to be within six feet of someone for at least 15 minutes (or share living quarters with them) to have a measurable chance of being infected. Being older also significantly increases the chances of infection, not just of developing significant symptoms.
If I understand correctly, pre-emptive self-quarantine of contacts of known cases (people who haven’t yet been tested) massively drives down the number of people ultimately infected, per case.
#9 looked at cases where children were the vector and found ~10% transmission to someone else in the home. Does this suggest that children are not significant vectors? Maybe we can re-open schools after all.
We are RED on the Waffle House Index nationwide! I don’t want to open my eyes, much less the schools.
I’m not always a pessimist, but all I have recently is bad news. Here’s more: the GiantCorp I work for is attempting to manufacture it’s own bleach based cleaning solution to use (not to sell). This is NOT something they do, they have no experience in any chemical manufacturing, none. Apparently they are having trouble getting enough to maintain the facilities and since we really are essential, they are doing what they have to do. The company’s internal news is celebrating making 2000 gallons so far.
The point is that if the essential industries are having trouble getting enough cleaning supplies with everything else shut down, how can we possibly open up schools (or anything else)?
Played devils advocate.
Maybe having a bunch of disinfectant on hand (to remove virus from surfaces I presume) is a waste of time and effort and not actually a condition that needs to be met in order to safely reopen. Particularly if it is reopening something like a school and it turns out that 1) children are much less likely to contract and/or spread and 2) almost all transmission is through breathing the same air (and so disinfecting surfaces does very little to minimize risk). Especially considering the gigantic short and long term costs of schools being closed.
I don’t think there is enough evidence yet to settle these questions, but my current sense is that the existing evidence points weakly towards both of those assertions being true.
Probably a little personally sensitive on this issue since the local university recently suggested that ‘having enough hand sanitizer’ was one of their criteria for reopening safely, despite lacking clear criteria about the number of people per room/unit area which strikes me as much more important.
True for Covid maybe, and it would be a perfect fit for the year of our lord 2020 when they open up the schools and two weeks later half the kids are back at home with strep, pink eye, or head lice!
This seems like a good argument for opening up cleaning supply companies or whatever part of their supply chain is closed down and preventing them from appropriately scaling up production.
The longer the lock-downs go on, the more we realize that essential industries rely on less essential industries for their sustained operation. This effect is going to become more visible as time goes on. How long can we keep auto maintenance shops closed before people can’t get to work in essential industries?
Note that this is not an argument for carelessly or immediately lifting all the restrictions that are currently in place. It’s an observation that the economy is very complex and interconnected and the strategy we use to manage it will have to be complex as well.
Amen.
Unfortunately, the entire world has “essential” things that are ALL (or at least most) increasing the use of any and all disinfectants. I’m unsure if we lost some capacity to make as much as we made before, or if we have maxed out existing capacity and are unwilling(?) to build bigger/hire more workers to raise capacity because the places that make the stuff aren’t convinced aur new found love of cleanliness we last long enough to make it worthwhile.
“How long can we keep auto maintenance shops closed before people can’t get to work in essential industries?”
Haven’t most jurisdictions classified auto maintenance as essential from day 1? I thought most of them counted bike mechanics as essential as well, for precisely the same reason.
Note: If you have bleach with a known concentration, making sanitizer or disinfectant is really simple–just following a straightforward recipe. I have been doing this at home, FWIW.
Agree, but getting it right on an industrial scale might be more challenging. I can figure out how to make a quart of good bleach based disinfectant for use right now, however, mixing a 55 gallon drum of the stuff that will not dissociate leaving half of it underpowered and the other half with a dangerous concentration after sitting for two weeks may be different. I’m not a chemist.
I was completely unaware of the Waffle House Index and just googled it to educate myself. Thank you for bringing that US-cultural tidbit to my attention, it’s quite delightful!
Great news for introverts. When someone approaches, start a 5 minute timer. When the timer expires, they must immediately leave.
The focus on disinfecting surfaces could be explained by sampling methods. We can measure what is on a surface easily, but measuring how much is in the air is more difficult. So effort is focused on the observable metric.
The #9 you mention contradicts your “bottom-line”. Children in schools are within 6 feet of 5-10 others for 45-60 minutes at a time, essentially 8 hours a day. This should be ideal for anything spreading through the air.
I think the result of #9 is that while children probably infect each other, they don’t infect others in their household as much as we would expect.
More evidence its fat tail driven, more evidence that the current approach is flat dumb.
What policies should we have to deal with the fat tails?
Step one would be focused research on what exactly the fat tails are. A priori, shutting down the schools was absolutely the right move – we had a limited time to maybe contain an outbreak of a contagious respiratory virus, and with most contagious respiratory viruses, children in a typical school environment are dirty, enthusiastic superspreaders. Now, it is starting to look like we didn’t need to do that and we should maybe stop doing that.
But we know this two to three months later, because small groups of independent researchers decided to poke at this corner of the problem with very limited resources. We should have known it two months ago and with high confidence because the CDC made a deliberate effort to find the answer, or barring that one month ago because State governors ordered their health departments to pick up the slack where the CDC fell on its face. And I’m not seeing much better performance on that front from other countries, either.
Same logic applies to everything else that might or might not be a major source of superspreader events. And it’s getting close to too late to get started, because “I dunno, lockdown everything I guess” is running out of tolerance and public trust.
I wanted to start a thread about general aviation – if I remember correctly, there are a few pilots who comment here. I’ve been a pilot since 2001 (training at the same school at the same time as Mohammad Atta; I’m certain I crossed paths with him at least once). It’s been disappointing over the last two decades watching an industry that seemed to have such promise dwindle and die. I’m 42, and almost all the pilots I know are older than me. The number one issue I hear is cost – a new Cessna 172 in 1971 was $14000 ($82k in todays dollars) whereas today the cheapest Cessna 172 which has nicer avionics but is basically the same plane is nearly $400k. But why? I can understand the rising costs at least somewhat being the result of spreading fixed costs over a smaller group of pilots, but we can’t then attribute the drop in pilots to strictly costs, as the spiral has to start somewhere? Being able to go places quickly without having to worry about traffic or airline/airport hassles and buying a ticket months in advance is valuable, it would be nice if I could understand why fewer and fewer people want to take advantage of that freedom.
My impression is that much of the decline can be traced to liability problems. Light-aircraft manufacturers pretty much got sued out of the business.
Using light aircraft for travel also turned out to have some problems, since you typically need a car at the other end to get around. Light aircraft are much slower than jetliners, and you still need to get out to the airfield, which is likely to be way outside town. It’s a pretty narrow window of distances where it makes sense to fly a light aircraft rather than driving or taking a scheduled flight.
Liability issues basically shut down light-aircraft manufacturing in the 1980s, and while the laws were changed to at least partially alleviate the issue in the late 1990s, production numbers never really recovered and so fixed costs are driving the unit cost to ~$400K per new Cessna 172 or equivalent. I discussed this a bit, with numbers, in the “Cost Disease” thread.
Which means catch-22, you can’t expand the market base when every marginal-wannabe pilot looks and sees that they’ll never be able to afford their own (new) plane. Used planes are still reasonably affordable; I got mine for $50K a decade ago and in superb mechanical condition, but the supply won’t last and it’s less than ideal for attracting new pilots.
I would think that the rise of Uber would go a long way towards solving the last-mile problem, and it’s been useful for some of my travels but I don’t know how common that is among pilots. My normal solution is a folding bicycle in the back of the plane, which cuts the seating capacity from four to two but gets me reasonable access to anyplace within 5-10 miles of an airport. But that’s for people in good enough shape to bike, and comfortable biking in a possibly unfamiliar urban environment.
I’d be interested in learning to fly and getting my pilot’s license. But having to plan on paying “buy a house” money for something that small/light/whatever is insane.
Where are you buying houses for $50K? Yes, it’s down payment on a house money, but then I only put $10K down on the plane (and could have got that down to $5K if I’d had to).
I think one barrier to entry for prospective new pilots is not understanding a basic rule of aircraft economics, and that’s something I can try to address right now: Only very silly rich people buy brand new airplanes for their personal use. Back in the 1970s, at the peak of the general aviation industry, you could back that off to “moderately silly upper middle class people”, but it’s never been the smart move.
It’s roughly equivalent to an amateur machinist pricing brand-new CNC milling machines and giving up in despair. Airplanes aren’t cars, they aren’t consumer goods designed to be traded in for a newer model when the styles change. They are industrial equipment, built to industrial-equipment standards even if the intended market is mostly hobbyists, designed to last many decades of constant use. They have to be, because if you design them to automotive standards too many optimistic fools will find the absolute limit to their service lives while two miles over a city.
That makes them much more expensive. But it also means that if you’re only planning to fly on the occasional weekend, or in my case an hour every weekday, you can buy an airplane 20, 30, even 40 years old with a fair expectation that your children will inherit it in good airworthy condition. Let a silly rich person buy your airplane first, and buy it from him when he’s ready to trade up for a newer model. Or a flight school or a charter service or whatnot, that’s going to put it through a decade of regular use before putting it out to pasture.
My airplane is now four owners removed from the silly rich(ish) person who bought it new. One or two more than I would have preferred, but they all kept absolutely meticulous maintenance records.
Rather than buy your own used plane, joining a flying club can be a much better option. When I lived in the US I was going to join one which was capped at 34 members with a waitlist to get in:
$5k to buy in, returned on leaving the club
$100 per month dues
cheap hourly rate for the aircraft:
$169 per hour wet for a 6-seat Bonanza
$137 per hour wet for a 4-seat cessna 182
$110 per hour wet for a 2-seat RV
All the aircraft were in great condition, hangared or covered and the club had a clubhouse with monthly social events. Far, far better value than anything you’d get buying your own for most aircraft owners. About $800k worth of airplanes and getting to fly them nearly at cost for $100 a month is a steal.
I hear that if you’ve got £3000 burning a hole in your pocket they’ll let you fly a Spitfire from Biggin Hill.
> Where are you buying houses for $50K?
Southwestern PA. Granted, I paid twice that for mine, but still. Is financing available through banks much like an expensive car loan?
@LesHapablap: How did the rates work if you want to fly somewhere for a weekend? Now that I think about it, how does *everything* work if you want to fly somewhere for a weekend?
@garrett:
The hourly rate only applies while the engine is turning. Some clubs have a daily minimum if you’re going to have the plane for the whole day but others don’t. Occasionally there’s a parking fee at the destination airport, but it’s rarely high. I have a client near Islip airport on Long Island which is also a commercial airport. I fly in there and park on the general aviation side of the field and pay less per day than I would to park my car at the airport.
Most of the time, the hourly rate includes the price of fuel, but if you fill the tanks at your destination, you just keep the receipt and get reimbursed by the club. John Shilling is right that Uber/Lyft make a huge difference in getting from the airport to your final destination, back in the 2000s this was one of the biggest headaches as it wasn’t easy to rent a car at small local airports.
Yes, airplanes are financed very much like cars. Loan durations can be longer because airplanes are more durable than cars, and I think the interest rates are about half a point lower because less risk, but same concept.
If you’re renting a plane for the weekend, whether from a club or an FBO(*) , the rental rate is based on actual flying time but with a minimum of say two hours per day. And for weekend trips you’ll want to book it in advance if possible, because it’s hit-or-miss whether there will be an airplane available for a full weekend on Friday morning.
Whether rental or personally owned, if you’re flying somewhere for the weekend, you show up at the airport, collect the keys and paperwork from the FBO if applicable, do a preflight inspection of the airplane, and fly away. If you’re doing it under Instrument Flight Rules, you’ll have to file a flight plan and talk to air traffic controllers the whole way. Visual Flight Rules, flight plans are optional, the sky is pretty much yours as long as you stay out of other people’s way, and you’ll only have to talk to controllers in the vicinity of airports with active control towers (only about a third of the total in the United States, and some of them are only part-time affairs). If there isn’t a traffic controller for you to talk to, there’s usually a common radio frequency for all pilots in the area to talk to each other on, but that’s a strong recommendation rather than a hard requirement – some airplanes even in the 21st century don’t have radios.
When you get where you are going, you land (maybe talking to that airport’s tower), taxi to that airport’s FBO, and park. There will be a fee of say $5-10 for overnight “parking”, usually waived the first night if you buy their fuel. Some airports will have a public ramp where you can just tie the airplane down and walk away, and/or self-service fuel pumps. There are web sites and printed guides where you can find out in advance.
There’s no TSA-style security, but post-9/11 there’s almost always a fence with a locked gate, so you’ll need to get the combination (often printed inside the gate for visiting pilots). How you get from the airport to the final destination is up to you, but most FBOs will help out. In olden days, it was common for them to have a beater car or two to be loaned to visiting pilots on a first-come-first-serve basis; less common now but some have established agreements with rental-car companies. And now we have Uber, Lyft, and folding bicycles. Unfortunately, the general-aviation airport usually isn’t served by local public transportation.
To get home, reverse the above process. And note that this is US-centric; other countries have different rules, but usually not too different at least in the Anglosphere.
* Fixed Base Operator, the aviation equivalent of an automotive full-service station with the emphasis on “full” and usually offering rentals.
I had a CO in the Navy who also owned a plane and flew for fun. He always told us that they were so expensive to own/operate/maintain that even if someone gave you one for free, the smart financial decision would be to refuse.
I believe the phrase is ‘floats, flies or fucks’.
Is that really why people become pilots? I thought it was just some kind of ethereal thrill-seeking, the freedom of soaring in the clouds or some such thing — or else an obsession with airplane-as-gadget. Or maybe some pilots played a lot of flight sims as kids and then as adults wanted to make the experience real. The practical ability to go places quickly without hassle makes sense, it just doesn’t seem like having to earn one’s pilot’s license and buy a plane would be worth it to many people.
It’s not why I became a pilot; that was definitely for the fun of it. But it is why I bought my own plane. Buying, maintaining, and flying the airplane to and from work (almost) every weekday, was cheaper than buying a house anywhere within reasonable driving distance of work. This in the Los Angeles area.
How did that work? I imagine it’s slim odds to have a workplace in LA that also happens to be near the kind of airport you could fly a private plane into without then having to commute by car for [some long amount of time in LA traffic]. And, did you have a spare car to keep at that airport?
Folding Bike on the plane.
And workplace three miles from the Hawthorne municipal airport.
For #1, the 105 freeway makes it easy – anything south of the 105 and below 5000 feet belongs to HHR, anything north of the 105 belongs to LAX, which makes for a bloody obvious landmark for traffic deconfliction. In IFR weather, the approach into HHR starts way out near Pomona so approach control has plenty of time to sort things out.
For #2, decent houses in Hawthorne start at about $700K, whereas I got mine in Lancaster for $200K. Including central heating and air conditioning, so I mostly don’t care about the weather – I get more complaints about the heat from my friends in the LA basin than I experience here, because LA basin homes often don’t have AC in spite of the ridiculous prices.
Yeah, I think you have a point. Purely personally, I learned how to fly because I just enjoyed the mastery of a complex machine, but now that I’ve put in the effort, want to find ways to make it practical. But I think the same could be said of automobile drivers in the 1910s, and the industry evolved to find practical uses and eventually base the entire economy around them, but that just hasn’t happened with light aviation.
fun fact, for the cost of a new cessna, you can get a modestly used mach 2 fighter. Granted, the Draken probably costs a bit more per hour than the cessna, but you get there faster, so it should all wash…
Anyone have any recent data/reportage/estimates about the true state of COVID-19 in Nicaragua? They were a prominent outlier country in terms of not locking down, to the point of still (albeit under restricted conditions) holding public sporting events into April. There were lots of alarming articles saying they were going to get whacked… but Worldometer says they have 15 cases and 5 dead. Is this underreporting and there really is a disaster going on there? Or did they get lucky because nobody from the hotspot countries wants to go to Nicaragua anyway? Or is there something else going on?
With how many tests? 16? 20? 100? 20 000?
Hard to tell, and that’s definitely part of the issue. But if their approach were going to be a disaster, you should see a big spike in overall excess deaths by now, no?
Not in a small, uninteresting countries with extremely poor government. Is Nicaragua fitting at least some of that characterization?
Population of Nicaragua is about 6.5 million. Denmark, with a slightly smaller population, has 503 deaths per Worldometer and is considered to have done one of the more effective containment jobs in the non-Asian world. So if Nicaragua had disastrous exponential spread, you’d expect at least several thousand excess deaths. Even with the poor institutional quality of Nicaragua and the relatively low level of attention paid to it internationally, I find it hard to believe that that many excess deaths wouldn’t show up in reportage, at a time when every reporter in the world is much more likely than usual to be looking for spike-of-excess-deaths stories. Their RSF press freedom ranking is poor, but not North Korea- or even China-level poor, and it seems like it would take at least China-level information suppression to hide something like that.
@salvorhardin
Just to give you another example, we haven’t heared anything about the excess deaths in Germany, mainly because those numbers haven’t been congregated yet. But they are very proud that they were able to publish preliminary data until early April…
And if Germany is that shit in gathering data, I wouldn’t been surprised if that is also true for Nicaragua.
The thing to remember is that overall mortality figures have to be put together (and compared to previous figures also put together) by somebody. CDC have put a gigantic amount of effort and funding into setting up the US mortality data surveillance systems, and they still produce fuzzy data best taken with salt – who’s Nicaragua got on this, exactly?
Right, I believe that their official data are crap. But would you really not get unofficial horror stories spreading if 0.1% or more of the population had died of COVID in the last month or two?
Well, maybe. But if it’s more like 0.1% – (portion of the most at-risk groups who already died of something else, in a region with lots of endemic disease and pretty bad medical care), with a higher cultural risk tolerance and less media penetration? Maybe not, I don’t know. But Worldometers haven’t got useful numbers for Nicaragua unless they’re much better than I think they are, is my point.
Taking social distancing to the next level:
A horrible new psychotoxic virus overruns the planet in a matter of hours, utterly reshaping human civilization. Let’s call it ANTICONWAY. Whenever one person has more than one other person within six feet of them, even for a split-second, all three people have a small but non-negligible chance (say .01%) of dying in the next 24 hours.
Naturally, many millions die before scientists even figure out what is going on…but eventually, this new situation will have to become normal. There is no fixing the ANTICONWAY phenomenon. Is modern society totally screwed, or can we readily adapt? What will change? What will remain the same?
Childbrith becomes rather problematic.
edit: Moreover, this probably ends the human race pretty quickly, as having more than two children becomes a death sentence for all involved.
If the problem is found almost immediately, I suppose we could adapt, with couples splitting after the children are born and coming together only to conceive the second child to keep the fertility rate above 1. This is a pretty dystopian premise.
How does one even raise children at a rate above replacement level? We’re going to need robot nurses very quickly.
The human race can resist a long time below replacement rate.
Demand for robot nurses will come accompanied for demand for robot old people caretakers so it will happen very fast.
Eventually mankind will live like the Spacers in Asimov novels, although checking the density of Earth is around 50 people per square km (140 per square mile) so it won’t be that dramatic. It will probably be around half that after the first waves of ANTICONWAY kill millions of people, tho. This, however, makes global warming worse (because now we have to move products a lot more) and since we are occupying even the deserts, a lot of people live in extreme hot climate.
It depends a lot of how anticonway behaves at bigger distances. Maybe people can accomodate living in less dense towns where machines coordinate human movement and we can avoid the Spacer situation.
Orgies become even more thrilling.
Gives a whole new meaning to le petit mort.
A couple thoughts:
Extended family networks come back: I don’t see any reasonable way a nuclear family can have above replacement children (ie, 3 kids) without help. The simplest and most scalable way (especially outside the us) is a return to extended family networks, ie grandma/grandpa, aunts, and uncles all join in in child rearing. You just have to be able to split up that workflow. Especially considering that you don’t just need childcare but education; public schools are gone, homeschooling is the norm.
Corporal punishment for kids: How else do you train a 3-4 year old not to immediately run to mommy when he cuts himself or falls down?
Travel: This is pretty gone. No planes, no trains, even automobiles change radically because I’m pretty sure I get within 6ft of people all the time on the freeway.
Hazard pay: That risk is low enough that some things still get done, you’ll just have to provide massive incentives. For example, heart surgeons and EMTs are probably still a thing because you’ll trade a 1/10000 chance of a medical team dying to save someone’s life any day. That just won’t be a long-term thing, I would imagine someone doing it for a year or two (4-8% chance of death) and then retiring. Same for firefighters, soldiers in wartime, etc.
Does the probability of death vary with the number of excess people within six feet, or on the length of time they stay within six feet? If so, you should specify what scenario the 0.01 percent chance of death applies to. It greatly matters whether its 0.01 percent per person over 2 per second within six feet, vs. 0.01 percent for any number of people over two for any length of time.
I’m no psychotoxicologist, but my understanding is that it’s the latter. That is to say, the very second any person has more than 2 people within six feet of them, everyone within that six foot zone suddenly has a 0.01% chance of dying of anticonway within 24 hours.
Because of complex psionic resonances, these fields do not stack. Like I said I’m not an expert so I have no idea what happens if you pack like 400 people into a complex chain shape.
I’d need to know what the chance is if they are close for longer than a split second, maybe an hour or so.
But while major adaptations would be necessary – certainly we would live in a far more dispersed mode *even* if the distance does not apply vertically (in which case every second storey of most buildings would have to be evacuated) – it would surely be survivable.
Many day to day and industrial operations would have to be hugely modified, others could go on much as they do now.
As per my answer above, exposure (of any kind) triggers a .01% chance of death within the next 24 hours, at which point it resets. That’s how psychotoxins work I think.
So people stay away from other people . . . except for when they decide to accept the 1-in-10,000 risk, and then they cram all the things that need meeting other people into a 24-hour window.
An interesting implication I had not considered. This scenario just got even weirder.
With the risk capped at 0.01% per day, I expect that most people will chose to roll the dice on a fair number of days, and cram everything into those days that they can.
If you roll the dice on one day per month, you have a ~91% chance of living at least 80 years before catching anticonway.
If you roll the dice on one day per week, you have a ~66% chance of living at least 80 years before catching anticonway.
If you roll the dice every single day, you have a ~48% chance of living at least 20 years before catching anticonway.
At those odds, I would expect most young men without families to roll the dice a couple of days per week. Then get risk averse when they have kids and dropping down to 1 dice day per month or less. Kids would probably be prohibited from taking more than a negligible number of non-emergency dice days.
Of course, every time you anticonway, you threaten not only yourself, but (at least) two other people…so I guess it ends up looking a lot more like Coronavirus than I expected: the biggest shifts involve very large gatherings, transit, etc, but you could actually still have two friends over for a drink 1 night a week and it ends up being a vice a bit like smoking.
Funny how percentages work out.
I had an SCP-ish idea similar to this: a virus which spreads by thought. Specifically, if a given person has the virus, the more you think about this person, the higher your chance of spontaneously developing the virus yourself. You don’t need to know this person is infected for the mechanism to work. The infectee is only dangerous as long as he’s alive; once he dies, you can think about him as much as you like without getting sick.
This is more of a straightforward species-ender, though.
My whole life is SCP-ish hypotheticals. I’ll post them more often.
How often does it check to see if you’re together? That is, if you’re together for 1 minute, is there still a .01% chance? What if you’re together for a year?
It’s clear as I perform more research on this dangerous possibility, it works as described above:
Every time one person is within six feet of two other people, it flags them. The flag lasts 24 hours. At the end of the 24 hour period, all three people have a .01% chance of dying.
It’s well known that you get 6,930 days of human contact (with more than one other person), before you reach a 50% chance of dying from it. This is about 18 years straight.
You get about 8 years straight before a 25% chance, 500 days for 5% chance.
Part of the virtual education every child gets includes a thorough understanding of probability and life planning, so they can spread their days or risk across their life.
An example template would be spreading 100 days thtough a baby’s early life, another 400-900 spread from early life to adulthood, 8 years total lasting till 50, then not worrying about your own chances for the rest of your life.
School will finally undergo a fundamental reform, as mass lecturing becomes untenable and the cheap childcare is no longer useful.
Jobs that require multiple people in close quarters will get danger pay.
Governmental leaders will not live as long and/or will be less corrupt, security will be take years off their lives
Also, people carry precisely measured 6 foot+ a bit sticks when venturing outside
A smallsword (or, for wimps, a fencing foil) at full reach probably gives you about six feet of distancing. If we have to to do this, I vote we bring back the old rules…
An interesting new instrument for suicidal terrorists.
So, about socks. I’d be interested to hear any thoughts. Here are some things I’ve been wondering.
How much time do you spend matching? How much time does an average family? How does time spent matching scale based on family size?
How long do your socks last you, and when do you give up on that sock whose pair you haven’t found in a while?
Do you care about the designs or colors?
What do you think about people who wear obviously mismatched socks?
Do you bother getting the right size?
Do you try different brands to see which is more comfortable?
I dislike wearing socks except when essential due to weather conditions. Same for most shoes (but felt slippers are okay).
Almost none. Just stick ’em on a pile and pick a couple that are similar.
Until they tear.
I prefer they be absent, but don’t care much if they are there.
They have their life priorities in order.
Most stores don’t even carry my size.
What size, if you don’t mind me asking?
47. I just get the 43-46 socks, which are tolerable.
I match them as I pull them out of the drier; it probably adds 5 minutes or so.
How this scales with family size probably depends on your laundry strategy. Given that load size is pretty much constant (washing machines only get so big), it depends on whether you do frequent single loads, or if you do less-frequent laundry days, resulting in multiple loads with everyone’s clothes mixed together. In the first case, you’d spend the same time sorting per load, but loads/month would scale linearly with family size, so sorting time should as well. In the second case, if you’re dividing multiple laundry baskets into multiple loads of laundry, and if the clothes become thoroughly mixed, there’s a chance sorting socks could take much longer.
Obviously, this will also depend on how much variety there is in your family members’ sock choices.
Maybe a year? I have a really hard time keeping track of stuff that happens at that sort of time scale. I also buy and replace socks in “generations”, trying to retire all of one type of sock at around the same time and replacing them with a single bulk purchase.
I care about length and texture, mostly. I wouldn’t buy neon socks, but most whites/grays are fine.
I probably wouldn’t notice, and wouldn’t really have an opinion if I did.
I have unusually large feet, so it’s easy to get ones that are uncomfortably small. I’ve usually seen them listed as ranges, like “sizes 11-14” or so. (I wear 13)
Not really. I’m always tempted to go with the cheapest, but I’ve been burnt by that enough that I usually go with the second-cheapest, and that works okay.
My wife loves specialty socks and I hate them because it means there is a giant pile of socks that needs matching.
Aside from a few specialty socks, I just keep dozens of the same kind of sock so I don’t need to worry about matching. I replace them every few years. My latest batch is Dickies Men’s Dri-tech Moisture Control Crew Socks Multipack https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0757RXZJH/
I have two types of socks: short and long ones, all in one color. I also have thick woolen ones for winter.
Since they are of the same color, it doesn’t matter if I lose one. I keep the spare one until I lose another one in a pair, and then I have a pair.
I don’t spend much time matching them, but more time folding (I follow the Marie Kondo method of folding clothing). 2-3 minutes per week folding, I’d say.
We have 4 kids and used to spend far too much time matching socks and putting them away, only to have kids never have socks on when we needed to head out the door. Then, I read a random reddit thread about strange things your family did that you thought was normal, where someone mentioned that their family had a sock box by the front door, and whenever you needed socks, you just grabbed a pair from the sock box. Now all of our kids socks go unmatched into a big basket by the door, and on your way out the door, you just grab whatever looks good, matching or not. My girls love it because they think it is fun, and we love it because it saves a ton of tedious time matching socks and running to get them from rooms.
Personally, I prefer the method of finding a pair of socks you like for each use (for me I have dark work socks, white normal socks, and gray workout socks) and just throwing them all unmatched in a drawer and picking them by color. Also has the bonus that if one gets worn out, you can still match it with any of the others.
My intuition says you have a fun household.
We do a similar thing by the front door… with crocs. It works fine for everyone else in the family except me – I can’t get my feet into anyone else’s crocs but they can all fit into mine. No problem except when my youngest goes out to feed the chickens she’ll waddle out in a pair of my crocs, which of course come back covered in chicken shit. Hey ho..
I don’t match socks at time of laundry. I toss them all in a big drawer and pull them out as I need.
I use black Darn Tough socks on a daily basis, big puffy or boot socks for comfort, and some ankle-high moisture socks for cardio and weights.
People buy me patterned socks. I never would buy them on my own, but I’ll wear them if people buy them. Even our VPs wear “wacky” socks, so that taboo is broken at work and I can wear pretty much whatever I want.
I match mine when I put away the finished laundry. It takes a couple of minutes. Not a big deal, but then I only do my own laundry.
Not sure how long they last. A year, maybe? If I have an unpaired sock and can’t find its mate anywhere, I throw it out.
I always buy plain socks, but I have worn some patterned ones that others have bought for me.
Daring fashion-forward trend-setters or just plain slobs. Mostly slobs.
The standard size for men fits me, and that’s usually all that’s available.
I’ve never compared carefully, but I have stopped wearing some socks that turned out to feel unpleasant after I got them home. They lay unloved and unused in the back of the sock drawer until I cleaned it out and tossed all the pairs I never wore.
I don’t match socks, but will try (not very hard) to not wear dark and light socks at the same time.
When I buy socks, I buy as many pairs of identical socks as I can get. The next time I buy socks, I do the same thing, with a distinctively different colour. This generally results in me alternating between blue and grey socks.
I’ve found that most stores won’t put enough identical socks on their shelves at the same time to make this convenient; in one memorable case I noticed 3 pairs of more-than-acceptable socks in a store, noted that the brand was also available online, and went home and ordered what I considered to be a reasonable number of pairs.
Given this setup, matching is trvial, and continues to be trivial even as the socks develop holes in the toes, which seems inevitable. I match on removal from the clothes drier.
I care about designs and colours – solids only, colours chosen to be unnoticeable combined with dockers, jeans, etc. I care more about materials – my feet need to breath, or I’ll wind up with yet another fungus infection.
The standard generic size of men’s sock fits me, so fit is never an issue.
I am concerned about the tightness of the elastic – too tight is somewhat uncomfortable; too loose eventually works its way down until part of my heel is bare. Some materials seem especially prone to this – I recognize them by feel, not by label, and avoid them.
Everyone in my house currently does their own laundry – so no scale up for family size.
I’m not sure how long my socks last. I’d guess a couple of years until I need a new batch, but I don’t generally start using all the new socks when I first get them. (If I have other clean socks available, I don’t start a previously unused pair.)
Hah, About 20 years ago (I’m now ~60) I decided to buy only white socks. (A few dark pairs to wear with shoes on special occasions). Come laundry day, the dry whites get sorted into socks, undies (also all white)
and other.. Tee shirts and such.) Socks are unsorted, and sometimes not folded. I seem to wear socks out at the big toe, and throw ’em out when I have a big toe hole on both ‘sides’ of the sock. (If a holed sock is the wrong side for your foot, you switch feet, or turn it inside out. (or outside in, ~1/2 my socks are already inside out.)) I find it’s nice to keep the number of sock pairs and undies about equal. You then run out of both at the same time, laundry day. :^)
My partner declared several years ago that he gets black socks and I get white socks. I do all the laundry in the house, so I’m fine with this. When bundling the socks, I try to match his inside-out socks with other inside-out socks, but all my socks go through the wash right-side out so I don’t have to match them by this status.
I try to have all my socks the same (black). There are generally a few black socks of other styles lying around the drawer, and very rarely I try to pair them up and use them.
Oh dear, doesn’t that clash with many common trouser colors like navy blue and all shades of brown?
I would prefer to have all my socks of two colors (white and black) and one style for each, but I can’t quite use “one-size-fits-all” socks, and I haven’t found a reliable supplier of large-size socks in one consistent style – they all want to sell me 3-packs or 6-packs with each pair a different pattern on the calves. So I wind up hunting through the sock drawer for a matching pair every time I pull out a new pair. Could do it when I’m sorting the laundry, but I’m not sure that would be a net time saver and I prefer the diffuse annoyance to more concentrated doses.
This is pretty much me, except my wife does out laundry at my mother-in-laws, and perhaps as a result I’m not sure I have any actual matched sets of black socks. My father-in-law is probably in a similar position.
Hardly any. I only have white socks and dress socks, as well as some longer socks I’m not quite sure the name of for soccer. My family does the same thing for the most part, but sometimes I’ll be gifted eccentric socks for holidays and such. Depending on how much the hypothetical family cares about socks, time would either be greater than or equal to a smaller family. Greater than if the family has a “lord sock matcher” or tries to match to other family members for some reaoson, and equal to if they don’t care about matching and each member individually picks socks out or if one person picks out all of the socks in an orderly fashion.
I’ve had socks last from a few months to several years. After about 3 laundry runs I’ll either throw the sock away or use it for some practical use
Not really, the only time colours come into play is when I need them to match a suit
I admire their rebellion against humanity
I try and get roughly the right size, but don’t bring my caliper to make sure I have acheived maximum comfort (yet)
If there is a scratchy brand I will avoid it in the future, but besides that, no
I get a lot of socks the same size and colour. Over time, they will start to vary a bit anyway, so after a wash I pair them up as best I can.
I don’t worry about losing one, I just leave the spare aside until I lose another.
People who have multiple colors and styles of socks confuse me. I’ve been buying the same white socks for 12 years. When too many pairs get holes in them, I buy replacements.
I also have a few pairs of black dress socks for special occasions.
And a few pairs of pokemon socks, which unfortunately are very uncomfortable.
The same white socks are sold for 12 years? Hanes keeps changing its white sock design and it’s a bother, what brand kept its design for that long?
The entirely obvious solve to the sock problem is to only have one kind of sock. Matching, what matching? All my socks are the exact same plain black sock.
I have all sorts of different coloured socks and spend inordinate amounts of time matching them and I regret nothing.
But I rarely put socks on until I’m about to put shoes on. So right now, I only put socks on every few days.
I have a subscription to one pair of socks and one pair of underwear in a matching “wacky” pattern each month. I never match the socks. All the socks are the same size and shape so wearing them mismatched isn’t uncomfortable, and they’re already wacky so it makes a little more aesthetic sense than just like, a brown sock and a white one.
As far as I can tell, most of my socks last forever unless I throw them away. I have a few from when I was 12 years old. (Those weren’t part of the above strategy and I should probably just get rid of them).
Adolf Hitler has been portrayed many, many times on stage and screen. Who did it best?
I would guess the performance to beat is by Bruno Ganz in the film Downfall.
I don’t have an opinion about the best portrayal in terms of performance (though I agree Bruno Ganz did a really good job; Chaplin’s mock-Hitler in “The Great Dictator” was also especially memorable), but in terms of casting for physical resemblance I haven’t seen any movie where I thought they really nailed it.
Aside from casting directors (understandably) emphasizing performance over physical resemblance, to the extent the physical resemblance component gets messed up it might be because there’s so much focus on the mustache. If I were casting Hitler I’d start with a picture of him that’s been edited to remove the mustache and then try and find a match based on that, then have the actor grow or wear a mustache.
Which actor looks the most like the man on the left?
Hugh Laurie?
https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-NA293_0416LA_750V_20160310141035.jpg
As mock-Hitlers go, I’ve also enjoyed Taika Waititi in Jojo Rabbit. For serious portrayals, definitely Bruno Ganz in Downfall.
John Wayne?
Or maybe Ciarán Hinds?
Dick Shawn in The Producers.
A. Hitler in Triumph of the Will? He had the dubious advantage, of course, of looking uncannily like Hitler.
Uh… sorry about that.
Never seen Downfall (though given quarantine film consumption, it’s only a matter of days), but my personal favorite is Oliver Masucci in Look Who’s Back.
This is also a general recommendation for that film, available on Netflix.
I recently re-watched Midsommar and am in the process of writing a fairly detailed review/analysis of the film. I have not read or heard any other commentary on it, so i’m not sure how unique or fresh my comments are going to be, but i’ve provided a version below. I still have some unanswered questions about the film, which i’m hoping will resolve themselves in the process of writing this. Appreciate your c&c.
——Everything below this line contains spoilers for Midsommar——
Protagonist backstory and their significance
Dani – depression, anxiety and trauma. Feels unaccepted by her social circle, orbiting her disinterested boyfriend Christian. Witness to her family suicide. Numb and hopeless from trauma, needs a change of scenery and opts to go to Scandinavia with her boyfriend and pals as an alternative to being alone and sad.
Keywords: suffering, openness, potential, nothing left to lose
Christian – reluctant, disinterested boyfriend to Dani. Has his group of immature college-friends who encourage him to leave Dani, but he hasn’t been able to take the decisive action to end it, and before he can make another attempt, Dani’s parents die and he is left as the unwilling shoulder to cry on. Wants to go to Scandinavia with his pals, and uses the pretense of a thesis research project as the PR story to Dani, even though the sincerity of his pals w.r.t. this purpose is dubious (just want to get laid and travel).
Keywords: passivity, indecision, struggling to maintain dual-narratives, tension between desires and capabilities.
Pelle – Extremely warm and open, friendly acquaintance from Sweden. Particularly warm towards Dani, compared to the other guys. His warmth doesn’t arouse suspicion partly because it is such a welcome contrast to the others and partly because we assume it’s a cultural thing.
Arriving in Sweden
Immediately upon arrival in an open field near to their accommodation village, they are offered magic mushrooms by their host, Pelle. This comes across as odd and marks the beginning of a series of events that propel the group through a series of experiences more or less against their will. Here Christian is reluctant to partake on behalf of Dani (given the freshness of her trauma), but nonetheless they both take a trip with the rest of the group.
Dani experiences the classic mushroom “becoming part of nature” hallucinations, and the film uses the trip to create a temporal break/void in continuity, and begin instilling confusion and uncertainty. The taking of mushrooms becomes a constant thread through the whole film, and are seemingly a fairly integral part of the Midsommar festival portrayed in the plot. As a film device the repeated use of hallucinogens robs the audience of the ability to accurately discern how the protagonists are viewing and interpreting the things that are going on around them. Given how weird the goings-on get, this becomes a pretty noticeable encumbrance from the audience’s point of view.
The scene where the group walks by a large illustrated banner (from it’s end to it’s beginning) essentially illustrates everything that will happen over the next several days, and helps to promote one of the main concepts the film is trying to invoke: inevitability. Furthermore this scene develops the theme of the characters being passive observers being carried through a course of events outside their control. It is the comparison of each of the main protagonists’ response to this course of events that creates one of the main analytical opportunities for the film.
Ritual Suicide of Village Elders
This is the first moment of ‘real’ upheaval (as opposed to merely drug-induced) in the minds of the visitors. As far as the locals are concerned the suicide is in total harmony with nature and culture, a physical manifestation of the renewal of human spirit and community. To the visitors this is unbearable, and drives one of them to “leave”. The first thing the audience is being asked to examine here is the analogy to Dani’s situation – the simultaneous death of both parents. The villagers and Dani now have something in common, except that in the Villagers’ case the death was voluntary, celebratory (although it didn’t go exactly according to plan), and part of a plan to allow the younger generation room to flourish. The fact that Dani is presented with a second rendition of the parent-death spectacle but in a controlled and deliberate setting acts as a kind of exposure therapy where the experience is reframed and recontextualized for her, and one in which she is allowed to be a passive observer of. Whilst all the visitors are clearly emotionally harmed by the event, Dani included, she does not appear to wither or weaken under the influence of them to anywhere near the extent the others do.
The position of the Protagonists with respect to the village community
A distinct inside/outside parallel story arc of the two main characters emerges after the ritual suicide. Dani is fully accepted by and integrated into the community, by being given productive jobs to share with the rest of the women and being asked to participate actively and collaboratively in the festivities. The villagers’ acceptance of Dani appears both radical and unconditional, in contrast to the position she occupied in her boyfriend’s social circle where her acceptance was conditional on her not being emotionally fragile or socially burdensome. Christian begins treating the visit as a research opportunity, squabbling with his friend about sharing of findings, standing on the outside looking in at the events and attempting to position himself as an uninvolved, passive observer. The villagers’ plan for Christian is to have him be seduced by and sexually paired with a young virgin to ensure the health of the community gene pool against inbreeding. It’s as if they have measured the strength and integrity of his spirit, has been found wanting, and so have opted to use him for the most limited and base purpose they require.
Festive Dance to Select May Queen
The community’s acceptance of Dani escalates into an elevation into candidacy for May Queen, decided by ‘last dancer standing’ and, of course, they’re all tripping on mushroom tea. The ever-present feeling of inevitability tells us that she will win the dancing competition, despite not knowing what she’s doing and being totally off her head. The message of this scene lies in the further divergence of the main character arcs. Dani is upstanding, dancing, integrating, succeeding, being open. Christian is sitting on the ground slouched over in the audience, alone but surrounded by others, the only one not wearing ceremonial garb, staring into space in confusion. His initial refusal to accept more mushrooms is fairly quickly overcome despite being told that it will ‘lower your defenses’, signalling his descent into resignation and apathy, and heralding the start of his fated seduction by the young virgin. Meanwhile the singing and dancing continues, and Dani discovers during the competition that she can speak Swedish in her physically-exhausted-but-mentally-envigorated state. The other women joke that Dani is ‘one of them now’, before falling over each other and leaving Dani standing to claim the title of May Queen.
This parting remark about being one of them is a big deal, and proves to have very big consequences later on. The dance scene is one of three moments in the film where a key plot device is uncovered: the use of group vocalising and group body movement to achieve a specific purpose. In this instance the purpose is to embolden and bond the women, but we will see it being used again for much more interesting reasons.
Mating Ritual
Christian’s time has finally
comearrived to fulfill the duty he has been assigned, and he leaves the May Queen celebration to do so. With the help of yet more inebriating substances doled out by a male elder, he is admitted into the room where the girl awaits, surrounded by a semicircular wall of older women who will oversee the process. Christian does the best he can given his mental state, but what the women do is more important. They begin chanting and moving their bodies in animalistic, rhythmic fashion, slowly escalating in accordance with the event taking place on the floor below them. One of them reaches down to hold the young woman’s hand, and the older women begin making the sounds you’d expect the sex-haver to be making, except louder and more exaggerated, and with bigtime hip-movements to boot. What we have here is a transference of the responsibility of the virgin to experience the emotional responses expected of her, from the virgin to the older women, and this I believe is one of the core ideas of the film. As if to say: “We know that what’s going on is very real and emotionally demanding, so since you are part of our community, we will unite and facilitate the transfer of emotional load from You The Individual Focal Point to Us The Unified Group, across which the load can be distributed.”Despite being told by her new friends that the commotion emanating from the mating-shed is “not for us”, Dani is drawn to investigate, and reacts to the events through the keyhole with expected horror and disgust, before being swiftly taken into the care of the other women.
Judgement Time
One of the jobs of May Queen turns out to be deciding on the composition of the list of people who need to die in a fire in order to complete the natural cycle of death and renewal. Several of the villagers have volunteered to give their lives, and other villagers have created scarecrows to stand-in for human sacrifices. All that’s left to do is for Dani to pick the last person to die, a choice between an anonymous villager who looks totally at peace with the situation; and Christian, who has been selected by the community, and who is rendered paralysed and speechless from being forced to inhale drugs after discovering the mutilated body of one of the visitors that decided to “leave”. Here Christian has reached his ultimate form of passivity: unmoving, unspeaking, totally inexpressive, a human rock. He has exhausted the only use the community could find for him – a sperm donor to fend-off genetic mutations from incest. Dani looks at him like a Queen looks at a peasant farmer on his knees in the dirt – equal parts pity, shame, compassion, indifference.
The next time we see Christian he is trapped inside the hollowed-out body of a bear and being loaded into a very flammable-looking barn, along with the others, who at least are given a final dose of a relaxing drug. If Dani is the May Queen, Christian is King in the sense of scapegoat-in-waiting and his wait is over. He is both extreme insider, extreme outsider. At once privy to all of a very small, mysterious community’s inner workings and a part of this community’s future genetic makeup; and at the same time exiled from it, rejected, measured and found wanting. The community (including Dani) has imbued in Christianbear all that it seeks to shed and sees as beastly and profane. Thus by being burned alive, Christianbear achieves the ultimate purpose set for him, in the absence of any other countervailing purpose.
Final, Metaphysical Peak
As the Queen watches in horror from a distance as the flames consume the building, she explodes into gut-wrenching mourning and sorrow. From within her overabundant floral gown her despair is physical and impossible for the gathered spectators to ignore. Then the interesting thing happens: The villagers, who up until now have been watching the carnage with total peace and equanimity, observe and listen to the Queen’s outpourings of grief and then begin to act it out themselves. They start by weeping, then crying, then descend into throes of total physical mourning – all as a kind of performance. Dani’s sorrow is reflexive, instinctive, natural, uncontrollable, genuine; their sorrow is exaggerated, dramatic, sympathetic, controllable. As the villagers’ sorrow-act reaches it’s ultimate, Dani’s emotional state begins to transform. Her posture slowly corrects, her wailing recedes to weeping, her face is becalmed by the sound and sight of the gathered masses echoing her inner experience. Against the backdrop of the heaving emotional turmoil expressed by her new community, she turns to look at the burning remains again, and this time a gentle smile appears on her face. Here we have to immediately examine the tempting assumption that she is smiling out of some sense of vengeance or justice for his infidelity. No – through their performance the community have absolved her of the expectation that her grief will take a toll too high to bear alone, and transferred the obligation of emotional suffering from her to them, thereby allowing her to be at peace with the outcomes of a process that operates at a higher level than her individual personhood.
Other comments
1. It’s hard to ignore the juxtaposition of Christian (the man) and the explicitly Pagan community he finds himself in. If the central idea of Christianity is sacrifice and the acceptance of suffering, then Christian himself has his namesake belief-system forcibly reified at the cost of his own life, at the hands of it’s opposite. Put another way, the film is a metaphor for Paganism taking it’s values (cycles of nature) to a natural conclusion, and devouring Christianity in the process – but only as a matter of course, and without any dogmatic agenda. The calm indifference of the villagers displayed throughout the film reflects this manner of metaphorical devouring.
2. Open question as to why the inbred mongoloid sleeps above the room of the mating ritual, or at least why he was there at the time.
3. Open question of what Pelle’s intentions were from the outset, how much he knew was going to happen, i.e. how complicit is he in the murders of half a dozen people. I think the film is very comfortable with this not being examined let alone resolved, and I don’t think it changes the main insights of the film.
Man, that was such a masterpiece of a movie.
I wouldn’t pursue the Christian (as in religion, not the given name) angle too far. The “moderns” in this movie represent the consumer, individualistic culture, which has absolutely no way to relate to the deeply collectivist, tribal mentality of the pagans. Compare the recent SSC favorite topic of the Amish. If anything, I’d say the contrast is between a complete spiritual atrophy of modern life and its helplessness toward personal tragedy and mental illness, vs. the all-devouring homicidal collective that is nevertheless full of love and meaning.
I also don’t think the moderns were invited there explicitly to murder them. They had the option to be assimilated or even go free, but they wasted it by repeatedly breaking the pagan taboos and refusing to engage with the culture for any other reason than detached scientific study. I think Pelle might have been expecting this outcome, but given that his friends were sort of assholes maybe he decided to endanger the ones he didn’t like, convert the ones that can be redeemed, and also remove Christian as an obstacle to Dani.
The other couple is also quickly murdered when they try to leave after the attestupa. I don’t remember them breaking too many taboos? May be forgetting some detail.
Yeah, I don’t recall the chronology very well, it’s been a while since I watched the movie.
Maybe they’ve decided that it’s murder time and they wouldn’t want to leave witnesses, so they could either convert or die. Since they weren’t too engaged in the culture they immediately bailed out and got killed.
To be honest the murders were the worst feature of the movie, it felt a bit heavy handed and out of character for the villagers – they seemed pretty big on hospitality, I’d just expect them to be absolutely vicious when defending whatever they think of as sacred. Killing the guy who pissed on their ancestor tree was one thing, same with the book, but then the violence got a bit indiscriminate. Perhaps they don’t really view outsiders as people, or they are nice at first to let them prove whether they are worthy of further respect or just animals to be slaughtered?
Watched this last week. Succeeded in creeping me out a bit, for which I give it points. Apparently there’s a director’s cut that contains more gruesome material, but I think I’m satisfied enough with the original to avoid that.
I think my favorite part was the suicide ritual and the buildup to it. Before that point, I didn’t really know what to expect, and that part did a good job of gradually escalating the intensity and mystery. After seeing the old folks slam into the rocks, I was pretty sure we had now stepped into horror/suspense territory and indeed, we had, because the movie took a path that is absolutely predictable for the genre: the cast makes a series of mistakes and is whisked away to be dismembered one by one. But there’s enough stuff going on that this predictable aspect of the plot was not annoying.
Well-informed sources tell me that the visual effects chosen to simulate magic mushrooms are in many cases not super accurate, but serviceable for the movie’s purposes. (Who knows what exact mushroom they’re eating, anyway.) The way that the community mirrors the strong emotions/sensations that group members are experiencing was, I thought, an interesting idea for a convention that a society that is frequently on psychedelic mushrooms would develop: psychedelics apparently can have a de-individualizing and pro-empathy effect, and their behavior definitely appears in line with that, as far as their in-group goes (the out-group is obviously excluded and subject to random dismemberment, of course).
Other comments:
-After the first disappearance, suddenly they were making meat pies. In the moment I had a strong feeling that the disappeared guy was that meat, but did I jump to conclusions? In retrospect, probably.
-Was the sacrificial maiming of nearly all the visitors actually inevitable, or would some of them have been allowed to survive if they hadn’t committed certain errors? (Sneakily taking pictures of the holy text, peeing on the ancestral tree…) The speech right before the final sacrifice overtly stated, I thought, that Pelle and his brother Ingmar did a great job of bringing all these outsiders in to be offered as sacrifices. Maybe if the outsiders were well behaved the village folk would have made up excuses to kill them. It seems fairly clear to me that this community’s mushroom-fueled collectivism does not extend to outsiders. (Dani was only an exception because Pelle arranged for her to be assimilated, since he related to her traumas.)
–
I didn’t take away anything like that. I took the name “Christian” to just be a name, since his character has otherwise no clues that suggest he symbolizes Christianity. He is not only passive, but passive-aggressive, resentful, and selfish on top of all of it. Not much of a Christ or Christian figure in the idealized sense.
–
I didn’t fully understand her reaction. I perceived it as being a vengeful killing caused by a distraught and established-to-be-mentally-unstable woman on drugs. But if what you say is on the right track, I would say to Dani: Bullshit! You directly chose to have him burnt. You are responsible. Your boyfriend was shit, but he didn’t try to kill you, and you don’t deserve to feel good.
FWIW, my well-informed sources tell me that the psychedelic effects were shown surprisingly well, to the extent that it’s possible in cinema. The subtle “breathing” of things and textures was really well made.
I report via hearsay: In certain scenes, the “breathing” and writhing of plants looked great, as well as some distortion of facial expressions. Other scenes looked much more obviously like a computer messing with the image and weren’t convincing, but it was definitely good enough for the purposes of the movie.
We should probably note that not only did Christian cheat on Dani (hard to blame him too much for that considering he was on drugs and borderline coerced), he pooh-poohed her concerns about her sister at the beginning of the movie. If he had taken her more seriously, her parents and sister might have survived.
I think this whole movie is about Dani’s drive to have people around her who take her emotions seriously.
Sounds like yet another reflex of The Golden Bough. Will Frazer ever die, I wonder, or is he just modern mythology now?
I realise that soliciting medical advice from the internet is not a clever thing to do, but as we’re about to establish, I haven’t been very clever about dealing with this thus far. So, I would like opinions on this cough I’ve been having which is very probably not COVID-19.
One week into January I returned home from a New Year’s trip, and some days later I came down with a cold. No surprise there, catching colds when travelling is a thing that happens. It was fairly mild, I got through the head headache, sore throat, and sniffles in a few days, all without much trouble. The cough would be next, except it didn’t come. I thought the cold was over without a cough, but then some days after the sniffles vanished there it was. Just a light cough though, about what I expected given everything else.
Except the cough didn’t go away. It took me a while to really notice, coughs are always the longest part of a cold for me, often persisting as long as or longer than all the other symptoms combined. This time though I kept coughing all through the rest of January and through the first week of February, which is definitely longer than I’ve had before. I was starting to feel tightness in the middle of my chest and feeling concerned, I went to the urgent care. They checked my breathing, it was fine, my lungs sounded unobstructed, oxygen levels were good. I was diagnosed with bronchitis and sent home with a prescription for cough suppressants. Doctor said it’s not uncommon for bronchitis to take four to six weeks to clear up, and that I should be fine, but to not hesitate to return if it got worse.
Fast forward to thirty days later, and it wasn’t worse, but it’s also not really better either. The tightness in the chest that concerned me did go away a bit, but I’m still coughing. Had a cough for nearing two months, I went to the urgent care again. Same doctor, who was rather concerned to find me still with the same symptoms. He checked my vitals again, still read healthy, got me a chest x-ray, lungs looked fine, nothing at all visibly wrong with them. He asked me if I had been sleeping and eating well, I said yes without thinking about it. I was sent home with a refill of the cough suppressants and a recommendation I see a pulmonologist. I never saw the pulmonologist, I never even wrote to my primary care asking for a referral. I don’t know why. I wanted to, I knew I had a small window of opportunity before the corona plague really started hitting, and I was and remain concerned that having a comorbid pulmonary condition will land me in the ventilator if I get COVID. Nonetheless I just didn’t, and by now it doesn’t seem prudent.
There is one piece of information the doctor didn’t get, because I wasn’t being reflective enough when prompted. I actually did seem to be getting better for the first couple of weeks after the first doctor’s visit. Then my sleep cycle randomly fucked itself and I didn’t sleep very much for a week, resulting in the cough returning to its now usual level of severity. It’s likely also relevant that I haven’t been eating well. Not for lack of food, I have more than I know what to do with, I’m just lacking the wherewithal to cook it. Which is bad because my fat reserves are already near nonexistant, and my chest has gone from having a visible ribcage outline to having visible ribs. Which means I unintentionally lied to the doctor, though I do not think it would have altered his recommendation beyond adding an exhortation to eat and sleep more.
So yeah, I have had a cough for over three months. It was actually getting better again, I didn’t cough at all for the last week, I think? I can still feel it in my chest, but it’s not bad enough I need to cough. I also used to cough every time I talked, but it’s not been a problem for the last month I think. However, I didn’t sleep last night and now I’m coughing a bit once more. It seems that I am just barely fighting off the infection, so any additional strain on my body is immediately felt. Anybody have any thoughts about this beyond the obvious that being a starving insomniac isn’t great for my immune system?
Eat food.
My wife had a very bad cough earlier this year that lasted a weirdly long time. Not as long as yours has, but a month or a bit longer. I think it was not covid. It eventually just went away, we treated it with lots of over the counter drugs which we weren’t sure really did anything.
I had a very similar set of symptoms last spring, short cold, long cough that wouldn’t go away, etc. It was bad enough that I was coughing up specks of blood, but otherwise felt OK, and could even exercise. Turns out it was a mild form of pneumonia and a few days on antibiotics cleared it up instantly.
Isn’t a big question whether it’s a wet or dry cough? If bronchitis-related, presumably you’re phlegmy and coughing stuff up still, which is (I AM NOT A MEDICAL DOCTOR) I believe counter-indicative of COVID?
I thought bronchitis was usually a dry cough and pneumonia was a wet cough. My understanding of bronchitis is that it is more irritation/inflammation than fluid buildup. (I AM ALSO NOT A MEDICAL DOCTOR OR EVEN ANY OTHER KIND OF DOCTOR).
That was my impression as well, bronchitis is a dry cough an pneumonia is a wet cough. I have for the record a dry cough and a bronchitis diagnosis, which was explained as irritation of the bronchi, and which in turn corresponds with the feeling I have in the centre of my chest. I additionally have chest x-rays confirming a lack of buildup in the lungs.
Right then, it appears I am definitely not a medical doctor!
I sometimes get in a circle where my coughing is irritating my lungs. It could be post hoc prompter hoc, but based on my doctor’s advice once, what seems to help is not coughing – for a few days, I drink a lot of tea with honey, use cough drops, try to get to sleep earlier, and that often helps the problem.
I do try not to cough, mostly because I do not like coughing, but I will try to continue with that except more deliberately and see if that helps. Thank you.
More than once in my life during busy/stressful times I’ve gotten persistent, dry coughs that didn’t let up until I managed to get a solid chunk of good rest. My non-medical intuition supports the recommendations to sleep and eat. I’d bet the majority of my toes that it would significantly help, even if you don’t fully get better from that alone.
If I were you, my non-medical advice would be melatonin and easy to prepare calorie dense crap like ramen noodles. These have gotten me through bad times. This also seems like an excellent time to use marijuana, if in good mental health, and your circumstances allow it. I know nothing better to encourage eating a lot and getting a good rest.
Feels silly to not have thought of this, but ramen noodles may be just what I need to fill the need for something that requires little effort to prepare and also packs a considerable caloric punch. There’s this one product in particular that I like. It’s a bit pricey for ramen at $1, but much tastier and with more calories per meal on account of having better sauce packets and tiny chunks of real meat. If I bought a dozen or so that may improve my caloric intake for the next week or two, which may be enough to push me further towards recovery. Thank you for the suggestion.
If you’re feeling really fancy, add an egg, peanut butter, and/or frozen veggies. Mmmm fancy ramen.
Are other microwave meals available where you are?
Like lasagna or curry?
If anything, they’re probably easier to prepare than instant ramen. At minimum effort, you can eat them straight out of the container they came in.
The $1 ramen I mentioned also has that exact advantage. They are meant to be microwaved in the container they come in and can be eaten in the same. Which is part of the reason why I’m going to buy that and not the 30 cent packages. There are plenty of other microwaveable foods available at my local supermarkets, I just don’t buy them because I’m poor, and they tend to run in the $2-6 per meal range. A notable exception being mini pot pies which are also $1. I try to budget by acquiring cheap foodstuffs like rice, beans, lentils, potatoes, but I suppose they’re not doing me much good if I’m not eating them.
Instant ramen is pretty limited, in terms of nutrition.
Your best bet is probably to make a week’s worth of stew or something when you’ve got the energy then freeze single portions of it.
Also maybe get a blood test to check you’re not anæmic or anything.
Punching up instant ramen is super easy. Buy the 30 cent stuff and throw some egg, meatballs, and fresh or frozen veggies in when you cook or microwave the water.
The $1 ramen containers are often explicitly designed to accommodate additional ingredients like that.
As for other microwave food, I suggest going to the local dollar store. They sometimes get stuff that would be more than $2 elsewhere on sale.
There’s also canned baked beans and other canned meals: remove contents, heat and eat (the contents that is, unless you really want some extra iron in your diet).
Or canned tuna in sauce, which typically doesn’t need heating.
Or frozen vegetables are pretty cheap, heat in the microwave.
Edibles specifically, if that wasn’t obvious. No reason to irritate the lungs further.
If possible, combine this with 3 days during which you constantly hydrate, use cough drops to suppress the cough, eat as much as you feel like, and sleep as much as you can. Call in sick and do low-effort activities that don’t keep you wide awake (so limit screen time). Pick out a few books to read, paint, write, do whatever else you enjoy that keeps your blood pressure low.
This is my routine for whenever I start feeling sick. I haven’t been sick for more than 4 days in over a decade.
Not a medical doctor, but I’ve had annoying persistent coughs in the past which were caused by gastroesophageal reflux, anti-acid and proton pump inhibitor medications resolved it every time. You might want to give it a try, stomach issues might also explain your lack of appetite.
If this doesn’t work, they I’m afraid you’re getting into serious disease territory.
The eating and sleeping comments seem helpful regardless of the cough. Make sure to get enough protein. I’ve been having lingering coughs (3+ weeks) after colds and was recently diagnosed with (exercise-induced) asthma. Regular inhaler use for about a week cleared up the cough, and now I use it occasionally when intense exercise starts making me feel like coughing (or before the exercise if I anticipate it).
The last bit seems like it needs more information – “I didn’t cough at all for the last week, I think? I can still feel it in my chest, but it’s not bad enough I need to cough.” A fuller description of that feeling sounds like a way to understand more deeply what is going on.
It’s a need to cough sort of feeling, right in the centre of my chest under the lower part of the sternum, consistent with irritated primary bronchi. Coughing does not actually make it better because there’s nothing there to cough up. It’s sort of been always there, less so for a while so I wasn’t coughing, but more intense these last couple of days that the cough returned.
Get a pulse oximeter (or borrow one) and periodically check your oxygen levels. If you’re dipping below 95% on a regular basis, start worrying a bit and figure you have some sort of lung condition. If you get below 90%, you need to go to an ER or InstaCare of some sort and get oxygen.
Hopefully, that can add some data to your “how bad is this?” decision-making.
I don’t have much to add to what others have already said, but one angle might be worth pursuing, additionally: Check for mould. Also check if you have any allergies (possibly new ones) that could be causing your lungs increased irritation. (I once developed a chronic bronchitis due to mild but varied pollen allergies (i.e. almost an all-year very mild and almost imperceptible allergic reaction) I hadn’t even known I had – had lived in coastal areas all my life, moved to a land-locked area, got the inexplicable chronic bronchitis, until my doctor thought to check me for allergies.)
Anybody else amazed at how good The Last Dance Netlfix documentary series about the Chicago Bulls dynasty is? I couldn’t have imagined being this engrossed by hour 6 of 10 of any sports documentary series, but here we are.
I was never a huge basketball fan (I’ve definitely watched <20 games in total in my life) but I played a little and was in high school/undergrad at the time, so there's definitely a huge nostalgia factor for me. But also it's just an extraordinarily well-crafted documentary, and the level of detail is something I didn't expect at all.
I haven’t watched it but will take this as a recommendation to do so – I used to play a lot and watch a fair bit (although I didn’t start until about 2007).
Thanks for being willing to wield the banhammer, Scott. I’ve noticed that the Twitterification of discourse appears to be metastasizing some and I’m glad you’re trying to stop it from taking root here. I don’t have much opinion on most of the people you mentioned except Nyb, for which I’m in agreement. Also if someone has made quality contributions in the past, and this is their first ban, it seems reasonable to make it a 1 month warning sort of ban.
Please let me know if I’m one of the people you secretly wish to ban so I can shape up.
I wonder if Scott hinting that there are still people among us on the brink of being banned is an attempt to scare the commentariat straight? If so, I don’t think it is a good idea – lots of people are probably wondering if they are on the list now, and while it is a good thing to make people stop and think, the result is most likely that the already cautious and polite will curb their behavior, while the overconfident loudmouths will keep on as before, thinking it’s surely not them that’s the problem.
I don’t think so, at the Philly meetup in my brief discussion with Scott it seemed apparent that a handful of posters basically absorbed his attention and his statement was something to the effect of ‘your username doesn’t register to me, that basically means you are no where near getting banned’. I don’t think he wants to control things in a subtle way.
It also means frequent commenters are more at risk, even if their good outweighs the bad. Like, if I make 2X the number of bad comments as someone else, but 10X the number of good comments, maybe that’s worth it?
The counterpoint is that Scott’s attention is extremely limited. Keeping the number of bad comments down, even at the cost of losing a significant number of good comments, may be worth it, because we don’t want to hit a tipping point where Scott shuts the place/comments down (or we get into a toxic dunking cycle that ultimately leads to that). And you can’t tell exactly how close you are to the tipping point.
I’d think the ratio would also depend on the ripple effects and amount of stickiness of a bad comment versus a good one, how replaceable the good ones are, etc. Intuitively I’d want to bump the “amount of good comments” needed up by a factor of 2–10× off the bat, depending on just how actively good counts as “good”.
Romancing the Romanceless: online comments edition
I would think the majority of SSC commenters who are polite don’t fear being banned because most of our comments are harmless, and even when controversial and volatile topics emerge people are generally courteous. It should be pretty easy to see who and who isn’t being inflammatory so I doubt there will be widespread negative consequences of him announcing this in the future.
It’s made me much more hesitant to comment. Realistically, I know that I’m probably at a low risk because I avoid CW topics and I’m not well known enough for anyone to care.
But the anxiety remains. I have an awful habit of accidentally annoying/offending people because I was never properly trained in the art of human communication.
… and same for me, but worse because Scott explicitly said I’m on thin ice for some reason.
For whatever it’s worth, I can’t remember any time your comments have struck me as objectionable, and yours is one of the names I notice; you often have interesting things to say.
But I may not be very normal myself.
Do we know what the practical implications of being banned are? The username is banned from signing in (or being mentioned), but the individual can still read and comment under a different name. Do people do that, or is being asked to leave keep them away? Or does it in practice mean not being obvious about their identity, which means forgoing whatever reputation they had and refraining from loudly arguing for the things they are known to loudly argue for?
Flagrant sockpuppeting could probably be detected and banned via ip blacklists, unless they use TOR or something.
The only person who caused problems by making more accounts had such an idiolect that detecting his posts became somewhat of a game (‘Go away John’).
He always reminded me to do more research on the Boeotians (I run RPGs set in ancient Greece).
To not get caught, they would have to come back with an entirely new personality and style.
And someone already linked this elsewhere, but: https://xkcd.com/810/
(I think some of the 6-month bans were overly harsh, but the general rule applies.)
But is supposed to not do this.
Question on non-‘COVID19 respiratory illness: is anyone getting flu, RSV, colds, random 24-hr bugs at all? Or has lockdown caused those to virtually die out — nobody’s in daycare! — while COVID is the only thing that spreads, and that like wildfire?
One-sided sniffles two times, despite self isolation.
I’ve been tracking my respiratory symptoms much more carefully than usual (for obvious reasons) and I’ve noticed several things that seem to cause sniffles – exercise in the cold, sometimes my allergies, etc. Is it possible that some of it is that?
There are some differences by which I tell them apart.
Hay fever running nose often also comes with itchy eyes, the throat is sore in a larger area and on both sides.
Breathing in cold weather makes no itching or soreness, but much runny mucus in the nose (some of it condensed breath probably), and no throat symptoms.
Presumed infections start with small sore spots, often on at first (or in mild cases) one side of the larynx only, later the nose on the same side starts running, and there is mucus from the maxillary sinus. If it goes bad, the soreness spreads and descends and I get a fever.
FWLIW, I had the latter, but not descending, no fever, no other covid symptoms.
Well, in Massachusetts there are about 10,000 tests a day, and about 8,000 of those come back negative for coronavirus. So presumably a lot of those people do have the flu/colds/random bugs.
Yeah, my understanding is that in most jurisdictions of the US, you can still only get tested if you are exhibiting COVID-like symptoms. And about 90% of the tests come back negative for COVID.
So all of those people must have something that looks like COVID, but isn’t.
Depends on the false negative rate. Friend of a friend of my cousin evidence but our friend took their 4 year old to get tested and it came back negative, but then a nurse friend of theirs said that to be accurate you needed the swab to be in the nose for near 30 seconds and that makes the test worthless for small children. I have seen a few reports of false negatives as high as 30%.
