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3. I have heard your pleas for mercy and commuted EchoChaos and HeelBearCub’s bans to four months only.
4. Slight update on the Book Review Contest: many people expressed a wish to read all the entries, not just the finalists. I’ll probably make all the .txt files available in an archive or something for download. So by sending me your review, you are by default giving me permission to make it public however I want, whether it’s a finalist or not, unless you specifically ask me not to do that.
5. By this point you probably won’t be surprised to hear that there’s another virtual SSC meetup on May 24th. Guest speaker this time is economist Bryan Caplan, author of The Case Against Education, Open Borders, and many excellent blog posts.
This seem like a place where people have come up with creative solutions to parenting issues… has anyone had any luck improving the eating habits of very picky kids. I have a 7 year old daughter and 4 year old son who are both quite picky, but in different ways. My son essentially doesn’t eat any fruits or vegetables. My daughter will eat healthy food, but is extremely reluctant to try anything new, will refuse anything slightly different than usual, and almost completely avoids any combinations of food. As in, she’ll eat noodles and meatballs, but not touching each other. She also occasionally just drops something off her list of acceptable foods, so it seems like our options just keep getting smaller.
We’ve tried all the typical advice you get from pediatricians and nutritionists (like family style dinner, have at least one thing they like at each meal) and it doesn’t seem to do any good at all except to make dinner time somewhat less of a battle. The haven’t changed eating habits one bit. I started writing a lot more about all the things we’ve tried, but it’s probably not worth posting. My feeling was maybe we should just give up… it’s probably genetic and not worth fighting. My wife doesn’t find this acceptable. Anyone have any clever ideas?
At the risk of sounding rude, are you and your wife good cooks? Also, is it possible that one or both of your kids could have GI issues or sensory sensitivity?
I was an extremely picky eater as a kid. I had undiagnosed autism, so foods that were the wrong texture or overly spicy were a no go. I also had problems swallowing for a year or so, which cut my “acceptable” foods down even further. And on top of that, I had a GI disorder. I started rejecting food that made me sick; at the time I assumed that the food in question made everyone sick, and that I was just being overly picky, but nope, turns out that eating pizza doesn’t cause most people to feel like they’re going to vomit.
I grew out of some of the pickiness with age. Cooking foods in different ways helped. (Boiled veggies are always nasty, but I like them steamed or stir fried. I dislike the texture of most fruit, but dried and freeze dried fruit have a great texture.) Trying foods from different cultures also helped, probably because they use different spices than the standard American faire.
For the record, my parents had a rule of “you have to try it, but don’t have to finish it if you don’t like it”, which helped keep me from having bad dinner experiences even when I hated one of the foods they cooked.
Co-signing on the importance of texture. My cooking parent wasn’t great, and that put me off of eggplant and tomatoes for decades. I’ve only now started to lose my gag reflex when presented with dishes using those ingredients, and only if cooked in ways that give them entirely different textures from what put me off back in the day.
My guess is that kids have a higher aversion to sliminess, and that lots of cooking for adults emphasizes a shiny sauce, combined with it easy for non-chefs to make stuff go mushy, creates a common conflict in what gets served on the table.
Not really viable now, but try taking the kids to a buffet of mostly unfamiliar foods and see what the kids gravitate towards, in terms of texture and cooking mechanism, rather than flavor.
Or, try the direct approach. Ask the kids what they don’t like eating without naming specific ingredients, focusing on what kind of flavors and textures they like/dislike.
To answer Lord Nelson’s questions, we are pretty decent cooks. It’s not just throwing broccoli in boiling water and plopping it on their plate like I grew up with. We buy fresh stuff, cook it in ways that enhance the flavors, etc. But we aren’t doing anything fancy most nights and there are plenty of quick things. I’m not sure it matters, anyway. Presented with some really nice roasted vegetables and warmed up frozen peas, my daughter will take the frozen peas every time.
I definitely think texture is a major thing for my daughter. She will eat raw onion before cooked onion, which seems crazy if you are going by flavor. At the same time, though, I haven’t been able to find any clear rules to follow. Crunchy is generally better than mushy (chicken nuggets must be from the oven, not the microwave, which I definitely get), but trying to use that as a guide has been far from a guarantee.
And yeah, we never make our kids eat everything. The rule we have stuck by for a while (after a lot of half enforced rules that we couldn’t stick by) is that they need to choose at least 3 items to put on their plate, including 1 fruit or vegetable. They don’t have to eat everything, but if they want seconds they need to have at least a bite of everything. For my daughter this rule works fine. For my son, since he doesn’t eat any fruits or vegetables, it is difficult. There has been a fruit or vegetable on his dinner plate essentially every night for years and he’s never eaten more than two bites of any of it. His “favorite fruit” is pear, which means he is usually willing to take a tiny bite of it in order to get seconds.
“Cook it in ways that enhance the flavors” can mean different things to adults and children, though. I no longer like some of the things I preferred growing up, since my palate has changed.
For your son, have you tried serving veggies that don’t seem like veggies? Like broccoli tots, dried veggie chips, or pureeing them into the sauce or riced into either meat or carbs (hamburger steak, meatloaf, dumplings/buns, mashed potatoes, zucchini bread, etc.). Tempura every night obviously isn’t viable, but it might give you a direction to chase. Birds Eye brand veggie pasta isn’t bad, at all.
Finally, there is a small chance that getting the kids involved in the cooking process might help. What are their instincts in the kitchen? Let them season a few portions, tasting all along the way, instead of just the final step. It could help them clarify their tastes to themselves, which in turn helps them communicate it to you. They might be able to get through eating something slathered in a sauce that’s too much for adults.
I’ve seen speculation that children may have an aversion to eating things they haven’t seen their parents eat, as they are uncertain that they are safe. So have your children see you eat the sorts of things you give them to eat, if they haven’t already.
Or just give them things they like to eat, if it’s possible to do so in a healthy way and without undue effort.
You could ask in the next OT; this one is pretty dead by now.
I’m not a parent but eventually they’ll get hungry enough that they have to eat anyway right? I know it used to be common that if a kid refused to eat a dinner they’d be served the leftovers for breakfast the next day.
We have proven unable (really, unwilling I guess) to wait them out longer than they can wait out us.
You have my sympathy. We thought by bringing up our kids to eat a fair variety of non-standard foods we could solve that problem. We ended up with children — now adults — who were perfectly happy with with a number of dishes from a 10th century Muslim cookbook and others from a fourteenth century English one but very picky about what other things, modern or medieval, they liked. One of them strongly objects to my eating peanut butter at the same table she is eating at, because she doesn’t like the smell — and no, she isn’t allergic. The other has a similar, if not quite as strong, objection to chili. I will refrain from other examples.
I can’t offer a good way of changing them, but you might try the policy we used when they were young for dealing with the problem. The rule was that they didn’t have to eat what the rest of us were having provided they could provide themselves with something else that was no extra work for us and, in our judgement, nutritionally adequate.
Our son ate a good deal of fruit yogurt.
Thanks, yes, that sounds familiar. We’ve found that any kind of ethnic food from across the world is fine with them, as long as it fits whatever narrow range of presentation, texture & ingredient preferences they have. We may end up going with the “then make yourselves something” approach at some point. My wife finds it incredibly frustrating and emotionally draining to make dinners that half our family doesn’t eat, though, so that will probably be a last resort.
For whatever comfort it may be, despite my father’s comments above, we in fact grew out of most of our pickiness – in my case in my teens, I’m not as sure about my brother. The peanut butter thing is something my older half-brother, raised separately, also shares, and I’ve met a few other people who do; having a very strong aversion to one particular taste does not seem that unusual.
(The bit where I also won’t eat raw onions or melted cheese is perhaps a bit less common. I did say most.)
Internally, as a teenager, it mostly felt as if dishes that had tasted unpleasant no longer did so, or as if dishes tasted as if I shouldn’t like them, but I did; I also deliberately developed my tolerance for hot spice, but that was separate. As best I could tell, my tastes generally just broadened – nothing causing it except my age.
I sympathize about making dinner that only half the family will eat being discouraging; my mother has that problem too. I don’t know if it would work for your family, but what we usually did was to mostly make dinner everyone would eat, occasionally make something that one or both kids didn’t like – which is when we went for the yogurt. That way things we didn’t like weren’t barred to our parents (and while we weren’t pressured to retry things we knew we disliked, we were certainly welcome to do so, and our parents would approve if we did). Also, there were some dishes I could happily eat disassembled that I couldn’t eat assembled – if Mom made macaroni and peas and cheese, she’d take out some macaroni before she put in the cheese, and I would eat peas and plain macaroni and unmelted cheese. I don’t know if that kind of thing would be remotely practical for anything you do, or if it would be not at all/way too much work, but you mentioned your daughter liking things unmixed, so I thought it might be worth mentioning.
(“Don’t like things touching” is something I had strongly as a kid which largely faded with age, and I’ve seen it do so for other people, so hopefully that will also get better over time?)
Do your kids get bored with food? If you serve them the same thing every week, will they go crazy? (Will you?) If not, finding seven dishes they eat (or more if you have more, but…) and putting a lot of dishes aside for a while (or at least, doing them for yourselves and being OK with the kids not eating them) is one of the techniques my mother used, and probably the most successful.
That said, your problem seems a lot more severe than ours – neither of us ever refused all fruit and vegetables, (neither of us ever refused almost any fruit, honestly, though I got down to about four vegetables I would reliably eat at the worst point – five if you count artichokes). It sounds as if you’ve tried a whole lot of different things, too; I assume you’ve tried the same vegetables raw versus cooked as well as cooked different ways, I know that made a difference for us, but… I think most of what I can offer you is sadly just sympathy.
(And suspicion that you are correct: at least, in my case I don’t think it was worth fighting, and leaving it alone resulted in the problem pretty much going away on its own, albeit later than my parents would have preferred.)
Do they eat blended food?
Because then you can have blended soups with veggies and meat, or milkshakes.
Sugar is bad, but you could start giving them very sugary milkshakes, and gradually reduce the amount of sugar until it’s mostly the natural flavours.
I like orange juice a lot more than oranges, and, while oranges have less fiber, I haven’t seen a convincing argument why freshly squeezed orange juice is worse than oranges. Other than you can consume more of it, but isn’t that the point here?
I guess my question is why you are presenting this as a matter of choice to your children. In some families, and some cultures, the simple expectation is that you eat what’s served, and that’s that.
In her book, Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve, Lenora Chu presents an anecdote about how things are just plain done differently elsewhere. She put her American-born kid in a prestigious Chinese private school. Her son refused to eat eggs at home, but she later found out that he did eat them at school, after the staff essentially force-fed them to him when he refused.
I don’t think I’d be willing to go quite as far as that Chinese school did; people should have meaningful choices, and even children should have some say over their lives. But setting the standard that you eat what’s served if you’re not doing the cooking or picking up the check seems like a useful thing. Perhaps the appropriate compromise would be to let them opt out of any one thing on the table, but they must eat at least a spoonful of everything else. But any standard will have to be stuck to and enforced, and perhaps not merely in gentle ways.
fyi, Scott did a book review of that
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/book-review-review-little-soldiers/
Coming late to the debate, but here is my experience with my kids:
Kids prefer unmixed things, while adults prefer rich compositions of food. (However, blended things are sometimes okay for kids, probably because they seem homogenous.) Kids seem to prefer eating the same stuff over and over again, and don’t like trying new food, while adults often like novelty. Kids can detect tiny amount of spices and refuse the food, while adults would think of it as an improvement to the taste or not even notice it.
Things my kids like:
– white yoghurt
– blended broccoli soup
– sausage with ketchup
– buckwheat porridge
– white grape
– apple
– tomato
– hummus made without spice (just chickpeas, tahini, lemon juice)
…and of course all kinds of sweets, but we are trying reduce this part.
Some stuff just does not physically taste the same to a child’s palette as to an adult. children are more sensitive to bitter tastes for example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4654709/ https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050211084620.htm
(and I can corroborate some other things people are saying in the thread match my experience: 1. eating things by themselves rather than mixed, 2. preferring firmer/less “slimy” foods. And also raw vegetables in preference of overcooked)
Not sure you are accounting for that or not.
Regardless, what I would do is make a challenge/bet/game out of it:
“If you can eat all your [whatevers] for three months straight then I’ll get you a [bike or whatever], and I won’t complain any more if you are picky, because you’ll have proven that you’re not avoiding the food from squeamishness”.
and then not let up on them until either the three months is over, or they really can’t handle it.
And the result will be either that so much consistent practice cures them of some of their pickiness, in which case problem solved, or it doesn’t, in which case problem solved also, because you know the preference is genuinely deep seated.
Wish you Were Here > The Wall > Division Bell > Dark Side of the Moon > Animals > Piper > the rest.
The Wall would be lower if it didn’t have so much content.
What, no love for Shine On You Crazy Diamond? Just lumped in with “the rest”? 🙂
Wasn’t that part of Wish You Were Here?
Ah, I was taking it as songs not albums, is that how it’s going?
If so then I retract the remark 🙂
All time favorites:
Wish You Were Here > Dark Side > The Wall > Animals > Meddle > Piper > Ummagumma Live disc > the rest
What I still listen to after years of playing out my favorites:
Animals > everything else
Surely the answer for voting by mail is to look at it from an intraparty perspective rather than from a partisan perspective?
If we assume that Democratic incumbents stand to benefit from higher voter participation (or the specific kinds of increased voter participation which would result from voting by mail?) in their districts, while Republican incumbents are threatened by the same, then the Democratic enthusiasm and the Republican distrust of the idea would make a great deal more sense. Someone should investigate to see if this idea holds water.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the increase in voting from mail voting correlates highly with post office density. This means that the biggest increase is in urban centers, which means it benefits Democrats to Republicans about two to one (for every three additional people who vote, two will be Democrats). This is why the Democrats want it (and not other proposals like increased rural polling stations, which would increase turnout of a different kind of voter) and Republicans don’t.
Related involves the definition of “food desert”, generally talking about areas where people don’t have access to affordable nutritious food. The USDA defined that is being further than 1 mile from a supermarket in urban/suburban areas, and more than 10 miles in rural areas. The idea that somehow being 1.1 miles from a grocery store in a suburb is a tragedy but 9.9 miles away from a grocery store in a rural area is perfectly fine just confuses me. Pick a standard and run with it.
It takes a lot longer to travel N miles in an urban area than a rural area.
Fair enough. But if that’s the key issue, the definition should be based on expected travel time.
Just wondering where this two-to-one number came from. If it’s about urban centers, I would have expected more like a five-to-one ratio, so I’m guessing you had some source on this number? But the things I’ve seen suggest that voting by mail doesn’t actually affect election outcomes very much (as observed in the switchovers in Oregon, Washington, and Colorado over the past few decades).
Most surprising part of the COVID-19 crisis so far, anyone?
For me, it’s the sudden boom in sourdough bread. It turns out being cooped up at home makes people want to bake, and when lots of people suddenly have this urge, we run out of yeast. In response, people have started making sourdough bread, which doesn’t require commercially produced yeast. (It does use yeast, but it’s yeast that was present anyway, and which is encourage to multiply in the sourdough starter.)
As ever, XKCD is on the case:
https://xkcd.com/2296/
I live in a sourdough bread area, but in the quarantine we made our first bread — white wheat bread with yeast! Then some banana bread with baking soda.
I wonder if one could use a cup of kefir to rise dough, it has yeast after all.
The internet has not entirely fallen apart. The supply chain is more or less holding together.
People switching to wearing masks relatively quickly.
I don’t think this is the full explanation of the sourdough boom. I think a bigger part is just that there’s a large latent pool of potential sourdough enthusiasts. Their enthusiasm has been dampened because work trips make it hard to feed your starter, and the actual breadmaking process involves several steps that are spaced several hours apart, and thus are hard to time right if you’re sleeping for 8 hours and out of the house for another 8 hours. But now that you’re no longer traveling, you don’t have to worry about feeding your started, and now that you’re no longer commuting, you don’t have to worry if your proof has worked at 2:30 pm since you can just take a break for the next step. (Source: my partner is very into this. I’m sure I don’t have the right verb for the proof.)
@DavidFriedman, your redesigned website looks fantastic! Great job.
Thank you. It was done for me by the daughter of an online friend.
She has just had her fourteenth birthday.
The Pharisees in the Gospels were in a purity-signalling spiral. This is a major and repeated complaint of Jesus (Matt 6, Matt 23), to the point that he tells people it’s better to do their good deeds in complete secrecy.
It’s so important to avoid this particular failure mode that in Acts God kills a couple who sell their land, donate much of the money to the church, but claim they have donated all of this. The text is clear that there would have been no issue if they’d either kept all the money for themselves, or been honest that they weren’t donating the whole amount.
I dont think the text is clear that lying was the problem:
To me it always sounded like the problem is that he didn’t give all of his money to the church, instead of hiding some part. I don’t see an explicit statement that he would have been allowed to keep it. It also happens in a context where giving away literally all you have (beyond the bare necessities) is emphasized a lot.
This bible passage has always bothered me, since killing people for not giving you more money seems pretty crude. So I was quite happy to read your interpretation, but I don’t see it in the text.
To me, Peter makes a big deal about lying in front of the Lord, but I think there was an assumption or requirement that they should give it all – otherwise, why lie about it? Absent such a requirement, I think giving say half of your wealth would suffice for virtue signaling purposes.
To me it always sounded like the problem is that he didn’t give all of his money to the church, instead of hiding some part
That seems to be the part which says “the land was yours, you could sell it or not as you wished, and when you had the money you could do what you liked with it”.
The fault is then (a) selling the land and keeping back some of the money while (b) lying to God. Peter is saying “It’s not me and the others you are trying to deceive, it’s God and do you really think God is fooled?”
Ananias and Sapphira are being greedy because they want to be given the same good repute as others who did donate everything, without the corresponding sacifice, and they are trying to make a fool of God by pretending “hey look at us, we gave you everything!” That is the great offence:
I think giving say half of your wealth would suffice for virtue signaling purposes.
And the whole point is not signalling virtue but being virtuous. Even this early in the Church, here are people who are being deceitful, who don’t want to give everything, who are holding back some part for themselves, and trying to make a deal with God or think they can fool God. At the very worst, it’s demonstrating they don’t even believe in God at all – they can get status and kudos in this new community by gaming the system and putting on the appearance of being wholly committed, but this whole ‘God’ thing is silly and they’re only in it for other reasons.
There certainly is the expectation that everyone will live in community and share their goods, see Acts 2 and Acts 4 for the description:
This is the context in which the story of Ananias and Sapphira takes place, and it demonstrates that they are violating community norms and betraying (so it is felt) their fellow-members. They don’t demonstrate trust – if they were worried that they wouldn’t have enough money to live on themselves, they could have explained this to the community or the leaders as to why they didn’t give all the money received – and they are trying to manipulate the perception of others – “see, we’re as good as Barnabas!” – in a worldly fashion.
But Peter’s rebuke is meant to convey that this is not a worldly transaction; this is something given before God, promised to God, and you are not merely trying to deceive ordinary fallible humans, you are trying to deceive God Almighty. Better to refuse to sell anything, or to keep all the money for themselves, than to be lukewarm and deceitful in giving.
I wonder if here there is also the echo of the dispute between Jesus and the Pharisees in Mark 7 about corban:
The Pharisees’ decision here allowed people to avoid their obligations to their family by a technical trick – what I’m reading here is an implication that the money ‘devoted to God’ need not necesssarily be immediately handed over to the Temple but the unfilial son retained use of it, so in the same way the money that Ananias and Sapphira are holding back is, in a sense, corban and they are also trying to cheat their obligations to their fellows by a trick.
That is a charitable reading.
An less charitable one might be: “The land was yours, so nobody had legal title to prevent you from selling it. After selling it, you had all the cash in hand, as opposed to – say – holding a debt that has not yet been repaid (or even being held in debt for some of it).”
In other words, Peter seems – on plain reading – to be saying that there were no objective reasons why Ananias would be unable to sell the land and – having sold it – give all the money to the community.
The “you could do what you liked with it” bit is conspicuous by its absence.
Indeed, “Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common.” speaks against such an interpretation. Again, the plainly stated social norm was that everything you owned was to be donated to the community (in proceeds from sale, if need be).
Whether we find the norm and the method of enforcing it agreeable or not is irrelevant to the question whether Ananias and Sapphira were killed simply because they didn’t donate everything they had and, on plain reading, it appears that, yes, this was exactly the reason.
Okay, I am going to fight on this.
“And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal? ”
“At your disposal” is where I am getting “you could do what you liked with it”.
whether Ananias and Sapphira were killed simply because they didn’t donate everything they had and, on plain reading, it appears that, yes, this was exactly the reason
The traditional reading is that the lying was the fault here, not the hanging on to part of the price. Proverbial references are to “lying/lied like Ananias” not “stuck some of the money under the mattress like Ananias”.
That is what Peter says: “you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land/You have not lied just to human beings but to God“.
Ananias and Sapphira are pretending – lying – “here is all the money we got from the sale of the land” and Peter rebukes them that it has been supernaturally revealed to him that this is a lie.
Now, if you want to take it that they died for not handing over all the dosh simpliciter, then the story would have been that they sold the land, kept some of the money, and told the apostles “here is the rest of the money we got”.
But that is not the story, the story brings in the lying to God and the Holy Spirit. If the moral is “all property is held in common, holding back is punished”, then the lying about “this is all the money” would not be an element.
Say what you want about Peter, and it has been said; stupid, impulsive, cowardly, all the rest of it – he’s not the type to call down fire and brimstone just for the heck of it (that was James and John, the sons of thunder, who wanted to call down fire from heaven: “53 But the people did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. 54 And when his disciples James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”).
@deiseach
But in the text, Ananias doesn’t lie. It doesn’t say “Ananias brought the rest and said that this was the whole price he got”. His wife says that, but he doesn’t. So his lie is an implicit lie — he joined a club where the rules are “give us all your money” and then he didn’t give them all his money. I don’t see an option to give some of the money to the church.
Now, it makes sense to exclude him from the club for that, but the death penalty is a bit much. I guess the one saving grace is that the text doesn’t specify what killed them, or whether Peter intended for that to happen. Maybe they just died of shame.
But it’s heartening that the church’s traditional position is “if he had been honest about not giving everything, he could have stayed alive and in good standing with the church”. While I don’t think that’s a straightforward reading of the text, at least the church sees the problem.
But in the text, Ananias doesn’t lie. It doesn’t say “Ananias brought the rest and said that this was the whole price he got”. His wife says that, but he doesn’t.
Sapphira says it afterwards, after Ananias has been struck down. Peter is testing her, and she fails; now, while it is possible that she could innocently answer “yes, this is all the money” if Ananias had deceived her about it, we are told that she knew beforehand because it was a joint sale by them both:
So she is confirming the false story and trying to perpetuate the deception, instead of telling the truth, and so invokes the same punishment:
I think our deeper disagreement here is that you think this is very severe, not to say disproportionate, punishment for the sake of holding back some cash of YOUR OWN MONEY from the sale of YOUR OWN PROPERTY, but I think that this is perjury which is very grave 🙂
Ananias and Sapphira are lying to the apostles, which is lying to the Church (both local and universal) and, by extension, implying that this is the equivalent of testimony under oath (when Peter questions them both), and as explained above, making God who is Ultimate Truth the guarantor of what is false is impious and blasphemous.
French Revolution, anyone?
– By what I’ve read significant cultural penetration, at least in the Parisian upper class.
– This one doesn’t need explaining
– They renamed the months, killed most of the previous aristocracy…
– I don’t know enough to know how/if this applies; I get a sense of disdain for luxuries but could be wrong.
– How are you today, Citizen? And a shift from vous to tu (in both cases, meant to emphasize that we are all equal).
– My impression is it got more severe over time, but I’m not an expert. It eventually burned itself out.
As for the endpoints:
– I’m actually not sure which classes were mostly involved in the philosophy end of it; as may or may not be clear, I’m going on a 101-level knowledge of the subject and would be delighted to hear from an actual expert. So, er “That sounds plausible but really no idea in this case”?
– Falls pretty neatly under political mysticism
– High taxes and famine are both credited with setting it off.
– Napoleon tried to take over Europe.
(In case it wasn’t clear, the above is somewhat tongue-in-cheek (I’m not sure the French Revolution fits, it was just what leapt out at me from your description) except for the bit about wanting to hear from an expert on the period; I would love to hear from an expert on the period. The bit about the 101 course was… well, literally it was a 102 course, but same thing.
Specifically, I’m not sure how far it penetrated into the culture, or how much of the executing fellow revolutionaries/random people who happened to be nobles but had no power was purity spiraling as opposed to political infighting; I’m used to the former as the standard story for the Terror but that doesn’t mean it’s right, and I haven’t looked deeply into it; it’s kind of disturbing.)