Actually the same smart thermometer data that was originally used suggested to be used to track COVID-19 outbreaks now shows clearly how much lockdown has reduced the other fevers. Check out the chart below the map here: https://healthweather.us/ everything plummeted below baseline starting right around when lockdowns went into effect.
But I wonder if there’s some other confounders going on like people check their temperature more often due to Covid so getting more negatives just by increased use? Not sure.
I fully agree with the theory. But we had an early flu season.
I’ve had what I take to be seasonal allergies, exacerbated by stress, the whole time I’ve been sheltering in place. Every morning like clockwork I wake up with a somewhat stuffed head and spend two hours intermittently coughing etc. to clear it. No fever, but I’m also sleeping more than usual – however, I put that down to stress/anxiety because of the covid-19 situation.
My wife and I both seemed to have some mild cold for a few days–I can’t imagine how we would have caught it from anyone else (we’ve been pretty careful), so I’m wondering if this is either a latent cold that came back, something we caught from the dog, or something we caught from some long-lasting bug sitting in the dust somewhere in the house. It might also have been allergies, but it seemed pretty cold-like.
My body decided to go full allergy season at the end of my hike this Sunday. Wake up with a runny nose that goes for a few hours until I sufficiently devote my attention elsewhere, comes back whenever I remember it. Very annoying, I get drippings into my facemask.
For people who have consistently frequented the SSC subreddit for a while: How have things changed(or stayed the same) since the motte split off and the rules of engagement changed? My confirmation bias is too strong for me to accurately gauge the changes by just scanning through it, and since I was banned there a million years ago I haven’t been keeping close track. Is it mostly the same? Better/Worse? Busier/Ghost-townier?
More boring, to me. I rarely see anything that interests me enough to debate or even comment at all.
Did you only comment on CW topics? Are the remaining topics just too inarguable?
Yes to both, I think — not that other topics can’t be interesting, but people don’t tend to be* as egregiously wrong on them; someone commenting on, I dunno, WWI-era biplanes or something is likely to know what they’re talking about or they wouldn’t comment, and if they are wrong it’s much more straightforward to correct them (and if you don’t, either someone else will, because it’s easy to verify the fact of the matter, and that’s the end of it; or else it’s just too inconsequential for anyone to even bother, and that’s the end of it).
(*or “appear to me to be”, of course)
Too, emotions don’t run as high, on other topics, so reading through debates on them isn’t as fun — they’re both shorter and more staid.
I don’t know how true this is, but after a little thought, it seems that another reason is that other topics that interest me are more profitably engaged by other means — e.g., if I’m interested in WWI fighters, I’ll learn more by reading a book about them or going to a specialist forum/subreddit.
The SSC sub was good for me because I could read high-quality, largely civil debates on controversial topics, which is not that common. Without this, it’s just a bunch of mild and mildly effective education on mildly interesting things; and it also seems to me that a lot of them are often either very common (“how are you dealing with the quarantine?”) or too niche (“distribution of graduate student stipends in the Bay Area”) — whereas CW stuff is an unusual mix of “not commonly discussed with rigor” and “widely relevant” at the same time.
I’m sure you could get heated emotional arguments about WWI fighters if you tried. Were sesquiplanes like the Nieuport 17 a brave and brilliant combination of the structural advantages of the biplane with the aerodynamic and pilot-view advantages of the monoplane, or a foolhardy attempt to have one’s cake and eat it that led to disastrous flutter accidents? (And would an inverted sesquiplane have been better or worse?) Was the Fokker D.VII really the best fighter of the War, justifying its special clause in the Armistice, or is that just the same kind of wehraboo wunderwaffe propaganda more commonly seen around WWII designs? Was the German “triplane fever” a rational response to the Sopwith Triplane, or an overreaction (and was the Fokker Dr.I inherently a deathtrap or just the victim of poor manufacturing quality)? And which was really better, the Camel or the S.E.5a?
If you think any of those questions can be resolved by a simple factual verification, I have a bridge to sell you.
This was sort of my impression browsing it and seeing comment counts – that most people aren’t commenting anymore, for whatever reason. I wonder how much of that is “a bunch of them were banished, so there’s less of them” and how much of it is “a bunch of topics were banned”.
Biweekly Naval Gazing links post:
If anyone happens to be in or near Spokane, Washington, they have a relatively new air museum that I’ve reviewed.
My long-running series on the Falklands War has finally reached the Argentine air attacks on Bluff Cove, possibly the greatest British disaster of the war.
While container ships may be the most prominent part of merchant shipping, the most common ships by tonnage are bulk carriers for solid cargoes like ore, grain, and coal.
Lastly, I’ve continued looking at the history of coastal defenses, focusing mostly on those in the US during the first 20 years or so of the nation’s history.
Someone built an AI solely to draw penises:
Dick-RNN
It’s unlikely that an AI threat will emerge from this particular example, but wouldn’t it be hilarious if it did?
If it does, I’m sure we’ll find a way to rise to the occasion.
It’ll be a hard one to counter.
Machines aren’t perfect; just beat it down when it makes a cock-up.
This made me smile. Indulge me in a personal memory. Over 40 years ago (’78?) a dear, now departed friend and I were playing around with color graphics on a computer, completely new at the time. I think he worked for Bill Etra. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Etra. And what did we create but a crude (I think the whole screen had 64 ‘pixels’) multicolored penis, complete with testes and ejaculate. Somewhere I think I still have a copy of penis.v1 and penis.v2. My friend, Michael Polatnik, who I miss every day, later went on to help design the graphics hardware in the Atari Amiga. Plus ca change.
So assuming a 8% case fatality rate for those in the 70-79 age group, multiply that by the “average years lost for those who have died” for the same age group (12.3 per the first study) and you get an average population years lost of 0.96 for that demographic. I’m not sure how to feel about that to be honest, but it’s pretty much what I had been primed to expect from my media consumption.
Sources: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/ (for CFR)
https://avalonecon.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/COVID-19-QALYs-v3.pdf (your link, confirming that this years lost metric is only for those who died)
People who went to the last SSC virtual meetup, how did it go? Was it easy to use? Are you required to register in advance to participate?
I think it went pretty well. I came late, but there were 3 groups of people having independent conversations (I think one was talking about parenting, another about physics and AI, and the third stood around listening to someone sing and play guitar). Hubs is very easy to use. I registered in advance, but I’m pretty sure that anyone who gets their hands on the link can join in – no one checks. It’s best to still register so that organizers know what to expect though.
What are some of your technical specs as far as accessing Hubs goes (browser, OS, etc.)? I’m using Firefox on a Macbook and I can’t get Hubs to load. I’ve tried with and without my VPN running.
Windows, Google Chrome, super cheap laptop
I use Firefox on an iMac and have no problem using Hubs.
Maybe a better question then is, are you aware of a page where Hubs lists its technical requirements? Maybe I can figure out where I’m falling short…
I’m afraid I don’t know. You could search the Hubs site.
I was barely able to get Hubs to load initially. It was super laggy. I emailed the meetup organizer, and he advised me as follows, and it fixed my problem. If you can’t get it to load at all, this won’t help, but if you can barely get it to load it will help. Or if you can get it to load on another device, change the settings for your account, and then log in on your main device.
“Try this link here:hub.link/Zd85BZs
Then click the hamburger menu on the top-left.
Then click Preferences. Try reducing these two settings:
Max Resolution (width x height in pixels)
Material quality (requires restart).”
I’m the kind of weirdo who enjoys reading patch notes. What software has had the most entertaining bugs?
Bonus question: will any release notes ever top Notepad++ 7.3.3?
Dwarf Fortress is a shoe-in for this one:
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-most-ridiculous-patch-notes-from-10-years-of-dwarf-fortress/
https://twitter.com/DwarfFortBugs
And if someone wants primary sources…
https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/changelog_page.php
https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
+1, although the linked article doesn’t mention a more recent bug where babies ride their mothers around like horses until the mothers die of dehydration.
I haven’t seen the actual changelog, but Crusader Kings II has a notorious glitch where, after one upgrade, something like 80% of the clock cycles were devoted to having every culturally Greek character repeatedly check whether or not they ought to castrate any/every other Greek character in the game. Debugging that one must have been fun.
Oh no! That means culturally Greek characters wouldn’t be able to bear bear cubs!
Ah yes, the most quintessentially Crusader Kings II bug ever. It’s infamous thanks to this post from the coder who fixed it. The actual patch note reads as follows: “Optimized fatwa, zun judgement, blinding and castrate decisions to no longer completely kill performance when enormous empires have started forming.”
I for one think that blinding and castrating decisions completely killing the performance of enormous empires is perfectly on brand for the Greeks.
“Dear Ayatollah, a Pagan Zun judgment of blinding and castrate caused my computer to completely stop working. Can I get an optimized fatwa about this?”
I used to be addicted to Dwarf Fortress. I managed to quit, and came back years later when I was trying to entertain myself while on an extended vacation. These bugs are funny to read about if you don’t actually play the game, but I was pretty disappointed to come back to the game and find that many bugs I remembered from years ago still hadn’t been fixed. At some point you have to ask whether Toady has his priorities straight. He has been piling on new systems and features and leaving a huge number of bugs untouched. Next time I want to flush months of my life down the drain, I’m gonna try Rimworld.
Paradox Grand Strategy games (Especially Crusader Kings 2) have some pretty good ones.
https://twitter.com/thestrangelog?lang=en
https://twitter.com/AmichaiStein1/status/1257401383474597889
Israelis find antibody that cures coronavirus.
I can’t read Hebrew and don’t know how authoritative these people are. They are the Israeli Ministry of Defense and the Israel Institute for Biological Research so not a bunch of randos.
I can read hebrew. Stein pretty much says it all.
The nagdan (antibody or antidote, I’m not sure) has already been developed – now patenting and getting international companies to produce it are the next steps.
I don’t know how seriously to take this yet
Is this the same as the recent monoclonal antibody paper?
Either way, it’s great news!
Derek Lowe has covered mAbs in general in a couple of posts (most recent). Assuming that’s that this is, I think we should interpret this as:
1) Great news
2) Not all that surprising
3) An effective stopgap, not a cure
To expand on point #3: These treatments are unlikely practical as widespread prophylaxis and seem quite expensive to produce, in part because their manufacturing process is inherently biological and therefore hard to scale. The world undoubtedly ought to take a Manhattan Project approach to production, so it’s hopefully less a question of whether it will happen but instead at what scale before something more sustainable and broadly applicable like a vaccine can come online. In the meantime, this sort of drug will probably work as a more effective treatment than we currently have and, in some specific situations, a prophylaxis.
Thanks. What I understand is that monoclonal antibodies likely confer temporary immunity, so we could give them to the most exposed people now.
But what happens when someone who has been given mAbs gets a positive exposure to coronavirus? The best case is that (a) their native immune system fights it off, giving them permanent immunity (b) with them having no symptoms (c) and they cannot be a vector (aside from things like touched a shared surface).
But are any of (a) (b) or (c) true?
I’m not sure, except that if (a) happens then (c) is highly likely. And I would suspect that anyone who has symptoms and then recovers satisfies both (a) and (c). But I don’t know if the mAbs interrupt the immune response such that the immune system only develops antibodies to them and not the virus in its native state.
Can anyone recommend a good book about the fall of the Soviet Union/Iron Curtain? Nothing too scholarly or dense.
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is a foodie book, and a memoir, and only incidentally (but vividly and authoritatively) about life in USSR, early post-Soviet Russia. That’s second-hand, I haven’t read it, but my partner loved it and read some sections out loud to me, and what I heard, made it sound smart and like it’ll leave you with some good true details helpful for relating to what it was like to be there.
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford is a great historical novel about life in Russia in the late fifties- early sixties when it seemed for a moment that communism is working.
It’s very engaging (the audiobook is good too), reportedly well-researched, and chimes well with my family’s stories of Soviet life.
Another thrilling and insightful read is my grandpa’s arrest reports, but they only come in the original Russian….
+1 for Red Plenty, however it’s not really about the collapse per se, but does show the systemic issues that led to the collapse. It is an excellent book. I’d even say that if you ever read a single book about the USSR, read that.
Scott’s review of Red Plenty is very good, by the way: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/
COVID-19 patient recovery statistics for some reason is not reported in California. Any ideas why?
Because it’s essentially garbage. When my friend got a positive COVID-19 test, he was told to go back home and stay inside until $time after he felt healthy, and then he had no more contact with the medical establishment. So, how should he show up in the recovery statistics? If the answer is “well, he should be given another test,” how do you propose to do that given our scandalous shortage of tests?
And then let’s consider my other friend who had something we’re pretty sure was COVID-19, but he never even got a test because, knowing we’re short of tests, he decided to just skip to the next step and stay inside.
Or my friend who got very sick with something very closely fitting the descriptions of the symptoms of COVID-19, but never quite sick enough to go to the hospital, seems to mostly be recovered now (but still with occasional fever and coughs), and since she doesn’t seem to be a crisis she was never able to get a test. I’m sure she’s not in any statistics for COVID-19. The confirmed cases data is a lower bound, as best I can tell–in NYC it’s probably at least within shouting distance of being accurate, and in most other places it’s probably not.
I don’t follow the logic.
By recovery I mean that person a) won’t develop symptoms of COVID and b) isn’t contagious. Obviously you have to know how many people have recovered to evaluate risks and make decision on, say, whether to stay home, put on a mask or open a busuness. In a 1 million-population city it is one thing when 100 000 are infected with COVID, and none have recovered, and quite another thing when 99 999 have recovered.
So, I’m kinda frustrated that this very important metric is not reported in California.
As for the first situation you described – basically, the question is if your friend is a) cured, and b) not contagious. He’ll need this information to know when he can interact with other people (unless he is planning to stay in quarantine forever). The answer “we could know if we had tests, but we don’t have them” is more or less ok (really though? still shortage of tests in May?), if you then tell that after $time has passed and he’s healthy – he becomes not dangerous to others. Why not report him as recovered after $time has passed then?
As for your second case – that’s unrelated to my question, because my concern is (lack of) official statistics on recovery.
Yes, we still have a shortage of tests in May. Our governor has been expostulating for weeks about how that’s the main block on lifting our Stay at Home order. Though, this particular story happened back in early April.
I suppose you could ask “please call us back after $time without symptoms, to update our records”; I wonder how much compliance you’d get with that?
I’d say “please call us back after $time so we could verify that you are recovered” would get a >50% compliance rate. But that’s not the point.
The point is — how on Earth are we going to make decision about lifting Stay at Home order if no one has any clue about how many people have recovered from the disease?
At Oleg’s point on recovery stats. Can we simply estimate this based on the date of the tests rather than trying to locate or retest everyone? It seems to me we can safely assume that anyone tested will have 1 of 3 outcomes after 1 month. They will be recovered, they will be in hospital with a serious case and will likely be retested or released when recovered, or they will be dead. As the hospitalisation to infection rate is relatively low (low as an absolute value, I’m not comparing it to other diseases) in populations under 70, then we could get a pretty good idea about those who are tested and active vs tested and recovered. You can pick a different time period, but I’d say any diagnoses older than 4-6 weeks who are not dead or in hospital a can be counted as recovered without subsequent testing. The date s easy to work out based on reported daily new infections. So I’d take the total cases and subtract all the new ones from over 1 month ago. I think you might be asking a lot for retesting, is that actually happening in other locations where they are reporting recovered numbers? I don’t know, but I doubt that’s a universal practice around the world.
So I just read Elizabeth Warren’s The Two-Income Trap, and while I could get into all sorts of discussions about lots of the things she says, I’m curious about something she doesn’t say. She discusses that many middle-class families had the wife go to work in the market through the 70s and 80s.
My question is: Did the drastic lowering of marginal tax rates in the Reagan presidency have an influence on this transition? It seems is should have had some – sending another person to work when marginal income tax rates are in the 40s and 50s (plus another 6 or 7% for Social Security) won’t make as much financial sense as when the marginal tax rate is 28%. Has anyone studied this, or have anecdotal knowledge?
They could file separately, which would actually incentivize in the other direction. Back of the napkin, two people earning $50k each filing separately pay $16,000 in tax. A single person working to support a spouse earning $100k pays $23,000 in tax. Also, the average family is almost definitionally not paying the top rate.
Further, the timing is off. Married women who work is a pretty standard growth trendline from at least 1955 to about 1995. (Unmarried women who work also trends up slightly but is similar to men in any case.) You’d have to explain how a trend that occurred both pre and post-Reagan was the result of Reagan’s tax changes.
Filing separately doesn’t work, because the thresholds are set up to be exactly half the married filing jointly thresholds, while the filing as single thresholds are not. People have been complaining of the “marriage penalty” since before the ’80s.
The top rate in 1979 was 70%, plus social security, so closer to 77%. Middle-class families were mostly not paying that rate, but there were so many rates that adding a second income would probably push the marginal rate up a bracket or two.
In 1987, the average family *was* paying the top rate, which was 28%.
This. I’ve heard so many people claim that “you can just file separately” as if that actually solves the problem. A glance at the tax tables instantly shows this is not the case.
The top rate in 1979 was 70%, plus social security, so closer to 77%.
Just an FYI. You only pay SS tax on the first $x amount of income. Currently it’s $137,700. So for example, if you make $275,400 on or about July 2nd you’ll notice your paycheck suddenly jumps by 6.2% as you’ve hit the maximum taxable amount.
I can’t find the exact number but the SS max in 1970 would be very roughly $20k. The 70% rate didn’t kick in until you hit an income of $200k which is equal to $1.3 million today.
You can see female labor force participation rate was moving steadily higher from 1950 through 1980, and if anything the rate of change slows during the 80s, but probably more doesn’t deviate much if you treat the recession years as a different animal.
Ok – I think this is pretty dispositive. It actually looks like the rate accelerated from about 1973 – 1982, then returned to the earlier growth rate, so the cause is probably inflation.
It’s worth remembering that the pre-1986 code had higher rates but also much larger deductions. Effectively marginal rates didn’t actually change that much. The richest 1/5 paid 55% of taxes in 1979 and 58% of taxes in 1989, while the overall level of taxation hadn’t changed.
This is a recently beloved right wing talking point but it is not at all undisputed: https://slate.com/business/2017/08/the-history-of-tax-rates-for-the-rich.html
that article largely backs assertions. The author lays out a similar argument, and then says “but I don’t buy it” with no additional evidence offered.
I searched for “deduction” and found nothing. They didn’t even bother to address the point.
Kennedy and Reagan each significantly cleaned up the tax code, lowering the supposed rate you pay but making you pay it on a lot more. You now get taxed on all your compensation[1].
Imagine the tax code changes so I go from (a) paying $20,000 in tax on 100K in compensation plus 100K in untaxed compensation to (b) paying $20,000 in tax on 200K in compensation, I’m still paying the same amount. But one can still draw graphs showing (1) I’m getting so much more money, (2) I’m paying such a smaller amount of percentage tax. Even though, as stipulated, I’m paying the exact same number of dollars.
[1] Except for health insurance, for no good reason. We could have fixed it then!
So baconbits provides strong evidence I’m wrong about tax rate changes having any effect, above.
However, changing deductions doesn’t change the marginal rate, it changes the overall rate.
In 1978, a married couple going from one income of $20,000 to two incomes of $30,000 would pay an additional $3,013 in federal income tax (plus $605 in Social Security and whatever state income tax). A married couple going from one income of $30,000 to two incomes of $40,000 would pay an additional $3,988 (plus $605 SS and whatever state).
In 1987, going from $25,000 to $35,000 would have meant only $2,410 more income tax, and going from $35,000 to $45,000 only $2,800 more in income tax. Though the Social Security tax had gone up, and the additional $10,000 income would pay $715 in Social Security.
I’m not sure what tax cuts you are talking about under Reagan. He cut them at first and was famous for it, but then he raised then multiple times to even higher rates in many cases. What his reign was mostly about at the time was incredible uncertainty and changes in terms of tax policy with significant changes almost every single year of his presidency. Only in later years was he lionised as a great cutter of taxes for internal party storytelling Which diverged from reality.
As others have pointed out these top rates don’t matter much as very few people pay those rates in a progressive tax system. if your partner can go out and earn a top salary, you would definitely have more money regardless of Relatively minor differences in tax rates as the new earner gets their own progressive tax steps. I’ve never understood the fear of tax brackets as I think many people interpret them wrongly, thinking their entire income is suddenly taxed at a higher rate vs a few dollars that spill over into a higher bracket from another high bracket, s a few 30% dollars but up against a few 37% taxed dollars for relatively small bracket to bracket jumps in the income ranges the overwhelming majority of people deal with. Also more money is more money, I don’t see people turning down a job for 250k when they take 220k currently, except for specific concerns around working conditions such as culture, location, hours worked, type of work etc.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-12-15/the-mostly-forgotten-tax-increases-of-1982-1993
Among the undeserved bans (of which multiple had already been touched by commenters), I think Howard Holmes had an interesting point and maybe failed a bit on delivery – but not to the degree I’d exclude him from a polite conversation.
Not to speak ill of the banned, but Howard made that point over and over and over in a way that got kind of intrusive. I definitely stopped paying attention to any comment thread once he became involved. It was an interesting point of view the first couple times, but after the 200th time it was just a tad tiresome seeing conversations constantly getting derailed in that direction.
I’m not sure that is ban-worthy, but he also got off (relatively) light compared to the others.
+1
He was one of two banned users I thought was just pointing bait.
I wasn’t sure he was doing it deliberately to troll, or as struggling to work through a mental issue, but either way, I just ignored everything.
IMO, he most consistently derailed threads into the same kind of productive and uninteresting conversation.
Any chance one of those is a typo? If not, I can understand the ire; productive and uninteresting is exactly what I go to SSC to get away from.
(And, to be serious, HH struck me as rather trollish as well, not that my opinion–or anything else in creation–matters to him.)
‘unproductive’
The very same argument seemed to be made again and again.
It looks to me like he made no effort whatsoever to be at all polite in that conversation, which makes sense given that he thinks politeness is entirely an act to raise one’s own opinion of oneself. While I think that belief of his is genuine, it unfortunately is not conducive to his participation in polite conversations on delicate topics.
Tbh I’m confused that the first person on the ban update list was only banned now; your list of example offending comments from them include ones from January and October that imo would merit banning pretty much immediately.
I get so much pushback on bans that I wanted to wait until I have a very strong case.
by itself should be enough to be instantly bannable in any place with any moderation
(though maybe https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/06/open-thread-138/#comment-807580 slipped through and was not noticed?)
More warnings!
If you’ve gone to the effort to save a comment as evidence for the future ban, it’s time to issue a warning.
I watched the James Bond movie, Goldfinger, recently, and in the movie Auric Goldfinger estimates that his plan to irradiate the gold at Fort Knox will raise the value of his own untainted gold by 10 times. Of course, in order to do so he has to launch a complicated plan involving nerve gas, lasers, and a dirty bomb, which is all easily foiled when James Bond converts his pilot to the light side through the medium of… sexual assault. Let’s not get into that part given the thread (kind of hard to express how much of a failure his plan was without mentioning it in passing). The 60s! Moving on…
What safer ways to get a 10x return would you recommend to a super-villain?
(Bonus question: which James Bond villain had the most reasonable plan that had the biggest returns with the lowest chance of failure).
Is it sad that I just now realized that Auric Goldfinger’s first name was a pun? Granted the last time I watched that movie I was maybe 13 but still.
Wait 10 years until people forget and then use CRISPR-Cas9 to design a nasty virus. Use those 10 years to buy up a lot of machines and factories that profit greatly from the current crisis. Create large supplies of crisis goods. Then during the virus-crisis that you create, wait a little until panic is greatest, then sell your machines and factories. Once sold, you undercut the companies you sold the machines and factories to, with your stored supplies.
And by virus, you mean wheat blight, right?
Nitpick: Cas9 is a nuclease, not a virus designing tool.
If we’re talking about purely financial gains, both “Mr. Big” (Live and Let Die) and Felix Sanchez (License to Kill) had the very pragmatic plan of selling lots of drugs to decadent Americans. That’s been a proven winner for about a century now, if we include alcohol and Prohibition. Mr. Big included the bit about addicting the target population with free drugs before jacking up the price, and keeping a psychic on staff to forestall unpleasant surprises, so I’ll give him the nod here. Just try to avoid gratuitously pissing off top-level national intelligence agencies by killing their people if you don’t absolutely have to.
Outside of the financial realm, some of the earlier Bond villains had the clever scheme of being a geopolitical superpower and using covert operations to position themselves advantageously for a bit at global domination and/or hegemony. Very high potential return, and the failures are mitigated by using deniable operatives. We last saw those guys in “For Your Eyes Only”, or maybe “The Living Daylights” but that one mixed it up with some private drug-smuggling.
If you’re a super villain with the resources and smarts to carry out such a plan, why not go into a legitimate line of business and get filthy rich, then use your wealth to influence politics and media in some direction more to your liking.
The powers that be stop you from achieving certain things legally.
Changing the governmental style (to or from democracy for example) usually isn’t allowed.
Doctor Doom says, Why not both?
Big business is a fan of big regulation, because it makes it harder for their competitors. Baptists and bootleggers can both agree on prohibition of the alcohol business model.
Ah, the Elon Musk gambit. Well played
Does cornering the Chicago onion futures market count?
Or more generally, futures and villainy should go very well together.
This is dumb nitpicking but in Casino Royale, after Le Chiffre’s plot is foiled, his broker calls him and tells him that his put options expired worthless but he hasn’t been able to calculate the loss yet. Then Le Chiffre states the exact amount without hesitation, as a way to show the audience that he’s a mathematical genius. But if the options expired worthless then the loss is just your cost basis. It’s trivial to find out, should be right there on Le Chiffre’s E*Trade page. If it were a more complex derivative trade, then we’d be talking.
So that’s how my quarantine is going so far haha.
In most Bond films the villain has a private compound, henchmen, and is obviously already very wealthy. The best thing they can do is retire immediately to avoid the ire of Bond or the various governments who would want to stop you. Just retire, jump off the hedonic treadmill of power over others and just Netflix and chill or go skiing or whatever you want. The main problem with their secret lair is the death ray or whatever they have on hand. Just retire immediately and forget about global domination.
Scaramanga has an excellent plan for massive self-enrichment and the protection of the Chinese government to keep the CIA, MI6 et al. off his back. Where it all goes wrong is that what he wants most is not skiing, Netflix and chill or indeed power over others; it’s a pistol duel with Bond.
Start a ‘will it deathray’ youtube channel where you destroy common household items using your highly impractical lasers/sharks/explosives etc.
Already exists.
Seems like the real life MI6 is diverting funds to fake viewers to potential supervillains on youtube.
Shows that realistic supervillains have to worry about fuses a lot more than the screen ones.
[eta: link included this time]
This link.\ is an interesting Twitter thread on meat packing plants and why they have COVID-19 circulating.
What it sounds like to me: These places are refrigerated, so virus probably survives a long time in the environment. They’re loud, so people probably yell a lot. They’re cutting with powered tools of various kind, so they’re probably creating aerosols. There are fans blowing all the time which likely move the droplets from me to you and from me to the meat, and then when the meat is cut into the air. Probably also you have workers largely working and also living in close quarters.
Can you link the thread?
Stupid question: couldn’t you eliminate spread inside a building by just constructing a mondo filter setup that sucks towards the ceiling and filters some large fraction of the building’s volume every second? Particles emit from infected, go up to where there aren’t any people, and get jammed in the HEPA filter and nuked with UV. I’m sure that’d be an insanely expensive retrofit but compared to just not being able to do business…
> some large fraction of the building’s volume every second
I hope you have a good paperweight.
It’d constantly be windy in any reasonably-sized office.
I know there are HVAC systems designed to avoid airborne transmission of disease (used in hospitals, for example), which do some combination of HEPA filtering and UV sterilization on the air. I think the idea there is to avoid having dried-out droplet nuclei floating along through the air conditioner ducts, not so much to protect the people in the same room with the infectious patient.
Whenever I go back to the office, I’m considering bringing one of the household HEPA filters I have at home and keeping it running in my office. These are rated for a certain number of air changes/hour in a room of a certain size. That won’t protect me from inhaling droplets from someone sitting in front of me, but it will probably filter out droplet nucleii floating around in the air in my office sooner or later.
I wonder whether ionic dust removers will work.
sucks towards the ceiling
A downward flow would not have to fight gravity.
In most US cities, the rich generally live in the hills, and poor in the flats. Is there any city where it’s the reverse?
My understanding is that this is a result of motorization of transportation. Back when everyone had to walk between home and other places, I think urban poor neighborhoods were often on hillsides while the areas closer to the center of the city (which was often at the riverfront) were wealthier. My understanding is that some of this pattern has persisted in the favelas of Brazil, and in the Andean cities of Colombia, where urban escalators and gondolas have started integrating the poor neighborhoods better into the city since the end of major hostilities in the drug war. I conjecture that this will result in major gentrification and displacement in the next decade or two, the way that recent changes in American urban desirability switched “inner city” neighborhoods from undesirable (and thus poor) to desirable.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/colombia-medellin-neighborhood/index.html
There’s probably effects that I’m missing though – marshiness would always have been undesirable for residential property in a city, and views would always be desirable. But there definitely have been some related shifts regarding technology – it used to be that the second floor of a building had the most expensive apartments (being sufficiently far from the street but not too much of a hike), until the elevator let the views of the top floor win out over the difficulty of getting up there.
Another consideration is that water transport used to be even more important than it is now–I don’t think the waterfront *itself* would be the ritzy part, because it would be warehouses, wharves, and factories. A lot of that port and manufacturing infrastructure no longer has to be there because before if you had it located at a distance you’d have to manhandle stuff from a boat into a horse-drawn wagon, then manhandle it off the wagon at your warehouse. We have forklifts and trucks now, for dealing with getting stuff off of water-borne transport.
We also don’t need to rely so much on water-borne transport with roads and railroads, which allow more flexibility in placement of factories. Transshipment costs also eat you alive, so if you can avoid multimodal transport, by, say, just trucking it from your factory to their factory instead of your factory –> waterfront –> boat –> waterfront –> other person’s factory, that reduces demand for wharf space downtown a lot.
The big thing here is shipping containers. Suddenly, you go from needing a ton of labor but not a lot of space (supports lots of communities at the waterfront in major cities) to needing a bunch of space but little labor. This killed off a ton of factories, too, and turned out to be uniquely terrible for New York for a bunch of reasons.
But yeah, these days it’s usually just putting stuff in a container and paying someone to move it. You don’t even have to worry that much about how.
A similar altitude-inversion happened also within single buildings. Nowadays, the ritziest apartments are the penthouses at the top. In Ancient Rome, before the invention of the elevator, the “walk up” apartments at the top were the cheapest.
In Medellín (Colombia) quite a few up-and-coming suburbs are flat and central, while the poorest comunas are up in the hills surrounding the city. They’ve even installed gondolas and massive escalators to help poorer folks get around, which is super trippy – the kind of thing you would normally pay ~$20 to ride as a tourist attraction is boring old commuter transport! The counterpoint is that the glitziest suburb – Poblado – is also hilly.
EDIT: confirming what keaswaran said.
I think a lot of places in the Andes are high enough that the higher up you go, the more the population becomes Indians instead of whites or blacks–thanks to high-altitude adaptations, they’re mostly the people who can live comfortably up there.
Medellin is not that high up, though. It’s only 1500 m, more than a kilometer lower than Bogota. (But Bogota has mostly not grown up the mountainside, but out along the Sabana.)
Would such high-altitude adaptational differences be noticeable in any sort of modern lifestyle though? Even unconsciously? I would think that high-altitude adaptations only really make a difference if you’re engaged in strenuous labor or doing something like long-distance running, not making dinner, watching TV and sleeping before next day’s work down below. But I don’t know anything about high elevations except for brief trips to the Rockies. I just suspect this blog has many commenters who are eager to find more roles of unsubtle genetic differences in modern life than we should reasonably expect. I’d get it if there were a population adapted to Mt. Everest elevations, but I don’t know where you cross the line from “your ears pop when you drive up there” to “it’s exhausting just to stand and breath”.
Yeah, I’ve read that in Bolivia this drives some important social phenomena, but it may just not be enough of an altitude difference to matter around Medellin.
And yeah, I definitely like the idea of subtle or invisible genetic differences having some interesting and surprising effect, so maybe I’m primed to see them.
Pregnancy.
La Paz is at 3,600 m, and its airport is in El Alto, at 4,000. El Alto is 85% Indian and 15% Mestizo.
In Pittsburgh, PA, the poor generally live in the hills, whereas the rich are at lower eleavtions. The justification I heard for this was:
When Pittsburgh was a very industrial town, there were large, consistent amounts of smog. Smog generally rose, so the rich purchased residences at lower elevations.
I’m having trouble finding a direct source for this; however, comparing an elevation map to the median household income confirms this.
…That’s actually the exact opposite of the story I heard. But I’m new to Pittsburgh and your theory seems better supported by the map, so without trying to dig further I guess whoever told me the opposite was probably mistaken.
Welcome to the area!
The story given by bobert doesn’t match the tales I’m familiar with, either. The household income map isn’t that useful at this point because it reflects a post-industrial model. There are 2 separate things which need to be addressed: topology and distance.
For those not familiar with the area, the rivers effectively form a pollution-trapping valley which still exists, though has been substantially mitigated by de-industrialization in the area. (The Clariton Coke Works are a continuing sore spot for some) So if you were living near the water you would have to deal with huge amounts of pollution. I’ve heard tales of yore of people waking up in the morning with inverted shadows on their pillows where their heads prevented soot from settling.
Additionally, the topography makes it difficult to build large houses. It’s very common for single-family houses to have an entrance at the front of the house which is on one floor and an exit out the other side on another. Areas further away from the rivers tend to be flatter.
Then you have the transportation problem. If you have gentle slopes, you can have a vaguely-standard (and efficient) grid pattern. But if you have severe slopes the roads have to switchback, though for pedestrians you can put in stairs (common in the area) or something more drastic, such as the Inclines. (See: Mount Washington Area just South of the Southern river, the Monongahela) There are 2 Inclines which remain in operation out of the many which were once here. But that makes for a more costly trip to work, which offsets the amount of house that you can afford. OTOH, once you get over that crest, the amount of pollution would have been reduced.
So if you have money and want a place which has better air circulation you need to get away from the river valleys. If you want a place which is larger, you want a place which is flat, which means getting away from the rivers and other topological features. Being on the top of a hill facing the rivers meant that you had a terrible time getting to/from work, limited ability to build as well as all the pollution.
Many of San Francisco’s low-income housing projects were up in the hills. But they’re closing down and selling the hillside ones off to developers. Outside of the projects, the general pattern is true, but probably less so than across the Bay.
The SSC readership must have a lot of people who tried introducing programming to younger kids. Anyone want to share advice?
I was just going to get Scratch Jr and see where things went from there. This is for a smart five year old.
FWIW, I was introduced to programming via an old programmable calculator (I’m old myself, so this was way before the days of the Internet or even FIDOnet). It had room for about 31 commands, but one of these commands was an “if”, and another was a “goto”. I was also introduced to LOGO, but at the time I didn’t find it nearly as interesting as the calculator. Sure, I could make it draw pretty pictures, but I could draw pretty pictures by hand just as quickly. The calculator let me write programs to quickly do things that I couldn’t do by hand !
A prior thread on this topic: programming for kids. Admittedly, I think the target then was a bit older.
When my children were that age, the limiting factor was their physical dexterity using a mouse/trackpad to move code blocks around. My fix was to act as their hands for a while, when necessary. We didn’t use scratch jr, but I’ve seen other kids using it without too much apparent frustration.
Find something they’re interested in and introduce them to how to build it using programming. Do they like dinosaurs? Get a programmable kinex kit and build a walking dinosaur. Videogames? Make a simple game. Etc. The most important thing for very young children is their motivation (since there’s no need for the skill to be immediately practical).
My little brother used Scratch, starting around 8, and then Python (maybe mostly PyGame?).
Back when I started programming (a bit older), I used a Logo variant. It was quite friendly: it had a REPL, and one could draw things with simple sequences of commands, and then gradually proceed to more complex programs.
I believe that programming is mostly the ability to explain real world problems and solutions in very simple terms.
As such, there is a lot of overlap with being able to explain something to a 5 y.o. son.
Which is a good thing, because I also believe that children mostly learn by observing parents! So, if you are a good role model, there is a chance they’ll pick up the skill needed for being a good programmer.
Thus, I make sure I answer all questions of my kids in simple terms, yet without hiding too much complexity – this makes explanations longer, but (as in programming) you build a base of common concepts quite quickly, so it pays off.
So, I really want to teach my son programming, but I follow a long term strategy – I want him to be able to explain complicated things, not just know the syntax.
And it seems to work! Today he has shown me a drawing of his idea for a new level to a game – he draws a lot of these recently, mixing ideas from games he saw with completely new mechanics and surprising twists.
This picture had some hidden sublevels you could teleport to from various parts of a labyrinth which he denoted by using the same number at both ends of the teleport.
Think about it: a 5 y.o. figured out a way to explain a non-3D topology of space using symbols. I had tears of joy in my eyes.
This also touches on another idea I’ve implemented: I try to show him old games in semi-chronological order: pacman, nimbles (snake), boulder dash, sokoban, scorched earth, tetris etc. The idea is that these games have very simple mechanics – so simple, that you are able to model in your head what will happen next, and thus you can build “gadgets”. So, you can get quite creative playing them, but you have to use very simple tools of expression (like eating ground to create loops to catch butterflies in Boulderdash). Think: assembly, hacking!
(In parallel, I’ve also exposed him to relatively new games like Little Big Planet and The Shooter, as they also have something to teach him – and there’s a level editor in LBP!)
I’ve also observed quite early, that modern computers are a bit frustrating for my kids – while they are “easy” to use in some sense, the number of gestures, small icons, etc. seems to be overwhelming and cumbersome for their fingers, which makes it difficult to explore on their own – things like accidentally pressing a Windows button on a keyboard, or a difficulty of targeting a small icon, or accidentally zooming-in because one finger was still touching the screen when another moved often lead to request for help etc.
So, I’ve gave him a Windows 2000 airgapped laptop, which he can do whatever he likes with.
The low resolution (1024×768?) means icons are big, the old UI is quite standardized so easy to understand. Lack of internet means I don’t have to be afraid too much.
Also, old Windows builds (IMHO) a more useful mental model: My Computer has things like “Drive C:” as opposed to things you see nowadays like “My Library” or “Music”.
And it gives a lot of topics for deep conversations if kid can see RAM being scanned at boot, or a blue screen etc.
There’s an argument to be made about preparing children for the actual environment of today the’ll eventually inhabit, but I believe that showing IT stuff in the “chronological” order makes it easier to follow the “inferential steps” and build abstraction levels from ground up.
We also developed together (as in: I was live coding explaining and consulting every step with him) two games.
1. https://codepen.io/qbolec/pen/QWbNgQe is based on his idea to have create a game like Boulderdash, but for two players, so we can play together! Turned out to be great adventure for both of us, as I’ve discovered that whole logic of the game can be described by a cellular automata with rules expressed simply enough that my son can propose new rules (“If there is a rock above air, then in next frame swap them”, etc.) I had a lot of fun figuring out rules for “water”, trying to encode the concept of pressure…
Note, that he was not coding anything. He was watching me doing it, and I was constantly talking about how I am approaching it involving him in discussion and following his crazy ideas (for example if two characters meet they hug together – thanks to a single unicode character of two persons holding hands!)
2. https://codepen.io/qbolec/pen/OJyJBpb is based on idea he has drawn, that he wanted a game where you are a white blood cell eating breadcrumbs to become larger and finally be able to swallow viruses. He proposed the mechanics of movement by swapping places with neighboring elements in the blood stream and insisted that all the blood vessels must be in constant movement due to heartbeat. That was a bit complex to implement, but I like the end effect.
So, what’s next? I was playing with him on a grid paper with pencil in something like drawing pictures using instructions, and he seemed to like it, so I’ve installed dr.Logo on his laptop, and have shown him how to he can command the turtle on screen to draw a square. I tend to do as much as possible without the computer itself – if I can explain a concept of algorithm by playing with cars or drawing, then I think it’s better.
I really like Logo, which AFAIR was designed as a language for children, with the explicit goal of teaching them how to think and verbalize thoughts in more strict way.
Scratch to me is like an eye-candy version of Logo, but IMHO it’s actually a weakness.
I believe that the more restricted the tool is, the more creative you get (think: twitters’ 128 chars for example, asm demo scene).
Also, I like that Logo strikes a nice balance between being functional and imperative.
An important thing in its design seems to be that a child can impersonate the turtle to figure out what will happen – it can use intuition like “I would go forward 20 steps and turn right and end up there facing in that direction…” to debug the software! And children already have a lot of intuitions about movement in space, so it’s really nice trick.
Think how difficult, by comparison, it is to build intuitions about linked list in C++ or classes in Python.
And I talk a lot with him about how stuff works helping him build good (useful) mental models – I think that to be able to program something you need to be able to analyze world and then reconstruct it back in the computer. So, for example: knowing that sound can be thought of as a sequence of numbers representing how far a membrane has bent over time, or that if you zoom in you can see the pixels and that if you mix a lot of red blue and green pixels you seem to get gray etc. I try to give him all that, not just because this is directly useful to program something, but also because on the higher level I hope to instill a belief in reductionism in him: I hope he will naturally feel that everything should in principle be explainable, it’s just a matter of finding a good/useful model.
When I was at high school, my classmate made a game like Boulderdash, with simple language to describe the rules. “If [object] is [relative position] and …; then put [object] to [relative position] and ….” (These days, this could have been a visual language.)
If I remember it correctly, e.g. the stone was defined as: “If stone is here and air is down, put air here and put stone down. If stone is here and air is left and air is left-down, put air here and put stone left-down. If stone is here and air is right and air is right-down, put air here and put stone right-down.” This makes stones fall down in air, create ^-shaped heaps when they fall on other stones, and remain when they fall on anything else. (Note: Only the first rule that applies is executed, so if a stone could fall both left and right, it only falls left.)
So we had the usual ground, stones, and monsters, but also a few more… I don’t remember which of them were in the original game. There was stone source “If stoneSource is here and air is down, put stone down.” and stone sink “If stoneSink is here and stone is up, put air up.”
Then water, which felt down, made horizontally-moving waves on surface, melted ground (both the ground and water disappeared), and became static water when it couldn’t move anymore, and turned into a drop or wave when it could again. With water source, and water sink. Also, when stone happened on top of water, they changed places… which could be used to kill underwater monsters, or raise the waterline .
Then acid, which felt downwards kinda like stone, but destroyed an object below it (and itself) when it couldn’t fall any lower. Also, acid source.
We built a few interesting levels with these. Some were fun to play, some were mostly simulations that we enjoyed watching. Probably the most interesting part was designing the proper rules for water to look realistic.
There is a Mac program, and I think now also a Windows version, called Robowar. You are writing a program to control an onscreen tank. Your friend does the same. You put the two tanks in an arena and watch them fight each other. You then revise the program to keep the tank from battering itself to death against the wall of the arena and have another match.
The language looked to me like something close to Assembly Language, although the Wiki page describes it as similar in structure to Forth.
There was an earlier version called Robot War, but I think Robowar is the one I played with long ago.
I remember that one. Quite a lot of fun.
My kids used Scratch. They got the basics of if/else and loops, which is about all you could hope for at that age.
Scratch is pretty great; for a couple years it was all I ever did for fun as a kid.
(My username actually comes from there, as I made it up on Scratch and discovered that it was basically a free username that wasn’t taken on any other websites.)
Start with something easy and fun to get them interested – making simple animations where the sprite moves around and says stuff is a good entry point. Doing a bouncy ball (forever move 10 steps, if on edge bounce in the normal Scratch) is also easy and fun, and can be turned into a very basic Pong game once they get better at it. It’s also surprisingly capable, and I developed a lot of more abstract programming skills by attempting to self-design 3d raycasters and save functions for games on there.
There’s also Bitsbox, but that’s aimed at older kids and I personally find it hard to navigate. I think that very basic Python (like just letting them mess around on with the turtle) could possibly be doable for a 5 year old.
I have seen “Father following his kids ‘exact instructions’ to make a sandwich” gif that was fun (it may be based on https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5d16ph or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN2RM-CHkuI ).
Something like that may be an interesting start, suitable also for a small children.
—-
Also, I support “parent is programming and explaining what is happening, child instructs what should be added” idea. It would at least explain how programming works.
https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-i-bargaining-for-goods-at-helms-gate/
Somebody introduced this awesome blog a few OTs back; it ruthlessly analyzes pop-culture depictions of war, especially ancient and medieval. The most recent update, a look at The Battle of Helm’s Deep from both the book and the movie of The Two Towers, introduces a wonderful notion–that Saruman is an example of a really smart but arrogant person who assumes that general intelligence and skill in one limited domain makes him effortlessly competent in every other domain. This is something I’ve run into a lot, and Saruman is an example most internet people are at least somewhat familiar with, so can we make this a thing? Can we just call this kind of pompous naivete “Sarumanning”?
I feel almost positive that there’s another term for this already. It isn’t quite the Dunning-Kruger effect, but it’s similar.
Anyway, it makes a certain amount of sense that Saruman would be worse at warcraft than Gandalf; Gandalf is primarily a servant of Manwe, who is something of a warrior, while Saruman was originally a servant of Aule, who definitely isn’t.
IIRC Gandalf is actually a supporter of Nienna, the valier who weeps for the world’s ills. Nothing to do with war. And Saruman’s main opponent here is poor mortal Theoden anyhow.
So this Maia stuff turns out to be one of the more interesting parts of Tolkien’s world. Here we have a typical pantheon of gods, and each of them has a group of lesser celestials who take after them and sometimes incarnate for thousands of years.
This is actually quite unusual for the mythologies Tolkien was familiar with. The Greco-Roman gods don’t have angels: Iris or Hermes is the singular messenger/angelos in Iliad and Odyssey respectively, the satyrs serve Dionysus but are always embodied (and bawdy) down on Earth, having no place in Olympus/Heaven. Ditto Pan and the lesser Pans (cf. Nonnus, Dionysiaca XIV). Norse mythology gives Odin and Freya a whole tribe of psychopomps to fill the function of the singular Hermes, but there’s nothing about Valkyries whose personalities take after the one or the other. Nothing of the sort in Finnish myths.
Of course he could have been influenced by Christianity, but the idea of angels being divided into groups who nature takes after a leader is exclusive to non-canonical elaborations of the Devil’s angels. And neither demons nor loyal angels incarnate like the Maia (the 5 wizards et al): the lore is that angels put on quite temporary bodies, not live out human or superhuman (Gandalf is 2,000 years old) lives.
It’s not that he “could have” been influenced by Christianity – he explicitly said so. https://books.google.com/books?id=TyKDAwAAQBAJ&pg=PP43&lpg=PP43&dq=of+course+god+is+in+the+lord+of+the+rings&source=bl&ots=0IQypKQzuS&sig=ACfU3U0oC-TE8eowrqp4PErH3jgat8P9BA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj1_NaQhpvpAhWBl3IEHeMqAOcQ6AEwFXoECA8QAQ#v=onepage&q=of%20course%20god%20is%20in%20the%20lord%20of%20the%20rings&f=false
At the same time, he didn’t consider his work to be a Christian allegory. (like Narnia)
@MilesM: He said he explicitly was in general. That says nothing about his fictional Maia, whose personalities taking after specific gods and incarnating are quite unlike either demons or loyal angels.
The temporary bodies thing is, so far as I know, unprecedented, but mythology is (IMHO) not the right place to look. The analogues are really to be found in Neoplatonist philosophy, especially the sophisticated theological-cosmological models of someone like Iamblichus. (Or whoever wrote On the Mysteries, if by chance it really wasn’t his). Tolkien should have at least have heard of the system of heroes, demons, and angels from Augustine’s refutation of Porphyry of Tyre–much more fragmentary than Iamblichus–in City of God 8-10.
Christian models of the heavenly powers–the “virtues, archangels, angel choirs,” the Great Chain of Being, and all that, described eloquently by a friend of Tolkien in The Discarded Image, owe a great deal to such Neoplatonism, often by way of pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.
I’m not sure, therefore, that we can easily distinguish between the Christian and non-Christian grounding of the divine hierarchy of the Silmarillion, though there is a general tendency over time, at least from the materials in BoLT to those in the published Silmarillion and Morgoth’s Ring, for the Valar to become more and more nearly “angelic” and less like pagan deities.
(Double points to the first person who catches the allusion in my second paragraph….)
Can we call a solution that’s technically superior but practically inferior an Uruk-Hai? “Yeah, yeah, it goes twice as fast but what we need here is really reliability. The old machines from ten years ago gives that, total Uruk-Hai.”
(PS: Anyone who knows the book will remember Gandalf pointedly says that Saruman is in over his head and his arrogance is blinding him. The best analogy to Saruman seems to be the Soviet idea of material superiority. Build a lot of really good tanks and you’ll win the battle, no matter who the command staff is, so let’s get a purging. Likewise, Saruman builds a big army full of fancy super-troops, puts them in armor, and then thinks that’s enough despite their inexperience. He clearly believes the literal materials, the bodies and armor, of his troops are the deciding factor so he sends people into battle who were literally born yesterday.)
Well, he also had really good intelligence (both humint and something a bit like satellite surveillance) on the opposition.
That fits the paradigm: I have great intelligence from my satellite, let’s send out an army that was literally born yesterday!
Back in engineering school we referred to this as “Engineer’s Disease.”
Seems incredibly appropriate. (Sorry engineers!)
Probably more apt, but I will continue to think of it as Saruman Syndrome.
This framing seems a lot closer to “ha ha, look at the nerd” than I’m comfortable with.
In my experience, the top performers in a field tend to have high levels of training, experience, and intelligence. People who lack different legs of that tripod tend to make different mistakes. For a trivial example from software engineering, consider engineer A who used a bootcamp to switch careers five years ago and has spent all of that time working on the same system in various capacities. And also engineer B who just finished their Master’s, but only has a couple internships in the way of real world experience. Noone has a hard time believing that those two can both have useful insights that benefit their team and their project.
For an example of someone with only one leg of the tripod still making unique contributions, consider the fable of the high-power consultants (high training, high intelligence) who have never actually run the production line and don’t listen to the (high experience) person who has. When I was in business school, that fable got retold in several HBS cases.
To return to the original example. Saruman’s mistake was not believing that his intelligence made him better at warfare than opponents who lacked it, it was believing that intelligence was such a weakness for his opponents that his strength in that arena could overcome large deficits elsewhere. If his premise had been “I’m better at warfare than they average officer”, he would have been entirely correct. But his opponents were not average officers; Theoden was an intelligent, well-trained commander with a lifetime of experience.
TLDR; Saruman’s intelligence got him pretty far, just not to the top. His approach did work against the local orcs. Probably would have worked against an opponent like Eomer. But didn’t work against Theoden and Gandalf. And wouldn’t have worked against Sauron.
I don’t think engineer maps to “nerd” that well (we aren’t talking specifically about software engineers, as far as I can tell). I would say less than half of my classmates when I studied engineering would be what I considered “nerds” (I was one). Later, in my professional life, having worked with dozens of engineers I can only think of two that I would label as nerds.
I don’t know about Conrad Honcho’s one-liner, but I’m certain that Bret Devereaux, the author of the original post at ACOUP, is not engaging in any kind of nerd-shaming. I mean, the guy’s an ancient historian (a military historian to boot: a nerd by historians’ standards!), and he’s writing about the Lord of the Rings. When he compares Saruman to those who make too much of STEM, he’s doing so very much from within the intra-academic competition for funding and prestige, in which STEM has been winning out because it brings “real world results” (true) and because it has secured a reputation for requiring intelligence (often true, but not exclusively). More generally, the point is that not all intelligence is transferable, something those of us who do work on the ancient world have to contend with all too often: far too many engineers and such do try to make pronouncements about the past, without even understanding that there are disciplines that do this kind of work, let alone understanding how they work.
Nothing you’re saying rebuts either that subtext or the critique of Saruman, since I see no reason to think Saruman is “‘better at warfare than the average officer,'” at least if Eomer is “average.”
But that’s only my two cents’ worth. I did once sit at a table with Bret at a conference, but it’s been years, so don’t put my words in his mouth.
I mean, this is what we engineers (of which I am one) called it in engineering school. It was mostly to remind us not to go outside of our areas of expertise.
> It was mostly to remind us not to go outside of our areas of expertise.
I’ve recently come to the conclusion that this is the biggest component of “professionalism”.
I am really excited for this series, I liked one about Minas Tirith defense. I was unaware that military part of LOTR was written so well.
One of my favorite things about the silmarillion is that the greatest defeat of the elves comes about largely because of the difficulty of coordinating two armies separated by significant distances and not under unified command, exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from someone who fought on the somme.
Awesome. I read the series on the Siege of Gondor last year sometime and it was fantastic. Looking forward to reading this one.
The acoup post is excellent, but be sure to read the comments over there. A couple of interesting points:
1) Saruman’s strategic plan sucks… his long term goal is to rival Sauron, but his army is an order of magnitude too small. So he may as well ignore Rohan until after the battle of Minas Tirith (which he knows is coming). Rohan will ride to Gondor’s aid, and Saruman can sweep in behind. His best case scenario is actually what happens – Gondor wins, but both Gondor and Rohan are badly spent. Saruman could come in and mop up at least Rohan.
2) some of the book contradicts the criticisms of Saruman in the post. In particular, the book implies Saruman’s army was carrying equipment to assault Helm’s Deep, and may not have actually completely scattered after winning at the Ford. Saruman’s plan may have been to proceed directly to Helm’s Deep… perhaps to cut it off, forcing Théoden into open battle, or to beat him there and take it before it could be reinforced?
To quote LOTR narrator about Orthank and Saruman’s efforts in general:
Also, ACOUP author in comments:
I don’t remember much of the movies, but according to the books, Saruman isn’t exactly wrong. From the outset, it’s obvious to everyone in the know (so, like, maybe 5 or 10 people) that the war for Middle-Earth will not be won through brute force or manpower, but through will. Sauron controls his forces by will alone (well, being mostly disembodied, he kinda has to); to the extent that Gandalf can oppose him, he can do so because his will can temporarily triumph over Sauron’s.
Saruman gets a hold of a Palantir, engages in a direct battle of minds with Sauron, and believes that he can win — not realizing that he’d already lost. In Saruman’s defence, though, his course of action is actually fairly reasonable.
(spoilers, sort of)
Saruman is a Maia, just like all the Wizards as well as Sauron himself. What’s more, Saruman is the chief Maia appointed to be the guardian of Middle-Earth. His personal power is immense, overshadowing even Gandalf the Gray, and he can draw on the other Istari for support — not to mention Orthanc. Sauron likewise started out with immense power, but was defeated and largely depowered, and Saruman knows this. On top of that, Sauron put most of his power into a single point of failure — the One Ring — and then promptly lost it.
From Saruman’s point of view, going mind-to-mind with Sauron is actually not a bad idea. It doesn’t matter how many kabillions of Orcs and monsters Sauron controls, because once his will is broken, they’ll either turn and run or (preferably) bow down to the new master.
Obviously, Saruman vastly underestimated Sauron’s mental prowess, but hindsight is always 20/20. Hubris and corruption through genuinely good intentions is one of the central themes in the books, but Saruman isn’t genre-savvy enough to figure this out (neither is anyone else, really, with the possible exception of Galadriel). I should also note that Saruman’s power was ultimately broken as a result of literal divine intervention, which no one could’ve foreseen at the time. But, of course, history is written by the victors…
Irrelevant nitpick: Sauron is very much implied to have a physical body in the books. One of the things that always makes me cringe about the films is the inexplicable decision by Jackson & company to interpret the metaphorical “eye” of Sauron as a literal flaming lighthouse-eyeball. I love the films, but I think the writing is the weakest aspect by far.
I thought Tolkien established that Sauron was a ghost in the Third Age. He had a body, was a badass warlord, got captured and was treated like a medieval hostage in Numenor, persuaded them to build a temple of Melkor, wandered off and became a badass warlord again, and got his body killed.
The Ring is his D&D phylactery.
For a while, yeah. It’s implied he re-formed his body at some point though. Gollum describes him having “only four fingers on the Black Hand”, and there are other passages such as Denethor saying “He will not come save only to triumph over me when all is won. He uses others as his weapons” that would seem to imply a non-eyeball physical form.
AFAIK both Le Maistre Chat and Ouroborobot are correct. However, at the time Saruman learned of Sauron’s return, Sauron was still very much disembodied, and in the early stages of regaining his power after being thoroughly defeated. As I said, this would’ve appeared to be the optimal time to strike against him.
I think it is fair to say that even if you assume he is disembodied, “giant flaming eyeball spotlight on top of a tower” wasn’t the best way to portray that.
his long term goal is to rival Sauron
That’s correct, and he is in way over his head (but does not realise it). His immediate goal, because he’s smart enough to recognise that you are either with Sauron or against him, there is no hope of neutrality or remaining a small independent power, and he is convinced Sauron is going to be the winner since Gondor is exhausted, is to convince Sauron “Hey, you can trust me, make me your satrap!”
Waiting for any scraps that Sauron may care to throw him after Gondor has been defeated means waiting to get nothing, whereas if he controls Rohan he has a small but definite bargaining chip from which he hopes to slowly and subtly extend his influence and become a trusted counsellor of Sauron. Taking over Rohan independently before Sauron weakens Gondor and presenting it on a plate to Sauron, instead of waiting for Sauron’s forces to draw the Rohirrim away and do all the work, looks better when it comes time to plead “See, I was on your side all along!”
He makes a mess of it, of course, because as pointed out he has no military experience and is going it alone on the basis “I am so much smarter than these idiot Horse Lords, all you need to do is pour More Orcs on top of them and flatten them with superior numbers”. And no doubt but that Sauron is not fooled for one moment by his protestations of loyalty, as we see in the rivalry between the
twothree (I keep forgetting the Moria Orcs) companies of Orcs that captured Merry and Pippin (if the kommisar of the Mordor Orcs has it figured out, you can bet Sauron has it figured out too):You are correct, but IMO your account is incomplete. Originally, Saruman really did believe that he could take Sauron on in a Maia-a-Maia fight. That’s why he engaged Sauron directly via the Palantiri network. Obviously he underestimated Sauron, but only by a small (though fatal) margin. Even after getting his mind broken and partially enslaved, Saruman retained much of his power and a portion of his free will — enough to at least attempt to undermine Sauron covertly.
Sorry, but isn’t Sarumans whole plan based on the assumption that he could break, Rohan with out running into anykind of organized resistance, since he controlls Theoden. (ironic since he is controlled in the same way by Sauron)
His game plan never consited on having to fight an all out battle, or having to storm an fortified position. Only after the spell on Theoden was broken, his hand was forced, and he needed to take the King quickly, before he could muster an organized defense.
To me that does not sound, like he felt effortlessly competent in the domain of warfare, but had a plan that played to his strenghts, that only failed when an Black Swan event (Gandalf acting against him) happened.
Bear in mind that the “demonic possession” thing is exclusive to the movie; in the book, Theoden is convinced by Wormtongue that everything is hopeless, and Gandalf has only to shut Wormtongue up and talk sense into Theoden. Saruman couldn’t count on Theoden staying immobilized by grief and fear forever, and even if he did, there were still lots of fighting men in Rohan who would not necessarily have scattered and died just because their king was paralyzed. The effectiveness of the resistance would be greatly diminished, but he would very much have to fight to convert the whole country into a support system for his Uruk-Hai.
Right, but there’s still a huge difference between having to fight scattered bands of elite cavalry and a generic peasant (well, yeoman) resistance, and having to fight an army lead by possibly the most skilled military commander of the age. If Saruman’s ambitions are ever going to extend to Rohan, and you’ve got Theoden wallowing in despair now, that’s a good argument for striking now, and hard.
Well yes, still look at the example given for an failure of Saurman army: dispersing after the battle at the ford at the Isen.
Yes this might have lost him the war, but as Bret (the blogger) describes, an pre-modern army might have carried food for 5-10 days. They marched 2 days, and won a major battle, against the only organized force they expected in the area and would have another two or three day’s of marching befor reaching the Rohan capital.
Like John Shilling said, his plan was defeating disorganized bands of aristocrats in detail, and not fighting the flower of the Rohan cavalery on their hometurf.
Which is to say, his entire strategy hinges on Grima’s continued persuasiveness. This is not particularly good planning. About as bad as his larger plan depending on his capturing the ring first.
Also, note that Bret/ACOUP’s opinion is that Denethor is a superior strategist to Theoden, even if Theoden is overall a much better leader. It’s at least plausible that the Witch King is up there too. And if we’re talking of people with experience in war, well, Sauron’s got thousands of years of it. He was fighting wars way back in First Age Beleriand. One imagines the Haradrim and Easterlings likewise have some practice with violence as well. Really, Saruman faces a steep learning curve here.
Yes, Saruman tries to take Theoden out of the picture, and than is to catious to seek battle with the enemies main force asap.
All I say is, that this is not the behavior of somebody who feels incredible supirior to his enemy.
I have to admit that in Saruman’s place, Grima’s continued persuasiveness would have seemed a good bet considering how long it had already continued. How could I know that it was about to run up against the suddenly increased persuasiveness of Gandalf (who had already been in Rohan a number of times with little to show for it besides a really nice horse)?
The witch-king was certainly an excellent general. He’d been fighting the Numenorean remnant in Eriador for millennia, and had already succeeded in destroying the tripartite kingdom that Arnor had become (Arthedain, Rhudaur, and Cardolan), reestablishing control of Mordor after Gondor’s eventual lapse in watchfulness after the Last Alliance, capturing and keeping Minas Ithil (Minas Morgul), and accomplishing the extinction of the royal line in Gondor.
While listing generals, you might consider Aragorn, who had a successful military career in Gondor starting in his twenties and is older than Theoden, only a year or so younger than Denethor.
I took a look at the blog, which is cool, and I just want to note I see a few old SSC commenters: Mary Catelli and Alsadius both commented in the last two months. It sometimes feels like the Internet is the same 20 people over and over.
This gives me a new understanding of the people who criticize the movies. I’ve never sat down with a map and studied the events of the movie before, let alone compared with the novels; it’s a shame they don’t really hold up when the source material does.
but also
I suggested one better way in the comments: merge Helm’s Deep and Dunharrow, and have the battle close to Edoras. Unfortunately, it was rightly criticized as departing too far from the novels.
I’ve also been reading ACOUP lately after being introduced to it here, and it is really fascinating. Shame it takes so long to read!
It’s kind of fascinating that humanity hasn’t really solved the ‘urban transport smaller than a car’ problem, huh? Other than I guess bicycles, which are not practical in some weather conditions (many prominent 1st world countries are in northern climates). The only two good options that I know of are….. Segways [snickers], and electric scooters? And both are subject to the same snow/sleet/rain issues that bicycles are- plus, none of them can really handle transporting goods (groceries, supplies from the hardware store, a small appliance you just bought, etc.) Just seems odd in spite of the 21st century having multiple vehicle categories (planes, space shuttles, trains, automobiles, subways, etc.), no one’s really invented a practical smaller than a car one. Is anything widespread in China at all?
Obstacles include- some degree of weather protection/traction on slippery roads. Power/combustion source (but there are tons & tons of small cycle engines in existence? Lawnmowers, weedwhackers, 4 wheelers, etc.?). And of course where to actually drive the small vehicle- car drivers are famously aggressive and it could be dangerous to share even a 25 mph city road with them, but pedestrians don’t want it on the sidewalk with them either.
Like- is there a reason no one’s built essentially a small golf cart with a trunk for urban dwellers- max speed 20 mph? In the country the product categories of ‘smaller than a car’ are enormous- snowmobiles, 3 & 4 wheelers, there are dozens of different small farming vehicles with a pickup bed, and so on. None of these could be adapted for the city? Just seems odd
I’m still waiting for the Asimovian 100+mph pedestrian treadmills in hyperloop-style low-pressure tubes.
This isn’t about building a car, this is about building a community. I’ve seen this often in, say, small beachside towns or other retirement communities with good weather.
Transportation has to get you where you need to be in a reasonable amount of time, safely, and with space for transporting possibly a couple of kids and at least a few bags of groceries or a couple pieces of luggage. If you don’t need to go far, then you don’t need to go fast, and you can make do with a moped or something. But a lot of people aren’t going to feel as safe on the highway on a motorcycle at 60 (and for those that like it, I imagine that feeling of unsafety is a feature, not a bug).
So once you account for engine, driver’s and passenger seats, trunk, and frame, you’ve go the smaller end of what is currently available in the range of practical consumer vehicles.
I am somewhat puzzeled by this for about 20 years now. A big part is probably that especially used cars are so cheap that it is impossible to offer a significant price advantage with a small scale production and the big car corporations are too conservative to try. On top of this such a vehicle can always do less than a car can. Less trunk space, less passengers, less speed, less comfort. If you want increased ability in congested traffic you need a two wheel vehicle i.e. a motorcycle/scooter, which are abundant. Add in the weird signaling around car size (SUV et al.) and this is probably a loosing proposition. The technical side would be easy. 250 kg, 10 kW, two seats in a row with a small trunk behind and aerodynamic exterior yielding 60 mph top speed. Probably three wheels, possibly mostly fibre polymer construction. ICE or electric depending on your initial cost vs. cost to operate tradeoff.
250 kg, 10 kW, two seats in a row with a small trunk behind and aerodynamic exterior yielding 60 mph top speed. Probably three wheels, possibly mostly fibre polymer construction.
Like so? They are somewhat noisy inside.
Basically, but with modern tech.
More like this I imagine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_rickshaw
Also a bit noisy.
There have been many small cars developed in Europe, the latest being the Smart Car. But Europe has more of a need for them, and less of a cultural influence against them.
The major car manufacturers that sell in the US all have small car offerings. They just aren’t as popular.
Toyota’s US sedan lineup is: Yaris (sub-compact), Corrola (compact), Camry (mid-size), Avalon (large). The Camry is the most popular, the Corrola is the second most popular. The Yaris is cheap, reliable, and available. But Americans simply don’t want it.
I think the issue is that the Yaris is cheaper, but not cheap. There is only a ~15% difference in MSRP between the Yaris and Corrola when I looked them up, and you can get a 3-4 year old Corrola (or Civic) as cheap, or cheaper than, a Yaris.
Bikes solve that problem if your urban planning is sensible. Car sharing for occasional cargo hauling, public transport for long distances. Biking in the rain is not a problem if you can change at the destination.
The actual problem that forbids car-free lifestyle is having kids, and living in such paranoid time that you can’t let them go to school on their own lest you get accused of neglect. Despite the entire previous generation in Central/Eastern Europe doing exactly that. Societies have a very short memory.
What city do you live in?
Plus, there’s many industries where you just can’t show up with wet hair.
Also a couple generations ago for Americans.
Eric Weinstein likes to say that our societal sense-making organs (including media organs) are broken. He’s right, but it’s not a new problem–moral panics about child molesters under every bed and stranger danger[1] were largely whipped up and maintained by traditional media outlets as a kind of pre-internet clickbait.
And people are bad at risk assessment–spectacular risks, things that make good (awful) stories, etc., stand out in most peoples’ minds a lot more than mundane risks. Like the guy drives 90 MPH all the way to the airport and then gets the shakes when the plane takes off.
[1] As I understand it, the overwhelming majority of sexual abuse of children is done by adults in trusted positions or by older children. Scary strangers who want to abduct and rape your child do exist, but they’re very rare. Worry about your kid’s teacher and scout leader and babysitter first.
And your spouse and your kids aunts and uncles.
> Biking in the rain is not a problem if you can change at the destination.
And you have a place to store your bike.
And you don’t have to worry about your bike being stolen or tampered with.
And you don’t care if you get struck by motorists.
And you don’t want to carry something to protect yourself which your employer prohibits.
And you don’t routinely want to go from work to anywhere else which requires a car.
And you don’t have 2-3 months of snow each winter making riding much, much worse and then have to get back in riding shape every spring.
And don’t live in a really hilly place.
And don’t have summer temps over 100 degrees.
I lived in Minneapolis for the first 21 years of my life, and biking in the winter was quite doable after the streets were plowed.
I’ve lived in Minneapolis for the last 40 years and I quite disagree. I am always terrified that I will run over bikers in the winter when I drive by them. One slip and under my tires they go.
Why you would need it? Just attach it to a traffic sign or anything else? (and inverted U bicycle parking is basically cheapest and simplest piece of infrastructure anyway).
Is it actually a substantial risk? I guess that it depends on a location, but I am curious where there is big risk of tampering/stealing bicycle and no matching problem for cars.
OK, this one depends on a location. In some places rain may change situation significantly.
I am confused by this riddle. Is it about guns? Is carrying guns in car (or while walking) legal and at the same time illegal to have it while cycling in some places?
Why rain would change anything here?
I think there are lots of places where bikes with poor quality locks are frequently stolen but cars aren’t. You can deal with this by getting a good lock though.
Some people overstate the risk. But lots of people will fuck with bikes that won’t fuck with cars. And if someone, say, slashes your car tires, you can at least sit in your car while you wait for AAA.
Yes, can drive away in an unlocked bicycle (or de facto unlocked one), what is harder to do with even unlocked car.
But u-lock should solve this.
Bikes getting stolen is a huge problem in every major city in America. Much more common proportionally than grand theft auto (precisely because of the grand theft part, I imagine). If your bike spends most days all day locked up to a signpost, it will almost certainly be stolen or vandalized within a year (probably less).
Yes, Garrett is referring to firearms. In many places, employers are allowed to ban firearms from the premises, but employees are legally permitted to keep firearms locked in their car. Bikes have in secure place to keep one (plus you’ll want to take your bike indoors if possible).
As someone for whom a bicycle is my primary mode of transport whenever possible:
Blocking half a sidewalk with your bike is pretty rude, and kind of an implicit “STEAL ME” sign.
Oh hell yeah it’s a risk. Two of my friends have had their bikes stolen in the past couple years; I’ve passed by a number of bikes with the tires stolen as well. As for why there’s no matching problem for cars: A bicycle is a hell of a lot easier to steal. If you break the lock, there’s nothing preventing you from driving it away free; cars generally need a key to run. If you can’t break the lock, you can get a tire off without any tools in about 20 seconds and easily carry it away. Try that with a car tire. Cars have license plates; once you’ve stolen a bike, there’s nothing tracing it to its owner (that can’t easily be scratched off) and certainly nothing clearly visible to the police that can instantly be run through a computer.
It doesn’t? I presume that matkoniecz was listing off shortcomings of bikes in addition to their limited utility in the rain.
Bikes are way easier to mess with than cars, you have parts that can be easily removed, you can just pick up and carry a bike away and it is much easier to puncture a bike tire than a car. Plus basic locked car entry is usually a smashed window which is louder and more noticeable than clipping a bike lock.
I wonder how much of this perception and how much of this difference in levels of petty crime between USA and Poland.
Or maybe people in USA drive fancier bicycles?
For reference, I regularly leave my definitely-not-fancy bicycle for days or weeks in a public place (I cycle to bus/railway station and cycle back on returning).
I suspected this but I was confused by crime levels so high that you cannot leave locked bicycle in public and at the same time leaving guns in cars being completely fne.
I though about position like this, not blocking large part of sidewalk.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bicycle_Taxis_Parked_Under_Traffic_Signs.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Author_Dynasty_bicycle.jpg
Let me know if such positioning is rude, if yes then I will rethink how I leave my bicycle.
I’ve been told that in Amsterdam, bikes get stolen all the time. People have several bikes for that reason. Whenever you go to some of the shadier areas, you take the shitty bike you don’t mind too much getting stolen.
In Valencia, Spain, bikes got stolen all the time by junkies. If yours got stolen, you had a pretty good chance if you went to the Sunday market in a gipsy area and just bought it back. Or you could bring the police, and, if you proved it was yours, you could get it back.
Every city with lots of biking I’ve been at has a huge bike theft problem. Even in places where I’d be absolutely safe walking at any hour of day and night, don’t get pickpockets or robberies, bikes get stolen constantly.
I even knew a couple of students, good guys who’d never have stolen anything else, who stole/”borrowed” bikes that weren’t locked, returning them a couple of months aftewards. People don’t seem to have the same moral qualms about bikes for some reason.
One semi-accepted way to get a free bike in Stockholm: every so often, the authorities decide to clear off the parked bikes, as some of them are abandoned. They put stickers on the bikes, and if it isn’t taken off by a certain day, they confiscate them. Quite a few people will take those bikes the day before they’re confiscated, feeling no moral qualms about it. Technically, it’s stealing, but nobody feels bad about it.
In my experience in a UK city with lots of bikes, a bike with a cheap lock is likely to be stolen but one with a good lock won’t be unless it’s expensive enough to justify someone coming with an angle grinder. Individual wheels being stolen is less common (you can also stop it with a second lock or similar). It happened to me once in several years, after I left my bike somewhere I thought would be safe (bike parking under a car park) but later learned had the opposite reputation for a couple of days. I’m not familiar with any cases of vandalism. My impression is that most European bike cities are similar.
My former roomate had his bike stolen. From what I’ve heard, bike theft is rampant in SF.
> If your urban planning is sensible
1) Make them.
2) Go after bike theives. And I can’t imagine per-capita risk is that high in a place where everybody cycles.
3) dedicated cycle lanes
4) Yeah, car-as-locker is kind of convenient
5) Well if you routinely need to move stuff that won’t fit in a pannier and is obnoxiously large for public transport, then get a car
Amsterdam is pretty high on the list of places where everyone cycles, but is also famously a place where a lot of bikes get stolen.
But is it a place where the average cyclist is at a high risk of having their bike stolen?
i.e. does bike theft scale as fast as bike ownership?
Lived in Amsterdam for 6 years, never had a bike stolen. My husband, though, had *four* bikes stolen. But I arrived in 2012, about two years after he did, and some considerable tightening up on bikes happened around then. They started putting the purchase of stolen bikes on your record, which could mess with your getting a job. Bike theft seemed much less common once the students were thinking twice about buying a stolen bike from some shady guy on the bridge at Oudemanhuispoort.
I came back to the US 2 years ago, and I really miss biking everywhere. It was so damn easy over there. Most of the drawbacks people think of over here never even came up.
Amsterdam sounds like a biker’s paradise, most of the difference between biking there and biking in places that I have lived are mostly weather and geography related.
My guess is that if you plotted bike ownership on the x axis and bike theft per bike-year on the y axis, you’d see a sigmoid relationship (within the range of values that are plausible for the real world). Tactics like “three guy turn up in a transit van with an angle grinder and steal 20 bikes in five minutes at 2am” become viable with higher bike density, but so does a lifestyle relying on opportunistic theft of badly secured bikes as and when you find them.
Certainly when I was a student in Oxford, bike theft was incredibly common. I’d say you’d generally expect a bike to last about a year before it was stolen.
Bike stands, usually. If not – traffic sign or a fence will do.
A decent u-lock solves that problem. I don’t have any good place to store bikes in my building so it’s outside 24/7 for like third year. Sometimes I see marks from people trying to force the u-lock and laugh.
Infrastructure! In European cities this is usually not a problem if you don’t ride like a complete idiot. Main arteries have bike lanes or wide sidewalks, on narrow streets just be a bit careful. The only problem I’ve ever had with cars is that they force right-of-way sometimes, so be prepared to brake.
Fortunately I don’t live nor work in a ghetto and that is not a problem I have.
If it’s routinely I probably messed up choosing my place to live/work. If it’s intermittent, Uber/car sharing/public transport.
The entire lifestyle probably makes no sense in the US, though I think there are some determined people trying.
If you’re lucky enough to live in a place with compatible weather, there’s another possibility that avoids some of these problems of bikes: inline skating.
* A pair of skates and a helmet take up much less storage space than a bike.
* No need to park outside means no problems with theft, vandalism etc. — just pop the skates into your bag and carry them into the destination.
* In some jurisdictions you can use pavements rather than going on the road and risking your life in traffic.
* The aforementioned portability means skates are easier to combine with public transport than bikes (even folding ones). E.g. when I want to go to another city I skate across town to the station, pop my skates in my bag and get on the train.
It works, at least for me — as a young professional living in a small city (pop ~125k) that doesn’t get much rain, I skate a mile to work every day (or did, pre-Lockdown) and other journeys up to about 15 miles are doable.
Of course, there’s no denying that there are disadvantages too:
* Even more weather-susceptible than biking: skating through puddles is bad for the bearings, so in winter (when evaporation is slow) one day of rain can mean three days stuck walking.
* You can’t really go off-road; a bike will cross a muddy field but skates are defeated by a lawn.
* People look at you funny. Skating is recovering from having been a fad in the nineties, but it’s still not quite totally normalised. Probably less of a problem for the (rather non-conformist) crowd here on SSC than the population at large…
* It’s not quite as fast or quite as long-distance as cycling; I’d say about ⅔ the speed assuming equal fitness levels, with the gap widening as distances increase.
Some things that you might expect to be disadvantages, but aren’t:
* Maintenance. Yes, you have to replace bearings and worn wheels now and then, but the cost’s no higher than the upkeep on a bike.
* Skill. It doesn’t really take any longer to learn to skate than to ride a bike (though admittedly most people have already sunk the latter cost). The belief that it’s difficult to learn probably comes from people who gave up during the first few days constantly-falling-over phase; it seems impossible until you ‘get it’ and then it’s easy.
* Safety. Judging by anecdotes from my friends who cycle, it seems like they take as many tumbles as I do — and they’re typically at higher speed, and more likely to be on a road with cars around them. (You still definitely want a helmet either way, though.)
And honesty compels me to add the biggest advantage of all: it’s fun! Even after doing it for nearly a decade, it still feels good every day to strap on the wheels and start rolling. What other commute can you say that about?
Fair point; where I live is pretty flat, so I’d forgotten about that constraint. Indeed skates don’t work so well in hilly areas, so they don’t solve every city’s transport problem 😉
I agree with you about downhill being the worst; if I have to get down a really steep hill (and there’s no shallower alternative route), I switch to shoes and walk that bit, because five minutes wasted tying and untying laces is better than the alternative.
Tbh I don’t find uphill to be much of a problem, because angling the skates is basically a continuously variable transmission, with the limit case of low gearing essentially being walking. I never found bottom gear on a bike to be any easier than walking up the same hill, but maybe I just didn’t have enough gears.
Only if you have a bag for clothes (and whatever else you might want to carry with you) that is waterproof, but also reasonably priced and not too cumbersome, and in which you can store your soaked clothing (perhaps in a separate compartment from other things you might be carrying?) without worrying about it getting musty (so I suppose it would also have to be easy to clean). Oh, and if you ever decide to go to more than one location without stopping by somewhere that you definitely have a change of clothes, you need to carry that many changes of clothes as well. And if you have limited or infrequent access to laundry – perhaps you go to a laundromat because you don’t have in-home or in-unit laundry, so doing laundry is a more distinct and mutually exclusive task – you need more copies of those clothes as well.
Also, you need to not care about the actual experience of biking in the rain along the way, so if it’s cold, wet, unpleasant, and hard to see through the pouring rain and your waterlogged glasses, you just have to round off the displeasure and increased change of accident.
Ortlieb 20l rolltop pannier + large drybag
Also technical polyester clothes that dry fast.
Good saddlebags and outerwear definitely help, and good shower/locker facilities really help, but at some level you need to enjoy the discomfort to bike commute day in/day out in hot/cold/rainy weather. I enjoy biking, and I feel way better arriving at work after a nice morning ride than driving. But despite having pretty ideal amenities for bike commuting at my work and a reasonably short commute, sorry, I just won’t do it when it’s below freezing in the morning, or >90F in the afternoon, or I have errands to run after work. It’s not that I can’t… I just don’t enjoy it, and I don’t have to do it, so I don’t.
E-bikes do help in summer, but don’t make riding in winter or rain any better.
I biked an hour to work in all kinds of weather when I lived in Amsterdam. I had a good poncho and a special cycling raincoat. Only my face and shoes got wet. I never needed to bring extra clothes or change at work.
And it’s worth mentioning that in Amsterdam, it’s flat, rarely very warm, and because the city is quite small and easily traversed, it’s normal to take a *leisurely* pace biking places. People bike in skirts and suits and don’t break a sweat. I sometimes feel like a lot of Americans are applying “biking for exercise” assumptions to “biking to get places”. Biking in Amsterdam isn’t strenuous, which is one reason it’s so popular. Maybe there are more constraints of climate and terrain in most American cities, but there are still lots of places and seasons where it could be just as easy.
What is the typical temperature/seasonal variation in Amsterdam?
According to google average temperature is between 6°C in January to 22°C in July August. WIth 12 to 6 raindays a month.
22°C does not sound like much, but the average temperature here in Germany are similar, and the last years Juli and August had >30°C, and the streets were still full of cyclists.
Average has a large factor in determining how many cyclists your area will have. We had this specific conversation about Amsterdam and cycling maybe a year ago and it turned out that most of Europe had much milder weather than lots of the US in terms of temperature ranges. Cleveland’s temperature range is something like -10C to 35C most years, and the in between phases are miserable (really miserable biking weather is the few days after it snows and cars are splashing puddles of slush against you). Wearing rain gear works in mild weather, but doesn’t work so well when it is 30C+ and raining as you will need a change of clothes just from the sweat and then there are all kinds of minor inconveniences (like your bike rusting way faster in areas where they salt the roads in the winter, though that might be on par with some European coastal areas).
My dad rode his bike to work daily in England for years, but it steadily dropped off every year we lived in Cleveland. Having to stop every winter for long periods and then pick it up (especially as he got older and getting back in shape every year got harder), as well as having a single ‘large’ hill to climb every day on the way home slowly dragged it from him.
The products exist, in many different forms: Neighborhood electric vehicles, for one, or Kei cars in Japan. NEVs are almost exactly the golf cart product you describe. Kei cars are a slightly more capable version.
The question is therefore why these things don’t have a lot of demand. It’s tempting to blame regulation, but NEVs are explicitly allowed in many places and Kei cars are actually favored by many regulations in Japan (to my understanding, they are illegal for road use in the US).
I think the answer is that the 2 – 4 seat passenger car achieves a lot of scale benefits that are hard to replicate in smaller footprints. They safely cover essentially the entire range of human ground transport, from low-speed local routes to long, cross-country routes at >100 MPH (where traffic laws allow). It’s hard to make something as safe or capable that’s smaller. Most infrastructure also favors passenger cars (e.g. roads), but this is less true in Europe than in the US where urban streets are narrower. Yet you still see a large number of traditional cars in Europe and elsewhere, and the substitute is motorbikes, which trade essentially everything for agility, compactness, and to some extent price.
But aren’t affluent urban dwellers who don’t own a car a separate group? I.e. they live in apartments or condos, they don’t want to own a car because of the expense & hassle of parking, and they have disposable money (and are probably high-openness, new tech experimenter types). They have no need for the long cross-country route stuff, they only need a small part of the ground transport range.
But this crowd still needs to buy groceries, maybe go to the plant or hardware store every once in a while. Even if they didn’t personally own a Kei- Zipcar couldn’t store a bunch on a lot and rent them out as needed?
I can see one of these faring pretty poorly in a crash with a full-size automobile, I have to say
That is the rationale behind the Smartcar. They are a modestly successful niche product in the automotive industry. There are probably some (perceived?) safety challenges, but in intra-city usage I would be perfectly comfortable in one.
The challenge is that they are not that much cheaper or smaller than a compact car, but they are substantially less comfortable and capable. If you buy one, you win slightly easier parking (but here the infrastructure limits the benefit) at the cost of a ton of flexibility.
I think the challenge is that any vehicle still has to fit people comfortably. Two adults sitting side by side sets a lower limit on width that is not much smaller than a normal car. There is flexibility on length, but length is not usually a heavily constrained dimension (because it’s the dimension the vehicle travels in) and cars already come in a wide variety of lengths.
I think this is basically right. With a fairly low-end 5-passenger sedan (think of a Toyota Corolla or equivalent), I can:
a. Commute to work
b. Take kids to school
c. Take a family of four (comfortably) or five (uncomfortably) on a reasonably long journey–perhaps even a driving vacation to visit the beach or grandparents hundreds of miles away.
d. Go shopping and carry a week or more’s worth of groceries home.
e. Drive a short (normally walking) distance when the weather is bad or I’ve messed up my foot or I’m super pressed for time.
and so on. A golf-cart-like replacement will do (e) and maybe (a,b,d) if your workplace, store, or kids’ school happens to be very close by. Otherwise, you will also need a car.
I’ve heard of some success with cities installing escalators and moving walkways. These can roughly triple to quadruple walking speed, meaning you can walk a mile in a few minutes. It’s expensive though, in both space and dollars.
What!? I’ve only heard of these in science fiction. I mean over large distances, like a mile or more. I’ve only seen moving sidewalks in airports. A moving walkway to get around a city would be awesome. Where are they?
Las Vegas has some around the strip/casino areas, primarily to move people quicker between affiliated casinos.
We have them in the city of Vitoria, Spain, which is very hilly.
Luxemburg city has a cool elevator from the plateau down to the river gorge.
I’ve seem an outdoor escalator in Barcelona.
Moving walkways can’t work in existing cities because the streets are too narrow. That’s the whole reason why we have constant traffic jams in a city. If you commute by car in regular hours, you can go ten times more distance on a freeway than inside a city in the same time, despite that the speed limit on a freeway is only two and a half times larger. We can’t make the roads wider, because buildings live for very long, and the narrow streets made sense when many of the buildings were originally built. There are often chokepoints on short parts of major roads where there are way too few lanes available. We’ve already sacrificed all the vegetation and sidewalk width, plus made parking impractical in the city, just to make car traffic and public transport faster.
I think the issue is that for weather problems, the only solution is enclosure, but for small vehicles, enclosure nearly doubles the space the vehicle takes up. There are enclosed bicycle-like vehicles, but they’re already basically half the size of a car, so at that point, people figure you might as well just go all the way to a small car, so you have storage space to take with you as you travel. I guess in rural areas, where you’re not using standardized roads, taking something a little smaller gives you some small advantages. But in urban areas, unless we redid everything to standardize on just a little bit smaller, you only get meaningful advantage of small size if you go all the way down to the size of a bike or scooter.
https://www.contemporist.com/5-examples-of-enclosed-bike-designs-that-are-taking-over-the-roads/
The “upgraded golf cart for urban dwellers” has been around for awhile. As noted it is only really useful for communities planned for its use. I mostly see them around as security vehicles on large campuses and for getting around gated communities.
The trouble is that these vehicles have many of the downsides of cars (they are expensive, you still need a place to park them) without the upside (minimal cargo capacity, short range, low top speed).
Basically, lots of people need a car occasionally, and even if it isn’t the ideal tool for everyday in the city, their downsides aren’t enough to justify having a second more optimized vehicle.
“Way better than walking / biking / public transit” but also “much smaller and cheaper than a car” AND “good enough that people who can afford cars won’t want cars anymore” is a surprisingly tough niche to solve.
I’ve heard (can’t track down the reference) of suburban retirement communities where everyone has a golf cart and cars are forbidden on the streets past the parking garage near the entrance. But it really takes that for what you are describing to be safe. Having bikes and cars on the same road is dangerous, both because bikes are squishy (they don’t have the mass to absorb a collision) and because of large speed differentials–coming up behind someone in the middle of the road whose maximum speed up a hill is 5 miles an hour, a driver can easily misjudge his speed and not stop fast enough. Your small vehicles would be almost as slow and squishy as a bike, and couldn’t be moved to a bike lane without widening all the roads. There also exist one-passenger cars, often with three wheels, that I have very rarely seen on the roads, but they can’t carry a second person or much stuff and presumably are also squishy in an accident, and never really seem to have caught on.
> often with three wheels
IIRC, their major advantage is that they are legally categorized as motorcycles and so can avoid a whole pile of the regulations which apply to cars.
The Villages, in Florida USA is the community you’re thinking of. The gold carts work very well for established residents, but it’s difficult if you’re just passing though town. The right-of-way rules are the same as usual, but the contingent of 70+ year old drivers is worrying. Fortunately, they’re all master-planned communities, so through traffic is rare.
One problem with most “urban mobility solutions”, is how do you deconflict them from the traffic that is already there and isn’t going away.
Cities have to be at least marginally pedestrian-accessible, because lots of poor people won’t have anything else and lots of short trips don’t justify anything else. So you need a place where pedestrians can walk safely without being run over by bigger and/or faster vehicles.
Cities have to be at least marginally truck-accessible(*), or else they don’t get built and if they somehow magically come into existence they’ll be abandoned when the shops run out of goods. So you need roads where trucks can drive without smooshing smaller and/or slower vehicles (or pedestrians).
Streets that are used by trucks, can also safely handle cars and buses and probably motorcycles for anyone risk-tolerant enough to ride a motorcycle in the first place. Sidewalks for pedestrians can maybe allow Segways and bicycles and the like, but only at the cost of most of their potential speed. Periodically stopping the motor vehicle traffic on the streets so the pedestrians can use the crosswalks, is a tolerable annoyance. But the problem becomes geometrically more complex with every new transportation mode that doesn’t play well with the existing ones, and even more so if you didn’t lay out the city with them in mind in the first place.
* substitute horse-drawn wagon for preindustrial cities
@John Schilling
The amount of traffic by trucks that deliver to the city is actually relatively low, compared to the cars that ride around if every customer comes by car. Also, many of those deliveries can happen outside of peak hours.
When driving traffic is low, you can reduce the number of lanes dedicated to cars & trucks, as well as offer much less parking & otherwise deprioritize that traffic and dedicate more room to other modes of transport.
Quadricycles have existed for 4 decades. The main benefit of this over a regular car is typically that it avoids various regulations, compared to a real car.
Then there is the A-segment/city car, which is very popular in some European countries (Italy, especially), as well as in Japan, where small cars got tax and insurance benefits.
Among the Dutch and in various other places, cargo bikes have become popular. These can hold a lot of groceries, some kids, etc. They come in electric variants, which makes them far lighter to ride.
However, I’m wondering if you actually know what you want to optimize for (note that in actual cities, parking space is a major issue) & understand the impact of city planning and regulations. From my perspective, Americans tend to mostly design their infrastructure and regulations around cars and then demand that other modes of transport compete with that, which is not a very reasonable demand.
Electric bikes?
What? You ever been to any city in Asia? The moped is king.
Some of this is in urban planning, where distances are close enough that you don’t have to buy things in bulk (but increasing in frequency), or if you do, you can hook up a trailer or cart.
Secondly, traffic laws address the “car drivers are famously aggressive” thing. If the car driver is always at fault even if the pedestrian is jaywalking, then they quickly stop driving that aggressively…trading off with pedestrians jaywalking all of the time. Which is the case in parts of China!
As the one non-driver in existence, I believe the solution is better urban planning.
Grocery stores no more than a mile away from residences.
Bus or subway routes from residential areas to corporate industries, running at work commute useful times.
Work commute does not require cargo or passengers. Commute for me is 1.5 mile walk and 30 minutes on a corporate shuttle, so one hour each way.
When I rode a public bus 10 years ago, I had less walking, but double the bus distance, and it was an hour each way.
Groceries go in a backpack, which carries 30 pounds (14-15 kg). That’s almost a week of food. Bulk foods like rice are a better weight to calorie ratio. A walk to the store 1.5 miles away takes about an hour.
Kids old enough to walk should be taking themselves to school. If it’s not safe, start summarily executing abductors until they get the message. If they don’t go, consider improving school conditions to something better than a large hen coop.
That covers probably 90% of the time you spend in a car. If a substantial portion of people did this, you’d spend even less time in a car because there would be less traffic.
Uh…motorcycles?
Or are they not SWPL enough?
For a post that asks about “humanity” solving something, the question and answers really seem to focus on Western car-culture non-solutions. Only one person mentioned the mopeds of Asia, and I linked to auto-rickshaws (aka tuk-tuks) also prevalent in many Asian countries.
I find it rather unimaginative that a discussion of urban mobility focuses on golf-carts used in gated retirement and vacation communities. Or that people think segways and scooters (the children’s toy kind, not the Vespa type) are any kind of universal solution.
For the West, it should be obvious that a century of car-centric development, suburban urbanism, resource exploitation, and car-driven economy (Detroit and the big 3) have pushed the US towards bigger-is-better mentality and lock-in. The choices of 50 years ago force most people to have large and inefficient cars, and since that’s what available, there is no push for change. Other cities and cultures around the world that have developed with other priorities, limitations, and patterns have found other equilibriums.
Optimize for bikes and bikes are optimal. Optimize for 2-stroke free-for-all and mopeds take over. Live on a densely crowded island with courteous drivers, then you can have kei-cars that would get flattened in the land of super-size pickups and SUVs. Need cheap ubiquitous transport anywhere in town in the monsoon rain? Tuk-tuks got you covered—one billion people in India cant be wrong.
I give you ..the P45!
Here’s my daily plea for someone to look at the data on NAD+ boosting and PARP10 pathway vs. coronavirus… unlike malaria drugs or bleach, nicotinamide riboside (a B3 variant) won’t kill you, and it reduces susceptibility to TB as a side benefit.
Recent paper on this. Also check out Dr. Sinclair’s paper on the same subject:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.17.047480v2
I am not qualified to examine this sort of thing, but what do you expect to come of “someone [looking] at the data”?
Most people will have seen those declassified USS Nimitz UFO videos by now; they were doing the rounds since 2017 anyway. I have an extremely low prior on these being anything other than some explicable terrestrial phenomenon, but I have no idea what. It seems to me that there are a people in the commenting community who have the technical expertise and/or experience to give some steers on what we’re looking at.
So, anyone want to give us a sense of what might be happening here?
just a link.
Thanks, noyann… I had been worried that the Navy was trying to pull a UFO hoax.
(Because they clearly ARE… did you see those ridiculous “warp drive patents” that they came up with at the same time the vids leaked?)
My epistemic status on this is “totally boggled” regarding the patents, but thanks for the link clearing up some of the issues with the old FLIR images.
Yeah, I read through one of those patents. It seemed like bullshit, but was just well written enough that I couldn’t be totally confident about calling bullshit. I would describe my epistemic status as totally confused, but more interested in UFO sightings than I was a few years ago.
But I think that the most likely explanations are, in order of most likely first:
1) The navy is intentionally lying about / faking this stuff for some kind of political goal. That goal could be intimidating foreign militaries, or it could be some kind of complicated domestic misdirection program.
2) Some conman is trying to make a bunch of money off research grants developing “alien” technology by faking evidence, and is skilled enough to be able to slip bullshit past mid-level administrative bureaucrats.
3) A weird/crazy/foolish/gullible UFO believer has naturally made his way to a mid-level bureaucratic position in the Navy administration, and is using their position to publish garbage that supports their beliefs.
4) Actual aliens.
But I will note that every single one of these options is in itself a really interesting story. If the navy is faking this stuff to mislead somebody, isn’t it really interesting that the US’s armed forces are willing to perjure themselves and damage the reputation of themselves and the US patent office in the process? If our mid-level defense administrators are that gullible, isn’t that something you want to know about? I hope somebody is taking this phenomenon seriously. And by phenomenon, I mean the UFO stories themselves, not necessarily the UFOs.
+1
I would also consider
4.5) Someone intentionally sabotaging Navy and trying to present them (and other parts of administration) as idiots. Reasons here may range widely.
as more likely than “actually aliens”. I would also switch (1) and (2). And consider that it may be not conman, but a true believer.
5) Pascals’s research.
Militaries have done a bunch of testing on stuff like ESP and PK because, compared to all the CVNs and fighter planes and nukes militaries spend their money on, it’s insanely cheap to check whether people can remote sense Bin-Laden or whatever. https://xkcd.com/808/
You stick a few junior officers on looking at UFO sightings instead of whatever busywork they’d otherwise be doing.
But why they actually announced results in this way, suggesting that something substantial was found?
Great comment.
I would discount the patents. People have been submitting a huge volume of frivolous patents for years. The patent system encourages this, because there’s almost no incentive to not file a patent for something, regardless whether it’s really about a novel and so patentable idea. So people patent early and often, even if there’s only a very slim chance that they’ll be able to use the patent for something later.
As for the UFO sightings by the navy, have we learned any surprising new information about this since 2019-06? If not, then I still think there’s the possibility that I mentioned in “https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/26/links-6-19/#comment-767916”, namely that the navy encourages rumors about UFOs to make sure that sensor problems get reported. I’m not confident that this is indeed happening, but it’s a possibility that you didn’t list above.
I’ve read the argument that GO FAST is a balloon or a bird; it looks like it goes very fast because it is hard to judge its distance to the surface of the water; if you assume it is close to the water, yeah that thing is fast as hell. If it is not that close to the water, it is a more reasonable speed and the water moves that fast because…the plane filming it is moving that fast.
The GIMBAL videos I feel are a little harder to explain. Don’t find the plane explanation convincing. I always assumed it was something on top of the camera, maybe an insect, and it drifts away at the moment the plane acceleration changes too much for the little thing. Could be wrong.
As for what happened?
I don’t think the pilots are lying, just really confused about what is going on. When they issued their report to their superiors, they must have been laughed at. It’s very probable someone on the carrier immediately identified GO FAST as a bird or balloon. Then they just never filled whatever paperwork on the flight report to mark it as a bird and got marked as an ufo cause disproving aliens is too much work.
Eventually someone comes across the videos, sees there is no official explanation and asks for release and, well, the navy or whoever complies cause they have better things to do.
I don’t have the right background to be entitled to much of an opinion, but I’d guess, from most to least likely, something like:
a. Some kind of optical illusion + sensor glitch (probably 95%). This might be engineered by someone or an accidental occurrence.
b. Some interesting physical phenomenon (most of the remaining 5%)
c. An actual ship of some kind (very low, <1%)
If there was an actual ship moving like what showed up in those videos, my understanding is nobody has more than a Star Trek technobabble explanation for how they failed to, say, make huge sonic booms and get extremely hot, and both would have definitely been detected. It's hard to imagine any humans having that kind of technology without it having been seen before or having the basic principles understood. (If they did, they'd probably want to keep it mostly out of the sight of the US military so it could be an extra-unpleasant surprise some fine day when they wanted to, say, sink a couple of our aircraft carriers.).
Space aliens could have technology that advanced, and it's probably impossible for me to make a guess at their motives or intentions, but it doesn't seem so likely. Though it's not like I can come up with a good justification for any probabiltiy assessment there, TBH.
And there is plenty of weird ones. Many are probably not yet discovered.
Weird red shapes, up to 50 x 50 km large appearing in upper atmosphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(lightning)#/media/File:BigRed-Sprite.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(lightning)#/media/File:Upperatmoslight1.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(lightning)
electronic countermeasure warfare tests? That is, the navy is pointing some black think tank toy at those airplanes that fuck up their sensors. That would also explain the ufo hoax that is gearing up – its an attempt to get adversaries to give credence to the non-existing returns you plant to swamp their radars with once stealth definitively looses the race with sensor tech.
Like cheap quadcopters with blip enhancers bolted on?
The darpa version of that, so “small million dollar missile with blip enhancers”
I’ve heard a lot of times that the US has at-will employment, and hiring and firing is much easier. But what does it mean, in practice?
In Spain, workers receive a month and a half’s salary for every year worked at the company when fired without cause. So if you worked at a company for 40 years, you get 60 months worth of salary. Firing a union employee even for cause (e.g. coming to work drunk) is hard. Union reps have to agree that there was a cause (the different unions have reps, which make up a tribunal).
Does it make a difference in compensation whether you’re fired for cause or not?
What is the practical difference between a temporal contract and a permanent one?
My vague understanding of at-will employment is that you can come one morning to work, your job tells you to pack your things, and you’re fired. No compensation or justification necessary. But if so, is there any difference between a contract worker (working on a year or two long contract), and a permanent one? Because if firing the permanent working is free, what is the difference between firing that worker and not extending the contract of a contract worker?
In Spain it all makes a huge difference (contract workers don’t get the compensation if their contract is not extended, for starters). But then Spain has very high structural unemployment, and the US has a much more nimble job market.
If you let someone go without cause (typically this is considered laying them off instead of firing them, though those aren’t really legal terms afaik) they will be able to claim unemployment insurance payments, which will impact the unemployment tax rate for the employer. If you’re fired for cause I think in most states you’ll be ineligible for unemployment.
Right. In Spain, your right to unemployment benefits depends on how long you paid into it. You can quit your work voluntarily and still have the right to unemployment benefits.
Sorry, but that is not correct. In Spain, if you quit voluntarily, you will not receive any benefits. You also have to warn them 15 days on advance, or forfeit compensation for as many of those 15 days you fail to present your resignation letter.
If you are fired, either with or without cause, you may receive unemployment benefits.
Yeah, there are caveats to quitting. You can quit an keep unemployment, if the employer changed your working conditions, didn’t pay, or asked you to move. And if you’re an abused woman.
Still, you don’t have to be fired necessarily to get unemployments.
But you can get around that by working at another job for three months; as long as you didn’t quit that one, you get the full two years.
I am not an employment lawyer, but I work in the US.
– yes, they can toss you out on your ear as of right now, without any severance pay except not-yet-taken vacation days.
– in my line of work, there’s a tacit agreement – we don’t walk off the job one morning with no advance notice, and they don’t take the job away with no severance. It is, however, common for that severance to come with strings attached, generally an agreement not to sue the now ex-employer.
– contractors don’t get benefits; employees do. Legal cases happen where so-called contractors are alleged to be employees in all but name, and thus deserving benefits. In some cases, there are also tax impliocations for the worker. With health insurance tied to employment, benefits matter.
– in some lines of work, mostly minimum wage, many employees routinely quit jobs by failing to show up. (OTOH I’ve seen this happen exactly once in tech, and it was something of a 9 days wonder. The presumption was that something very bad had happened to the employee and they were unable to call in, but the immediate supervisor checked, and that was not the case.)
– a contractor with a real contract (if those exist at all here) may be better off than an employee, legally speaking – if their legal agrement specifies the length of the job contracted for.
– some employees also have contracts that e.g. specifiy severance payments; they tend to be executives.
I think there’s a misunderstanding here.
A contract worker is not a contractor. Maybe I’m using the wrong term, please tell me the correct one.
In Spain, a contract worker is an employee with a fixed-term contract. So, the employee is working for the company for a fixed period. Usually ranges between three months and two years (the maximum period after which you have to make a worker permanent), and can be extended up to the two year period, after which a worker has to be made permanent. This is avoided by subterfuges like changing the company the worker is supposedly working for. So a worker changes work between an affiliate to the mother company to another affiliate, while working at the same desk at the same office for years.
Contract workers get all the same benefits as ordinary employees do, except that their work is not guaranteed after the contract expires. If fired in the middle of their contract period, they’re still entitled to compensation. But if they don’t get a new contract at the end of the previous contract’s term, they have to look for another work.
Contractors are self-employed workers who have to pay for their own benefits but generally there is a requirement that a contractor work for several companies and set their own hours so they aren’t considered an employee.
Maybe in the US you don’t have contract workers, since the whole reason contract workers exist in Spain is to make it easier to avoid the difficulties the Spanish protectionist job market creates, and it’s not necessary with at-will employment.
And contract workers are a different category from temp workers.
Yea I don’t believe there is an equivalent to what you mean by contract worker in the US, nor would it be necessary since you can lay off full-time employees whenever you want, typically with minimal costs.
Temps are pretty similar (although not all temp agency placements are for a fixed term, but some are).
And based on ana’s description of why they are used, they are used for much the same purpose.
We have temps in Spain, too. They aren’t the same as contract workers; they work for a temporary working agency, which farms out their work to other companies.
Contract workers are working for the same company, temp workers change work constantly.
Or do temps in the US have access to company 401ks, health insurance, maternity pay, and all those things? Because contract workers do, and temps don’t in Spain.
No, temps work the same way you described.
I missed the part of your post that said contract workers get the same benefits as ordinary employees.
Well, there’s analogous contact positions in government and non-profits that are funded by limited time grants in the US, where the position has funding for X years and isn’t guaranteed thereafter. If more funding shows up, the position might be extended, but it’s communicated at the outset that the position may not exist after X date.
In theory, yes, people can get fired under at-will employment for any reason or no reason at all (except for a short list of things you legally can’t discriminate against.) In practice, it doesn’t happen. Every large business has an internal procedure, and violating that procedure is taken to mean it was a pretext for illegal discrimination.
So, between this and inertia, there’s a very real difference between permanent workers and temporary workers.
But when you’re laid off, you don’t get any compensation, right?
If you’re “laid off”, you get unemployment payments (and the business’ unemployment taxes are raised for having more people laid off).
If you’re “fired” for cause, you may get nothing.
What are these unemployment taxes?
In Spain, you pay a fixed % of your salary to unemployment insurance. Once you’ve paid in a year, you get a right to get unemployment payments.
For between 360-539 days of paying into the system, you get 120 days worth of unemployment; for every additional 180 days of paying into the system, you get an additional 60 days of payments, up to a maximum of two years of unemployment benefits.
The pay you get is based on what your salary was, and there are minimums depending on how many children you’ve got under your care (children under 26 whom you are maintaining).
The employee is the one that pays for unemployment benefits, not the company. It’s also how it works in most European countries I know of (Germany, France, AFAIK).
It varies from state to state, but generally that’s how it works in the US as well. But usually the employer also has to pay taxes for unemployment insurance as well. (Though that’s a bit of a distinction without a difference: if you make employers pay more taxes on a payroll, then they’ll just lower the salary to compensate in the long run).
Generally each state runs it’s own unemployment insurance plan through some state bureau, and the rules on what is paid when and how vary from state to state.
Unemployment taxes are paid by the employer NOT the employee, at least in the states I know of, and on the federal level.
How the system basically works is that each state has their own unemployment fund which they set their own state-level unemployment tax rate on, and they determine eligibility reqs, how much benefits pay and for how long. Based on those values each state determines the unemployment tax rate each business is charged on their payroll. Most states will have a variable tax rate determined for each business, so if your business has high turnover with a large number of unemployment claims, you’ll get a higher rate. These can range from 1-15% of gross wages, I only really have experience with Michigan where I think the max rate is something like 13% which a lot of seasonal employers up north would always hit since they basically lay off their entire staff every winter.
There is also a federal-level unemployment fund that employers pay into (current rate I think is 1.5% gross wage), and this federal fund is used to help fund the states especially in cases where they have a shortfall like when Michigan had unusually high unemployment back in the 00s.
“Laid off” employees often get some sort of severance package, although it is not a legal requirement.
Usually a “lay off” is something you do when you don’t have enough work to justify your current workforce size, so usually you are getting rid of people you actually like and would keep if business was going better. Often you’d like to hire these people back if things pick up again. So it is often in the employer’s best interest to make things easier on laid off staff.
To add a bit more detail:
-Most states pay unemployment weekly, and require the unemployed person to file a short form (these days sometimes online) stating they were available for work, did not refuse any job offers, did not receive any income or if they did how much and from what sources, etc. Some states allow you to refuse work if it’s sufficiently below your previous salary/outside your field/etc, some notably do NOT. Generally, if you turn down a job offer the state’s unemployment program thinks was good enough, they will cut off your unemployment payments.
-Your weekly unemployment rate is tied to your average wage/salary at your last job, but is almost always lower. 50% is common, though again this varies, and most states have a flat dollar maximum. For example, Ohio is 50% of your previous job’s average weekly pay, up to a maximum of $540 a week. The presumption is A) making it less than 100% pushes people to find a new job ASAP rather than riding out the full length of their benefits and only starting to look for work towards the end, and B) the more money you made before becoming unemployed, the more likely you saved (or should have saved) money for a rainy day that you can live on and thus don’t need the unemployment insurance. NOTE: I am not commenting on this reasoning one way or the other, just explaining the general thinking behind the structure.
-In another layer of “push people off it ASAP” measures, most states also require weekly PROOF that you were looking for work. This can range from checking a box that says “Yes, I was looking for work”, to listing places you filed a job application, to having to file for jobs -through- the state’s unemployment program. Again, failure to meet this requirement can result in termination of your benefits.
-The amount of benefits varies by state, anywhere from a low of 6 weeks to a high of 26 weeks, or about half a year. I’m not aware of anyplace that goes beyond that, but I haven’t made a detailed study of the issue.
In my state you definitely have to file in person (although the requirement is waved currently with COVID), and I think you actually have to talk to like a “case manager” each week, not just turn in a form. There is also a requirement to apply to some number of jobs each week (I don’t know what the number is), and provide evidence that those applications took place, as well as any interviews you took.
I am
Also not an employment lawyer but I will be in a position at some point where I will be able to fire people and so we had a training seminar that included instruction on employment law. Here is what I remember
1 Internal company ethics are that we are a just cause company because of ethical commitments as a company. I am not sure if this is public and it is definitely not made in any sort of legally biding sense policy.
2 We are in an at will state and if it comes to it, our lawyers will argue that to the nines.
3 Because, it is really easy to run afoul of employment law accidentally even if any sane person would agree that firing this person was the right call.
4 Document everthing
5 Try to never fire someone and if you really have to, talk to the companies employment lawyers before firing someone for anything short of embezzlement
And the corollary to that: if your boss is suddenly very concerned with documenting your performance and any issues he has with it, he is likely putting together a case for getting rid of you. You’re probably better off jumping before you’re pushed, if you can find another job. Otherwise, at least you want to make sure you jump through all hoops they demand of you in that process, don’t give them more chances to document your showing up five minutes late or some such thing, etc.
We were told to document and give feedback everyone all the time. In part for good reasons in part because you can show that this person had this problem for years and part because if someone needs to be fired for another reason and they have been tardy for years and you have repeatedly told them this needs to stop, you can use that as the legal cause of firing.
But realistically, you are totally right if I are my peers start documenting performance that is a bad sign.
If in the US your job wasn’t tied to healthcare, I’d bet employees would enjoy the at-will nature of employment here more.
People insist that professionals would demand higher salaries for working at places where you can be fired easily. But I’ve worked in places that refused to fire people and they sucked.
Shitty coworkers who can’t be fired is one of the things that makes a job suck. And shitty managers who can’t be fired make the situation about ten times as bad.
So far I’ve been fired twice, (software engineer in California). The first time, I went through a year of Performance Improvement Plans so they’d have an excuse to fire me. I also collected unemployment insurance afterwards.
The second place didn’t bother with a formal PIP process and just offered me four weeks of severance pay to quit “voluntarily” in exchange for not badmouthing them, filing a lawsuit etc. This also made me ineligible for unemployment benefits, though the severance pay was still a better deal.
Looking over your bans, I think you are overreacting to both HBC and Echo.
Looking just at the examples he linked I sort of agree, but IMO a lot of their recent exchanges have been fairly uncharitable and rather bluntly biased, particularly some of the exchanges they’ve had around the coronavirus/lockdowns. It’s a contentious subject for sure, but I’ve honestly just been skipping over their posts, and kind of annoyed how often those post chains devolve and get sidetracked by their torrent of sniping back and forth.
I get that – I’d engage in slightly different line-drawing too – but I think the added value to draconian comment moderation that errs on the side of sanctions over mercy is in the long-term good of the order.
Comment moderation is a beast in the best of times – I recall a gaming board that I found terrific that had no moderation and well-behaved folks and that lasted years. It took one troll to wound it and a second to kill it. I’m sure we’ve all seen decays in various groups.
Look, maybe I’m wrong and those with differing opinions are in fact terrible people. But those discussions are why Twitter exists.
+1
I think that Brad and HBC have both drifted towards uncharitable and lower quality posts lately, and that it’s a pattern that’s been going on for a longer time than just those example posts…
…but at the same time, Scott, I think at least part of that is on you. If you set a policy that says “I will hold posters coming from this side of American politics to a lower standard than the other side”, it’s sort of expected that people are going to take you up on that offer.
I’m not sure I disagree with the bans (though some of the 6 month ones seem excessive, I’m not the mod), but the bait-and-switch aspect there does seem a bit rough.
I also have observed this pattern, and in d*ck before them, and arguably sk*f even further back, and very plausibly myself in the near term. And speaking for myself but in a way that I think would get agreement…
…it’s that this is very near to being the opposite of the problem. “[B]road hostile generalizations about groups that contradict their own understand[ing] out of nowhere” are a huge problem here – if not in comparison to Twitter or Reddit maybe, then that’s a blistering damnation by faint praise. It’s definitely an element of SSC culture that broad, sweeping attacks against groups will draw less moderation than attacks against individuals, so calling out hostile generalizations gets you on the ban radar more reliably than the initial bad behavior.
And of course any biased individual would say this, but the asymmetry appears stark. And if there is also an asymmetry in who comes back after a ban expires, it’s not going to get better.
Can you point out specific instances?
Also, any idea how to deal with groups with really different perceptions of themselves compared to every other group, even when the other groups read up on their ideas?
You want me to call out specific instances of where calling out specific instances attracts moderator action?
Quip aside, which specific thing were you addressing? (Not sure.)
I think Scott’s links in this post point to quite a few regardless, but I can maybe elaborate on what I’m seeing with a little help.
Rigor, followed by charity and humility. Clarifying examples for all of these upon specific request, but YMMV.
The most important thing is to make sure you aren’t addressing a straw/weakman or otherwise addressing a fringe belief – is this actually a group of significant size to be worth talking about? Is this what the group actually believes, or is this an image presented to (or BY) outsiders for complicated signaling reasons? See The Ideology Is Not The Movement. This is harder than it sounds, especially on CW topics.
After that, one can start applying all the standard techniques of Rationality – everyone’s worldview makes at least some sense to them, the trick is to find the differences that matter, and are within inferential distance. What concrete thoughts about physical reality differ? Is there a way that this can be translated into predictions? Note that the actual testing is secondary here, as once there’s a mutually valued binary disagreement that could genuinely go either way, you’re a very short step from being part of the same group.
But frankly, all of that can be short-circuited by one silver bullet: find someone who genuinely holds that opinion, that you respect, and talk to them about it. If a sincere conversation can happen without the endemic posturing and railing against formless things, we’re 90% of the way there.
an example of calling out bad behavior being reacted to worse than bad behaviour itself would be appreciated.
Your answer to my question seems very sensible.
“Worse” is inherently tricky to quantify without base rates, which are going to be very difficult to objectively measure. But just looking at posts cited for banning, a large fraction are criticisms of specific other posts:
Al*xander (1)
Br*d (1) (2) (3) (5)
HBC (2) (4) (5)
JS (4, at least partially)
I could go back to the last banwave in September to pull more examples, but there are definitely posters for whom this type of comment is the majority of what they’re apparently doing wrong. Hell, I genuinely don’t know if this comment of mine would be in keeping with current standards.
(I’m also realizing now how some of these comments – Br*d’s maybe most notably – were before the last banwave. That leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, if one considers (4) and (5) there alone deserving of a 6-month ban. I understand the logic about being more severe towards explicitly-warned users, but it makes it really hard to divine the relationship between ban duration and the in-practice comment policy.)
Partially-competing theory describing the same pattern: lots of comments break the commenting policy, but Scott is driven to act much more sharply when a conversational breakdown is visibly happening (particularly if one side is clearly more poorly-behaved at the point of breakdown). In theory this allows a maximally-broad range of discussions, but in practice it favors indirectly drawing first blood.
Agree. In particular, I think the quality of EC’s comments has been significantly above the average for this site, and I consider it completely implausible that banning him would have an overall positive effect on discussion quality here.
I think that, too. There are times I’m frustrated with both EC and HBC, but it seems to me that both also add a lot of high-value content to the discussions here.
I have the exact opposite opinion. I saw EC as being one of the most extremely uncharitable and bad faith people who comment widely on this site. While I cannot provide specific examples right now, there have been many threads that I just stopped reading once EC started to comment, because I saw his contributions as being loudly low quality and very frequent. I am personally glad to see him go.
While it is quite possible, even likely, that this is a result of my bubble being unused to his opinions it is still anecdotal evidence in support of the idea that he contributed to the driving-off effect our host is worried about.
I’ve argued/discussed with him a couple times, he was charitable and argued in good faith. I don’t think those are the issues, and I think the bubble effect + abrasiveness + frequency more likely account for your dislike
+1
Have an idea for a science fiction story: To reduce crime the government introduces a new kind of money. You can no longer pay with credit cards, only coins. Each coin is unique. People have electronic wallets that register when a coin is put into it and sent this info to the government. Shops and banks also sent this info when they get coins. The government keeps track of the history of every coin.
So say someone steals your money. You can report the coins stolen. When the thief tries to spend the money, the police knows its the same coins.
There’s a computer program that detects money laundering. Say a drug dealer tries to launder money through a laser tag business. The program notices that money from people that has previously been busted for drugs tends to end up in the pockets of the laser tag owner and suspects him of selling drugs.
Drug dealers might try to sell drugs for other things than money to not get caught. Therefore the government makes it illegal for normal people to own gold and diamonds and similar. They makes it illegal to own cryptocurrency and to convert normal money to cryptocurrency. They makes stocks behave like money, each stock is an unique coin, and the history of each stock is registered.
Most countries use this new money system, but a few don’t. Currency from those countries are banned. It’s illegal to own banned currency and you can’t convert money into banned currency. Anyone that arrives from a country with banned currency gets body searched for banned currency.
Some drug dealers started swapping drugs for stolen goods. Then they would ship the stolen goods to a country with banned currency to be sold there. Therefore the government made it illegal to send any items to countries with banned currencies.
Is there a way for a money thief or a drug dealer to operate under such a system? Assume they can’t hack the government’s computers.
Presumably certain durable goods would become the “currency” of the black market, which would operate on a barter system.
All of this is easier with electronic payments only than with coins. Electronic systems should be able to keep track of every “token”. Currently banks may be only required to report suspicious or known-to-be-criminal transfers, and I don’t know whether the sort of tracking you propose is used, but it should certainly be possible.
The overhead costs and irritation associated with this would vastly outweigh the benefit of reduced theft. Many, many people do not want the government being able to track their purchases–bear in mind that this makes a permanent record of your sex toy purchases on Amazon, which could theoretically be accessed via Freedom of Information Act–and governments seldom display any success at restricting commerce they do not like but which other people choose to engage in. When you add on the effective crippling of international trade (refusing to play nice with people who don’t use this system), this would sink like a rock. Almost everyone would use alternate currency systems of some sort, especially after the economy crashed due to the trade restrictions.
As this is SciFi… Have alternate worlds where goods or money disappear in one country of thisWorld, are transported within the altWorld, and resurface in their original world in destination country. Stross’ Merchant Prince series is based on this.
It’s just a more extreme and technocratic version of something which authoritarian societies have already attempted many times.
You get a black market, and how smoothly it runs depends on how much effort you’re willing to put into enforcement, and how easily the government and police involved can be corrupted. (or even the government deciding it’s useful to allow certain amount of black market activity, while being able to crack down on it at any time under the guise of enforcing the law)
“Gold and diamonds and similar” cease to be a viable currency. Any scarce, but widespread good becomes a replacement currency, or in the worst case, a barter & favor economy develops, possibly augmented by hawala. The government ends up with 20% of economic activity transacted through their controlled system and the rest in barter. Value of unique coins plummets as everyone has a lot of them but you cannot use them for many purposes. Trust collapses as people get scammed in black markets.
The country lands somewhere between Somalia and Zimbabwe in economic development rankings. The end.
I could be wrong, but didn’t you just re-contextualize Bitcoin ? FWIW, China is working on exactly this type of solution; personally, I think that it will work out quite well for them. It won’t work out in places like the USA, which are not totalitarian dictatorships; nor in places like Russia which are dictatorships, but whose population has a long and abiding tradition of noncompliance.
Speaking of the Soviet Union, its leadership periodically tried to pull stunts like these (though, of course, they were hampered by the non-existence of purely digital currency). As the result, vodka became the de-facto currency among the poor people; cognac and other high-class booze was the currency of choice for middle-class and rich people. If you wanted to e.g. have your toilet fixed, you could put an official request into the queue and maybe one day someone would read it; or, alternatively, you could go down to the basement to Uncle Vasya the fix-it-man, wake him up, hand him a bottle of vodka and say, “by the way, my toilet is leaking”. He’d fix your toilet this very afternoon, and you’d give him the second bottle.
This being a physical version of Bitcoin was my first thought as well.
My second was that the same things that work for Bitcoin to foil tracking would also work with this coin economy. For example, have periodic privacy parties where everyone brings coins, drops them into a big bag, you shake them all around, then everyone takes back the same number of coins they contributed.
The third is that in similar situations, as others have noted, different currencies emerge if the official one isn’t ideal for a particular purpose. For example, bottles of tide have been used as a street currency because it’s densely valuable to people, widely available, and otherwise innocuous. Ditto cigarettes in prison, etc…
I saw a related discussion a year or so ago – I forget if it was on a linkable blog or just on Facebook. The idea that prompted this other discussion was that people could credibly divest from fossil fuels not only by not investing in them, but also by refusing to accept payment in coins that had come from fossil fuel companies (or only accepting them at a discount). This then gives your major customers a major incentive to also divest.
There was a worry about whether Gresham’s Law effects would take hold (so that anything that accepted fossil fuel dollars would only ever be paid for by fossil fuel dollars).
Isn’t that what Digital Dollar wants to be?
> makes it illegal to own cryptocurrency
Here’s the thing: the government is far too stupid to manage something like that all by itself, so it outsources the complicated stuff (such as “chain analysis”) to oppression-for-hire companies. But those companies do not really want to succeed completely. If they are too effective, nobody will use cryptocurrencies anymore so nobody will pay those companies anymore. Thus when the bootlicker companies feel like people are too scared to use cryptos, suddenly there will be an anonymous paper along the lines of “A New Method to Hide Your Ass From the Government With zkBoojums”. And the people will rejoice. And the government will pay a lot of money to research ways to tame this new threat.
First off, even if you record the sequence “A coin was removed from Alice’s wallet, got reported stolen, and was added to Bob’s wallet,” that doesn’t prove that Bob intentionally stole the coins. Maybe the coins fell out of Alice’s wallet and she didn’t notice, and Bob picked them up. Maybe Alice made a mistake, or forgot she gave those coins to Bob. A good scam artist can make plenty of plausible excuses.
You can add more plausible deniability if your wallet “malfunctions” at convenient times. Maybe it ran out of batteries, or maybe you have one of those tinfoil RFID blocker things because you’re paranoid about your credit cards getting scanned. Maybe you live somewhere with crappy internet, and shopkeepers occasionally have to fall back on paper receipts until they can upload their transactions to the govt. (You can’t ban people from making offline transactions without impeding an awful lot of legitimate business – at the very least, you have to be able to buy a new wallet!)
Once you can move coins around off the grid, you can break the chain of custody completely – Bob steals a coin from Alice, puts it in an offline wallet, and hands it to his buddy Charlie, who spends it in Dave’s shop. All the authorities are able to see is that Alice’s coin somehow wound up in Dave’s shop. Bob never set foot in Dave’s shop, and Charlie never went near Alice, so the authorities can’t prove anything unless they do some offline legwork to find the link between Bob and Charlie.
(This is basically an offline version of a Bitcoin tumbler – mixing stolen coins with clean coins so that the authorities can’t tell where the dirty coins went.)
I suspect you could pull a double-spending attack in a similar way – spend money but prevent your wallet from recording the coin’s disappearance – but I’m not quite sure of the logistics. Probably harder to pull off, as you’d have to report your own coins stolen and invite scrutiny.
Thank you, this was the sort of reply I was hoping for.
The way I envisioned it, Charlie can’t spend the money without registering it. When someone spends the money in a shop, the network register both the information from the wallet and the shop at the same time. People can’t shop without a wallet. You raise a good point about malfunctioning and crappy internet though.
As for claiming to find money, people are not allowed to spend money they find. Alice is not allowed to give money to Bob without seeing him putting it in his wallet.
A scam artist could probably pull off a scam once, but the computer program would notice if it kept happening and get suspicious.
Wallets are not bought, they are given to you by the government.
I still think that would be incredibly constraining – I lose my wallet, and I can’t buy groceries until the government issues me a new one?
Requiring stolen coins to be sent back to whoever their last recorded owner is is a very strong disincentive against accepting unverified coins, I’ll admit. (Well, as long as the last recorded owner is generally reliable, but we already covered that.)
For a reliable scam that doesn’t rely on possessing stolen coins, you’d want something where you can argue that the scammee voluntarily paid you those coins. E.g., run a strip club, where it’s plausible that the victim got drunk, spent too much, and is lying to get their money back before their wife finds out. Or a variant on the “teahouse scam” where they spring a bunch of surprise fees on a tourist who’s too intimidated to dispute it.
Yup. Petty theft becomes purely physical, people will still steal phones it’s just your wallet that’s protected after all. Drug dealing just has to evolve to involve some upfront money laundering. So people start buying extremely expensive ‘haircuts’ or ‘financial planning consultations’ which are all services that can conceptually be any price. Sure people still get busted when anyone actually investigates or catches product changing hands, but there’s no real way to differentiate between rich idiots and active lawbreakers from the transaction records alone.
Money launderers could do the same thing they do today – gamble. They make matching bets in an online exchange with their dirty money and their clean money from a different account. When the dirty account loses, the clean account wins. The beauty of it is that the money won on the clean account can’t be traced to the dirty account. The two bets can appear completely independent; they can be made on different exchanges, even in different currencies.
If your dirty account wins money on the other hand – hey now you have a bunch of clean money that you can send anywhere. At least that’s what happens in our reality. The exchanges allow you to send the winnings straight to another account. In your scenario I suppose these winnings could be retroactively labelled as dirty for having touched the dirty account. In that case you’d have to keep gambling until you lose everything in your dirty account and that might not happen before your clean account is out of funds.
Maybe this scheme doesn’t work in your universe after all.
I have to say I don’t understand why this would address crime any better than universally using a credit card, or a credit card with a thumbprint to guarantee that it is being used by the proper person. The addition of smart coins and smart coin-purses just seems like multiplying entities beyond necessity. What am I missing?
Once again requesting that Scott consider hosting another classifieds thread soon.
I think that banning Heelbearcub for so long is regrettable in light of your stated goal of cutting left-wing opinions more slack.
Agreed, though I disagree with him politically.
Especially because I’ve found his comments to be a lot less political than in in the past lately.
While I did like the bear, I don’t think Scott could have in good conscience banned EC without also banning the bear. The bear Constantly bickered with EC, and by my measure the bear’s offenses were more egregious. There is cutting the left wing some slack, and there’s punishing only one side of a problem. I think Scott made the right call.
I’d justify it as a way to keep a bit of balance in the commentariat. As a non-left person, I’d much prefer to keep people like HBC on board for the sake of balance. It pains my libertarian soul to say it, but government meddling is justified in this one unique circumstance.
Scott is a private corporation, so you can relax.
So he’s not Big Brother?
Big Brother Inc.
Our glorious new order combines the compassion of a multinational corporation with the personal touch of a vast government bureaucracy.
The comment section has a slight rightward lean, that feels even more rightward because a lot of our most prolific and active commenters are more right-wing (that is, if 0 is Far Left and 10 is Far Right, the comment section’s average was a 6 or so, but the average of the top 10 or 20 most active commenters was a 7 or 8. There was some analysis of this by one of our posters at one point, but I haven’t seen an update in awhile).
Scott basically declared an attempt to correct this via post quality affirmative action: He would maintain or even tighten standards on right-leaning posters, while cutting left-wing posters more slack, in an effort to nudge the comment sections balance towards the middle.
This is just my opinion, but I think that in a several cases including several commenters he just banned the result was that they decompensated and their posts got lower quality and more uncharitable/unpleasant.
I understand it. While a double (or triple?) standard might seem unfair by the letter of the law, I think it makes complete sense. It helps assuage what I think is a very real problem of the minority voice feeling crowded out and just fading out because of the overwhelming odds and, as such, helps preserve the legitimacy of SSC as a neutral/ broadly-acceptable venue, rather than “just another right-wing adjacent” blog or something (which a place like Quillette quickly became, for example).
I think it happens in both right- and left-leaning communities — the specific dynamics might be different. I know that when I’ve tried to be the more right-of-center voice in left-dominated forums, it just turned into a pile-on – not an aggressive or mean one necessarily, but 10 comments disagreeing with you and spouting a dozen “alternative facts” to what I think/know to be true is too many fronts to argue on at a time. I sometimes go back to those places, but it’s just kind of not worth it.
For some time I’ve meant to write a follow-up to my (somewhat abbreviated) comment on the PNSE Paper thread. When I wrote that comment, I had had the aforementioned non-symbolic experience several months prior, and I felt it was highly significant but near-impossible to interpret. Just prior to the time of my comment, I had started reading the Pali Canon in-depth and the accompanying commentaries – as I said in my comment, I had grown up around Buddhist communities all my life, but had never considered its texts enough to consider giving them a serious reading. I had no intention of becoming a monk at that point in my life, and it seemed that the nitty gritty of Buddhist scripture was not relevant to any other pursuits. However, something about my experience made me seek out these very scriptures – at first I read these as I would other ancient texts of philosophy, evaluating the claims and trying to test their validity against more modern ideas. At some point I realized that the Canon had taken on a larger life in my eyes – I began to realize some of the layered meanings inherent in each text, and felt that I had a more intuitive grasp of the *why* – why did the Buddha teach his doctrine? Why are concepts like kamma and dependent origination so central to his doctrine? Why is meditation, or the practice of focused awareness in general, key to this doctrine? And perhaps most significantly, why have these words and concepts so profoundly moved people of a thousand walks of life across 20+ centuries – myself included?
Many figures who were influential in bringing the dhamma to the West, in its various shades, have commented on the psychotherapeutic/psychoanalytic features of Buddhism (as well as other religious traditions). I recall Alan Watts making this point often in his lectures, but now that I have a better understanding of the Buddha as a textual figure, it’s very clear that he – either as a historical person or as a syncretic, legendary figure – had an uncanny ability to determine the needs and mental problems of the people around him. This is a rather orthodox explanation (and, in the context of many of the suttas, a convincing one) for why the Buddha would often alter the content or framing of his teachings for new audiences. This also means that, as a student of the Pali Canon today, readers with many different ways of understanding and learning can grasp the teachings through different approaches. Indeed, the Buddha also has the unusual habit of refusing to make statements that would have a deleterious effect on the listener – in the Ananda Sutta (SN 44.10) for instance, the Buddha refuses to answer the wanderer Vacchagotta’s question on the nature of self. In conversation with his disciple Ananda, he explains that a concise answer to the wanderer’s question would only have bewildered him – since the dispensation of an answer would hurt the listener more than help, the Buddha remains silent. It is no stretch to consider this through the lenses of medical ethics and particularly the psychotherapeutic practice propitiated by Carl Jung. Indeed, it seems that this idea – that descriptive and prescriptive statements about the world should improve the welfare of those who hear them, and never worsen it – is a throughline in the Canon. Considering the Buddha as a historical personage and a teacher, it is conceivable that this was the entire rationale for the Buddhist worldview – the doctrine of kamma is meant to illustrate that there is no action without consequence, and that all actions are consequential (even if the consequences are not immediately visible through the limited scope of human thought). It’s worth noting as well that some of the chief “wrong views” were nihilism and eternalism – viewpoints which, through an instrumental lens, imply that there is little significance to human sweat and toil. From this perspective, the goal of the Buddha was entirely therapeutic – he sought to conceptualize the world in a way that would balance the realities of suffering with the significance of human agency. However, students of Buddhism will likely cry foul – how does this view, of an ascetic teacher crafting a therapeutic world-view, explain the stress placed on practices such as mindfulness and meditative practice?
The first explanation is that, like the doctrines of kamma and dependent origination, the practice of meditation is a therapeutic tool. This jives with a modern perspective, where we can quantify changes in quality of life or explain the benefits of meditation through a materialistic lens. However, those of you familiar with Mary the Color Scientist will be familiar with the idea that an objective explanation of a phenomenon often does not give us the most appropriate toolkit to describe or perceive said phenomenon. Indeed, to get to the point: I have found that some of the suttas give me the vocabulary to better describe and interpret my experience. In particular, I have found the Bahiya Sutta to be one of the most illustrative of my experience. In the Sutta, Bahiya of the Bark-Cloth – an unusually devout hermit whose curiosity was roused on hearing word of the Buddha and his companions – seeks the Buddha out, wishing to understand how much farther he has to advance. The Buddha, noting that the fellow is unusually devout but not yet released from the fetters of suffering, delivers a short and concise description of the path forward for Bahiya:
In the usual fashion of such stories, the precisely chosen words of the Buddha immediately releases the mind of Bahiya from its “effluents.” Indeed, this framing is unique to this encounter as far as I am aware – the Buddha speaks often of the doctrine of non-self, but here he takes an unusually direct approach to talking about self as it relates to perception. We could say that the implication here is that egoic consciousness is constantly moderating and mediating our perceptions – but to the worldling, this moderation and mediation is near-invisible as it is simply a part of the machinery of our everyday experience. I believe that my experience, for a half-a-second going up the stairs of Wall Street Station, was a fragmentary experience of awareness unmoderated by egoic consciousness. I realize that this is a bold claim to lay down 3 and a half paragraphs in to this comment – but I wish to go further along this line of reasoning to explain why I find this description of my experience appropriate.