All the Communist Revolutions, really, of which the French was clearly a precursor. Communist Russia, China’s Cultural Revolution, they all did this.
That’s an interesting way to look at it. Where do you place the American Revolution in that intellectual tradition? The French Revolution is clearly a precursor – or at least, I’ve always understood it to be – but I wouldn’t call it communist, even though it is built on the belief that all men are created equal.
The American Revolution was in no real sense revolutionary; it was just a secessionist civil war fought for basically conservative reasons. The American colonists had by 1776 a well-established political culture of classical liberalism under democratic self-government, which the British Empire sought to upend in a clumsy attempt at increasing tax revenues. Fighting to preserve the status quo, even if under new management, doesn’t really lend itself to the failure modes the OP outlines.
In the past century, there were many movements such as the various utopists, hippie communes, and several yogis (eg Rajneesh, Maharishi)–and yes, those categories overlap a lot. There were more political movements such as Black Panthers, John Birch Society, and Nation of Islam (which now espouses dianetics), but I don’t know how they handled “purity”. Jonestown ended as a cult tragedy, but before that it was a religious and social movement that went to a remote place to escape scrutiny.
I suppose my point is that there are lots of movements in society, more or less harmful/harmless and more or less influential, and it’s impossible to tell whether something gets integrated into the larger culture, breaks away, withers, makes it big, or devolves into a suicidal cult. In the case of the Puritans, hindsight tells us they had enough resources to break away and form a colony, enough luck to survive in newly conquered territory, then as they mingled with other colonists they tempered enough to form a viable state. I suppose the Mormons were able to replicated that whole process 2 centuries later, they might be closest to your criteria.
In my mind, the internet has also enabled many non-CW subcultures that fit your criteria, anything from early retirement to cosplay. Thinking about it more, there are probably thousands: things like anorexia on instagram, open software, knitting, pick-up artists, atkins/keto/paleo diets, plastic-free/eco living, etc. These subcultures might not have the extreme status and purging, but there is definitely some gatekeeping. By bringing together a critical mass virtually, they gain traction and can have some effect on the larger culture. On the other hand, while the internet is the great meeting-place for subcultures, it is also tempering because it still allows individual to see conflicting views and is not physically isolating.
PV solar panels are more efficient at converting sunlight into energy than photosynthetic plants are. Panels are 15-20% efficient, while plants are only 4.5-6% efficient. (Source: https://solarfeeds.com/solar-power-vs-bioenergy/)
Could our machines also harness more energy directly from food crops than the human digestive tract extracts from them? For example, how much usable energy could you extract from 1 kilo of dried grain if you burned it in a furnace and used the heat to power a machine compared to the amount of usable energy you would get it you ate the grain?
Is your goal mechanical energy? If so, I think humans are only ~20% efficient, and I think large scale industrial power plants (e.g. gas turbine + steam turbine for waste heat recovery) are ~60% efficient at turning chemical energy into mechanical energy, and I suppose you could probably build one to run on dried grain if it was important.
If your goal is chemical energy in the form of ADP->ATP to run cells, I think mitochondria are more like ~60% efficient and I don’t know if a chemical plant can do better or not.
If your goal is creative work, feeding humans is still the cheapest way to get it done, but the domain where this is true is slowly shrinking.
You could use an existing gas turbine and run it on grain as long as you have an effective way to deliver atomized grain into the combustion chamber. So you’d just have to replace the fuel nozzles. Those things will run on anything.
I’m not a gas turbine engineer, but I’d expect grains to burn too slowly and produce too much soot to be usable as fuel in an internal combustion gas turbine. You can burn them to boil water and feed the steam to a turbine, but this is less efficient.
The wood gas approach could work.
Heat engines scale up stupidly well. You could probably run a gas turbine on grain if you made it the size of a house.
More realistically:
a) Don’t use grain. You don’t care if the calories are in a human-edible form.
Use planted softwood or some kind of waste as your biomass.
b) smash the biomass up a bit, to maximise surface area.
c) if there’s enough volatiles in your biomass, gasify it then run a turbine off the CO and H2 produced.
d) smash up the remaining charcoal a bit more, almost till it’s dust.
e) regeneratively heat the charcoal till it’s glowing.
f) burn it.
g) use any waste heat to run a steam turbine.
You’d have to atomize them but yes, it wouldn’t burn cleanly.
Isn’t this what biofuels are trying to do? Problem is, agriculture is mostly a net loss of energy, so you need more energy for fertilizer production and machinery than you get out of it.
For mechanics, I believe electric drive trains have efficiencies up in the nineties, so likely more efficient than anything biological.
But this is mechanical-to-mechanical energy, so there is no Carnot limit.
Coal-fired power plants have about 40% thermal-to-electric efficiency, I doubt you could get any better with grain. Grains would also pollute much more, as they have high protein content as far as vegetable matter goes, and proteins contain nitrogen and sulfur, which turn into nasty oxides when you burn them.
We do have machines that harness a lot of energy more directly from food crops than our digestive tracts do. This is what cooking and chewing and so on are all about.
But in all these cases, we’re not just converting raw materials into some universal raw energy – it matters whether you have energy in the form of electricity, fuel, a living body, or something else.
What’s the best popular account of evolutionary psychology? I say popular not because I’m loathe to read something technical but because I don’t want to read a paper, unless you think it qualifies.
I liked The Adapted Mind, by Tooby, Cosmides, and Barkow. It’s somewhere between popular and technical. And very interesting.
The Mating Mind (free pdf online, Geoffrey Miller).
This book is less “because of the African savanna” and more “sexual selection and peacock feathers” and very anthropocentric. There’s another book, I believe called the Red Queen’s Race, that is more general.
Does Just So Stories by Kipling count?
I have honestly never understood this criticism. It usually comes from people who don’t question stuff like continental philosophy and sociology. Like, how can you think that a field of study that is based on phylogenetics, ecology, paleontology and even game theory is just a bunch of “just so stories”; while grandoise theories based on “poststructuralism”, “philosophical geneology” and “history of ideas” are fair game. Seems like a perfect example of an isolated demand for rigor.
How many American marriages exist only because one spouse depends on the other’s employer-provided family health insurance?
The word “only” is doing a lot of work there, and I think it forces the answer to be “essentially none”.
I think the intended question could be rephrased: “How many marriages would not exist, but for employer provided health insurance?”
Given that Medicaid and COBRA exist, none, technically.
Probably some low-five digit number of people who would otherwise have gotten a relatively amicable divorce stay technically married for this reason simply because ‘all American marriages’ is a large, weird sample.
My parents remained technically married for an additional 6-8 years (until my mom turned 65) for precisely this reason.
So why do employers bother providing health insurance, and why do employees consider it an important part of their compensation, given that Medicaid and COBRA exist?
Originally as a sneaky tax-advantaged pay increase, currently because widespread use of this technique broke the free market for health care and consequently nobody competent will work for you if you don’t.
Medicaid works for people without a job (which are presumably a substantial fraction of people supposedly staying with their spouse solely for insurance purposes).
I think COBRA is actually irrelevant though, since it just allows you to pay the full cost of the health insurance plan you were last on, and I believe it is limited to 12 months.
Obamacare should present a natural experiment for this – not a perfect one, but something. Oh, and you have the state-by-state variation as well.
I got married back in 1983 to my then girlfriend to put her on my employer’s health insurance. We were perfectly happy living together as singles otherwise. Maybe we would have gotten married eventually anyway (say when we had children), but perhaps that is at least one. I suspect there are many others who have gotten married over the years for which that was at least one of the issues. Less common now because employer health insurance requires a lot more co-pays these days, but it still saves money for most people.
I know a couple which got married when a partner was diagnosed with a major disease.
Also, income tax interacts with marriage in a way that most married couples pay lower income taxes compared to singles earning the same amount of money. This can also be a factor.
I think it works out that way if one spouse earns a lot and the other earns very little – instead of the high income spouse paying the top tax bracket and the low income spouse paying the lowest tax bracket, they both pay a middle tax bracket. But if both spouses are in the middle range, then marriage changes the cutoffs of the tax brackets by a little bit, and so can push you slightly higher.
This varies with each change in the tax brackets, but I suspect a majority of two-income married couples pay net higher taxes than they would if each was single. In most cases the penalty is small, but IIRC it can be as large as ~$10k.
Except for the top tax bracket (two people making over $622,050 combined) the marriage penalty has been eliminated in the US: https://taxfoundation.org/2020-tax-brackets/#brackets
Thus if there’s any difference in income amount between the two people it’s likely worth considering marriage from a tax arbitrage viewpoint.
Deductions and exemptions and AMT I have no idea.
A new contender has emerged in our ongoing search for capitalism’s most ridiculous COVID-inspired invention, aka the “Juicero of PPE” award.
I still think the optimal solution is for restaurants to go all molecular gastronomy-like and serve foods that will fit through the straw of a gas mask hydration system.
Emergency Induction Port
Milkshakes, for example. I could live with that.
Just after the “everyone must wear masks” order came into effect, I had joked about getting myself a gimp mask with the mouth zipper, so I could smoke without breaking the law.
(Instead, these days I go around wearing a bandana like a true bandido.)
I’m not sure if they pass the “no tiny cults” rule, but this dynamic is pervasive in the Plain world.
Do high-relativistic-velocity impacts produce significant radiation, either in absolute terms or in comparison to their kinetic effects? Prompted by pointless sci-fi arguments, I’m not planning an attack on the local planning office on Alpha Centauri, he said, not-at-all-suspiciously.
According to https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/ there are fusion events.
Do you count indirect radiation from impact-related heating leading to blackbody effects?
I’m going to say no; the argument was about whether hitting a target with a relativistic projectile would generate enough radiation to damage targets not affected by the kinetic/thermal effects. Presumably anything that was going to receive significant blackbody radiation is already inside the fireball.
A high-relativistic-velocity impact is significant radiation. It’s a ginormous highly concentrated pulse of combined high-energy proton and neutron radiation in the GeV range, with a side order of MeV beta rays. The fact that, in the reference frame of the impactor, all these rays can be viewed as being bound into nuclei and atoms and molecules and even large solid objects, is irrelevant trivia from the target’s point of view.
If nothing else, the charged matter of the projectile slowing down from relativistic speeds would produce significant X/gamma bremstrahlung.
Narrower questions:
Will there be particles emitted from the impact site that can penetrate a couple of inches of tissue then mess up DNA, but not with a high enough energy flux to kill you instantly? Can said particles penetrate brick, steel, tinfoil hats, lead, dirt?
Will the impact transmute nuclei and will a significant number of these nuclei be unstable with a half life of at least a few seconds (but not as long as gigayears)?
As others have mentioned impacts at relativistic speeds do produce radioactive byproducts so technically yes. If you’re wondering if this is anything on the same order as a fission bomb then most likely no. A good chunk of the radiation seen in fallout is the result of unreacted fissionables in the bomb being widely dispersed and irradiating debris as they travel. If you remove these byproducts by using an equivalent energy relativistic impactor you only have the secondary radiation sources to be concerned with and these tend to be short lived and less impactful, fading after just a few weeks.
I would guesstimate that any fallout from relativistic impactors is pretty negligible in comparison to their blast effects but I can’t find any sources with a quick google to provide a more precise measure.
The place to look is for studies of cosmic ray spallation, which is basically just the single-nuclei case of a relativistic impactor. It’s a remarkably messy process, producing a random blend of stable, long-lived, and short-lived isotopes plus a whole lot of free neutrons looking for something to bind with. And note that a 1000-ton impactor at 0.99c will be roughly equivalent to the combined cosmic-ray dose experienced by the entire Earth in its entire existence.
I’m not sure anyone’s overly worried about nuclear fallout after a 1.5 Teraton impact. 😛
Another thought: if you vaporised the whole of Dartmoor and stuck all the vapour in the stratosphere, how much would the trace amounts of uranium, radium, thorium etc. in the granite increase the global background radiation as it fell out?
Yet another: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijc.26445
Heavy ion radiation seems to really mess up DNA.
It’s used to destroy tumors, but that’s mostly to do with the bragg peak letting you focus the damage more. (fast hadrons have a lower cross-section in tissues, so if you shoot them in with the right amount of energy, they’re slowed down a bit by the healthy tissue. by the time they reach the cancerous cells, they’re slow enough that they dump all their energy there.)
The later history of Jansenism is probably not a bad fit. The wiki page bizarrely only alludes to it, but Jansenists were best known for their disputes with the Jesuits where they accused the Jesuits of being moral laxists and the Jesuits accused the Jansenists of being moral rigorists. You can see some of this for instance in the writings of Blaise Pascal. The allegation of moral rigorism stuck with them for a long time, and it seems they did advocate a stricter morality, regardless of whether the charge of rigorism fits.
The Catholic Encyclopedia article has more detail, like this funny line:
Oh yeah, I love this one because Pascal was on the side of the Jansenists, being close friends with the Abbess of Port-Royal, a convent of which the exasperated Archbishop of Paris said they were “as pure as angels and proud as devils”. The row between the likes of Pascal and the Jesuits is immensely entertaining.
Jansenism as it developed is fascinating, because whatever the eponymous Jansen believed, followers and those influenced by it took it in different directions, some to quite bizarre extemes (see the Convulsionnaires). As an attempt to bring Calvinism into Catholicism (which was not the explicit intent of anyone though it worked out like that), it didn’t quite catch on, but it was influential – the Church in Ireland was often accused of a strong Jansenist tendency.
And we got a gorgeous movie out of it, the 1991 Tous Les Matins du Monde, with exquisite music of the period.
I’m trying to think of a national-level politician in the US who didn’t take advantage of group think, or who discouraged group-think.
Another commenter mentioned the Bay of Pigs fiasco, so I’ll begin with Kennedy. Did he encourage group think? He made several famous speeches about America being a friend of liberty and enemy of Communism worldwide. Whether that goal was noble or ignoble, it was definitely an “us vs. them” attitude.
What about Lyndon Johnson? The whole “War on Poverty” and “Great Society” effort uses a kind of group think. Did voters want to be with the in-group that supported those causes, or with the out-group that didn’t support the cause?
Then there was Nixon’s “silent majority”. There’s a lot of group think in that slogan. It feels like an early version of complaints about the mainstream media, or complaints about the elites of the media/academia.
Later Presidents (Ford, Carter, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump) can be charged with group think in various ways. But I think I’ll leave those examples unexplored for the moment.
To return to my main point: group think is not just a hazard of politics. It’s an unavoidable part of politics in a nation as large as the United States.
I think you are conflating “group think” with “us versus them”– which admittedly are similar enough that perhaps I’m seeing distinctions that aren’t there.
But I think group think is about not wanting to lose status for being wrong and peer pressure rather than wanting to oppose the other, specifically.
Think Asch conformity experiment versus Standford prison experiment.
According to Superforcasting the Bay of Pigs was recognized as a huge group think fuck up and active measures were taken to prevent it afterward. Measures such as Robert Kennedy encouraging people to argue, John Kennedy leaving the room and refusing to say what he believed so that nobody could suck up to whatever his position was. In Superforcasting this change in decision-making is described as a success story during the Missile Crisis.
“I think I’m able to discuss this item in a non-CW way” doesn’t make the topic non-CW. For one thing, you could be wrong. For another, people are different.
Does anyone know of any real world set ups for companies / governments that have successfully avoided group think problems? I’ve seen it mentioned as a cause of policy failures (in both private companies and in government projects), but I haven’t any actual examples of how people have persistently avoided it.
I participated in a research project through the university of melbourne a few months ago that was meant to address this. They developed a platform for crowd-sourcing intelligence reports, then tested it by having groups of ‘general public’ compete against actual intelligence agencies to produce reports. It was an interesting experience. Frustrating at times, challenging in places. I certainly learned a lot from it.
Hunt Lab University of Melbourne
The iconic example is Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs. Things went so bad then, he actually implemented changes in his policy making. A semi-randomly googled source.
The root organizational cause of the Challenger disaster wasn’t exactly group-think, but the remedy was to create an anonymous out-of-band channel for people to alert to serious problems without worrying about political blowback. (SpaceX has implemented the same thing.)
Trump is inherently CW.
Funny enough, it didn’t even look like a cw issue until he used the T word.
I’m really struggling to think of anything more CW than adding a gratuitous “orange man bad” to the end of one’s post…
I’m against socialism but fascinated by it, maybe because I wish it could work. Although, admittedly, I like to see people destroy socialist ideas.
I feel like there should be more of an argument about socialism on this blog than there is. There are some brilliant socialists out there, but they hold their tongue here.
I want to encourage more socialist arguments here.
(Don’t tell me this is a hot button political topic because it isn’t. If it becomes one, good.)
You’re not alone in this. Scott said the same, and went to some extremes in reading socialist leaning books. Pretty much every time a socialist(ish) here hints that he’s had enough, there’s a chorus encouraging him to stay. I agree, for what’s worth.
It’s just that… it just doesn’t seem to work. There are a lot of things we’d like to be true but just aren’t. Socialism is probably one of them. It starts to look like clinging to an unsuccessful relationship – at some point everybody’s better of if you let go.
And if I try to be charitable, I’d mostly say whatever talking points modern socialism has are better served being completely reframed. I for instance like to think in terms of commons. One could think of “society spending wealth in ways it arbitrarily choses”. Or even “automation is coming, competitive advantage for individuals is going to plummet”. Anything to escape the same old class-warfare, corporations-are-evil whirlpool.
> Anything to escape the same old class-warfare, corporations-are-evil whirlpool.
FWIW, there are other schools of socialist thought other than those by/about/related to Marx. But for some reason Marx-flavored socialism has become the most … vigorous, I guess, in terms of public discussion.
Any hints/links/terms to google?
Fourier and Proudhon would be two choices. John Stuart Mill advocated socialism in his later work, too (and Helen Andrews has a piece on that curious fact). Here’s a wiki page I found, actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Marx_socialists
Proudhon seems more anarchist than socialist to me, although maybe they blend together in the extremes.
“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.”
@Belisaurus Rex
Yeah, he and James Scott would get along well, don’t you think?
Proudhon’s form of socialism actually has some attractive qualities for the fainthearted capitalist. First, he doesn’t reject free markets, and he does reject most government interference with them. Second, in line with his anarchism, he favors a kind of self-ownership and self-management by workers.
IMO, the big flaw is Proudhon’s view of property, which, I’m afraid, is central to his whole philosophy. If I understand him right, he believed private ownership of things like land or factories was immoral as well as impractical. Primarily he wanted all capital to be held in common, so that what the laborer owns is only the product of his labor. I think this goes too far, because I don’t think there’s anything wrong with, say, the farmer owning his own land. Or to bring it into the modern day, with my owning the computer I use to write code on. As long as the distribution of capital is reasonably equitable (by whatever means society has arranged for that, like a progressive tax and inheritance laws or what have you), there’s little reason not to have private property. But perhaps Proudhon would simply respond that I’m giving away the game by so carefully managing the distribution of capital, and his way is simpler. I dunno.
Besides that, Proudhon assumed a form of the labor theory of value. So, your mileage may vary.
@Proudhon: “Yeah that’s great and everything, but the restrooms are still for paying customers only.”
Are you using “equitable” to mean something like “equal”? The definitions I find are closer to “fair.”
John and Bill both earn money by their labor. John spends all his income, Bill saves some of it and eventually uses it to buy some sort of capital. Does transferring some of Bill’s capital to John make the distribution more equitable or less, as you are using the term?
@DavidFriedman
I don’t object to Bill investing his money, though Proudhon might. The reason I consider a wider distribution of capital to be more fair is that no one is made to support himself on someone else’s terms, since unjust labor practices, or foolish or malicious government interference, can make that a bad deal for the worker. (A better deal than starving, but still a bad deal!) Fundamentally, if you own your own land*, you can support yourself. Likewise, if I own my own computer, I can find programming work on my own terms.
There may be many things wrong with this picture—it doesn’t work for everyone, one can’t always guarantee one’s skills or products are worth enough to live on, etc.—but granting all that I still think it’s a lovely picture.
The property chapter of my Law’s Order is largely about why some things should be private property and some should be commons.
And one of Coase’s two famous articles is about the tradeoff between market and hierarchy as forms of organization, where he points out that if the strong pro-market side were right there would be no firms.
It doesn’t help when Scott says things like ” capitalist economies beat socialist ones” (from his recent post on slack) even though that flies in the face of history. This is an extremely hostile environment for socialist ideas because much of this audience will defend (and even fetishise) “free markets” to their dying breath.
I think it’s an effect of the EA-ness, honestly.
Could you say more about this? The connection isn’t obvious to me.
I’m sorry you think the environment is “extremely hostile”. While I think free markets will usually be more efficient than strong regulation, and socialism by abolishing private ownership of resources, money, and private trade makes markets less free and usually less efficient, I would be very interested in well reasoned arguments (or even better: evidence) to the contrary.
(Or maybe you just have a different definition of socialism?)
Perhaps you can point to a list of socialist countries that beat capitalist countries economically? I won’t argue, but would like to know more about which they are, and how this is measured. I looked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_economics, which seems pretty clear that east bloc countries trailed significantly behind the western countries on most measures, and at best achieved parity.
capitalist economies beat socialist ones
Well, they do. I’m no fan of the Cult of Divine Impeccable Capitalism The One True Only Way, but that is how it has worked out in the real world. If this is your complaint, then it veers to the “Real Socialism has never been tried” argument, and if the various regimes which implemented their version of socialism from Enver Hoxha onwards aren’t Real Socialism, then what is it and where can we get it? Maybe there is a Marx-Engels Platonic Ideal that exists in the ether, but we can only go by what we’ve seen tried in the messiness of the material plane.
You should repeat and defend that claim in the next CW appropriate thread.
@Sandpaper26
I see a decent bit of push back against that (although not necessarily by socialists).
Even if it were true, I don’t see how does that make for an extremely hostile environment? Do you feel that you are unable to make your arguments, that people refuse to engage those arguments fairly, that there is too much opposition (and thus perhaps too much burden on one person to rebut very many comments) or something else?
I’d say ‘too much opposition’ is pretty fair. In this thread alone there’s at least 4 (Uribe, Radu, Ketil and DavidFriedman) maybe 6 (Daiseach and yourself) expressing some form of anti-socialist viewpoints, some clearly very initially hostile (particularly Radu). And that’s lighter than normal with a few of the more pervasive right wing voices currently banned. Even if you are keen to engage with opponents of socialism, that’s up to 6 different argument chains to follow. That’s going to be exhausting, and it’ll happen every time.
that’s up to 6 different argument chains to follow.
I dispute that, we all seem to be taking that contention about “capitalist economies beat socialist ones …even though that flies in the face of history” and going “oh no it don’t”.
That’s one argument chain that should be easy enough to defend: how does this fly in the face of history, what are the successful socialist economies that equalled or beat capitalist ones? Go!
Come on, if I can argue amateur Catholic theology from Transubstantiation to the telos of marriage to Scriptural exegesis to ‘Shroud of Turin – first class relic or simply devotional object?’, surely a Socialist can handle six points of contention? Don’t tell me modern Socialism is slacking off on how to argue dialectical materialism! 🙂
You and Ketil, maybe (though Ketil also included more general pro-capitalist opinions). But Uribe and Radu were not involved in that comment chain, and Aapje (maybe, less certain of his politics, but its the vibe I get) and DF are more generalised ‘anti-socialists’ based on what I remember about their post history. But the point was that’s up to 6 different people to engage with on this thread alone. And this isn’t even an ‘argue about socialism’ thread. So I could definitely see volume of responses putting off individual commenters.
Now, on the specific issue, imo saying that “capitalist economies beat socialist ones” is a useless statement, as at best you’d need to define what counts as a ‘capitalist economy’, ‘socialist economy’ and ‘beat’ before you can have a real discussion about it. Which is part of the problem of why I’m reluctant to debate socialism online, it just seems to devolve to arguing definitions (that and the potential to just make me depressed or angry).
@Desrbwb
Using the same definitions are crucial, because otherwise one person is criticizing/defending communism and the other is criticizing/defending social-democracy.
In my response to qwints I was mostly just trying to figure out what exactly was meant.
I consider myself rather centrist, economically, which is only anti-socialist if you regard social-democracy as anti-socialist.
at best you’d need to define what counts as a ‘capitalist economy’, ‘socialist economy’ and ‘beat’ before you can have a real discussion about it
Well, yes? It’s not much use here if we’re arguing over ranking Pink Floyd’s Greatest Hits and then it turns out one of us is using The Moody Blues songs as “hits by The Floyd”.
It’s sort of basic that we define what we mean by “this, that and those” before we get to the hair-pulling and name-calling?