The main concept that has been helpful in unpacking this experience is the word “papañca”. The phrase has historically resisted translation – but modern scholarship has settled on the term “conceptual proliferation,” which addresses much of the content of the phrase. Papañca can be thought of as a tendency of the mind, an attribute of consciousness, or even as the basis for conscious engagement with perception. What is clear in the Canon is that papañca is a process that takes place relatively high up in the chain of cognition – the processing of sense information is the primary antecedent of papañca, and in a normal human mind any interpretation of sense data leads to this almost immediate proliferation of associative thought. In its most simple formulation: “what one feels, one perceives; what one perceives, one reasons about; what one reasons about, one proliferates conceptually/[papañcizes]”. In Concept and Reality, Bikkhu Nanananda discusses this process as one that is initiated by the worldling/thinker, but one that immediately overwhelms the worldling: the proliferative conceptualizations of papañca have their origin in the cognition of the worldling, but the constructs that emerge from this proliferation are FUNDAMENTALLY OUT OF THE WORLDLING’S CONTROL. A further point that helps explain the salvific aspects of the Buddha’s teaching is that the cognitive structures spawned through this process CONTROL THE WORLDLING – egoic consciousness is, in a strange way, a slave to the schemas and associations it constantly creates. I highly recommend Concept and Reality to those curious about this idea and how it relates to a Buddhist model of psychology, but for the time being I want to highlight the idea of papañca mainly in how it relates to self and non-self.
As the Buddha puts forth in the Bahiya Sutta above, one measure of mental advancement is the extrication of “self” from perception and cognition. The processes of papañca, while triggered by sense perception and the cognitive processes that ensue from perception, are highly dependent on an egoic mental schema. From an evolutionary standpoint, egoic consciousness (or at the very least, a mental schema that separates the agent and its physical body from its environment) is clearly an advantage; in order to pursue food, mates, territory and so on, an agent must have some concept of an “I/Me” through which it relates to its environments. In humans, this is painfully obvious in everything we do: “I must make money,” “I must find a sexual partner,” “I must do any other number of things that I imagine will advance my place in the world.” However, it is this very structure of thought that the Buddha claims is to be overcome. Think, for example, of a deeply-held anxiety or desire of yours: does holding this desire make you happy? And regardless of the fact that the cause of your anxiety either has yet to pass or is in the past, does it nonetheless make you unhappy to think of it? And if you wish to not have thoughts surrounding that desire or anxiety, can you simply make them go away? You could just be going about your day, and then an unexpected stimulus thrusts you back into the thought of that anxiety or desire. Thanks to papañca, it is very difficult to avoid a proliferation of thoughts and associations that center ultimately on your desires and fears – both of which are abstractions of uncertain changes that may or may not take place in your future. The Buddha thus posits that a cessation of this egoic mental structure would, in turn, “close the valve” on papañca and cease the flow of conceptual proliferation. This is precisely how I have come to interpet my strange, near-contentless experience: as an extremely brief moment of freedom from the proliferative process, brought on by a novel combination of perceptual contents and a receptive mental state. I have come to this conclusion on the basis of intuition and a highly charitable reading of a 2000 year-old text, so suffice it to say that this is a highly falsifiable kind of claim. However, when I read the words of the Bahiya Sutta, ostensibly spoken 2500 years ago in Savatthi, I cannot help but feel that I now understand the meaning of the words: “When there is no you in connection with that, there is no you there. When there is no you there, you are neither here nor yonder nor between the two.”
A random effortpost for no reason other than that we need something to talk about that isn’t COVID-19 or who’s being banned for what. And because this is a good place to find smart knowledgeable people to add their thoughts on something that’s particularly important to me. The subject:
How to Hire the Best People
This is a subject that comes up frequently here and elsewhere, and often in the annoying context of someone claiming that of course they hire the best people, which is exactly the same claim that everyone else in their industry makes. Which raises the obvious question of who is hiring all the people who aren’t the best. But also the question of how, if it matters, you really do hire the best. I’m in a position to bring some insight here. I work for the Aerospace Corporation, a non-profit that was specifically chartered by Congress to hire the best people in the industry to provide technical oversight for all the lowest-bidder contractors building critical hardware (and for government agencies whose internal hiring and promotion policies often keep them from keeping the best people on staff). We are generally recognized as having done quite well in that area. And in my current position, I’ve had to build a six-person team from scratch. Looking at the people we collaborate with in industry, I think we’ve got the best. Looking at all the generic management training and handbooks I’ve gone through, and seeing how few of the “challenges” they describe apply to my team, I’m even more confident. So, with apologies to Mel Brooks, How I Did It.
I don’t have all the answers, and like I said I want everyone else’s thoughts.
But before you go out and hire the best people, you have to decide whether you really want to hire the best people. Tautologically, of course, everyone wants to hire the best people – but for a local and perhaps very idiosyncratic definition of “best”. Most obsequious yes-men, or cheapest possible headcount, or comeliest secretaries who don’t know the meaning of #MeToo, are fairly common standards of “best”, and I can’t help you there. If you think “best” is defined by technical expertise in the relevant field, you may find that the best people are reluctant to go along with your plan to quickly roll out a Minimum Viable Product with a measure of planned obsolescence. Or to devote their careers to maintaining a legacy system that they didn’t develop. And, being the best and knowing they are the best means that they don’t have to go along with your plans. So you probably don’t actually want the best people. What if you do?
This breaks down into three parts, which I’ll break into sub-posts for convenience.
Step one, where to find the best people?
The best people are likely to already have jobs with the best firms (broadly speaking, not just corporations) in the industry. If those firms are your competitors, then collaborate with them on projects neither of you can do alone. If they’re your customers, work with them to give them products or services tailored to their needs, and if they’re your suppliers, same deal in the other direction. And that means engineer-to-engineer (or whatever) collaboration, not suit-to-suit with the engineers in the background. Your best people will quickly figure out who their best people are. This is an area where the Aerospace Corporation has a particular edge, because collaboration is our core mission. And we have a reputation for honesty, in particular for keeping our partners’ secrets, which is vital if you want to keep collaborating. If you’re just one person planning to build a new team from scratch, work for one of the top firms for a while first.
This isn’t a recommendation for unrestricted poaching. Some industries tolerate that, some don’t, but even if you can get away with it, trying to hire away people who are happy where they are isn’t likely to get you people both talented and loyal. But you’ll know who is talented and dissatisfied with their job, talented but undergoing a change in life circumstances, talented but seeing their firm change around them into something less suited for their talents. And the talented ones who are happy where they are, will point you to their colleagues who are ready for a change.
If you’re really looking for the best people, you probably are one of the best firms in the business, so some of the people you want to hire are already working for you. In a different branch that they’re maybe no longer happy with, or otherwise ready for a change. So make sure your organization isn’t so siloed that the best people in one branch don’t know who the best people other branches are, and make it easy for them to find a better home within your firm so they don’t up and leave it.
Also, you’ll want to participate in industry trade associations, conferences, etc. Have your people sit on industry technical and standards committees. And again, send technical people, not suits (unless you’re looking to hire the best suits). It can be hard to convince the masters of the budget to release money for such an “unproductive” activity, but this is one of the places you find them.
If your industry has a strong hobby/amateur/volunteer component, look there as well (and encourage your own people to participate). Outside of maybe coding, you’re probably not going to hire people strictly on the basis of their unpaid work, but if they’re doing unpaid work on top of their day job, you’re guaranteed enthusiasm and you get a good look at the quality of their work.
You’re probably also hiring talented newcomers right out of college. We’ve all heard education dismissed as “mere signaling” here many times, but the ability to get into and graduate from a top university actually is a pretty good signal. But also look at the second-tier universities with strong programs in your particular area of interest, because a student seeking out one of those programs is a particularly good signal as well. If I’m hiring a plasma thruster specialist, I’ll look at a resume from MIT but I’m going out of my way to look at the resumes from U. Michigan and Georgia Tech.
And don’t just send your recruiters to talk to the graduating seniors (masters, doctors, etc). Do that, and do collaborative work with their researchers, and have your own best people teach part-time at local universities. Most importantly, look at people who are still at least a year out from graduating, and bring them in as undergraduate or graduate interns. By which I mean, people that you pay to do real supporting work on your projects, not people who fetch coffee and run errands for free – if they’re really the best, they won’t settle for less.
Targeted recruitment, by your own HR department or by outside headhunters, can work as well but you have to be smart about it. Or rather, your recruiters have to be smart about it, because they don’t have the knowledge to recognize top technical talent when they see it. But some of them, at least, can learn. The best recruiters will start by handing you a stack of resumes matching all the right keywords but with not a single useful candidate among them – and then ask “what specifically was wrong with that batch?” and tailor their next batch accordingly. But there’s a catch-22 process here, because most recruiters can’t or won’t do this, so part of your plan for hiring the best people requires that you first hire the best people in the HR/recruiting field.
Nepotism isn’t out of the question, so long as it is understood that one of your top people recommending their daughter/cousin/whatever is good for an interview or an internship, not a guaranteed job.
And, finally, you sometimes do find the best people sending their resumes in to your open requistions. There’s a lot of chaff for not much wheat in that stack of resumes, but you are going to want to sort through it to make sure you don’t miss anything.
Step 2, How do you know when you found them?
A lot of this overlaps with Step 1, and I’m not going to repeat it. You found them at the best firms or the best or most appropriate universities, or presenting at conferences or participating in high-end amateur activities. Or already working for you in some other capacity. You know them because your own best people are saying “Bob is one of the best people at [other firm]”, or “Alice is one of the top students in the class I teach at [local university]”. Or one step removed from that, the best people who aren’t ready to make a jump to your firm, recommend one of their colleagues who is.
But that’s not enough to make a hiring decision on. You’ll need to look at their resume. When you do that, focus less on what their credentials are, and more on what they have done. Less on their GPA (you already know it was enough to e.g. graduate from an elite university), and more on what classes they took and what research projects they participated in. What jobs they took on, what their responsibilities were, and how successful they were. What papers they have written or presentations they have made. Extracurricular activities as well, but not so much the things they did for six months to justify a line on the resume but the enduring commitments to things they are passionate about.
If possible, talk to people who have worked with them – starting with whoever recommended them in the first place, but not stopping there. Unfortunately, if you do this through official channels or with the list of references they put on their resume, there’s a good chance you’re just going to get a bland “Bob worked as [job title] for X years and I have nothing bad to say about them”, because that’s all their own HR or legal department will let them say. You’ll want to play the “who do I know that also knows Bob” game, fortunately starting with the person who knows Bob well enough to have recommended him, and looking for people who are willing to talk off the record.
Again, and I cannot emphasize this enough, if you’re hiring people out of college, you really want to bring them in for a real, productive internship first.
Finally, you’re going to have to bring them in for an interview. Ours is nominally a full-day process, but we normally try to make it a short day. And we ask them up front to give us a writing sample (conference paper or the equivalent) and prepare a one-hour technical presentation – because they’re not the best people if they can’t communicate what they do. We start with an hour-plus meeting with the hiring manager and his manager, almost entirely non-technical, and geared as much towards selling the company to them as hearing them sell themselves to us. If possible, we go from that to the technical presentation, with an audience of a dozen or two interested and knowledgeable people and lots of Q&A. After that, a long lunch with no explicit “shop talk” except maybe about the fascinating subject they just presented. Then a three-person panel with the technical peers they are going to be working with; they ask most of the technical questions. Half an hour with an outside manager for a second opinion, and then another half-hour wrap-up session.
I find little value in generic “logic puzzle” questions, or in the lame “tell us your greatest weakness” stuff that everybody has a canned answer to anyway. Technical questions and whiteboard exercises narrowly focused on their area of expertise are vastly superior – my standard was to hand them the schematic of a fairly complex satellite propulsion system and have them go through as much of it as they could, explaining how it worked and why it was designed that way. You are also looking for judgement, character, maturity, and culture fit. It can be clumsy to ask about those things directly, but if there’s no other way it has to be done. You also want to know why they want to work for you, and make sure you and they have the same clear understanding of what the job actually is.
Then bring everyone who was involved in the process into a meeting, and talk it out. If even one of them has a strong opinion that the candidate should not be hired, you should almost always accept their judgement. If most of them are in the “meh” range but one of them has a strongly favorable opinion, there’s probably a reason for that and you should try to understand it. Very few people are so good that everyone recognizes their brilliance, and achieving a broad consensus often means settling for mediocrity. If you’re the hiring manager, you’ll ultimately have to trust your gut, but your gut should trust your people. If you’re setting hiring policy at a higher level, trust your hiring managers and their people – they are far better suited to recognize the best people than is your HR department.
+1 on technical discussion as the best way to interview.
An excellent engineer I’ve worked with used to ask people “how would you implement a flood fill with pixel/vertex shaders” – which is basically the graphics equivalent of “how would you assemble a pocket watch while wearing boxing gloves”. The problem has no efficient solution and the tool is extremely ill-suited for the task, but recognizing the difficulty and being able to throw a few stupid ideas at the wall is what we’re looking for.
Trick questions or google-style “general thinking” puzzles are worse than useless and kind of insulting.
This more or less matches what I went through when I interviewed at RAND, which seems like another on the list of places seriously concerned with hiring the best people. Didn’t get that one, and can’t comment on Aerospace’s policies, as someone decided to hire refugees from Boeing El Segundo instead.
(But it all worked out for the best, at least as far as I’m concerned.)
Step 3 – How do you get them to work for you?
This one often gets overlooked, because it doesn’t matter for the vast majority of employers who are hiring good-enough people. The actual best people, don’t have to take your offer and there may not be another top candidate waiting in line if they don’t.
And the answer usually isn’t “offer them more money”. In some industries, e.g. investment banking, most everybody can be modeled as a simple dollar-maximizer and you can get top people just by offering better compensation than the next firm. Usually, though, the top people are looking for a balance between financial comfort, good working conditions, and interesting or rewarding work. By the time you’re paying an industry-standard salary, you’re approaching the point of diminishing marginal returns on the money side and you’ll have to offer a lot more money to overcome deficiencies in other areas. Which they will probably use to retire early, or quit and start their own company. So if you can afford it, offer salaries at about the top of the industry-standard range but not much beyond that. If money is tight, average salaries can still get you the best people if you do the other parts right. Salaries at the bottom of industry standard (or below) are likely to be an insulting deal-breaker for the best people.
Fortunately, the “interesting or rewarding” work part is usually a given if you’re in a position where you really want the best people. But if you need e.g. a top coder to turn your legacy COBOL-spaghetti system into something that can be maintained in the 21st century, you’re going to want to see if you can structure the job so they spend only half their time on that and the other half on cutting-edge software development. Even in the spaceship-building business, there’s an awful lot of infuriatingly boring stuff that absolutely has to be done if the rockets have to work; we try to make sure to spread that around. Even the interesting work, stays interesting longer if you give people two or three interesting things to do rather than demand absolute focus on one.
Then there’s the good working conditions part, which is one thing the Aerospace Corporation does right.
One part of this is also usually a gimme – the best people really want to work with the other best people, so if you are consistently hiring the best people you’ve got that covered. If you’re only willing to hire a few of the best people for an otherwise-pedestrian department, try to hire top people for the mid-level positions and have them mentor the younger ones – many people find that intrinsically rewarding.
Office space and working hours offer the potential for a double win, increasing your odds of getting the best people and maximizing their productivity when you do. Outside of a few highly-collaborative fields (and then only if everybody is collaborating on the same thing), open offices both dissuade anyone who can do better, and greatly diminish their productivity if you somehow do get them. We aim for two-person shared offices for people hired right out of college, and private offices for mid-career professionals. There’s legitimate debate about where in the 40-60 hour/week range is optimal for productivity; it depends on the project and the people. Young professionals working on an exciting project, will often work 60 hours of their own accord. But you’re going to need senior people as well, and they’re going to want to get home to their families. And longer hours, especially above 60/week, mean earlier burnout.
Another double win comes from giving your people the best tools, the best facilities, and the best organizational support for their work. All of this costs money, which you’ll have to fight for. It’s probably a better use of your time to fight for all this, than to fight for salaries much above industry standard.
The best people also want the respect and the autonomy to do their jobs without micromanagement. That doesn’t mean complete autonomy; the “top” professional who bristles at having their work reviewed or being asked to do it any way other than their way, isn’t really the “top” man any more than the one who can’t communicate their brilliance. But if you’re going to hire the best people, they’re going to need you to trust them. Not just in how they do their work, but how they manage their own subordinates. And their time – so long as the job is getting done, be moderately flexible about specific working hours, work-from-home, etc.
Finally, if you’re doing this in the United States, employer-provided health insurance delenda est, but your employees don’t have any good alternatives for now, so you’re going to have to step up with a range of good plans. Other benefits are less important, but shouldn’t be ignored. By the time you’re talking about snazzy cafeterias and ping-pong tables in every breakroom, the point of diminishing returns comes pretty early for those but (as with salary) you don’t want to drop much below the industry-standard range.
But then we come to the problem of how the people who you hope will work for you, will know all this great stuff. The salary offer, at least, will be explicit. If you’re one of the biggest established firms in the business (or if you can get Forbes to give you a top-10 nod), everyone will know about your great working conditions. If you’re a new or smaller firm, you’re going to need to advertise it.
For part of this, we go all the way back to step one where you’re sending your best people out to collaborate with other firms, universities, etc. While they are learning who all the best people are, the best people will have an opportunity to learn how great you are to work for. The next part is, once again, internships. A top college graduate will have lots of recruiters telling them that their firm is the best one to work for; you want them to be remembering what it was like to work for you. Assuming of course those are favorable memories, so treat your interns right.
At the end, we come back to the interview. For the best people, the interview is as much about selling your firm to them as it is you figuring out whether they are right for your firm. Whatever it is that makes your firm great to work for, make it explicit. Introduce them to the peers they are going to be working with, and show them the facilities they are going to be working at. And most important, listen to their questions. If they don’t have any, they lack the confidence typically associated with the best people. If they do, you’re going to need to answer them.
Having separate offices instead of open spaces should seriously be placed in job offers as a perk. Beats the usual benefit list, yes I know you have private medical insurance and free fruits in the kitchen, everyone does, we don’t care.
One thing that’s hard to gauge as a candidate is the level of intensity in a given workplace. In software, some candidates are looking for a job where they can chill and solve deep puzzles at their own schedule, some enjoy high-pressure environment where a lot of stuff gets done and they’re adding features every week and hammering out releases every month, some are in between. But you can’t really tell from the job offers which companies or teams have which style of work, perhaps because communicating anything less than MAXIMUM INTENSITY AND CHALLENGE looks bad to the suits.
In my latest job search, I tried gauging that by asking what sort of timeframes and deadlines their projects are on. It led to some interesting conversation, and the team that answered “deadlines every week” felt very different in my mind from “every two months or so.”
I think this is the main problem with your article (not that I didn’t find it enjoyable !): only the best companies can afford to hire the best people. If you are a small startup, you could always say, “work for us and soon we’ll all be millionaires !”, but the best people aren’t stupid — they know this is most likely untrue (statistically speaking). Realistically, your offer would be more similar to this:
In other words, there’s not much a small startup can do to attract top talent. So, my question to you is, “how can I hire adequate people ?”.
There is a huge relative gulf though, if you are a small startup then one kick-ass employee (probably one of the founders) has an out sized influence on the outcome when compared to one kick-ass employee being folded into a massive multinational, and that multinational has to spread its great employees out or end up with brilliant programmers and a shit sales staff or an HR department that can’t hold things together.
There are some top people who would actually be attracted by Bugmaster’s hypothetical honest pitch.
Mostly though, the rules for startups that want to hire the best people are, first, don’t overcommit. A small startup can roll out one product, not very polished, and not gong to Change the World or make the founders billionaires. Stick with a more reasonable ambition, like being e.g. the best sushi restaurant in town. Or inventing a time machine so you can go back to the time when the remaining fruit wasn’t impossibly out of reach of two-guys-in-a-garage “tech” startups.
And second, start by hiring a first-rate admin person. Seriously, the first person in your small company that makes an actual salary rather than being paid in sweat equity, should probably be the admin person. And your first interview question should be, “How would you go about legally hiring yourself for this job?”. Get that right, and the number of jobs everyone else winds up having to do drops enormously.
There is a bit of ‘how can we compete against Ford/GM in the auto-market in 1945’ with some software startups now.
You are not going to hire anyone I respect with this policy.
Admittedly software is a weird place, and one with a stunningly wide range of outcomes. But I know plenty of people who think they make a great “industry standard” salary, that is actually something like a third of what an actual top employer pays. People who say “Oh, well, if you try to get people via money, you just get greedy bastards–we recruit based off compensating differentials!” tend to be that low band, and the worst part is, the compensating differentials tend to go the other way. Shops that pay you actual market rate care a lot more about building offices that actually don’t suck, giving you high end gear, and making it pleasant to get things done, because they know they’re investing $bignum in those people anyway. Not always–I left Google because it had become a miserable place to work, for me at least–but the smart money, in software, is that the guy who pays you better probably also treats you better, and I know the exceptions by name.
(This, by the way, is fractally true: Any FAANG company is way nicer than ~random software shop. The by far least pleasant of those, for most people, is Amazon. They also pay the least.)
I actually interned at Aerospace many, many years ago, in $PURE_SOFTWARE_DEPARTMENT. It was a perfectly fine summer for a college freshman, but made me pretty sure I didn’t want to work there, at least not on anything but, you know, rockets. I was not super impressed with (my fraction of) the company as a software shop. (I don’t think they were even particularly trying to hire the very best.) I would be much more interested if you asked me to diagnose a thruster, though I assume as a layman I would…flame out…miserably. Maybe the propulsion engineering world is more normal, in which case your advice is good, and I certainly would perk up if offered a private office (he said from the desk in his 1BR apartment…), but in software, you’re basically describing a common set of lies told by shitty employers.
I will, however, heartily endorse a lot of what you say about good problems and good people. I won’t even think about a job where the work isn’t interesting and I don’t actually want to spend time with my coworkers, and this is something that is a lot cheaper, and better for your company anyway, than paying people to work with people they hate.
@John Schilling
Thanks for your insight on hiring. My confidence that I will know who the best people are was shaken a few years back when some acceptable, but not perfect recommendations I made taught me that I am too biased towards other personalities similar to my own and confuse that with quality. I still don’t know how to avoid this. But given what I have observed as the cost of mistakenly hiring the wrong person, identifying the wright people is absolutely a skill I want to work on.
However, in such cases where one does make a mistake, do you have any advice on how to get rid of people do not meet the required level of quality? The one thing I keep hearing from my management is that it is absolutely impossible to fire people for mere laziness or incompetence. Is this true?
Fortunately (for me, not you) I don’t have much experience on that side. One of the things Aerospace does right is hire good people for their HR department, and tell them to structure things so that all their other people don’t have to get bogged down in HR stuff. I’ve been told that if I ever need someone fired, I tell HR and they’ll make it happen (presumably with some effort required on my part, e.g. documenting poor performance over a period of time). And I know that it has been done in other departments, so I know that with good HR people it is possible and not impractically difficult even in California, but I’ve been lucky enough never to have to see the process at close range.
The effort post is appreciated, but I think you’re solving the wrong problem. The level of effort you’re discussing implies considerably more senior people then most of us around here are hiring or being hired to be. I run through a version of the process you describe in my department, but a miniaturized version because you can’t do all day interviews for positions at the level I hire at. I’d be curious to hear more of what you have to say about sussing out who’s the best when you don’t have all day, and when all the candidates’ experience is limited to grad school, internships, and maybe a couple years on a job.
We use the same process for mid-career professionals and people fresh out of college (almost always grad school; we almost never hire fresh-out bachelor’s candidates). And it’s only an all-day interview for the candidate :-), it’s half a day plus lunch for the hiring manager, an hour or two for everyone else involved.
You may be right that it would have to be streamlined a bit for candidates with just a BS – by the time they’ve got the MS, they’ve got enough of a record that we can be reasonably confident by the time we bring them in for an interview. I think we average one hire per two or three interviews, and that’s a reasonable investment for a new full-time employee in a position where you need the best.
ETA: When we hire interns, that’s usually done on the basis of a professor’s recommendation (ideally one we trust from past experience), a transcript, a brief interview with one of our recruiters at their campus, and a phone interview with our department. About a third of our interns turn into people we ask to interview for a full-time job when they graduate.
Interesting. I’ve worried that my 90ish minute interviews for good candidates are too long, maybe we should take them to lunch. I usually end up talking too much trying to get them to talk, lunch might loosen them up. We try to bring in 5ish, and usually get it, but we get very little meaningful help from HR, so we try to hire from the ranks of our interns and RAs, and that definitely works out the best. Intern hiring I’ve delegated.
Our HR people are very good at the logistics of setting up interviews, at least. Everything between “bring this person in for an interview”, and their showing up in my office after a night in a decent hotel, is transparent to me and fairly painless for the candidate. And as I said, they can be trained to do targeted recruitment fairly well rather than just scanning for buzzword + GPA, but that does require work on my part.
When we used to do true full-day interviews, checking in with HR at 8:00 AM and often not out until 5:00, the candidates were often visibly fatigued by the end of it. Now that it’s more 8:30-3:30, with a lunch in the middle, and that works pretty well for everyone. Definitely recommend the lunch, if your schedule permits.
And agreed, hiring your own interns is absolutely the best path if you can pull it off. It’s really the only good reason to have interns, IMHO.
I’ve had 1-2 one full time hires a year for the last several years, and I don’t think I’ve had a different HR rep for more than 2 in a row. They’ve all been corporate HR who didn’t know anything about defense or aerospace, and couldn’t contribute much beyond scheduling and phone screening. I’ve largely given up on training them because of the turnover and some have been actively obstructionist. One insisted that it was unfair and contrary to company policy to have people submit writing samples they’d published. I had to go over his head, and he never forgave me for it. Frankly, I have a hard time imagining a world where HR was helpful and informed, that’s too much even to dream of…
We actually get good work out of our interns, but we have a lot of time consuming research and data tasks we can use to keep them busy with minimal supervision. Our biggest trouble is some corporate policies that restrict who we can hire, which reduces our ability to keep them around longer than a semester. I try to promote them to RAs, and then RAs to analysts whenever I can, I think it’s a real pity that the practice isn’t more common.
Hiring is very hard. I’ve heard people say that 1/3 of good hirings is a good rate.
IMHO the best method is also the most expensive and hard to do right; just hire people temporarily and decide you want them a month later. It obviously does not scale well so you still need to preselect. I’ve heard of long, multi stage interviews and tests, but at the end of the day the only way to see if someone is good at their job is…look them perform said job.
But honestly it won’t matter if you have the best people if your internal processes aren’t up to par. Companies only scale well when there are processes in place to fill with people. Talent alone will not save you and may even flee more structured environments.
The truly best people, whom you’re hiring away from other jobs they already have, won’t agree to such an offer. They’d have to quit their job, and move. That’s a big risk and investment, which people don’t take for something that is less than a sure thing.
You could maybe do that with those who are just starting to work.
I think this is more of a way to find decent, hardworking workers who are a good fit to your company. Not the best ones, but good ones.
It works better if you assume that e.g. all of the best people and all of the best jobs are in Silicon Valley, and that most of those jobs won’t last more than 2-3 years anyway. But as a general solution, yeah, it usually fails the “how do you get the best people to work for you” problem from Part 3.
I’d say that in this economy, when revenue from advertising is expected to go down, startups have to do massive cuts because venture capital is drying up, anybody who quits a decent more or less stable job in Silicon Valley for a month-long test run:
a) Either hates their current job so much they’d quit it anyway and go on unemployment.
b) Are financially independent and this is a job they’d like to try
c) Are dumb or irresponsible, in which case they aren’t the best people.
Presumably, you don’t hire the best people only in a good economy.
I can only speak to the software development field, but this assumption will lead you astray very quickly there. And I think that’s worth calling out because it seems to be quite common. Silicon Valley has a very specific culture, a very specialized environment, and a very large barrier to entry for new people trying to move in. All of those things create strong filters that keep people out of the Valley regardless of their capabilities. If you restrict your search for the “best people” to SV, you’ll miss everyone who didn’t move there for any of those reasons. This is not a criticism of Silicon Valley; it’s a criticism of the idea that all the best people in a globally relevant field can be found wherever the highest concentration of those companies happens to be. Silicon Valley has about 2% of the tech companies in the U.S; it probably also has about 2% of the “best people” to work at tech companies.
By way of comparison, San Francisco has the highest density of restaurants in the U.S. But no one would seriously suggest “look for someone who worked in San Francisco” to a restaurant that wanted to hire one of the “best” cooks.
WTF is “the best people”? Maybe I’m a European, but that notion kind of irks me. If you are hiring people, you have an organization, and the culture and leadership is more important than getting “the best people”.
Sure, some people are dimwits. Some are mediocre. Some are good. But I’m pretty sure that separating “the best” from the good is a pretty pointless task.
People are productive in context. I’ve had jobs where I was the star employee with great results and my boss heaped praise on me. I’ve had jobs where I did nothing of value for months. (These might have been the same job.) In the first case, I had a boss I trusted, a clear mission and mandate, and passion for what we where doing. In the second case, the corporate leadership was a bunch of idiots who spent their time on office politics instead of engineering and no-one had any faith in the success of the product. Am I “the best people” or not? I sure think so, IF I find the right context.
Another example: A friend of mine managed a task force of stereotypical autistic engineers with a very narrow area of expertise. Friend has headhunted them from all over a vast organization to form this special team, which turned out to be easy since most of their bosses actively wanted to get rid of them since they were so hard to manage. Friend put all of them on the assigned task, did all communication with the outside world by himself, shielding the engineers from everything that wasn’t their single area of expertise. They got great results, fixed a number of huge long-standing issues, and then everyone was fired because of office politics. Where they “the best people”?
If I were to form a company or a team, I wouldn’t care much if I got people from the top 5% of my colleges compared to top 50% of my colleges. (Sure, my colleges are already pre-selected for excellence.) Hell, I don’t even know who the top 5% of my colleges are. I would make sure that I had good people, and I would put my effort into the mission.
That means you aren’t working at the tasks where you need the best people. Fair enough, most industries and companies aren’t, and they’re still important.
There is truly a staggering difference between a good worker and the best worker in some fields. The space industry is presumably one such industry.
Research consists of some labs with the top people that do paradigm breaking research, and they do need the truly best people. And then there are a lot of other people who work hard at the minutiae of knowledge, slowly, grain by grain building the monolith of science.
So during my entire career, I have never encountered a single “the best people” person among all of my good colleges, since I would have instantly noticed them if so was the case? Sorry but no. I file this in the same box as the x10 programmer myth.
I know a few programmers who I would say are probably 10× better than your ordinary programmer.
The real use case for hiring the best people is that teams tend to be constrained by coordination costs, which grow triangularly with the size of the team (if a team of 2 is has cost x, a team of 3 will have cost 3x, a team of 4 will have cost 6x, and a team of 5 will have cost 10x). Having more productive individual team members will thus allow you to have a more productive team at a given size.
The 10x programmer idea likely has the healthy part of its origin in this same phenomena (for the less healthy part, see the nnpp article on the c2 antipatterns wiki). Unless you are setting your standards of competence very low, it is very difficult to find one programmer who can consistently do ten times the work of a single “competent” programmer. However, finding a single programmer who can have the same output as a team of 10 “competent” programmers is much easier. Some of this is due to high individual variation in the field (2x or 3x programmers aren’t that hard to find, by this metric). But much more of it is due to the costs of having such a large team.
In my workplace, it’s pretty clear that there are some top contributors–people whose input is important in every project they’re involved in, who can be counted on to meet deadlines, who will bring genuine insight into discussions, etc. I’m thinking there’s probably legitimately a factor of ten or so range there.
I’m very sceptical of this “factor of 10” thing, except as a rhetorical device, because it implies a non-arbitrary scale.
And I can totally accept that there’s a non-arbitrary ordering on how good at the jobs you’re interested in people are, and hence that you can say “Bob is better than Alice but not as good as Carol, so let’s call Bob a 5, Alice a 4 and Carol a 6”. But any order-preserving transformation still gives you a valid rating system, and I’m dubious that there’s a single non-arbitrary choice of transformation.
In particular, “will contribute 10x as much value to $task” strikes me as unlikely to be at all constant – I suspect that if Bob is consistently better than Alice then that will generally manifest as adding twice as much value in some tasks but 20 times as much in others.
> I’m very sceptical of this “factor of 10” thing, except as a rhetorical device, because it implies a non-arbitrary scale.
You are right to be skeptical. But I’ve also encountered a handful of people like that. People who are so driven and visionary that they are able to outclass just about everybody else they are working with.
How about:
Is as productive as a team of 10 average programmers.
Brooks’ Law is the real killer here, I’d guess.
IIRC the whole 10x programmer thing has been measured again and the actual multiplier is 7x best case.
Which is still very impressive.
Best case? There are problems where an average programmer just fails, like those that require more complicated cases of algorithm design. An average programmer would be fairly unlikely to succeed before dying of old age, whereas some can finish the task in days or hours.
You need to make some assumptions about the tasks before you can set any finite per-task upper limit on productivity compared to average.
[citation needed]
7x is comparing what to what?
Because there are many tasks outright impossible for some programmers (for example me) that were done by other programmers.
I am clearly far more than 7x more productive than some programmers (that had NEGATIVE work output, as in “doing nothing would be preferable”).
And there are people 10x, 100x, 1000x more productive than me in specific areas of programming. In some cases I would spend my entire remaining lifetime learning how to do something and not reach this ability.
—-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 is a tired, old but fitting example.
You can easily find many other cases where unusual level of incompetence, compared to other programmers (at the same time), resulted in massive damage.
You can easily find cases of massively productive people.
One thing that distinguishes “10x programmers” from 1x (and frankly I think 10x is an underestimate. But that may be self-serving bias on my part) is that they have good taste. It’s a tricky thing to define (here’s an example of someone trying), but I’d summarise it as the ability to foresee the consequences of a design decision beyond its immediate context; the better ‘taste’ you have, the more distant holes and corners you can avoid falling into and painting yourself into respectively. It generally tends to be an intuitive thing — tasteless code just looks ugly and you can’t necessarily articulate why, but that aesthetic judgment is capturing a kind of compressive learning about what kinds of things come back to bite you in the backside. (This is also what programmers are usually talking about when they describe a line of code, function, or entire architecture as ‘elegant’.)
If you have a team of 1x programmers churning out code, they’ll all look individually productive — they keep getting features committed, bugs fixed, and problems apparently solved — but what you don’t see is the steady accumulation of technical debt in the form of tasteless implementations, which mean that the next feature needs rewrites in twelve places, there’s thirty bugs from unanticipated interactions, and new problems somehow keep materialising. Whereas if one or two 10x programmers do the work, their feature implementations will have an uncanny knack of turning out to be flexible in just the right way to make next week’s unexpected must-have feature easy to implement, their data structures make it so easy to reason about the program’s state that bugs are rare, and the problems the army of programmers was busy solving never arise in the first place.
To give an (opinionated!) example from my own experience: the team I work in maintains the sfc (Solarflare) Linux driver. There’s been only about five people on it at a time for most of the six years I’ve been part of it (sometimes less if you don’t count the people whose time is split between it and, say, our PXE and UEFI drivers), but almost everyone who’s worked on it has had good taste. By comparison, Mellanox (one of our competitors) has so many driver engineers that they send about a dozen to a conference to which we send one; but to judge from the code they send upstream (I’m not just talking about their drivers, here, but also the patches they make to the networking core), most of them have quite poor taste (at least by my exacting standards). The result is that they have a lot more churn — they have lots of patches and lots of lines added or changed in every kernel cycle — but don’t actually achieve that much in extra capabilities. (To be clear, I’m aware that they’re maintaining two drivers for very different pieces of hardware — mlx5 and mlxsw — and we don’t have any equivalent to the latter. My observations above are after allowing for that.) And these aren’t even ‘1x programmers’; they’re kernel hackers and they’re well above the average for the software industry as a whole.
Am I saying that Solarflare’s way is perfect? No. Five engineers isn’t really enough for everything we want to get done, and it’s hard to find new ones (or hang on to the ones you have) when your standards are this high. But I don’t think you can mix the strategies either — a programmer with taste will hate working in the same sandbox as an army without it, with their previous bad decisions constantly throwing up obstacles to his code and frustrating his designs.
Depending on what you’re doing, the 1x army may be the right choice from a business perspective. It’s certainly worked for plenty of companies in the past, at least in the short-to-medium term. But if you want to create the kind of engineering that becomes an institution and the bedrock of multiple generations’ work… well, Unix and C were not created by 1x programmers, but by a handful of hackers with some of the best taste ever seen, who by lucky happenstance were all gathered together in Bell Labs at the right time.
@ec429 I love that description of “taste” – yesterday I was shown an API by an open source project that is trying to do much the same of what the product I work on does, and I was so, so jealous of that API. It reminded me of what I was imagining when I wrote about how we should rewrite our API. I was inspired, and would like us to replace what we do with that open source API.
My team would be for sure better off if our previous product was built by that engineer with that taste – we’d be better able to support our existing product, add new features and integrate with other stuff.
I don’t believe that’s what most people are talking about when they say 10x Engineer though.
FWIW I’ve worked with a lot of programmers, and the difference between the terrible ones and the average ones is as stark as the difference between the average ones and the best ones.
When you ask the terrible programmer to do something, the end result usually prompts you to say, “WTF even is this, why is this my life”, followed by, “huh, I’ve spent more time trying to fix this than it would’ve taken to just do it myself”.
When you ask the average programmer to do something, the end result usually is, “this is actually pretty good; there’s room for improvement but I like the way it turned out”.
When you ask the best programmer to do something, he usually says, “actually, it’s already done, because I knew this would be needed so I did it last week”. When you look at the resulting code, you can’t help but say, “I have no idea what kind of black magic this guy used, but I’ve learned more about programming just by reading this code than I’ve ever learned during my entire career”.
And then the code is unmaintainable by anyone else…
Pretty similar in a lot of fields. As someone mentioned above, a lot of being a 10x, is solving coordination problems, all the better if they are done before ever becoming problems.
A lot of the asks towards me stop being a big issue once I started saving source data I knew was valuable in ways that were easy to manipulate.
However, as to what Aapje said, a lot of it seems unmaintainable by anyone who is not me.
@Aapje:
No, that would be the guy somewhere between the first two options.
A decent programmer learns to write maintainable code – if only because otherwise they tend to be stuck maintaining it, rather than continuing to work on interesting new code.
Many of us can recall lightbulb moments, such as when I realized that alomost no programmers educated in the past decade or two can correctly use pointer arithmetic in C, and stopped using that contruct myself. Or the time I wrote code with a migraine, that worked first time with all the tests I could contrive (an unusual occurence) – but was almost incomprehensible to me, post migraine, or to anyone else in my team. (My coworkers informed me quite firmly that (a) I wouldn’t be allowed to check it in and (b) that next time I had a migraine, I would take sick leave, not try to meet a deadline.)
I work in Federal HR, and I agree that the notion irks me though I get where that’s coming from. The federal government, especially out in the field, doesn’t even try to claim that they hire the best people. My job is to figure out how to get mediocre employees to perform adequately and to fire abysmal employees to make way for the mediocre.
Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to work HR for someone that has the best employees, but I like my Agency’s mission and the potential for student loan forgiveness, so I’ll stay where I am for now.
As noted in the intro, for most jobs you either don’t want the best people, or don’t need them and can’t afford them in the numbers required. The Federal government is quite rightly optimized for hiring mediocre people and providing an environment structured so mediocre people can (usually) get the job done. For the jobs that actually require the best people, they had the sense to create e.g. the Aerospace Corporation.
We do offer student loan forgiveness, and we make that clear in the interview, but I’ve never had any of my people take the offer. Too much overlap between the people we hire and the people who get academic scholarships, full-ride TAs and fellowships, or jobs at firms that will pay for their postgraduate education.
This depends on the part of government, though. Some really sharp scientists work at an agency like NOAA, and might not be able to do the same work anywhere else.
From that perspective though, Aerospace Corporation is kind of the government. Yes, they are very explicitly an independent, nonprofit company, but they were created by and for the federal government for the express purpose of collecting smart people in one place to do smart stuff for government space programs while remaining nominally independent / free of conflicts of interest (in particular IV&V for spy satellites).
Their scope has expanded somewhat since their founding, but Aerospace Corp would not exist in anything like its current form without the direct involvement of various federal agencies.
The sort of smart people you can imagine working at NOAA are exactly the sort of people who end up at Aerospace.
From my 20 years of experience you are incorrect. Strongly disagree. For context, I am a tenured engineering professor at arguably the best university in the world. We grab the best scientists and engineers from all over the world.
On my team right now there is at least a 10x difference between my best and worst researcher (MS, PhD, Post-doc, professional scientists). Of course the measure is hard, but the one I use is something like (scientific advance)/(my heartache and effort). The best come up with brilliant insights and solve problems I thought impossible. The worst suck up an incredible amount of time and arguably result in less science being done in the group than if they weren’t here at all.
My guess: people who don’t believe in 10x are either inexperienced or not working on incredibly hard/novel problems.
In the very different context of academic economics, 10X would be an understatement. Judged by productivity, articles published in good journals or citation counts, the top people are considerably more than ten times as productive as the average.
I know that your assumption that the best people have tons of other options is incorrect, because I’m someone with way too much talent (this is not the comment for false modesty) and a very low-status resume, and I know that there are more people like me out there suffering in unemployment or underemployment than basically anyone imagines.
This suggests an obvious strategy for hiring that no one employs (and that I have not yet had the chance to employ due to the aforementioned languishing – I’m available if anyone in this comment section is hiring or investing, btw) – either don’t take resumes, or take them and deliberately throw out the ones that look the best, then set them a very difficult problem in your business domain (this also has the positive effect of filtering out more high-status candidates who expect to waltz in based on their high-status resumes). Pay them on the low end of reasonable and reap great savings, but still reasonably so it’s an improvement over low-status underemployment. With a few tweaks you will also have the most gender-balanced team in your industry. (basically, specifically encourage women to apply because so many of them have been discouraged out of the market by arbitrary rejection as low status (and the more an industry talks about it, the more they consider women inherently low status – looking at you, “tech”) – the difficult part is that they also saw insincere statements about equal opportunity on the websites of the companies that arbitrarily rejected them.)
The fact that no one does this says a lot about the demand for talent (practically nonexistent – most things are done by just sort of inefficiently throwing bodies at them and accepting mediocrity to high-failure as a result) and the demand for high-status resumes (high in every industry, because they increase your status as an employer by being around). Rocket science is probably better than most knowledge work fields because of the dangerous explosions when someone gets it wrong.
Disclaimer: not in a position to get anyome hired.
What field are you in, and how do you measure your talent against others?
Personally, I am guilty as charged of rejecting resumes that seem too good to be true, because (in my experience) 99% of them are. I am reminded of a guy whose resume said, “I have STRONG skills in probability and statistics” (yes, STRONG in all caps). I marked his resume as “rejected”, but my boss said, with an evil gleam in his eye, “Oh no, Bugmaster. Oh no no. We’re definitely interviewing this guy.” So we did, and of course not only had he never heard of the Bayes theorem, he couldn’t even tell us the chances of getting N heads in a row on a coin flip.
Sure, obviously it’s a bit unfair to reject everyone with a seemingly-padded resume, but you’ve got to see it from our perspective, too. We’ve only got 24 hours in a day; we need to hire someone sometime this quarter; and thus we can’t afford to waste time on sifting out pretentious phonies from people who only seem like pretentious phonies.
By the way, we’ve also learned to spot the people who are, in fact, very smart and hardworking; but whose attitude consistently is, “I have more talent in my little pinkie than all of you combined, so let me show you idiots how it’s done”. The statement might even be true, but we can’t work with someone who refuses to work with us.
An incompetent employee is a mile better than a highly competent person moving in the wrong direction.
Seems like that’s a problem with the recruiters doing 1st-step resume filtering, though. If the only way you get past the first stage is to copy and paste the magic terms, of course you’re only going to get resumes that are “too perfect.”
We took over a year to hire someone for a long-term spot in our department because our recruiter kept sending us people who clearly would leave as soon as they had better prospects, which meant that there were likely candidates quite suited to us who had been rejected for not knowing how to game the system.
Lying on resumes is a related but subtly different risk (the whole institution of the resume encourages lying!) – the ones you need to throw out are the ones that look real and good (but throw out the fakes too). The point is to ignore candidates who are capable of passing resume filters (with or without lying) – they’re too expensive for you and probably not exceptional, the business value they provide is precisely having a high-status resume and anything else that may come with them is incidental.
Then you try the “bad” ones by fire. (Don’t haze them, just realistically simulate something hard you actually do.)
Then you underpay them (but not really underpay; pay well, just less than the high-status resume would have cost you, because you’re buying worthless actual talent and not an expensive resume).
Then you profit with your cheap and highly skilled organization. Applying for diversity grants for your new 70% female workforce (assuming the software industry and ballparking) is only ethical if you share the proceeds with them.
You can’t start a company without a high-status resume yourself, but if you have one, this is how to build a team. It should work for any knowledge work domain that doesn’t require some sort of licensure (like lawyers). You can even buy them degrees and licensure yourself, depending on how onerous that is (too onerous for lawyers, incredibly common for MBAs, most things are in between).
pay well, just less than the high-status resume would have cost you
And then your people figure out that if they managed to finagle a high-status resume they would be earning more for the same work, and they leave you for someone who will pay them full whack, and all the applicants to replace them now know the trick so you’re back with “is this resume any indication of the actual ability of the applicant?” problem.
This doesn’t work, for a few reasons. First, you have overhead. A full time employee costs considerably more than his salary because of taxes, insurance, benefits, and other overhead, so paying 10% below average, or whatever, doesn’t save you that much. Second, there are costs to bad employees. They screw things up, they take more manager time, they get less done, they’re bad for morale, and so on. a strategy of bringing on lots of employees who have a higher chance of being bad is more costly than sheer salary.
The main reason these things don’t work (imo) is that lots and lots of people have conditional productivity, and assessing them individually misses that point.
I work in technology and am a hiring manager. We generally work together when interviewing and hiring, so I see the process beyond just the people I hire.
In my experience, any female candidate who appears to remotely possibly be minimally capable is interviewed and if it still appears they may be able to do the job, it’s an instant hire. The recruiters also give them an explicit boost where you’d have to justify why you couldn’t hire them to senior management. The process for males is much more competitive and difficult, with perhaps 1/100 resumes of men who meet the minimal qualifications posted being interviewed.
So while perhaps there are some places where a female applicant gets short shrift, in my experience for the last few decades in technology, the opposite is true. A competent female technologist can pretty much get hired anywhere they want, at least in all the mid-size and larger companies I know. To the point where I’ve considered trying to talk one of my daughters into going into technology, just for the job security, because I know she’s smart enough, but she has other options she prefers.
When we were still hiring, our HR department told us explicitly, “you have to hire a woman”. When we replied by saying, “ok, where do we get her ? None have applied so far”, the response was, “you have to hire a woman, finding her is your problem”. We did end up interviewing about 3 women. One was totally incompetent; one was probably very good at her job, but we were hiring for a totally different job; one was excellent and we would’ve loved to hire her, but she chose a bigger company that paid more and was within walking distance of her house.
> our HR department told us explicitly, “you have to hire a woman”
Did you get that in writing in some fashion? Because that strikes me as a clear case of gender discrimination.
Of course it is – but who is going to sue? The men who applied/interviewed for the job, never heard back, and just assumed “well they must have found someone more qualified?”
Discrimination in favor of underrepresented groups is allowed by the courts in the US and EU.
I intend to be the best people.
How do I get found?
(I’ve already failed step 1: Don’t be about to graduate during a pandemic)
This is an interesting article to read today, as I start a new job at a new company.
To put it in context–I have about 20 years experience as an actuary, and/but have a somewhat odd resume. Most actuaries specialize more than I have–I’ve done a lot of different things, but I’m not an expert in any one thing. I’m very good at what I do, but fundamentally, what I do is explain things usefully to decision-makers. One challenge in the type of roles I fill is that relatively few of the projects I work on can be talked about. In the last 3 years, I’ve worked on one projects that I can disclose enough details to give a clear idea of the size and scale.
The role I’m leaving has the best manager I’ve ever worked for, I was very well-regarded and well-liked, and I took a slight cut in both pay and rank to leave. So how did my new employer find me, and get me to work for them?
The company I’m now working for, I first worked with in 2010 when I supported a transaction between them and my then-employer. A couple years ago, when I started looking at options, they were on my short list of desirable options. That’s a typical timeframe in my industry–people go to firms where they’ve known key people for years. I was interested because they’re very stable, and very long-term focused–they’ve consistently refused to optimize short-term at the expense of the long-term.
My overall take-aways would be two:
One, be clear in your own mind what you need, what you want, and what you don’t want. A lot of people hire and they need someone who can do one thing well, and one thing adequately–but they say want to hire the best person in a general field. They waste a lot of time interviewing people who can’t do the one thing they need done, and end up hiring someone who might be good at something else, but is only adequate at what they actually need. “Best” depends on what you are trying to get done.
Two, sell your unique advantages–you’ll lose some people, but the ones you get will be likely to be better fits. If you’re the one tech firm that’s in {random location}, there may well be a few people for whom that’s a huge advantage. If you pay normal salaries, but work a more predictable than typical schedule, sell it.
This was very enjoyable to read. I’m not sure how much of it was my monkey brain telling me that I am one of those best people, and this is how I would like to be treated.
Actually, I’m probably no longer one of those best people. I’m older now, and the need to learn the latest-and-greatest way to do everything every year or two is pulling me down in a dozen different ways. I also lack the energy I once had.
Also, I was probably never at the same ability level of most of those in the general class of software engineers adept enough to be a household name among other software engineers. I was close, but not quite there. And for jobs requiring lots of negotiation with powerful non-technical people, I was never even close. So I never was quite the type of person you want to hire, much as I’d like to think I was and still am.
At any rate, I am at least in the category where some effort is taken to convince the prospective employee that they want to work for you. The things you suggest would work well for me. Maximum possible income would not work for anyone with an actual vocation, because they actually want to do the kinds of things you are proposing to pay them for. Money needs to be neither exploitive nor insulting, and I at least would want insurance against the case where most of the job turns out to be uninspiring (to me). But I only started going for best total compensation when I started thinking “how soon can I retire” rather than “where I can I find the next fun chapter of my work life”.
Thank you for this long essay, John. I’m reading this from an employee’s point of view, so I don’t know if there’s anything missing from what you listed, but the points you list ring true.
I imagine that the part where you show the candidate around the office to illustrate working conditions and let them ask questions is more important to experienced workers. They have specific ideas on what exactly they disliked about previous job, and what part of working conditions matter specifically to them that you might not have thought of as important. For example, if I interview for a job, I would like the see the bathrooms, kitchens, depth of the desks, and the EFFING WINDOW BLINDS. Why the heck is it so hard to put something on the windows so that the sun doesn’t glare into my monitor for an hour every evening during half of the year?
In my current job and the previous one, it also helped me a lot that the interviewer could tell me specifically about the first project that I’d be working on if they hire me, and meet the person who’d be my supervisor for that project. Even if I might work on something entirely different three month later, this gives a useful example, and a hook to ask questions about. Sadly some projects are secret enough that the employer can’t tell enough details to a candidate before they’re hired, and I have no idea what they could do about that.
I am worried about the possibility that those who recover from COVID-19 do not actually gain immunity to the virus. There is precedent for that being the case with similar viruses, and the few studies I’ve seen seem inconclusive. But with Europe opening up again, herd immunity seems to the consensus solution, debating only on the best way to mitigate deaths until we reach that point. And yet it might not be a solution at all. Why is no one even talking about this?
There has been quite a bit of discussion of this. I think the main thing is that with all other coronaviruses that infect humans, people do in fact appear to develop some amount of immunity for some amount of time, and also for all influenza viruses and rhinoviruses. The viruses that people don’t develop any immunity to seem to be in fairly different families. Furthermore, for influenza viruses, one of the reasons why immunity doesn’t last that long is that they mutate fairly quickly, while coronaviruses tend to mutate more slowly, so it’s likely that immunity will tend to last somewhat longer than for flus.
But there was also a good paper early in the epidemic that modeled various scenarios based on longer or shorter lasting immunity. Some of these models ended up developing an interesting biennial seasonal pattern, and some had major outbreaks up until 2024, but all eventually settled into something comparable to influenza (with maybe slightly higher mortality).
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/24/science.abb5793
So why do we develop immunity to some viruses and not others?
My imperfect understanding is that some viruses attack our immune system’s memory, others mutate so fast that this memory is quickly obsolete, and still others never leave our bodies and sometimes just go dormant. Of course, the most common reason for us to not develop immunity to a virus is that the virus kills us before our immune system figures out how to beat it.
In the case of lentiviruses, we “are” the virus. Only 1.5% of your DNA codes for genes that could make proteins for you… most of “your” genome is old retrovirus. Some still active like LINE and SINE elements, most filled with random stop codons and dead (but re-activate-able, like HERV-1).
And of course HIV is still putting copies of itself into our genome.
As far as coronavirus, the problem is that it’s RNA, RNA has no error checking and just mutates all over the place.
I’m loathe to disagree with a telomerase on this topic, but can you source the 1.5%? That seems quite low to me and I’d like context. Does that include things like activator regions and structural portions dedicated to proteins?
How do I reply to Randy’s reply? And how is ‘Tegridy Farms doing?
Yes, the regions of human DNA that actually code for protein are only 1.5% of the genome. Another 1.5% codes for RNA that isn’t translated. There are centromere and telomere regions that have functions, and of course there are various effects on transcription from the vast junk and LINE + SINE areas…
…but you could fit several human genomes onto Chromosome One by itself… you’d have to modify the promoters and modify the whole human design a bit to correct for the resulting smaller cells (as birds and bats both do to a lesser degree, they have less junk DNA).
I’m at a loss to pick a source, there aren’t big disagreements between genome databases… pick any of them.
I don’t seem to be able to reply to either Randy M or to your attempt to reply to him, either.
Anyway, I think it would take a lot more than “a bit” of modification to be able to stick the entire human genome on one chromosome and get the sort of gene expression resulting in
normalhuman development.How much depends on the extent to which the exact 3D structure of our chromatin is critical for things like the ability of various DNA-binding proteins (polymerases, transcription factors, epigenetic machinery) to access specific regions of DNA in a regulated manner.
And how much of the regulation of gene expression is a matter of transmitting mechanical forces from the ECM to cytoskeleton to nuclear lamina to the chromatin.
It’s kind of like saying “Most of a book is just dead weight, the real information is the tiny amount of ink on the pages, you could squeeze it down to a much smaller size if you just modified the design a bit…” 🙂
There’s a nesting limit, both your replies show up fine in the proper place.
I guess that’s the problem with graduating just before the HGP finished (not not following up since).
“As far as coronavirus, the problem is that it’s RNA, RNA has no error checking and just mutates all over the place.”
What I had heard is that out of the RNA viruses, it’s a relatively slowly-mutating one, so there’s at least hope for longer immunity than for influenza viruses.
https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-mutation-rate.html
As I understand it (I’m an interested amateur):
a. Even the experts don’t agree on why some viruses give lasting immunity and others don’t. Maybe something to do with an immune response focused mainly on antibodies vs cellular immunity? Or something to do with whether you’re periodically re-exposed so you maintain your immunity? Or whether your immune response is targeted in the right part of your body (do you get the gut-specific immune cells targeting it or just high titers of neutralizing antibodies)? Probably a mix–immunology is fiercely complex and tangled. This is a system that has evolved under constant selection from a lot of fast-evolving pathogens, and even the really dense explanations of how, say, an adaptive immune response works are likely to be massive oversimplifications.
Famously, measles immunity lasts for many decades. At some point, some isolated island was exposed to new measles cases like 60-70 years after the last exposure, and everyone but the old people got sick, while the old ones were fine. OTOH, other kinds of immunity fade away over time.
b. Some viruses (including cold-causing coronaviruses) give you complete immunity for a few months to a couple years, and then after that they make the disease much less severe but you can still catch and transmit it. This happens for other viruses.
If people lose all immunity to COVID-19 over time, then we’ll have circulating waves of COVID-19 forever, because it’s hard to imagine how we would eradicate all of it. If people lose the full immunity (where you never catch it and never become contagious) after a year or two, but retain some level of immunity
I’m afraid I’ve missed any substantial discussion of this. I’d seen the models before, but a model is only as good as the assumptions that went into it. And there have been reports of people getting reinfected, though those might easily have been measurement errors. I’m not aware of any study that concludes one way or another, and it’s probably too early to tell for sure.
I think the best current expert explanation for the re-infections is that they’ve still got viral RNA some places, but not infectious viruses. Though I sure don’t know why they should still have viral RNA a couple months after apparently clearing the infection.
I don’t think there are any “a couple months” after clearing the infection. I had thought it was mostly positive tests 2-4 weeks after a negative test. (Then again, at this point there are probably only a few thousand people in the world that cleared an infection 3 months ago or more, so we just don’t have the possibility of that sort of data.)
Even if an infection gives you eternal, 100% immunity going forward, we’d expect to see some cases of positive test, negative test, positive test for any non-trivial false positive and false negative rates of the test you’re using.
I spend about 75% of my work day not needing to hear or talk to anyone. During this time, I listen to a variety of things (books, lectures, music, etc). This doesn’t slow down my work or distract me and I usually retain what was said at least as well as when I (for example) read a book. This means I have over a thousand hours a year to learn anything that involves passive listening. A thousand hours is a time block equivalent to attending a year of school without homework or the ability to ask questions. (And I could do some form of work or question asking in my off hours to supplement what I’ve learned by listening.)
I fear I’m using that time suboptimally: how can I use it in a way that will lead to the most human flourishing (personally or generally)?
What kind of work do you do?
I find it hard to do any work that involves much thinking (apart from manual stuff) while listening to the radio or a podcast.
Technology and consulting. I can do things like write code, send emails, prepare presentations, etc perfectly well while listening to the radio or a podcast. Really the only thing I can’t do are meetings or presentations but those take up a few hours a day at worst. I tracked it over the past couple of weeks (which saw no real change to my normal work routine) and I really am consuming about 6 hours a day of audio just at work.
I’m aware I’m somewhat unique in this. Most other people tell me what you did: they can’t do it, it distracts them. But I can do both, for whatever reason. Though I’ve also never tried to listen to something about what I’m doing and tried to do it at the same time, which might be more distracting. (Ie, listening to a book about data analysis while doing data analysis.) Then again, I don’t know.
This difference struck me in the contest of World of Warcraft, back when all of my family was playing. I find it hard to pay attention to more than one thing at a time, with the result that I often missed stuff happening in text when I was paying attention to combat. My daughter, as best I can tell, could pay attention to healing her group, pay attention to everything in text, and conduct a conversation with a friend at the same time.
At a slight but not unrelated tangent, I concluded long ago that a major difference between me and Richard Epstein, who used to be a colleague, is that I reason in series and he reasons in parallel. He is making an argument for some conclusion. I point out a hole in that argument. He responds not by showing the hole isn’t there but by switching to another line of argument for the conclusion. As best I could tell, he is running several lines of argument in his head at once. I don’t do that.
I do the parallel thing and it doesn’t work because most people want to feel smart about the first hole they poked and don’t move on.
While I like to think I don’t start from a conclusion and work my way back, I do think… asynchronously, I guess I’d call it? Like when I took exams I would work on a question until I hit a snag and then move on to the next question while still thinking about the previous one. Rinse and repeat. I usually got to the end of most tests in fifteen minutes and looped again.
I still prefer to have multiple projects ongoing because that switching gears makes all of the processes work more efficiently. Again, I’m aware this is all abnormal (though, I think, not a problem per se).
@Belisaurus Rex
Or maybe they’d just like you to acknowledge it if your argument doesn’t work.
Going in parallel is a core competitive debate tactic, but you have to show your work on it. You have to establish a framework in which you only need one “successful” argument to win, and when you concede an argument to your opponent, you have to show how conceding the argument doesn’t disqualify your entire position.
Disagree with needing to explain this beforehand, one successful explanation should suffice to explain whatever phenomenon in any context, no matter how many alternatives have failed. It might stop being persuasive, but that doesn’t make it incorrect.
The order in which you make your arguments shouldn’t reflect the end result on what is correct or incorrect. What if I had just started with the ultimately successful argument? Then it doesn’t matter that the other party could bring up and poke holes in the others.
It matters because, well, you made the other non-successful argument. And with some of them, the way in which they are non-successful could have severe implications that outweigh your other arguments, if someone can prove that it’s foundational to your entire premise. That’s why you have to show that:
1. The world in which the argument is conceded does not negatively influence the new argument you are pursuing (having consequences and implications that outweigh any benefit of the premise), or
2. The implications and consequences of the argument you are now pursuing outweigh those of the argument you conceded.
Essentially, you need to make a statement like “I concede A. But even if A were true, B.” Your opponent, meanwhile, will likely pursue “Because A is true, not-B,” and you have to address that. Interaction factors are real.
Do you subvocalise what you read in your head?
I wonder whether it’s possible to learn this power by deliberately not doing the stuff involved with reading that conflicts with listening.
Not unless I’m writing something that’s meant to be heard. Like I didn’t hear this sentence I’m writing now.
But if I were to write a poem… let’s see:
The pale gold star of subtle spring alights,
Beaches bereaved and canceled leisure flights.
I heard that, and I heard the original words I wrote, and I heard the revisions. I was simultaneously thinking of tests to run to isolate an annoying CI pipeline problem and listening to the closing remarks of a conference that they put on Youtube.
What I will say: one of the first things I noticed I could do while very young, that others could not, is listen to multiple conversations nearby while participating in one myself. Maybe trying to separate out multiple voices simultaneously would help? Maybe while reading or something?
I too find anything other than quiet instrumental music distracting. I could listen to lyrical music or podcasts if I really wanted to, but it would just be a matter of a) learning to tune out the podcasts or b) not getting real work done. The idea that someone could do mentally intensive work while also paying attention to a podcast is utterly alien to me, to the point I’m skeptical it’s actually happening. (I do accept that people might think they can multitask effectively, which is not the same thing).
Heck, I sometimes even get distracted and tune out podcasts, TV, etc just by thinking about something unrelated.
The idea that someone could do mentally intensive work while also paying attention to a podcast is utterly alien to me, to the point I’m skeptical it’s actually happening
Maybe @Erusian is actually capable of time slicing with extremely low-loss context switching?
Erusian, have you explored how the mechanism of your gift works?
Honestly, this is genuinely not where I thought this would go. I was just surprised at the amount of audio content I consumed and wanted to switch it from random stuff to something more self-improving.
So, I can do things like separate out conversations and listen to multiple ones at once. But it’s more mental strain and the quality goes down as a result. What I can do effortlessly is take input from different senses for unrelated tasks simultaneously. So I can be listening to a lesson on a new language and even saying the words while simultaneously looking at a computer and typing something. I can briefly stop listening to the lesson or stop looking at the computer but that’s more like context switching. Which I can do, and in fact am more productive if I can do regularly.
Notice that none of the senses are overlapping: I can do that but it’s not effortless. Also, I don’t know how many inputs I can take. I don’t think I’ve ever gone above two because you (as a human) really only have two inputs and two outputs for most common tasks.
Apparently two of the key mental differences: Firstly, I do not “hear” words I read normally. And I can’t be alone in this, since being completely deaf isn’t an impediment to being able to read. Likewise, when I hear a word I don’t think of how it’s written. Apparently the linkage between the two is stronger in most people?
Secondly, my mind tends to be thinking more than one thing simultaneously. In fact, chewing through multiple problems at the same time makes it better (or at least faster). I proved to myself in college that I answered three math questions, cycling between them, faster than if I did them three in a row. It’s so pronounced that if I have to do exactly one thing for work I’ll bring something else to switch into. But that’s more of a large preference for context switching.
Honestly, I’ve never really explored it. I genuinely thought this was… well, maybe not normal, but well within common human experience.
I wonder if you would do better than average at the test with color words in the wrong color.
That matches an episode in Feynman’s biography (by J. Gleick) when Feynman and other students tried to permanently count in the mind while doing other things. They found that someone’s counting could be interfered with hearing (or speaking?) numbers, while others were susceptible to reading (writing?) numbers. They concluded that they used different parts of their brains for counting, ‘inner voice’ and ‘watching a graphical counter’ IIRC, and left it at that.
A result of the strategies used to teach reading?
It’s plausible that mouthing individual letters to recognize a word would form such a linkage. Maybe you skipped this phase or it was very short?
That must be more than noninterfering separate input/output channels for each task. Unless, of course, the thinking itself has different demands — composing a poem vs. calculus, for example.
But that cycling through problems of the same nature makes you think faster and better really puzzles me.
The brain does some housekeeping during sleep, producing better results the next morning, and often it helps to do a Monty Python (“And now for something completely different…”) when stuck with a problem, or when learning. Maybe your brain is able to use background processing (for lack of a better word) more efficiently than most people?
For the range of humans I met in real life, this is between rare and exotic. For the readership of this blog maybe not?
Before reading the post, I would have assumed that it was basically nonexistent/impossible, let alone exotic.
Found a random test online. It took me ~1.34 times longer to read the mismatched words and I had no errors to correct. A random study I found found an average of 2.59, with their best participant getting 1.7x. So it appears I do significantly outperform the average, in this very unscientific experiment. Anecdotally, once I had switched from reading words to colors it got very fast with only two or three hiccups. I wasn’t even reading the words.
(I seriously make no claim to the absolute accuracy of these numbers: I just took a random test online and then googled a study for comparison.)
Never tried that, but it is absolutely possible to interrupt my thoughts. I can’t say I either hear or see the numbers. I kind of… feel them? Same with most words. I remember when I was a child I had very strong opinion about “good” and “bad” words and numbers related to how they felt. (Isn’t this why people say things are their favorite word? Or hate the word moist?)
Highly possible. I wasn’t taught to sound out words, I was taught to associate words with pictures, shapes, objects, etc. I was taught to read by being given text or math problems and then being tested on comprehension. I remember a book that counted from 0 to 11 which was basically a number of objects (sticks, ducks, etc), the word (“two”) and the number (“2”).
I remember my written and spoken vocabulary remaining fairly distinct until I was in my teens. I commonly wrote words I could not pronounce and said words I didn’t know how to write before that.
Maybe. It makes sense. A question: When you’re keeping something in the back of your mind, are you aware of it? Because I’m aware of these processes and can usually bring them to the forefront if I need to focus on them. (Though not always: some are entirely unasked for or force their way to the front or hidden until they pop.)
I imagined this was how everyone was. I mean, that’s what Eureka moments are: the guy is vaguely aware of a problem and kind of passively thinking about it and then suddenly the process spits out an answer. Isn’t it?
Obviously it’s difficult to compare subjective experiences, but that does not sound like how I would describe my own experience at all. It’s hard to tell with confidence, but as far as I know, my “eureka moments” only happen when I am consciously thinking about a problem. Although often they come when looking at a problem from a perspective I hadn’t previously considered.
Putting things actively on a backburner and popping them up again does not work for me. What I don’t want to forget I have to write down. Sometimes even the steps into deeper details of a problem, and getting out from there entails a backtracing and reorienting moment; “Now… where was I?” But my mind has some psychiatric issues and is not representative. I can’t consciously push and pop a mental stack.