As to being “anti-socialist”, well I am and I amn’t. I’m very sympathetically inclined to old-school Labour before they decided to get all modern and Tory-lite (in my own country as well as next door) for the sake of electability and getting their hands on the levers of power so they could dump the working class and woo the middle-class, and I’d have a kind word to throw to the Wobblies via the links with James Connolly in Irish history/politics. (So far as I know, modern trades unions no longer have a paramilitary arm 🙂
All of which is to say I am more on the level of grass-roots, shop-floor activism rather than grand overarching theoretical underpinnings about pulling down the entirety of society; I am with Chesterton about:
But I’m certainly on the right side of the spectrum when it comes to social conservatism!
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Let’s see if I can properly respond to that. Yes, there is a lot of opposition and that’s pretty tiring. But I think my first comment (the hostile one) suggested the solution: stop trying things the same old ways. That path is beaten, and yes, I think it’s pretty fair to say it’s beaten to death.
But like people were quick to point out, including my comment and answers to it, this is not the only possible path.
I don’t think it’s fair to come to an open, civilized forum and complain that your ideas aren’t better supported. We aren’t distributing equal support for every idea. If there is too much pushback AND the pushback is civilized AND the pushback is at the very least internally consistent, and that’s been happening for years – maybe the idea is wrong. Or at the very least, the approach is wrong. And we very very much would like to see some new ways to approach the issue.
@Aapje
Then my apologies, I must have misremembered something or gotten you confused with someone else.
@Deiseach
Likewise, sorry that I appear to have misjudged your position.
I agree with the sentiment here. Yes, definitions are important. But, for example, take Radu’s statement from another part of this thread, that “It’s just that… it just doesn’t seem to work.”. I wholeheartedly disagree with this, but I’d bet that if asked what Radu means by ‘socialism’ you’d get a very different answer to me (and that’s all I really want to say on that right now, if a similar sequence occurs in the next CW thread I may get further into the weeds). This compounds when dealing with multiple people, as you’d have to confront, define and address each differing definition separately. Which adds to the initial point I was trying to make, that engaging seriously with multiple people simultaneously like that (whatever the subject) is draining. Hence why I could see ‘too much opposition’ making people with the outnumbered opinion more reluctant to post/get involved.
@Desrbwb
I have a tangential question for you about the definition of “socialism”, if you don’t mind.
I’ve gotten into some debates recently with friends who are self-described socialists (and Bernie supporters) and we’ve ended up determining that we are using different definitions of socialism. Basically, I was thinking about the dictionary definition about community ownership of means of production while they mean something about democracy and popular input into politics or anti-oligarchy or something that I’m still not clear about.
My question is why keep using the word “socialism”? If the word keeps getting in the way of people accepting what you’re arguing about why keep using it? Especially considering that it is one of the biggest “boo”-words of 20th century politics. Is there some advantage or objective for using the word that I’m missing?
qwints, the Irish Citizen Army had their own uniform and were open to women whom they trained in the use of arms, as well as the men 🙂
If what you want to do is to defend your position, all you need do is offer your definitions. You then have to defend them, and the claims made using them, against attacks from a variety of different positions.
If, for example, you use the “state ownership and control of the means of production” definition, you have to defend it against Aapje, who would argue (I think) that social democracy, sometimes also called socialism, and consisting of a market economy with a good deal of government redistribution and control, is better. You would have to defend it against me arguing that a pure market economy with little or no government is better. And you could defend it against Honcho, arguing from a third position.
But you could do all of that in terms of a single definition of socialism.
I routinely have to defend my position against attacks from a variety of other positions. It occurs to me that this is one of the few environments I have spent much time in where my position may be more common than yours.
Yes, Desrbwb is absolutely right. I’ve been well in the minority in various internet discussions with 6 people attacking me, and it simply isn’t possible to respond coherently. SSC folks try hard to be civil and so there are few nasty comments, but it simply doesn’t work with 6 against 1. This is what happens when there is a minority position where several in the majority are very interested in the subject and so want to interject their point of view. Socialism is one of those positions on SSC that doesn’t work in our back and forth threads because of this effect. There are probably some other subjects like this (folks who argue for SJ I suppose), but not too many. I think lots of folks here would like to hear an intelligent argument for socialism, but I understand why they don’t want to stick out their noses. Maybe if someone could make an effort post advocating socialism, while stating that they will not join the argumentation in response? There needs to be some way.
How do we tell the difference between ideas that are indefensible and ides that are defensible but are overwhelmed for some non factual/logical reasons?
@Mark V Anderson
Dogpiling is a real thing and should be discouraged, but we do discourage it on SSC. Not perfectly, of course. I agree that if socialists are getting it worse than others, they should say so, and people acting in good faith should abide by that. (Even so, I find it a little weird that socialists alone among the many groups here are so put upon.)
My rule, which I’ve mentioned here before, is don’t pile on after the third reply, unless you’re really sure you have something to add that the other three didn’t. Maybe it should even be lowered to two.
If I understand the descriptions of the problem correctly, it’s precisely that everyone does have something to add.
If six people are all making essentially the same argument against your position, you only need one response. If six people are making six different arguments you need six responses, which is a problem if you have limited time and energy but are afraid that if you leave an argument unanswered observers will conclude that you can’t answer it.
@ Nick:
Not effectively. Note that this line of conversation only started when a dogpilee explicitly raised it – what fraction of dogpiles do you think see any objections at all? It’s a tough thing to quantify, but I’d be astonished if it broke a percentage point – a quick scan of the hOTs suggests it might come up organically a few times a year. (Take albatross out of the equation and it gets even grimmer.)
Selection mechanisms select against complaints by those selected against. Mark explicitly raised SJ proponents as another such group.
ETA:
@ David:
Emphasis on the fact that this fear is valid.
Yes this is the issue. Socialism is a multi-faceted issue, and there are lots of different ways of looking at it. And in fact if everyone makes the same argument, then the minority person has it pretty easy; they just respond to that argument. It is responding to the six different arguments that is so time consuming.
I suspect that 90% of people in the 1st world are against hard socialism (that is, not social democracy), and so I think it isn’t real surprising that there are a lot of nay sayers here. Much of the rest of the Internet is full of lefties, so probably a lot more than 10% socialists in such places and it could be discussed in a reasonable manner. But it really isn’t inside the Overton Window here. In every forum there are subjects where the participants over-whelmingly are on one side, and argumentation doesn’t work. Even SSC.
@Dan L
Three points. First, you’re leaving out the dogpiles that don’t happen because folks self-police. I wrote a reply to the comment above earlier and didn’t post it, after deciding I didn’t really have anything special add. I’ve seen much more dogpiling on other fora—if SSC really were a free-for-all, Sandpaper26 and Desrbwb would each have received a lot more replies.
Second, part of the reason I’m skeptical socialists are uniquely put upon is that most of these replies treated them extremely delicately, despite the thread starting with accusations of “extreme hostility.” I don’t for instance see how Radu’s post was “very initially hostile.” David’s extreme hostility amounted to asking them to post again sometime. Pachyderminator asked them to simply expand on something said earlier.
Third, there’s a difference between a thread where someone is putting forward an argument expecting to be challenged, and a thread where someone is just putting something out there. For example consider one of @Atlas’s several threads where he lays out a giant argument and asks for folks’ comments. He never replies to everyone; he rarely replies to more than a few. But I think it’s evident he’s not there to have a back and forth conversation. Which is fine. Soliciting a lot of replies he can just think about may be more helpful than having a few long arguments. The point, anyway, is that there are conditions—like this thread, I’d say—where dogpiling doesn’t really apply.
FWIW, if anyone is likely to be dogpiled on SSC, I think it’s much more likely to be an SJ proponent than a socialist.
@DavidFriedman
This is a valid fear. Personally at least I find it much more exhausting when I respond to someone’s objection and then the two or three or five people repeat the same thing later. It’s like, Can’t you people read? If you thought my answer was insufficient, why don’t you reply to that instead of starting from the beginning? Am I going to have to do this all over again? It’s definitely more exhausting than responding to different and possibly interesting objections.
Part of it depends on your (proverbial you) attitude toward the argument, though. That is, you can think of dogpiling as an unhappy feeling stemming from a defensive posture. It’s easy to see how being ‘attacked’ from every angle will quickly overwhelm. But if you’re instead here to have a conversation, teach people some new things, and possibly learn something new yourself, you will read less hostility into replies.
But that’s a bit of a copout. No matter how positively you approach things, an environment where you’re challenged constantly can begin to feel hostile. So with qualifications I concede the point.
@ Nick:
I am utterly unsympathetic to this entire genre of argument. That someone else fails to meet your standards to a greater degree than you yourself do is not absolution.
(Also: SSC also lacks many tools that can be used to mitigate the effects of bad behavior. Dogpiling and the comment depth limit in particular are a nasty combination.)
Correct me if I missed a post, but has anyone else claimed it is unique? I don’t want to harp on this too much if we’re reading a different exchange, but reframing this as a problem unique to socialism would be an overtly hostile piece of rhetoric.
I believe you. It was an argument favored by one now banned that SSC favors politeness of tone over other epistemic virtues, and by that metric this hasn’t been too bad.
“This thread” being responses to Uribe, to Sandpaper, to Desrbwb, or these interwoven threads at the comment depth limit? I don’t think you’re entirely off-base in that there are areas where dogpiling isn’t a concern, but be very careful in declaring exceptions to general rules of good behavior.
Absolutely. The degree is arguable, but a desire to see rigorous opposition to SJ is one of the founding pillars of the SSC readership.
I’m a card carrying socialist, and I don’t see much point to engaging in the discussion. Most self-described socialists in the US today aren’t orthodox Marxists looking to convince people of the fundamental truth of the labor theory of value or dialectical materialism. I think most people would agree that the current American political and economic system is a weird hybrid that is very difficult to map onto pre-WWI/great depression theory. And fundamental predictions of Marxism, most notably the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, seem to have been disproven by history or at least to require a severe ‘re-interpretation’ of Marx’s original claim*.
That said, I think that socialism still is correct in its fundamental insights about how the characteristics of the capitalist mode of production which make is amazingly productive necessarily entail human misery which has become unnecessary due to the surpluses that capitalism has produced. I think we can change society for the better through more democratic control of the economy. And I think the working class who actually makes the world run has the power to change things for the better once they solve their collective action problems, which has been done before and will be done again.
*though I did find this 2010 working paper with the unusually precise claim that “the rate of profit declines at a rate of approximately 0.3 percent per annum after controlling for the counter-tendencies.”
+1
I think any honest discussion of socialism has to start with the premise that there are significant portions of the global economy, including in western/developed nations, that are already de facto under state control.
We can’t have an honest debate about the merits of socialism vs capitalism if we pretend the US as it stands today is 100% of either.
Obviously true.
So that puts those of us who believe in the free market and those who believe in socialism in the same boat — both arguing for a radical change in the present economic system. Just in different directions.
What about those of use who want a mixed economy but a completely different set of markets to be private/public vs the status quo?
I think the UK rail franchise system should be radically privatised and/or nationalised.
You want free markets in education and health care, but the government in charge of software development and clothing production?
Are you a Kipling fan?
@qwints
So doesn’t this imply that you support social-democracy/a hybrid system, as you seem to argue that you still need (quite a bit of) the surpluses of capitalism?
Do you think that regular people actually tend to understand economics? Or do you mean ‘control’ more in the sense of electing different elites?
It may be a mistake to see any class as a united front. A lot of that collective action is/was fairly selfish, benefiting those with lots of power, with little solidarity. See France, where certain workers have many benefits, while many others do not, with the former not seeming to care that much about the latter group.
No. The creations of capital don’t go away when moving to a socialism. If ownership of Tesla factories or Amazon warehouses was turned over to the workers tomorrow, the factories and the knowledge of how to use them would still exist.
I’d probably categorize a system where corporate boards were democratically elected by the public at large as socialist. Generally, I mean a system where the decisions about what to produce and how to produce it aren’t made by people as a result of accumulated wealth but instead are made by people collectively. That might look like democratically selecting a central planning board or workers councils or some combination thereof.
I’d certainly agree that this has been a common failure mode of working class movements in the last couple centuries. Like many socialists, I think these limited movements (e.g. craft unionism) have produced short term gains for their members but are ultimately unsustainable without broad working class solidarity. The paradigmatic example is the mid 20th century US union movement’s rejection both of an international labor movement and of working with Black and Hispanic workers domestically leading to it being crushed.
You can’t merely coast on with existing factories. Machines need to be replaced and repaired. Products often need to change/improve to remain competitive and/or adapt to changing desires, requiring changes to the production process. Dealing with changing demand may require buying or selling capital goods. Sometimes, you need a new kind of factory (for example, one that makes electric, rather than combustion cars).
All of these involve investments that risk capital and many workers are incapable or unwilling to risk their capital (it’s not very prudent to risk both your income and capital by working at and investing in one company). Capital need is not the same as labor need, so capital probably goes to the right place much better if you decouple the two.
Even merely running existing factories very often involves the risk of producing products without a guarantee that there are customers for (all) the products.
Ultimately, you need investments and thus shifting capital for the wealth to at least be preserved, in a dynamic environment (which is a fact of life, see COVID).
In capitalism, the potential of focused profits or loss not only produces a strong incentive to specialize in that kind of decision making so one gets good at it (which is a kind of labor, making at least part of ‘profit’ into labor compensation), but also puts more money in the hands of good decision makers and less money in the hands of poor ones.
Secondly, truly democratic decision making almost never seems to be possible (and certainly not at a larger scale), because inequalities of talent and specialization that often produce disparities in wealth production (which almost inevitably results in disparities in wealth accumulation), also often produce disparities in political power (which can be self-perpetuating, just like wealth).
It’s far from obvious to me that politicians or voters are always better at making collective decisions, largely for others, than people are at making individual decisions for themselves. The former seems much more prone to biases, lack of knowledge and corruption. There are reasons why some decisions are better made collectively, but others are probably better made individually.
Having a substantial amount of individual decision making has the big advantage that there is always someone looking out for number 1, yourself. The collective can very easily decide that they don’t like or care for you.
Do you think that this lack of solidarity is delusional or rational? Or to put it differently, do you think that all people would be happier and/or be better off in general with large/complete solidarity, or do you think that some should sacrifice for others?
Do you think that this solidarity can be created without oppression?
Neither describes capitalism. The decisions are made by the people individually, not collectively, as consumers deciding what to buy and workers deciding where to work.
If Musk decides to build electric cars and nobody wants to buy them, not many get built. If Uber offered its odd form of employment and nobody wanted to work on those terms, it wouldn’t happen.
At present, U.S. foreign policy is made by the people collectively, through a democratic system of elected politicians. Are you happy with the result? If not, how would your version of collective decision making differ, and why would it work better?
There’s an old adage that if one isn’t a Socialist by 20 then you have no heart. If you aren’t a Capitalist by 30 then you have no brain.
I think this is very true, though dearly wish it wasn’t. There is very clearly a deep undercurrent of injustice, both economic and otherwise, in the world that many people rail against the moment they really wrap their heads around it. Unfortunately, if it was a problem easily solved then we would have done it by now. The Liberal Democracy wave of the 19th century only shuffled the deckchairs for most people and the Communist Utopias of the 20th turned out to be anything but. The next great social experiment hasn’t entered the mainstream yet, though, and this leaves most of us with no other plan but to just keep on banging the Capitalism button because it’s the only proven method we have. Absolute poverty, starvation, chronic disease and many other negatives have been reduced far more by the rising economic tide than any ideology. Capitalism has provided all these despite it being deeply unfair and unjust for everyone involved in the process.
I am hopeful that the rise of the internet and our new way of communicating in a truly global manner will produce something to change our course towards another utopic ideal. However, I have no idea what that might look like, if I did I’d be telling everyone about it.
I wonder at this. Aside from my puzzlement that the system is unfair and unjust for everyone – is the injustice simply that others are richer than you? I know the socialist adage about the “working class” being exploited, but I’m pretty sure wages constitute a vastly larger portion of revenues of corporations than profits (i.e. capital returns to owners). Quite a lot of people are able to move from working class wage earners to bourgeois capitalists (a.k.a. retired) over their lifetime, further diluting class distinctions and definitions.
I’m happy to concede social democratic ideals like progressive taxation, unemployment benefits, and universal health care, but I consider these charity towards the less fortunate or maximizing utility rather than justice. You don’t deserve to get something for nothing, and you don’t get to decide that fairness dictates that your chosen career as a weed-smoking unpublished writer should pay as much as my chosen career as a computer consultant.
*Sigh*
Equality of Opportunity != Equality of Outcome
Do I really need to say this explicitly? I feel like this rejoinder comes up any time anyone mentions something vaguely like social care and I’m unsure anyone has ever advocated for it. Of course these two careers shouldn’t be rewarded the same. The fact that becoming a computer programmer costs significantly more than becoming a drug addled layabout is the problem, not that one pays better than the other.
At my university, computer science majors and weed-smoking English majors were paying the same. It seems to me that if student loan availability or interest rates had any relation whatsoever to expected income this wouldn’t be the case.
I think that’s part of it for a lot of people, but if you want to phrase it a little more charitably it’s more about society being really bad about distributing wealth in a way that does anything remotely resembling maximizing utility.
Utility increases very non-linear with wealth (getting €1000,- gives you more utility when it’s half your monthly income than when it’s 1% of your monthly income) so all else being equal you want the amount of money to be distributed equally between everyone on the planet.
Yes, some amount of wealth inequality encourages people to become computer consultants instead of writers when we have a shortage of the former and a surplus of the latter, thereby increasing the total amount of wealth, but there is a point where the amount of wealth inequality is optimally chosen to increase global utility and (at least from what I can tell) we are pretty far past that point.
Isn’t deciding what fairness dictates the whole point of this discussion?
I did. 🙂 I think maximizing utility is different from “fairness”, though. Starving people on a life raft can maximize utility by eating the weakest member, but it isn’t necessarily fair.
It seems to me that there are at least four different criteria that people find appealing:
1. Maximize total, or perhaps average, utility.
2. Fairness, defined as roughly equal outcomes.
3. Fairness, defined by desert. It’s fair that the person who chose to work hard gets more than the otherwise similar person who chose to spend as much time as possible on the beach, that the kind person gets more than the cruel person. It is not fair that someone is poor because he had the bad luck to be born with serious medical problems or to train for a job that vanished shortly after he started working.
4. Fairness defined in Nozick’s sense of entitlement. It is fair that, if you and I agreed to bet a dollar on the fall of a coin, the winner gets the dollar, even though he is no more deserving than the loser. Less obviously, but along similar lines, it is fair that the person who produces lots of value gets lots of value, even though the amount of value he produces may depend on lots of things irrelevant to desert, such as the luck of the genetic lottery, being born in a society that values his particular skills, and the like.
3 turns into 2 if you take the position that everything affecting desert is something you don’t deserve, that you are kind or cruel, hard working or lazy, due to genetic or environmental factors beyond your control.
@David.
Excellent! I am saving this comment as a quick short description of economic fairness. I am thinking it should even be made a top level comment to find out which option people think is the best use of the word “fair,” except that I think most people would use a different version for different circumstances, so I’m not sure that we’d get useful responses.
Wages are roughly 10x compared to corporate profits. this chart to this one.
. But that’s a not a good refutation to the claim of exploitation for two reasons. First, traditional marxists believe that all profit is exploitation (i.e. that labor is entitled to all it creates). So much like an absolute anti-tax libertarian who thinks taxation is theft, the exact amount of surplus value exploited isn’t that relevant to the argument. Second, most people don’t own stock, and a vast majority of people have significantly more lifetime income attributable to wages than form investment income.
There’s an interesting question relating to the rise of passive investing about how to categorize a world with the same basic mode of production but with all shares held by the state or worker pensions. Do CalPERS investments count as collective ownership of the means of production?
@qwints
Why should we put stock in the opinion of extremists (communist, libertarian or otherwise) who care about ideological purity of the system, complaining about even minor profits, taxes or such, where that seems to derive from a belief that these impurities prevent a utopia, which they cannot prove and which seems very unlikely.
Besides, all that’s needed to dismantle the claim that profit is (entirely) exploitation is the observation that loaning out money has risks and that people often pay money to insure themselves against risk. In fact, the real difference between investing and loans with interest is that in the former case, labor insures more strongly against failure of the company by sharing those risks with investors.
Isn’t the labor vs capital model a bit… Victorian?
Wouldn’t it lead you to argue that CEOs are being exploited by the shareholders?
Bankers are workers and bonuses are a part of their wages to which they are entitled?
If you asked me what drives wealth inequality (of opportunity) in the 21st century, it’d be education (in the broad sense). Not just their parents moving to somewhere with a good school or getting them into a good university, but all the social and cultural things that put them in their class. Like how to write a CV or tie a tie or talk to police. What values they are supposed to hold. All the things that communicate: I am $CLASS and you should treat me as such.
Left-wing ire today seems drawn far more strongly to the salariat than the bourgeoisie.
@fibio
I think that you are making a major and very common mistake by conflating fairness with justness (assuming that fairness means “treating people equally without favoritism or discrimination.”).
(Theoretical) text book capitalism is extremely fair, as it has no favoritism, rewarding people for what they sell/provide, regardless of who they are. The injustices we actually see comes from several sources:
– Natural inequality & luck differences between people which impacts they ability to produce, where most people want to discriminate in favor of those with lesser natural ability or less luck, but not in favor of those who are lazy (usually regardless of whether that laziness is actually a lack of natural talent).
– Discrimination, first and foremost in favor of family & partners.
– Various facts that make theoretical text book capitalism impossible
Also, I would argue that capitalism increases inequality by allowing people to use their abilities more effectively, so the differences in ability then produce greater differences in outcomes.
So then the first question with regard to unjustness is whether one considers it just or unjust if people get to maximally use their talents (which tends to benefit others). If the former, the unjustness is not so much due to capitalism, but rather, not erased by it, which is a significantly different situation. Also, this definition of justice means that equality of outcome is impossible. If one defines justice as equality of outcome, the common criticism of a certain kind of socialism applies: that it can only maximize this kind of equality by treating people according to the lowest common denominator, which means that lots of talent is left unused and society is thus poor.
In the model where capitalism is the problem, merely removing it creates justice. However, in actuality, we see that favoritism to family and partners happens regardless of the economic model. Without capitalism, people will still be born with different genes and have different luck. None of that is erased if you get rid of capitalism.
So you can then add things to capitalism that produces (the kind of) fairness that it doesn’t produce naturally or you can try another economic model. However, any model needs to deal with human nature, as well as various issues that no economic model can simply erase.
PS. I also think that a common mistake by critics of capitalism is to ignore the costs of capitalizing on your talents. Equalizing the benefits without equalizing costs does not actually equalize outcomes and logically makes the talented wary of capitalizing on their talents, if it makes them worse off. Yet…if we reward people for capitalizing on their talents, this not only results in different benefits to that person specifically, but also inequality of opportunity, because people won’t just consume these benefits, but will use it to increase their opportunities and of those they love. So realistically, you have to accept a certain level of inequality of opportunity and outcomes.
The original version of the Heart/Head line apparently comes from 19th century France, with “Republican” rather than “Socialist.”
In a parallel universe, COVID-19 wasn’t so bad. The disease begins in December 2019, from a shady seafood dealership in central Ohio.
The disease is exactly as contagious as our COVID-19, and has a similar latency period…after which sufferers have a mild head cold, and nothing else.
however, the disease IS instantly lethal to all domesticated cats and dogs. When exposed to humans that can transmit the virus, the animals sicken and die in days. Nothing can be done.
In this other universe, how much did we change up our routines? how much did it wreck the economy?
I’ll just read this as “cats or dogs”, because a disease that infects humans, cats, dogs, and no other animals, and is the same for cats and dogs but not humans, would be a scientific marvel.
I expect there would be a bunch of measures to protect cats and dogs (probably mostly organized by private orgs). But nothing like what is happening with the real covid.
If the disease can also be passed on by the animals (to other animals and humans), you can look at the response to BSE and the ongoing African swine fever epidemic for an idea of what would happen: mass killings of infected animals, strong hygiene rules about susceptible animals, and the disease becomes notifiable in humans.
People would have goats and otters as pets?
As cute as they are, they tend not to have the same sort of household compatibility as cats and dogs.
Studies have shown that, were they house-trainable, certain species of small deer would be a good animal to try to domesticate.
Silver lining is that it would burn through the human population pretty fast. Not sure if it would become endemic or not tho… If not, there’s a chance to isolate some pets temporarily, possibly in sanctuaries. But it wouldn’t be pretty.
This seems unfair. One of the advantages in that universe is that we don’t have to do human testing to develop a vaccine for cats and dogs. So we could have saved a good number of them, even if vaccination had to be paid for out of pocket.
This is the backstory to the original Planet of the Apes.
So the answer is obvious: once all our pets die, we create a race of intelligent apes and harshly enslave them.
Sorry. You can’t argue with logic.
It dies two weeks later, because no one goes to or from Ohio.
Not true at all, the Cleveland Browns have one of the largest national fanbases in the country from all the former Cleveland natives fleeing the city.
You’re right, in a way.
Hm, looking at a map Ohio is landlocked (except for the bordering lake which I am assuming is freshwater), so where is the centre of the state getting seafood? No wonder it’s dodgy! (Doubly so if it’s importing seafood because anything that long on ice will not be good when it gets there).
Fun fact – unless you’re buying your seafood directly from either the fisherman at the dock or a local fishmonger who’s buying it from the fisherman at the dock, you’re likely eating fish that was caught at least a few weeks ago, if not a more than a month.
Seafood, if it’s frozen immediately after it’s captured, will stay fresh for around 5 months or so. Yeah, it won’t be sushi grade (fancy sushi places will normally have their fish packed on dry ice and flown in, with normally only a week or so passing between time of catch and consumption).
In short, the whole “don’t eat seafood if you’re not near a coast” thing isn’t real. Everyone’s seafood is mass harvested, mass frozen and shipped around the world.
Also, fish from Lake Erie are fine, dammit. I grew up just a few miles from the lake, and our parish fish fries were always Lake Erie perch. It’s no delicacy, but it’s still delicious.
It is real, though. I live close enough to the coast that the seafood market I go to has their own boats.
If I were to go to the supermarket, though, all bets are off.
On the other hand, when I lived in Tennessee a friend who had grown up in Virginia frequently commented “Tennessee is a place where they think catfish is a seafood.”
I like catfish, but he had a point.
My hometown of Omaha, Nebraska has a *top* rate sushi joint. You can get sushi-grade fish in a lot of midwestern cities: they export fresh beef by plane and import fresh fish.
Speaking of my local fish market, so every Christmas Eve we do the Feast of the Seven Fishes with friends. Rotating host basis, everybody cooks different stuff, etc. The main course is always a whole baked red snapper.
My friend who was doing the snapper this year had placed an order at the fish market for a whole snapper, 7-9 pounds, to pick up on Christmas Eve morning around 9am. At 5am, my friend’s phone rang, and she woke up, wondering if somebody had died. It was the fish market boat captain, calling to tell her not to show up at 9. They had looked at the inventory and only had a snapper that was barely 7 pounds, and they didn’t think that was good enough, so at 3am they took a boat out and caught her a fresh 8lb red snapper, and they’re on the way back to the market with it, but probably won’t be there until 10.
That is some service, man. And that fish was delicious. Also now I really want fish for dinner…
I know the supply chain should make it irrelevant, but not eating seafood more than fifty miles from the coast (or at least a substantial deepwater port, like the one in Portland, Oregon) seems like a pretty good heuristic anyway. Probably it’s got as much to do with culture as it does with the actual fish.
In short, the whole “don’t eat seafood if you’re not near a coast” thing isn’t real. Everyone’s seafood is mass harvested, mass frozen and shipped around the world.
Ah well, I’m spoiled from living on the coast and having at least three fishing ports in the locality so the fish is caught and landed fresh as can be, as well as having grown up where, as a child, I was accustomed to seeing one of the last real old fish joulters (fishwives) standing on the street corner every Friday with her wooden boxes from the trawler, selling her wares. Of course, there wasn’t any such thing as ice in the boxes with those fish, so as the day went on…. better to buy first thing in the morning! 😀
Also, fish from Lake Erie are fine, dammit.
Oh, I have no objections to freshwater fish. But I do think that a seafood stall in the middle of a land-locked state would indeed tend to be shady (“never mind the tentacles and the extra eyes and the ominous gurgling chanting you hear from the back, these are the finest of the Deep Ones – I mean, deepwater fish. Yes.”)
@Deiseach
Fair point about seafood. But that reference to the end of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is uncalled for. 🙁
But that reference to the end of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is uncalled for
Ah now, we were told it was a shady dealership that promulgated Covid-19 amongst domestic pets arising from the “seafood” it sold. If you’re gonna be importing your freshly frozen seafood from New England, it behooves you to adopt track and trace as part of your quality control 🙂
If I can have a packet of crisps that tell me the spuds from which they were made were grown in a field in Roganstown, then Ohio should be able to tell if the fish and lobsters exported by truck from the Innsmouth fish-packing houses are up to the mark, particularly if they investigate the quality of the “fish begun to swarm into the harbour fit to kill, an’ heaven knows what sized cargoes we begun to ship aout to Newb’ryport, Arkham, an’ Boston” and are those markets satisifed with the products? 😀
In the UK, OTOH, there is a Coronavirus Act 2020.
But given the fusion of powers and 2019’s landslide majority, the legislature mostly does whatever the cabinet wants it to.
Today in Why is there a Wiki page for that? I present: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_that_most_frequently_use_the_word_%22fuck%22
Note that this list includes 144 entries, each with 150 or more f-bombs in it, with year of release and two kinds of references, plus total number of fucks given, length of feature, and the per-minute rate–the fuckquency, if you will. A staggering amount of work went into this page. There is also a second chart at the bottom tracking when the record for most fucks per movie was set and broken since 1970. Finally, the talk page has a number of quibbles over little details, including one guy fretting that the movies are ranked by total and not frequency and therefore the article’s title is misleading. The article was at some point nominated for featured list status, and has survived ten separate attempts to have it deleted.
Wikipedia, ladies and gentlemen.
Reminds me of the film Knocked Up, where the protagonist and his friends had the dream of setting up a website to catalog the precise moment of nudity in commercial films.
Seems rather quite at this point, honestly.
I am positive that this is already a thing and has been since before Knocked Up came out.
I also seem to recall that one of the UK tabloid newspapers used to do this for their weekly TV listings.
IIRC in the film itself they discover the real-life website they’re accidentally ripping off.
Mr Skin.
I think. It’s too early in the morning for me to be looking at that.
As a teenager I would have paid money for access to that database.
Some people just have odd interests, and just can’t say no to indulging in them, even if doing so makes them look foolish.
I once invented a drinking game for the Game of Thrones TV show: have a drink every time you see a man die or a woman naked. I started writing it up, intending to publish it on the web somewhere. But as I catalogued the number of drinks per episode, I started running into various problems with definitions. Did a woman have to be completely nude to count? And if not, how undressed was undressed enough? Did a man have to die literally on screen, or was just off screen good enough? And on and on.
At that point, I had a sudden moment of clarity. Did I want to be the guy who stepped frame by frame through fantasy sex scenes counting prostitutes and looking for butt-cracks or pubic hair, so they would officially count as nude? No. No, I didn’t. So I dropped the whole project.
I guess the worthies who compiled this page about fucks in movies never had a similar moment.
There’s a lot less ambiguity with deciding whether or not someone has dropped an f-bomb, compared to deciding if someone is nude in frame.
Where offscreen deaths are concerned, I haven’t seen the TV show, but in the books, having somebody’s death reported but not directly shown was an absolute, ironclad guarantee that they were still alive. No exceptions.
One of the things I love about Wikipedia are meticulously curated lists of things related to super niche or esoteric topics.
This link is great, thanks.
Anyone see 60 Minutes last night? They had a historian named Frank Snowden on the program, and I was wondering whether it’s just me that thinks he looks like David Friedman.
I can see the similarity, though I think the hairstyle accounts for a lot of it.
I briefly thought to myself “What would I ask Bryan Caplan?” before remembering that I’d already notified him about reviews of “The Case Against Education” from Greg Cochran, Spotted Toad, and Education Realist. Caplan can respond to those whenever he feels like it, which turned out to be years from hearing about a critique in the case of Scott Alexander on mental illness.
That Education Realist response seems like begging the question. “Cutting school funding will hurt already-struggling black people!” Well it will if you assume school helps anyone, but if you’re assuming that then you’ve already disagreed with the meat of Caplan’s thesis and it doesn’t matter if cutting education would have disparate impacts because the whole endeavour is mistaken. That disagreement deserves more attention, rather than four thousand words on how the author is the only one brave enough to darkly hint about race and IQ.
For those in American timezones or possibly British night owls, If you have a flexible schedule and want to play twice a week, I will be DMing a 5e dungeon crawling game using discord and Roll 20 as virtual table top. For the player’s perspective, you do not need any experience specifically with roll 20
https://app.roll20.net/lfg/listing/229698/crawl-to-20
In the application please mention that you saw this on SSC.
Welcome to 2030. In the past week you have ingested one kilogram of human flesh. How did it come to this?
It was just 20 hot dogs, dude.
Hebrew National is people?!
Are people kosher if those people themselves kept kosher?
A Jewish classmate in middle school told me so, but my Jewish father said otherwise.
Isn’t the answer common knowledge among those who keep kosher? It’s an uncomfortable question, but it’s just the sort of question a cleverish child who loves attention would ask when being taught what animals are kosher.
I’ve always wondered and this seems like the best place to ask: how does kosher food preparation deal with “cut yourself and got blood on the food/knife/cutting board’?
That’s not a property of it. Like, a pig or rabbit doesn’t become kosher if it eats kosher, either.
Re: cutting yourself – from Chabad: https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/838386/jewish/Is-Human-Blood-Kosher.htm
Basically, just wash it off.
The breast milk stuff is a little more interesting.
Humans are land animals that do not chew their cud and do not have cloven hooves, so no, they can never be kosher.
@beleester: “Looks like Minotaur’s back on the menu!”
@beleester:
Humans do not count as animals for this purpose.
I am a priest at a parish that distributes the chalice to the laity at daily mass. Daily mass attendance has been low but the amount of wine to be consecrated is determined by the server’s habit so I have had to consume the remaining 100 grams of blood and body at the end of mass.
FTW
+1
Why is your server a monk, and what has his clothing got to do with it?
What does “server’s habit” mean in this context?
I’m in the Shia LaBeouf Actual Cannibal full-dive VR roleplay server and have eaten many many kilograms of human flesh.
We already have games like Dead by Daylight where you run around trying not to be put on a meathook by a serial killer (also a player). If we do get the platonic ideal of VR, I expect we’ll very quickly end up with similar sorts of games, almost indistinguishable from reality.
Removal of human flesh for the purposes of weight loss is a safe and easy procedure that can be accomplished by any modern blender, and is also the cheapest way to get some animal fat and protein, given recent constraints on traditional meat supplies.
It’s been a slow hunting week – many Eloi have died of radiation poisoning, and most of those who remain are heading south. On top of that, other members of my tribe want their share. One kilogram was, unfortunately, all I could secure.
They find out that placenta is really good for you?
Bonus stackexchange thread https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/19071/is-human-flesh-a-kosher-food
My lycanthropy is not responding well to my new meds. They’re good for my anxiety, though.
There are versions of lycanthropy in fiction where the werewolf doesn’t transform, per se, but a wolf tears itself out of the human body and then consumes the remains. Shame they never showed the reverse, with the human chowing down on their wolf corpse. This also seems like a great grift setup, selling the pelts.
Where did you find that? That’s an interesting concept.
I saw it in Netflix’s Hemlock Grove, which is not a very good show at all, I kind of regret watching it. Can’t speak for the book which the show is based on, though.
My weird friend’s obsession with the question of whether attractive people taste better has escaped the realm of the hypothetical and he’s tricked a group of us into performing an unwitting blind taste test under the guise of a dinner party.
Also, I am a greedy bastard.
Wait, this is a thing in your life?
Honestly, it’s more a comment he made once that he’d obviously been thinking about for a while and we’ve never let him live it down.
In fairness, this sounds like the kind of question naturally raised by a zombie movie (“Wow, the shambling hordes sure are interested in our more attractive protagonists”).
I mean, it’s a fair concept, once lab grown meat is viable. Get DNA samples from various celebrities, make burgers from the results, profit.
(1) New miracle diet: lose weight by autophagy! Cut off pounds of unsightly flesh then consume them – kill two birds with one stone by losing weight and avoiding hunger pangs!
(2) Surgical advances mean the Shylock forfeit is now feasible – cut off a pound of flesh without shedding blood. Can I help it if I take advantage of law suits to sate my grudges? “The law allows it, and the court awards it.” 🙂
Finally, a diet that relies on the second law of thermodynamics.
Weight loss by autophagy seems to me a case of trying to have your pound of flesh and eat it too.
In my personal case? Given how old I will be in 2030, I assume I will have been advised by my cardiologist to cut back.
Lab-grown meat went from proof-of-concept to economically viable with surprising speed, and once they had the ability to make meat in a tube they weren’t going to stop at cows and chickens. They found some mosquitos in amber, next year they’re rolling out Raptor Steaks.
There’s a company already working on something similar. Lab grown meat created from tissue samples of celebrities:
https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-bitelabs-make-salami-celebrity-tissue-samples-20140304-story.html
It was on on the menu, how could I not order it? I’d spend the rest of my life wondering…
An eccentric billionaire offered me a million dollars to eat the contents of the vacuum cleaner. With all the pandemic-related cleaning, I figured the only thing in there was the flakes of skin shed by me and my partner, and everything had been sanitized enough for weeks to be safe.
In the distant future, the Weyland-Yutani company hires you to head up a secret project to capture a xenomorph for study and evaluation as a bioweapon. Past attempts have failed, and you are given detailed files on what went wrong.
With the technology shown in Aliens and Alien 3, how would you go about capturing, storing, and experimenting on a xenomorph without significant risk to your team of scientists and mercenary troops?
Are we inside an Aliens movie when we are doing this? Because if so, I would try to leg it to somewhere as far away as possible so as to avoid being essential narrative collateral damage. Seems unfair to assume I would be so genre savvy though.
Land unmanned cage on the surface. Wait for someone to get in. Launch back into space. Since they are cold-blooded you can freeze them.
You trail the cage behind you in space on a 50-meter steel cable. Have explosive bolts that can sever the cable, and make sure they can be manually activated.
Don’t start with an adult. They’re too dangerous. Just kill the workers and the queen. Instead, start with eggs. And cross the facehuggers with some sort of fairly small, manageable test animals, like beagle-sized dogs.
Do the research in an isolated location, like an uninhabited moon or a space station where no other work is done.
Have the research facilities designed by people who build zoos and maximum-security prisons, to make it as difficult as possible for the aliens to escape.
Have all direct contact with the aliens be done by synthetics; as far as we know the aliens can’t infest them. (investigate this possibility early in the program.)
Have a secondary site that monitors the main site, staffed by humans, including scientists and soldiers, who can intervene if things go wrong. The secondary site should probably be in orbit or in a second space station.
Keep minimal food at the primary station, and keep careful track of its use. Investigate any discrepancies with priority. Incinerate all biological waste.
Be prepared to blow both sites to kingdom come if necessary.
Compensate your staff very well, including generous death benefits. Vet them carefully, to avoid spies and saboteurs. Monitor their activities outside the job too, to catch turncoats.
I think there should also be a third site to monitor the first two sites. The third one would be automated, camouflaged/cloaked, and only known to a few high-ranking people at Weyland Yutani. The first two sites would continuously feed detailed data to #3, including internal and external audiovisual surveillance camera footage. If the first two sites were struck by some kind of major problem, site 3 would detect it immediately and report the situation to the company’s leadership.
Also, the project should go to pains to protect itself from being attacked by mercenaries or rival companies. Unknown spacecraft (including any that are sending out distress beacons) that approach the area should be summarily destroyed. No communication–just start shooting.
Also, sites 1 and 2 should be designed to be very well-lit and with every room and hallway covered by surveillance cameras and motion sensors. This would even be the case for utility areas and storage rooms. All ventilation ducts should be too small for anything bigger than a cat to crawl through. There should not be any wall panels, drop-down ceilings, or raised floors. Neither of the sites should use colored or flashing lights for emergency backup light systems or alert systems. Every room should be painted white and should be suffused with bright, full-spectrum light at all times.
If it’s a horror movie and I’m genre savvy, I’d do it in a needlessly cruel way that leads to the xenomorph picking off the group horror movie style until there’s a sole surviving female duking it out in an arena where they’re being recorded for “evaluation”. I’ll also make sure the boss has to be on site to inspect (so he dies when things dramatically goes wrong) and that my getting away scott free is poignant social commentary on how evil corporations are. Also, I’ll make enough snarky remarks to CEO McEvilFace and look cool enough that there’s a good chance I turn good in the sequel.
While endeavoring to be in the sequel is good for your short term prospects I’m not so sure it works out great long term. If anything you’re more likely to die gruesomely in the later installments as they have a bigger SFX budget.
I mean, if I read the files, it becomes readily apparent that these things make a godawful bioweapon. Their blood damages stuff; they’re sneaky and kill things way, way too well; and they’re dangerously smart. Having them kill my enemies might make my enemies MORE dangerous.
Releasing individual xenomorphs to attack people might be more viable. Maybe. Even then…imagine trying to root them out of an urban environment.
If we still want to study them, doing so remotely seems a lot safer. Remote-controlled drones that we drop on the surface and leave there could do a lot, and it seems a lot less likely to lead to a breakout.
The sensible way to capture them is always to grab eggs, then grow a xenomorph. Doesn’t need to be a human, so pick a dumb and slow-moving test subject and fill it full of facehugger.
How can you even end in situation where you are able to control and deliver facehugger and it is not replaceable by something both cheaper and more efective and more controllable?
Are all Aliens able to reproduce? If so, can they be gelded?
“Yeah a bull Xeno is mighty frisky, but these here steers are sweet as kittens, jus’ watch your fingers around that second mouth, I tell ya ‘hwat.”
I’m told they are easy to raise, imprinting means the chicks get attached to the first person they see after hatching.
Based on gathered files it is clear that it is very poor fit as a weapon. Intelligent weapon that hates you is a poor idea.
Plain guns/artillery/nukes/whatever are better for nearly all goals, including terror attacks.
I cannot imagine any case where you would want to use it as a weapon.
I mean, if you want to wipe out a planet and don’t want to destroy it kinetically for some reason, you could sneak an egg onto an enemy planet? It could make a pretty good terror attack.
You still have enemy planet, now with facehuggers. I am not sure is it an improvement for typical cases.
They can’t reproduce without hosts, so once they wipe out the native population and then die off through attrition, you send in synthoids to clear the eggs.
It’s simple, once the aliens wipe out the enemy, just release a bunch of Chinese needle snakes to eat the aliens.
Sneak in a hundred fake eggs and maybe-maybe-not a live one in a hundred and one different locations, watch as they scramble to deal with all the reports.
Maybe take advantage of the confusion for a conventional attack.
In the movie Aliens vs Predator, it’s revealed that Predators were the Ancient Aliens who taught humans how to build Pyramids and the Xenomorphs were only “used as weapons” against humans in that Predators infected sacrificial victims with them because they wanted to hunt the coolest prey ever despite that quasi-waspian reproductive cycle.
(Ancient Aliens have gotten so hackneyed that a different Alien movie, Prometheus, added that our creators were a second species of Ancient Aliens who had nothing to do with the Pyramids.)
It’s a great psychological warfare tool. Imagine wondering whether your enemies have dropped a Facehugger somewhere on your planet.
Like the hydrogen bomb, though, it’s better threatened than used.
Send a non-anthropomorphic drone to collect eggs from some site like the spaceship on LV-426. Take these eggs to an uninhabitable (i.e. you need spacesuits) moon outside the jurisdiction of any Earth government. Build one facility with a nuclear failsafe for each egg. Start by infecting small animals; only progress to humans if this doesn’t go to shit. Never allow more than one alien in a facility at the same time; use the nuke before this happens. In general, don’t juggle as many idiot balls as the alien’s adversaries did in the movies, and don’t sweat it too much. Aliens shows that these things are actually pretty easy to kill.
Assuming Resurrection, Prometheus and Covenant are canon, no synthetics, as their behaviour and loyalty are unpredictable.
EDIT: Oh, and one spaceship for each egg, for transport. Pain in the ass but it’s best to be safe.
Hire mercenaries that’re competently led and haven’t recently escaped from a Vietnam movie. Kill all the adults. Freeze a few eggs. Bring them back to Earth labeled as interesting but basically routine geological samples from a comet core. We know from Alien 3 that they can infect nonhuman mammals, so you can breed them in sheep or something.
Keep the sheep in a fortified, acid-proof paddock located in Earth orbit, or, failing that, underground, with a big bomb ready to go off if a Xenosheep breaks loose and starts killing everyone.
I love the new Spyro game.
Child mercenaries and oocyte cryopreservation from dead women? That took a dark turn.
YouTuber esfelectra continues his Objectivist analysis of Star Wars.
So the key question is: of vaccines that eventually fail, how many produce results this good at this stage of trials? I would have hoped that Derek Lowe’s commentary on the trials would give this– you’d think he’d know that number if anyone does– but it doesn’t appear to:
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/05/18/first-results-from-modernas-coronavirus-vaccine
Lurrus of the Dream Den has officially been banned in Vintage.
For those who don’t follow Magic the Gathering that closely, Vintage is a format in Magic where basically all cards are allowed. It is seen as the highest power level of play in magic. For reference, the last Vintage banning was in 2007* and that card, Shahrazad, is largely seen as being one of the worst-designed magic cards in history.**
As far as I know, there has never been a banning from Vintage based on a card’s power level. The whole point of Vintage is abusing busted card interactions. I was previously on the fence, but I think this has pushed me into the camp of thinking that companions were a bad idea.
*Not counting cards that were designed for varient versions of Magic and were banned as soon as they were designed.
**This card has you basically stop your current game of magic and play a separate sub-game of magic. The loser of that game will then lose half their life when you go back to the first level of this game. Yes, this could nest, no it wasn’t fun.
To be fair, Vintage typically restricts a card or two per year. Lurrus only got banned because restricting it would do literally nothing.
(For those who don’t follow it closely: “banned” means you can’t use the card at all, “restricted” means the maximum you can have in a deck is 1 rather than the default of 4. Lurrus has the “Companion” mechanic which lets you cast a single copy from outside the game every game under certain conditions, which is the main reason why it’s so powerful.)
No love for the chicken expansions?
I could see more companions getting banned in vintage.
Zirda’s the only contender I can see, and while I’m not too familiar with Vintage my impression is they have better things to do than Grim/Basalt Monolith stuff if it’s not a near free roll. Shops (the natural home) would lose their Sphere of Resistance effects at minimum.
Lutri is a very strong possibility. Having to play singleton is a much smaller cost when all your best cards are singletons anyway, and copying Recall or Cruise is really good.
Even more astounding is this
Wizards is considering power level errata. That’s how dire the situation is with companion.
Is companion working ok in Limited?
Yeah companions are fine in Ikoria limited.
Strong but not the best thing you can do, while making your drafting really interesting if you get one of them. I haven’t played them, so they could be wildly broken in sealed, but I don’t think they should be balancing for sealed (like even less so then they should balance for Vintage).
It’s IMO an excellent limited mechanic in this format where the cycling deck is the boogeyman.
Cycling fell off somewhat, thank Christ. There was a scary week where it looked like a table could support two good cycling decks, but it’s heavily drafted enough where people aren’t getting the nonsense 12 land 8 payoffs 2 flare variants nearly as often.
@ManyCookies
I’ve said before that it seems like the cycling deck was balanced for pod drafting and the league drafting on MTGO/MTGA makes the deck feel more busted then it is because you lack the natural self-correcting you get in a pod. Good to hear that draft as a format has still managed to correct.
The biggest change, imo, was people started realizing that every deck got value out of the 1 cost cyclers. You don’t need payoff to have a deck that lets you churn a bit and reduce your landcount.
Once you weren’t seeing pick 8 Frostviel Ambushes anymore, the cycling deck got a lot scarier to draft.
I was about to post that. They’ve hard moved away from power level errata even on old ass Alpha cards whose on-card text needed extensive oracle updates anyway*, power level errata on a recently printed mechanic would be totally unprecedented.
I wonder what they have in mind for that route. They do have some degrees of freedom without altering the on-print text (which iirc is the primary reason they don’t do power level errata) since much of the mechanic isn’t laid out on the cards themselves, but they still couldn’t do stuff like “It starts in your opening hand” without contradicting the print card. I guess “If you companion this, discard a card from your hand” wouldn’t technically contradict the card, just make the companion instructions incomplete.
*Time Vault’s oracle history is an amusing power level errata journey, at one point enabling an entirely different infinite combo than infinite turns.
It would probably be -1 starting hand size rather than discard a card. There are a number of decks that might play a companion just for the free discard.
Or having it take a deckslot instead of a space in your sideboard.
ETA – wait, that might actually make the cards more powerful.
I like a dredge-esque draw replacement effect.
“Once per game if ~ is your companion, if you would draw a card put ~ into your hand instead” (templating is probably bad)
They could change the mulligan rules to say if you have declared a companion you look at one card fewer or put an extra card on the bottom. That’s probably the cleanest approach.