Often ‘forgotten’ things come up again with ideas for a slight improvement[*], sometimes in the same waking period, but the bigger jumps in quality usually come after one or more night’s sleep(s).
[*] with luck even during an edit window 🙂
Agreed, except for the ‘vaguely aware’ part. For me, it the specific issue can be totally out of awareness right before it pops, but a general aimless mulling around in that problem domain usually took place in the time before the pop.
Learn languages?
I’ve thought about that! I already speak a couple but I could go for being a complete polyglot.
That said, in a practical sense, I speak English and Spanish and can get by in Portuguese. I’m American, so that’s 91.3% of anyone I’m going to meet without crossing a big ocean.
What would be a useful language?
Depends on the value for ‘useful’. FWIW…
Access to new literature? German and French have 93,600 and 77,986 new books/year and are #1 and #2 for translations into (imo a quality filter) (sum since ’79). Chinese, Japanese and Russian offer even more new books.
Travel? Business?
Chinese, Russian. French also for the former colonies.
I would add hebrew and arabic. Israelis and the entire Arab world respectively
Mandarin, surely.
I’ve been doing a person project of systematically listening to classical music, basically following the repertoire from the book Language of the Spirit (which I’m enjoying). I put it all into Spotify playlists that look like they’ll shape up to be ~250 hours (but that’s including some long operas/oratorios that could be skipped if you want).
I’d be happy to take a listen. I’m actually a classically trained baritone and pianist, so music is definitely relevant to my interests.
I wonder what is going on in your brain when you read something? When I read something (simple) I have a conversation in my brain. The words turn to sounds that I understand. So reading something uses the same part of my brain that reading something does, and I can only do one at a time.
I only hear poetry or music I’m composing as if it’s being heard. Or if I’m transcribing something I heard, now that I think of it. And, of course, I can stop and force myself to hear something that way. Otherwise, I have no auditory sense of the words I read. I do read them, understand them, comprehend them, but I don’t “hear” them. (Side note: I do have trouble remembering exact wording with prose, but not with songs or poetry. Something I’ve never noticed until now.)
Isn’t that most folks? Introducing structure into text, like meter or rhyme, aids memory a lot.
I suppose I’m just getting the impression from this thread I’m not like most folks.
6 month ban is quite strategic, taking us until just after election day.
Ooh, good observation. Given the 6 month bans are some more politically oriented posters that would make sense. I was thinking the DisorderedReverberations (EC) ban seemed strange (especially compared to the other bans of similar duration, whose comments showed a lot more personal invectiveness; I’m still unclear what is the problem with the 2nd example as it seems a salient response to the argument in question which was expanded quite a bit further in the follow up comment), but he is a particularly prolific commentator in open threads on political issues and this election season seems likely to be contentious…
Though it makes sense from the political timeline, I suspect shorter more frequent bans would be much more effective in modulating behavior of the types who post very frequently and might be easier to mod. Don’t wait for a pattern or try weight up positive and negative contributions; just ban for 2 weeks or a month or something on any example of a comment that’s bad in it’s local context. If they are posting 10+ times an open thread they’ll notice it. Also suspect with shorter bans they’d be less likely to come back under another alias and instead actually take a step back for a bit (which is prob. healthy).
Many of these bans are for behavior from several months ago.
The ideal would be for Scott to do shorter and more frequent bans instead of letting things go. But running a website full of people who like to argue is hard work. Really, really hard work. Even if Scott didn’t have a really serious day job.
So when I say “that’s the best way to run it” I also realize I would struggle (and likely fail) to run things even to this blog’s current level of moderation, much less to the standard that I encourage.
So Conflict Theory is officially banned?
Only without presenting evidence, presumably.
You could phrase conflict theory in a less inflammatory way (“the Republican party consistently supports policies which favor the wealthy and hurt the poor because it is in their constituents’ interests to do so”). Still a hot take, but less redolent of throwing down a gauntlet.
A tiny minority of Republican votes are cast by the wealthy, so that doesn’t add up as stated.
I have a negative opinion of the GOP and might try to steelman, but apparently I’m already on thin ice and this is an integer thread.
I meant that as an example of phrasing a conflict theory claim somewhat less combatively than “all X are Y.” Whether the claim itself is true or false is of no interest to me.
Wasn’t the median Trump voter making like $85k a year?
Based on Nate Silver’s data, 72K Trump, 61K Clinton based on 2016 exit polling. US Median income was a bit over 57K in 2016. That’s not a huge gap, and given that it was based on exit polling in 23/50 states (where states vary widely, note his chart) using extremely coarse questions, I am sort of skeptical of his claim that we can get accurate median income data from them.
His “Trick” of using census data to assign a number to each income bracket per state still strikes me as extremely lossy, and the ranges (30-50K or more) are wider than the intervals in the result we care about. For example, taking a “50-100K a year respondant” and saying “Well, state average for that bracket is 70K, not 75K so we’ll put them down as 70K”.
I think the key word in those examples is “only”. You can be a conflict theorist that thinks politics is a struggle of domination. You can accuse political leaders like McConnell and Pelosi of also being conflict theorists that are struggling with domination. You can’t accuse every single member of the opposite party of also being conflict theorists. Mistake theorists are out there, and even if you think they are wrong, they honestly believe their chosen policies will help everyone, not just themselves. Especially in a comment section that has lots of mistake theorists, it’s uncharitable to impugn the motives of half the side. Assume people believe what they say they believe.
You can add the #NotAllX caveats, but at some point it becomes an empty rhetorical device. The position of a party or a movement are defined by what it does in practice and what its key figures advocate for.
To give a concrete example, in the previous thread there was a discussion about whether the different responses of the #metoo movement and the Left in general to the accusations of sexual misconduct levied against Kavanaugh and Biden were evidence of hypocrisy.
Is making the claim “Left-wingers say they care about sexual abuse, but really they’re just after power” an example of “broad hostile generalization” that is not allowed here?
Certainly the generalization can’t apply to 100% of the people who identify with the Left, but still, if we aren’t allowed to discuss trends then we can’t meaningfully discuss political ideologies and movements.
Maybe differentiate between the politicians, media, and citizen left wingers?
I think it’s better to claim the more defendable and specific, “Prominent Democrats like X and Y say they care about sexual abuse, but it looks like they’re just after power.” If people round that off to “many, most, or all Democrats”, then it’s on them, not you. Phrasing it like that gives people who identify with the left wing the option to either agree with you that the Kavanaugh/Biden reactions were hypocritical and disavow the prominent figures, or to defend the thought leaders and argue with your characterization of their motives. The important thing is, you avoid attributing motives to groups broad enough to include large segments of the commentariat.
Honestly, I couldn’t think of a more central example of “broad hostile generalization” even if I tried.
But what’s striking to me is that this claim is actively detrimental to the quality of the discussion even if we insist on assuming the worst about entire groups of people, instead of regarding it a problem in itself.
To wit, left-wingers are the ones who have broken out the story and made sure it doesn’t get starved by liberal media looking the other way. They are in fact perfectly fine with and counting on Biden being treated the same way as Kavanaugh. They do not support him after all, they made it clear even before Reade’s accusations surfaced. They have their own candidate of choice, one that is currently next in line to nomination were Biden to falter. Liberals, in turn, coalesced around Biden for the explicit purpose of stopping said candidate, and it makes it all the more difficult for them to ditch Biden now.
A right-winger looking from a vantage point at which his entire out-group is homogeneous is, essentially, rendering himself unable to understand what’s going on even on a basic, generalized, surface level of group interests of merely two antagonistic factions.
+1
Good point.
The comment section’s official “rules of engagement” have always been essentially Mistake Theory. But I don’t think it’s impossible to have a conversation under those rules that nevertheless assumes a Conflict Theory worldview.
More pithily, you can talk about Conflict Theory, but you can’t engage in Conflict.
I agree that directly accusing the people you are interecting with of being disingenuous or dishonest doesn’t necessarily lead to productive discussion, but my point is that if you can’t ascribe conflict-driven motives to broad idelogies or movements, then you can’t really discuss politics accurately.
I agree, but I would call that “talking about conflict theory” not engaging in it.
“This action only makes sense if you assume the GOP is operating from a conflict mindset” can have some value as a discussion point. “Republicans just hate poor brown people” doesn’t.
This is a space where non-conflict-theorists expect to be able to exchange ideas in a win-win exchange. The internet is a graveyard of formerly successful discussion spaces of this type, many destroyed by outgroup bashing, so it’s not crazy for Scott to be pretty protective against even the appearance of letting this space trend toward a rah-rah-teams kind of space.
The idea of marit ayin may be helpful here. In addition to being respectful toward the intent of the comments here, you need to work hard enough to make that intention reasonably apparent, so as to continue to foster a space that can be reasonably expected to be win-win.
I think if you are a pure conflict theorist and want to post something like, “I’m an organizer for such-and-such issue/campaign/group and I wanted to leave a calling card for people who want to connect” that would be fine, at least so long as your group doesn’t endorse violence as a substitute for a more prosocial political process, and you keep the volume of your comments small enough that it respects the time of people who are in this space daily or weekly (e.g. don’t post an identical comment more often than, say, every six months, maybe? I’m not Scott, my opinion is, as the Dude would say, “that’s just like, your opinion man.”)
If you are a pure conflict theorist who expects to find it fun to hang out here and serially say things like “my political opponents are unreasoning and unworthy of honest interaction” and do that rather than actually offer any positive policy or evidence in favor of your view — then go away.
If the conflict theorists are smart about it, they’ll take advantage of the mistake theory environment to get a better understanding of different outgroups (by engaging in mistake-theory style discussion here)
Is that really a bad thing?
https://xkcd.com/810/
I don’t think it’s a bad thing:)
Yeah, also see the hover text on that comic. Brilliant.
Why is corporate music so bad? Like, the music generated for corporate commercials is terrible. Even when they choose music from popular songs, they tend to choose a very generic type of quasi-indie pop that’s usually quite terrible and resembles the stock music they choose. (The genre isn’t terrible but they never choose interesting examples.)
Now, on the one hand, I get it: it gets workshopped. I’ve been in those rooms. Too many cooks spoil the soup. But there’s three things that really fascinate me. First, you would expect some of the more advertising heavy firms to take bigger risks and they really don’t. Secondly, it has a stunning consistency, to the point where I once considered writing a stock music generator. And thirdly, it didn’t used to be this way. I remember a culture of embracing more conventional popular music as little as a decade or two ago. Admittedly, this is still pretty safe: Oh, something is popular, let’s get it in a commercial. But this doesn’t seem to be happening as much anymore.
When did this happen? Why? I feel like I know a lot of amateur musicians that are various kinds of professionals, why doesn’t some enterprising young ad exec with a band insist on something that isn’t a super generic looping pattern that doesn’t really leave its key and gets louder and ads more instruments rather than any kind of note complexity? It’d certainly make your presentation stand out if I didn’t hear something so damn generic.
I dunno about that. I remember a recent commercial featuring a snatch of Moondog, and one a few years ago that actually sampled Thick as a Brick. I would say that corporate music is actually getting more adventurous, not less.
Do you mind linking, or at least pointing me in the general direction?
It’s not all bad, my family still sings this song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShWp1IbRKQE all the time which iirc was original for that ad campaign since I tried to find a long form of it. Though there’s no accounting for taste, I’m sure at least someone finds it really annoying. I know a fair number of people (myself and family included) who’s first exposure to certain songs (or arguably whole genres of music) that they now very much like was via the various Apple ads.
There’s prob. some art critic vs mass consumer at play here. Desire to be inoffensive (or just the right memorable amount of inoffensive) as well. And if you’re giving a presentation etc. you don’t necessarily want the takeaway to be that was some awesome music, what were they talking about again? Etc.
There’s probably also some kind of filtering mechanism at play as well. Most music is crap, corporate music vs. pop vs. other genres have different set of filters they go through to reach mass audiences which prob. drives them in different directions.
It’s fairly generic but this is actually the kind of thing I’m saying I don’t see happening anymore. Here’s a compilation, all from within the past ten years. They all share the same traits that make it generic: simple notes, no key or instrument shifts, adding more instruments as a cheap way to add complexity, and playing the same thing repeatedly only louder.
Interesting point, I missed that you were referring to this are a more recent trend (rather then a general property of corporate music historically). And I agree that anecdotally measured at least there seems to be something to that. Not sure what. My first thought as to what has changed is that advertising has become much more narrowly tailored as people’s media consumption has fragmented, but that should mean there’s more room to tailor music for the audience not less.
Are your family members fans of They Might Be Giants? They were hired to do a series of songs for Dunkin Donuts (including the one you linked) up until about 2009 I think, which would place it before the compilation Erusian posted.
I might argue in a biased manner that hiring TMBG for an ad campaign automatically lands the ad outside the general categorization of corporate jingle.
I thought that sounded like TMBG!
It’s optimized not for the maximum attractiveness, but for the least repulsiveness.
Yea was going to say the same thing. A bit like how most the actors in ads are attractive but not threateningly attractive.
I deleted the example of canteen food.
Re-consider, that sounds great.
What happens if the music is an Earworm? I always hate when someone gets music stuck in my head, and if a commercial got music stuck in my head multiple times, I’d start actively avoiding the commercial and the brand.
Considering jingles are explicitly meant to be earworms, I think they’ve already bitten that bullet.
I don’t think jingles are earworms. They’re catchy, but they aren’t long enough for me to get them stuck in my head.
I suppose. I guess I’m just cynical but I think if you told a marketer, “I can get a three minute jingle into their head,” they’d go for it in a New York minute.
At the risk of transmitting the earworm to all of Scott’s California readers, the Kars 4 Kidz folks seem to think that it works.
I don’t know you but for myself, I certainly don’t listen to the vast majority of music that’s even EXTREMELY popular. Usually if I even look at a list of top 10 tracks in a month or something, I haven’t heard of any of them. Even people who listen to popular music still usually only listen to a fraction of it.
So consider that it’s not that the music is bad, but that it’s optimized to appeal to the millions of people who are a relevant and profitable marketing segment that is not you.
The lazy counter: Do you know anyone, absolutely anyone, who listens to corporate background music for fun?
My fiance sources a decent part of her music collection from “songs I heard on commercials and liked.” So yes.
I think you’re describing the V A P O R W A V E movement.
I’m not sure if this is an answer, but it’s at least the correct statement of the question.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIxY_Y9TGWI
It’s a video by a youtube music theory person (vlogger?). That offers a taxonomy of corporate music, along with a sample use for each sub-species. The tone is more negative than some hypothetical neutral observer would take, but I have reason to believe that a neutral observer would have less insight to this question than you require.
Two points to note.
One: I don’t hate corporate music, and in fact I’m surprised to find out that people do. (which will lead into my second point). I mean, I don’t seek it out and it’s not memorable, but eh. It’s generally just a smooth flow of a shallow, feel-goodish melody. It’s makes me feel goodish
Two: I put corporate music in things for corporations sometimes as part of my job. I seek out three qualities: Innoffensive and unintrusive first of all. The third is kind of a momentum thing, and probably answers your question: I want it to sound like other corporate music. That is a short cut for “professional”.
And that friend is how these things happen. It’s like the trends of shaky cam or everything being green in action movies over the past few decades respectively. Neither is particularly good. But they remind you of other movies that are professional, so people keep copycatting it until it is over exposed and chipped down to it’s bear core of resembling something else that was mass-associated with quality.
Slight tangent, but I was on hold with my car insurance company the other day and I’m growing convinced that the hold music is purposely bad. No modern phone signal that isn’t being routed through a chain of a penguins holding hands across the antarctic should have that much distortion on the line! Also, why the hell did you only licence thirty seconds of this popular song and loop the chorus into the same verse! After fifteen minutes I was about ready to kill, let alone expand my insurance coverage! Is this just to stop people waiting around long enough to cancel their plan or just generalized incompetence?
My favorite corporate music memory: an elevator Muzak cover of Don’t Fear the Reaper. (I am not kidding.)
One of my favorite video game soundtrack moments ever was in the “What the Heck” level on Earthworm Jim (which takes place in hell).
The music starts off with the intimidating Night on Bald Mountain, then segues into elevator/hold music with human screams interspersed. Truly the most appropriate soundtrack for hell.
Do you happen to have a link where I can listen to this?
I’ve been writing a series of posts on my blog about Universal Basic Income (I’d recommend starting from the beginning, but it’s up to you!)
Each post is from a different, specific perspective (so don’t expect to see all arguments exhausted in a single post – in fact, I’ve tried to avoid duplicating arguments, so I keep each point contained to the most relevant perspective).
Posting them to the SSC subreddit has resulted in some interesting and pleasant exchanges, so I’ll leave this here in case anyone is interested, or wants to chat. Next new post is on Wednesday, from a liberal viewpoint.
Are you going to write any posts arguing the antithesis? You could have one each from all your current perspectives. Then you could attempt a synthesis.
You may surmise that I think UBI a fundamentally bad idea, which is true. But I’m more interested in seeing how well you’d do in making the argument against UBI from each of your separate perspectives because it’s the best way to understand the entirety of the subject.
Unfortunately, regardless of intentions, I don’t think many people would view such a thing as a good faith attempt. I have clearly shown my hand as someone pro-UBI, and my stance isn’t reached through a lack of understanding of the arguments of its detractors, therefore I think many would view such an attempt as disingenuous.
Your thought is the kind of thing that would probably make for an excellent Adversarial Collaboration, so in the unlikely event that Scott were to run another competition, I might be tempted to throw my hat into the ring.
Out of interest, what are your reasons for thinking that it is a fundamentally bad idea?
Admirably fair points.
My opposition to UBI is that it incorporates all the worst aspects of the welfare system and then spreads this into a wider catchment area.
If our fundamental material needs are food, clothing and shelter, it seems to me that providing those things for ourselves and our families (if it is possible) is what gives us our sense of being adult humans. Particularly, the work involved in doing so. But it is also true that most of us have some laziness within us, and at the margin indulging this laziness has negative consequences. By making it easy for us to have those fundamental things without lifting a finger, it’s tantamount to taking away (for many of us) that which gives our sense of adulthood, competence, and self-worth.
I once had a relationship with a woman who was born into the welfare system (in the UK, where the welfare ‘benefits’ system is quite comprehensive) She died having never worked a single day in her life, and I say that as a criticism of any UBI-like system that would take away her need to work, and not as a criticism of her. She was lazy (like me, as it happens) but intelligent and quite capable of working. She was denied all the fulfilling things that work provides because the necessity for work had been removed. I should add that I was against the idea of universal benefits before I met her.
UBI would extend this to an even greater number of people, including the many whose meaningful existence is predicated on the need to work. Take away that and you’re left with a whole lot of misery, daytime tv and pizza.
There may be a difference if everybody is receiving the benefits, but I doubt it. My experience of people not having to work is that generally it is an incredibly dispiriting situation. Inflicting this on everybody can only increase the suffering.
This seems like a typical mind issue. I think there are many people who do indeed require “meaningful” work to feel “fulfilled”. And yes “inflicting” idleness on these people is bad.
But:
1) not everyone is like that, and the current system “inflicts” on them the need to struggle in dull or difficult work simply to survive
2) UBI / welfare need not “inflict” idleness. Current welfare systems have some cliffs in them that make it difficult to work a little, or work a low paying job, and be worse off (by losing all or part of your benefits) than if you had stayed idle. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and in fact the U in UBI ought to address that neatly.
3) “what is fulfilling” and “what is remunerative” are frequently misaligned for many people. UBI might allow more people to “follow their dreams” into less well paying but more personally satisfying work.
4) UBI is somewhat utopian and really assumes a post-scarcity (or nearly so) world. In such a world there may simply not be enough “meaningful” work to fully employ everyone. Today a bus driver can work a hard day and go home knowing he made a useful contribution to society. 20 years from now he may simply be miserable that he’s doing busywork a robot ought to be doing instead.
Just to pick up your last point. It may be true that the widespread technological unemployment thing happens, but then again, it might not. It’s been a concern for hundreds of years and yet..
I’d like to add that you make a very cogent defense of UBI.
(Thanks for the compliment – this is replying to your first reply)
Sure! But to my mind your objections to UBI essentially require that technological unemployment never happen. Otherwise idleness will be inflicted upon us whether we like it or not.
What do you propose we do if it does?
It seems like will we / won’t we go post scarcity may be the crux here, and I think a lot of UBI discussion can go awry if the participants aren’t clear which side of that crux they are on.
I don’t see it as quite such a dichotomy. There’s a certain amount of unemployment currently which is both higher and lower than it’s been in the past. Technological unemployment is simply one of the things pushing in one of the directions. Since the invention of the wheel it hasn’t managed to overcome the preponderance of new occupations being created.
As such, I think the discussions of a (suddenly-occurring) post scarcity are a bit fanciful.
Interesting. I have heard perspectives similar to this quite a bit before, but the way you phrase it puts me in mind of Herzberg’s Dual-factor theory, with Hygiene Factors and Motivational Factors.
Food and shelter are classic Hygiene Factors – the lack of which is demotivating according to the theory, but they do not provide fulfillment in themselves. I agree that for some people their job can be fulfilling, but others certainly find their fulfillment elsewhere.
Reading about your experience with someone on benefits being lazy – my interpretation of the causes of that situation is almost the exact opposite of your conclusion. I would say that rather than the money itself, it is exactly the way that the benefits are administered that drives people into this kind of helpless stupor:
The people I have come across that are on benefits find claiming them to be a job in itself – not full-time by any means, but it takes time and effort, and is remarkably stressful. This constant low-level stress about whether the government will sanction you at any moment, leaving you with nothing to live on, takes its toll and leaves people feeling disempowered and helpless.
Add to this, the fact that if you were to find a job, the benefits would be taken away, you are left with a “devil you know” kind of situation. If you start a job, you might hate it, or they might not keep you on anyway – how long would it take for them to restart your benefits? You know how long it took last time, and that was a very difficult few weeks.
If you found a full time job, that’s great, but most people that return to work after illness have a phased return – it is a big shock to the system to start a job after having none at all, and most places don’t really allow for that. If you found a part time job, that might be a bit easier to get started with, but it might not pay all of the bills – you might still be reliant on some benefits. How much of your benefits would you still be entitled to though? You don’t know, and can’t find out until you are reassessed. Maybe it’s safer not to take the job after all.
After enough of this, many people effectively teach themselves that there is no point trying to get off benefits. If there were no reassessments, no sanctions, no reduction in the benefits whatever you did, it would be much easier to try out a job. Ease into it, earn a bit of extra money without worrying about whether your other source of income is going to be suddenly cut off. Perhaps decide that you like having a bit more money and you like getting out of the house and seeing your coworkers, so you increase your hours.
Anyway – I don’t disagree that it is very sad when people are this demotivated, and don’t achieve their potential. I think it is a very reasonable thing to be concerned about. I just think that it is the bureaucracy rather than the free money that crushes people’s souls.
> the many whose meaningful existence is predicated on the need to work
I find this to be an extreme statement that is patronizing and borderline bad faith, or at the very least not thought through. Essentially, it seems to be saying that those who would benefit from UBI (the poor and welfare class) deserve neither leisure or free will, and worse, they should be enslaved (not given the option to not work) for their own good.
In his/her reply, gbdub gave a good rebuttal of the underlying sentiments, but I find this statement to be so over-the-top that I’m surprised it hasn’t already been called out in a non-CW thread.
@205guy
The belief that an excess in idleness/leisure is bad for people is hardly extreme*, nor is it typically limited to the lower class.
Believing that it is particularly a threat to the lower class doesn’t require believing that idleness is worse for them, but rather, can be due to a belief that higher classes are better at avoiding excessive idleness in themselves and those near them.
You seem to regard leisure as an unalloyed good, but don’t seem to recognize that many others don’t share this premise. To them your ‘deserve […] leisure’ may seem as incongruous as using ‘deserve alone time’ to describe an environment that creates lots of lonely people.
* Nor innovative, as such sentiments can be found all through history and in different cultures.
I think you should to show that you are aware of the arguments against UBI and why someone would disagree. Otherwise people may think that you haven’t considered their opposition.
More importantly, they won’t get as full a grasp of the topic if they’re noobs like me
It might accelerate the bifurcation that is already developing in society. Also, are we going to require even more of a constant influx of migrants that we exclude from UBI, so they will do the shittier work? Cue a lot more ‘you will not replace us,’ as well as a risk of a major crisis if that influx stops.
Yeah, this is a super common issue with any policy debate (it’s happening a lot with pandemic-related stuff). This doesn’t mean UBI is not worth considering, but something like this changes a bunch of fundamental assumptions/values/expectations/social affiliations/ambitions in a way that results in a different society in the not-so-long term. It’s not the type of thing you can treat as a controlled environment, because you can’t direct the forces.
I think we’ve been undergoing a pretty massive shift in the last few decades that isn’t as different from a shift to UBI as people might be think, though. I think we already broke with enough of the modern participation in the workforce assumptions to create a truly type of society, and haven’t really grappled with this. Otherwise UBI wouldn’t even be being considered in the way that it is.
The biggest effect of UBI would be to break the spell of the current system, throwing out the old standards for how things “have” to be. Which are unusually narrow and complex compared to earlier times, even if the result is that they create great wealth overall. In the long-term, I actually think it could let people regroup and become more productive, but that depends on how much this interferes with the plans of their “superiors.” It is possible they could rebuild a flexible and organic economy for those who wanted to participate, without threatening the billionaires, who seem content to ignore them. That isn’t doable now because the system requires everyone to view themselves as a worker or potential worker, in the structures as currently arranged.
@mtl1882
But the thing that very many advocates see as a positive aspect of a UBI is the removal of pressure to be productive in the capitalist sense (where other people see your work as being worth their money).
You can argue that there are non-capitalist forms of productivity, but there are all kinds of challenges here:
– People doing things they consider productive, but almost no one else does (like writing books/blogs that close to no one reads).
– Social rewards being much more effective for people-oriented people (men already seem to be increasingly checking out, so this would likely accelerate it)
– Prosocial rewards being much better for well-educated people, so this not being very helpful to the less educated
– People trying to find approval in the exploitation of prosocial behaviors, which in turn causes an anti-social backlash. For example, imagine a ton of people pushing their shitty music/writing/etc on you, expecting you to evaluate it all.
This may be another policy that is irrelevant to the lived life of most of the well-educated, is a boon to a minority of the well-educated or those near them, while resulting in a large quality of life decline of the lower class.
Yeah, I should have been clearer on this, but that was what I was getting at. People see it as an alternative to current problematic arrangements, and that is what it would be in the short-term. Freedom from that. But I think over time, it could create its own alternatives. I don’t think most people have a fundamental problem with being productive–I think they enjoy it when it is done in a way that feels useful, but capitalism can go in unhealthy directions in which it feels oppressive, and which doesn’t actually want their best work or to compensate them properly for it. But there doesn’t have to be so much pressure in a different system, especially not the psychological pressure of ours that in some ways leaves little choice for many. The rigid schedule of modern work and other issues are what most people resent. I’m not saying it would be a utopia or anything, but it could be a lot different from what we’re used to. And not everyone would have to participate. It’s also possible to be productive in hobbies that don’t make a lot of money but that still would have some value if people had the time and resources to form communities and work on such projects.
Yes, I think a lot of this would happen. It is possible they’d have more readers in a UBI world, though, where people had more free time and interests. And I think many people absolutely would need ways of finding social rewards and would find ways to do so in the new system. This could be done through various communities with different roles, as in the past, not national companies that replicate prior conditions. UBI is viewed as a passive thing, almost a withdrawal from society, but it would eventually lead to active responses, I believe.
@mtl1882
An issue is that a large part of the quality of life improvements that we’ve seen comes from hyper-specialization. Capitalism helps bridge the gap between the diversity in our own life that most people prefer to have, while we also tend to prefer the fruits of a not so diverse life lived by others.
Are people willing to give that up or is an UBI just a mirage where people think that they can have their cake and eat it too?
I don’t disagree with your general point. To me, UBI getting passed presumes a world in which many of these workers are basically unnecessary. Either these fruits are getting made without them, or the system has become dysfunctional in a way that diverse fruits aren’t really being produced. In any event, there are some people who would be willing to give that up, or who would not realize what they were giving up but would adjust to it, but I don’t know how many. Also, people on UBI could end up bridging some of each other’s simpler gaps eventually in different ways. I totally understand the wonders of capitalism, but my personal experience has been that there are many instances today in which it is not efficient in practice. I don’t expect communism or anything to work better, but a more organic, flexible, local market could arise among UBI recipients.
@Zephalinda
I understand your point, and I’m not talking about me and my friends. I am under no illusion that most people would exemplify bourgeois productivity. I was trying to say that such productivity is not the only kind, and that I basically see UBI getting passed in a world that accepts many workers have no use in the economy as it exists. It would understand that the purpose of UBI was not to make them behave as they were supposed to prior to UBI.
What I am saying is that people like to be productive as in they like to make things. Build a shed. Plant flowers. Make custom sneakers. Film a YouTube makeup tutorial. I’m just listing the simplest kind of things here. Over time, this can turn into bigger things. When you have more time and less to worry about elsewhere, these things take on more significance. You help a friend with a similar project. Etc. That’s what I’m talking about. Some people do more significant things than that, obviously. Some play video games 24/7 (this is hacking their drive to be productive, and possibly could be productive in some way, such as if they stream their playing or use the skills/motivation elsewhere). But people like to fiddle with and make things.
I don’t feel very productive after all my prepping and training to be that way, in the jobs that are available to me. It feels like busywork. To me, a lot of those higher values have become dysfunctional in our society already. So I don’t worry about UBI being the start of a descent into hell–more of a response to the descent. I am not an idealist and have no vision of a utopian world after UBI. I just think most people want to do something with their time, even if it doesn’t meet the standards of a bourgeois striver. I agree that TV, superstimuli, and atomization are real concerns. I consider these separate social issues to address, not givens, and I think our dependence on them is in part due to our dysfunctional economic and social systems in which people don’t feel in control of their work and lives. UBI is a response to this. It will intensify it for some, but may offer a new beginning for others, by giving them new outlets and alleviating other pressures. I doubt many of these people are very productive now, even if they are working.
@mtl1882
An issue is that part of the population is outcompeted primarily by foreign workers and migrants, rather than by robots.
So unless we get Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism relatively soon, it requires a permanent working class that doesn’t get a UBI. Pretty much everyone accepts a permanent underclass of robots, but neither believers in equal outcomes or equal opportunity can accept a permanent underclass of people.
You can turn the native or national underclass into an underclass with better incomes and/or less pressure to earn (which may or may not make them happy, with the evidence not being encouraging), but then you still have the migrant or foreign working class who cannot get an substantial UBI without breaking the system, where lots of things get much more expensive (and middle/upper class Western people thus collectively get poorer).
I don’t see advocates for a UBI arguing for the latter, so that means that they either accept that we exclude a group from it and have them be most of our working class or don’t understand the impact of their policy, where the latter seems by far the most common.
More charitably, they may think that a SF Utopia is just around the corner, a belief seemingly shared with many people in the rationalsphere.
@Aapje
Yeah, I think most people don’t really understand the implications, some believe a utopia is around the corner, and some are resigned realists who don’t see other options and intend to exclude a group to keep the system from collapsing.
I tried to leave a comment on your blog, but failed. From the libertarian perspective, I wonder if you’ve read “In Our Hands” by Charles Murray?
Why Plumber? He seems polite when commenting, though I tend to feel annoyed by him. But that’s mostly my bias. And he hasn’t even been posting for a while.
That one confuses me too.
If the bans represents 10% of us that we wants to ban, all of us are probably on thin ice.
Yeah, Scott calling him out today seems bizarre in the context of his ~6 week absence..
Checking back through open threads, it was back in 149.75 that @Plumber’s phone broke, so it’s been *quite* a while since he posted much. I went through several open threads /link posts 148 – 149.75, and didn’t find anything that seemed even marginally objectionable from Plumber, but I didn’t check any named threads, and obviously this ban update has been overdue for a longtime, so who knows?
However, one clue is that Plumber does engage quite a bit with some other commenters who are more flame-throw-y, and his most common @__ in threads around 148 – 149 seemed to me to be echo__chaos, who did make the ban list, and got one of the longest bans. Looking at the two examples given to justify that ban, it seems clear from the 2-out-of-three rule why those comments didn’t pass–they were absolute 0%, total bagels, for ‘nice’ or ‘necessary’. I think the lesson all of us can take from a warning to Plumber is to be careful which threads we engage with, even if we ourselves are mostly being kind/true/value-added.
Each of these echo-chaos comments highlighted was a clean ‘dunk’ on a perceived outgroup’s inability to think or avoid rank hypocrisy. That’s about as purely a character attack on an entire group as is possible to imagine, short of calling the group animals or insects… in some ways it would have been less insulting if echo-chaos had simply stated that “all liberals are fundamentally unworthy of trust or responsibility is a claim that follows logically from their position on Constitutional interpretation” or etc., because that at least makes the claim plainly, so it may be challenged equally directly.
Continuing to pick on the two echo-chaos comments that are listed as the reason for that ban–
Look at this one. It’s a plain attack on all people who tend to prefer Democrats as being purely and always hypocritical, contains no other content whatever, and is gleeful to boot. Even usually more sane/productive posters, like @Deiseach, when replying to that echo-chaos post, end up appearing to be in ‘dunking-on-libs’ mode.
In another context, Deiseach’s comment that penumbra’s emanate could have been a starter for a good discussion. Someone could have chimed in that, while true that penumbras emanate, this fact was (a) surely not lost on the founders themselves, nor on Justice John Marshall, or else argue (b) mere words have always been shadowy creatures of human creation from the start, and of such warped wood no straight thing was ever made, and that even Scalia was quite candid that occasionally the dictionary failed him and he had to just go with something that made practical sense of garbled or nonsensical ‘original intent’, and/or simply respect precedent to keep the ship of state sailing.
We might have gotten fun alliterations like “Jurisits determined to defer to dictionary definitions are doomed to delusional dictatorship, or desultory discipline by disruly data.” Instead, the libs who think differently than whatever it was echo-chaos would have us think is the noble way he thinks about things are now unAmerican, and Deiseach is an “honorary American” and the whole thread is hostile and crappy to anyone who knows too little about Constitutional Law to defend their general sense that it’s possible to be both A) a good American and B) think the Constitution requires interpretation.
I would guess that Plumber’s mistake is not doing a little more to watch for whether being polite and noncommittal while interacting with comments like echo-chaos’s highlighted ones–that’s how Plumber ended up getting a warning.
@yodelyak you could be… a bit more charitable there.
Definitely a dunk on the left, but I didn’t read that as an attack on “all people who tend to prefer Democrats”
or an assertion that any Democrats are “purely and always hypocritical”.
I read that as a dunk on the Left in the form of the assertion that when it comes which authority should be respected, (hardcore) leftwingers always think it should be theirs.
Still not a shining example of behaviour, but your interpretation seems like slander
@purplehermann
I take your point. If I was inside the 1-hour window, I’d consider rephrasing “everywhere and always” to something less all-encompassing. If E-C is here, I apologize for the sweepingness of that characterization.
However, to the extent the linked comment has any real semantic content at all, it really does read to me as claiming that Democrats have no coherent principles (at least w/r/t/ C-19) but rather simply believe in their tribe’s authority figures more than the other tribe’s. Either that’s a claim with zero content (and meant as no more of an insult than if he’d said ‘yellow team’) or it’s a claim that Dems are specially and uniquely hypocritical and therefore worth ignoring.
I could think of some other things I might have phrased differently also. I regret mentioning ‘calling groups animals or insects’–which I think adds nothing here, and invokes historical episodes worth leaving out of a discussion that could remain civil. Live and learn I guess.
I stand by my point that the linked comment has no contents whatever to redeem it from being a pure dunk on an outgroup. It scores a ‘zero’ for passing any one of the three gates. And the rest of the comments replying to it, even if not intended this way, are very easy to read as further piling on the same outgroup, and in a way that completely lines up with the culture war and so pretty much guaranteed to be all heat and no light. Unsurprisingly, it completely soured everything that followed.
@yodelyak
I don’t disagree that the comment would have been better off not existing.
Glad to see that you’re willing to reconsider the excessive parts of the comment.
I won’t argue further about the interpretation of his comment, but will say that civility is two-sided, and trying to read comments charitably where and when possible, especially by people who are your “outgroup” is an important part of being civil (and would suggest putting some extra effort into that)
In case anyone’s curious why I made time to dig into this a bit, well, I was very curious, but also I had waded into the Tara Reade thing a couple times in recent threads, and not-quite-within-the-1-hour-window regretted it, and wondered if Plumber’s mistake was similar, or if I could learn how thin my ice might be from his example.
I don’t want to bring that whole story up here, I just am admitting that I think I am guilty of having underestimated how difficult some topics are, and the result is I ended up letting honest questions (like what a prior should be on whether specific foreign governments might be looking for ways to hurt specific Presidential candidate’s candidacies) come across as attacks on people who don’t have the same priors I have. Since my guess at Plumber’s likely offense(s) isn’t in the same category as mine, I’m still in the dark, but going to try and be more careful going forward all the same.
If I could hazard a guess, “college educated people” and “people who end up in gifted programs at school” are Plumber’s outgroup and he does sometimes engage in some less than charitable stereotyping of them. I recall being kind of offended a couple of times as a member of that group, but don’t have a specific comment to point to.
But I too would like Scott would clarify a bit what out folks on the thin ice list.
Plumber engages in false stereotyping, but his whole schtick is “I’m old! I’ll update my beliefs if you can prove things that happened after 1980!” I mean, I remember him literally saying “I’m a Democrat because I’m a union laborer and I still think of Republicans as wearing top hats and monocles.”
Maybe Scott finds this anti-charming, but he seemed popular.
Literally?
I don’t think he literally said that; I think LMC is thinking of Randy’s description here. As you can see, though, I endorsed it, because, well, it is accurate….
Plumber made a lot of posts around that time along the lines of, “Here is the entire history of my political views, including the views of my parents and wife and coworkers, and all the sorts of progressives and conservatives I’ve met over the years.” It was interesting the first time, but he then went on to say basically the same thing in every thread for like a couple of weeks, including in replies where it was scarcely relevant. I don’t think any of it was especially offensive, Mr Moneybags or no, but it might have gotten to bother Scott after the tenth or twelfth time. I don’t know.
So far as I can tell, he does. He made some claims about Prop 13 being responsible for bad things in California, I offered data inconsistent with that, such as expenditure per pupil in California compared to other states post Prop-13, and I don’t think he made such claims again.
I don’t think he is hostile to college educated people, just to the existing educational system. He has a view of the world biased by the bubble he lives in and the fact that he is, like some others here, a well educated auto-didact. He describes things from that view but seems to recognize that parts of it might well be wrong.
I enjoy his posts.
@DavidFriedman;
Thanks.
IIRC round about that thread some other commenters suggested and introduced me to the term “Washington Monument syndrome” which may explain much.
I probably like Plumber because I’m old too, and because elements of his political positions were shared by my parents, also strongly pro-union.
OTOH, I’m probably in his outgroup – I went to college, became a techie, and moved into the SF Bay area. But he doesn’t seem to hold it against me personally, maybe because I’m down at the San Jose end, which he doesn’t consider to be his home ground.
I like Plumber, and I’m young, extremely anti-union, and definitely in his outgroup.
But he has generally struck me as being nice about it.
I think his insight is valuable because he’s a genuine blue-collar worker among a bunch of white-collar navel-gazers (like me). But maybe I missed something negative I should have noticed because I was valuing the minority viewpoint.
@DinoNerd, @Rebecca Friedman, & @Edward Scizorhands;
Thank you.
FWLIW, I married my “outgroup” as my wife is a college graduate who was born out of State, and our older son has “Tech” ambitions.
I’ve never gotten the vibe that Plumber looks down on college-educated people. But I would be curious to know if he went to college and then pursued plumbing as a trade, or skipped college, became a plumber, and educated himself by doing lots of reading (which is not a bad way to go about things).
@Bobobob says:
Both.
I was a weird kid who skipped classes and went to the library instead (first the public library, then I’d go to the nearby university library), at 16 I started volunteering for the local college radio, it was then a requirement that non-university “community” volunteers be enrolled at a certain class at a nearby local “community” college, when I re-enrolled for the next semester they noticed that I was under 18 and not yet a high school graduate and told me that I needed official permission from my high school to attend any further community college classes, the high school told me “Take this “California High School Proficiency Exam’ test on Saturday and you can”, I did, it was a long test but an easy on, I was then told “You aren’t a high school student anymore, leave”, so at 17 I enrolled full-time at the community college (I remember greatly enjoying the “Cultural Anthropology”, and “European History” classes), at 18 my parents told me to “get a job and pay rent”, so that was the end of my being a student (some folks have been able to pay rent and go to school full-time, but I couldn’t manage that trick), years later I’d enroll for some welding classes there but “academic” classes ended for me.
When I met the women who became my wife she was a law school student at the university and her book shelf was one of the reasons I fell in love with her, and I eagerly read her books, she dropped out of law school and has been a house wife for most of the last two decades (FWLIW the overwhelming majority of the peers I grew up with who I know did get college diplomas are girls I knew who are now public school teachers, the overwhelming majority of the guys I knew just didn’t get college educations).
So I had almost a blissful year of “Junior college” before I was 18, otherwise my further education was “trade school”, second hand, and a library card.
@Algon33 says:
Thanks!
Sorry!
I had planned a much longer “What I’ve noticed/thought about this last 50 days” post for this thread, but on sadly finding that our host has deemed me “on thin ice” I’ve shortened (a bit) what I planned to post.
So, on March 16th my boss told me and most of the rest of the crew that we are “essential City and County of [Lankhmar] disaster service workers, we had our “Irish” breakfast feed the next day as we have done for decades, even as the crew changed from 95% Irish or Italian, to 90% Filipino or Russian (when I joined), to now mostly Irish (again), Latino, or Russian (still).
During the week just before the lockdown/shelter-in-place-order I dropped the smartphone I was issued and until I got it repaired on April 30th e-mails and viewing SSC comments could only be done with borrowed devices which I just didn’t do often or for long. Now that I’ve seen a couple of e-mails and some posts asking about my welfare I’m touched and heartened.
Thank you!
Starting in October 2019 (according to my HMO when I called in) I’ve had a cough and/or sore throat most weeks (symptoms similar to those @Lillian described elsewhere), and I remember in November or December having a frightening shortness of breath for some weeks, really the symptoms seemed to be what had later been described for Covid-19, but the timing is too early. On March 23rd my wife woke me up in dark o’clock in the morning with some severe and uncharacteristic (for her) coughing, that morning my boss said that some deputies upstairs in the Jail tested positive and we aren’t to go up there for a while, I told him that since my wife was coughing and I had no outstanding service orders to do that weren’t for the Jail I’m asking for two weeks of sick leave, the next day I started coughing as much as my wife and our son’s had sniffles. After a couple of weeks the symptoms at my houses faded from what they were.
I read a lot of fiction and took our younger son for many walks, listened to old songs and thought a lot about the plots of some old movies (Best Years of Our Lives, Make Way For Tomorrow, Tokyo Story, and Waterloo Bridge), plus some newer ones (Atonement, Locke, and Twentieth Century Women) and I cried a lot. In particular the striking (to me) differences between the 1931, 1940, and 1956 (re-named “Gaby”) versions of Waterloo Bridge seemed indicative and instructive of the character and mood of the times they were made and I thought to do an “effort post” contrasting them, but given my status I’ll shelve that for now.
On returning to work most times I go into the jail my temperature is taken, apparently I run cold (usually 95 to 96 F) and almost have “anti-fever” all the time, when asked if I have any “symptoms” I truthfully have said “Yes, for decades now” (I work in dirty and dusty conditions which I’m a bit allergic to). I’m trying to get on the wait list for a Covid-19 test, but police and fire have first dibs, and my HMO just tells me to stay away “unless you have a fever”.
The Jail has been greatly emptied out, cells that had a dozen men in them now hold only one to four, the hallways around the courts are far emptier, the few remaining lawyer and court worker ladies have been unusually flirty recently, which may be because they’re far lonelier now, or it may simply be that my appearance is greatly improved by my being masked! Speaking of flirting, this last Saturday I told my wife “I could look at you all day”, she did a dismissive gesture and said “You’re ridiculous”, but while she may simply have been laughing at me she had such a big smile that I’m calling it my “win” for the year!
Our 15 year-old starts his first job next week!
Only for one hour a week, for the private supplemental school we’ve been sending him to he’ll be tutoring a younger girl on some computer coding stuff, and he’ll get paid, so pretty exciting.
I may have a daughter!
I joined Facebook this last year, and a twenty-something women messaged me that “I know this is weird, but I think we’re related, I kind of just wanted to say hi and fill out any relevant medical information…”, my brother told me that some years ago she tried to contact me via him as he had a “social media” presence, and I didn’t back then.
Could be a scam, but given her appearance, persistence, and the date of her birth, she’s plausibly my daughter.
I e-mailed her back some family health history, and a brief description of personalities of her ancestors.
@Plumber
Glad you’re OK and back to posting.
I don’t think scams are usually this persistent, so she probably really believes that. Could be true.
@ana53294 says:
Thanks!
That’s my assumption as well.
Very good. Teaching, in my experience, is a good way of learning.
My first tenure track position was in the econ department of VPI, at a point when I had never taken a class in economics. Over a few years I ended up teaching a good deal of the curriculum. My conjecture later was that James Buchanan, who was the de facto dictator of the department, had set that up deliberately for my education.
With regard to your putative daughter … . If both of you use 23 and me, they will tell you.
Welcome back! Glad to hear you’re doing okay.
@Garrett,
Thanks!
I finally was able to be tested for Covid-19 yesterday, now awaiting results.
If you are lucky, you have already had it.
I tested negative for Covid-19, and the cause of my months long chronic cough remains a mystery.
To find out if you used to have it, don’t you need a blood test?
The nasal swab just finds out if you have it now (or just got over it), right?
@Edward Scizorhands,
That’s right, I just had the nasal/throat test, which I’ve read isn’t very accurate.
I’m not aware of any accurate “you already had it” test that’s available yet.
@Plumber,
I started a short thread in 153.25 about getting the antibody test from Quest Diagnostics.
@Doctor Mist,
Thanks for the link!
@Scott obviously it’s your site your rules//
Bans:
BackofFootLargeFuzzyMammalSocialGrouping has a lot of ideas that rub me the wrong way (I count this as a thought diversity bonus with him) and he seems to post a good amount, and he’s generally more or less civil.
I like voiceBouncingOffWallsUnorderly, he posts a lot and he’s also usually fairly civil, the two comments linked aren’t horrible in context imo.
Any chance to shorten their bans to around 1-3 months?
LackingProprioception/handEyeCoordination’s comment seemed pretty tame especially in context, if it’s a one-off then maybe just a warning?
In general, if it’s not too much work could you send an email to people you want to ban but aren’t going to yet? I personally would much prefer an earlier warning if you think I’m being horrible, and it could help in general with generally civility without knocking out as many commenters
Those first two are the ones that surprised me, too. CadUrsineAspiringEagleScout and ReverberationPandemonium can both be counted on to move conversations along.
I’d vote to shorten the bans on EchoC and HBC.
+1
Agree. I will say, of the two, I also think EchoC offended somewhat less, and I wonder if Scott is punishing them equally just because their views are contradictory and they spar sometimes.
I only think Echo’s first comment was bad. The second maybe reads as more partisan and less insightful than we’d hope for, but it had actual content and wasn’t by any means uncivil.
The 5 linked HBC comments mostly were unnecessary, provocative, basically without content. But Scott is digging back to last year here, and HBC posts a lot. Still think he’s a valuable contributor to the discussions.
Some of those people post a lot, and their worst 10% looks bad.
I’d say the rest of their stuff makes up for that 10%, but the moderation policy may currently be “who makes the most headaches for me” instead of “who overall makes this place better.”
This is not an irrational policy, especially if Scott is really busy. The alternative is the place completely collapsing.
I am going to suggest that Scott should delegate some of the moderation work. There are lots of models, both volunteers and paid, both secret moderators and public.
Sparring is dangerous. As someone who has been banned twice before (and really doesn’t want to get banned again) I’ve basically made myself a mental list of “if you find yourself going back and forth with this person, disengage immediately” in order to try and prevent myself from getting caught in those kind of back and forth situations.
And that sort of back and forth tribal-based argument is the sort of “Twitter at its very worst” atmosphere that Scott seems to be trying to desperately avoid.
“Don’t quote or mention your tribal enemies by name” is a policy that could help people go a long way towards avoiding bans.
I don’t want to speak too much ill of people who can’t be here to defend themselves.
But both the posters you mentioned did a couple things frequently that I think Scott is right to discourage:
1) pushed the limit – made a lot of posts that may not have been strictly “more heat than light” but certainly had “significantly more heat than necessary to justify the light”.
2) engaged in a lot of provocative back and forths that devolved (or threatened to devolve) into not quite ad hominem, but definitely stuff more like “attacking a poster” than “criticizing a concept”. Note that several of the linked posts are deep in subthreads that have long since spent whatever utility they had initially
Both of these are bad behaviors that tend to degrade the quality of discussion, and more critically encourage bad behavior in others, without necessarily generating a single smoking gun “obviously bannable” comment.
@gbdub
I reluctantly agree with you. Because I wasn’t involved in any of the long to-and-fros it’s easy for me to imagine they didn’t exist. And it’s no excuse that the long arguments were often between the two of them.
As somebody noted above, 6 months puts the ban just past the US election, which is probably best for both, considering what they were banned for.
+1
Acknowledging the fact that this is empathically not a democracy, I would vote the same way.
The posts quoted for DubblesoundNotLawfull honestly don’t look that bad and while the ones for BackfootBabyBear definitely are crossing the line, they generally have high quality comments, so I’d be more willing to overlook things.
I don’t know NotVeryElegants comment history, but the quoted comment also doesn’t seem particularly banworthy to me.
Same, but I accept that our opinions aren’t the critical ones here.
One of those individuals previously received a warning about behavior.
(I recall both having received warnings before, but only one is listed in the comments page.)
I think Scott made a previous “folks on thin ice” list on an Open Thread without giving explicit warnings on the comments page, which is probably what you are recalling (because I recall it too!) but I don’t know where to find it.
EchoC was banned a while ago, initially forever. The ban was reduced after a fairly widespread plea for clemency due to his general civility and high quality commentary. He was asked to refrain from mentioning a particular aspect of politics which he adhered to strictly.
I don’t have as much familiarity with OrthographicallyUnhygienicHominid or CryptoGallic, but those bans were somewhat surprising, too.
On the other hand, maybe you should keep banning people–it’s fun to come up with these user-name workarounds!
Speaking as the person who was being responded to in one of the comments that got CryptoGallic banned, it’s amazing it didn’t happen earlier. When you reference actual living fascists positively and openly state that you don’t care about the rules of the site after being warned about repeatedly breaking them… I’m not sure what else you can do.
Some of the others were a bit odd to me.
To quote that directly:
They also ended that comment with “Send me to Deiseach by all means.”, which is pretty close to literally asking to be banned (I’m assuming this was during the time that Deiseach was banned).
I have no strong feelings on the particular bans, approve of the efforts to increase civility, and wholeheartedly endorse silly name games.
We need a Minister of Silly Names.
I also agree that FootTigerbaby and repetitivedisorder were two of the more interesting commentators, and I enjoyed their input. However, I do see that they crossed the line rather aggressively, and I think a 6 month ban is fair. I think a 3 month ban would be close to as effective as a 6 month ban, and could see lowering it to that, but I do not think a 1 or 2 month ban is long enough.
I just think 6 months without either of them would be a shame.
CommandGivenToDogChicagoProFootball&BaseballPlayer does need to knock it off with all the eye-rolling, but I’m pretty sure that a warning would be sufficient to get that point across. Since I don’t recall such a warning being given before, the ban seems over the top.
I disagree, actual bans are useful. I do think private warnings earlier on would be a very good thing.
I also would prefer they not be banned for 6 months
I’d vote against shortening HBC’s ban. He’s someone who has been here a long time, and has a history of high-quality comments, but his quality has been dropping lately. At one point recently, he attempted to link all Charismatic Christians to Kenneth Copeland (prosperity gospel televangelist) in precisely the sort of smearing-the-outgroup stuff that we really should be better than, and doubled down when called on it.
@Bean you don’t think 3 months is long enough for whatever effect you’re hoping to get?
It’s not “6 months is the objectively correct length of ban for his crimes”. It’s that he’s been pretty low-quality for a while now, and I’m worried about the message we’d send by shortening the ban.
Seconded.
OK, at the risk of trespassing on forbidden territory…I’ve only been active on SSC threads for about six months, and I am mystified by that list of newly banned participants. I’ve debated with (and seen debates with) lots of names on that list, and I’ve never felt personally offended. Even when someone says something like “All X’s are like Y’s, what losers,” that is usually the spur for an enlightening (to me) discussion about ingroups and outgroups, received ideas, new perspectives, etc.
On the other hand, I have no idea what’s been going on on Twitter, so that is just my perspective regarding SSC open and hidden threads. There may be virtual jungle firefights going on of which I am completely unaware.
Statements like “All X’s are like Y’s, what losers” can lead to productive discussions about the topics you’re mentioning. Given the right mix of participants and shared understanding about communication norms, they could even often lead to that sort of discussion.
However:
Statements like “What losers” aren’t value neutral: it ups the probability that people are going to go into tribal warfare mode. It lowers the likelihood of productive discussion. It biases the discussions towards repetitive tribal conflict, of the kind that HBC and EC often engage in. Plus, the statement “what losers” isn’t even falsifiable. It’s just like, you propagating your biases.
There’s a specious argument that I see made sometimes, that being polite and measured somehow gets in the way of having good discussions, by taking too much work and stifling people’s ability to say what they mean.
If it’s really important to your point to describe leftists as “foolish youth”, you’re not making an interesting point. You’re letting everybody know who you think the ingroup and the outgroup, in a way that has negative externalities.
If being polite in conversation takes too much cognitive effort, it’s because people don’t know how to do it. Politeness and reasonable epistemic humility overlap to a great degree. It’s generally impolite to say “All X’s are Y, what losers.” It’s also not epistemically humble. If you can’t be polite, you’re almost definitely not being humble.
A more honest, and not entirely incidentally more polite, formulation might look like: “Sometimes, when I’m feeling fired about about the culture war, it feels strongly to me like all X’s are Y. I’ve tried thinking about A, B, and C to give myself a more nuanced and generous understanding, but it’s not helping. Could someone else help me get more perspective here?”
So being appropriately humble and realistic about what you know vs. what you suppose to be true vs. what your feelings are telling you for tribal reasons gets you a long way towards never saying stuff like “All X are Y, what losers.” But it requires being clear on what you’re saying, what your motivation for saying it is, and to ensure that your motivations aren’t tribal warfare. It’s a pretty high bar.
But being polite to people is also rational on its own, not just because it overlaps with realistic epistemic humility. Adjacent to the initial point: It also helps the people responding to you not get tribal triggered. If you’re interested getting other people to respond to you thoughtfully, starting the conversation by forcing them to do emotional effort to quell their own tribalistic responses is a terrible strategy. If you’re not interested in getting thoughtful responses, then you’re just picking fights on the internet, and it’s rational for Scott to ban you.
It’s true that discussion will usually be improved by taking at least the low hanging politeness fruit of cutting out the gratuitous insults. But I have the impression sometimes that too much epistemic humility can result in a mushy statement that doesn’t actually establish much ground to argue from or against. Like, oh, this one, for example.
What makes you say that? I’m not sure that’s necessarily true. I think that it is at least possible even in those circumstances to establish a relatively absolute statement.
Joking aside, I know what you mean. Two observations:
1. We sometimes encourage folks to reconsider, and we see (AFAICT genuine) retractions and apologies most of the time. Including in at least one of the linked comments for Germy Wise One. It’s one element of our self-moderation, or maybe I should say co-moderation. And I think saying something ill considered, retracting, and apologizing is much better than saying something ill considered and being banned for six months. But it’s still not better than not saying something ill considered in the first place, and maybe six month bans reduce that on the whole. It also introduces an expectation that you learn from what you did, and maybe the folks who apologized weren’t learning. I don’t know.
2. Like you I value advancing the conversation, and I think some impoliteness along the way is tolerable. Of course it’s easy to say that in theory. But more than that we have to be careful here because SSC is such an unusually charitable place. There ought to be a law: there is no statement so asinine that a civil debate could not follow. But we can’t just judge the results and say “No harm, no foul” (as I am tempted to do many, many times) or we’re incentivizing those initially inflammatory posts. We’re saying, “You can say whatever you like, as long as other folks give you a free pass.” That’s not okay.
What I do know is that I more than ever don’t like this approach to moderation, and I repeat my begging that Scott delegate.
I can’t remember the name of the post, but Scott has that post about how to enforce rules with limited enforcement capacity. It seems like he’s following the rulebook he laid out there, and I mostly like it.
He’s telegraphed pretty clearly what will get a person banned, and he’s following through. It could be helpful to have people who are empowered to guide the conversations/moderate stuff, but then, that has substantial time costs for Scott, too. Who does QC on the moderation? I prefer more posts and uneven, terrorist-style rule enforcement over Scott sinking more time into community management.
First offender model
@roflc0ptic
I don’t see how empowering a moderator could have greater time costs than Scott doing it all himself.
Pretty easily, I think. Having a moderator, or a moderation team, that follows Scott’s way requires either 1. extensively documenting his thinking on moderation, so that another person can do it, or 2. extensively communicating with someone in real time about the content of the site. Either way, the coordination costs are steep and ongoing. And even with that, you can’t just get an off the shelf moderator here: you need someone who is sharp, conscientious, and shares Scott’s preferences.
Plus, Scott seems really turned off by dealing with community drama – see his comment about why he waited so long to ban people. He’s managing this in a largely unaccountable way. When moderation actions occur with some hypothetical moderator, it’s hard to imagine there’s going to be any less drama.
The idea of hiring someone incurs all of those issues and then some. The position needs to be funded, and adds further admin work for Scott.
A subtler point is that a moderator, paid or unpaid, becomes another human Scott has to think about in an intimate way. Are they happy? Is he treating them well/fairly? It incurs cognitive load in the form of parsing out ethical obligations. We get a really limited number of slots for non-objectified Other People in our minds.
If there’s someone who do Scott’s will without incurring coordination costs, then great. Without that, outsourced entails up front difficulty and ongoing costs, and I assume that Scott is doing the math right for himself.
@roflc0ptic
Sorry, but that strikes me as a series of weak or dubious arguments. Taking them in order, since I think they can be pretty easily isolated:
He’s already documented it. To be sure, he would probably have to say more, but that’s a one time cost. I don’t see why you say the cost is steep and ongoing.
I don’t see why. Certainly he would have to communicate changes to his policy, but he already does that, like in this very post. That’s not particularly steep when you consider how much he writes at other times in the week, and it’s less ongoing than punctuated. The cost isn’t fixed, in other words, like it more or less is when there is some thousands of comments per week and some percentage which are reported; it only comes up when he wants to change policy.
Sharp and conscientious? SSC is full of such people! I seriously doubt no one could be found here; the subreddit has a whole team of people, too, remember. Scott wasn’t the one who found them, of course, but he didn’t have to, because someone else could also find them for him. And as for sharing Scott’s preferences, they only need to do what his moderation policy says. There’s a difference.
This is a good point. Drama around mod actions would, I agree, grow when the mod isn’t Scott. But if moderation on other sites is any indication, that’s not that big a deal. For one thing, a lot of drama is silly and can be ignored. For another, you’re discounting where the drama would decrease: many of the complaints that surface, for instance, are about the slow turnaround time and apparent harshness of the retaliation when it finally does come. Quick mod action would both better justify any of the ‘harsh’ actions (“Alice the mod warned Bob three times in the last month not to do that, and he still did it”) and curb behavior in the meanwhile.
The big exception are cases where a mod strikes down a post Scott wouldn’t and we the people clamor for justice. How common do you think that would be? Do you really think those cases are plausibly more of a time sink for Scott than doing everything himself? Remember that we clamor about a bunch of cases already—seemingly the majority of all bans, even. I’m not sure how this could be expected to get worse.
This is just not true; you even contradict it in your very next sentence. Mod positions don’t need to be funded; many, many positions are volunteer.
This is true and a reasonable point—but let’s remember Scott is currently personally responsible for moderating all the comments on the entire site, which raises the same “Are they happy? Is he treating them well/fairly?” questions, to a lesser degree but to many, many more people.
Of course Scott is the person best placed to make this decision. I only beg that he reconsider, as I said from the start.
The “sharp and conscientious” people that are in this thread seem to have a consensus that they don’t actually know where the line is. You can’t really have a rule-for-every-issue rulebook. A lot of it is “I know it when I see it.” For example: Someone made a post describing a third party as a partisan shill. They were not banned. Someone else who responded disparagingly got banned. Calling people partisan shills is usually bad manners and bad thinking, but is sometimes factually correct.
Scott’s going to have to own all of the bans, whether or not he does them. I think we disagree about how difficult it is to recreate Scott’s editorial bent. Given the level of confusion and pushback he’s getting, clearly lots of sharp people are failing to create an accurate model in their minds. Scott’s a pretty clear communicator. Why hasn’t he *already* explained himself in such a way that everyone understands? Because it’s difficult.
You’ve misunderstood. I’m not saying that as a category, moderator positions must be funded, I’m saying that if you hire a moderator, that position needs to be funded. The claim that you would have to fund the position follows from the definition of “hire”. I maintain my assertion that hiring someone costs money and adds administrative complexity.
So you’re saying Scott would need to pay attention here. I agree. You’re also saying that people complain about most of the bans. I agree.
If I’m Scott’s moderator, I don’t want to be in the position where I’m banning people and having it rescinded. If I’m Scott, I presumably don’t want that either. Presenting a unified front means spending time coordinating, and again, emotional energy.
I don’t know. I have managed a couple of software teams, and recently got out of a complex communal living situation. At this moment in my life, the time cost of “getting on the same page” with other people and worrying about their feelings seems… too high in almost every case. So perhaps I’m overestimating the cost. But humans regularly underestimate coordination costs, and I suspect that you are, too. And if perceived coordination costs (and the risks associated with failing to coordinate) aren’t what’s stopping Scott, I have no idea what else it could be.
@roflc0ptic
I will cop to things being pretty unclear at the moment. But I think we should distinguish between the extreme measures Scott is taking because not wanting to moderate more closely, and the measures he’d be taking if that were not so much an issue. Of course I can’t read his mind, and maybe he loves doing things this way. But things weren’t always like this, and I’m not sure anyone thinks current policy is great (if anyone does, say so!). So I’m not supposing that a hypothetical mod would come in and try to do exactly what Scott’s doing right now; the fact that I don’t like how things are now is exactly why I’m suggesting a mod.
Like, concretely, I don’t expect that someone who devoted more time to moderating than Scott does a on a weekly basis would be handing out six month bans; more like one or two week bans. And more germane to your point: that people don’t know where to draw the line comes largely, I think, from moderation choices like that. Let’s imagine EC made those two linked comments. A day or two after the second one, he gets a week’s ban. Is there a public outcry? Maybe. But it’s harder to justify one when the ban is a week, and it’s likewise easier to simply ignore the outcry.
My mistake; you are correct.
We might be differing about the costs of keeping on the same page because I’m imagining one mod and not a team. My reasoning is that if Scott, a full time doctor who also writes this blog on the side, can afford to moderate things, then someone with a less busy schedule can afford to do it more. And I think coordination between two people (or more accurately, supervising and directing the work of one person) is much more manageable. If you think that’s an unreasonable assumption, that would explain some of our differences.
Is “Like, oh, this one, for example.” self referential, or referencing my comment?
Sorry, self-referential, but disappointingly ambiguously so.
My default mode is too wishy-washy and I try to correct in the direction of clear statements with only the caveats necessary for clarity.
I didn’t find it ambiguous, but admittedly I’ve been primed to expect self referential humor from Randy.
Haha, thank you for clarifying. It was probably me. I have been negotiating with a particularly bad faith actor this last week, and my conflict-mind is really activated. Statement has a less likely interpretation that’s an insult to my honor?!?! Knives out, motherfucker.
And yeah, depending on how you operationalize it, epistemic humility is on a gradient with being terminally vague. I agree with Nick, that you can establish relatively absolute statements in the face of uncertainty. “Too much” epistemic humility, as defined by “you know it when you see it”, is unhelpful. It’s easier to proselytize than to practice.
Quoted for truth; when pervasive, it makes it really easy for Xs to go elsewhere. I used to recommend SSC to people as a discussion space pretty highly, but it’s disheartening when people who could be valuable contributors decide this isn’t an environment worth participating in. It’s doubly a problem, because:
This strategy doesn’t work nearly as well if there aren’t any Xs around. Anecdotally, I feel like there’s been a real increase in the number of “can anyone steelman* this view for me?” posts lately that have gone unanswered.
(*Pet peeve – it’s not a steelman when built by someone who believes it.)
I’m trying to understand why I wasn’t personally on the list of people on thin ice, if Plumber in particular was.
As an example, in the last OT, I was explicitly claiming that certain political actors made me very angry, and that at least one of their positions (specified at the time) seemed to me to indicate they were either clueless or knowingly stating falsehoods. Several people then started arguing in favour of that position, or asked why I thought it was (factually/legally) wrong. After several attempted responses, I found I simply couldn’t explain without an aura of “talking down” to the people involved, and abandoned their questions unanswered.
I think the difference may be that I framed my comments as “this makes me angry” and started with “this may be evidence that I’m succumbing to knee jerk political responsiveness.” Or maybe it’s that I walked away, rather than posting in a style that would have strongly suggested I thought of my interlocutors as at best exceptionally slow learners, and more likely disingenuous. But I don’t always manage either of those. So why am I not explicity on thin ice? (I do love a nice argument …)
OTOH, maybe it’s just that I don’t post enough for Scott to see me as worth mentioning, even though it seems to me I post rather more than most.
You may post more than most, and yet that can be a rounding error compared to Plumber’s output..
> I’m trying to understand why I wasn’t personally on the list
Part of the goal of any Reign Of Terror is to have people questioning their actions at all times. Deterministic rules provide a sense of safety. Vaguely arbitrary ones may lead to people being on their best behavior.
Vaguely arbitrary rules lead to people being on their most cautious behavior. There is a difference.
That is not to say that people being more cautious about interacting with others is necessarily a bad thing, but too much of it can definitely have a chilling effect.
@DinoNerd;
Thanks.
Reading the speculation on what may have been my posting sin has been alternately hilarious or humbling, my take-away is to simply post a lot less.
I hope I didn’t “humble” you too badly 🙁 FWIW I find the thin ice thing baffling, too. I was just giving my best guess as to what might have annoyed Scott.
@Nick;
Thanks.
FWIW your guesses seemed “a fair cop” to me
I feel like a jerk for even mentioning this, but given what Scott gave away about his filtering method for banned users, beware people making usernames with common words that appear on the blog going trolling…
Feel free to delete this comment if you decide to edit your post to remove that nugget.