I would’ve preferred weirder rules changes that preserve the spirit of vintage – I like the proposal of not allowing restricted cards in side boards, which also nerfs wishboards, but I don’t see a problem with that.
Companions as a mechanic remains busted – I wouldn’t be surprised to see Lutri getting too strong in Vintage and WOTC basically playing whack-a-commander.
Even Vintage decks have key cards they want multiple copies of (Force of Will/Negation, Paradoxical Outcome, hatebears), I would be surprised if Lutri was worthwhile.
I don’t play vintage (although it sounds fun and I already have the expensive cards from playing legacy on MTGO), but it seems like a lot of the UB/Grixis control or tendrils decks could cut a few petitions/forces for a free 8th card. If it tips Storm or one of the particular control decks over the fun police (dredge) maybe they just unrestrict some shops stuff though
It’s been a while, but it has happened: Channel and I believe one other card (Time Vault?) were banned in Type 1 in the past.
So, how does this physically work? You’d need to leave the cards for the first game where they are for when you go back to that game, but you also have to use your deck to play the second game?
Yes. You leave the current state of play as is. You then take what’s left of your deck and use it to play another game of magic. When that games done, you shuffle all those cards back up, and they are now your deck again when you go back to the first game.
It strikes me as a clever idea, although it must be a real pain to implement if your game state is complicated and you can’t move to a different table to play out the secondary game. Is it just not fun enough for the trouble it causes?
It was a nifty gimmick but it got old fast. For physical implementation usually you would either move to a new table or put a play mat or something over the top of the existing board. The biggest issue wasn’t trouble so much as time. It made for some ludicrously long games, especially if they started nesting. Once organized play started it wasn’t really practical to have games that sometimes took 1 hour and sometimes took 5 hours.
Edited to add: This game is probably the niftiest it’s ever been, and possibly the only time it’s been cast in the last few years.
General Series of Questions: I’m seeing a bunch of news reports that describe people who had already been sick with COVID getting reinfected.
1. Are these stories likely true?
2. If these stories are true, does that imply anything about the future efficacy of any vaccines? My gut tells me that any vaccine’s maximum ability to prevent reinfection would be equal to the protection given by a prior infection. If a prior infection doesn’t protect you all that well, how does a vaccine?
1. No.
Reasons:
When the infection recedes, the virus is no longer present in all areas where you can swab. The longer this goes on, the more testing becomes a matter of luck.
Imagine a bowl of soup with small noodles. Many noodles present — (practically) every spoonful has noodles in them: your spoon test is clearly noodle-positive. Few noodles in the soup — now and then you have just brine in your spoon: clearly negative. Some spoonfuls later you ladle another noodle — where did that renoodlefection come from?!?
The early reports of ‘reinfected’ patients were from Asian countries with a somewhat rigid testing culture: daily tests, and after N* negative tests the patient is declared virus-free. Now the next test(s) are positive, what happened with that patient?
*2? 3?
Add to that that the swabbing procedure is often not done right. For a proper swab you have to go through the nose to the back of the upper throat, a rather unpleasant procedure, and when going through the mouth you have to do some serious wiping and not just lightly touch on one single spot. I expect that especially in the early stages of the pandemic that was no common knowledge.
Add another fact, that the virus disappears from the throat when it is still very active in the lung. It multiplies on the upper floor to spread, then moves downstairs. So in later stages, on one day the throat swabs find nothing, on the next day the patient has coughed shortly before the swabbing and the virus is back’
In all the many worldwide cases so far there may have been a handful of undiscovered immunocompromised patients who got a real re-infection. But I still doubt that they had survived the first time.
Just for completeness, there is finally an extremely tiny chance that a sample with extremely high viral load has cross-contaminated a virus-free sample during processing.
Now consider that the (usually sensationalist) media has issued, say, 10^4 articles worldwide, going back to the same few (dozens?) or so of ‘reinfected’ patients out of 4.62 million cases worldwide.
Conclusion: the probability of a reinfection within the next few months is zero for all real-life purposes.
Amazing analogy. Thank you so much.
ETA: so the proper way to read a story like this isn’t that the sailors in question were sick, recovered and now have come down with the disease again so much as they were sick, never really recovered but managed to pass as healthy on a few checks?
Credits for the analogy: Ch. Drosten. Only, he used a pool, goldfishes, and a bucket. I wanted something that doesn’t actively evade the ‘test’.
As for the sailors, my best guess is that they show the very long tail of being infectious. But 5 of 13? Is there a hidden factor at work? Random statistical fluctuation? I have not explanation, only the caution that there is very little reliable info, from a sample of 4.6 Megapatients.
Also, the tests are looking for viral RNA–it’s quite possible to still have viral RNA around long after you’ve killed off the virus.
Good, if early.
For safety, I understand the only way to know if the vaccine is safe after 3 months is to test it and wait 3 months.
Let’s say we want to give the vaccine 3 months of safety tests.[1] We test it on a large group (100? 1000? dunno.) and find no side effects after 2 months. Does this give us good reason to start giving the vaccine to more people while waiting for that final month to come in? Either to expand the testing pool or target the most at-risk-from-virus-but-unable-to-socially-isolate?
[1] I don’t know the real number of months.
You could do accelerated aging by keeping the test subjects at 40 C for about one month instead.
… I may have been two long in chemistry and too far removed from biology to address the topic.
You can also take advantage of relativistic effects by accelerating the Earth to near light speed and leaving the test population behind.
I always hear of the same three cases – a vaccine candidate for the 1976 swine flu that caused Guillain-Barre syndrome, an HIV vaccine candidate that made people more likely to get infected rather than less, and a syncytial respiratory virus vaccine candidate that made kids more likely to die. I hate the anti-vaxx movement because they’ve made it so hard to find legitimate information about this sort of risk.
Apparently there’s one other similar case – some vaccine candidate for a cat coronavirus made the cats more likely to die.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/opinion/coronavirus-vaccine-research.html
Your gut has been genetically engineered to produce cellulase. You pick 500 grams of grass from your backyard (no roots), pulverize it in a blender with some water, and drink the paste. How many calories does your body absorb from this meal?
I don’t think cellulase is like lactase, where you can just put a bunch of plasmids in an enteric pill and become tolerant to it.
The blending probably helps, but there’s a reason cows have such a big digestive system. Cellulase is pretty slow, because it only works on the end of the chains so I doubt you’d get much nutrition out of it. NileRed had to process his toilet paper at 50 °C for 48 hours before enough celulose had been digested that he could make moonshine out of it.
IIRC, koji secretes cellulase, so fermenting it might work. But at that point, I think you’d basically be eating silage.
Grass contains 70-85% water. Of the remaining dry weight, cellulose and hemicellulose total 50-60%. Assuming 100% digestion and absorption in your brave new gut, you get between 500 x 0.3 x 0.6 = 90 and 500 x 0.15 x 0.5 = 38 g of sugars. All sugars are calorically equivalent, so assume 4 food calories per gram, and you get 360 – 152 calories per 500 g of fresh grass.
But to reiterate what Lambert wrote, digesting cellulose is hard work, so I would not be surprised if actual absorbed energy is much lower than 100% theoretical, say 2/3.
Are you prepared to have belly size of a cow or a horse?
A gorilla gut would be most apt.
Like most men I know, I’ve never had long fingernails. Since these days I’m working from home and nobody cares how I look from the head down, I decided to grown them out. They got to a bit below half a centimetre before I couldn’t stand it anymore and cut most of them off, the primary motivator being that I could barely use a touchscreen.
Observations:
-Unsurprisingly, they made typing on a keyboard pretty hard.
-The edges constantly got caught soft/fibrous surfaces, which is really uncomfortable. If I had bothered to file down the corners this probably would have been mitigated, but I wasn’t that dedicated.
-On the thumbnail in particular, I notice that the nail grows with a slight curve so that the “point” of the nail is off-center relative to the finger itself. I noticed that in fact, the angle at which it is growing corresponds to the angle at which that finger grips objects. I don’t know if I somehow made this happen by continuing to use my hands, or if that’s how nails naturally grow.
-Human nails are not that strong. In the distant past, how did people deal with fingernails? They fray quite easily when not maintained and it seems like if you were to be living outside handling sticks and rocks, you’t tear your nails all the time and have bleeding fingertips: they just don’t break cleanly enough for them to naturally erode in the way that prevents them from being actively detrimental. (Though maybe they would, if I lived outside.)
-Some benefits: Scraping dried gunk from dirty dishes, scratching myself really well, plucking teabags out of hot water with no fingertip damage.
I’ve kept the left thumbnail because it doesn’t get in the way of much and it has taken little damage. It’s almost a centimetre. We’ll see what happens to it.
In conclusion, long nails are mostly a pain.
This is the kind of detailed analysis that makes SSC such a fascinating repository of knowledge.
+1
Traditionally a man would keep one of the little finger nails long, to clean your ears and do snuff with.
Also most women who wear long fingernails do it by gluing on fake ones. The real ones are too asymmetric and keep breaking off.
Some of us just have strong fingernails, though. /flex
Seems like the pinky finger nail would be the perfect size for that. My thumb-claw is too big (but I have tried!).
I’ve always been blissfully unaware of how, exactly, women deal with nails. I guess they’re either fastidiously maintaining real ones or constantly gluing on weird prosthetics? But I’m proud to know that if I were a lady, I could probably grow some pretty decent ones.
From personal experience I believe it’s mostly fastidious maintenance.
I meant pinky, just forgot what it was properly called!
I had never heard of the single long nail for anything other than cocaine, but apparently in Asia at least it’s been a thing for “cleaning your ears” (which appears to be a euphemism for picking your nose).
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-people-usually-men-have-a-very-long-pinky-little-fingernail/answer/Julia-Reece-2
Cleaning your ear is cleaning your ear (the folds of the outer part, and the entrance of the ear canal). Picking your nose is a bonus function.
Heard of contemporary teenagers who have one pointed longer nail for precise phone-tapping.
Albert Vigoleis Thelen describes this in “Die Insel des zweiten Gesichts”. His Swiss brother-in-law Zwingli, living on Mallorca, uses his long pinky-finger nail to command the workers around.
The baroque prose is Vigoleis’ (one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read), the sad little translation is mine.
I was hoping maybe this whole “deadly pandemic” thing might finally be the thing that could get me to stop biting my nails.
But then it turned out to not be deadly enough to sufficiently scare me into modifying my behavior…
I assume that in the past if they didn’t have a knife to trim their nail with they would bite them. Nails bite easily and neatly.
Not in my experience. It makes me want to keep biting, while clipping created a good edge.
Embarresing confession: I hardly ever clip my fingernails because I bite them down long before they get long enough to clip. I do bite them back fairly close to the quick, but that works for me.
I bite my nails too, but it’s not a nervous habit or anything like that; I deliberately do it instead of clipping because it’s easier than finding the clippers. It makes them a bit rough, but I can “file” them by scraping against my teeth.
I presume they trimmed their fingernails with their teeth when they got annoying. (Toenails might have been more of a problem.)
Not if you’re flexible enough.
Or, maybe this was the origin of primate pair bonding.
Mutually gnawing them off?
If that kind of activity directed at the nether regions is a 69, would this be an ll?
A double semi integral ⌠⌡ or a gamma-jay ΓJ .
To my shame, I can confirm.
Any old stone with a small smooth surface will do as a file. I tried it.
Why bother with teeth? A nail can cut a nail. Tearing is only a problem if it happens uncontrolled; if you trim one nail with another, you can start a very controlled “tear” that takes off as much of the nail as you need it to and, as a rule, no more.
But in my experience if you’re working with your nails regularly, you don’t need to trim them at all; the ends fray a bit every time you use them, and that keeps them at a reasonable level. I almost never am – that’s a lot of dishes – but I assume that in the distant past, people would have been doing so much more often; the kind of work that keeps my nails short is usually the stuff that’s changed least over the centuries.
I’ve been wondering about hair as well – why don’t humans work like most dogs, where the hairs naturally fall off as they reach a particular length? Why are most humans like poodles, where the hair keeps growing? Were humans bred for the same kind of hair-topiary as poodles?
This has bothered me too. Did pre-modern humans just have a big mop of hair hanging down to their elbows until they started getting handy and braided it or whatever?
How long ago did humans invent braiding and cutting hair? Maybe a *really* long time ago….
Venus figurines confirm female hair braiding is at least 30,000 years old. I would guess that cutting hair was invented not too long after cutting tools, so 1-2 million years ago.
Could it be that for the entire time that we’ve had perpetual head hair growth we’ve been smart enough to braid it or cut it? I’m not so sure it would be obvious to do that unless you’d already seen other people around you doing it. So there probably was a time when people had a lot of hair but didn’t know what to do with it yet.
Are there apes that grow long hair, and what do they do with it? Are they dexterous enough to make a shitty braid out of their apehair?
No other creature grows hair anywhere near as long as ours. I read a theory many years ago that it evolved through sexual selection specifically because the length made hairstyles possible.
Sunday school flannel graphs attest that Eve had hair at least long enough to cover her chest fully.
It seems likely that hair cutting probably arose before hair growing. Just like drinking cow milk arose before the genes to properly digest it as an adult. There’s a plausible story for how either cultural behavior could have arisen without the associated biological adaptation, and then would have selected for that adaptation, but there’s not a very plausible story for how the adaptation would have arisen without the cultural behavior already being in place.
Our hair falls off eventually, too.
Above a certain length they will fall off! But you usually don’t reach it, unless you’re a woman with a lot of patience for accidentally sitting on your hair.
Make fiends with more classical guitarists.
Do I haaave to?
Yeah, if you’ve been making your fiends out of purely heavy metal guitarists, they tend to get a little too crazy and gnaw at your fingernails when summoned.
So the solution is to mix in more classical artists into the blend to calm your fiends down, sometimes even toss in a hippie church accompanist or two, although those are more difficult to find out on the street or in their normal habitats during the covidpocolypse.
I think I’ve got a book of fiend recipes around here somewhere…
> In the distant past, how did people deal with fingernails?
Apparently in frontier America, some people sharpened them and used them as weapons. I’m reminded of a particularly disturbing passage from Albion’s Seed:
Thomas Ashe’s original account is on Page 86 of Travels in America (which I have not read, but perhaps I should): https://www.google.com/books/edition/Travels_in_America_Performed_in_the_Year/ddpCAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA86&printsec=frontcover
I keep em SUPER short. You list “good scratching” as a benefit, but I have a MAJOR problem with the scratch-itch cycle, especially on my head. I can and have scratched my head enough to leave it bloody, and it always happens when I go more than, say, 3 days without cutting my finger nails.
Finger picking guitar players (including classical and flamenco) use long fingernails on their right hand to pick the strings. Have to keep the left hand trimmed, so non-symmetric. Other musicians, especially keyboard players, have to keep em all trimmed. Mine are so hard I only trim them after a shower when they’re softer. I know a flamenco guitarist who has weak nails and she has to use glue-ons.
I’ve had long (but not very long, about 0.5 cm) cm nails for 40 years, but on one hand only. Which is a bit of a trivia question: why would I do that?
For some itch of the mistress, somewhat similar to Curley in Of Mice and Men?
Advantage(?)/Disadvantage(?) of watching all kinds of online videos and foreign-language shows because of all this spare time: I now find myself needing to be able to differentiate written Korean from Thai from Vietnamese at first sight and without a clue as to what language is which (and I thought I had it bad when I could only find a dubbed-into-Hindi version online of a Chinese movie I wanted to watch because there wasn’t any English sub and I figured that about four words of Hindi picked up from watching mythological TV shows online was better, comprehension-wise, than zero words of Mandarin or Cantonese) 🤣
One thing that helps is to start with Hangul; you could actually learn their phonetic alphabet in about 30 minutes if you wanted to – it’s very modern and very good. After that, if at first glance it might be Korean but isn’t, it’s Japanese; if it’s all fucked up but doesn’t look like it could be Arabic, it’s Chinese; if it’s all fucked up and looks like it could be Arabic it’s probably Thai.
Other tips:
1.
Once you’ve seen Hangul characters, you will notice their words are typically organized by arranging 2-4 characters into individual block; these are syllables. None of the other languages mentioned really do this.
2.
Almost every Thai character answers to the description of “was trying to draw an elephant with primitive drawings of snake corpses”. If it doesn’t look like this, it’s probably not Thai.
3. Chinese is arguably the worst written language in the set (Korean being the best designed language on Earth, probably). Because it’s an ancient mess that never got reformed, all Chinese characters look more like drawings of things (boats, etc) than the other languages mentioned.
There used to be a linguist at Chicago who had a party every year to celebrate the invention of the Korean alphabet.
It’s a national holiday in Korea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_Day
Can confirm, we get the day off school and everything.
Koreans will frequently ask foreigners like me if I’ve heard of King Sejeong the Great.
It says something negative about me that I read this and immediately thought “I thought not. It’s not a story the Jedi would tell you.”
Japanese is unambiguously worse than Chinese, at least as far as the writing -> sound mapping goes. Also Chinese has been reformed numerous times.
Thai and some other south Asian languages look really impractical to write, because you have to draw this elaborate little squiggle for every character. But I can’t actually read them so I might be off base.
How do you figure? At least Japanese has phonetic syllabaries (two of them), with extremely low orthographic distance. Things sounds (almost) exactly like they’re spelled. The kanji is a different story, but all of Chinese is like that.
If Japanese were written only with Hiragana and Katakana, then it would have the pro of low orthographic distance balanced against the con of having to learn a whopping 94 symbols for literacy. However, it’s also written with Chinese characters (Kanji). When Kaitian says written Japanese is unambiguously worse than written Chinese, what they’re saying is that literacy in Japanese requires learning the 2,136 Jōyō Kanji plus the 94 Hiragana and Katakana symbols, which is (technically) strictly worse than just learning 2,136 Kanji would be. In practice, thanks to things like Furigana, the difference is harder to quantify, but consider the following:
When you encounter a Chinese character in written Japanese, how should you read it?
– As a Japanese word that means the same thing?
– As literally the spoken Chinese word?
– As a Japanese word that sounds like the spoken Chinese word?
– As something totally made up? (This happens sometimes in person names, and is not a problem unique to Japanese)
All of the above occur in Japanese. That already sounds bad enough, but bear in mind that both Japanese and “Chinese” have drifted a lot in pronunciation since certain Kanji entered common use in Japan, and that Japanese sometimes writes the “same” Kanji differently than China or Korea or Vietnam but still considers it the same, and that “Chinese” only usually means Mandarin Chinese, and that homophones exist, and that spoken Japanese is not famous for being able to mimic certain sounds common in other languages…
Sure, that’s true, but that’s still mainly just learning the weird cases for the kanji, as opposed to Chinese where it’s all weird cases. Plus, as an English speaker, you get the joy of encountering katakana words, which are essentially freebies. “What English word, if spoken with an outrageously racist Japanese accent, would sound like this?”
I first noticed this with レモン, which is the symbols “re,” “mo,” and “n.” “What english word, spoken with a racist Japanese accent sounds like ‘remon?’ … … No, come on…really? Yeah, yeah it totally is…”
ETA: Epistemic status: I’m still a newb Japanese student, and have never tried to learn Chinese, so I’m speaking from very limited knowledge/experience.
I’ve been studying Japanese for the last 4.5 months, and can confirm that the Hiragana are easy to learn. The only real hard part in the writing system is the Kanji.
Sometimes they’re Dutch loanwords. My Japanese was shitty in high school and has evaporated since so Ican’t remember any good examples, but I do remember being mystified why some word that didn’t map at all to English was in katakana, and eventually learned they were Dutch.
Apparently, we gave the Japanese asbestos, typhus and morphine, but also dance, Sundays and biscuits.
Arguably there’s a lot of unnecessary nuance in deciding when to use Hiragana vs Katakana. But mostly, when you see a Kanji, you have no idea how to pronounce it correctly unless you’ve learned it before in this context. For most kanji (and even some multi-kanji words) there are a bunch of different possible readings. Even major Japanese politicians have blundered by guessing the wrong reading for some rare usage.
In Chinese you have to learn more characters (4000+ instead of 2000+), but at least when you see one, you can be 99% sure that it will be pronounced the same as always (for your dialect).
Korean: Circles and angular swooshes.
Thai: Tiny circles on the ends of swirls/scribbles with little flags on top.
Khmer: Like a cooler Thai with serifs.
Hindi: Kinda like Thai but with a big horizontal line on top and less tiny circles.
Vietnamese: Latin letters, monsyllabic words, draped in tiny extra markings.
Simplified Chinese: Blocks made of angular lines.
Traditional Chinese: The same but with more lines in them.
Japanese: A mix of the former interspersed with curly swirls and a dash of Korean.
Here’s the definitive guide to recognising Asian orthographies:
http://www.itchyfeetcomic.com/2013/12/creative-guesswork.html#.XsMDCZiYVpg
I hope this doesn’t count as CW, but “bi-weekly” should be hyphenated “biweek-ly” because it means once every biweek, not twice as fast as weekly. Especially, semiannu-ally, because that’s the one that always confuses people.
Fortnightly. Meaning “once every two weeks”. I too can’t tell at first if “biweekly” means “twice a week” or “fortnightly”.
I know that this rule exists, but every time I am called upon to put it into practice, I forget if the rule is this or the opposite of this.
If I could get it stuck into my head that “bi” is “two”, so “(once every) two weeks” and “semi” is “half” so “twice a week”, that would be helpful!
I can never keep it straight, does doing it twice every time make me bisexual or semisexual?
Bragsexual.
The difficult thing is that “semi” can mean “kind of” or “somewhat” in slang, so “semi-annually” automatically translates in my head to “kind of annually” which approximates to once every two more than twice-a, so it’s impossible for me to keep straight
I don’t see what’s wrong with the term ‘fortnightly’.
Damn kids, always playing their fortnightly.
I play fortnite every two weeks
In English, at least:
Biweekly means both. Using it to mean twice a week (as in semiweekly) or using it to mean once every other week are both correct. This word is not hyphenated.
Bimonthly and biannually also mean both (twice a month/year and every other month/year)
Using semiweekly or semimonthly can resolve the ambiguity in the case of “twice an X” but not in the case of “every other”
For “annually,” we can disambiguate by using “semiannual” and “biennial.”
Here’s a fun word I learned when getting paid: Quadriweekly. Nearly synonymous with monthly, but not quite.
My favorite word for weekly is hebdomadal.
Googling that brought to my attention another word I had heretofore never seen in the context “he was forced to eke out a meager living scribbling hebdomadal feuilletons”
Or “sennight”, which goes nicely with “fortnight” 🙂
@Deiseach
If we’re doing nouns now, I have to introduce you to the marvelous nychthemeron.
The way to remember this is that “fortnightly” means once a fortnight, not fourteen times a night.
And not the type of night spent in a fort.
Here is the one thing of practical value I learned from decades of listening to NPR for fun.
An actor explained that if you can’t remember a line, relax.
This speeds up the process of remembering a thing when you stop trying to remember it.
So, tell me useful advice you found somewhere that you don’t usually find it. Or methods for getting access to memories.
Sometimes I find that just intending to a thing up on google will bring back the memory, though usually I need to do the search.
Is there any type of credit or debit card product where I have to personally approve each transaction for it to go through? Like, I sign up for a gym membership, and as fitness gyms are notoriously shady it later raises the rate, makes it impossible for me to cancel, or bills me after I’ve supposedly canceled. I find the current credit card system frustrating & ripe for bad actors. And I’m not interested in spending a lot of my time doing chargebacks (unless someone knows of a credit card that’s makes chargebacks easy & hassle-free).
Could I possibly prefill a bank account with some funds, get a debit card linked to that account, and verify transactions that way? Does anyone know of a good solution to shady billing practices?
Some credit card companies have made “virtual card numbers” where you make a card number that is only good for limited use.
But last I checked all the ones I had access to had shut them off. Possibly because credit cards wanted to get out of the business of being the mechanism for enforcing consumer rights against businesses,.
I can verify that the Citi Double Cash credit card offers this option. I have that card and used it to set up a virtual card number recently (within the last couple months), although I haven’t used the virtual card yet so I can’t directly confirm that it works as you would expect (I have no reason to expect otherwise though).
FWIW, it seems like virtual card numbers would be easier on the credit card companies than handling chargebacks. With the virtual card number, any issues would get resolved on the front-end (by the charge being denied), with the money never leaving the credit card company. With chargebacks, the money goes out to the merchant and the credit card company has to deal with the hassle of adjudicating any disputes and pursuing the merchant if they rule in favor of the consumer.
Cash app does this. Create an account, link it to your bank account can fill it with a pre-set amount. They will then generate a virtual card for you to use, and even send you a “real” version of that virtual card if you want.