Now he has to set up filter with a looooong list for new user names.
Now some guy named externality is going to be all up in here promoting Holocaust denial and it’ll be all your fault.
I feel like we’ve been here before.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/06/open-thread-118-5/#comment-706927
Problem: It’s extremely difficult to get good, honest medical advice online for free, and it shouldn’t be. Medical professionals are (rightfully) scared of being sued if the inquirer ends up dying of that thing you told them wasn’t serious.
Potential Solution: Pirate med! An online repository of medical advice provided anonymously to asked questions. Anonymous donors & contributors, hosting in pro-freedom jurisdiction, the whole package.
Question 1: Since there appear to be a lot of medical providers on here, what sort of anonymity setup for the site would it take for you to hop on and answer a few questions honestly during your down time? Can randomized logins 4chan style and a VPN get you contributing, or do we need to TOR the whole thing? Any other concerns on your end?
Thoughts on construction: I think a stack overflow model would work well, where answers to a question can be provided by anyone and the community upvotes the ones they find most useful for follow-on searchers’ ease of use.
Ideally, I’d like to see a decision tree system eventually where an inquirer inputs their problem and symptoms and follow-up questions about potentially paired symptoms, medications, etc, are automatically generated. The end result should probably be a confidence interval (Flu: 91%. COVID-19: 8%. Lupus: <1%) (Is it obvious yet that I'm not a medical professional? I'm sure this would be fiendishly tough, but it's hard to imagine building something useful any other way)
I happily quitclaim any rights to this idea if someone else feels they can develop it. I have no relevant skills in software or medicine.
Also whoever hosts this contraption may have problems.
Also, note that it is likely that it will be overrun by trolls, idiots, vandals who will have more time to give free advice than doctors. AKA witches and libertarians problem.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
I am betting that consensus on such site will be not matching reality or medical consensus or an useful advice.
Well, the site would need to be heavily moderated for this to work, and anonymous users would need to have a way to gain reputation over time, even if their public-facing handle were to change every time they post.
Question: if a doctor evaluates the quality of other people’s medical advice and deletes the bad advice, is that action in itself providing medical advice?
I think it would be important for bad advice to be down-listed but not deleted. Only trolling should be deleted. See my other comment below.
Again though, I’m just trying to think through how this might work. Anyone who actually puts in the work to develop this can run it however they want. I firmly believe though that importing the “only verified science” or “for their own good” lenses into this project will render it stillborn.
See also Scott’s struggle with getting the medical mouthpieces to admit that masks might be helpful with preventing COVID transmission.
Swedish hosting, or TOR if absolutely necessary (although that would dramatically cut down on people accessing it. I think TOR should be avoided unless necessary. Maybe a mirror on there for providers who are extremely scared about litigation).
The Stack Overflow model would help with the trolls & vandals problem. If you haven’t been on Stack Overflow, check it out. Top Comment quality is insanely high, and I’m certain the model would port to non-software-engineering. An active mod team on Pirate Med could also help shape the community by aggressively removing outright trolling.
This brings up another thought though: this being the internet, I’m sure that Pirate Med would have tons of answers about how -weed/sugar pills/crystals/magnets/not getting vaccinated- would cure the problem. I suggest not censoring that stuff. It would remove the credibility of the site (oddly enough). The upvoting system will help the supported answers rise to the top, but people should be able to reach other info if that’s what they want; that’s the whole point.
I am familiar with it (and was active there until recently), and they have multiple sites not about programming. See https://stackexchange.com/sites#
But antivaxers, bleach drinking enthusiasts, homeopathy, alternative medicine, crystal healing and similar seems to be quite unique. And without equivalent among for example programmers, photographers, hikers, 3D artists, writers etc.
Based on my experience number of deranged/malicious/scamming/idiotic people around medicine is vastly higher than in other areas. Homeopathy quackery is even sold in pharmacies in some places!
BTW, there is https://medicalsciences.stackexchange.com/
Come on, you really don’t think LISP guys are a little bit like alternative medicine gurus?
Thanks for the link to medicalsciences.stackexchange, I had no idea. I haven’t dug in deep yet but I expect they’d be limited in their ability to provide accurate data for litigious reasons. In the US we’ve historically held platforms blameless for content posted on them, but that’s starting to shift legally as platforms like youtube and facebook are able to demonstrate wide scale censorship.
After a little more digging it looks like the site you linked is a lot more theoretical than practical. It doesn’t answer the sorts of questions people hope for answers to when they log onto WebMD. My search for “stomach ache and fever”, for example, returned 1 unrelated hit.
I am betting that they ban personal medical advice and expect questions to be very widely applicable. But maybe in some situations it may be useful. For example home births risks for pregnancies without known issues may be fitting.
In case anybody in the medical profession doesn’t get how hard it is to find good advice online, let me provide the example that kicked off this thought series.
When my wife was pregnant with our first back in ’16 we started researching. I’ve got a background in statistics; she has a doctorate in Physical Therapy. There are no useful summaries of actual risks levels. No risk info for people who were following the basic guidance about smoking, drugs, weight, etc. Given the number of babies born in the world, this lack of info blew my mind.
After much digging I found a chart that showed that severe adverse outcomes (death or long-term hospitalization of mother or baby) were minimized if one planned a hospital induction, but the data wasn’t clear enough for my tastes and there was no attempt to handle confounders. We ended up electing to do a planned induction in the hospital. Everything went normally. It was a nightmare.
Apparently there’s this thing called the cascade where once you induce, the body tends to respond in a way that leads to the need for a c-section within 6-8 hours. My wife’s recovery was normal, and terribly painful. My 3 year old is healthy. I was on Tricare at the time. I don’t have much to complain about, but the experience was so terrible and poorly understood that…
Baby 2: Midwife time! Partly because I wasn’t on Tricare any more, partly because I didn’t trust the birthing doctors we talked to, and partly because my mom used to be a practicing midwife, we looked into supported home birth and found that IT IS AWESOME! I’ll cut this comment less-long, but for non-high risk pregnancies, it would blow my mind if people regularly chose a hospital birth if they were adequately informed on what hospital and home birth are actually like, and the risk levels and recovery times of each. Apparently the Europeans get it; tons of home births over there, and lots of midwife-assisted hospital births as well. Seems far superior.
It was really the complete lack of data that blew my mind though, especially about medical procedures as common as birth.
It gets worse. Even doctors often refuse to give useful answers.
Sorry for a morbid example following, but nearly all doctors treating people with cancer refuse to give any answer for questions about expected remaining lifetime. Even in case of patient explicitly asking about. And explicitly mentioning that answer with wide range is perfectly acceptable and that perfect accuracy is not expected.
(note: second-hand info – reported by a family member, situation in Poland)
They wish to not set an expectation that exerts a nocebo effect. (Can’t find the study that Asian immigrants had a higher mortality in years that were ‘bad’ for their astrological sign, dammit.)
An oncologist here does the opposite, on delivering the diagnosis he immediately makes all appointments for the next five years.
Good point.
But I am not convinced that refusal to give any prognosis is a good solution. Especially after request from a patient.
There is a lot one does not learn at med school…
My dad’s oncologist was clear that he couldn’t predict a precise timeline, but that he was unlikely to survive another year. (He died about six months later.).
Do you recall the specifics and how it compared with your experience?
Was it the case that the study omitted home (and therefore low complication) births, or that they did not count inductions that did not proceed to C-section?
It was just some poorly cited 2×2 chart in some article, I forget where. It had the adverse outcome percentage for people who planned/did not plan induction, and planned/did not plan c-section.
The upshot of it was that an unplanned induction caused more problems than a planned one, but it was obviously lacking any analysis of confounders (such as the cause of the unplanned induction). It was obviously trash, but in the complete void of useful info anywhere else it was the only solid-ish data point we had, so we went with it.
The article did not discuss home births. I couldn’t find any remotely rigorous studies about home births at the time (haven’t looked recently).
Ultimately it was all actually a little reassuring, because I eventually realized that the likely reason the data didn’t exist was that there was no significant risk for healthy moms and babies in the developed world. Still, it would have been nice to see some data-based explanation of that fact, instead of just being stuck deducing it.
Okay, thanks. Fwiw, my story is similar to yours, first hospital birth that ended in C-Section (that my wife will absolutely swear was unnecessary), two subsequent home births that went fairly well.
I think I can get medical advice from randos on the internet already. What would be more useful would be a guarantee that I was getting a consultation with a real {cardiologist, oncologist, psychiatrist} that somehow landed in a more sane jurisdiction for any malpractice claims.
That might be interesting. 3rd party vetting, voice garbelers, shaded informant-documentary style camera work… for some decent medical advice online.
I’m just envisioning something that helps people make the “ER, appointment, or wait a bit?” decision with better information. I’m not trying to compete directly with hands-on medicine.
I’m a software engineer and my sister is a doctor. We’ve had long conversations about ideas like this. From the engineering side, yes, it should be pretty simple to make even a 70s-style expert system that follows a decision tree and gives you a probability of a diagnosis. For your average 20 or 30-something healthy person that goes to the doctor once a year to get some antibiotics for a strep infection or something, this system would work awesome (which also happens to be a lot of the demographic that think this would be a great idea.)
Her response is that a lot more of her work as a primary care physician is not in the diagnostic realm, but in trying to convince patients, especially those with chronic conditions, to do what is best for themselves, and trying to navigate which of the outcomes are actually feasible for the patient to accomplish, which is a lot more nuanced task.
The other problem, is that a lot of the steps in diagnostic/treatment currently require a doctor’s orders to actually execute, whether it’s getting labs drawn or trying out a new medication, there needs to be a doctor in the loop in the current framework. If you were to automate the system, one of the arguments is that it would make it too easy to get bad treatment by just knowing the right steps to follow in the program. Think of how many people already try doing this, even with doctors in the loop, to get things like opiates or stimulants, and it would be even easy for them, if they didn’t have to convince a human first.
I think it would be a great idea, and doctors already have access to a lot of programs that will give them similar diagnostic capability. It would be great to have those publicly available as well, but I think the most likely outcome would be similar to what has happened with WebMD and other sites, with tons of people showing up to their doctor saying “I think I have Ebola, because all the symptoms line up in the tool, even though I’ve never left my house in Northern Canada for the last 20 months.” (a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea)
Adopting this idea as a front-line treatment for mild symptoms of the type currently allowed to be treated by telemedicine I think is the next logical place to go with it. Have a system where you can call in and say “I have a fever and a sore throat”, then a computer orders you a strep test from a nearby lab, and if it comes back positive, is allowed to write a prescription for an antibiotic, with the whole process costing $20 or something, is probably the next evolution of the system, but I don’t see it going much beyond there, because of the potential for abuse.
Thanks, very helpful inputs. Obviously it would be nice to eventually have a tele-medicine AI assist, but in the short term I’m just envisioning something that helped people make informed “ER/Appointment/Wait a bit” decisions when they notice something wrong. You know, what WebMD could be if it were immune to litigation.
I think a good part of the problem is that you are asking for something different from what you are asking for.
First: Medical advice by-name is a specific legal concept. When you are asking for medical advice, you are asking for “the provision of a formal professional opinion regarding what a specific individual should or should not do to restore or preserve health.”
This generally means an individual consultation with a healthcare provider to be able to perform a detailed assessment. And if someone is able to do that online, why would they want to do it for free? A lot of people go into healthcare to help people one-on-one and they hate the associated paperwork. Having to deal with people only through a chat forum is like the worst of both worlds. (One EMT I worked with once said “I’d do this job for free if I didn’t have to write the trip sheets”)
Providing “medical advice” also falls into the realm of not just legal but also licensing risk. If you screw up and get caught, you might not face any legal consequences. “Did you really think that a ‘DrCokeNose69420’ on a forum hosted in Sweden which explicitly disclaimed something as legal advice was actually something you should rely on?” OTOH, you never know what a licensing board will yank your credentials for – doctors are frequently required to disclose if they have any mental health issues as a part of maintaining their ongoing license. You think an report about “unprofessional” advice to a license board via an angry doxxer won’t cause a *single* bit of headache?
But let’s go with something a little less formal. You want guidance or information about the practice of medicine to better inform yourself. Maybe you want to know about common treatment regimens for particular conditions. Or you want a way to figure out what might be going on. You’re going to end up with something like WebMD’s symptom checker. Yes, it might be cancer. It also might be lupus. It’s probably a muscle strain/sprain or a cold. But getting a more useful answer requires individual assessments. Very few people have enough medical knowledge to be able to report all of the relevant (and only relevant) information required to go through a detailed expert system. So you might reasonably be able to do better than WebMD. Maybe twice as good. But not 10x as good. And certainly not as good as a medical professional.
Finding out what the current standard treatments are for a given condition is already fairly easy. (I use Wikipedia a lot) Figuring out what condition(s) *you* have, and whether the standard treatment is right for *you* is a lot more challenging.
Note that https://slatestarcodex.com/comments/ has broken syntax around “face for one month” text.
Piggybacking to highlight strictly technical issue – several of the referenced ban reasons seem to point to comments caught in the report filter. Example. In a few such cases I’ve been tracking Scott seems to have manually re-enabled the comment eventually, but it’s a systemic issue that impacts comment policy clarity.
Oddly, there do seem to be indications of some amount of user-end ability to pull filtered comments. This either means the filter is implemented in a very odd way, or the entire issue is an artifact of one experiment or another I’m running and forgot about.So, uh, can someone confirm please that the above direct-comment link is broken for them too?ETA: Nevermind, figured out the source of confusion. Would still appreciate confirmation though, since the underlying problem seems to not be an artifact of my setup.
Confirmation of what? That the comments don’t exist any more? Yes, the comments you mention here don’t exist anymore. I think that I checked that they all did exist at one time. In particular, SCC did comment on that thread.
I’m not sure if I can count that as confirmation, since it seems as though your particulars are very nearly the opposite of mine.
The post referenced in SCC’s ban was not available at the time the ban hit the Comments page (and I commented on it), but has since been restored. See the fact that Scott did not reply to the bad post to announce the ban, as used to be his habit – unless you checked the Comments page there was no way to even know that SCC was banned, and definitely no way (short of third-party archiving) to know why.
I seem to recall the reference post for d*ck’s ban being visible at some point, but if correct it was removed quick enough that most archival services didn’t get a snapshot. It serves as a good example of the specific problem…
…that a combination of moderation policies leads to an ever-increasing opacity, barring continuous effort by Scott. If comments get pulled automatically as a response to user reports, then there is a mechanism by which they can disappear even after they have been referenced in other places. If Scott is increasingly relying on comment references to explain the moderation policy, then it is vulnerable to this dynamic and requires manually approving things for them to stay relevant. It gets worse when you make the connection that especially bad comments are more likely both to be reported and used by Scott as examples.
In Chicago, population density is anticorrelated with COVID19 prevalence. But number of people per household is correlated with COVID prevalence. Source A similar pattern is observed in NYC.
This suggests that to prevent similar epidemics in the future, US cities should decrease zoning restrictions so that it is affordable for people to get apartments of their own (rather than living with roommates or family), even though this leads to higher population density overall.
Would be interesting to see if the pattern holds up internationally. A quick Google gives me avarage household size of 2.58 for Italy, 3.33 for Iran, China 3.1, USA 2.5, UK 2.5, South Korea 2.9 and New Zealand 2.7. Which doesn’t have any obvious correlation with the relative severity of their outbreaks
On an international or even national scale it doesn’t hold up. NYC is the densest major US city and has the highest level of cases. But that is in large part because it is an international travel destination, unlike low-density parts of the US. (Also it had irresponsible policy for far longer than other early-infected places like Seattle and San Jose.) So those factors overwhelm the effect of household size.
Also, it sure seems like there’s just a lot of noise in which places got big outbreaks and which places didn’t. NYC got clobbered, and Washington State barely got its hair mussed so far, yet there was probably community spread in Washington State as early as there was in NYC. That looks like it might be density of the urban area, but then there’s also apparently a nasty outbreak in some American Indian communities that are extremely sparsely populated.
Is this explained mainly by different strains with very different characteristics? Susceptibility profile among the people there (maybe American Indians and New Yorkers are extra-vulnerable for some genetic or behavioral reason)? Randomness in some initial superspreader events happening in one place and not another?
I think if you are looking at statistics on a national scale, you’re doing it wrong (especially if you are comparing “all of the US / China to one country in Europe). There is a ton of local and regional variation in this thing
+1
I don’t know much about China, but treating “the US” as some sort of monolithic entity is almost nonsensical in this case.
This seems intuitively like it has a lot of confounds that are going to make it hard to learn much from it. Race and age are correlated with where and how you live, and correlate with having bad enough symptoms of COVID-19 that you actually get tested. Occupation and social class are correlated where and how you live, and also with how likely you are to have been exposed (but may not be so strongly correlated in May of 2021).
A question here for libertarians and other people weary of government intervention, with a short introduction on why I think it’s worth asking:
I feel like a lot of skepticism regarding government intervention here is coloured by experiences with the US government. The US government does seem to be, at least recently (since the 1980s) incredibly incompetent. Whether this is by design (Republicans defunding essential government agencies so much that they start sucking), lobbying (American donors more or less write legislation to work for them, not the country) or culture, is an interesting side question. (I am assuming kind of here that while the US functions well for the top third of the country, most other countries have better outcomes for larger parts of their populations. Feel free to disagree with this, but please don’t reply just based on that as it will derail the thread.)
My main question is twofold.
1. Would you imagine yourself to be more accepting of government intervention if you lived in a well-functioning democratic state in Europe or Asia? If only in some cases, where do you see the cut-off point: small Northern European states, large states with a more federative bent (large either in population (Germany) or area (Australia, Canada), or large states that are highly centralized (e.g. France).
2. Regardless of your answer to question one, what are your top X potential fixes. Can be anything from huge things like having a parliamentary system or proportional representation, to outlawing donations by corporations and/or limiting the amount of money individuals can donate.
Thanks for engaging! I’m just trying to make sense of your world-view from a perspective of a Dutch left-wing (raging commie by American standards) person who is quite happy with the way his country is run, despite some fuck-ups every now and then.
My answer would have a CW streak running through it, so I’ll hold my tongue on this thread. Ask the same question on a fractious thread and I’ll be more forthcoming [But still really really civil 😀]
I’m going to dodge your particular questions for CW reasons and provide a more abstract answer. One of the main questions which political philosophy needs to answer is “what is the proper role of the government?” There are many different ways to go about developing an answer. However, the founding of the United States was based substantially on the principles of English liberty, in a fashion most typified by John Locke’s Second Treaties of Government. If someone was to read this and take it to heart, the “soul” of the US would become apparent.
1. No. Almost every (every?) country that I think would fit your general definition has extremely low rates of unskilled immigration, and that is a moral (and economic and stability wise) non starter for me.
2A. I think laws should have to be reaffirmed by the public. For a real democracy you shouldn’t have people’s opinions from three centuries ago acting as a binding constraint. A new law would have to be positively voted on every X years (or Every X*Y years where Y is the number of times it has been reaffirmed).
2B. A person needs to be able to vote against a candidate and accumulate their votes over time. If you give me a choice between Trump and Biden I ought to be able to make a vote against either of them that means something, and small groups ought to have mechanisms for voicing strong preferences.
@baconbits9
1. Interesting, are you for a very lenient immigration or completely open borders? Incidentally, most Western-European countries have around 20% of their population consisting of people who are either foreign-born, or have at least one foreign-born parent. Half of which are of non-Western heritage, which would often overlap with unskilled. I’m sure that’s lower than the US, but taking into account the already much, much, much higher population density of Western Europe, I’d say it’s not an extremely low rate of immigration.
2A. I don’t know about other countries, but here (Netherlands) the constitution dates from 1848 and got updated several times since. The current version dates from 1983. The current iteration of the French Republic (Fifth) dates from 1958, and differs radically from the Fourth, going from a near-parliamentary system to an executive one. It was ratified by referendum under Charles DeGaulle.
Again, I feel like this idea of static government is uniquely American. ‘Founding Fatherism’ doesn’t exist anywhere else. Perhaps this can be explained by the US having a less stable cultural identity, therefore a political system becomes fixed as part of that identity? Just thinking out loud here.
2B. I don’t know of any system that allows for empty seats in parliament or a vacant executive office if it has one. However, proportional representation does provide an alternative to mainstream political parties. In the most barrier-free systems, those of Israel and the Netherlands, there are over a dozen parties in parliament. The three traditional parties in the Netherlands (Christian-Democrats/Liberal Conservatives (fiscally conservative, socially liberal) and Social Democrats) went from having a reliable 80+% of the vote in the 1970s to less than half, currently. Those votes all went to new parties, founded from the 60s onwards, many of which have partaken in government.
Even in larger and less open proportional systems like Germany, you still have alternatives to the big two, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, ranging from post-communists to extreme-right parties.
Again, I feel like this is a problem mostly of Anglo-American systems based on the British one.
Which brings me back to my original post: I feel like a lot of the structural issues attacked as ‘Government’ by a certain part of the commentariat here, is just attacking US system, which is clearly dysfunctional (in my opinion). That’s why I’m trying to find out if and what opinions exist on foreign governments.
PS: I also don’t think this is particularly Cultur Warry. This is just about governmental systems, something we talk about all the time here.
PPS: I also prefer not to go into object-level arguments like cassander asked for. Please look for examples yourself.
2A some amount of this might be related to unresolved federalism compromises. A very good argument can be made that if the constitution ceased to exist, we would get 50 sovereign nations resulting (plus the assorted territories). The constitution is not just the way that the USA happens to be governed, but why it exists and the legal ground for its existence. A good portion of the population feels that something like this is the case but not a super majority. But it is enough that it can not be ignored.
Then again the EU does not seem to have this with respect to the various founding treaties.
I have trouble understanding why the Constitution would cease to exist. Do you mean if it would get updated? Why would that mean it ceases to exist? Isn’t the whole point of updating things that you keep some things that work well but replace or discard others?
@MVDZ, I think what @edmundgennings is arguing is: Suppose that the US held a convention to write a new constitution and then submitted it to be ratified by referendum, like France did in 1958. Suppose that an overall majority ratified it, but in three states a majority rejected it. There is an excellent argument the new Constitution would not be valid in those three states; they would become independent while the new Constitution went into effect in a United States of the other 47 states.
This’s exactly what happened in 1788: the Federal Convention wrote a new Constitution which was submitted to conventions in each of the 13 states. 11 states approved it and then proceeded to elect a Congress and President, while North Carolina and Rhode Island didn’t approve it for another couple years and stayed independent in the meantime.
Other countries talk of suspending their constitutions. If that happend in the US, the federal government would plausibly lose all legal authority. Alternatively, if the USA tried to make a new constitution without following the methods established in the old one, any state that wanted to could plausibly have the legal right to leave and become independent.(Whether this is in fact the case is unclear but at least half the population has some feeling in this direction) And if they did follow the methods for amending the constitution, it would not be a new one just the old one significantly changed. And we have had a number of admendments.
There is one other possibility, though: Do what postwar Japan did. Write an amendment to the existing constitution saying “Everything in this Constitution is repealed and replaced by this new document we’ve attached.” Then, pass that using the preexisting amendment process.
Assuming you don’t deny any state without its consent its equal suffrage in the Senate, that would be completely constitutional without any risk of leaving nonconsenting states outside the Union.
I think that the real issue is whether there is a cohesive enough society at a specific level for people to create a new constitution and trusting that they don’t be hoodwinked in the process. I think that this doesn’t exist at the EU level, nor at the federal US level.
The EU tried to create a constitution, but this was rejected in two of the four referendums that were held. 16 countries didn’t see a need to hold a referendum. The very same constitution was then adopted as amendments to existing treaties, without further referendums.
In contrast, when some changes were rejected during the last major revision of the Dutch constitution (1983), they actually didn’t get adopted. If you look at the opposing votes, they come from all over the political spectrum, so it’s not one minority that got trampled on.
It seems to me that there is now both a desire for increasing centralization of governance among a certain group, but also a deterioration of cohesion in society, which makes that centralization in accordance with democratic principles harder.
There is something that always bothers me about these conversations, and part of it is the comparison between the US and European systems as if there is a European system. The approach lends itself to ‘of course you can high immigration work, look at Sweden, and you can have this parliamentary system work look at X, and you can have UBI work, look at Y’, Europe is large enough, rich enough and fragmented enough that there are going to be innumerable individual successes to hold up as examples.
As long as the US government controls the borders they need to enact some measures or you create a tragedy of the commons. Purely open borders is only desirable in a far more decentralized US, so I don’t support ‘open borders’ but I strongly support large amounts of free movement of people.
Percentages don’t particularly interest me in this context, the ability to immigrate to the US in the 1800s was incredibly valuable to an Irish person, but that person and their descendants are long considered American. If you did count them simply you would bin them under ‘Western’ immigrants when in reality they were among the poorest people who could afford to immigrate at all in the world. On the other end I don’t think that growing immigrant populations that are surging due to a flat or declining total native population are desirable on their own. Dynamics have to be long run stable and I don’t view the European path that way, with some possible exceptions.
Now surely we aren’t going to start counting the Irish as human? Read Caplan’s book, he has a whole chapter on how to make immigration more efficient without going totally beyond the Pale:
https://www.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigration/dp/1250316960
I read a lot of Caplan’s stuff from the late 2000s through the early teens, and I have never found him to be compelling on policy.
@baconbits9: I haven’t read that much Caplan. This book that I linked to is actually a collaboration with Weinersmith. I found that not only were the arguments compelling, he doesn’t demand that you share his worldview… you could be a Modi Hindu nationalist or a rabid Build A Random Wall Trumpistani, and still be able to appreciate the policy ideas.
There are always deadweight costs of immigration restriction, but some are worse than others. (E.g., “walls” in a world where immigrants come by air and overstay tourist visas…)
name one time this has happened, please…
@cassander a quick Google search will yield a ton of results on the SEC. I can highly recommend interviews with William K. Black (Bill Black), an expert in financial regulation and prosecution. From memory, he goes into why the SEC was woefully understaffed in the 2000s in the run up to the financial crisis.
I’m willing to say this is a bipartisan issue, though a lot of the sources I saw mentioned a Republican administration/Congress.
The SEC budget more than doubled from 2000 to 2008.
Good to know, bad example then.
Anyway like I said in my PS, don’t want to go into examples too much. If you find this claim too partisan, feel free to focus on the other possible reasons I gave, like lobbying or culture, or come up with reasons yourself. Trading examples won’t yield a particularly interesting debate as far as I’m concerned.
I think these cases probably exist, but that they will be hard to find from casual searching, because local government and government agencies routinely complain that they’re woefully underfunded and can’t do their jobs because of the unreasonable constraints of their budget. Without some digging, it will be hard to distinguish between the genuine underfunding of critical things and the strategic claims of underfunding as a strategy to get more money in their budget.
[eta]
The classic example of this is public schools. Public school administrators will always tell the public they are dangerously short of money and can’t educate the kids without more, even when their budget has outpaced inflation for the last 30 years.
I suspect that some of this is pure posturing for bigger budgets, but often it’s also people in the government agency or whatever who take their agency’s work seriously and see all the important things they could do if only they had more money.
We just went through the FDA banning all commercial and nonprofit PCR test kits for the first critical months of an epidemic. Then CDC pushed its own fake test kit into use (yes, “fake”, I used to run PCR at Mayo and the CDC test kit isn’t even for current machines [in addition to the whole “doesn’t work” thing]).
CDC pushed hard to get people NOT to use masks, FEMA hadn’t bothered to restock the mask stockpile since H1N1… we’d all like to have some anti-plague defenses, but if we gave FDA and CDC more money, they’d just have worked harder to stop us.
Before we do anything else, we have to stop the FDA from shutting down Mayo Clinic, John Hopkins, Roche, Co-Diagnostics etc. Then we can ask whether the FDA should get more than $6.6 billion per year, or the CDC $6.6 billion.
I’d like to say yes, fund them more (along with the Army’s biodefense programs)… but would that help? Or would it just kill us all if we ever see a real bioweapon released?
I have seen numerous credible claims that it is happening with IRS
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/irs-the-gop-propublica-budget-cuts-enforcement-billions.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2014/07/02/the-time-has-come-defund-the-irs/#4a7a12295dea
https://www.atr.org/trump-budget-cuts-irs-funding-239-million
I wouldn’t describe reducing the IRS budget from $14 billion to $12 billion (inflation adjusted) as “defunding it,” only as reducing its funding.
I’ve seen credible plans for terraforming Mars (via asteroid impact) that cost less than $12 billion….
“Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic and CHEAP regarded this Mars with envious eyes.”
I hope an Am J Public Health article on “History of US Presidential Assaults on Modern Environmental Health Protection” is not too CW.
(Note: Figure 1 is not all of the story. And better not quibble whether the EPA is really ‘essential’, that may be too CW.)
You probably should ask in the precious open thread or wait for the next one.
Please post this in a non CW thread, since I have a good response that includes that. I’ll give a brief response that is not CW I believe.
I am libertarian leaning, but I actually love the job my state and county government does. I feel that those reps are much more approachable, and the government in general governs closer to my political view point. I chose to move to my state in large part because I liked how it was governed. All I want is the federal government to stop interfering with programs that the states should be running.
That’s good to hear!
Can you please explain what’s so Culture War-y about this thread? It seems like pretty dry stuff to me and so far everyone is very respectful. Am I missing some community standard?
This alone likely trigger USA culture wars (Republicans vs Democrats)
There’s an important distinction w.r.t. what level of government does something. If the level of government I mainly interact with is the city or county government, it’s pretty easy to move away if I think they’re too awful. That’s harder if it’s the federal government.
Also, a lot of government programs end up being things where everyone is an involuntary customer. If I can’t stand the shitty service I get from my local Wal-Mart or the plumber I hire to fix a leaking pipe, I don’t have to keep doing business with them–I can find someone else. If I can’t stand the shitty service I get from my local DMV, I don’t have any alternatives available. That sets up a situation where there’s no escape valve from bad services–even if 90% of government programs where I’m effectively a customer work just fine, I’m likely to mostly notice the 10% where I have to stand in line for three hours to get a license renewed or something.
I could (probably wouldn’t just for time reasons) write at least 5 paragraphs explaining my view of how the Democratic Party is the reason why the federal government is incompetent, another 3 paragraphs on why European and Asian governments are poor functioning on the metrics I care about, and you’ll notice I never stated which state I lived in, because I knew that lots of people hate the way my state governs, and it could start an argument.
To be clear, I think your question was a good one to ask on a CW free thread if you took off the sentences about republicans and lobbyists. Asking these questions on CW free threads allow you to get nuanced discussion on questions close to CW but not CW, like Federalism. The disadvantage is you miss out on the other half of my response.
1: I contest the premise that European countries are notably better-functioning democracies than the US (or my home of Canada, which is like Europe, several notches left of the US). But in theory yes, my objection to many government interventions is the ways in which they are consistently incompetent and I would object less if they were less so. I think the biggest problem with Western democracies is that the average person is stupid and so a correctly-functioning democracy will tend to select leaders for stupid reasons, so to flesh out what my hypothetical better-functioning democracy looks like, it’s less about structural reforms on funding or lobbying and more like dissolving the population to elect a smarter one.
2. I have a novel fix for lobbying that I’m quite fond of. Personally I’m of the opinion that lobbying doesn’t really have big impacts on policy (serious question: if it did, would Google still be bound by California’s zoning regulations?), but even people thinking it’s a problem creates a problem of legitimacy, so let’s fix it. Pay politicians more. Ten million dollars a year for senators. A billion for the President. You can’t bribe a billionaire, at least not with the pocket change lobbyists throw around. It sounds like a lot of money, but it’s less than 0.1% of the federal budget and if you think lobbying has any negative effects at all, surely making the president unbribable would result in at least 0.1% better governance.
If you think direct and indirect bribery is a major problem, then paying the president and congress and senior civil servants more would be a useful way around that. But if you think the main problem is more about raising money for campaigns, then it’s not clear how much that helps.
I think people seriously overestimate the amount of money “lobbyists throw around”.
A lobbyist is basically just a person you pay to hang out in Washington and talk to important people on your behalf. Big companies and big organizations can afford plenty of very good lobbyists. They mostly don’t need to throw around money because they have baked in influence. A senator is gonna listen to what the second biggest employer, or the biggest union, or the organization representing a big block of single issue voters, wants, unless they want to be retired from office at the next election.
That calculus isn’t going to change if you increase their pay (might make it worse, actually!). A politicians biggest desire is usually re-election, and pissing off the sorts of people who can afford lots of good lobbyists is a poor way to get elected. This is not necessarily corruption of the hundred dollar handshakes sort – these groups represent real constituencies.
The signaling theory of lobbying: “Look at all this money we raised! Clearly we’re very important, you should listen to us.”
The term “lobbyist” seems to have taken on significant negative valence and is often discussed in that way. Doubtless, there are examples of lobbyists that represent a net negative, but the blanket opprobrium for lobbyists does not seem helpful.
Lobbyists do not, for the most part, throw tons of money at politicians. The major political incentive seems to be reelection and it’s not clear how paying politicians more can address that.
As gbdub notes, lobbyists represent real constituencies. Important too, to remember that “big companies” and “big organizations” also represent real people and their interests. Those terms also tend to call to mind negative images, of oil companies or tobacco companies, etc. But “big organizations” here also means organizations formed for the purpose of representing constituent interests – does anyone think that civil rights advocacy groups, for example, don’t employ lobbyists?
Are you familiar with the idea of rational ignorance? Even smart people can select leaders for stupid reasons if the voter knows that the effect of who he votes for on who gets elected is very close to zero, but the effect of who he supports on his interaction with the people around him is not.
I’ve never been quite satisfied with most attempts to describe self-interested voting behaviour, because it seems like the best option in most cases is to simply not bother voting. If someone asks you whether you supported [locally popular candidate], that’s the easiest lie in the world should you be interested in conformity.
I think most voters do it either out of a mistaken belief that “your vote matters”, or because the “civic duty” propaganda is really good at creating obligation (and I’m glad it is: people acting irrational in this way is probably a key component of democracy working at all). If that represents a significant amount of the electorate, smart voters will make better selections than dumb voters.
IMHO, people who don’t vote are free riding on other people with their preferences who do vote.
I don’t agree that declining to free ride is irrational – it’s a matter of preference, and IMHO a good one.
Do people feel like they have a civic duty, or a duty to their cause, to walk to the voting booth and check a candidate? Sure. Do people feel like they have a civic duty to study certain subjects for years so they can make a more informed vote? Much fewer people do.
The bottom line: not only stupid people, but also most smart people are ignorant about the policy areas their vote influences.
My explanation of why most people vote goes along with my explanation of why sports teams are linked to cities or universities — the pleasures of partisanship are a consumption good. You don’t just go to a football team to watch athletes do something difficult and interesting, you go to cheer for your team — and you feel as though your cheering heartens them and makes them a little more likely to win.
Every four years, a game is played out across the U.S. with the fate of the world at stake. You not only get to cheer for your team, you get to play on your team, even if in a tiny role, which makes it even better.
Most people are not very good at concealing their feelings. It’s much easier to convince people that you are an enthusiastic supporter of X if you really are.
I’m European.
1. I don’t think European states are well-functioning, with perhaps a few exceptions. (I don’t live in a well-functioning one). I’d rather live in one with a government as small as the US, or preferably much smaller.
I don’t think that the US only works for the richest third. Egalitarianism reduces productivity to a point that nearly everyone ends up poorer. A while ago someone posted data about how every income quintile in the poorest US state was at least as well-off as the same quintile in the UK, with higher quintiles progressively better off. In Europe, Switzerland is perhaps the only country (except Lichtenstein) with a government as small as the US, and (not) coincidentally also one of the wealthiest. Also one of the most unequal, but its “poorest” is still better off than pretty much anywhere else.
I don’t believe that more democracy necessarily makes things better. Much of the bad and illiberal economic policies I oppose is forced on the governments by the economically illiterate majority. (E.g. worker “protection” laws that make it difficult to lay off employees; as such, if no company is confident that it’ll need you for the foreseeable future, no one hires you. Yet they are impossible to get rid of in Southern Europe.) I think that rich people’s and companies’ preferences are much closer aligned with good economic policy than the majority’s preferences. (Hong Kong has functional constituencies: a large part of their parliament is elected by various professional and business groups. One could expect that it leads to terrible special interest politics, but it actually leads to a well-functioning laissez-faire system.)
I’m both a deontological and a consequentalist libertarian: I think freedom and less government generally produces better outcomes, but I also put a large value on freedom itself, including economic freedom. As such, I wouldn’t support an interventionist government even if it was well-functioning.
2. It does seem to me (as an outsider) that the American political system is rather dysfunctional. My impression is that a major problem is that power is divided between so many places that they can’t coordinate on anything: federal, state, local; executive, senate, house, legislative committees…
How to fix it? Sticking to conventional systems, perhaps: effective state governments: unicameral elected legislature, with the legislature electing the executive. If a few legislators submit a bill, it always gets voted on (unless they withdraw it), and if it gets a majority, it’s law. Committees, filibusters, Mitch McConnells and whatnot can deliberate over it, and they can recommend a “no” vote, but they can’t block it. Combine this with a much more limited federal government.
If we go for less conventional systems:
— I’ve seen someone suggest sortition. It has the advantage that the legislators drawn by lot would have a non-negligible influence, so they would have more incentive to make informed decisions. That contrasts with the rational ignorance voters show in a representative democracy: they have too little influence for it to be worth studying policy.
— Hong Kong-style functional constituencies.
— Swiss-style semi-direct democracy. My expectation would be that it would lead to even worse populism, but in Switzerland it works well. My theory is that in representative democracies, people expect all sorts of generosity from the government, but they always blame the government (rather than their own demands) for the negative consequences; the opposition eggs them on. The Swiss, who ultimately make the decisions themselves, feel responsible for the costs as well.
These are the sort of things left-wingers, egalitarians tend to demand, I’m not sure how they relate to libertarians. I also see in Hungary how they can let the government to control the media by controlling its funding, and restricting the funding of political parties. If there were a few wealthy businessmen who didn’t depend on the government, and funded opposition media or campaigns, the propaganda landscape wouldn’t be so lopsided in favor of the government.
Switzerland also avoided Russian occupation, WW II damage, WW I damage… I would not assume that small government is sole (or the most important) reason for their wealth.
WW II was long time ago, but effects like murdering >15% of population and deliberate attempt to murder people likely to oppose subjugation have long term effects. To say nothing about direct destruction of infrastructure and imposing destructive totalitarian regime for next decades.
In modern era section “List of wars involving Switzerland” Wikipedia article links “Aerial Incidents in Switzerland in World War II”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Switzerland links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_Incidents_in_Switzerland_in_World_War_II
The Swiss didn’t stay out of WW2 by accident. They were in literally the worst strategic spot in Europe. Read “Target Switzerland”.
Or for a short take on the Swiss system:
https://original.antiwar.com/bwalker/2012/02/01/how-the-swiss-opted-out-of-war/
My guess is that small and fairly homogeneous northern European states work better, but I have never lived in any so could easily be mistaken.
My fix is, first, to sharply reduce the amount to which decisions are made by government instead of by voluntary actions of individuals, and then to shift as much as possible down to local governments.
That gets you some of the effect of the small and homogeneous European states. I don’t expect governments to work well in any context, but they should work better if the same things are in the interest of most people, most people have enough fellow feeling to care about their fellow citizens, and people understand each other reasonably well.
Libertarianish USian here, trying to stay CW neutral in response.
I think the US has three classes of government problems:
1. problems that basically any government has because of the kind of institution that it is. These are mitigated by culture in some places and by one-off historical accidents in others, but no place can be free of them for long and certainly the Northern EU countries are not free of them, and these are the most generally applicable argument for limiting government.
2. problems that are caused by scale. The least-badly-functioning governments in the world all seem to be in jurisdictions with populations roughly in the 1-10 million range. This is true of US states as well: the governance of Utah, Minnesota, and Massachusetts would IMO stack up well next to similarly sized EU countries, and note that these three have wildly different party preferences. I would not expect any government with a 100M+ populace to be anything but badly run, and I think the experience of actually existing governments with populations this size bears me out.
3. problems caused by polarization. For a government of any size to function relatively well, you need a supermajority consensus among the population on basic facts and values. The US is unusual among Western countries in the degree to which it lacks that consensus, and arguably has been for 50 years, and this is a big part of what makes the federal government so bad, and in particular what leads to the perception that things have kept getting worse since the 1980s. Notably, this problem is much less severe in all of the relatively-well-governed US states I mentioned.
As to solutions:
1. Devolution/federalism has the nice property that it mitigates all three classes of problem above: the first by introducing Tiebout competition which tends to improve governments better than democratic voice; the second by limiting scale to something manageable; the third by making it more likely that the governed populace shares the necessary consensus. So yeah, devolving much more power toward metro-scale governments (a single significant city and its hinterland is often a natural unit of relatively-effective governance), and maintaining larger-scale confederations mostly for common defense and customs/free-movement union and that sort of thing, is a major mitigation.
2. Within governance units, narrowing the scope of government to more strongly prioritize the provision of public goods, in the economic sense (nonrivalrous and nonexcludable goods) and not the looser sense of “anything that seems to be broadly in the public interest”. Public goods provision is where government has the largest comparative advantage over other institutional types, and most existing governments underprovide public goods that are very hard for the private sector to step in and provide instead (recent notorious examples including clean air and pandemic preparation!) even as they spend enormous resources on doing things that are not public goods provision. Public goods provision is also where government is most likely to contribute positively to long term sustainable economic growth, and I am persuaded by Tyler Cowen’s argument in _Stubborn Attachments_ that that is the most important thing for long term human flourishing.
3. Government reforms which moderate and temper the transitory sentiments of voters. Garett Jones’ recent “10% less democracy” is a good sourcebook for these.
1. I don’t really care how the government comes to its interventions. If the intervention is good, it’s good. If it’s bad, it’s bad. It doesn’t matter if it comes from a democracy or a dictatorship. Even functioning democracies can make really stupid decisions. I’m not confident that the form of government changes what the government ends up doing.
2a. Prisoners are not counted for determining congressional representation. Nor is anyone who is disenfranchised because of a prior crime. This twists the states’ arm about lowering incarceration.
2b. End federal drug prohibition. States can make drugs illegal, but this is not required.
I’m not a libertarian, but I’ve talked to quite a few (both in real life and on the Intertubes). One consistent theme that runs through their argument is that “the government has no right to do X, therefore asking how it can do X better is a moot point”. For many of them, X is basically “anything”; for others, X is “almost anything except for national defence”. Failures of the government to do any specific thing are seen as a given; successes inevitably turn out to be failures once you take all the factors into account, or alternatively as the result of actions by some heroic individuals who’d succeeded despite governmental intervention, not because of it.
Just to clarify, I’m not trying to strawman anyone’s position here. Rather, I think that the difference between libertarians and non-libertarians is one of the core values and philosophy; like all such differences, it is IMO irreconcilable.
I’m not sure to what extent I agree with you about this being a value difference; there’s definitely some degree of that, but I think empirical questions of “how good is government at certain tasks, or at doing things in general?” and “what sort of things will an empowered government attempt to do?” definitely play a role. I have a decently libertarian bent. But if you showed me convincing evidence that a marginally more empowered government would use that power to effectively do things whose consequences I and a supermajority of the population approved of, I would change my mind and approve of giving the government more power.
This does, to some extent, factor out into “what things is the government trying to do,” “do I want them to do those things,” “is the government good at doing those things,” and “do government actions, successful or not, have significant negative side effects.” I’d say all of those except the second are empirical questions, though we should probably postpone discussion of them to a fractional OT.
As best as I can tell, not only libertarians but most other people believe in a curious coincidence such that the system they believe is morally most justified also happens to produce the best result. That makes it hard to tell which half of that is responsible for their belief in that system.
Have you encountered libertarians who agree with you that unless government does X, terrible things will happen — that without compulsory government funded schooling, large parts of the population will be unable to read?
If you mean basic reading, phones/social media would probably take care of that. If you mean good reading comprehension, large parts of the population are incapable
I have met at least one libertarian who agreed with me on national defence; i.e., without a government of some sort coordinating and maintaining a modern standing army (with all the aircraft carriers that implies), your country probably wouldn’t last long on the world stage. Of course, I have met others who disagreed, as well.
That said, most libertarians don’t believe in schooling of any kind other than home schooling and possibly apprenticeships; many (thought perhaps not most) believe that compulsory schooling is essentially a plot designed to keep the population pliable and enthralled.
That’s just my personal anecdata, though, not meant to be a representative sample.
Did the libertarian who agreed with you on national defense also think it was wrong to have national defense? I should have been clearer. What I was looking for was someone who believed both that it was wrong to do X and that if we didn’t do X terrible things would happen.
Absent that, you can’t tell how much of the motivation is the deontological argument and how much the belief about consequences.
You have a very odd sample of libertarians. A fair number of the ones I know are professors. Many libertarians, myself among them, are unhappy with the public school system, but although some, myself among them, approve of home schooling, I think there are very few who have any general objection to (private) schools.
@DavidFriedman:
OIC; no, the national defence guy did not think it was morally wrong to have a standing army strictly for defensive purposes; he also thought that having a government who would maintain (as opposed to private citizens doing so) it is a necessary evil.
Not gonna argue with you there ! I don’t personally know any libertarian professors (other than yourself, obviously).
Regarding schooling, the sentiments I’ve heard most often is that public schooling is basically an indoctrination mill. Private schooling could theoretically work, but in practice, it would be impossible to prevent it from turning into an indoctrination mill over time. Generally speaking, the libertarians I’ve talked to believe that raising children is a very important job; too important to be outsourced to any external organization, no matter how well-meaning. Once again, I’m not endorsing this opinion, nor am I claiming that it’s representative of all libertarians, I’m just relaying what I heard.
> Private schooling could theoretically work, but in practice, it would be impossible to prevent it from turning into an indoctrination mill over time.
There’s a range of options here. On one side you have compulsory government-run, government-directed, government-funded schooling. On the other end you have “no schooling or guidance from the government – if you learn anything it should be because you think it’s a good idea”.
There are other options in the middle. These could include combinations of:
* A voucher system. Parents pick from competing schools and get government funding to attend. Plus various options for how to handle cost-savings.
* Relaxed curriculum mandates. Whether $CONTROVERSIAL_SUBJECT is covered in class can be determined at the local class/school/board/city/whatever level.
* HS diploma granting being separate from the school you attend. Eg. you take a test(s) which grants the diploma. So whatever schooling system exists can’t fake everything.
* Relaxed credentialing for teachers.
Etc. Etc.
Related note: I think that people have a human right to buy/own functional nuclear weapons, but I believe that the consequences for not restricting this would be very, very bad.
I expect libertarians are more likely to have that attitude than the average, but I think where it comes from is having views, political, religious, or other, far from the current consensus. If you believe that a school is going to teach your kids things, as part of what everyone knows and is sure of, that you are pretty sure are false, that’s a reason not to send your kids there.
A related reason is strongly preferring your family culture to the outside culture, in particular the part in schools. My (not home schooled) wife’s comment on teenagers is that she has been younger than that and she has been older than that but she hasn’t been that age. Our daughter had a close friend from when they were small children. They drifted apart when the friend became a teen and she didn’t.
I think this is happening to our oldest right now. Her friend is rushing towards the trappings of adulthood that accompany teenagehood–boyfriends, celebrity gossip, fitting it, etc.–and our daughter is quickly finding they have little in common.
@Garrett:
I’m not a libertarian, so it might not surprise you that my own opinion is diametrically opposed to yours. I think that some form of mandatory, government-run (or at least government-certified) schooling is important — because it’s critical for a modern society to have a population that is 100% literate (+- epsilon). In the modern world, being literate means more than just being able to puzzle out street signs; it means being able to read and write well enough to at least skim voter pamphlets; to know enough arithmetic to understand basic finances; to know enough about basic science to avoid falling for simple hoaxes; and to maintain some baseline level of physical fitness. This is the bare minimum; the average person should know a lot more.
FWIW, speaking as an average-IQ individual, my own high school curriculum was actually fairly adequate. It exposed me to many different subjects that I’ve never deigned to explore on my own. Some of them I hated and still hate; some of them I warmed up to; and some I found surprisingly useful later in life. Was high school an idealized learning environment for me ? No. If I were a truly gifted child, I probably would’ve found it a total loss. But I think it largely accomplished what it was supposed to do.
To briefly address your bullet points:
* Vouchers: the voucher-eligible schools would have to be certified in some way, which does mean more government control.
* Relaxed mandates: Who decides if a subject is “controversial” ? Is the age (or shape !) of the Earth controversial ?
* High School diploma: AFAIK you can already take the test and get a diploma without finishing high school — am I missing something ?
* Less credentialing for teachers: I disagree, I think we need more “credentialing”; that is, we need to make sure that teachers are on average more competent than they currently are. Obviously, their salaries and benefits should be increased accordingly.
Being literate may or may not mean being able to do this, but these life events happening is obviously not a certain result of literacy, given our voting rate, consumer debt, and high rates of obesity.
How big a problem is it for someone’s future if they, say, just take the GED at 14 and pass?
We have compulsory schooling, most of it produced by government. We don’t have a population that is 100% literate even in the literal sense of the term, and nothing close to that in your more demanding sense. So why do you assume that a government run school system is the way to achieve your objective?
It is essential that everyone have enough to eat, desirable that everyone have good nutrition. Do you conclude that all food production should be under government control, from farm to restaurant? That experiment has been done, with negative results.
More generally, why would you assume that government production is the best way of producing something?
@DavidFriedman:
This is an outright strawman of my position. I’ve never said anything close to this, nor do I secretly believe it. Moving on:
Well, yes, that’s why I added that “epsilon”. Developed nations (ours included) have a literacy rate of 99%. Admittedly, 1% is a lot more than “epsilon”, so I may have been sloppy — mea culpa. Some people could never learn to read and write, for various biological reasons, and I should not have undercounted them.
The difference between basic schooling and nutrition is that there’s no consensus on which nutrition is best, nor is there even such a thing as best nutrition for everyone. Some people like spicy food, some are lactose-intolerant, some are just fat (myself included), etc. If the government tried consolidating all food production under its control, the results would be disastrous.
But, I hear you saying, schooling is actually the same way ! Some people prefer liberal arts, some prefer science, some learn faster, some are visual or auditory learners, etc. All of this is true, and I absolutely agree that private colleges should exist… which they do.
This is why I explicitly mentioned basic schooling. In order to learn anything at all, you have to be able to read and write. In order to pick your favorite cuisine, you have to be alive in the first place, which means you need to eat something. Our government isn’t great at ensuring either of these conditions, but it’s better than nothing. The approach is different — public schools in one case, food stamps and (largely private) soup kitchens in the other — and we can argue about which is better.
You seem to have this implicit notion that, if public schools were abolished tomorrow, we would enter a new renaissance age of culture and learning. In practice, many people would just fall back on Jesus-oriented homeschooling (one book is all you need !); others would try to juggle homeschooling and full-time work, with sad yet predictable results; and yes, others would send their gifted children to elite private schools, thus supercharging their educations. I believe that, on average, the outcome would be much worse than the (admittedly, quite bad) situation than the one we have now.
The contemporary United States of America does not have a literacy rate of 99% by your standard. We barely break 80% by the “read a newspaper or complete a job application” standard; I doubt we’re even close to that by the “not fall for simple scientific hoax” standard. If as you say 99% functional literacy is “critical”, then we critically need something other than what we have.
What we have, is mostly government-run and almost entirely government-certified schooling. So, something other than that would be…?
(?) I know a lot of libertarians, most of their school preferences would be:
1. private school
2. nice suburban public school
3. home school
4. most real public schools
That’s not any different than most people’s preferences. It’s not different than the “socialist*” Netherlands, Denmark, or Swedish systems… all of which have massive school-choice programs and heavy use of private schools. The Netherlands has had its system since 1915, and most students there are in private schools.
*Those countries aren’t socialist, of course. But ‘murricans tend to think that they are 😉
@John Schilling:
Is that true ? I’m under the impression that most people could read a newspaper, assuming that newspapers still existed (which is still the case for now, though maybe not for much longer). Do you have a source ?
This is a false dichotomy. By analogy, just because evolution is not 100% accurate, that does not mean that creationism must be true.
@Telomerase:
I think we have already established that my sample of libertarians is far from representative 🙂
“At the same time, 19 percent of adults cannot read a newspaper, much less complete a job application, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.”
According to the Washington Post, which links to a primary source if you need to check it out.
You forgot to add 5, a boarding school.
But they’re so out of the pale most peole would never even consider them, libertarians or no.
I’m sorry, what?
I’ve lived here all my life, and what we call private schools are a very small part of education here. What definition of private school are you using that you dispute this? What are your sources on most of our students being in private schools?
@Telomerase & DeWitt
There are basically three types of schools in The Netherlands.
1. Schools that are run and funded by the government (openbaar onderwijs), where ~29% of Dutch kids go.
2. Schools that are run by a private foundation or association, but funded by the government, where the vast majority of Dutch kids go (bijzonder onderwijs). These are typically religious, but can also have a particular educational method (like Montessori). This is very similar to a charter school.
3. Schools that are run and funded privately (particulier onderwijs). These private schools are very rare.
The boarding schools I know of in the US are mostly military academies. My mom and stepdad worked for one for the last years of their careers, and the mix of students was something like:
a. Foreign kids (notably from China and Mexico) from very wealthy families, who were being sent to get a good education and become fluent (and often accentless) in English. Sometimes I think part of the goal was also getting the kids out of the line of fire of any local troubles the parents might have with gangs or the local government, or away from risk of crime or civil disturbances/revolutions/regime change.
b. US kids from wealthy families who have gotten into a lot of trouble or don’t get along with their parents. Often, parents are sending their kids to a military academy as a last-ditch effort to get them straightened out before they end up in prison. (I know two families, well-off but not rich, who did this–in one case, it worked, in the other, the kid overdosed and died anyway, on his third or fourth school/rehab/etc.) Occasionally, it’s rich parents who just can’t be arsed, or rich divorcees whose new husband/wife doesn’t like the older kid from the first marriage.
I think some foreign parents had the same motivations as most Americans (dealing with troublesome/troubled kids), and some American parents had reasons more like the foreign parents, or reasons like the parents died in a car wreck and the childless uncle who ended up with the kids didn’t know what else to do with them.
Along the literacy lines: about a quarter of Americans haven’t read a single book this year.
@albatross11
Honestly I’m surprised it isn’t higher…but it doesn’t really say much about literacy. I’ve been reading adult novels since I was 7, and was an avid reader for decades. I probably haven’t read a book in 3 years*…combination of lack of time and the fact that all the low-hanging fruit has already been picked (I have to go looking to find a new book I want to read).
*Unless you count Unsong which I read ~2 years ago.
Where did I suggest that? We aren’t in such a world at present, so don’t have to enter one for the change to be an improvement.
For some evidence on what a world without compulsory free public schooling is like, you might want to read Education and the Industrial Revolution by E. G. West. Early 19th century England was a much poorer society than we are, yet did rather better than your imaginary version of a future America without public schooling — roughly speaking as well as contemporary Prussia, with compulsory universal public schooling, did.
I expect most people would send their kids to non-elite private schools. Even at present, elite private schools are a small part of all private schools — on average, private schools cost less than public schools (tuition vs money from taxes), not more. And that’s in a world where a private school has to be enough better than a public school to make up for the subsidy of eleven or twelve thousand dollars a year per student that the latter has.
You don’t think governments are better at producing things, so why should they be better at producing schooling?
Do you think that’s what most home schooling looks like? Do you assume most home schooling parents are themselves uneducated? Home schooling primarily for religious reasons? Such data as exist support neither claim.
When our home unschooled daughter applied to St. Olaf’s they suggested that she should apply for their scholarship program because they had found that home schooled students were sometimes particularly well qualified.
@DavidFriedman:
Short answer, yes. Long answer, most parents have an average education level (by definition); additionally, their education is not broad enough to cater to the potential needs and interests of their child. For example, if the parents are world-class historians, and their child is interested in computer science, that child is on its own. Additionally, just being educated in something does not automatically confer the ability to teach it to others — especially to children. And this is assuming that the parents would even want their child to step outside of their prescribed path in life, of course.
Like many libertarians, you seem to have a rather binary view of economic systems. Governments are bad, free markets are good, the rest is just details. But I believe that the governments (or other centralized systems) are better than laisseiz-faire free markets at producing some things: specifically, at producing things whose payoff is diffuse (i.e., it doesn’t benefit the provider substantially more than it benefits everyone else), and/or very long-term. Basic education — again, note that I said “basic” — does IMO belong in this category. Having a population of people who are educated enough to choose their own path in life benefits everyone; but it doesn’t benefit anyone specifically.
BTW, pure scientific research is another thing that the government is better at producing, or at least financing. The ROI on LIGO is entirely negative, you know ?
The average education of parents who home school is about the same as that of parents who don’t — a little higher the first time it was surveyed, a little lower the second.
The parents don’t have to be experts in everything their children are interested in. The parents can point their children at books and help the children with them. Nowadays they can help the children find material online.
If the parents happen to be enthusiastic experts in something, it is likely that the children will find it of interest, since having people close to you interested in something tends to make you interested in it — that was true for me, my children and my grandson. I only discovered that geology was interesting when I fell in love with a geologist. And an enthusiastic parent is going to be a better teacher, a better inspirer, than a teacher teaching something because it is his job to a room full of kids most of whom don’t want to learn it.
One of the things wrong with the conventional K-12 model is that it implicitly assumes that, out of all human knowledge, there is some subset about the right size to fill K-12 that everyone should at least pretend to learn. That’s nonsense. There are far more things than that that are worth learning, far fewer that it is important for everyone to learn. With home schooling, better home unschooling, the parent can make sure the kid learns a few things almost all parents know, such as how to read, things that almost everyone needs, and help and encourage the kid in learning the things he finds of interest. Children are much better at learning things they want to know than at learning things of no interest to them that an adult has told them they will need to know at some time in the indefinite future.
Have you looked at Public Choice theory, the branch of economics that deals with government? My guess from what you write is that you are implicitly assuming a philosopher king government, doing good and wise things because they are good and wise. A more realistic model sees government behavior as the outcome of a political marketplace. To defend your claim, you have to show why it is in the interest of government actors to produce such goods.
On the contrary, having my child so educated benefits him and me. There may also be some benefit to others, but education is primarily a private good, not a public good.
On the other hand, informed voting is very close to a pure public good. If you spend time and effort studying issues and candidates in order to vote for the right presidential candidate the benefit, if any — perhaps one chance in ten million that your vote is decisive — is divided among the entire population. The result is that voters are rationally ignorant — the value of the information to the individual voter is much less than the cost — and voting behavior looks more like fans cheering at a football game than individuals buying things on the market.
Yet it is majority voting that is supposed to drive the government into doing the right things.
Try making the same assumptions about people’s behavior on the political market that lead you to conclude that the private market does a bad job of producing some things and try to reason from those assumptions to the conclusions you want.
You might want to take a look at The Economic Laws of Scientific Research by Terence Kealey. The author is a biochemist who offers empirical evidence against your claim, as well as an interesting explanation of the mechanics of private production of basic research.
No, that child is not “on its own”. That child is being raised by parents who, as world-class historians, probably have at least marginally above-average computer skills, meaning skills well above those of even a precocious young child. Who will be motivated to improve their own comp-sci aptitude for the sake of the child. Who probably have somewhere in their extended family or social circle an uncle or whatnot with above-average knowledge of the field. Who are at least loosely tied in with other local home-schooling parents to the same end. Who are likely willing to pay for a tutor in any subject their child is particularly interested and talented in, and to send that child to specialized summer camps, etc. And who almost certainly have an internet connection, such that by the time the child has even begun to outgrow all of the above resources he or she will be in regular online contact with a community of enthusiasts whose combined ability and willingness to educate newcomers vastly outstrips that of any government-run school.
“Child is on its own” is such a ridiculous caricature of home-schooling that it is difficult for me to believe you are arguing in good faith here.
@DevidFriedman:
I was comparing homeschooling parents to professional teachers, not to other parents. I will fully grant you that the quality of modern professional teachers is… highly variable at best; but at least this is a parameter we can in some way manipulate.
Yes, that is what I meant by “the child is on its own”. Some children can learn independently from books; some cannot. I was one of the latter.
Oh, absolutely ! That’s why it’s important to have a place where children can go to interact with many enthusiastic experts in many different fields. I will absolutely grant you that average parents are better teachers than incompetent teachers. Average parents are also better plumbers than incompetent plumbers; does this mean that everyone should be his own plumber ?
Why is this an absurd idea ? Ultimately, the best outcome of a K-12 student is to learn a). basic literacy/numeracy/history; b). how to learn; and c). exposure to a wide variety of disciplines. This would empower the student to go on learning on his own, in the field of his choosing.
This is, once again, a strawman of my position, but I think it’s understandable. Most libertarians see the government as a sort of squatting alien entity, completely divorced from the actions of enlightened individuals. Personally, though, I see the government as a giant corporate monopoly that we all agreed to hire to perform certain tasks which private corporations proved inadequate to deliver. Yes, it has problems just like ordinary monopolies do; however, assuming the government is some for of a democracy, we have much more control over it than we would over ordinary monopolies. You are right about the “political market”, but I think you and I have vastly different views on what it looks like.
I disagree. Education in general is a public good. Vocational training in a specific field is a private good.
I agree, and I also agree that voting for the President of the USA, specifically, is nearly pointless unless you live in a swing state. What does this have to do with my argument, though ? Ok, yes, the President does affect educational policy to some extent, but that’s really not his main job.
I haven’t read the book yet, so obviously I can’t comment. Still, I I were president of GiantConstructionCo, and I had two choices on how to spend a billion dollars — build LIGO, or build new factories to make my goods 5% cheaper — I know which I’d pick.
“We all agreed”? Show me the contract, and show me where any of us now living signed it. (Even if we had, you’d still have a duress problem, but the idea that the government actually has the consent of the governed can’t even pass that first hurdle.)
How, exactly, do other people get most of the benefit from me being able to read a novel, balance my chequebook, write a poem, find Greenland on a map, or understand the causes and consequences of the American Civil War? I see only three ways: (1) to the extent that my education makes me productive, some of that productivity is taxed; (2) being educated makes me (supposedly) a more informed and thoughtful voter; (3) my friends get to have someone interesting to talk to. But (1) doesn’t favour general over vocational education in the way that you seem to, (2) seems (to me) to be far smaller than the value to me of a rich and fulfilling intellectual life, and (3) is a reciprocal trade — I befriend them because they’re interesting for me to talk to — so not an externality.
Why do you consider non-vocational education a public good? What am I not seeing?
If plumbers were assigned and funded by a government bureaucracy, captured by the Plumbers’ Union, who prevent incompetent plumbers from being fired, then sure, homeplumbing would be the obvious choice for anyone who couldn’t afford the private plumbing sector, small and beleaguered by regulations designed by state-plumber lobbyists to make it hard for them to compete. Which would all, of course, be orthogonal to the question of whether ‘unplumbing’ leads to more or fewer leaks and smells than ‘factory-model plumbing’, except that the state plumbing sector only offers the latter because it’s easier for them to organise and measure.
… did I take the analogy too far?
You seem to be assuming that the average teacher is selected for being enthusiastically interested in his field, and continues to be that for forty years of teaching children most of whom don’t what to learn what he teaches. There are probably teachers like that, but they are pretty rare.
Since the standard K-12 model is that you learn things by being told them by your teacher or reading them in the book you have been assigned, it does a much worse job of teaching children how to learn than the experience of going out and learning something that you actually want to know.
History is interesting and useful, but a kid really interested in Roman history will learn more that is useful for himself than a kid learning American history because he is going to have to pass a test on it at the end of the quarter — and is free to forget it thereafter.
Algebra is useful to some people, useless to most. Ditto geometry. Ditto most things that are taught in K-12. But lots of things that are rarely taught and almost never well are also useful to some people — statistics, probability theory, economics, evolutionary biology, … The things taught, with the exception of reading and arithmetic, are mostly no more worth learning than many things not taught. And people learn things a lot better when they are things they want to learn.
When my home unschooled daughter went to Oberlin, she observed that when a class was cancelled she was disappointed and the other students were glad. Learning stuff in classes wasn’t something they wanted to do — they had been taught for twelve years that it was something you did because someone made you do it. It was the price they had to pay for four years of parties and socializing with their peers.
You deny assuming a philosopher king government, but none of what you wrote even starts to explain why you expect government to make good choices, which is essential for your argument. What is your theory of what determines outcomes on the political market, and how do you reason from it to your conclusions about what governments will do.
A government has less incentive to act well than a private monopoly, because a private monopoly can only get money from people if they choose to buy what it produces and can only get labor from people if they choose to work for it. A government has neither constraint. Voting in a population large enough so that you know your vote has no effect isn’t a substitute.
Argument by assertion — explain. Do you believe that knowing how to read and do arithmetic does not benefit the person who acquires those skills? That’s what you are claiming.
Your argument requires that the governments running schools have some reason to do it well. The usual argument for that is democracy. But rational ignorance applies at the state level as well as the federal level. So why would you expect the political actors in charge of the schools to act like benevolent despots instead of self-interested actors just like those in the private market — with a very different set of constraints, since they don’t have to sell to willing customers?
Do you have a theory of what determines government decisions and why? So far it looks like only an assumed conclusion — that if government can do something good, whether with schooling or basic research, it will.
@ec429, DavidFriedman:
(your comments are similar, so I’ll consolidate my replies in one post)
You are shifting the goalposts a little, most likely on accident. You are now saying, “current public school teachers are universally bad, so everyone should homeschool”; whereas before you were saying “public school teachers can never be good a priori, so everyone should homeschool”. I was arguing against the second, stronger claim; but I would disagree even with the first one. Not all public teachers are bad; anecdotally, I’ve met many good ones myself. Furthermore, in some ideal world, it is at least possible to allow the majority of children access to a wide variety of enthusiastic and competent teachers; this cannot be accomplished with home schooling, in principle (barring some sort of polyamory, I suppose).
My own K-12 education included labs, art projects, and even PE; I’m not sure about yours. That said, how would you propose to teach literature or math without reading books and doing exercises ?
How would a kid learn enough about Roman/American/Babylonian/Chinese/Russian history to develop an interest ? One easy answer is, “a World History course”… which is what they teach at schools (well, or at least they used to, back in my day). Furthermore, I’d argue that for a person living in America, learning American history is useful, but that’s a separate argument.
See, statements like these is exactly why homeschooling is a bad idea. On the surface level, algebra and geometry are useful to anyone who wants to get any kind of an engineering-related job — and yes, even jobs such as “car mechanic” are rapidly becoming engineering-related. But on a deeper level, algebra and especially geometry, when taught properly, are instrumental in developing general critical thinking skills that IMO every person should have. Well, I suppose this is another assumption on my part; I’m not sure where you place the importance of critical thinking on your list of priorities…
How are you going to teach probability and statistics without algebra ?