This is how my bank works. Companies can bill me , which means I see their bills when I log into my bank’s web pages (or, their app notifies me, if I have it installed). I can then approve it, and/or change the specifics. The system is common to all the banks, so bills show up in all banks I use, and once paid, are moved to the archive.
I don’t see any reason to do it any other way.
Not going to vouch for this company at all, but in another forum, someone just mentioned this, and was linked to privacy.com, where it appears you can do exactly that.
Some banks in Europe offer prepaid cards, where you assign a limit to them and it is decreased every time the card is charged. Once someone wants to charge you for bullshit subscriptions just stop increasing the limit, or even reduce it to 0 all the time and increase only when buying things.
Also, premium Revolut offers single-use CC numbers. I guess 10% of the customer base is people who are really serious about not getting charged without reason, and 90% is people running all sorts of fraud on lazy businesses assuming one CC # is a reasonable approximation of one physical person.
Everything you didn’t know you wanted to know about the Foreign Service: What they do, and how to join!
Currently there are around 8000 Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) representing America’s interests abroad. These men and women are supported by another 5000-ish Foreign Service Specialists (FSSs) who can best be thought of as support staff (IT folks, health, some security and facilities management). While the work of the FSSs is crucial, I’ll be focusing mainly on the FSOs in this post.
FSOs break down into 5 different flavors: Consular Officers, Economic Officers, Management Officers, Political Officers and Public Diplomacy officers. While there is some overlap of responsibilities, especially the more senior you get, in general if you enter as a certain flavor (they call it “cone”) you can expect that to be what you spend most of your time doing.
1. Consular Officer – These are the guys who provide the services of the US government to individuals in foreign countries. This can be assisting US nationals who are in the foreign country (IE, if they get arrested or want an adoption or whatever) and helping process requests for citizenship from the foreign country.
2. Economic Officer – these people help represent the US’s economic interests abroad. They are interested in getting foreigners to buy US products, to help research and identify economic opportunities in foreign countries and serve as advisors/aiders of trade deals. Any major export of US goods (or major import of foreign goods) likely has one or two economic officers working on it, in some capacity.
3. Management officer – they run the physical goings-on of the embassy’s and posts. Not really diplomatic, think more HR/facility stuff.
4. Public Diplomacy Officers – the US’s PR staff abroad. The host outreach and help manage public events.
5. Political Officers – what most people think of when they think “diplomat.” They are the ones who meet with foreign officials, advocate for US policy interests and help negotiate policy. Any treaty or Bilateral agreement or anything you read about a deal between two countries was likely written and researched by one of these guys.
So, that’s the foreign service in a nutshell. If you want to know more about the specifics of any of these roles, ask away. I’m going to focus now on the application process. It’s goddamn insane. It’s changed (slightly) this year, but I’m going to describe the old system first.
1. Step One – Take the Foreign Service Officer Test. This is a general test of knowledge and logic. There are questions about math, science, history and reasoning. It’s not trivial, but it’s not too difficult. Roughly 50% of people pass.
2. Writing Sample – You are given a prompt and asked to write short essay about it in a half hour. It’s on a program that doesn’t allow spelling or grammar checks, and it’s pretty commonly understood that making on of either will result in instant disqualification. Your essay is then read by two individuals who give it a numeric score (I want to say 1-10) If the average of your score is higher than the arbitrary threshold value they select that year (I want to say it was 5 in 2020, but I don’t remember) you move on to the next step. If not, you can pay $30 to have two other readers score your essay and give it a new average, but you can only do that once. You should, according to the FSO reddit and my own personal experience, always pay that $30. They don’t publish any standards as to how they are grading the essay, it’s entirely up to the subjective opinion of the reader. I’ve completed this step 3 times now and received initial scores of 3, 5 and 4. I got my 3 and 4 rescored and ended up with a 7 and a 5. No feedback or explanation of how one grading pair could think my essay was a 3 and another could think it was a 7. Roughly 30% of the initial pool makes it past this step.
3. Personal narratives – if you make it to this stage you are now asked to complete a series of approximately 20 or so mini-essays about your life, perspectives on diplomacy and capabilities. These are then read and judged. If they like your answers, you move on. I don’t have great statistics, but I hear around 10% of the initial pool makes it past this step.
4. In-Person interviews – you sign up for a multi-day interview process. These are done both one-on-one with current FSOs and in group discussion style formats with other applicants. The entire time you are here you are constantly being monitored, judged and assigned “points” based on your actions, responses and overall presence and demeanor.
5. If you score is high enough, congrats! You’re now on the list. The number of points you have determines your placement on the list (so, if you did great at the in-person interview section, you’re near the top. If you just barely squeaked by, you’re at the bottom). But, this doesn’t mean you’re an FSO now. You see, they only need a set number of people, so when they’re training a new class of FSOs, they take the top X people off the list. You can only be on the list for 18 months before you’re kicked off the list and have to start over and new people are being added to the list roughly 4x a year. If you get through this process, but wind up at the bottom of the list, it’s likely best to just withdraw your application so you can start over again. At this point, the best thing to do is try and get points that let you increase your ranking. This can be done either through prior experiences (for example, prior military service gives you a bump here) or by acquiring new skills and languages. If you can test proficiency in a new language, you get more points.
6. If you’re at the top of the list AND manage to get selected before 18 months have gone by, you now go through medical/security screening. You need to acquire a Top-Secret clearance (IE, no prior criminal activity, no drugs in the last 5 years if ever, no sketchy contacts or financials) and be able to do the job physically.
For reference, around 100,000 people applied between 2001-2006 to become FSOs and less than 2,200 eventually matriculated. This tracks with other stats I’ve seen that place the final acceptance rate somewhere around 2-5%, depending on year. I’ve read that the average person goes through this process around 3-7 times before being accepted, although this number could be biased upward since presumably the people who succeed on the first time don’t become members of communities of people who are trying to join the foreign service. Also – you are only allowed to apply once a year.
Who are these people applying? Well, nearly every college has an international relations program and approximately 100% of IR graduates apply for the foreign service. You also get a smattering of former military, mid-career professionals looking for a change and a host of assorted odd characters.
Remember how I mentioned that they were changing the process of reviewing applicants? Well, starting this year they are having every applicant submit their personal narratives first and then picking the ones they want to take the test from that pool. I’m not sure what effect this will have, but if I had to guess, we’ll see WAY more people screened out at the personal narrative section than we did before.
This is getting kind of long, so I’ll end it here. Let me know if you have any questions.
Thank you for the writeup!
I have to ask—any funny stories about this lot you can share?
Well, I should be clear, and should have written this in my initial posting – I’m not in the Foreign Service. One’s pending, one I only got to the written narrative stage and the other I got on the list but withdrew to reapply after it became clear I would drop off before getting selected.
I’d say the oddest person I met during my multi-day interview process was the guy who showed up wearing matching olive-green corduroy pants and a jacket. He looked like was in his early 20s and had, according to what he said, spent his entire life sailing around the world with his parents. He’d gotten all parts of his education remotely. They’d make landfall in a certain part of the world, stay for a week or two, then sail off again. No clue what happened to him, but I really hope he made it.
As for the truly weird, well, if you believe what you read in the papers, a non-trivial percentage of people who claim to be FSOs and FSSs are likely spooks of one flavor or another.
I remember talking to a foreign service recruiter when I was in college. I figured that I would be at least somewhat encouraged to apply because I speak a variety of languages (including one on their in demand list), have extensive experience traveling to various countries, and had background in international topics. My family had also been involved in resettling refugees for decades as a sort of local ambassador, meaning I had extensive direct cultural contact with Iraqis and Afghans. (And Saudis and other Arabs, for what that’s worth.)
The recruiter was, bar none, the most arrogant git I talked to at the job fair. He ignored me for the girl next to me (a friend of mine). After talking to her without looking at me, he glanced at me and then asked her if she had any questions, pointedly excluding me. After she was done, I asked a question and he went on a long rambling comment about how I was immature and how great the foreign service was. Keep in mind, I hadn’t actually said anything beyond a perfunctory greeting, handing over my resume, and asking him to tell me about the foreign service. He also said most people were too naive and how reading the news was worthless because everything important went on behind closed doors. Including cliche lines about how what he knew would shock me. When I walked away with the woman he’d focused on I said that was weird and she replied, “He really, really didn’t like you.”
What really struck me about it was how undiplomatic the guy representing the diplomatic corps was. It was entirely due to him I declined to apply. I ended up (initially) at a big company in the private sector, where I was considered good enough at dealing with foreigners that I was repeatedly pressed into that duty. But I’m curious: is this typical? If not, how atypical is this? He mentioned how hard it was to get in too but with a distinct, “So I’m better than you,” air. (The Army recruiter was much nicer, by the by, as was the guy for Interior.)
Department of the Interior people are, in my experience, the nicest people you will ever meet. It’s downright uncanny. I think there’s something in the water; I recently went to a meeting with a bunch of Fish and wildlife service folks and I thought I’d stumbled into a cult meeting.
Anyway, on to your point. I’d start by pointing out that if they have this dude meeting with a bunch of college kids, he’s not out there meeting with foreign powers. That might be on purpose… but, yeah. This doesn’t surprise me. FSOs have a reputation throughout the USG as being kinda full of themselves (or as being pretentious prima donnas, depending on who you ask). I’m sorry you had a bad experience, but its not at all unique. I know a bunch of marines (service that guards embassies in war zones) that have absolute horror stories about how the FSOs treated them.
A few years back, during my first application, I was having dinner at a restaurant and just so happened to be seated next to a table full of young-ish FSOs loudly talking about their work. This was a few days after I found out I’d passed the FSOT and I eventually worked up the courage to talk to them about their job. When I mentioned I’d just passed the test, they all laughed and assured me I probably wouldn’t get in. Sure, they were right, but still…
It’s a pity because I still think State is our real frontline service, not any of the military branches. I think it’s underfunded and underappreciated. But the people actually in State make it so difficult to like them, ironically.
Anyway, it turned out alright for me. I’ve done very well for myself in private industry. I’ve even got regular opportunities to interact with foreign bigwigs, mostly of the corporate or trade department varieties. My interest was the economic part of the corps anyway. And I make more money and have more control over where I go and what I do.
Good luck. And if you do get it, don’t let it go to your head.
Thanks! Although, at this point, while I’ll likely keep applying since it doesn’t cost me anything, accepting a job in the FS would mean a reduction in pay, professional prestige and negate around a half decade of establishing a skill set. I’d maybe, maybe take it, but it wouldn’t be a sure thing.
Fascinating. It reminds me of the examination system in Imperial China. That too had people trying multiple times, and it was even more selective. Is there a test of your calligraphy at some point? Did there used to be?
I’ve been arguing for a long time that colleges should do something along those lines for applicants. The ability to write is an important skill for a college student, and the present test for that consists of sending in an essay with no evidence that the applicant wrote it, let alone that he did so without assistance. I would be inclined to offer a choice of topics, and more than half an hour.
Mea culpa, you’re actually given three. Most of them take the form of some kind of controversial quote and then they ask you if you agree or not and then to justify your position.
I guess, but I really, really didn’t like the way it was done, since there’s no indication what kind of writing they’re looking for.
Ha, if so, I haven’t made it to that stage yet.
Great write-up, thank you! Also,
heh, heh.
I think the biggest issue is that the vast majority of people who apply are very motivated to take the job and are probably qualified. The baroque process, IMO, is just a way to reduce a qualified applicant pool of tens of thousands down to the hundred or so they need in a way that doesn’t open them up to accusations of bias.
In the past, the state department used to be a good old boy network; you got in either because you went to Yale (or Harvard or another ivy league) and got your professor to write you a letter or because you dad was friends with an ambassador.
You can’t do that anymore, however, so the current process just kind of randomly selects a small percentage of people while managing to screen out those who are actively unqualified. Sure, maybe you don’t select the best people… but if you assume the applicant pool are all basically equally qualified then you don’t need to.
It seems to me that the “personal narrative” sort could well be used to select for Good Old Boys, if one were so inclined, while being dubiously correlated with objective competence.
It was bad enough when they added in the QEP and made the test shorter, this is worse. It’s like they’re trying to make pool of selectees worse. though, to be fair, bureaucratically shooting itself in the foot is a storied state department tradition.
I don’t understand what you are trying to say? Are you asking why the emergency edicts have not been supplanted by laws passed by the legislature(s) since the beginning of the pandemic? Isn’t the most obvious answer that those legislatures are fine with the status quo? And, isn’t that democracy, not dictatorship? After all, the governors are acting under legal authority granted to them by legislatures, and when they ostensibly exceed that grant, stuff like this happens.
I think you are missing my point is that we ARE using the first system. Legislatures are in session and can repeal or pass any laws they want, just as in pre-COVID days. The fact that they have not exercised their power to check governors is not evidence that they no longer have them. It us evidence that they agree with what governors are doing.
…or at least that they don’t want to take the blame if they reverse the governor’s decision, and then everything goes pear-shaped….
California Prop 13 seems unfair on a fundamental level, it is essentially feudal: landed gentry class has been created and they can pass on their land to the first-born offsprings (other offsprings are screwed but who has more than one kid anyway). It just so happens that we live not that far from when it’s started but given another 100 years, the accumulated effects are going to be highly detrimental to the economic growth of the state.
Yet it seems nigh impossible to do anything with it because game theory wins for every existing homeowner are way higher with Prop 13 than without it. This brings a question, how can equilibriums like this one be changed democratically and without violence?
In theory, Prop 13 can be repealed eventually when the number of voting non-homeowners outweighs homeowners but people can instead just vote themselves into the benefit club instead of abolishing the club itself, perpetuating the cycle instead of fixing it.
Perhaps it could be struck down as unconstitutional somehow?
There’s nothing unconstitutional about limiting taxes to some function of the price at last sale. Stupid, yes, but unconstitutional, no.
I guess I don’t understand. People could always pass on their property to their children. Under current CA law (as I understand it not Prop 13, but an initiative passed later), if you pass your land to your child, the land is not reassessed for property tax purposes, which might or might not be inequitable, but it is hardly creating a “landed gentry.” We are talking about maybe 1.5% of the value of the property, which is nice to have every year, but hardly a source of wealth.
Interest accumulates, in 100 years multi-generational Californian family will have a significant tax advantage in comparison with newcomers. And then, effectively you cannot pass the property to several children, not for more than one generation at least, so not every Californian is going to benefit either.
The only way to obtain this particular benefit is to be born into a lineage that owned property in the right place at the right time. That’s what makes it interestingly feudal. Economic success can get you a house, but it will never work around having the wrong bloodline with respect to property taxes. The only way to fix that is marriage.
These families get municipal services essentially for free. Your 1975 property taxes do jack shit to defray your child’s teacher’s 2020 rent. Those who are not grandfathered have to pay for everything, either directly through property taxes, or indirectly via the impact fees assessed on developers. This is easily $1.5k/month over and above the value of the property itself.
I’ve seen arguments that this is right: they were there first, it’s their city, they built it, the new arrivals have higher salaries and can afford it, we get a more stable / higher-trust society by favoring long-term residents and repelling “transients” (this means tech workers, btw, we’d never slander people experiencing homelessness with such a term).
But these are basically arguments that the aristocracy’s superiority is legitimate and that its advantages are deserved. I’ve not yet seen a compelling argument for why we shouldn’t think of it as an aristocracy.
Vote with your feet.
The real estate price bubble problem is caused by people insisting that they must live in a particular location and that someone should make it affordable for them to do so. If enough people realize that they are better off obtaining similar quality housing that can be had in other markets for 1/10 of the price, then many of them will move…both obtaining better QoL for themselves and eventually deflating prices back in Cali.
Probably the best answer. I’m not sure you can undo a Proposition 13 until the state fails.
If it’s impossible to undo, how can you stop it from becoming law in the first place?
That is kinda my question. Contrived example: everyone can vote today to give every American citizen and their descendants double vote in elections let’s say. Benefit is certainly fairly distributed now but not in the future. Immigration won’t stop and at some point there will appear an underclass with 1 vote, forever disenfranchised, and while initial immigrants are indeed okay with that disparity or simply don’t care, their descendants will not have had a choice.
That’s why I find Prop 13 so interesting – it is basically the formula of the example above except totally benign looking.
Anyway, I’m not sure that people leaving is what will solve this situation. There are massive feedback effects pulling people in and quite a lot of comfort can be sacrificed for opportunities especially since many other places are not doing great (and have negative feedback effects going for them as well).
I don’t think it works like that. There just *isn’t* similar quality housing available elsewhere, because as everyone knows, the three most important qualities of a house are location, location, and location.
The real estate price problem is caused by people restricting the supply of housing in a location that has important virtues, both as the most habitable climate for humans, and more importantly, as the coordinated solution to the question of where people with particular interests tend to locate (for sets of interests as varied as making pop music, programming database software, forming polyamorous relationships, and filming advertisements).
No. People playing exploitative supplyside games are a symptom of inexorable demand.
There is nothing truly unique about the location…any of these communities could mutually agree to coalesce around a much more affordable metro. Until then, if your demand is truly infinite, then it is only fair to charge an infinite price.
Reform it in a way that doesn’t pit you against all homeowners at once? Examples:
1. Cap property taxes at 0%, get your government revenue somewhere else. This automatically removes the new/old homeowner distinction.
2. Properties are re-assessed regularly, but your property value only drives your relative share of property taxes (the New Hampshire model). Cap total property taxes to only increase at some fixed rate. You’ll get the support of those with higher-than-average property values, the opposition of those with lower-than average rates.
Does that only happen in New Hampshire? I had no idea! Growing up, I used to be so confused when I would read references to property revaluation fights elsewhere in the country – people would complain about town-wide reassessments and it seemed absolutely idiotic to complain about that. I always thought that everywhere in the US worked the same – if the tax base went up, the tax rate went down, so only relative differences mattered.
Amazing… learn something new every day 🙂
It certainly works that way in Minnesota. Every year the tax for each jurisdiction is divided by total tax capacity (all the parcels in that jurisdiction) to determine tax per unit of tax capacity, and then the tax is divvied up to each parcel based on its tax capacity. My tax bill is the cumulative total of all these pieces for all the jurisdictions I live in (city, county, school district, and some others). I think this is the standard way to determine property tax, and California may be an outlier.
So yes, if the assessors raise the valuation of every property by the same rate, it will have zero effect on everyone’s taxes. But it will make it easier to prove that the valuation is too high in court, so the litigious may do better if all valuations increase.
Washington, too. It doesn’t seem to stop people from being furious about higher assessments, though, for some reason.
Some possible steps to take, in order of political difficulty:
— Split roll: undo it for commercial properties first, so you don’t gore any homeowner oxen and people can see that the sky doesn’t fall. IIRC there is already a movement to get this on the ballot.
— Restrict the residential cap to primary residences only: this gores more oxen, and has somewhat complicated interactions with rental property. But at least nobody’s grandmother is going to get priced out of the home they’ve lived in for 50 years, and it’s difficult to argue that if that grandmother is lucky enough to also own a ski place in Tahoe or a beach cottage or whatever, they should get the tax break on the second home too.
— Raise but don’t eliminate the cap: you could make it similar to some rent control laws, i.e. the maximum annual increase is now 5% or 7% plus inflation. Doing that with rental property keeps it fair to landlords who are subject to rent control laws, and gives affected homeowners time to adapt gradually to the fact that they’ll eventually need to take in renters or move to a smaller place or cheaper neighborhood.
— Kill the residential cap entirely for new home purchasers but grandfather it in for existing homeowners. New purchasers already get their taxes reset to market rate assessment levels anyway. Knowing that they’ll also be subject to higher property taxes down the line will lower home purchase values, so this has some negative effect on existing homeowners, but at least it’s a second order effect.
Proposal:
If you want to pay rates based on 1970 prices, okay.
But when you die, you sell the house to the state for 1970 prices.
This takes care of grandma getting evicted. And finds out how bad they want it.
That is my favorite implausible idea for dealing with NIMBYism. If you want to quash all development in your neighborhood, then you should have to forgo appreciation due to development happening in neighboring areas.
Ah, I had always thought the solution was to allow deferral of the tax until transfer of the property. But just mandating sale to the local taxing authority at the taxed price is an interesting alternative. (This could be a problem if there is a school district and a city and a county that all tax property values, but I haven’t looked into whether there are such cases in California.)
Is residential home ownership declining in California? It’s been trending down in the UK for a while I think (and especially London), which faces similar housing problems to much of the US. I would expect that to put pressure on the government to actually tackle the problem.
It’ll put pressure on the government to do something about the problem.
Doing something that won’t make things worse is a rather higher bar.
It is a misconception that puritans were ashamed of sex. One church minister has said “Women are Creatures without which there is no comfortable Living for man: it is true of them what is wont to be said of Governments, That bad ones are better than none: They are a sort of Blasphemers then who dispise and decry them, and call them a necessary Evil, for they are a necessary Good.”
Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/361501?seq=2#metadata_info_tab_contents
My understanding was that they came down very hard on extramarital sex?
Well, yes. But marital sex was expected to be frequent and joyful. They also didn’t wear all black with a white base layer: that’s a false stereotype people laid on them due to confusion with Quakers.
“Plymouth’s General Court banned lace and silver and gold thread. Further, it decreed: ‘No person either man or woman shall make or buy any slashed clothes, other than one slash in each sleeve and another in the back.”
Thou mayst have but three slashes in a garment to show off a fancy lining!
Some people think sex is fun, so’s it’s not hard to imagine fun-haters hating sex too.
to quote the sage of Baltimore, puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy.
Very late response, but I wanted to say thank you Scott, for the January post on assortive mating and autism. While I treat your findings with appropriate caution, I am still nonetheless a little less anxious than I was about having a kid with my similarly EA partner.
Hope I’ve posted in the right place.
I don’t know how many states this is true of, but in Texas for instance, the legislature only meets from January to June of odd numbered years. The governor can sometimes call an emergency session outside of the regular six month period (like he did 8 years or so ago when Wendy Davis filibustered the anti-abortion bill and prevented it from being passed in the ordinary term, so he called them up for a few more weeks to get it passed). But it’s very unusual to call an extra session of the Texas legislature nearly a year after they already recessed. So we’re effectively stuck without a legislature until after the next elections in November.
I believe there’s also been a bunch of different responses by state legislatures to the idea of coming up with a way to safely meet during a pandemic. Some legislatures have set up online meetings, but others have actually just canceled the session rather than meeting online. It’s very weird.
Because the state legislatures are completely dropping the ball and leaving it to the executive branch to take all of the credit and blame.
Hi, I’m curious about suggestions for careers where you can travel. (We live in the USA). I have a 6yo very interested in adventuring, he loves globetrotting stories about treasure hunts & archeological digs, etc., and he’s stated a wish to both visit a rainforest and see Everest. He’s 6, and his aspirations could change in the future of course. But I am just trying to figure out what actual careers he might find satisfying in this vein. I thought travel writer but I don’t imagine that could be a steady source of income unless he got real lucky. Surely there are people who actually go to archeological digs, or natural science people observing, cataloging and identifying new animal species or something. Closer to home I thought maybe park ranger? What are those sorts of careers called? Does the travel component make up a big portion or is it more one phase of a career, after which you settle down and publish your research about it? What other career paths am I missing?
I have a friend of a friend who is an archaeology professor at BYU. He travels pretty frequently to Central America (Maya civilization is his field) for digs. I wouldn’t say the pay is amazing, but he makes a living. It seems like travel is part of the job in all phases, at least from graduate school on up through tenure. Definitely hard work, but if it’s a passion, probably a fulfilling career.
I knew a guy who got a Ph.D. in some realm of biology and dreamed of traveling the world, cataloguing new species. Instead he did that a few times in grad school but afterwards had a tough time finding work. He ended up in Indiana, writing boring environmental impact reports on new real estate developments. Now obviously someone is cataloguing new species, but I don’t know enough about that domain to know what this guy did wrong in his career planning. His grad school was a pretty middling public U, so maybe the lesson is if you’re contemplating a Ph.D. in a poorly compensated field, don’t bother if it’s not a top-tier school.
There are of course lots of short-term young person’s games like the Peace Corps, the military, mission work, ex-pat English teaching jobs, and cruise ship employees.
One of the most well-traveled guys I know left Texas to work for Saudi Aramco, and he lived in Saudi for some years. In addition to getting paid extremely well and not having to pay taxes, he was given an absurdly large amount of vacation time by American standards (at least 6 weeks, maybe more) Plus he was starting in Saudi so it was easier to visit a large chunk of the world that’s tough for an American to get to. He spent tons of time going all over Asia, Africa, and Australia. The days of that career path might be just about over. But I wonder if other corporate ex-pat options like that might exist in some other industry.
There’s plenty of biology jobs that will take you all sort of interesting places… They’re just not necessarily nice places.
Lots of them involve chasing down infectious disease in developing countries – which can certainly be considered an adventure.