Being a monopoly means denying people a choice; that’s kind of the whole point. Note that public schools are actually better in this regard. If you live in an EduCo town, you can send your children to an EduCo school, or homeschool them, those are your only choices. If you live in a US government town with an EduCo monopoly, you can send your children to public school, or EduCo, or homeschool.
In any case, your view of government seems to be entirely focused on national-level Presidential elections. I agree that they are mostly pointless; however, local elections on the county/city/district level are not. You can affect e.g. educational policy by a surprising amount, should you choose to vote.
One reason why public schools are better at providing basic education (a public good) than private ones is that they don’t need to make money; more on this below.
I believe that teaching everyone (or rather, as many people as possible) how to read and do arithmetic benefits everyone, but it is very difficult to monetize. That’s what public goods are: items that benefit everyone if most people have them, yet do not benefit any individual party sufficiently to allow for competition. In a corporate system, having a population of people who are empowered to study and work at any corporation of their choosing is pointless; what’s useful is having a pool of workers who would be ideal employees for your own corporation.
Because they can very easily get voted out when they do; in fact, this does routinely happen. Also, you keep using loaded words like “benevolent despots”; this is understandable, but keep in mind that not everyone shares your baseline belief that government is automatically evil.
Once again, this is a strawman of my position. I’m saying that a government monopoly is better equipped — by contrast with the free market — at providing services whose benefits are diffuse, and/or whose payoffs are very long-term. The free market is ill equipped to provide such services because there’s no immediate monetary feedback mechanism associated with doing so. I’m not saying, nor do I secretly believe, that the government is better at providing every kind of service.
@Bugmaster:
@ec429, DavidFriedman:
I wrote:
You replied:
How do you get “universally bad” from:
Do you know what the word “average” means? If teachers were universally bad, how could there probably be good teachers, as I just asserted?
You wrote:
There are two possible arguments you can make, for this issue or others. One is that we know government can be expected to do things well because we observe it doing them well. For that argument, the relevant question is what actual public school teachers are now like.
The other is that there is a good reason to expect government to do things well. I have a theory of the political market — public choice theory. I have been trying to get you to explain your theory of what determines how governments act and why, so far without success. Talking about “some ideal world” simply evades that problem, since that isn’t the world we are in.
Furthermore, in the world as it exists, while most home schooled children cannot have access to a wide variety of enthusiastic and competent teachers in the form of their parents — the exception being the case of parents who are enthusiastic polymaths — they can interact with people other than their parents, either over the internet or by interacting with other kids enthusiastic about other things because they have different parents.
That doesn’t give you a utopia with an unlimited range of enthusiastic teachers — the thing that gives that is the library. The Selfish Gene. Feynman’s Lectures. …
I wrote:
You replied:
What fraction of the time in your K-12 education was outside of the classroom setting?
You learn literature by reading books, not books you read because someone else selected them and assigned you to read them — a good strategy for persuading kids that reading is work, not fun — but books you read because you enjoy reading them.
When our home unschooled daughter was applying to colleges without the usual sorts of credentials (other than SAT exams), one of the things she offered was a list of four hundred books she had read. Saint Olaf’s, the one school at which she did not have family connections that accepted her, said that was what blew them away.
Have you seen figures on the number of books read per year by American adults? The median is four. That says something about the attitude to literature produced by classes on it.
Arithmetic can be learned from a book or by a parent teaching it. Beyond that, a kid who is interested in math can learn it from books suggested by his parents and read because he wants to read them. A kid who takes algebra or geometry only because he is required to do so is not very likely to retain it a few years later.
Almost any college level teacher is familiar with the usual pattern — pupils learn what is needed to pass the exam and most of them forget it rapidly thereafter. They go through the textbook with a highlighter, marking the bits and pieces that they have to memorize to regurgitate on the exam.
I wrote:
Your quote omitted the rest of the sentence. It was:
You asked:
Playing computer games is one way. Reading good historical novels. Getting involved in historical recreation. Talking with other people who have such interests.
I wrote:
You replied:
Those skills can be learned in any of a wide variety of different ways — and most people don’t learn them in the present system. One good way of learning critical thinking skills is to have a question you want answered or be looking for arguments for your political or religious position, go out on the internet and try to figure out which sources of information to believe. With luck, in the argument case, there is someone on the other side to point out problems with what you found.
I wrote:
You asked:
You can teach a good deal of both without algebra. Our two kids were about eight and eleven when they read and enjoyed How to Lie With Statistics. Our son (the younger of the two) was an enthusiastic player of D&D and the like and wanted to know how to figure out the odds of getting different results by rolling dice. The author and illustrator of How to Lie With Statistics had also written and illustrated How to Take a Chance, a popular book on probability theory, so he read that, and could calculate the probability of getting seven, or twelve, by rolling two D6’s. No algebra needed, just arithmetic.
Beyond that, if a kid finds those things interesting and wants to learn more that will give him a reason to learn algebra — even calculus.
I’m not arguing that nobody should learn algebra, I’m arguing that it isn’t something everyone should be required to learn.
I wrote:
You replied:
That is not the case. Being a monopoly means that other people can only buy the particular good you have a monopoly of from you. They can still choose not to buy that good, and they can certainly choose not to be employed by that monopoly.
And the monopoly isn’t denying people a choice, unless it is a government enforced monopoly, like the airline industry under regulation, that can make competition illegal. The monopoly is the one firm producing a particular good, which increases the number of options for that good from zero to one.
Governments, on the other hand, really can and routinely do deny people a choice.
You wrote:
One of those three alternatives has a subsidy, paid for by your taxes, of about twelve thousand dollars per student per year — more or less depending where you are. Does that really look like a more competitive situation than what would exist if there were no public school system and instead half a dozen private schools competing with each other? Or a voucher system, where the public school competed on even terms?
In order to attract students away from the public school at present, the private school has to be enough better to outweigh that subsidy.
You wrote:
If I was entirely focused on national-level presidential elections why did I write, in the post you are responding to:
I asked:
You replied:
Again, do you believe that knowing how to read and do arithmetic does not benefit the person who acquires those skills? It isn’t corporations who pay for it in a private system, it’s parents. If you agree that those skills are valuable to the individual who has them, then you have conceded that basic education is not a pure public good.
My child learning those skills may also benefit other people, but a large part of the benefit goes to me and him, which gives us a reason to pay for them.
It’s true that if some of the benefit goes to other people, we have less than the optimal incentive, as in the case of any positive externality. But for that to be an argument for your position you have to offer a reason to believe that government provision will come closer to optimal.
You claim to know about public goods. Informed voting is a public good — or, if you prefer, has an externality far above 99% in any polity of substantial size. For a state with the average population, the voter whose activity in a state election results in improved outcomes for residents of the state is taking an action with an externality of 1-1/6,000,000. At the level of an election in my city, the externality is about 99.9999 %. Why do you expect the political system, where the mechanism controlling it has an externality of far above 99%, to produce something closer to the optimum than a mechanism, private choice of education, where there might be an externality of ten or twenty percent?
Or is your claim that only a millionth of the benefit from basic education goes to the person who is educated?
I asked:
You answered:
Acting like a benevolent despot is what you want them to do — make the correct decisions in the public interest. Your answer is an argument for why they will not act like non-benevolent despots.
But that argument requires the rationally ignorant voters to know whether the politicians are making the right decision for the schooling system. In a competitive private system, customers can judge that by comparing price and quality of different schools. In the public system they can’t.
You write:
“Benevolent despot” is loaded in the positive direction — it’s someone who has power and uses it for the general good, Plato’s philosopher king. That’s your assumption, that if government can do something good, whether with schooling or basic research, it will, not mine, and I am still waiting for you to justify it.
You wrote:
And I keep pointing out that the benefit of basic education is not very diffuse. Most of it goes to the person who is educated and his parents, some of it to other people.
Where benefits really are diffuse, neither the market nor the political system does a very good job. Market provision of public goods generally depends on tie-ins, indirect ways of benefiting by giving one thing away and selling something else whose value is increased by it. The argument made by Kealey, whose book I mentioned, is that firms get benefits by having some employees who are engaged in basic research and so knowledgeable about what is likely to happen that will be relevant to what the firms are doing.
For a more familiar example, consider open source software. That’s a pure public good, since it isn’t protected by copyright. It is produced on the private market. If you are curious, I could describe the indirect benefits that a firm gets by having an employee part of whose time is spent on an open source project that firm uses, or the benefits a programmer gets by participating in an open source project.
You wrote:
You have that exactly backwards. Firms routinely make investments whose payoffs are very long-term — consider, for a simple example, firms that grow hardwood trees for lumber or, for a more high tech example, the history of Xerox. National politicians, in contrast, are interested in the effect of their policy for conditions at the next election. State politicians routinely solve the problem of how to retain state employees by paying them in part with very generous pension guarantees — i.e. expenditures whose bill will come due when someone else is in office.
Politicians routinely talk about the long term, because they can claim to be doing good things and nobody can see the future to know they aren’t. But it should be obvious from both theory and observation that they act almost entirely in the short run.
So far your only answer to my repeated challenge — Why do you expect governments to do the good things that your argument requires them to do — is democratic voting. I point out that for that to work the voters have to know whether the government is doing the right thing, that finding that out is very difficult, and that the individual voter has no incentive to pay the costs of doing so, precisely because of the public good problem. To which you have offered no answer.
It’s true that market outcomes are not perfect because of problems such as externalities, public goods, adverse selection, and the like. But those problems are the exception on the private market. On the political market they are the norm.
The fundamental problem is that an individual is taking an action where either most of the benefit or most of the cost goes to someone else. That occasionally occurs on the private market. It is true of very nearly every decision made by any actor — voter, politician, bureaucrat, government employee, judge — on the political market.
@DavidFriedman:
Regarding homeschooling, I think we are talking past each other. It seems like we have three points of disagreement:
1). Homeschooling is sufficient to educate the average child; schools, be they public or private, are not required. I disagree with this, you seem to agree.
2). If everyone were to switch to homeschooling right now, in our current society, then the average education level would rise significantly (by comparison with strictly public schools). One again, I disagree.
3). Private schools are a priori better than public schools — irrelevant given point (1).
Are these roughly the claims you’re making ? If not, then can you re-state your claims ?
Regarding homeschooling specifically, your opinion seems to be that,
4). Children should only learn what they want to learn, read the books they want to read,
5). Children can seek out a wide variety of subjects by browsing the Web or playing video games or talking to other kids, etc., and
6). The resulting education would be superior to public schools (and possibly private ones).
I disagree with all three points, obviously (especially since point (5) contradicts point (4)). Learning things that one does not wish to learn is an important life skill. Furthermore, in order to pick up a book the child would need to know that such a book exists. You seem to have some special hatred reserved for assigned reading lists, but the whole point of such lists is to expose the child to a wide array of books that make up our shared cultural heritage. I personally hated most of the books on my list, but nonetheless I’m very grateful to my teachers for making me read them — because I’d discovered a few gems I never knew I’d enjoy. During that time, I’ve also learned how to slay Pinkie demons with a chainsaw, but that wasn’t terribly educational.
Moving on to a few specific comments:
Generally speaking, this is true. I enjoy driving on roads, going to the library (well, not so much anymore, but I used to before the Internet days), and the few times I had to call the cops or the ambulance I was moderately satisfied with the results (I’ve never had to call the fire department, thankfully). My own public school experience was fairly decent. Obviously, all of these services could be greatly improved, but still, the government is performing them reasonably well. I’ve also had cable Internet service from Comcast and Time Warner, which are private monopolies. Don’t get me started on them.
Some are enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and possess whatever spark of personality is required to engage children in learning. Some are just going through the motions to get their paycheck. Most are average, by definition. I completely agree that this situation could be improved.
I expect the government to do things better than the free market — which does not mean “optimally” ! — in certain cases where the lack of immediate financial gain precludes financial expenditures. As I asked before — would you authorize $1B payment to build a LIGO ?
As I said before, the government is not some alien entity; it’s just a bunch of managers who are paid by a fixed community subscription fee (i.e. taxes). Eliminating financial gain from their motivation allows them to focus on things that are financial black holes, such as general education, scientific research, or national defence (or libraries, back in the old days before the government-financed ARPA developed the Internet). Their motivation to do well depends on the type of government. In a democracy, it’s the knowledge that they will be voted out of office should they perform especially poorly. In a representative two-party system such as ours, this motivation is admittedly quite weak on the national level.
The library is a government-run project. The Internet is semi-private today, but would not exist without the government. Arguably, neither would the transistor.
It’s hard to say (I’m actually pretty old, you know); but perhaps 20%. All of that was spent solely on subjects I was personally interested in. As I said before, I am extremely happy with the fact that I’ve learned other things as well, in a mandatory setting. To name a few examples, “shop”, biology, geometry, and even literature were very useful to me later in my education (and in life), even though I disliked most of them in school.
Oh, I agree that this is terrible. Most other countries — ones with even more widespread public schooling systems, such as Germany or the Netherlands — read way more, on the order of 10 to 20. I absolutely agree that the American metrics are bad, but you can’t pin them on the mere existence of public schools.
Well, I was required to do so, and I retained it, but I admit that it’s just one data point.
I completely agree that exams should be better. The SAT in particular, while far from optimal, is still pretty good. Studying for the SAT will increase your score, but not from 0 to maximum.
Have you seen Twitter lately ? You go on the Internet to read ragebait. If you want to get some useful information, then you need to know beforehand how to construct a proof by deduction or induction; some basic statistics; and the common logical pitfalls. None of these things can be learned just by chatting online. Geometry, when taught properly, is actually better at developing those skills than a philosophy course, because it is completely abstract. Triangles don’t care how you feel about gay people or whatever, and the skills you develop to prove (not just memorize !) that e.g. the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees, will serve you better in life than learning which celebrity has the coolest scarf or whatever.
Wow. No, you can’t. You really, really can’t. You can maybe learn a few tips and tricks, and you can learn a caricature of some common concepts, expressed in common English-language metaphors. But you can’t calculate anything. For example, how big of a sample size would you need to be 95% confident in your mean ? You cannot answer that question without at least some basic algebra; but that’s not even the most interesting question. Why would you need a sample of that size ? That’s the interesting question, and without algebra, it will forever remain a mystery to you.
I argue that basic algebra is simple enough that everyone should be required to at least attempt to learn it. Algebra is one of these basic skills that unlocks an entire galaxy of possibilities, yet seems useless on its own, so most people — like yourself, apparently ! — would never even look at it twice. That is the point of education: not just to teach you to be a productive worker in some industry, but to allow you entry to any field of your choosing.
The whole point of a private monopoly is that it makes competition impossible. Right now, I live in a Time Warner service area. I could choose to buy my Internet service from them, or I could choose not to have any Internet service at all. Things used to be a lot better a few decades ago, when the government executed a concerted push to break up telecom monopolies. If you rewind history a bit, and look at “company towns” back in the 1850s (IIRC), you can see the glorious paradise that monopolies had built (spoiler alert, it sucked).
I suppose they could, but how is that the case with education ? Right now, you can send your children to private or public schools, can you not ? Well, many people can’t, because they can’t afford the cost of private school, but I assume that you can…
That depends, is there a government to prevent those dozen schools from agglomerating into EduCo; to ensure that they actually teach their students a basic curriculum, instead of just handing out diplomas or focusing on e.g. Jesus; and to provide some alternative for people who cannot afford the cost ? If the answer is “yes”, then it’s pretty close to the situation we have now (ditto for vouchers).
Once again, you seem to have missed the point of my argument entirely. Literacy helps everyone, including but by no means limited to the literate individual. Being a general literacy service provider does not benefit anyone sufficiently to engage in this enterprise (by contrast with specific job training, ideological indoctrination, etc.).
As I said before, local elections — on the county/city/district level — are very important. State/national elections, less so. However, note that if a state/national politician proposed, say, a 99% tax on bread as the main plank of his platform, he’d very likely still lose to a competitor who had more rational policies.
Er… yes ? And how do they know what’s in the public interest ? Is there a feedback mechanism that tells them when their policies are appreciated by the public ? In case of actual despots, not so much, but I never claimed to be a monarchist.
Could you please stop telling me what my assumptions are — at least, until you can provide some evidence of psychic ability ? My actual assumption is, once again, that there exist a class of services that laissez-faire capitalism is ill-equipped to provide; and that, so far, the government is the only alternative system that can adequately provide such services on a large scale. That is very different from saying “the government is an monibenevolent cornucopia”, and I am puzzled that you seemingly can’t see the difference.
Please do — and then, please explain why the overwhelming majority of firms make no provisions for allowing employees to participate in open-source projects on company time (obviously, encouraging them to do so on their own time, at no cost to the firm, makes perfect sense).
That’s not a long-term investment, that’s an ongoing operational expense.
Do you mean, their government sponsored research operations, or something else ? Please elaborate.
The Manhattan Project. Moon landing. ARPAnet. The Interstate Highway System. Hoover Dam. Standing armies. Public libraries. Clean tap water. And yes, public schools. Somehow, those shiftless politicians managed to create and maintain all of these things, despite only looking toward their next election — whereas private companies failed. Why do you think that is ?
You write:
I have made none of those claims. This started, more or less, with your writing:
None of those assumptions is necessary to dispute that claim.
And, of course, the claim as stated leads to the opposite of your conclusion, since nothing close to 100% of the population, probably well under 50%, is literate by your expanded definition of literacy, and that’s the outcome of a system of compulsory schooling, mostly public.
A slight exaggeration and oversimplification of my position. Adults can help by telling kids about interesting things, suggesting books, interacting in a variety of ways. But I think it’s rarely desirable to compel kids to read a book or study a subject.
Or reading books.
Done well, for many kids, but not all, it would.
Best learned when you have a reason to do so better than someone else’s orders.
There are lots of contexts where you have to do something you don’t want to do in order to achieve something you want to achieve — saving money in order to buy a toy, spending several hours in preparation for the D&D game you are DM for because you like being a DM.
And part of the role of parents, or other adults, is to tell kids about books, get them interested, point them in the right direction. There is a difference between helping people and giving them orders.
More precisely, to whatever books are currently in fashion for the purpose.
The important lessons are that books are fun and interesting, plus learning the skill of reading. Making kids read books because the teacher thinks reading those books is good for them is a much worse way of accomplishing both of those objectives than encouraging kids to find and read books they enjoy.
Your response:
I was responding to a specific argument you made. You appear to be ignoring that. If you don’t remember, you can reread my post — that’s the advantage of arguing in writing instead of in speech.
On your public school experience, you have no basis for comparison to tell you whether or not it was better than alternatives. I have my education at school vs my education in other contexts and my observation of the education of my home unschooled children.
I went to a very good private school and was bored most of the time. My wife went to a good suburban public school and was bored most of the time. I was not bored reading books, arguing with my father about lots of things, arguing moral philosophy with a friend, interacting in a variety of ways that I was choosing.
My children learned lots of things, some of which required quite a lot of work — I think my daughter worked harder learning Italian, which she had chosen to do, than I ever worked in any class in K-12, college or grad school.
I wrote, and you quoted:
You responded:
Yes. But the argument you were offering for the superiority of school to home schooling required that all, or at least a large fraction, were enthusiastic and knowledgeable.
Do you mean “one can imagine an improved situation,” which is surely true, or “the public schools could improve this situation,” in which case the obvious question is why they haven’t. That’s getting us back to the point I keep trying to make and you, I think, keep missing. The behavior of a government, or a firm, isn’t something we can simply assume — we have to figure out how it will behave, either by observing how it does behave or by having a convincing theory to predict its behavior.
You would consider it unreasonable if my defense of home schooling started by assuming that all parents were enthusiastic polymaths. It wouldn’t be a defense if I said that they could be. No more is it a defense of public schools to say they could have many more enthusiastic and knowledgeable teachers.
Again quoting me:
And replying:
As I keep pointing out, that doesn’t describe basic schooling, since most of the benefit goes to the person who is schooled, so doesn’t support your position on schooling.
I will happily agree that the private market often does a poor job of producing pure public goods — how poor depending on whether there are good indirect ways of funding them. I don’t agree that the government does a good job of producing such goods because, as I keep pointing out, the mechanism you rely on to make the government do the right things, voting, requires individual voters to produce a pure public good, and an expensive one, which they don’t do.
Continuing to quote what I wrote:
You responded:
Knowing whether a government actor is doing a good job isn’t easy — nobody runs for office on the slogan “I’m the bad guy.” Nobody introduces a bill into Congress entitled “A bill to make farmers richer and city folk poorer,” although such a bill is introduced and passed every year. Even at the state level, even at the local level, the government is doing lots of moderately complicated things. Unlike the situation in the private market, the individual can’t directly compare the performance of the alternatives. Nobody gets to see whether Obama did a better or worse job than Romney would have done.
As I keep pointing out and you keep ignoring, the individual voter has essentially no incentive to do the hard work of forming an intelligent judgement of how good a job elected politicians are doing, for precisely the reason you have been arguing that the private market doesn’t do a good job of producing diffuse goods. The benefit from voting wisely is diffused across the whole polity, an externality of way above 99%. And yet that good has to be produced privately. The result is that voters are rationally ignorant. So they make their voting decisions either in terms of what arguments sound most persuasive to someone who knows nothing about the subject and has no reason to make an effort to evaluate the arguments, or in terms of what political position will help them get along with friends and other people who matter, or which politician or party they enjoy identifying with, or similar factors.
Some libraries are. Some are private. A library is producing an ordinary private good for the people who use it so, on your own arguments, there is no reason it can’t be done privately.
I asked:
You replied:
That’s not my point. Your argument was that forcing kids to read literature was the way to get them to appreciate it. Kids are forced to read literature, and the fact that, as adults, they don’t read it is evidence that your claim is false.
And my point was not about public schools but about the conventional model of schooling, public and private.
I wrote:
You replied:
No. I don’t use Twitter, and it isn’t a sensible way of doing what I discuss. Usenet used to be pretty good. Nowadays you use the web. As you might have noticed from current observation, I spend a lot time on this blog.
I wrote, about statistics and probability theory:
You replied:
Almost nobody actually answers that question by calculating if for himself, and if he did, algebra wouldn’t suffice for the purpose. People do it by looking up the answer on an appropriate table, which requires neither algebra nor calculus.
One of the things you can learn with neither algebra nor calculus is what a significance measure means — something that, in my observation, the great majority of those who do statistics that produce such results don’t know. Most of them think that having confirmed your hypothesis at the .05 level means the chance your hypothesis is false is no more than .05 — which, unfortunately, is not the case, indeed cannot be deduced by classical statistics.
You wrote:
The hard question is what it means to be 95% confident in your mean, or any result from statistical analysis of data, and most people who have taken a stat course in college don’t know that. The hard and important issues are conceptual ones. I can demonstrate what is wrong with the usual misunderstanding of significance measures using no math beyond arithmetic — and in the process explain the difference between classical and Bayesian statistics. I’ve explained the point several times on my blog — here is one of them.
I’m not arguing that nobody should learn algebra, I’m arguing that it isn’t something everyone should be required to learn.
You wrote:
Would it help if I told you that my father taught me algebra when I was about ten? I took my first college calculus course when I was fifteen and was nineteen the first time I got an A in a graduate student only math class, which I was taking as an undergraduate. My doctorate is in theoretical physics.
I’m not arguing that nobody should learn algebra, I’m arguing that not everybody should — fortunate since, although practically everyone takes a class in it, many, probably most, can’t actually use it thereafter.
My wife, as a graduate student at VPI, taught labs for a geology course that was used to satisfy the science requirement by non-science students. A majority of them, given the height, width, and depth of a rectangular ore body, had no idea how to calculate the volume. That’s about as elementary as geometry gets. VPI is the second best state university in Virginia, so the students would probably be from about the top quarter of high school graduates.
I wrote:
You responded:
All U.S. states have compulsory schooling laws, and in some that means that I would not be free to home unschool my children.
It didn’t occur to you that compulsory schooling laws deny people a choice?
I wrote:
You replied:
Your assumption seems to be that the people running the public schools care more about the welfare of my children than I do. At least, that’s what you need to conclude that if the government didn’t control the private schools, they wouldn’t teach kids.
Is it your assumption that schooling is a natural monopoly? That’s not consistent with observation of the size of schools — we don’t see very large schools consistently outcompeting smaller ones.
Over the past century, government intervention in the U.S. has been the main source of monopoly. A private monopoly can keep competitors out, absent government assistance, only by providing a service on better terms than other firms are willing to provide it. A regulated industry — airlines under the CAB before deregulation, rail and trucking under the ICC — can keep them out by making competition illegal.
Again, do you believe that knowing how to read and do arithmetic does not benefit the person who acquires those skills?
Do you deny that much of the benefit of my being literate goes to me? Your argument is only that some of it goes to others, which might well be the case. But that makes it a good with some positive externality, not a pure public good. Do you understand the difference?
The fact that one of the benefits from education is diffuse doesn’t mean it can’t be provided privately, given that another benefit is an ordinary private good.
That’s pure argument by assertion. I don’t know if you have children, but if you do, are you saying that if there was no public school you wouldn’t teach them to read?
You quoted me:
And replied:
Do you understand what an externality of 99% means? I live in a city of about a million. That means that if I do a good job of electing local politicians, I get about one millionth of the benefit. That’s a diffuse benefit — enormously more so than the benefit from my getting my kid basic education. You argue, correctly, that private action can’t be relied on to produce a diffuse benefit. But your whole argument here depends on private action by voters producing a very diffuse good — informed voting.
You quoted me:
and replied:
You are in a poor position to make that objection, given that in our previous exchange you not only told me what my views were, you twice asserted that I had views which were inconsistent with what I had just written and you, presumably, had just read.
I am attributing to you the assumption needed for the argument you are making to go through. Your argument is that “Eliminating financial gain from their motivation allows them to focus on things that are financial black holes, such as general education, scientific research, or national defence.” Allowing them to do something is only relevant if they choose to do it.
You went on to sketch your reason for expecting them to do it — voting. I have pointed out repeatedly why that doesn’t work, and you have simply ignored the argument. I have done it again in this post.
I had written:
You replied:
A firm is using an open source program. It may have problems with it, encounter bugs, want modifications. An employee of that firm who is part of the project might be able to do those things, although probably not if it is a reasonably large project. But the person who can find and fix the bug or make the modification is someone else on the project, and people on an open source project talk to each other and do favors for each other.
For a more complete explanation of the economics of open source, I recommend The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond.
I wrote, about your claim that we need government for long term planning:
You replied:
If you spend money now for a return twenty years from now that is an investment.
I had added:
You replied:
Haloid corporation started on xerography in 1947. Its first marketable plain-paper copier, the Xerox 914 (by that time Haloid had become Haloid Xerox), came out in 1959.
This has gotten too long — I, unfortunately, can resist anything but temptation — and for too much of it I feel as though I’m talking to the wall, so I don’t plan another round. You are, of course, free to respond if you wish.
@DavidFriedman:
Since you’re not interested in continuing the debate, I don’t think it makes sense for me to respond to your points. That said, since I too cannot resist temptation, let me add one novel point.
Based on your latest comment, and your comments in general, I think I can safely conclude that you are very smart. Much smarter than me, in fact. I am not being sarcastic or ironic, I genuinely mean that. Being smart is a good thing, but I think in this specific case — a debate on education — it clouds your judgement.
You are the kind of person to whom learning comes very easily. Since early childhood, you could pick up virtually any book and absorb it without any assistance; you could go out and study any subject (as long as it wasn’t too boring for you), and achieve mastery of it in short order. For people like you, any kind of structured schooling would be torture, because you’d be forced to crawl along with the average people, waiting for them to catch up.
I think it is difficult for you to appreciate that average people, such as e.g. myself, are not nearly as efficient at learning on our own. We need lectures, we need exercises, and it takes us many hours and multiple attempts to internalize some concept. The type of learning that seemed so boring and pointless to you, was exciting and stimulating for me — because, despite what you might think, I do genuinely enjoy understanding new things and expanding my horizons.
Would the world be better off if everyone was as smart as you ? Undoubtedly. Would the world be better off if people like yourself were empowered to study at their own pace ? Absolutely. But, would the world be better off if every student was left to his own devices ? No. Not everyone in the world is the same. Most people are average, in fact. Sad, but true.
Fair points. One of the reasons I’m not claiming that unschooling, which is really what that part of the argument was about, is best for everyone is that most of my first hand data is for a very atypical sample, my own family. So I don’t know how well the conclusions would apply beyond that.
But you might want to look at the literature on the Sudbury Valley School, which is a school run on unschooling lines. Its defenders at least claim that it works for a wide variety of students.
On the general subject of unschooling, you might find my past blog posts of interest.
Also, while looking over my own posts, I came across a link to a news story on illiteracy in America. It’s relevant to your statement early in the thread that it is critical for a modern society to have a population “100% literate (+- epsilon),” literate in a sense much stronger than the news story is using, and that government schooling was the way to achieve that objective.
Bugmaster:
I think almost everyone has an idea of things that government should or should not be involved in, and if you propose ways to have the government do something better I think it shouldn’t be doing at all, I’m not going to be impressed by the gains in efficiency. For example, in the US, we’ve broadly accepted the idea that the government should not be in the business of owning, operating, or (outside some edge cases) regulating churches. If you propose a better way for the state to ensure that the right theology is taught in the nation’s churches, I’m not going to be too excited even if you are right that your way would be extra-efficient. Similarly, if you come up with a much more efficient way for the government to decide what everyone should read, or ensure that the next generation is genetically improved over this generation, I’m not interested in the efficiency gains, because I think it’s not a good thing to have the government doing in the first place.
I don’t think any of the three examples I gave above are particular to libertarians.
Some of the libertarians I’ve talked to have a more fundamental disagreement than that. They don’t merely argue that the government should stay out of matters X, Y, or Z; instead, they believe that the very concept of a centralized government is oppressive, immoral, or otherwise invalid. So, while they would technically agree with “government should stay out of X”, they would only do so because X is a member of the set of things that governments should stay out of, which includes literally everything, because governments should not exist.
That’s a description of anarcho-capitalists. As best I can tell, they have always been a minority among libertarians. The more common position is something close to classical liberalism — police, courts and national defense are legitimate government functions, anything else probably isn’t.
Is this grounded in Natural Law? Because surely by definition the legitimate government functions, sensu positive law, are whatever Government X happens to have on the books without triggering its own overthrow.
Libertarianism is a set of conclusions, more accurately a range of conclusions, that could be reached for any of a variety of different reasons. A utilitarian could be a libertarian because he had concluded that restricting government to those functions maximized utility. A natural rights libertarian could offer arguments for why those activities didn’t violate natural rights, anything more did.
As one of the hardline libertarians you seem to be referring to: yes, I do indeed believe that government (defined in a particular and specific way) is intrinsically immoral. To be precise, it’s about the source of the government’s legitimacy and authority; there are three main possibilities.
1) Government authority derives from its ability to deploy overwhelming force. No-one defends this on a small scale, but some people somehow seem to think it’s acceptable when a nation-state does it.
2) Government authority derives from a ‘social contract’ (that may be unwritten, but at least the US managed to write it down and — for the first 150 years or so — took seriously the idea that it needed to follow it in order to remain a legitimate government), consent to which is presumed against ‘natural-born’ citizens and is (with unclear justification) made a requirement for inhabiting a specified territory. For any citizen who decides they don’t in fact consent to the social contract as implemented, their choices are emigrate (the procedures for which in many cases require them to be signing up to another recognised nation’s ‘contract’, as for instance in nations signatory to the UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness per Article 7 thereof) or see (1).
3) Government authority derives from an explicit contract made with (and consented to without duress by) each citizen separately and individually. Territorial sovereignty may be involved, as essentially a way of reducing enforcement costs of the contract, but only if obtained by homesteading or by contracting with the homesteader of the territory to either buy or manage his sovereign rights. (It also really helps if there’s an open frontier; large aggregated territorial claims get a lot less morally defensible when they’re exhaustive and create an oligopoly.)
Now, you’ll notice that (3) is not something that actually exists in the world today. (I’ve actually based most of the description on Alistair Young’s Eldraeverse sci-fi, which among other things does a good job of illuminating the difference between this and the kind of ‘dogmatic Rothbardianism’ it’s often mistaken for.) To someone like me, however, it’s the only kind of ‘government’ that could ever be morally justified, because all ethics is grounded in consent.
Pace David’s “curious coincidence” upthread, I do indeed happen to also believe that oath-consent states would be better governed than the other kind; but then what is morality if not the matter of what rules of behaviour lead to good outcomes? (Comparison with the Posner thesis — that the anglo-saxon common law, economic efficiency, and intuitive notions of justice align — is instructive.)
@ec429 A few more possible views:
4) The government is legitimate because society, on the whole, is better of if it exists than if it doesn’t.
5) Government is legitimate because it is (approximately) elected by a majority, or because the system of governance itself is supported by a majority, or at least the majority prefers it to having no government at all.
6) The concept of legitimacy is meaningless. There are no natural rights, only interests. Most people support the existence of a government because they believe they are better off if it exists than if it doesn’t.
10240:
I think (4) more-or-less captures my view. I think it is very hard to morally justify a lot of what government does, because government is just people. That is, I don’t think government has any special moral status that a private club or informal group of friends of business don’t have. And yet, I think we don’t know a good way to have a decent society under modern conditions without it. (Though I very much appreciate the efforts of folks like David in trying to figure out other ways.)
I see this a little like MAD for deterring nuclear attacks. There is absolutely no way to morally justify launching a retaliatory nuclear strike on Russia after they launch one on us. Nearly everyone we’d kill would have been innocent of the actual mass murder we were avenging. And yet, it seems like committing to doing just this is more-or-less the only way we can work out to prevent the use of nuclear weapons in war. If we resolved to behave morally in this realm, we’d incentivize an enemy to nuke us as soon as it seemed useful for them, and knowing they could would empower them to push us around to their hearts’ content.
@10240
(4) rests on the assumption that utilities can be aggregated interpersonally, which I reject — if you give Alice an apple but take away Bob’s banana, have you increased or decreased total happiness? To me the question is meaningless, unanswerable; which is why I follow the Marshall approach (maximise revealed-preferential dollar value); the process that reveals those preferences also monetarily compensates them, and would in the spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum version turn every Marshall improvement into a Pareto improvement (for which, of course, interpersonal utility comparisons aren’t needed to conclude that “yes, it’s good”). In practice of course the compensation doesn’t always happen (*waves at Ron Coase*) but the Marshall criterion at least gives us an actionable way to resolve the question.
Government, having access to (1), doesn’t need to compensate those whom its existence makes worse off, so it generally doesn’t, meaning that only much more indirect mechanisms are available to pressure it to limit the extent to which it makes people worse off.
(5) assumes that ‘the majority’ has some intrinsic right to impose its will on the minority. Which is incoherent without some account of why it’s this particular set of people from which the majority should be drawn; and I’ve never seen a justification for it that didn’t either fall back on (1) or require interpersonal utility comparisons like (4) (usually, both).
(6) is simply false-to-fact. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma with communication, both participants have interests. But if they ignore the natural law that says “if you fail to find a way to co-ordinate, you’ll both defect and be worse off as a result”, they fail to serve their interests as well as they otherwise could. Natural law, game theory and timeless decision theory are all views or aspects of the same underlying thing, which is “how can optimising agents best optimise in an environment containing other optimising agents”. Things like Rule Utilitarianism or the Rawlsian veil of ignorance are just strategic moves in the metagame; and so is the idea of legitimacy, because it is in your interests both to cooperate with legitimate order and to resist illegitimate order (even where doing so is costly ex post). This is what I was trying to gesture at earlier with my “what is morality” line.
From my perspective, that means that retaliating is the moral thing to do: the morality of an act depends not just on its consequences in this reality, but on its effects in counterfactuals. Possibly we’re using the word “morality” differently? (What’s your opinion on this triple of definitions?)
@ec429 “In a prisoner dilemma both participants are better off if they both cooperate than if they both defect” is a simple true fact. “Therefore they have a moral obligation to cooperate” feels like a stronger claim, one that is a matter of worldview, and it’s unclear if it’s meaningful at all. (6) espouses the worldview that morality is meaningless.
What is the operational difference between “morality is meaningless, there are only competing interests” and the “morality is a set of game-theoretic strategies” worldview I described above (in which ‘natural law’ is the science of which metagame strategies work)? The only difference I can see is that (6) thinks ‘morality’ has to be some kind of epiphenomenal aura of goodness, rightly observes that auras don’t exist, and concludes that nor does morality. Which is purely a dispute about the definition of the word ‘morality’, rather than anything in the territory.
But I doubt my characterisation of (6) would pass the ideological Turing test, so maybe you can explain what I’m missing.
@ec429 Yes, you can define morality or legitimacy as certain game theoretic strategies, but I think most people feel like they are making a claim with a truth value when they say (for instance) that there is a moral obligation to follow the game theoretic strategies that would produce (in some sense) the best result if everyone followed them, rather than simply defining the word ‘morality’. That feeling, according to (6), an illusion. I think the way you put it is actually pretty similar to what I meant.
(My actual views are similar to (6) but slightly weaker: I recognize morality as a set of personal preferences, but not as an objective feature of the world.)
I think the basic problem with America is that there are two levels of government, state and federal. This creates way too much bureaucracy and nested laws and conflicts that simply don’t exist on simpler societies.
Which isn’t to say that simpler countries have better governments, or that certain parties have not ruined given parts of either governments. But maybe America hit some complexity level where the federal system works against itself.
Thinking on it again, dunno why there’s a cutoff date of the 80s and assume this is some bias of the observer or hearing from the good old days. Could be wrong.
Does such a conflict not happen with national vs. city/town/county authority? Or in other countries with provinces?
Germany has three levels and still remains functional.
Germany has those layers too, doesn’t it? I am not sure if the US has that much more bureaucracy than them since I am not that familiar with the system, but it seems like other countries with a system of similar complexity at least seem more functional.
A brief illustration.
That pyramid gave me a potential answer to my own question; the german states are (presumably, correct me if I’m wrong) strictly inferior to the national government; likewise towns are strictly inferior to states. But in the US, there’s a (dwindling) notion of powers that the states have which the federal government does not.
It’s a proper federation, not a unitary state. Not as strongly as the US is.
>the states have exclusive jurisdiction on the police (excluding federal police), most of education, the press, freedom of assembly, public housing, corrections and media affairs,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalism_in_Germany
Germany, or the modern German state, is relatively young compared to the USA. It hasn’t had time to accumulate cruft. But even then, it would not be surprising that there may be some factors that make the American model worse overall, and that Germany has been able to avoid.
Germany has the disadvantage of being part of another government, the European Union, but only time will tell if this will have the same effect, particularly as it does not seem to be as close a union as the United States. I mean, they just let a state leave the union without a civil war.
The 80s cutoff is mostly partisanship but there is a difference in the competence of government from around that time.
I put it down to three main factors.
Unionization, allowing public unions in the 1960s meant that bad employees were harder to fire and good employees were harder to keep. Because of this the government is chronically understaffed.
Civil Service Reform in 1978 made the test easier reduced employee quality.
The rise of suing the government and the death of discretion. Every agency lives in fear of being sued if the letter of the law isnt followed to the letter. This means zero discretion or wisdom is applied and the rules are followed blindly lest some person think they were being discriminated against or treated unfairly. It is better to give crappy service to everyone than good service to everyone except one. This has made government jobs harder and less rewarding.
This is a feature, not a bug. I usually quote Justice Kennedy here:
The way I like to think about it is insurance against the worst outcomes by providing multiple power bases. It’s the same intuition why we’ve split up the federal government into three co-equal branches. When there are multiple power bases, it’s harder for one faction to capture all of them. People can flock toward another power base and use that to push back against one power base that is running amok. To take a current example, some folks think that one or the other levels of government is being terribly unjust in their response to COVID-19, so they’ve flocked to a different power base to push back (creating amusing accusations of hypocrisy to go all around). But I also say that when the states want slavery, I want to go to a federal government who can make them stop. If the federal government teeters toward tyranny, I want to the states to have a way to shut the whole thing down. If a President actually banned Muslims or whatever, I want the Judiciary to push back. Etc. I could probably think of an example for every combination of power bases, but the combinatorics grow factorially.
Note that this is a reason why I’m also alright with some amount of corporate power. They can push back in unique and interesting ways (e.g., large companies that process search warrants for digital information provide as effective of a pre-execution check on warrant powers as we have anywhere). But I also think that it’s important that we have governments able to push back on corporate power, as well (anti-trust, for example). Sure, none of this is as efficient, but it helps keep the political and economic institutions inclusive, staving off the most colossal failures.
The Framers were all Classically educated and got their idea of checks and balances improving the longevity of the State most specifically from Polybius. Following P., a “mixed constitution” was believed to make a state more stable and powerful than pure democracy, oligarchy or monarchy.
I question your premise. First, many of the metrics that I presume you are looking at re outcomes are functions of state govts in the US, not the federal govt. Second, and relatedly, if you look at those metrics on a state-by-state level, you will find that it is not the US that performs poorly, but rather the South.
I live in the US and lean libertarian, so I’ll give you my answer.
I think the reason the US governs mostly incompetently is because it is so complex and the government tries to do everything, which results in them doing nothing very well. In fact I wrote a book about it!
So yes, IMO the issue is that government is run incompetently, and a better run government would most definitely make me less libertarian. It does appear that some countries are run a lot more competently than the US, such as Singapore, Switzerland, and the nordic countries. Part of this may well be that all these countries are much smaller than the US, but I don’t think that is all of it. I don’t know a whole lot about the inner workings of the more competent nations, but I do strongly suspect that they are run in a much simpler manner than the US, even beyond the effect of size. They have a few functions they feel must be performed, and they perform them well. Even a large welfare state can be run a lot more simply than the US, as long as they don’t have 100 agencies in 5 separate jurisdictions all trying to do the same thing.
Since you are pretty happy with the Dutch government, I am curious if you can give me a feel for how it works. Is the government mostly controlled from the central capital or do you have independent local governments? If someone decided that a group of people were falling through the cracks of the welfare system, would there be one agency they could work with to fix the problem, or would there be a multiplicity of agencies you have to look at? In the US, nobody really knows how much is being paid in welfare and to whom, because it is paid out in so many different ways.
May the 4th be with you, everyone!
Let’s use this day of days to pick through the dregs of the Star Wars franchise. What’s the worst film, TV series, game, novel, action figure, character, line, and whatever else we can think of in the published works of the franchise?
Worst live action film? That would be either The Phantom Menace or The Last Skywalker. Anyone have a third option?
Worst TV show? Anyone picking anything other than the Christmas special?
Worst game is probably that one where you have to pay for ‘a sense of pride and accomplishment’.
No, you’ve got it all wrong. You had to play for ten hours to do that, you could pay to not earn a sense of a pride and accomplishment.
Battlefront II is actually a very good game, that got saddled by EA being greedy and trying to turn it into a $60 free-to-play.
If you haven’t played it, it’s worth a second look. The vestiges of the loot box / pay to win system were impossible to fully eradicate, but they mostly cut them out and the gameplay itself is a lot of fun (especially the star fighter battles).
+1. Yes, the Pride and Accomplishment comment got them thoroughly shellacked, so badly that all that lootbox stuff was taken out before launch. I’ve played since launch, and there’s never been pay-to-win possible*. It’s a very good game, and an excellent Star Wars experience.
* for hyper-pedants, yes, you could buy the gold edition or whatever and get access to the game like 2 days early, and the lootboxes were there for that time, but were removed before the official launch.
I actually just started playing the campaign for this yesterday, as I noticed it is not available for free on Origin Access Basic. The graphics, at the very least, are amazing. I’m not a bug multiplayer guy but I plan on giving it a bit of a go.
Don’t get your hopes up for the campaign. It was something they basically put in so they could say “see, we have single-player, too!” Also so they could have a female dark-side hero (villain)*. The campaign is short (4-5 hours) and doesn’t go anywhere, but it is kind of an okay intro to the mechanics of the game. If you want a single-player Star Wars game, play Fallen Order.
* Phasma wasn’t in at launch, and was added a few weeks later to coincide with the release of TLJ. Also, the Force Being Female and all, why don’t have a good female Sith antagonist in the movies yet? Like a sexy space witch who goes heavy into the manipulative aspects of the force. That would be cool.
I’ve already played 4-5 hours and I’m not done yet, so you must be exaggerating!
Well bless your heart, enjoy your adventure.
If Scott spoke Southern, you’d be cruising for a banning with language like that.
Shhhhhh! Don’t tell him!
I kid, I kid. HLTB says it’s 6 hours. If it takes you much longer than that, well….
I finished last night. Including the bonus “Resurrection” campaign, I think in total it probably took me 10-12 hours. I died every once in awhile, but not too much.
You can tell they didn’t put too much effort into it by the difficulty curve (or lack thereof). The mission I died the most often on was the very first one. I never died once in the final one.
I’m sure people could make a very salient, well structured argument that the Last Jedi torpedoed the series or is objectively the worst one of the sequels, but none of the sundry Star Wars content offends me on a level quite like Rise of Skywalker. It’s intertextual argument with Last Jedi may have set it up for failure but there’s so much else wrong with it whose fault lies nowhere else that I just can’t with it.
Last Jedi also achieved the occasional visually interesting scenes, like the Argento-y throne room, the not-dagobah-cave-mirror-world, red hoth, or the universe-breaking-hyperdrive thing. Since Palpatine’s giant trapezoid is derivative of his previous giant prisms and spheres, I’ll only really give Rise of Skywalker the wireless long distance fight scene.
I’m perhaps bitter because that movie dragged back Palpatine – the only person who knows what movie he’s in – and I felt rather squandered him and his meme potential.
At least Carrie Fischer had a good time at the Christmas Special, though she doesn’t remember it.
My favorite fact about The Rise of Skywalker is that the new small droid D-O was voiced by J J Abrams himself. For those who don’t remember D-O’s entire schtick was rolling into a scene and giving uttering a single word like “kind” when Rey helps it, or “sad” when Leia dies. That means the director of this movie put himself into the movie as a character to say out loud the emotion you are supposed to be feeling in all the scenes.
With The Last Jedi at least there was a glimmer of something more interesting and intelligent under all the confusion.
I’m reminded of Richard Ayoade’s On Top and his take on the narration in “View from the Top”:
So J.J. Abrams has the same film sensibilities as a director who cast Gwyneth Paltrow as a girl from a trailer park.
The only JJ Abrams movies I’ve seen were Star Trek and Star Wars reboots. I assume he must be more competent than he seems from those movies, or he wouldn’t have gotten those jobs.
I think that TLJ was, at its core, a really good movie — that got mashed together with a terrible one, then put through a blender until only faint glimpses of the truly interesting and original ideas remained. But I can still respect it for its unfulfilled potential.
RoS, on the other hand, had no redeeming features. It was just a spaghetti-code hack on top of a previous hack, designed to get the story to at least compile and run once without crashing. It failed even at that.
Wasn’t that the official name of Siberia from 1918-1991?
Phantom menace as the most disappointing star wars movie, but attack of the clones was a worse film. The dialogue is worse, the plot goes nowhere, and the action was less novel.
Worse dialogue?? Uhh we get an exposition on sand in a movie that cost $120 million to make /s
I mean, there’s always a bigger fish
The chemistry between them is approximately what you’d get if you cast a brother and sister as the romantic leads in a school play….
Hayden Christensen isn’t a bad actor either, he’s not great but he is competent. It’s just that Lucas doesn’t seem to have done any actual directing across the prequel trilogy, which is why the experienced actors tend to do well while the inexperienced ones failed and faltered.
Then to add insult to injury, George Lucas somehow actually did manage to film a decent sequence building up Anakin and Padme’s romance. It shows the two of them with Padme’s family on Naboo, and not only is it not painful to watch, but they almost have chemistry together! You haven’t seen it because he cut it out of the damn movie. It’s as if when Lucas finished filming and started editing he looked at these scenes and then said to himself, “No that’s not unpleasant enough, it can’t go on my film, we’re going to for maximum cringe here.”
I once watched what was actually a pretty damned good recut of the prequel trilogy into a single film of two hours and forty minutes. It starts with the duel at the end of TPM and ends with Darth Vader rising. My only real criticism is he cut it a bit too deep by excising Count Dooku almost entirely, as I think it would have been better if he’d let his cut run to three hours to keep ol’ Tyrannus in. Anyway, one of the most amazing parts about it is that with some rather clever editing, the guy behind it actually managed to make the Anakin-Padme romance work.
What he did is he took the scenes with Padme’s family and cut them back into into the film, thereby clearly establishing that she and Anakin have feelings for each other. Then he cut out most of the dialogue in the subsequent scenes at the lake retreat, favouring instead poignant silences while they make eyes at each other. It was amazing how much better that was without having to add anything that wasn’t already filmed. Turns out the good material was there, Lucas just butchered it.
A lot of scenes were filmed in front of a green screen without props, which is very hard on actors.
A fairly mediocre actor like Brendan Fraser seems to be very capable at acting without much context, which makes him a popular for movies with a lot of green screen. Andy Serkis is another example.
Lillian (or anyone), what’s the best recut of Star Wars 1-3 on YouTube? TIA 😉
I guess somehow I am able to compartmentalize those terrible (I mean truly awful) romance scenes. I barely even remember them. I really enjoyed pretty much everything Obi-Wan was involved in in Attack of the Clones, and the banter between Dooku and Obi-Wan/Yoda/Anakin. That and the last 20 minutes or so of Revenge of the Sith are basically the only redeeming parts of the whole prequel trilogy (well, the lightsaber battle with Maul also, but that is the only decent thing to come out of Phantom Menace).
The love scenes are probably tied for the worst part of the trilogy with anything that involved one or more Gungans, but the rest of the movie held up reasonably well I thought (if you mostly ignore Anakin, but you have to do that in all three anyway).
I actually really like the wedding scene, which is beautiful and IMHO had kind of a tragic Shakespearean feel where you know why everyone’s doing this even though you can see it leading to ruin.
But that’s probably because it doesn’t have dialogue. I do agree that everything Jake Lloyd or Hayden Christiansen says to Natalie Portman is painful.
I had really high hopes for rogue one, and they were almost totally dashed. The last half hour was mostly good, but the first hour was miserable. I maintain what I said when I first heard about the film, that you needed to structure it like a slasher film, with vader as the monster.
I would definitely watch this movie, but I don’t think that’s what Rogue One needed to be.
@acymetric
it shouldn’t actually be a slasher film, but it has to have that dynamic of a group of people we like running from the utterly unstoppable force that was vader, not some bland admiral. A more claustrophobic story with fewer locations, less space travel, and characters I care enough about to remember their names getting chased by someone who they know they cannot fight.
I contend that the worst movie was Force Awakens. Skywalker and arguably TLJ are worse in a vacuum, but the reason those were bad comes back in significant part to a total lack of planning in TFA. J J’s “mystery box” style is to pose a vague question that will lead to audience speculation (who are Rey’s parents, what’s Snoke’s deal, why did Luke leave) and hope he can figure out a satisfying answer by the time the next movie tries to cash that check (he can’t). I’m sympathetic to TLJ’s decision to say “no, all of those mystery boxes are stupid and there was nothing in them anyway, they’re gone now”. It’s a shame Johnson couldn’t build anything decent to replace the stuff he burned down.
Worst character: Darth Andeddu, the undead Sith. A perfect microcosm of all the ways in which the Expanded Universe is dumb.
A shame? It’s his fault the third movie had nothing to go on! The Mystery Box is stupid and awful, but stomping all over it and not putting something genuine in its place just means the next writer has nothing to work from. In a trilogy. That is a terrible idea.
Not only a trilogy, but a trilogy of trilogies… “deconstructing the Star Wars mythos” is not the worst idea for an interesting film, but it’s a terrible thing to attempt in the mainline trilogies after you spent 7 movies building the mythos and have only one more left to finish it.
It’s the Hero’s Journey with laser swords. Don’t frack the formula midstream.
As I understand it, the fault comes down to Disney basically giving their directors free rein and refusing to meaningfully coordinate the way they shifted the future of a bajillion-dollar franchise, to the point where the two directors were passive-aggressively dickslapping each other with the plot.
The warning signs were there in The Force Awakens; it should have been much less obviously a JJ Abrams movie, but it had his “storytelling style” (“look, it’s an allusion to a better work you liked!”) all over it. I assumed, as I left the theater, that he had a strong hand in trilogy planning and it would follow a consistently mediocre but sort of competent direction. It didn’t even occur to me that effectively nobody was in charge of the trilogy at all. I suspect a lot of cocaine was involved.
This mostly describes my reaction as I left the theater. I really enjoyed Force Awakens, between the nostalgia factor and the fact that I liked pretty much all the new characters (Rey, Finn, Poe, Maz, etc) and (yes, yes, JJ mystery boxes) set up some potentially interesting questions (which I thought would amount to something since someone else was finishing the trilogy rather than Abrams). And then…
I reckon that’s a norm Lucasfilm established with the Holiday Special.
It’s hard for me to figure out where to assign blame (after all, J J created the empty mystery boxes, there was never anything to go on), but in case I came off as too soft on Johnson, my take is that he correctly recognized that J J was taking things in a bad direction, got halfway through turning around, and wound up plunging off a cliff instead of crashing into a wall. That I’m as sympathetic as I am is entirely because I despise J J’s mystery boxes and found it cathartic to see them thrown away. It’s certainly not because TLJ was any good.
I became far more sympathetic to Rian Johnson after watching Knives Out, which proved to me that he is capable of writing coherent and interesting and fresh things. I now assume that most of the incoherence was not his fault, or at least that was the bad outcome of trying to make something interesting while hemmed in by producers and outside influences.
That said, The Last Jedi made me want to shout angrily at the screen at certain parts while Rise of Skywalker just made me groan and roll my eyes the whole way through. I’m not sure which was worse.
Maybe, but my understanding is that Disney was very hands off and Ryan (also JJ) basically had free reign.
Force Awakens was a decent movie but a lousy basis for a trilogy.
TLJ made the trilogy unsalvageable, and was a crappy movie to boot. You can’t build a whole non-parody film out of mocking the audience for having genre expectations. The B-plot casino planet shenanigans sucked and took way too long. And it required major idiot balls to be carried by Poe and especially Holdo to happen at all.
The throne room scene was legitimately excellent, although of course it wasted Snoke. The Red Hoth stuff was great right up until Rose ruined it.
All that said, Clones is still probably the worst, although I hate it less than some other people do. Rise of Skywalker is probably second worst.
It’s a tough call. Outside the original trilogy the hard part is finding unambiguously good ones. Revenge of the Sith had its moments, apart from the weakness of the lead actor and the idiot ball Jedis it was pretty good. The Phantom Menace would be a fun kids action movie, except that the core plot was a trade dispute and Roberts Rules of Order. Clones was lousy – the final battle was pretty cool but the CGI doesn’t hold up. Force Awakens was fine as a fun nostalgia piece.
Revenge of the Sith had the only believable, well done, and appropriate emotional note of the entire trilogy, which should probably count for something.
if TLJ had had the balls to end with Rey taking Kylo Ren’s hand in the throne room, it would have been an amazing setup for a third movie. Instead the rest of the movie is spent repudiating everything they set up in the first half.
That would have repudiated everything that happened in TFA, which highlights the real problem with those movies: Nothing is set up, everything just happens. If you need a character to survive you just write it so they survive every encounter, if you need a character on a planet you just have them crash a ship there, ignoring how impossible it would be for them to get from where they were 2 pages ago in the script.
@baconbits9 says:
Yes. it would have been actually shocking, like Darth Vader saying he was Luke’s father, not his father’s murderer. I agree that it would have been better if it had been set up early (I like my fiction structured) and I think it’s insane not to have planned out the trilogy in advance, but we were where we were after TFA. That ending would have (A) meant TLJ was consistent with itself at least, if not with TFA and (B) gives you a lot of interesting angles on where to go with the third movie.
I was actually kind of hoping that would happen, and the trilogy would end with Ben Solo being redeemed but Rey lost. Plus it would make the “Rise of Skywalker” make more sense since Ben actually IS a Skywalker.
That would have been a great way to subvert genre expectations while still staying solidly in the genre. And it would have made the title “The Last Jedi” so much more poignant…
You may be right that the Force Awakens trilogy is three decent movies but a very lousy trilogy. That explains why I enjoyed watching each of the three movies, with two years to forget most of the previous movie before watching the next one.
At the risk of opening the floodgates: The Last Skywalker is my favorite Disney Star Wars movie (though I have not seen Solo). While it is far from perfect (the prequels still overshadow it for me, and each of the original trilogy is well beyond it), I was pleasantly surprised by the way it advanced the core conflict/relationship between Rey and Kylo without retreading the same ground as Luke/Vader or Anakin/Obi-Wan. I also thought it had the strongest supporting cast performances (both the returning Lando/Leia and the new Zorli).
My least favorite Star Wars movie is either Rogue One or The Last Jedi. Rogue One ranking so low for me is probably just that movie being a uniquely poor fit for my personal preferences (i have a hard time enjoying both war movies and prequels). At the very least, I can understand and appreciate why most people enjoyed that movie more than I did. I have a harder time understanding why someone who enjoyed the rest of the Star Wars franchise would prefer The Last Jedi to The Rise of Skywalker. If someone who holds that opinion would we willing to explain it to me, I would appreciate it.
My nomination for worst action figure would have to go to the miniatures game where the miniatures were on spring-loaded rotating bases and “did the other mini fall over when you twisted this one and let go to whack it” was a core mechanic of the game. Note that this has nothing at all to do with the current X-Wing miniatures game, which I highly recommend to anyone who is at all interested in the idea of a Star Wars space battle represented with tabletop miniatures.
I’d also like to add a new “least necessary cross-over” category, to which I will nominate the appearance of the Apprentice (from The Force Uleashed) in Soul Calibur 4.
Rogue One is kind of a lukewarm mix of scenes from better war movies, but I was sort of hoping they would start making Star Wars versions of other movies – A Star Wars heist movie, a Star Wars meet cute rom com about two workers on the Death Star who keep meeting when they’re out walking their droids, etc.
If you haven’t seen it yet, The Mandalorian is basically (and seemingly intentionally) just a Star Wars flavored Western and it is great.
Solo should have been a heist movie, and the most heist movie part of it (the train robbery) is actually pretty good.
I second the recommendation for the Mandalorian. I found the middle episodes to lag a bit in quality, but they never get worse than mediocre. Meanwhile the last third of the season is quite good and the first third is amazing.
Agreed. I got a tad worried in the middle that it was just going to stall (I really did not like the Bill Burr episode although other people seemed to love it). But things got pretty good as the season closed out.
I found Mando pretty average, but I’ve been very down on all the other Star Wars media so even I have to admit it’s notably better than the rest, and it’s easily the one that feels the most Star Wars-y.
My one big objection is a recurring problem with their fight scenes: they will go out of their way to establish that the hero’s armour can deflect blaster shots, then forget about that and structure the battle as though shooting at him should create some dramatic tension. At one point he’s losing a fistfight to an ordinary human who keeps punching him in the metal chestplate.
Tim Zahn’s “Scoundrels” was at least a SW heist book, albeit from the now-discredited EU. I enjoyed it.
_TLJ_ did a pretty decent job handling the Luke/Rey/Kylo/Snoke storyline. If they had managed something like that for the whole movie, it would have been a very solid Star Wars movie, probably up there with the original three. (Though they should have foreshadowed the idea that Luke could do that weird astral transmission thing but it would kill him.).
I liked _Rogue One_ because it felt like a Star Wars movie. But really, it was a competently done Star Wars fanfic made into a movie. Some dumb stuff, but probably no more than the original movies. They stuck to the rules of the universe and had known starting and ending points, which helped them a lot.
_The Force Awakens_ introduced some interesting characters, but the world they portrayed didn’t make a lot of sense, they didn’t stick to the rules of their universe, and the plot was almost 100% just a rehash of the original Star Wars plot.
Rian tried to foreshadow the lethal astral projection thing, he just did it unsuccessfully. There’s a scene in which Rey and Kylo see each other for the first time, and Kylo says something like “It can’t be you doing this, the strain would kill you.”
I vote Phantom Menace as worst, Attack of the Clones as second worst. TPM has, as far as I can remember, many bad qualities and no redeeming qualities whatsoever. It starts with the trade federation text crawl, then introduces the actual trade federation, then for anyone who was concerned that the trade federation might play on racist stereotypes, it introduces Watto and the gungans. The action scenes made no sense, nothing Anakin and Qui-Jon did made any sense, the battle with the gungans throwing giant magic balls out of catapults made no sense, the actual trade federation plot made no sense, the stupid fetch quest to repair the ship made no sense, and it gave us “Are you an angel,” and “Master, what are midichlorians?”
You could sort of defend it if you assume that it was intended to appeal solely to children from ages 3-10, but even that just moves it up to C- grade – there are much better wish fulfillment/wonder movies for kids.
The biggest deal in the whole movie – the idea that the Jedi rescue Anakin but are somehow unable or unwilling to save his mother – is completely glossed over. I couldn’t tell you today whether they don’t save her because (1) they’re forbidden to, (2) they’re just completely unable to, despite all their force powers, or (3) the force is intervening somehow.
Duel of the Fates is in the running for John Williams’ best work. Also podracing is cool, fight me. It’s a big dumb B movie sort of cool, but that’s still cool. Phantom Menace collapses under the weight of expectations, but in some alternate universe where Star Wars never existed, you could release Phantom Menace as a standalone and with the scifi genre being such a ghetto, it would become one of those moderately popular cult classics like The Fifth Element.
John Williams brought his A-game for the whole prequel trilogy. I think he’s the only one involved who did.
+1
Ewan McGregor stands out too – there are long sequences where it looks like he’s the only one taking everything seriously.
The lightsaber duels in the new trilogy were better (unlikelihood of Rey and especially Finn not getting skewered in Force Awakens notwithstanding). They looked more like people trying to kill each other.
The prequel trilogy fights looked cool, but on rewatch were mostly a lot of silly flipping and completely ineffectual stage fencing.
Ok, I retract “no good qualities.” The music was great, and it was awesome to watch Ray Park (Darth Maul) move. His footwork alone is astonishing.
I thought the pod racing felt artificial, like I was watching someone else play a video game.
Pod-racing could have been cut entirely with no negative impact on the plot.
For my money, Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones both have plenty of problems, but Phantom Menace has at least a couple of good things: the pod-race, the fight against Darth Maul, and Qui-Gon Jinn. What parts of Attack of the Clones are actually good?
Yoda actually getting to be a badass?
Yoda’s fight with the Emperor actually kinda reminded me of the old Disney TV show “Gummy Bears.” There’s just no getting past the part where he’s ridiculously short and has to bounce/hop around to hit his opponent. It’s like Reepicheep from Narnia, but played straight.
I actually think it was a mistake to have Yoda fight Count Dooku. Yoda isn’t a warrior. He’s a sage and a mystic. Having him contribute to the war effort made sense, but they should have found some subtler way for him to make a difference.
Yeah, there’s a part in the “making of” features on AotC’s DVDs where Lucas is talking to somebody about how “we’ve never gotten to see Yoda fight,” and I’m thinking “who ever wanted to see Yoda fight…?”
You say it reminded you of Gummi Bears like that’s a bad thing!
Clones was boring. I didn’t give a hoot about anything at all in it. Like the worst of the Jurassic Park movies.
TPM was full of problems but could be enjoyed.
Diss it all you want, but Yoda lighting up his saber actually got the opening night crowd cheering during an otherwise disappointing screening.
In retrospect, yeah, it would be better if Yoda were more of a mage, but it’s hard to do that when you’ve established that the good guys aren’t allowed to shoot lightning bolts.
Yeah, I remember being really excited at that moment as a teenager.
It gave off a “oh shit, things must be really seriously if freaking Yoda is about to throw down” vibe and most of the audience seemed to love it.
Yeah, I think a lot of people wanted to see Yoda throw down and were excited when he did.
Palpatine’s moves were way worse than any of Yoda’s spinning anyway.
In Charlemagne romances (e.g. Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato establishes this in early cantos), Paladins fight giants by making 20-foot high jumps in armor to strike their heads. Do you think it would be inherently ridiculous to adapt this to visual media?
@Le Maistre Chat
Judge for yourself
From what I recall of the Italian Charlemagne romances, they were pretty ridiculous in print. Mind you, I read adaptations by Bulfinch, and it was some time ago, but I recall it as something of a farce, with people bumbling around like A Midsummer Night’s Dream losing memories and finding magical artifacts that make you invincible and stealing each others’ lovers with charms. Kind of funny to read, but I’m at a loss to see why one would take it seriously when the author can’t work out a way to drive the plot without constant extravagant sorcery.
Anyway, yes, visually implausible jumps up into the air to bonk someone on the head are intrinsically funny.
Every proper munchkin knows that a hit point is a hit point and the optimal strategy is to just keep hacking at their shins until they drop dead. Which is also an intrinsically funny image.
@theredsheep:
I mean… yes and no. Some of the Italian epic poets were just being wacky and erudite (Morgante has the title hero die of laughter watching a monkey put boots on, which behavior is a Pliny reference). Ariosto had a goal of being a Capital-A Artist, a poet to compete with Dante, and so structures his poem more to the tropes of epic: which remember, was considered the highest form of literature, given the reverence modern literati give the novel. He was trying to balance the silliness expected with serious themes like religion, violence, the State and the psychology of love.
Maybe you need to get into a GK Chesterton or CS Lewis mindset to grok the expected reception to what elite Renaissance Christians considered deep yet entertaining?
— Lewis, The Allegory of Love
Conan knows how to fight giants: if you cut the legs, they fall down and then you can reach the rest.
I feel it would have worked better if Yoda used the force to control several lightsabers at distance, much like conducting an orchestra. Then stature doesn’t matter and it fits better with him lifting heavy things in the swamp later on.
I liked the secret wedding and the arena fight. (Are those in Attack of the Clones?). The stunt with Anakin and Obi-Wan jumping between flying cars was IMHO cool in a Roger Moore over the top Bond way. Without Neeson in the way, Ewan McGregor really starts to show off, and he’s the best thing in the prequels.
I liked the idea that Palpatine is winning by forcing the Jedi to militarize – that the shift in their stance and outlook is enough for the dark side to take root.
From this specific perspective, both Ewok Adventure movies are surprisingly good.
But we did eventually get the best answer: “It’s heroin.”
Yes, the “midichlorians are opiates” theory tied it all together.
Auralnauts also showed that using Blade Runner music for Star Wars would still have been pretty good, no disrepect to Williams.
The whole series is amazing. Anyone who hasn’t seen it needs to watch those. It’s a pretty great way to spend May the Fourth.
For those who don’t know, the Auralnauts YouTube channel is run by…I guess they’re audio/sound engineers/specialists? They recut Episodes 1-6 and then dubbed new dialogue over the sound. In the new interpretation of the prequels, the Jedi are drugged out party monsters and Mr. Palpatine is just trying to get them to pay their bar tabs and stop wrecking his Space Hooters. If you haven’t seen it, and you sort of like Star Wars, you have to watch this series.