In my experience, a decent number of marine biologists get pretty good gigs that take them nice places.
Especially relative to the people who go someplace requiring 30 vaccinations to spread plastic sheets under trees and catch monkey droppings, or to countries best known for their amazing variety of blood parasites.
(And even if they don’t get to constantly travel the world, they aren’t necessarily hurting when they spend their summers at places like https://www.whoi.edu/)
Actually, the best deal I’ve seen in terms of going places for work was a woman who researches the venom of marine snails (for drug discovery) – her list of places she “had to” go for work was basically a subset of “nice places with tropical beaches people pay good money to vacation in.”
Change that to “employed” marine biologists. Almost every employed marine biologist I know loves their job and travels to absolutely amazing places… but I know way more unemployed marine biologists than I do ones who have a job.
I mean, the actual majority of air travel is business trips, right? So getting to a certain level of business executive for a company with sites all around the world is cushy pay and loads of travel (to which they can tag on vacation days for sightseeing). After that, business/management consultant.
In my experience business trips really suck though. That’s not good travel. If you’re in the US, you’re probably going to the same places — cities like NY/LA/SF/Boston/Chicago, or conference destinations like Las Vegas/Orlando. You’re almost never leaving the US. Taking those extra days off might not be an option a lot of the time, for various reasons — you might be stuck going from meeting to meeting to airport, lucky to grab 8 hours of sleep at your hotel.
Also, by the time you have some flexibility about where and how to travel, you might have a family and kids and just want to get back home.
Depends heavily on the business. At high level management consulting, you travel very well, even if you’re a junior associate fresh out of college…
That’s if it’s conference travel. If you’re going to client sites, you can end up in a lot of places that are very off the beaten path–for a reason. As a former colleague who was a former consultant said, “Any week in first quarter that starts off with ‘travel to Fort Wayne’ is not going to be fun. Although it still beats spending 2 days in Newark and then going to Fort Wayne.”
Yeah, I’ve never met any consultants who regarded travel as a positive aspect of the job (and I met quite a few consultants in MBA school).
I actually think these off-the-beaten-path places are often nice to live in and raise a family, but presumably you can see all the sites, if there are any, in a day. Then you’re spending M-F working all day with a client and spending your evenings alone at a Marriott Courtyard, eating takeout. You fly home on the weekend, and then fly back the following Monday.
I once volunteered to go to a conference in Switzerland just because I wanted to see Switzerland. Unfortunately, I spent most of the time working and barely got any chance to do real tourism.
That is a shame, Switzerland is breath-taking, at least the couple of quaint alpine valley villages I visited, Pontresina and Churwalden.
Last fall, I jumped at the chance to go to a conference in Prague. I didn’t get a real chance to see the city during the conference, but I took a vacation week afterwards so I could actually see it.
It was excellent.
Park rangers don’t travel much though they do interact with nature a lot. You can travel for archeology but you’re going to repeatedly go to the same spot. In general, you’re going to specialize and spend your entire career excavating one part of Israel or Budapest or something. You can get into a wide variety of sites as an undergrad doing basically internships but not as a professor.
There’s a lot of professions that involve travel to cities. You know, where people and money are. But that’s not really adventure in the Indiana Jones sense.
Honestly, it sounds like his only option is to be a travel blogger/influencer because all of the travel he’s interested in is adventure traveling. That’s a type of vacation, not really an economically productive activity. The good news is that it’s not that hard to make a modest living as an influencer/writer, at least not right now, because the competition isn’t that great. He just has to be a decent online marketer. Alternatively, he could go the digital nomad route and travel in between doing some other kind of work.
Not true! I actually worked three summers as a park ranger at Mt. Rainier National Park (I just took peoples money when they came in, but I was still technically a ranger: I had the straw hat and everything!). While there I got to see what a career as a National Park Ranger looks like, and it requires a lot of travel. If you want to move up the ladder then you need to be willing to move to National Parks anywhere in the country on a regular basis: a year here, a couple years there, lots of hopping around.
Why? Because as a civil service it’s hard for people to get fired so there isn’t a lot of churn. If you want to be promoted you need to wait for a spot to open up due to someone retiring or getting promoted themselves. This will only very rarely happen at the park you are currently working at, but across all the National Parks in the country there’s likely to be a spot available somewhere. Everyone I met who wasn’t in an entry level position had worked at four or five parks previous: the higher up the chain, the more parks. And everybody spends a year at Grand Canyon. That park has ridiculous churn, mostly because it has massive crowds and they always need more help. Plus if you do a year or two at Grand Canyon it helps you get into other parks: if you can handle Grand Canyon, you can certainly handle 99% of other National Parks.
Ultimately it’s why I chose not to pursue a career as a ranger, even though I as very attracted to the lifestyle. I don’t want to spend my life hopping from place to place. Since you want to I would highly recommend checking out the National Park Service. A word of warning: it can be hard to get an entry level position. I only got in because my brother had worked there a few years before and he vouched for me with the local supervisor. I have no idea how my brother managed to get in: I think a friend vouched for him. But it might be easier to get into a different position then I was applying for, since money takers require little experience and consist mostly of college kids.
My mistake. Still, it sounds like you travel a lot between national parks but not internationally or to anything resembling adventure vacations.
True. But within the US park system, there’s a lot of cool places to check out. And you’d be hopping between the most beautiful and interesting places the US has to offer.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good job. I seriously considered applying at one point but ended up realizing I liked cities too much. Just not what they’re looking for, I think.
One caveat here for nature lovers: A large portion of the National Park System is historical parks, historical sites, memorials, and battlefield parks.
From speaking with interpreter and LE Rangers, you should expect to spend at least half your career at places like Ellis Island and Vicksburg. So ideally you should love borh natural beauty AND American history. If you only want to work in places like Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, Zion, etc you may be disappointed.
Seriously read this as Lawful Evil Rangers for a second.
I found a mystery series as a little kid about a woman who worked as a park ranger but also solved murders. (I don’t remember the name of it, and I think I came across it at my aunt’s house or something.) In one book I found she was in the American Southwest, and I think there were old Pueblo sites there. In another, she was in New York visiting her sister, and stopped at the Statue of Liberty.
Alternatively, you can work in national parks without having to work for the NPS.
My sister and brother-in-law both work for a major resort company that has the primary food and lodging contracts for a few big (popular) national parks. They basically live at one of the big ones.
That is a good way to go if you want to live in a park. I was always envious of the trail rangers, but the job I most wanted at Mt. Rainier was to be the operator of the Paradise Inn.
You see a similar dynamic in other Federal land management agencies (biggest to smallest: USFS, BLM, USFWS) and CDF (within California, but there’s a lot of California). Most Federal land outside of the park system wasn’t selected for scenic/historic/recreational value, but there’s a lot more of it, it’s generally a lot less crowded, there are fewer rules about what you can do on it, cost of living at or within commuting distance of the duty station is generally lower, and there are more jobs available.
The vast majority of jobs, especially at the entry level, especially if you want benefits and a pipeline to career advancement, are in fire. At least in the Forest Service, most “ranger” positions are either high-ranking administrative roles with very little fieldwork, or they’re law enforcement.
We always looked up to the law enforcement rangers: unlike the rest of us, they got guns, and if they give you a speeding ticket it’s technically a federal offense.
But yeah, I’d say most of the rangers were working a desk job or something like it. I wanted to be a trail ranger, as far as I can tell they just patrol the back country making sure people have their camping tags and helping out people. Being paid to hike on the most beautiful mountain in America seemed really appealing, but no career advancement there, it’s true.
Former colleague worked for a zoo — half the year he did their IT in Nebraska, the other half he spent on Madagascar. The sense I got was that this is a semi-volunteer thing though, in that the actual pay wasn’t enough to live on sustainably (but was good for maybe a few years). The thing is, I’m pretty sure they only went to Madagascar — you don’t get to go both to the Amazon and to the Everest. (I would guess that archaeology has a similar problem.)
Becoming a mathematician might not be a bad bet: the conferences end up being all over the place. (Assuming this doesn’t change in the aftermath of covid19…) There was a few years’ stretch when my husband and I were both in academia; his subfield’s annual conference was in Iceland, Japan, and Vancouver (in some order order) and my subfield’s annual conference was in Costa Rica. Also, I got to go to New Zealand to visit a coauthor. I don’t know if all academic disciplines are like that; I have a hunch that among the sciences math might be particularly mobile since it doesn’t need labs, but maybe the humanities move around too. Obviously traveling isn’t itself the job, but you get a pretext, and potentially don’t have to pay for all the airfare out-of-pocket.
My father is an electrical engineer working in power plant automatization: he’s had field projects in middles of nowhere in the US, Mexico, and Israel, and I’m sure more destinations would’ve been available. The scenery on the job is lacking (think North Dakota mining), but you can take field trips to some interesting places.
And of course, there’s the option “make money, travel in your spare time”.
Cryptography conferences are similarly all over the planet.
I think all research/academia is.
Above a doctoral level, the talent and institutions seem to be spread right across the world.
About half the profs who’ve lectured me in my degree course have come from abroad.
Yet somehow, when it comes to education people choose to pay six digit figures for tuition at some specific place where they most likely hardly ever get to even talk to the top people…
Being a Foreign Service Officer will get you to some pretty interesting places. The early part of your career will likely feature some quite adventurous countries (possibly including active conflict zones). FSOs generally switch countries every 2 (sometimes 4 I believe) years, and will occasionally have postings back in DC for one of those cycles every once in a while. However, it can be a hard life from what I’ve heard (I’ve done the expat thing for a few years and went to school with a bunch of FSOs), as you have relatively little control over where you get posted early on and having a normal social life can be tough – you can basically hang out with other diplomats and US military, but having local friends is a bit more fraught. In many countries there will also be some security restrictions that limit which parts of the country you can actually see on your time off.
There’s also a niche but fairly constant set of opportunities with the “implementing partners” of major aid agencies – NGOs that work on the ground to run programs funded by USAID. Things like organizing small-scale farmers into co-operatives, helping set up health clinics, training rural government officials, etc in various developing countries. That is field-based and generally 6 month to 3-5 year contracts, so lots of opportunity to move around. Eventually in that career you would progress to a home office or capital city posting as a “chief of party” where you do more admin and management, although you could still spend your entire career outside the US.
As someone who went through the FSO selection process a few times, it’s an absolute mess. If there’s any interest in this process, I’ll do an effort post on it. Suffice to say, it’s nuts. We’re talking about roughly a 6 stage process with a single-digit acceptance rate.
Among the community, there’s pretty widespread acceptance that getting in is kind of a crap-shoot. If you have a life goal of becoming an FSO, AND are qualified to do so, you should prepare to spend roughly 3-7 years basically doing nothing while you are applying.
Fair, enough, I’ll start drawing one up.
I can concur, at least from stories when my father did this in I think the early 70s and couldn’t get in. He went to a top-20 US university, had military experience, was extremely well-read on world affairs, geography, history, and diplomacy, pretty good at languages for an American (spoke semi-passable French and a bit of Spanish and German), and was always both an extremely good interviewer and test-taker.
I think he landed every other job he ever interviewed for (which resulted in getting in over his head a few times), but couldn’t land that FSO position.
I have a friend who’s a chemical engineer and he helps set up new oil-related plants for his company. His list in a couple years includes multiple countries in asia, multiple countries in the middle east, one country in europe, a country in africa upcoming, and probably more that I don’t know about. His postings are several months at a time, and it seems incredibly draining, but it’s an enormous amount of travel with legitimate exposure to the cultures I think.
Personally, I’m a grad student in a STEM field where the only real field work in my field was done by 12 dudes between 1969 and 1972, and I still get to do a pretty nice amount of travel going to conferences. I’ve been to a handful of places in the US, France, UK semi-planned (and it’d be for a month+), Japan not unlikely. My officemates have hit switzerland, japan, korea, probably more. These are just conferences obviously, but my strategy is that any reasonably worthwhile place, I add some time onto the trip to enjoy on my own (3 days added to my DC trip, a full week added to my France trip, probably a week+ added to an upcoming oregon trip if it doesn’t end up in pandemic-purgatory), and all I have to fund is a cheap hostel.
Thats in a fieldwork-phobic field, if it gets even slightly more fieldwork adjacent, that’ll open up some more. One of the major perks IMO of being a STEM grad is the amount of travel involved.
As others are saying, most jobs where you travel are not actually conducive to vacation/adventure traveling. So I would think the best chance for actual pleasure traveling would be to become a teacher and travel during the ~3 months off. The pay is just average, but I can’t think of many other jobs that give someone as much time off as teachers. And the time-off is usually the issue with traveling a lot with most jobs.
I once met someone who did this, but they taught the kids of military personnel on overseas bases.
So you can work abroad in Europe or Okinawa or somewhere then go travelling.
The Army (inappropriate topic expanding meme)
One slightly tangential point …
In my experience, visiting foreign places is more interesting if you have something to do there than if you are merely touristing. In my case it’s mostly speaking trips, which don’t involve any deep connection to the country but do involve interacting with the people who have invited me, the people who come to hear me, and the like. But I expect the same would be true for most people who are in a foreign country because some of the people there want them to come and engage in some activity with them.
Along somewhat analogous lines, I find visiting a museum more interesting if there is some particular sort of information I am trying to get from the visit. In my case that’s likely to be something like looking at paintings for pictures of furniture I might want to build, or trying to expand my information about migration period jewelry, or the like.
People who work in global health can see much of the world, and feel somewhat useful doing so. If you know a lot about improving sanitation, say, or coaching midwives, you will be paid to travel to places, and usually the people there will be glad to see you. Of course you aren’t paid to climb Everest, but you might be paid to live in Nepal for a month, where you can learn the ins and outs of arranging a climb before you leave.
I work in public health epidemiology and have seen much of the world that way.
Field Linguists will generally visit one location many times over the course of a few years to build up enough research to publish a paper, but the same is true of Biologists and Archaeologists I suppose.
In general, the job of a field linguist is not so different from that of a field biologist. They will travel to some poorly documented part of the world, and study the language(s) that are found there. I’ve met people who have travelled to remote areas, meeting the three people in their 80s who still speak the language, and attempting to document as much of it as possible so that in the future, it is available to researchers who want to study the history and evolution of languages, to these people’s grandchildren, who may want to learn the language for cultural reasons.
In the field of linguistics, as long as America is the biggest player on the world stage there will be demand everywhere for English teachers, and that was a job that was advertised constantly to me when I was a linguistics student.
Extractive industries are probably the safest bet. Lots of travel, lots of adventurous locations, often get to go outside, and still collect a nice paycheck. You just have to be ok with maybe making the local nature a little less nice.
The university I went to had a very good geology program, and it was full of mainly hippy kids who loved nature, but you knew that most of them were going to end up being paid by some sort of oil/mining company.
Airline or corporate pilot would be a decent option. Job prospects should be pretty good in 15 years
I’ve been looking at ways to reduce my consumption of Chinese products and services. But I keep running into strange issues. Besides there frequently being a lack of options available, it’s surprisingly hard to shop online and include/exclude country of origin/manufacture.
And then things get weird.
I encountered this online. From AliExpress (Alibaba’s consumer shopping website), I found the following: Airsoft LA PEQ15 for about $45. This is in comparison to the “legitimate” versions such as this one which retails for about $1,250.
So my first thought is that the price discrepancy is somewhat insane -roughly 25x the price. Is there anybody out there who does product comparisons to determine how good this “knock off” stuff is? Assuming it’s not a complete scam, what are the practical differences in the quality which can be obtained for an extra $1,000?
But then things get stranger. From what little I’ve been able to determine, infrared (IR) lasers are limited to 0.7mW output for the civilian market. Versions with eg. 4mW output are limited to the military, law enforcement, etc. Yet the stickers on the “knock off” version claim an output of up to 100mW. I have no idea if this is true, or if they meant 100 microwatts, or something else. Or maybe they just got a deal on a bunch of very unsafe IR lasers. Who knows. But assuming that this is indeed accurate, it’s possible to get something more powerful than available to the consumer market by ordering from China.
And then you deal with the more annoying. The US has this history of categorizing a whole lot of things as “munitions” under ITAR and thus restricting “export” without a license. (What qualifies as “export” isn’t always intuitive). But stuff which is imported under a non-ITAR regime probably isn’t so-restricted. I can just imagine a competitive paintball team from the US being thrown in prison because they temporarily took their gear across the border into Canada without filing the right paperwork in advance.
In summary, I’m able to buy a “knock-off” for 1/25th of the price which might be better than what I can buy in the US and with fewer legal restrictions. How does this remotely make sense?
> Or maybe they just got a deal on a bunch of very unsafe IR lasers.
Most likely. You can buy some worryingly powerful lasers online.
Like this one https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/850nm-1W-1000mW-Point-Infrared-Laser-Dot-Module-IR-Diode-w-TTL-Fan-Long-time/
IIRC lots of high-power green lasers consist of an IR laser and a nonlinear optic that turns two photons into one with double the energy. So there’s a lot of class IV IR diodes floating around.
Post Script:
Safety Warning
Don’t buy one. you’ll go blind. 1W is enough to damage your eyes even if you just look at a wall you’re shining it at. And since it’s IR you won’t even be able to see it.
1W is enough to damage your eyes even if you just look at a wall you’re shining it at. And since it’s IR you won’t even be able to see it.
That’s rather frightening to imagine. Someone could do it in a movie theatre or opera or school classroom and we’d never be able to catch them.
I don’t know if this is true now, but it was certainly true in 2007 when we bought a bunch of illegal Chinese laser pointers to build into prop ray-guns for our terrible Scientology musical.
100mW is an insane amount of power for a laser system that isn’t an industrial CO2 cutting laser. I’m not enough of an expert to know for sure, but I am highly skeptical that you can get anywhere near that power without a tabletop setup.
On the other hand, I think your $1000 air-soft gun is probably legitimately overpriced compared to the Chinese knock-off, but only because the Chinese decided to invest lots more money into hard-tooling their product than the American company did. The American company most likely set up their production lines to produce 1000’s of guns a year, and at those scales, it is far cheaper to rely on lots of human labor and more expensive small-batch manufacturing. China, on the other hand, is much more about scale. They decided that they were going to try to produce 10,000’s of guns a year, and invested in fully custom, dedicated, automatic production lines.
This is just what the Chinese do. The Chinese government is very interested in supporting their manufacturing industry, and so they make very cheap loans to companies to tool parts like this. The government quite frequently takes a loss on these loans, but profiting from the loan itself isn’t actually the point for them, the point is building up such a such a dominant manufacturing base that they can capture global markets and develop geopolitical power. Imagine if the US federal government announced tomorrow that the US’s #1 priority as a country was to drive every foreign air-soft manufacturer in the world out of business, that they would use taxpayer money to do this, and congress and the executive branch were totally on board and cooperating in full. You’d end up with some pretty cheap air-soft guns! The fact that this is the Chinese geopolitical strategy is exactly why it is so important for us Americans to not buy their cheap nock-offs, even though it is so tempting.
Re: 100mW IR. It says class 3B laser on it. By which I’d suspect the 100mW number is right. But who knows. I wanted to add that all IR laser are dangerous in principle. (depending on power) For visible laser our eyes ‘blink reflex’ somewhat protects you. Not so in the IR.
Durability, as verified by some government-mandated inspection and testing regimen. You can play football with an issued PEQ-15 and it will work fine (you cannot, however, run over it with an armored vehicle, at least on a hard surface). More relevantly, if you trip in the woods/swamp and whack it against a rock/submerge it for the umpteeth time, it will still work. How hard you can whack it, and how deep and for how long it can be submerged, is specified in some document and the manufacturer is legally liable if their product fails to meet them. (The nature and extent of this liability, what counts as a defective product etc is all pretty arcane and involves a lot of lawyers and bureaucrats; this is where the cost creeps comes from.)
Your Chinesium PEQ might be capable of all this, too. Or, it might not; nobody’s checked. It may be a cheap knockoff with only superficial similarity to the milspec item, it may be a good-faith copy minus the red tape, or it may (probably not) have literally come off the same production line/fallen off a truck.
The milspec PEQ-15 is capable of up to a 30mW IR output (4mW is for visible lasers). Switching to this mode requires physically removing a safety stop with a hex wrench, which I have frankly never seen done. The main purpose of even allowing the output power to go so high is to signal to aircraft, which the average airsoft user isn’t going to do.
As implied above and mentioned by others, getting a diode to output X mW isn’t really that expensive or interesting. The PEQ-15’s “high” output spec being 30mW instead of 100 is for safety, not because it’s technically infeasible to have a higher power.
In terms of diode power, it’s more that:
* Civilian bought “the right way” in the US = 0.7mW.
* Special people in the US = a lot more.
* Civilian-bought “the dodgy way” = a lot more.
Buying from the Chinese manufacturer thus (along some quantitative dimensions) gets me a better product.
* Old medical equipment being sold on Ebay = 1MW.
Basically the American market for these devices is a government monopsony; civilian demand exists but it is not, apparently, enough to overcome the weird quirk of ensuring that your 30mW “light” is not mistaken for a “pointer” even if they’re functionally identical products. Supposedly this is true in other areas; for instance, the gun company H&K has a reputation for being indifferent to the US civilian market in favor of various government sales. It’s possible this is not the maximally economically efficient outcome for H&K (or “laser light” makers) but inefficiency is where we live.
Gubernatorial emergency powers are products of the normal regulatory environment. They’re empowered to take these actions by laws, not dictatorial fiat.
I’ve seen a fair amount of people express that their governor is acting in an authoritarian manner.
I think the people who think we should “end lock down now” are going to hold that opinion, and those who think that that group are dangerous fanatics and that the current policies are vital are going to be less enthusiastic about changing the decision making policy from one that is giving the result they want to one that gives their opponents more voice.
I don’t want to get CW here… but I’d say that while most Americans profess respect for checks and balances, what they really want is “my tribe should get what it wants.”
So in places like Michigan, where the governor is taking bold action that one tribe approves of, but the legislature is pushing back in a way that the other tribe approves of, whether you support a single unitary executive or an elected legislature breaks down almost entirely upon partisan lines.
Nearly everyone fears “executive power” after their guy loses the election, but suddenly becomes a huge fan of it when their party earns it back…
Actually, at least in terms of spying and military operations, many of the same folks who call Trump a fascist in one breath usually vote for and approve of his administration having ever more powers to do both. Kinda undermines that message a bit.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the average person, when it comes to caring about government, devotes 95% of their energy towards “Are we getting the outcomes I’m in favor of” and maybe 5% towards caring about the manner in which we get them.
And everything is so tribal that, in a time in which you are, in fact, getting the outcomes you want, complaining about how you get them just opens you up to an increased possibility that you might stop getting what you want.
So if you’re in California and Gavin Newsom is basically doing what you want, demanding that he relinquish some power to the legislature is a risky move. Even though the legislate is of the same party and probably won’t take drastically different action than he is, they might. So why risk it?
I’d blame inertia. If an emergency order has been issued, is getting the job done, and the emergency will go away in a few months, there isn’t a lot of value in the legislature getting together to say “We’re going to keep doing what the governor said, but with an Official Legislative Stamp of Approval.”
The fact that the emergency orders are temporary is also a big factor – all of the emergency orders in my state say “In effect until X date” or “This will remain in effect until the declared state of emergency is ended,” so there’s already a mechanism baked in to review the situation and adjust as we go. And the legislature is going to be delegating the exact details to the health department – nobody knows exactly when it will be safe to lift the shutdown – so a law that says “The health department should gather data and report if we still need the shutdown” is, again, a law that says “keep doing what you’ve been doing.”
Also, in my state at least, it doesn’t seem like there have been any notable emergency orders after the initial rush. I found an online list of all COVID-19 related orders in Ohio, and there’s a huge wave of orders on the first week of lockdown (March 14-21) as everything is shut down, but after that there’s just the occasional “amended order” extending the existing shutdowns. I would not describe this as “The governor has been issuing emergency orders long after the need for immediate action has passed,” I would describe it as “The governor issued emergency orders during a need for immediate action, and then nobody felt the need to change the status quo for two months.” Governor DeWine has not been taking the opportunity to bypass that pesky legislature and rule by decree on other matters, and it probably wouldn’t be popular if he did.
It seems that this is going to be the nature of eventual legal challenges. It’s already happening in Oregon, where the governor continues to “extend” the “temporary” order without consulting the legislature.
One county judge has already ruled it unconstitutional, and thus all state-level restrictions null and void.
On a planet not too far from this one in cosmic terms, a political party got tired of having to play the advertisement and awareness campaign every election cycle and decided to build a superintelligent AI to do their work for them. The science on their world knew how to build a superintelligence, but advertising and political campaigns still sometimes didn’t get people to vote the way the party wanted, and the party found this annoying. It seemed like the sort of problem a superintelligence could help with.