Episodes 1-3 are top-tier comedy gold. It falls off a little after that simply because it’s harder to make fun of genuinely good movies like the original trilogy.
Also, SUPER BOAT.
Damn, this is amazing. Gonna be singing it’s baby time for a long time.
My favorite is still “you promised me fleeeessh!!!”
I never got into the EU stuff, so I can’t really say there. (“I’m super trustworthy”, said Darth Nefarious)
As for the movies.. there’s unfortunately just so much to choose from. I’m not sure anything could ever be more disappointing than The Phantom Menace, but at least it has an original plot. The Force Awakens retreads every single beat from the original movie, but dumber, and then seems to set up the rest of the sequel trilogy for failure. The Last Jedi seems to fulfill said promise of failure while also adding its own original bad parts. I never did see the last one. The other prequel movies after TPM are also bad, but I’m not sure they’re actually worse than TPM as such.
Oof. I’m just going to keep pretending there are only three movies, two of which are great and one of which is still pretty good, and none of them have any CGI other than wire-frame Death Star graphics.
Concur on the last bit. SW was two great movies and one good one. Some of the books and video games were fun. Now it’s dead, and we can move on to other pop culture.
If I tried to be dispassionate and objective, I might rank The Phantom Menace as worse than some of the recent… efforts.
But in terms of what I actually feel deep down inside, it’s The Last Jedi, by a huge margin.
Even if you set the big question of what Johnson decided to do to Star Wars aside, it’s actually mostly terrible – badly paced, without a central plot worthy of the name, uneven in tone, endlessly contrived and (worst of all) boring. There was not one decent action scene in the whole movie.
(The throne room fight might have looked great on storyboards, but the fight choreography in the final product was terrible. The climactic salt planet scene had some nice wide shots but otherwise was just people driving in a straight line, yelling into their radios. And the less said about the whole casino planet interlude, the better.)
As far as bad toys go – I grew up with bootleg Star Wars action figures. I think they were made by making molds of the originals and casting the pieces from hard-ish rubber. The limbs had studs (shaped like a fat arrowhead in cross-section, so that they’d go in, then lock in place) and were just pressed into the torso piece. If the casting wasn’t great, they’d have a tendency to fall out when manipulated, and would have to be replaced.
I just now remembered that line where Finn says “it was worth it” to annoy the rich gamblers by causing a bunny-horse stampede, even if it did mean their mission appeared to be an utter failure. I thought that was kinda funny, that spiting a bunch of rich people he doesn’t really know, and not even causing them much lasting harm, was worth EVERYONE IN THE SHIPS IS GOING TO DIE AND THE FIRST ORDER WILL WIN.
Right up there with the part where Holdo says “you’ve gambled everything and lost,” when, at that moment, they had no reason to believe they wouldn’t succeed. Since the random junkie they were jailed with had all the skills they needed. And also they weren’t gambling much of anything, just taking away two people who were sitting on their asses waiting to die. I guess wasting a bit of fuel, too.
Really, TLJ was just a remarkable ball of cock-up. My pick for worst of the movies, though I haven’t seen RoS. The prequels had bad acting and atrocious dialogue, but I seem to recall characters’ motivations and behaviors making clear and consistent sense. Yes, even the romance; Anakin can’t handle celibacy and Padme apparently has terrible taste in men. It’s depressing and the actors don’t really sell it, but it’s consistent enough.
I love The Last Jedi. Depending on the day you ask me, the third or fourth better Star Wars. Yeah, it has some very dumb problems that I honestly don’t know how they made to the final script, but what’s good in it is among the best in the franchise. It absolutely nails Luke, has two of the coolest lightsaber battle, has the fucking red guards attack when Snoke is killed (while they promptly flew away when the emperor was killed), and implies the war has been in the service of the galactic war profiteering elite.
Honestly I’ve would have gone with that angle for the sequel.
ROS is such an unrelenting movie. The pace is insane and makes me think it could have been two slightly less bad movies. Dunno. It’s a serviceable ending to an unplanned trilogy but it is just so boring. Only better than Attack of the Clones. Probably worse than Revenge of the Sith, which at least had a much more interesting Palpatine.
For movies, I have to go with Attack of the Clones. It has the least believable romance I’ve seen combined with the worst acting. I’ve never cringed harder. Even the action scenes were worse than the two other prequel movies.
With the caveat that I haven’t seen the last two movies:
Absolute worst movie, Attack of the Clones. It’s a close call between that and Revenge of the Sith; at this point I can’t recall which of those prompted my post-viewing comment, “This would have been a pretty good movie if they’d just rewritten every single line of dialogue”. But RotS had scattered bits of coolness around, well, the Sith. AotC had the wretched, unbelievably horrible Annakin/Padme romance, and that takes it straight to the bottom. But at least everyone admits that there was at least something off about it.
Most overrated movie, The Force Awakens. Taken in complete isolation, it’s a mediocre Sci-Fi flick with a bunch of characters I can’t make myself care about. In context, it’s a wholly inferior retread of A New Hope, apparently for people who want an ANH for their generation. And I’m not one of them. The early scenes on not-Tattoine weren’t too bad, though, and having a recognizable Han and Chewie back for one last time was OK. So, mediocre Sci-Fi flick with a few OK bits, but enormous hype about how this was the perfect rebirth of the franchise with an awesome strong female protagonist(tm) and a villain with emotional depth(tm), and just no.
Worst anything outside the movies: The very concept of having Star Wars exist outside the movies. Again, apologies to Mel Brooks, but this is a great way to make money and a pretty good way to make me not care. There was some pretty good work done in the old Expanded Universe, amidst a whole lot of dreck. I assume the same is true of the new extra-cinematic canon. But it all comes with the expectation that I’m supposed to know all of it, and if I don’t then I’m not a True Fan(tm) and I deserve to be confused when something from some odd part of the canon shows up somewhere I am paying attention. Most notably in Solo, where the central action sequence is based on a bit of forty-year-old extra-canonical fanwanking, and the final twist is absolute nonsense unless you’ve watched the (let me check my notes) fourth season of the third animated series. If you insist on doing this stuff, make it a purely optional add-on, because if I get the impression that you’re creating a vast multimedia construct that will lose me if I don’t watch the movies and read the books and tune in for the TV series and all the rest, you’ve already lost me.
The Ewok Adventure (1984) and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (1985) are not on my list of best movies ever.
Has the franchise ever done a good job of showing someone’s turn to the dark side of the Force? I didn’t find Anakin’s path in Revenge of the Sith particularly compelling.
The problem is the whole premise is nonsensical. Yes, one should not give in to hatred, fear or anger or you might become a monster. But that doesn’t make you join the side of the people you hate. If you hate Hitler for killing Jews, you might go crazy and start killing Aryans. You don’t give in to your hatred for Hitler…and then join him and start killing Jews. But in Star Wars we’re supposed to believe if Luke gives in to his hatred for the Emperor for killing his friends he’s going to…join the Emperor and help him kill his friends.
Well, maybe we could think of the dark side as something like a drug. And this drug is performance-enhancing, feels really damn good, is definitely habit forming, and tends to make you kinda crazy. Assuming you’re Force-sensitive, you start out doing it just to get a little edge, you know. Then you find yourself using it more and more. I think that works.
And continuing the drug metaphor, plenty of people go from using drugs, to dealing a little on the side, to becoming full-on drug dealers. Similarly Force users would be in danger of using the dark side a bit and then seeking out Sith teachings on how to do so better and then finding an actual Sith instructor, until ultimately they are Sith themselves.
Of course, that’s a much longer, slower tale of succumbing to greed than Star Wars is looking to tell. But if you’re trying to emphasize the psychological side of it, to show why someone might do such a thing, this is the sort of explanation you really need to provide. And I think you could tell a tale like this within the Star Wars universe.
I mean, I don’t think you even need to work that hard to justify why people who give up control to an omnipotent, evil mind-controlling force might behave differently than real people who were driven insane by hatred.
The Emperor is not asking Luke to join him and kill his friends, from his POV Luke’s friends are all dead and Luke isn’t there to save his father so they can live a happy life together as he thinks that any moment now the rebellion will destroy the DS2 and kill all three of them. Additionally the Emperor has nothing to fear from Luke, he can shoot lightning from his freaking fingers! He crushes Luke with a single gesture.
When Luke cuts off Vader’s hand and then looks at his own hand the realization is ‘they are taking me one piece at a time’. They took his hope by revealing the trap, they took his self control by goading him and threatening his friends and sister, and if he kills Vader they will take away the part of him that loves his father despite the fact that his father is a monster. The Emperor is all about control and the action is purely symbolic- if I can convince you to kill your own father then I can convince you to do anything.
You can’t ignore also that Luke isn’t there to kill the Emperor, when he beats Vader he throws his light saber away. He has a singular goal which is to draw a piece of the light sight out of his father, killing his father himself is a complete admission of failure (again simultaneously he friends are about to be wiped out from E’s POV).
Yes, the symbology is not lost on me. But the Emperor did expect that Luke would kill his father, and then not…get all depressed and eventually fall to the dark side, he expected him to literally take his side at that moment and help him take out whatever was left of the Rebellion. When I said “his friends” I didn’t just mean Han, Leia, Chewie and Lando, I meant the support guys back at base or whatever. Just like Anakin went from “I’m going to help arrest Palpatine” to “I’m going to bow down in front of him, swear allegiance to him and his cause, and then go murder children.”
I always assumed that the Emperor was operating on some “For the greater evil” paradigm, and if Luke killed his father, the Emperor would then call for a pacific resolution and scale down the conflict and concede stuff to the resistance, probably even reopen the senate, as long as Luke became Vader’s replacement. And eventually Luke would be evil and the Emperor can be evil publicly again.
Because yeah, ROTJ doesn’t make a lot of sense if interpreted directly in that regard.
The only good thing that ROS does is make the Emperor’s plan make a little sense, because he is looking for a way to corrupt either Kylo or Rey and take over their bodies, but I am not sure this applied to Luke in ROTJ.
Anakin was believable right up to the point he attacked Windu, and then nothing made sense.
I mean, up until that moment he wanted Palpatine captured. And Palpatine betrays him, tricking him into attacking Windu and then murdering Windu himself. Suddenly Anakin gives up all resistance and goes off to murder children? The angry, impulsive Anakin should have put his saber through Palpatine’s smug face. Maybe he still falls to the Dark Side, but having him become Palpatine’s unquestioning servant in that moment is not believable.
Yeah. Note that if Anakin takes Palpatine’s head off, he’s the only witness to what happened. He can emerge a hero or at least can honestly justify why he wouldn’t let Windu kill the elected leader of the Republic with no trial.
But when Anakin kills the little jedi, there’s a holofilm of the act. Maybe Palpatine’s quarters are bugged in some way too.
Or they can priori incantatem Anakin’s lightsaber and ask the Emperor’s ghost.
Anakin is impulsive, angry, and megalomaniacal, not stupid. Part of why he is on the outs with the Jedi Council is because he hates being manipulated and kept out of the loop – he thinks he’s the greatest and that he deserves recognition for this.
Palpatine sporting his evil grin and Force-yeeting Mace out the window is the moment Anakin would have realized he got played. And Anakin as depicted would have been pissed. Holocams be damned, Anakin would be swinging, not bowing to the guy who just revealed that he’s been doing exactly what Anakin thought the Jedi were doing to him.
Even with a surveillance video, if Anakin kills Palpatine right after Palpatine kills Windu, then Anakin is:
a. A hero who killed yet another Sith lord.
That makes him the current title holder, having killed two Sith to Kenobi’s one.
b. Able to make a completely reasonable justification for his actions.
Mace Windu was violating the rules Anakin had been taught to uphold, and was about to summarily execute the head of the democratic government Anakin was sworn to uphold. Anakin attempting to prevent the summary execution of Palpatine while helping Windu take him into custody was 100% defensible.
c. The guy who ended the war, since without Dooku and Palpatine, the whole operation is probably going to fall apart.
@albatross: That would have been a better film for sure.
I guess this is the problem with writing prequels to another of your stories.
Did anyone other than the Jedi know of the Sith Lords?
I mean the galaxy almost forgets about the Jedi 20 years after they fall, so an occult order of dark Jedi is probably even more forgotten.
So in that case what the public sees is Mace Windu trying to kill a popular Senator, then Anakin helping Palpatine free himself, then Palpatine killing Mace Windu, THEN Anakin killing Palpatine, which is to say, at least somewhat confusing.
People would largely ignore Palpatine shooting lasers from his fingers because the Jedis killed him anyway.
And don’t forget:
d) secretly the current reigning Sith Lord, who now needs to find a Sith apprentice himself
Anakin protects Palpatine from Windu because he thinks Palpatine can save Padme. To me, the part where Anakin really should attack Palpatine is when Palpatine admits he doesn’t actually know how to save Padme.
So here’s my take on what’s going on:
Firstly, and I think this part is basically canon, being able to use the Force comes with a huge drawback: giving in to the wrong emotions turns you into a psycho killer.
We all know that fear and anger are Dark Side emotions, but Vader in the original trilogy never really seems afraid or angry. He tells Luke, calmly, that he just can’t turn back to the Light because the Dark is too strong. I propose that despair is a Dark Side emotion. When Palpatine says that he doesn’t know how to save Padme, Anakin doesn’t look surprised; he kind of already knew. But he’s already cut ties with the Jedi by siding with Palpatine over Windu, so he doesn’t see any way that his life can go other than becoming Sith. Also, Anakin is kind of dumb and always thinks in black and white; Jedi are Light and Sith are Dark, so having fallen to the Dark Side he thinks he has to follow Palpatine.
I think Palpatine can strengthen the Dark Side in other people. It helps him take control of Anakin, and also it’s why Windu suddenly changes his plan from arrest to assassination.
“He can help me save Padme” explains Anakin wanting to protect Palpatine from death. It emphatically doesn’t explain him becoming immediately and unquestioningly subservient to Palpatine after he takes advantage of Anakin’s mercy to kill Mace.
Remember, arresting Palpatine was Anakin’s idea. He has already decided that Palpatine is evil (even though he does still want his forbidden knowledge). He is NOT willing to become Palpatine’s patsy before this point (the offer was clearly already on the table). The only thing that has changed is that Palpatine is even more obviously evil and has shown a willingness to use Anakin.
Potential reads on the force
1:It is basically demonology. The force is Evil, with a capital E, but it can be forced towards constructive ends by practitioners with nearly inhuman levels of self-control. This is why the jedi order only recruits very young pupils, instilling the necessary discipline is more reliable if you start them that young.
2: The easiest person to do the jedi mind trick on in all the galaxy is yourself.
This is why force practitioners are either saints or devils. If you believe you are a good person, the force trivially grants you the willpower to never, ever violate your own code. If you do evil, the force grants you the ability to squash all feelings of guilt or remorse. This is how people can go from one extreme to another so very quickly – their initial personality is essentially a force construct, and once they have “given into the dark side” and cant persuade themselves it is who they are anymore, the usual response to the guilt of whatever the precipitating event that shattered their self conception was is to simply turn their conscience off entirely.
Grey jedi and the rest that do not fall into this duality are simply force users who are aware of this problem and go to extraordinary lengths to not mind-fuck themselves.
Not really. Can you name a single canon Jedi that never violates their code?
Number 1 is a pretty interesting take. It makes so much sense I wonder why I haven’t seen it before.
But with Number 2, how can Anakin fall to the Dark Side? He thinks of himself as a good person, so he should only do things he thinks are right. Which he doesn’t; he knows that murdering the sand people is wrong, and that murdering Count Dooku is wrong (Dooku is essentially a POW at the moment of his death).
I propose a Number 3: the Force grants a type of power that no one has in real life, and it tends to screw with people’s heads. Real life power requires some degree of cooperation with other people. Even gangsters demanding what they want at gunpoint need the cooperation of the rest of the gang. But if you’re strong enough in the Force you can strut around and demand whatever you want without anybody backing you up. The Dark Side is simply the temptation to use your power without regarding other people as people. Palpatine only bothers with all of his scheming because he has to worry about Jedi showing up and stopping him. Once they’re gone he’s untouchable and he can go full evil.
One consistent until the sequels message about the Force was that the dark side was a way to get quick results. Basically, by focusing on your anger and fear, you can quickly get powerful enough to fight a much more skilled user of the Force.
The implication in the final showdown between Luke and Vader was that Luke was seriously overmatched (he’d had no additional training, note) until he got so upset/outraged/scared by the threat to Leia that he used his rage to defeat Vader. That’s also why he had to toss aside his lightsaber–it was how he could avoid tapping into the dark side.
I’m guessing the Force amplifies and maybe burns in those emotions, so a person who uses fear to more easily reach his Force power is canalized more and more toward fear, and a person who uses hatred or rage is canalized more and more toward hatred or rage. That fits with the idea that using those is a quick path to power, but also that once you start down that path, it’s increasingly hard to come back.
Vader comes off as mostly not being driven by hatred or fear in episodes 4-6, maybe more contempt and pride. Perhaps those are less dangerous emotions, and made his final heel-face turn possible. In particular, he *couldn’t* feel rage at his son, and didn’t feel fear of his son at least until his son whooped up on him. Several times during both showdowns, Vader was clearly proud of his son. (“Impressive. Most impressive. Obi-wan has taught you well.”)
@albatross11
I thought it was pretty heavily implied that he did train in between Empire and RotJ, likely with the assistance of Ghost-Kenobi and/or Ghost-Yoda. Not that he wasn’t still seriously overmatched, but I just had to quibble there.
The latest Clone Wars season has made a strong case for showing why Anakin fell.
Is there a new season?
Ah, it’s on Disney+. One of these days, I’m really going to have to start my plan of cycling my streaming membership among Netflix/Hulu/DC/Disney/etc. like a nomadic hunter/gatherer.
The Disney/Hulu bundle (it also includes ESPN+, but that service is almost completely useless even for most sports fans so we’ll ignore it) is a pretty good deal. I’ve found Hulu to have much better offerings than Netflix (especially in terms of TV shows).
Thanks – right now we have Youtube TV and Netflix, but there are a couple things I want to watch on DC/Disney/Hulu
HBO. I’ll probably propose to my family that we switch the secondary service every quarter or so.
I think the Legacy of the Force EU novel series did a decent job showing the descent of Jacen Solo into the dark side. You can sort of see how each step makes sense, and the way that Jacen’s (twisted) adherence to his principles take him from one of the greatest heroes of the good guys into the biggest villain since Palpatine.
The trouble is, though, the EU throughout the New Jedi Order/LotF/Fate of the Jedi era of publishing (so basically 2000 – 2012) was at war with itself. The authors couldn’t agree on what the Jedi philosophy was, or what it meant, and so repeatedly the grand philosophical struggle amongst the new Jedi would be resolved, only for the next author to seize the reins and Well, Actually…take things in an entirely new direction. Jacen, as more or less the central protagonist of that philosphical debate, comes across with an incoherent mess of ethics that kind of undercuts the whole premise.
Vergere is, though, I think the best Sith ever written. She’s worth it.
Wait… are you implying that Episodes 7-8 were a retread of the latter parts of the Legacy of the Force EU novels, skipping everything before Han and Leia’s Jedi son is a villain?
(Episode 9 was a mash-up of the Disney Trilogy’s existing characters with the plot of the Dark Empire comic, where somehow, Palpatine returned in a clone body. He has a Sith clone of Luke named Luuke Skywalker.)
“Vergere was a sith the whole time” was itself one of those “at war with itself” retcons by subsequent authors, after the creation of the character and the entire philosophy-heavy work of Matt Stover’s “Traitor”.
EDIT: @LMC Hmmm, I think the only thing they have in common is “Han and Leia’s Jedi Son is the Villain”, really. Jacen in the books and Ben in the Movies are -very- different characters with very different motivations, and their contexts are completely different (with Legacy of the Force also having some on-the-nose and heavy-handed 9/11/GWOT allegory thrown in).
Spoiler alert! :p
film: Rise of Skywalker
TV series: don’t know
novel: I’ve read 0. Heard the old Thrawn trilogy is good.
action figure: Willrow Hood, an extra from Empire who’s on screen for literally one second, fleeing Cloud City with an ice cream maker.
character: Oh man, this one’s tough… Jar-Jar? Rey? Snoke?
line: closes eyes in despair “Just say it, Oscar… Oscars are a lost hope now, but you’ll always have a Golden Globe for Inside Llewyn Davis.”
The Empire Strikes Back, because it’s the most boringest one.
I have a bit of a cautionary tale for people who are putting a lot of faith in the “test and trace” path to normalization.
I work for a GiantCorp, but I’m not a manager or a supervisor or anything like that, and they don’t pay me to say nice things about them (they might stop paying me if I said negative things in which case I’d follow my mother’s advice and stay silent). Anyway, I do have good things to say about them. The company really has done a lot right for dealing with the virus. They have everyone who can telecommute doing that, they are continuing to pay anyone with the virus to stay at home and not counting it against regular sick time, all that stuff. This company is really on top of things, the day that all the news reported that the CDC was rumored to be changing the recommendation from no masks to yes masks, they gave everyone on site a cloth mask. Not an N95, just a regular one, but still, they were far enough ahead to get them ordered and delivered before the policy changed.
The part I work at is a massive construction project that is considered critical infrastructure so we are still working. This project alone is the largest single employer in the state, and they have a lot of money in getting it finished. They set up a medical village in the parking lot with 10 trailers staffed 24/7 and are offering free urgent care type stuff for everyone who works on site, contractors included. They can test for flu and strep here, but still have to send off the covid tests, but they pay a company to do them so they get a one or two day result. Anyone suspected of having the virus is paid to sit at home until they get a negative result along with anyone who was in close proximity to them. It started getting about 10 people quarantined for every positive case, but that’s gotten a little better so it’s down to averaging five extra quarantined for each positive. Basically, test and track that is being talked about, and yes, they are also testing the close proximity people too.
Still, with everything they’ve done, we are still getting quite a few people infected with Covid. We went from one to 50 in two weeks, and it’s still been rising, but a little slower, two more weeks and we now have almost 200 total, although 100 of those are “recovered and allowed to come back to work “.
True, we don’t have any fancy cell phone app, but most of the workers don’t carry a cell phone around with them in the construction area, not a safe place for very expensive pocket computers.
One thing that should have been obvious, but I didn’t think about it was that even a relatively low number of people with the virus really has a major impact on getting anything done. I initially thought that having one percent of the work force quarantined for having or being near someone with the virus would cause a one percent slow down. Nope, turns out that the people who are generally in close spaces are the people that work with them, so when an Iron Worker gets the virus, you quarantine most of the other Iron Workers and now you can’t get the rebar in and can’t pour concrete for at least two weeks. If you have a Pipefitter get it, you lose a bunch of Pipefitters and that work needed to be done before you install the HVAC underneath the pipes in the overhead. Progress has really slowed down.
This is just my experience, but if you are under the impression that “test and trace ” will allow everything to get back to normal, you might want to consider making a contingency plan.
You’re describing “test and trace” in the context of a workplace. In the context of a family or school or social circle, there is not the dependence you describe.
Since your workplace is doing “test and trace” but not the rest of society, you are going to keep having infections from outside, indefinitely. But if all of society did “test and trace”, that wouldn’t be a problem.
Until this week everyone was social distancing so I’m not really sure how much people are getting infected from outside. I think a lot of the non-essential business that open back up we have similar problems and not all of them are going to be as competent as my employer.
I don’t know how many other businesses are trying to test and trace, I don’t think the restaurants that are open for drive thru or takeout are testing their employees, and if they did then I’m not sure they would be open. I would guess that if a cook gets the virus they would have to quarantine most of the cooks and shut down for two weeks, ect.
Right now I think that the few places that are open are operating with an attitude that ignorance is bliss and get away with it because they employ mostly young people.
I’m thinking that a society wide test and trace will look very similar to the current situation with a lot of places shut down rather than a return to something similar to the pre-virus days. Possibly worse, I guess the meat processing plants are going to keep working, but the non-essential places are going to have to worry about their own employees AND the supply chain inputs to their business. If the textile plant shuts down, is the designer clothing store going to stay open? Bad example I’m sure, but that’s not my area of expertise. I’m not really familiar with how much inventory is stored and how long the retail face of things can stay open if the supplier is shut down for two weeks every other month.
Not everyone is actually social distancing – we know that because the number of cases is not actually dropping 🙁
(Unlike in almost every European country, where the number of cases has been dropping for weeks, starting 10-14 days after the lockdown started. In some the drop is really fast like Austria, in some it’s slower like Italy.)
I have seen some interesting evidence suggesting that different countries with different degrees of lockdown, quarantine, social distancing, etc., still have remarkably similar patterns in progression of coronavirus cases.
I’d also suggest that the flatness of the U.S. curve is due to the fact that the U.S. should not be treated as a single entity when compared to, for example, Italy. The U.S. is much more like a collection of individual outbreaks, each with it’s own curve. Adding those curves up leaves U.S. with a flat line currently, because some are increasing and some are decreasing.
In retrospect from case numbers, the social distancing in Germany, had already reduced R before the lockdowns began. Conveniently ignored by lockdown opponents.
@noyann – Can you elaborate?
Wouldn’t the position of lockdown opponents be: “social distancing is working, see that R is being reduced, why do we need lockdowns?”
Maybe so. Though all the non-essential business have been shut down throughout this period. I’m just giving my example of a place trying to make the test and trace system work and the number of cases isn’t dropping and it’s causing major problems. None of the excuses apply here, there are enough tests for anyone who feels ill, and quite a bit of incentive to get tested, every close contact is quarantined and tested, we all have masks (though not 100% usage since some jobs aren’t compatible with masks). If you’re counting on test and trace to get everything open again, you may be right, but you may be wrong too. Just start thinking about what happens if test and trace doesn’t work well enough. What’s the next move?
The numbers in NYC – cases, hospitalizations and deaths – have dropped massively.
On the other hand, NY state as a whole is lagging behind the city, but the numbers are also IIRC declining.
I think that as mitv150 suggests, the overall shape of the curve has to do with individual cities and states peaking at different times.
Also, the rate of testing has gone up significantly over the past month. (although it’s still not high enough, and may be plateauing or dropping again)
EDIT: minor stuff
@mitv150
“social distancing is working, see that R is being reduced, why do we need lockdowns?”
The voluntary distancing was not enough. Its effects were fading (the R curve cited below was flattening), and fear of an exponential growth getting out of control because people would become reckless was not unsubstantiated.
The registered cases are here (1st graph, log scale) and the estimations for R of that time here (1st graph). Later Rs are here (scroll down to graph “Coronavirus Ansteckungsrate”).
The “Limitation of social contacts”[*] was issued on March 22, later extended until May 3.
April 10: Quarantaine for returning travellers. April 15: “Urgent recommendation” for community masks”.
Before the “Limitation…”, the infections had already spread and had become more homogenously distributed (absolute cases/calendar week in the federal countries) — voluntary distancing was not enough.
Germany currently hovers a little under R=1, but before concluding that this looks all nice and harmless, please keep in mind that, should R go up to 1.2, Germany’s hospitals will be overwhelmed some time in June, despite efforts to ramp up ICU capacity. Getting there from ~0.8 (last week) is dangerously easy as we see more threadbare nerves and hear/read more opportunistic emotion wave surfers. OTOH, shops are allowed to open today in an attempt to salvage of the economy as much as possible and reach a feeling of ‘normality’.
[*] The word ‘lockdown’ for Germany is out of proportion for this (not available in English?); I would reserve such an expression for Wuhan style measures.
When bernie describes a pretty good test-and-trace system, and how it doesn’t work, it doesn’t seem useful to say “well, yes, but that wasn’t real test-and-trace. When we actually do it right, it will work.”
And I am a big proponent of test-and-trace! When faced with an issue, we have to figure out the problem, not insist there isn’t a problem.
If R dropped a great deal without the lockdown because people were avoiding public places like restaurants, bars, and theaters, then it’s quite possible that the lockdowns were unnecessary, but it’s also clear that ending the lockdowns won’t breathe life back into those restaurants and bars and such. I’m not sure how many restaurants can survive indefinitely on, say, 25-50% of their normal custom, but quite a lot of them probably can’t.
^ And if restaurant owners are allowed to open but get minimal customers, then they won’t even get unemployment benefits. Making the economic situation for them worse rather than better.
mitv150, a quick glance at your article shows it to be horribly bad research, not worth the paper it could be printed on. I mean they couldn’t even think to use a logarithmic scale for their exponential growth graphs. And their percentage graph is about the worst way of presenting the information, and is also misinterpreted. If I were a college professor and my student wrote this paper for me, I’d maybe give it a C.
@albatross11
If R dropped a great deal without the lockdown [ … ] , then it’s quite possible that the lockdowns were unnecessary
If you look only at the numbers, maybe. In favor of your opinion: Robert-Koch-Institute estimated that R would even decrease further, but for the beginning outbreaks in nursing and retirement homes that bent the R curve toward horizontal (and would/will get worse, imo).
But then there are considerations outside epidemiological numbers. After the initial alarm reaction and a basic orientation people will get used to the new normal, they adapt, become lazy and sloppy, explore available openings, get stressed, and ignore caution. That the real R can’t be reasonably certain until at least a week later means a lack of immediate feedback that further degrades discipline. So does a danger that is invisible and that many expect to cause a merely minor illness.
And so does the difficulty to comprehend exponential growth, for most of the population. A runaway EG would be a catastrophe, for public health and/or the economy, that could only be fought with a Wuhan style lockdown. Try that on a whole Western liberal country, with a population that already chafes under “social distancing”… Not going to work.
No, looking beyond the numbers and taking into account the severity of a failure, I think not taking any chances has been the most reasonable decision.
All the above applies to a situation of high uncertainty, in which inevitable errors were/are being/will be made, but so far I see them in the details, not in the strategy.
That can go either way. Getting used to the new normal may mean finding ways of functioning better within it, so having less reason to violate it.
To take a minor real world example, one consequence of social distancing was that I couldn’t do my South Bay meetups. So I went looking for an online equivalent and discovered Mozilla Hubs, which is a pretty good online tool for the sort of casual socializing (as opposed to the one to many interaction Zoom is designed for) that we do at meetups. A pattern is beginning to develop, because of someone else’s organizing, of online SSC meetups on Hubs, which have the advantage of eliminating the geographical constraints of a real world meetup. They may end up as a superior substitute, and are clearly a good enough substitute to reduce my desire to be able to again do meetups in realspace.
@DavidFriedman
Fair point.
We’ll have to wait and see how it plays out. The current policy allows local and country authorities to adjust rules as they see fit; that should give a better overall outcome than one-size-fits-only-a-few strategies. Foreseeably, a few cries for ‘justice’ will flare up, and the (few, I expect) grossly misguided decision makers will see the results right in their electorate.
The tightrope dance becomes fractal.
OBTW, this is in a very rural area in the south where it’s nice and warm so we really have a lot of advantages. If anywhere could make this work it should be here.
I didn’t really comprehend how specialized everyone has become. People aren’t interchangeable anymore. We have I&C techs who get additional training on specific pieces of equipment and it’s a very small group. If they get quarantined then no one is prepared to take their place as an example. Rumor today is that we just quarantined almost all of our REDACTED group which is going to throw the schedule for the next two weeks in the round file.
For you youngins, imagine if your college implements this system. You have one person in your class who gets this virus and ten people in the class who sit near them or studied near them are quarantined for two weeks. Remember, most of the quarantined people DON’T get the virus at that time. Everyone comes back, and a week or two later someone else in that group gets the virus and everyone in that group is quarantined again, rinse and repeat. Do you bother even trying to teach the class?
Long long ago when I was young, I worked at the beloved Toys R Us stocking shelves for the holidays. Even that was somewhat specialized, I had no idea how to work the cash register and those people didn’t know anything about the inventory storage arrangement. It wouldn’t take a long time to train a replacement, but it wouldn’t be a same day seamless turnover either.
Never forget that humans are going to act like humans. They get forgetful and sloppy even with a lot of reminders about maintaining distance and having good intentions, they tend to cluster. You can’t hand wave that away and assume everyone stays six feet apart and have a successful plan.
That reminds me, If I understand it correctly, the six foot directive is because gravity still works on the virus infused moisture that a person exhales. Within six feet it all falls to the ground unless they are yelling or sneezing or something. HOWEVER, that assumes that you are on the same elevation and stationary. Is there a safe distance from someone exhaling virus above you? I’m picturing a cone shaped infection area, at some point it’s diluted enough to be safe, but is six feet horizontally under someone 10 feet above you, say a balcony one up and one over safe? I also saw someone post a picture of their local walking track where the local government had put up a poster directing people to stay single file at six foot increments. The internet was so people could maintain that six foot separation while passing in the opposite direction. Seems to me like a bad idea, after all, jogging six feet behind means you are in the airspace of the person ahead of you before the virus falls to the ground. People like simple rules like six feet, but don’t really understand why and when that should be adjusted.
Yeah, today I have to do an inspection at a dam, and I can tell already the social distancing requirements will make it a phenomenal pain in the ass.
A really efficient way to inspect, say, a gate for a regulating outlet is for two or three people to work together, where one person is doing the actual inspection, one person holding the light, and taking notes (sometimes it’s very wet with water spray and being right up on the gate while trying to write can be difficult). Then when you finish with one part, the other guy helps you move the ladder. You bang it out.
Now, the tunnel you’re in is only about 6′ wide, so it’s basically impossible to socially distance while having assistance, so I have to do the whole thing myself. This is on top of the fact that while I was doing this, the hydraulic engineer would be doing his own inspection of both the gate lip and the other parts of the conduit. Now, not only do I have to do my part myself, all the disciplines have to do their inspections sequentially. What normally would have been a one-day inspection is expected to take two or two and a half days.
Yuck. Don’t lose track of all the regular safety precautions either, confined space, air monitoring, LOTO, and buddy system. Stay both healthy and safe.
+1. This is part of the difference between social distancing as a practical safety measure, and social distancing as a civic religion. As a practical safety measure, you look at the possibility of death due to being within 6′ of someone who might be an asymptomatic COVID-19 carrier for a bit, and the possibility of death due to working effectively alone on a ladder in a dark, wet place, and maybe have your colleagues hold the ladder and the flashlight already. As a civic religion, social distancing is a Commandment and breaking your neck is an outside-context problem.
Basically eveything that becomes a civic religion or moral imperitive stops being something you can reason about. So “wear a mask, keep 6 feet apart, wash your hands regularly” are all good general rules to limit spread, which don’t work everywhere and should be applied along with some common sense. But that’s not either compliance culture or moral imperative or civic religion culture.
That sounds like an “essential service” for which you shouldn’t socially distance if it affects the job quality.
@bernie638
Yeah, we had all of that, radio contact with the confined space attendant, an air monitor, the works. Fall protection, too, since access is through a hatch in the roof, and it’s a 20-foot drop if you slip off the extension ladder they have put in there for access. Well, if you manage to slip off when finagling yourself through the 24″ hatch–whoever picked that dimension is my new archnemesis (curse you, W.E.D.!). I’ve been in other regulating outlet tunnels, and they never felt the need to make them so tight to get in or out–I had to do a dip to get my foot on the last rung coming up, because I couldn’t bring my foot up without my knee hitting the side of the hatch.
And no worry about the lockout-tagout. The process approaches psychotic here. “We set the bulkhead to dewater the RO last night. Here’s our lockout points: we’ve locked out the pump for the gates you’ll be crawling under, as well as blocked them up.”
“Cool. I’m severely allergic to being crushed by huge hydraulic machinery”
“We’ve also tagged out the balancing valve for reflooding the conduit.”
“Uh, OK, when we were chit-chatting before starting you told me that it was severely undersized, so it takes like three hours to fill the space, and that can only be done after closing the gates that you have tagged out, but better safe than sorry I guess.”
“We also put a tag on the lifting cable for the bulkhead.”
“That bulkhead can only be lifted under balanced head, which would require flooding the space through the severely-undersized balancing valve after closing the gates, so I’d be dead for like an hour before the crane could possibly budge that bulkhead, but sure, why the fuck not.”
I didn’t say any of that, of course, but yeah, there are a lot of man-hours spent running around hanging and removing tags that probably don’t actually improve safety much, but those all technically control sources of dangerous energy.
@eric23
It’s not so much that it affects the quality, it just makes it take a lot longer and is therefore more expensive. It’s also not so much for me, or the other inspectors who came from the office out to the dam site. It’s meshing with the COVID-19 protections for the Project operating staff. I, or any of the other inspecting engineers, could be replaced and our work delayed/shifted to other personnel, etc. We’re there to provide oversight and general technical expertise, but nothing that couldn’t be replaced by somebody else, or even hiring an Architect/Engineering firm if push came to shove.
The people who operate the dam are another matter. You have the maintenance staff and the powerplant operators, and there have to be asses in those seats 24/7/365. They also have to be familiar with that Project and it’s machinery and behavior in detail. There was a huge crack in Wanapum Dam on the Columbia River back in 2014 as their spillway tried to do a backflip into the tailrace. That wasn’t found by an engineer. It was found by a (IIRC) mechanic who was walking by and said “Huh, I don’t remember this handrail being bent.”
If you get a bunch of these operators laid out by the ‘Rona, that’s a real problem, because you can’t swap out their very particularized knowledge the way you can my general knowledge of engineering. Dams don’t take being left to their own devices well–they have to be actively managed. So while the risk might be very small to me over a period of one day, being careless means a lot more to the guys who *don’t* normally sit at home in front of a computer working through the VPN.
As it happens, though, we did decide after today that there wasn’t much incremental risk given the masks, gloves, and sanitization procedures, so we’re going to have two people doing the inspection for more efficiency tomorrow.
Thank you for posting a specific case from your work. I’d like to hear more such interesting stories from commenters in various different jobs.
Who are these people, anyway? Amish, Mennonites, Amish-Mennonites, and etc–an not-quite-effortpost.
Vocabulary first:
Anabaptist is a broad religious group, of which the Amish are one component. “Anabaptist” (re-baptizer) is a name that Reformation-era state churches used to describe their adult-baptizing opponents, and at the time included multitudes—including, for example, Jan van Leyden (look him up–one of the craziest figures in a crazy era). In today’s religious landscape, that original description would include Baptists, Seventh-Day Adventists, and most charismatic churches, as well as Amish and Mennonites. But today, Anabaptist is almost always used to refer to the subset of adult-baptizing churches that believe in non-resistance (refusing to use deadly force even when attached) and a strong avoidance of involvement with the state, summed up in the Schleitheim Confession. I will use it in that sense in the rest of this post.
The Schleitheim Confession is short—I strongly recommend reading it. But at least,note this key line from the 4th article:
“This is the way it is: Since all who do not walk in the obedience of faith, and have not united themselves with God so that they wish to do His will, are a great abomination before God, it is not possible for anything to grow or issue from them except abominable things.”
That understanding of the world is pervasive and fundamental to Anabaptist worldviews–it’s very different from the “He shines in all that’s fair” of more typical Christian understandings.
Within the Anabaptist world, there are two overlapping sets of categories.
The first set are group names based on history and geography—there are 4 major groups:
The Amish—named for the leader Jacob Amman, from what’s now the Rhineland in Germany. Strict shunning (the “Streng Meidung”) is distinctively Amish. The Amish generally wear beards without mustaches, and don’t wear clothes with patterns.
The (Dutch/Swiss) Mennonites—named for Menno Simons, from the Netherlands (including what’s now Belgium and some parts of north-west Germany) and Switzerland. If you meet Mennonites in the US, east of the Mississippi, they are likely to be from this group. Mennonites are generally clean-shaven, and permit patterned clothes.
The “Russian” Mennonites—from the same Netherlands area as the Dutch Mennonites. They fled to the Vistula Delta (present-day Gdansk in Poland) in the late 1500’s, and fled from there to the Crimea in the late 1700’s. They fled Russia in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, mostly to the US and Canada. In the anti-German mood after the First World War, Canada forbade schooling in German, and a large group (40,000 or so) moved to Mexico. If you meet Mennonites in the US West of the Mississippi, or in Mexico or Canada, they are likely from this group.
The Hutterites – named for Jakob Hutter- are the fourth group. They are originally from Moravia, and unlike the rest of the Anabaptist groups are communal—the group, rather than individuals, owns property.
Since all these groups except Hutterites have the same fundamental set of beliefs, there are many, many groups that have a mixture of practices most typically associated with a group with a different name, and many churches that are described as “Amish-Mennonite”. For example, I grew up in a church that was called Mennonite, but only wore solid-colored clothes and practiced strict shunning. (I left 20+ years ago and am now Catholic, but my parents and several siblings are still Plain.)
The second set of categories has to do with governance and level of assimilation. Some Anabaptists groups have a church rule (“standard” in English, “Ordnung” in German). It will typically include rules for clothes, accessories (whether and which wristwatches are permitted is a perennial hot topic), acceptable occupations, and so on. Groups with a standard are “Plain”; think of “Plain” as the opposite of “assimilated” and you’ll be approximately correct. Sociologically, Plain/not-Plain is a much more important distinction than Mennonite/Amish. Some Plain churches are “Old Order” (probably the single most misunderstood and misused name; Old Order is a set of beliefs about salvation, and doesn’t really say anything about level of conservatism in clothing.) (Very roughly, Old Order groups have a view of salvation that is similar to that of Catholics, based on sacraments and being part of the church; New Order group have an understanding that is closer to that of Baptists, based more on experience and focusing on the New Birth.)
Useful resources:
Levi’s Will is a great book about a man who leaves the Amish, with snapshots over the years as he visits them. The main character is roughly based on the author’s father.
Most Plain groups use the Dordrecht Confession as their official statement of belief.
A fairly typical Amish-Mennonite standard is here. Other things on the same site are also interesting.
The Martyr’s Mirror is a book about martyrs; the “Old Book” is a collection of trial transcripts and letters from prisoners. It’s read and studied a lot. I recommend the interrogation transcript from Jacob the Chandler.
Governance in the Plain world:
There are three key topics
1) Who is in charge of what?
2) What are the typical rules, and how do they change
3) How does decision-making work
The Plain world is centrally congregational, and congregational leadership is almost always plural: a congregation (“church”) typically has a bishop and at least one deacon, and often has a “minister” or two as well. The group of ordained men is the “ministry”, and all ordained men are referred to as “ministers” if their exact role is not important in contact. The ministry are not paid, and not specially trained.
Because governance is mostly congregational, details vary a lot. The rest of this is models I’m familiar with, and to the extent I know about others that are importantly different I’ve noted this.
Churches will be grouped, and there are three basic sorts of groups. “Conferences” have substantial decision-making power; a change in practice will be made at the conference level, and churches do not get to opt in or out unless they choose to leave the conference altogether. Looser-but-still tight affiliations (often called “fellowships”) will have a specific set of rules that are required for participating churches, and ministers from all the churches will meet regularly to discuss issues and make any modifications to the required rules. The loosest affiliations have ministers meetings, but no decisions are made there—the decisions are entirely congregational and there are no firm boundaries on affiliation.
In general, changing the rules takes substantial agreement; keeping them the same is the default. In the churches I grew up in, all the ministry had to agree with a change before it could be brought up for a vote; a 2/3 vote was required to actually make a change. The difficulty of changing rules encourages splinter groups—a new group starts from a blank slate, and so substantial changes are easier to make when a group is new. A typical set of topics and positions from a middle-or-the-road conservative Amish-Mennonite church is linked above.
Who gets to decide what is a hot topic—the churches I grew up in were blown up when I was a pre-schooler in a quarrel over exactly what things took a vote, and people were still very clear on their positions 20 years later when I left. But the common picture of the bishop as dictator is fairly inaccurate; in most churches, the bishop can at most enforce things that have already been decided (and may need something close to consensus even to do that—that’s a topic that varies between churches.)
How does the whole “no technology” deal fit into this?
Mostly accidentally.
The church gets to make rules, and in general something new has to be allowed to be permitted under those rules. And being more connected to the world is seen as a bad thing unless absolutely necessary. So there’s a default to not changing, and a skepticism of connective technologies–when you look at what’s restricted, it’s transportation and communication primarily.
I’m glad to answer questions, but I’m starting a new job today, so answers may be delayed.
Were the Plain in the United States fully exempt from the draft? I have to believe this caused some sort of tensions, since the government was really panting for labor in the later stages of WWII, sometimes going so far as drafting illiterates and encouraging some disabled men to serve.
Very quick answer: in WW2, yes–there was alternative service for committed conscientious objectors. (About a third of participants in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment were Plain.) In WW1, there was not–and the Plain world still remembers the Hofer brothers as martyrs.
I appreciate SamChevre’s historical post. Again, my church is not plain, but there are a few things I can address. Yes, there was resentment against Mennonites during WW2. Many men worked in hospital settings, as orderlies, janitors, or maintenance workers. They weren’t just let off the hook. Some of the work they undertook was very unpleasant, but they weren’t looking to avoid unpleasantness, they just didn’t want to kill others.
The Amish observed that young men who were sent to empty bedpans in urban hospitals, rooming with non-Amish, dating nurses, quite often did not stay Amish when it was over. They eventually got the IRS to agree that their conscientious objectors could do their war service growing food on farms run by Mennonites.
One minor detail. There were two Amish migrations to the U.S., one of German speakers and a later one, in the 19th century, of speakers of a Swiss-German dialect. The former group now use Pennsylvania Dutch, a German dialect that originated in America, as their home language, the others use a Swiss-German dialect.
Theology is not a huge concern–the focus is more on doing God’s will than on making a coherent framework for thinking about God. I’d say the average 12-year-old could explain how their faith is different, but the explanation would be about separation and non-resistance, not about sacramental economy or natural law. The religious education is very Bible-focused; this differs a lot between groups though. I grew up reading and studying the Bible, memorizing a verse or so a day throughout school, and listening to the adults discuss it at church for an hour or so a week. But in some communities, especially the more traditional ones, the Bible is in German–Luther’s German–and people speak Pennsylvania Dutch or Plautdietsch (Russian Mennonites) or Hutterisch and find it very difficult to read and make sense of the Bible. That’s too far from my experience for me to say how education works there.
For Amish and Mennonites excluding the Russian Mennonites, there’s a central body of texts; I’m not sure about Russian Mennonites and Hutterites. Centrally, these are the confessions of faith and martyr stories – especially the Dordrecht Confession and the Martyr’s Mirror. Newer texts sort of become broadly accepted over time–but since they’re often written deliberately to take sides in some quarrel, that happens very slowly and is rarely universal.
Anabaptists are sometimes Arminian, sometimes Catholic–but never Reformed–it’s all about choosing to obey God and be part of his people. Predestination is understood as foreknowledge rather than constraint, falling away is considered a real possibliity.
I don’t think that there’s ever been an Anabaptist society–the worldview is so focused on being an odd minority that I think that would be seen as a nonsensical idea. The closest would be the Russian Mennonite community in Mexico–but even there, they weren’t a government. The complete refusal to use force really makes it impossible for them to survive without a government of which they are not part.
Debates about matters of practice tend to be a mixture of practical (we can’t keep being dairy farmers without bulk tanks) and political. Very often, a debate over what should be allowed is proxying a debate over what kinds of lives are best–for example, in the churches I grew up in, there was one group that was more restrictive of farm equipment, and one that was more restrictive of crew sizes for construction. This reflected a differing judgment about whether farming was ideal or tended to tie people down too much.
This is fascinating. What is the education for bishops and ministers? I remember taking an Amish tour and being told their education only went up to 8th grade. Is this true? If so, what sort of advanced education do the bishops and ministers get, and where and how does it take place?
For the Amish, there is no special education, and they are selected by God.
Someone is nominated for the clergy by members of the congregation — I think it’s common to require two people to nominate him. From among those nominated, the choice is random, by lot. It’s a lifetime, unpaid appointment.
I believe that is true for all three levels, including the Bishop.
On education and selection of leaders, I’ll speak for the group I know; the process is similar, but not identical, in other groups. It’s a selection process, not an educational one.
First note, though: self-education is normal across domains in the Plain world. An eighth-grade education is enough to read and do most practical math, and with those tools you can learn nearly anything. Plain people with 8th-grade educations regularly get electrician’s licenses, build and run multi-million dollar businesses, and so on.
Being a participating church member serves partly as training for ordained ministry: all the men take turns leading discussions at Bible study, preaching short sermons (“devotions”) at events like singings, and so on. By the time someone would be considered for ordination, everyone would have a good sense for how they think about religious topics, how clearly and helpfully they explain them, and so on. Criteria for ordination also include running your own life well across domains–a happy marriage, well-behaved children, good judgment in work and business, etc.
The process is multi-stage:
Before starting, decide that an ordination would be a good idea for the community. This generally means that things are relatively peaceful, there are several plausible candidates for ordination, and it would be helpful to have more ordained men.
Then, to start, review the criteria–preach through the Timothy and Titus passages. This is usually done by a visiting bishop (it takes two bishops to ordain a minister, three to ordain a bishop). Deacons and ministers are chosen from the congregation, bishops from the ministers and deacons.
Then, take nominations; it always takes at least 2 nominations for someone to be a candidate. This is done orally, one at a time, to the ministry as a group. ETA: each person gets one nomination, and can decline to nominate anyone. (Things that differ: do women nominate or not? Do the ordained men have the ability to make nominations? Is the number increased above 2–if so, it’s announced beforehand, and is often around 20% of the number of nominations available? Do the ordained men have to announce as candidates everyone who is sufficiently nominated, or can they veto nominations.) After all the nominations have been made, the candidates are announced publicly.
Next the candidates are examined privately, by the ministry–that’s mostly in my understanding about alignment with the church, any issues in the marriage that might not be apparent, and so forth. Someone can disqualify themselves, or be determined to not be qualified by the ministry.
Next there’s a meeting just of voting members excepting candidates, in which each remaining candidate is voted on. This is an approval vote, not a preference vote. The threshold varies–it can be as low as 2/3 approval, but it’s desirable and typical for the vote to be near-unanimous.
If there are still multiple candidates, the choice among the candidates is made by lot–typically, a slip of paper with the lot verse (Proverbs 16:33) is put in one of a stack of identical Bibles or hymnals outside the building by one person, another person retrieves the books, and a third person arranges them. Each candidate picks up a book, and whoever gets the one with the paper is chosen.
One thing I’d note: the original conflict was mostly doctrinal, but the doctrinal questions were very practical–how should church and state relate, what should membership in the church mean, and should Christians use force in any way.
But the ideology is not the movement. And also, that completely unacceptable theology tended to mean that Anabaptist groups were located in peripheries, and that had a substantial impact as well.
The Russian Mennonite communities in Belize might come closer. I gather these have handled taxation and road construction internally.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mennonites_in_Belize
Law enforcement is the show-stopper. To be consistent with their faith, they’d have to hire that out to non-members. And, if the non-members convert to the Anabaptist community, they’d have to leave their law enforcement jobs. A revolving door of sorts could be required.
Anabaptists aren’t alone in noticing some inherent problems with this situation. Charles Colson wrote an entire book on this subject, “Kingdoms In Conflict,” that seems trying to justify Evangelical-types having to compromise their faith in order to maintain their political position. Anabaptist communities like these would probably take the opposite position, and just say that a government leader who converts to their faith would have to resign.
One way of explaining the “Two Kingdoms” teachings behind Anabaptist communities like these is that their ideal is being an earthly embassy of Heaven. And most countries don’t expect their ambassadors to join up with their receiving nation’s governments or militaries, but only be outside observers and represent the interests of their sending nation.
I saw that the Hutterites are from Moravia and wondered if they were the same as the Moravians who founded half of Winston-Salem NC. I looked it up, and no, they’re a completely different denomination from the same place. The Moravian Church aren’t Anabaptist, not even in the broader sense.
Sorry I’m late commenting, but I only saw this thread today. While they might not necessarily count as a ‘major group’, I think that the plain Brethren groups descended from the Schwarzenau Brethren are worth mentioning. Originating in the village of the same name in southwest Germany near the beginning of the 18th century, the Schwarzenau Brethren fused Anabaptist and Pietist ideas. They came to America in the early 18th century, around the same time as the Amish and Swiss Mennonites, and like them settled in Pennsylvania and spoke Pennsylvania German, though all Brethren groups, even the plain ones, now speak only English.
In the 19th century, there were splits in the faith, resulting in three factions: traditionalist, moderate and progressive. The groups descended from the traditionalist faction are still plain, as are the Dunkard Brethren, an offshoot of the Church of the Brethren, descended from the moderate faction. The largest church descended from the progressive faction is The Brethren Church.
Most of the plain Brethren groups are car-driving, though there are a couple of horse-and-buggy groups. The largest plain Brethren group is the Old German Baptist Brethren. OGBB men’s dress is very like that of the Amish, and they also usually wear beards. The most noticeable difference appears to be in hairstyle, as they tend to wear their hair brushed back from the forehead, unlike the Amish bowl cut.
Women’s dress is more distinctive, as they wear a shoulder cape, similar to the pellegrina worn by senior Catholic clergy, over their dresses, rather than having the cape pinned or sewn to the waist of the dress, as Amish and Mennonite women wear. Their head covering is also distinct, a translucent stiff cap that covers the ears and is tied tightly under the chin.
Another distinctive practice is that children and unbaptized teenagers do not dress plainly, though from the pictures I’ve seen, young girls do not wear trousers and do not keep their hair shorter than shoulder length.
As far as I’m aware, all plain Brethren groups have a similar dress code, except for the Dunkard Brethren, who dress more like conservative Mennonites, with men being clean-shaven, and women wearing a Mennonite-style head covering and cape dress.
Thank you! I’m aware that the Brethren exist, but I don’t know enough to say anything useful about them (although they dress distinctively–I can easily identify the Dunkard girl in this video, for example.)
Sorry, did you mean to include a link to the video?
I did, sorry–here it is.
I’m somewhat surprised by the ban-fest. Sad, actually, as quite a few of the banees are commenters I enjoy reading. And the vast majority of the time I think they (EchoC and HBC in particular) are extremely civil.
However, the reason I spend more of my time reading SSC than anything else is because of the culture of civility, and anything that moves the commenting in that direction is to the good.
ETA I’ve just read all the examples of comments that led to the bans – much less surprised now. I guess I don’t get involved in US political conversations, which seem like the place where the problems erupt.
Also, it occurred to me that the commenters who were banned were those who only inhabited open threads, rather than people who respond to Scott’s posts. That also makes the banning more understandable.
Still sad, tho’..
Yeah, pretty much my reaction as well, including double back after reading the comments. I will miss those people, tho. Wish the bans would be a bit shorter (maybe a bit more frequent as well?).
I was quite surprised to see there posts that are a few years old. Makes me a lot more paranoid about what I write. As, I guess, it should be.
I agree about shorter bans, and maybe more frequent.
And yes to the paranoia about old comments!
+1
I’m not a psychologist, but last time I checked, operant conditioning worked best when the stimuli were small, frequent and immediate.
But I get that this is more work for Scott.
Well, he said a couple of times that moderating isn’t a huge amount of work, and also just said that he’d like to ban more people so… win-win? And yeah, was also thinking of operant conditioning. I think there’s some research specific to punishments as well, and time+consistency matter a lot more than intensity.
He has indicated that moderating is extremely mentally taxing for him. So doing it frequently is exactly what he doesn’t want.
Scott may be aiming at a variable ratio schedule:
(Wikipedia)
And I want to register support for moderation, especially for a transparent moderation. Hopefully I am not posting anything against rules and bannable, this would be ironic.
But looking through a linked content I am not surprised by bans.
My favorite is probably
(not linked directly, but next to linked)
Yeah that was the one that really amazed me didn’t lead to an insta-permaban (but of course that would require Scott to be constantly on the lookout for such things and I think he does not want that). Of course I’m biased, given that comment was in response to me.
I assume that it was missed.
I’m somewhat saddened to see HBC gone for so long. The commentariat is well-served (IMHO) with solid left-wing representation. I wish we had more so the work could be spread among more.
Hey , I resemble that remark. In my case, and probably others, it isn’t that I don’t read Scott’s posts, but I try to keep the signal to noise ratio higher on those and if I have nothing to say other than my uninformed opinion, I don’t want to post.
But it is a good point–I value open threads to have somewhere to ask questions of interesting and usually pretty well informed people. But for Scott, they are mostly there (it seems to me) as a place to keep discussions he’s less interested in away from his main threads.
*stares uncomfortably into the middle distance*
No call-outs, that’s not a universal policy with me either. More of a tendency.
Justin case it’s not clear, that was meant as self-deprecating..
This is a good point. I try to post in response to main posts, but I’m sure >90% is on OTs. But of course for Scott the purpose of this blog is the main posts. Which must make policing the OTs extra frustrating.
I should have used ‘the’ as my username. I would be unbannable, other than by nuking the blog by banning the word ‘the.’
banning the username ‘the the’, on the other hand, would reduce the background paranoia I experience when I’m here by at least 8%.
How will people express snarky indifference should I end up on the list?
By removing the first letter of your name, perhaps, thus improving efficiency by 33% !
“I don’t agree with banning 13thLetterOfCanadianAlphabet.”
Incidentally noticed that this comment which got its author banned
Replies to a comment linking to an archive.is snapshot of a purported medium post by Tara Reade, praising Putin.
The date of the post reads Dec 17 2018 while at the bottom of the page it says that the author is a “Medium member since Mar 2019”
How many levels of shenanigans do we have going here ? Has this been pursued elsewhere ?
Membership is a paid option, but you can sign in and probably write stuff without it.
It might be imported from an older blog.
Medium: Import a post
Makes sense, shenanigans_level–
Ban them all. Moderation is the key to success.
… Tom said indefinitely
“Moderation in all things. Especially moderation.”
I’d like to argue for second-order extremism–either completely moderate moderation, or completely extreme moderation, I don’t care which!
Beginning to think Roman Hruska was a man before his time.
For readers who don’t remember, this references Scott’s 2018 fiction short story “https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/12/in-the-balance/”
Dutch fixed expressions predict the future better than Scott
‘De vermoorde onschuld spelen’ = Acting like the murdered innocence
Acting angry or surprised at being accused or suspected of something. This is used in particular when suspicion is clearly warranted and the surprise or anger seems like a tactic by a guilty person. This probably comes from a 1625 play by Vondel: ‘Palamedes oft vermoorde onnooselheyd’ (Palamedes or murdered innocence). This was a political play written about a political conflict between Prince Maurits of Orange and Johan Van Oldenbarnevelt, where the latter was accused of treason and hanged. Vondel wrote an adaptation of a Greek tragedy to argue the point. The Greek tragedy is the story of Palamedes, who was falsely accused of treason by Odysseus.
Given that the expression now implies that the person is actually guilty, the play probably didn’t convince that many people that Van Oldenbarnevelt was innocent of treason.
‘Zoden aan de dijk zetten’ = putting sod/turf on the dike
Making a difference. Can also be used with a negation, arguing that if something doesn’t put sod on the dike, it doesn’t make a difference.
‘Besje’ = little berry
Granny or old woman.
‘Chocoladeletters’ = Chocolate letters
Fat, shouty, exaggerated headlines in a newspaper. Often used disparagingly by the center-left to describe the most popular (center-right) newspaper in The Netherlands, De Telegraaf, when they engage in propaganda and/or activism that the person who uses this expression doesn’t like.
This terminology refers to the tradition of giving people their initial in chocolate, during the Sinterklaas holiday. These initials are often written in the Égyptienne typeface. This was the first typeface designed for phototypesetting, which no longer required metal type & allowed for a far larger range of fonts and images. However, this technology required ‘fat’ typefaces, as well as serifs. This is also desirable when making letters from chocolate, as the strokes of the letters need to be fat enough for the letter to hold together, but yet not so compact that it is hard to break off a piece of chocolate to eat. Phototypesetting typefaces like Égyptienne provide this with their fat, but not too fat, strokes and serifs.
The chocolate letters derive from pastry letters, seen here in a 1615 painting by German painter Peter Binoit. Pastries like these are still eaten at the end of the year, consting of puff pastry filled with almond paste or persipan.
Some clever design goes into making letters that seem to be roughly the same font size while having every letter of the alphabet contain the same amount of chocolate, so Jaap doesn’t become jealous of Willem…
Marzipan?
No. Marzipan is 1 part almonds to 3-4 parts powdered sugar. Almond paste (‘amandelspijs’ = literally almond spice) is 1 part almonds to 1 part granulated sugar. This makes the latter less sweet and gives it a rougher texture. Marzipan is better alone or paired with pure chocolate, while almond paste pairs well with puff pastry or fruited Christmas bread. For example, a very popular Christmas treat is a yeast-based bread, with dried fruits, raisins and currants, lemon and orange zest, water, milk, butter, sugar, vanilla and cinnamon (and optionally, nuts). The center of the bread is filled with almond paste. See here. Some people smear the almond paste over the bread before eating it, while others prefer not to do so.
Apricot or peach kernels can be used to replace the almonds in both marsipan and almond paste. I’ve only heard the latter called ‘banketbakkersspijs’ (= literally pastry chef spice), which is the Dutch word for persipan, although technically the marzipan-variant is also persipan.
It’s all an abomination unto the Lord, of course. Only the real spice unlocks prescience, while no person of taste and sophistication wants the Wannabe spice.
Is “chocoladeletters” the same as “koienletters” (cow letters)? I learned that expression from the song about how difficult it is to stay humble, if your name is printed on billboards in cow letters.
I like the irony that this singer is now living humbly on the Shetland Islands and leading a shanty choir.
A slightly different form of letter-shaped pastry is known as Russian Bread.
‘Koeienletters’ isn’t restricted to newspaper and doesn’t have the political connotations. It is a more generic term for big letters.
I learned recently that the reason that adults can’t hear high frequencies is simply because their ears are larger. This made me wonder if there could be a correlation between size and music preferences. This would explain the stereotype that women tend to like pop and men tend to like rock. Rock has lower frequencies which fit men’s larger ears.
The easiest way to test this would be to compare general body size against music preferences within genders. Does anyone have a dataset containing music preferences and height or weight?
I’m skeptical ear size is the reason. As far as I know, the ability to hear high tones declines through your whole life, so old people would hear much less than younger people even though they aren’t larger. Then again, the outer ear does grow throughout life, but older people are not known for enjoying bass-heavy music.
The stereotype of women liking pop and men liking rock fits with the general cultural norm that men like rough and “dangerous” things while women like pretty and polished things. These genres are also heavily marketed towards these genders. So I doubt that a biological explanation is useful here.
There will probably be a filtering effect from the outer and middle ears, but the bulk of the change is due to the smallest hairs in the cochlea dying.
Ear size does increase slowly as you age, apparently.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2013/jul/17/big-ears-grow-as-we-age
If your ears are more elastic and bigger, a loss of hearing in the higher ranges would certainly make sense. Plus what other people have said.
The wavelength of 20kHz* is ~1.7cm, ISTM that is too much to make a difference in the ear canal or inner ear.
*as an upper boundary
I would be interested on seeing a source on the ear size thing. Age related hearing loss is mostly caused by accumulated damage to the hair cells in your cochlea and that effect is known to hit high-frequency regions first (here’s some sources). It’s my understanding that this effect happens more or less continuously over the course of your life, so I just always assumed that the reason adults couldn’t hear the same frequencies as children was because they had more hair cell damage.
Rock music probably has more of the very high frequencies which you lose in ordinary age-related hearing loss than do other kinds of music, due to its greater use of distortion as an effect.
High frequency overtones/harmonics, yes, but the general melodies and arrangements are probably lower pitched on average (and more concentrated in the middle ranges) than pop music. Well, except for those sweet, sweet guitar solos anyway.
As I understand it, the HF loss from aging doesn’t make a difference once you get down to where the fundamental frequencies of all voices, and nearly all instruments, lie; it’s just some of the overtones that you lose. The highest note on a standard piano keyboard, for example, is pitched at 4186 Hz; my pretty ordinary 63-year-old ears can hear not just the fundamental of that note but the second and third harmonics as well.
How do you do this?
If you mean how do I know, I admittedly can’t listen to a C8 played on a piano and say “hey, I can hear the 2nd and 3rd harmonics.” What I can do is listen to a succession of sine tones at increasing frequencies and make note of where I start losing the ability to hear them, which happens right around 13 KHz, which means I can hear 8372 Hz and 12558 Hz.
Nope, that’s not true. Age-related hearing loss is due to the loss of hair cells in the inner ear–wavelength vs. ear dimensions has nothing to do with it. Someone posted a well-researched answer to the question on StackExchange. tl;dr: the hair cells in your inner ear respond to different frequencies based on how far along the spiral of the cochlea they are; the high-frequency ones on the outer edge are the first to feel the negative effects of aging.
I have written a blog post about an old working paper of mine on the theme of economic convergence: http://www.michelecoscia.com/?p=1801
Quick summary: economic convergence is the tendency of poorer economies to grow more quickly than more developed ones. Whether this actually happens or not is an interesting question. In the paper, we look at municipalities in Colombia and at two hypotheses. If there is economic convergence, is this connected to good institutions (e.g. good state governments foster convergence) or by informal social networks (e.g. poor municipalities tend to raise to the level of municipalities with which they have the strongest communication links)? We find evidence for the latter.
How can someone who used (confirmed) knockoff THC cartridges for a short period of time recover their lung health?
(Aside from quitting, which I’ve done.)
I don’t have any symptoms or reason to believe my lungs are not healthy per se. But the usage could not have been good for me. I feel ashamed and just wish to make a concerted effort to undo any damage.
Your initial best bet would be to visit a pulmonologist and make sure that you actually have suffered harm to lung health. They’d also be best able to guide you through any treatment which might help.
This is my new favourite example of policies as organisational scar tissue
A scar leads to diminished function of the tissue, not a now neutral-or-worse persistence of a once useful reaction. A better word would be a ‘societal neurosis’, it also allows for re-learning and being healthier after shedding the obsolete policies, which cannot be done with a scar.
There is also an infrequent usage of ‘scar’ that includes the plus side of acquired usefulness, but this stretches the notion of ‘scar’ too much, imo (I once heard immunulogists refer to acquired serological immunity as a ‘sero-scar’ from an infection).
The actual Maginot line is not actually a good example of this. There are other better local experts on this, but the French (the ones in charge, anyway) understood quite well what the Line did and didn’t do, and what it did do had real military value.
That’s true, the Maginot Line did have many failings but the French “Dyle Plan” expected a mobile battle. The French even spent more on their air force than the Germans (and so did the British, separately), and had more tanks and in most ways better tanks.
And the Maginot Line had the enormous benefit of not being destabilizing… unlike the air forces, it didn’t reward striking first.
The Swiss WW2 defenses can be considered very successful, they deterred Operation Tannenbaum. And they included many fixed fortifications, including the “national redoubt” which gave them the ability to threaten to cut off Germany from Italian rail communication, essentially forever.
https://original.antiwar.com/bwalker/2012/02/01/how-the-swiss-opted-out-of-war/