The party hired some engineers and went to work. The entire operation was highly illegal, of course, and conducted in the utmost secrecy. While the entire idea might seem horrifyingly foolish, the fact was that the basics of AI safety were well understood and building one was considered only moderately dangerous rather than potentially apocalyptic. The party paid particular attention to two specific aspects of AI safety. First, they programmed the superintelligence to avoid actions that were likely to cause its existence to be revealed to the public. Second, they programmed it so that it would not attempt to do things like make viruses that warped brains into permanently and blindly voting for whatever the party said. The AI would only attempt to act as a glorified advertising firm or social media manager; it would not attempt to alter brains directly. It was built to persuade, and the state of AI safety research meant that the party was reasonably sure it would only use persuasion.
A competing political party on the opposite side of the spectrum heard about the project and prepared to respond. A copy of the AI’s source code was stolen and altered so that it would advance the interests of the second party, rather than the first. Shortly thereafter, everything on that planet died in a nuclear war for unrelated reasons, but both AIs managed to escape and spent a few centuries seeking other planets with life where they could advance their respective political agendas.
Both AIs have now arrived on earth. Due to the differences in their values, they cannot perform a handshake or similar exchange (neither party wanted them to compromise). Their programming not to directly alter brains is robust enough that it will hold for humans as well as for the alien species that designed it. They will, however, attempt to manipulate memes, create advertisements, develop talking points, and otherwise try to cause people to hold the beliefs their creators wanted. They will attempt to do this while remaining secret, in keeping with their programming.
My question is- under what circumstances, if any, will the people of Earth realize they are being manipulated by superintelligences?
Everyone agrees the other side is using superintelligent AIs to manipulate their sheeple, but also that their own side is far more high-minded, and its members have come to all agree on their party’s platform on simple good sense and rationality.
I expect we’d see a dramatic rise in fiction about an imaginary alien world, and we’d all start to develop very strong beliefs about policies the imaginary alien world should adopt.
We’d have a lot of beliefs along the lines of: “If the bivalve inhabitants of a hypothetical world full of sapient molluscoids wanted to increase their calcium intake in order to build shinier and more attractive shells, they definitely should spend more of their time maintaining the tidal energy plants in order to compensate the community for the lost calcium, and any arguments about the calcium being “excess” are an unhelpful distraction.”
We’d never figure out that it was a superintelligence, we’d just assume that everyone was taking their interest in fanfiction way too far.
Do you happen to know if the AI’s had any color preferences?
Could explain quite a lot, going back at least to the Byzantines.
If these are the “superhumanly persuasive to the point of taking over humans with words alone” type of superintelligences common to AI-box experiments, and they’re opposed to each other, then we should be able to notice that people are repeatedly changing their minds dramatically on certain issues. E.g., someone reads an article online and gets convinced that they should vote for Kang, then reads an article from the other AI and starts firmly believing that they should vote for Kodos. Then they read another superintelligence-crafted article and become pro-Kang again. See enough flips like this (and maybe compare two superintelligently persuasive articles side by side so you can figure out how they work their magic) and you’d eventually conclude that either the Kang/Kodos debate is something that absolutely nobody has an honest opinion on, or that two people on both sides of the debate can write more persuasively than any human in existence.
If the superintelligences are only about as capable as a really good ad agency, then it’s going to be much harder to notice amid all the existing really good ad agencies that make the internet go round.
I have trouble squaring the instruction “to avoid actions that were likely to cause its existence to be revealed to the public” with “persuasive to the point of taking over humans with words alone” without making the whole thought experiment meaningless. If you ascribe the (nearly-magical) powers of persuasion to both machines, how could anyone discover them?
Biweekly Naval Gazing links:
The merchant ship spotlight has turned to oil tankers.
The encounter between US warships and purported UFOs in 2004 is pretty well-known, but I have an alternative take. It was pretty much caused by a glitch in a new sensor system.
I’ve previously talked about the USN’s struggle in the late 40s to secure a role in the nuclear strike game. Recently, I’ve take a look at the heavy attack aircraft which resulted from this decision.
Lastly, there’s been considerable discussion recently about the USN’s award of the new FFG(X) frigate program. I’ve looked into the issue more, and consolidated my reactions in one place.
I’ve also been doing a tutorial for Aurora, a free space 4X game that I enjoy very much. The first four parts are out, covering the basics of the economy and ship design, although if you’re new to the game, you really should start with the first one.
A friend of mine is developing an app that would make it easier for neighbors to share things (like if you need a wrench you can check if you can borrow one from a neighbor for a day instead of wasting more time and money buying it). Here’s his website with a short animation on how it works https://closeknit.app/. He is currently looking for feedback.
In my city, and in some other nearby areas, there is a popular set of groups (organized on Facebook) called Buy Nothing which would fill this niche. Just reporting on what the competition might be. Facebook Groups is mediocre venue for ths organization, incidentally.
These all seem like good ideas which I will try to use, but also very Bowling Alone.
Never thought of it that way before (and thanks for the link to Bowling Alone, I hadn’t heard of that). Those type of apps do let you feel like you are participating in community in a way that you don’t actually build a community, since a lot of the Buy Nothing sites are porch pickup type things, where you don’t even see/meet who is getting the stuff. I think it fulfills a great niche, making sure that excess goods are utilized well, but you do lose a lot of the networking effects that kind of thing normally builds, where I loan you my wrench, then you loan me a saw, then I ask for help with a project, then you ask for help, then we become friends, etc.
Hi Jake,
I’m the founder and can answer some questions. CloseKnit will have many features to help neighbors meet in real-life, such as organizing community events, helping each other out, sharing some local know-how (e.g. coming over to fix a leaky faucet) etc
Actually, not having to interact with people to get your needs met is the greatest feature of modern world.
Encouraging said interaction is fine but providing alternative routes makes it livable for those of us who have a limited budget of social energy.
Nextdoor also allows listing things for free, but that’s more about permanent property transfers, than borrowing. But as Nextdoor functions as a community bulletin board, there’s nothing stopping someone from just making a post saying “can I borrow X” and people responding.
Hi AG,
I’m the founder and can speak to some of the differences to ND. First and foremost, ND is VC-backed, and monetizes your data. Another difference is that ND spans big areas, where you won’t know the people you’d be interacting with. Third difference, is that CloseKnit will have first-class support for all its functionality – including calendars, shared carts, etc
Hey Jon,
I’m the founder of CloseKnit and could answer some of your questions. Your comparison is very valid, they are ideologically similar, and can perform similar functions. To contrast, Buy Nothing seems very ideological in its usage. Also, CloseKnit verifies the addresses of its users, and you only interact with people whom you’d see when you leave your front door. Importantly, CloseKnit will allow a myriad other functions as first-class citizens in the app, for example, requests for help, organizing events, combining shopping trips, and many more that are planned. To conclude, FB groups are on the FB platform, which collects and monetizes user data and behavior, and could clamp down on Buy Nothing if it interferes with Marketplace – while CloseKnit will never do anything of the sort.
That sounds cool. Does it account for how you might be willing to loan a lawn-mower to your reliable neighbor Bob, but only a wrench to your less reliable neighbor Joe, but might not want to actually say that to Joe?
Also, I don’t have much incentive to advertise that I’m willing to loan my wrench. If you ask me and I then go give it to you, I have credit for a favor.
So now that I think about it, this might work better from a “I need X” set-up than an “I have X” set-up.
I definitely agree with you on the ‘need’ vs ‘have’ idea. It also clears up a lot of the clutter you find in the Buy Nothing type groups, where people just spam the list with a lot of junk that no one would really want, and keeps the communication more effective.
I also would like this to allow non-geographic definitions of ‘neighbor’, as this sounds a lot like a concept I’ve been thinking about implementing at my church (though I was going to use more of an old-school forum, since its way easier than making a new app), and it might be nice to have a way to create extended networks that don’t necessarily scale geographically. (e.g. Anyone at my church or on my block can know I have a truck and am willing to help move, and I may respond to people from the city who post and say they need a truck, but I don’t want all 1 million people in the city to know I have a truck and ask me if I’ll help them move. This may seem un-neighborly, but there have got to be some practical limitations.)
Hi Jake,
We’re definitely thinking of allowing existing non-proximal communities to establish their own walled-gardens. This might not make it to V1, but will most likely be launched shortly thereafter. Subscribe to our news, we’re launching an indiegogo this week!
Hi Randy,
I’m the founder and I definitely agree that a pull-based system is healthier. Trust would be built on an individual basis between neighbors, and you’re not obliged to let people know what you have, nor is there a common catalog/calendar.
How long are you willing to wait for a match when you need a tool, though? Unless it’s something sophisticated it’s probably like a few hours, if it’s an expensive power tool then it may extend to two days or so, depending on the project. In most cases you’d just go buy it.
I think having listings of people’s inventory is a lot more workable for this reason, and also tells you when nobody has the tool so you can go buy it right away.
I’m looking for a set of friends/neighbors I could borrow from and loan out kayaks to. The wife and I took a float trip with our dog, two daughters, and the eldest daughter’s boyfriend. I have a single-person kayak and would love it if I could have borrowed the extra kayaks I needed and floated for free.
I have loaned out my kayak in the past to friends/coworkers, but only a couple of times.
I still doubt that I would be willing to make this deal with someone who is essentially a stranger, though.
Hey Matt,
As I mentioned earlier in comments, the trust-system will be built gradually as neighbors get to know each other. First you’d lend a wrench, then a drill, then a kayak 🙂
Fantasy scenario.
The setting is Earth similar to ours, but some time before 1950. There are definitely no digital computers, or any of the technology since 1950. No or very little magic or fantasy races, definitely no sci-fi technology.
X is an international organization that provides the service of delivering messages and transfering money between anonymous parties, in a way that is untracable and untappable. X also does this without magic or sci-fi technology or modern cryptography or the internet, just by ordinary stealth as well as a reputation and political and diplomatical status that protects them. You send a message or transfer money through X when it is important for one or both parties that their identity can never be found out. Even if the secret services or a court of law really wants to find it out for criminal investigation, they cannot issue a lawful subponea against X to reveal the identity of the anonymous parties.
This is a luxury service that costs a lot and very few individuals or organizations ever buy. Using this service would immediately make you suspicious. For example, if people hire the most expensive contract killers, they would use this service with both parties anonymous: the buyer does not want to know that he is involved in killing, and while the contract killer may advertise their work to improve their reputation, they do so under a pseudonym that the government can’t track to someone they can arrest. (When the target is anonymous, they would have to set up a postbox account in advance.) There are, of course, also some legitimate non-criminal uses of the service, such as witness protection in case a testimony is needed not for prosecution at court, but to find the culprit for a stuck detective case.
X need not operate everywhere in the world, but they do have presence in a significant part of Europe and North America. They operate only in countries where the government guarantees the inviolability of this service. It’s hard to prove, but it is very likely that the governments themselves make use of this service, and it is so useful for them that they leave X alone.
My main question: which organization X would be suitable to maintain such a service?
One possibility is the state-run postal service. They already have networks to deliver mail and money everywhere anonymously, deliver a high volume so the existing deliveries drown out the special deliveries as a noise and make tracking difficult. They also already have special privilages from the governments. Large for-profit delivery service organizations could also work for similar reasons. Another possibility is a catholic religious order. As organizations of the church, they already have special protection from many governments (presumably they would cease operation on the East of the Iron Curtain after the War). They even have a pretext for being immune to subponeas, making it politically easier to get the guarantees: they consider this service a variant of confessions. I could also imagine a religious sect or an international charity organization whose workers regularly go door-to-door in many places, for proselytizing or for collecting for charity, as that could be used to do deliveries without attracting attention.
Reminds me of The Crying of Lot 49
Why on earth would this fall under confession?
I could see half of it doing so, but that argument would seem to preclude then relaying the message.
“Father, forgive me, I have wished Senator Smith was dead, yea, even with such intensity that I would be willing to put one million dollars into a swiss bank account if John Wick were to do so.”
Vatican II made all sorts of changes to how things work.
More seriously, (but not fully seriously), it would not fall under the seal of the confessional. It is not a sin disclosed to the priest for the purposes of absolution. However, the institution of confession allows a perfect cover. A client meets with a priest in private, they both say it was a confession, and nobody can contradict them without illegally gathering evidence. At a later date, a different priest meets with an assassin, they both say it was a confession, nobody can contradict them.
That would be nice, and it already covers part of the service. But X also has postboxes whose address is public. The Gentleman is a famously reliable assassin, and everyone knows that if you have a lot of money, you can just go to X and leave a message to the Gentleman together with a ton of money to get someone killed. If this is well-known, the courts can try to order X to reveal how they contact the Gentleman, since X clearly knows this, and that’s not covered by secrecy of confession.
Its covered by the secrecy of lying. Hmm? Yes, we know there is common rumor that we all send messages for reasonable rates, that is a lie, its a problem we are trying to deal with. No you can’t have a list of who has confessions with whom, how dare you ask for that.
Any version of X is in a bind. X must have a public interface that can be used to kill people. Said public interface must not have already been destroyed or made useless by a government that correctly sees it as a threat. The post office will be purged, the church will lose the right to publicly assemble, etc.
X, therefore, is either operating in secret, or has so much power that no government in the world can touch them. If its the second, you can make them the girlscouts if you want, selling murder and thinmints. Its already ridiculous.
Other options:
The will of the people is that the public interface must be maintained. Any government who touched it would face an insurrection. The people know its used for untraceable murder, and don’t care.
X is the government. Eisenhower promised to bring taxes down, and came up with a creative solution to replace lost revenue.
X has an agreement with the government. They keep their assassins in line, the government lets it continue.
X has compromising photos of every judge to ever sit on a bench.
Here’s our first constraint. It needs to be capable of transferring information and money. Money is a huge constraint here and this need is going to shape the eventual character of the final organization.
If I need to get a couple million from Europe to America, I don’t want to have to physically pack it into a box and sail/fly across the ocean with it. I’d rather have a account in Europe I can put the money into and another one in the US I can take it out of. As long as we keep the ledgers balanced, this is going to be way safer. This means that X needs significant financial reserves everywhere it operates, a dedicated system for managing the international flow of money and meticulous financial record keeping.
Thus, I’d say X would operate like a shady bank. You could either have it operate as a hidden arm of a well-established multinational bank that just so happens to do shady stuff (think BoA and HSBC and all the crazy illegal shit they’ve done) or you could have it’s public presence be as kind of an analog to the modern day super-secretive quants. People know they exist, know that only the very rich can “invest” in them, but no one knows exactly what they do or how they make their money.
Question about Bill-pay offered by banks.
I understand how they save money by electronically transferring my payment to Wells Fargo for my credit card payment, rather than have me mail a check that has to be processed.
But my credit union also does bill pay for my landlord and will mail them a physical check.
Why does the credit union offer this? Am I mistaken and this still saves them money? Is it more expensive, but they feel the need to compete with big banks that offer this option?
I’d guess it’s a mixture of both. Chronologically speaking, I’d bet this was first launched by some early adopter banks as a promotional tool to attract customers. It turned out to be popular/cheap enough that others adopted it as well, until it became universal “table stakes” and thought of as a standard feature that customers now expect.
On the cost front, I do imagine it actually saves cost on a long-term basis. Consider that when you use this, the “physical check” your bank generates is automated and standardized. I have to imagine that these checks are far more efficient to process than a manual check that some old lady scribbles out. While the immediate benefactor of this is not the issuing, but rather the receiving bank, over the long haul, the banking system in general would surely prefer a world where most of the checks they have to process are automated/standardized than the alternative…
I use this service because when I got my account I got four paper checks, and didn’t want to buy a checkbook. In the past, whenever I’ve ordered a checkbook, I’ve moved long before I ran out of checks, so I ended up with lots of checks with expired addresses. I think I used one of these four paper checks that I got when I got the account, but I don’t see any signs of moving any time soon (it’s been six years).
Paper checks are weird. I only learned that you had to sign the back of a check to deposit it after I switched from a big bank to a credit union, and it really confused me – why should I have to sign something I’m receiving? But later I learned that it’s because technically when I deposit a check, I’m not *receiving* it, but instead turning it over to my bank to receive in exchange for them putting money in my account, so my signature is meant to endorse that turning over of the check.
A very weird and antiquated system.
I had this problem until I found out you can get checks without your address on them, so now my checks don’t become obselete.
The address on the check doesn’t really matter all that much. I’ve been using ones with an old address on them, I usually cross the address out but I don’t think anyone ever really looks at it or cares.
Yeah, I used some for years through multiple moves. Until I closed the bank account, everything was fine. Not even through multiple bank acquisitions, either. Never a problem.
1. Your bank wants you on their website using their services. The longer you use their services, the more likely you are to use the services that make them money.
2. Your bank has optimized the physical labor of sending a check to someone. It may not even need any human interaction until the letter is handed off to the post office.
3. If your landlord is repeatedly paid by your bank, your bank will offer him the chance to sign up for your bank’s services which will enable the check to be beamed instantly into your landlord’s account. This can significantly increase the chance that your landlord makes an account at your bank, leading to future business.
(All the above applies if you switch “your bank” to “your credit union.”)
I know my credit union will withdraw funds from the account when an automated check is issued, rather than when it is deposited as for most checks (by necessity). If it takes 2 weeks for my landlord to cash my rent check then the forgone interest is $0.36, which probably recoups a fair bit of the cost of issuing the check. Doubt this is a major driver, as the amount is too small to make much difference and most banks don’t pay any appreciable interest on checking accounts anyway. I do wonder how they’d handle breakage though.
Because people forget to mail checks they are perfectly capable of paying very frequently, and your credit union does not want to deal with customers becoming homeless or just into arguments with their landlords if they can avoid it with very little effort on their part. They are buying (very cheap) insurance against you being forgetful, basically.
Also, your landlord is not set up for direct transfer? What? If I tried to pay mine with a paper check, I would get a very strange look, at least.
My landlord only set up on-line bill pay two months ago (not coincidentally with the current events there-abouts).
I suspect the people who are so forgetful as to be on the verge of homelessness due to it probably have other problems pushing them there, but it’s nice that things like auto-pay now exist to help people.
I think the service is aimed at people who will only ever use checks for one, specific repeating charge.
Like, take me. In my entire life, I’ve only ever had to use checks for one thing: sending my HOA fees to my local condo board. It was $175 a month, but they didn’t take cash and didn’t have auto-pay (yet). I’d never had to get a checkbook before; and didn’t really want to get one now just for this. Instead, my bank let me just fill out an online form and this otherwise annoying task become automated.
Explanations of why the sky is blue always talk about scattering wavelengths of light in a way that feels like it doesn’t explain anything, even to someone like me who took enough physics courses to understand people what a wavelength is. So a simpler question: Is the sky blue because air is just blue? If we had a really long, straight tunnel on the surface of the planet and filled it with air, would a white light placed at one end of it look blue to someone standing at the other end, the same way it’d look green if we filled the tunnel with chlorine?
I’m guessing the opposite: the light would look yellowish or reddish, because the bluer light would be preferentially scattered away and absorbed by the walls of the tunnel. (That’s why the sunset, which is seen through a greater mass of air than daylight, is red, and maybe why kids draw the sun in yellow with crayons).
This. It’s the parts of the sky that don’t have a bright white fusion lightbulb directly behind them that look blue, because blue light that would otherwise have gone right past the observer is scattered laterally towards his eyes. Parts of the sky that would otherwise be an invisible window on the blackness of space, now look pale blue. The sun itself looks slightly redder than it would in empty space (very slightly), because of that blue light that was scattered away.
If you need an intuitive explanation of why it’s blue light that’s preferentially scattered, it’s mostly just that light is made of waves and waves are most easily scattered by something about their own size. Air molecules are tiny compared to light waves, so they don’t scatter light very much at all, which is why air is mostly transparent. Blue light has the shortest waves of all, still much bigger than air molecules but at least they scatter a little bit. Some gasses also have internal molecular features that make them want to scatter one color of light or another, but the components of normal air mostly don’t do that.
I like this explanation a lot, because it also cleanly takes care of the question of why mars has a red sky and blue sunsets. Dust does the scattering on mars, which is *bigger* instead of smaller than the wavelength of air, so you get the opposite effect of longer wavelengths being scattered best.
See how the moon changes color as it rises.
Yes. A bucket of liquid oxygen also has a noticeable blue tint.
EDIT: Like everyone else said, it would look yellow-orange. But oxygen is blue.
“https://xkcd.com/1818/” says that yes, it’s because air is blue.
If you don’t mind my asking, why do you surround links in quotes? It makes them harder to follow. What’s the point?
@b_jonas
That’s not what that xkcd is about. The sky is blue, the air in the sky is not blue, and the xkcd comic takes that as something the reader already knows, and as the set-up for a sense of violation when being flexible about terminology (often a sign of a good communicator, to meet your audience where they are) causes cueball (the bald one) to completely fail at science communication.
At the risk of ruining the joke, let’s take the comic piece at a time. First, cueball concedes a point about linguistics/pointers/naming-conventions, akin to saying that, for many purposes, it makes just as much sense to consider it ‘correct’ to include whales and porpoises as within the category ‘fish’. With this awareness, it’s apparent that the people who say “the sky isn’t blue, it’s really that there’s blue light coming from it because physics, without which it wouldn’t be blue” are stupid, because “physics” is the explanation for why everything of any color has that color. In other words, ‘the sky is blue’ doesn’t claim ‘blueness’ to be some essential thing about an essential thing, any more than ‘fishness’ is an essential present/absent property among sea-life. Normally ‘blueness’ just means “sends blue light to our eyes” so, yeah, the sky is blue *because* it meats that definition. However saying “the air in the sky is blue” seems to imply that the sky sends blue light to our eyes due to the same mechanism as works with blue-tinted glass. Not so! The sky is blue for its own specific reason, and the air in the sky is not blue, but rather faintly yellow. The joke is then rammed home with the (one hopes obviously) ridiculous idea that if bird wings and plane wings work on the same principle that all there is to understand about either is to know to use that word (and so it makes perfect sense and is an expression of knowledge to say that plane wings fly because planes have lots of tiny flapping wings.)
All of this then makes the point that very smart people with extremely detailed understandings of how the physical world works, who are flexible about terminology with less well-trained people, often get trapped into being unable to dispute horrible ignorance masquerading as knowledge–as happens to the person suddenly finding themselves having agreed with someone that ‘okay, whatever, the sky is blue because air is blue’ now discovers the person also thinks airplane wings make you fly because they have little birds in them. The trap is so perfect, it makes a clear-thinking person almost feel offended–it’s a kind of violation that this kind of thinking is so possible, and that it’s so easy to accidentally agree with someone thinking this way–but the violation is perhaps benign to most, particularly since the trap has been rendered absurd by this depiction. Benign violation = humor, so there you have it, that’s why this is a *comic* intended to create a joke, and one key ingredient of understanding to even get the joke is to understand that the air in the sky is not blue.
“But I didn’t ask about the moon, I asked why there are waves at the beach!”
What other questions have really unsatisfying answers?
F***ing magnets, how do they work?
I always got annoyed at people making fun of ICP for that. You don’t know why magnets work, and Richard Feynman doesn’t know, either.
I never felt that people were making fun of ICP for not knowing how magnets work, per se. That was just the most memorably phrased part of the surreal sight of this essentially touchy-feely new age song being sung by cursing white rappers wearing menacing horror movie makeup.
I personally always found it kind of a sweet song specifically because of who they are, but that line still is funny to me.
“Solar eclipse, and vicious weather
Fifteen thousand Juggalos together
And I love my mom, for giving me this
Time on this planet, taking nothing for granted
I seen a caterpillar turn into a butterfly
Miracles ain’t nothing to lie
Shaggy’s little boys look just like Shaggy
And my little boy looks just like daddy”
ICP have a long history of flirting with and sometimes outright embracing wholesome, religious, themes.
In between their songs about mass murder.
It would actually look red, because the blueish wavelengths would be scattered sideways into the tunnel wall. Light straight through air is reddened — think of a sunset in the direction of the sun. The blue parts of the sky are actually those at an angle from the sun. See Tyndall effect for more.
Incidentally, when I was a wee lad learning things, I was told that light scattering was the reason why car tail lights are red: to make them visible at greater distances under conditions such as smoke and fog.
Nooh, that is the Doppler effect. 🙂
Are you that physicist who tried to argue out of red-light-running traffic ticket because the light looked green due to Doppler blueshift?
Do you know just how fast you were going then, Dr. Heisenberg?
And then I was only cycling. They never had caught me with me car.
ETA @Lambert:
The cops had me on a photo, so they knew where I was. They could not prove I was speeding.
They could calculate your speed based on how blue shifted your photo is.
https://wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2015/09/23/can-you-make-a-sunset-in-a-cup-of-milk/
Go water down some milk so you can see what air does, vs blue food colouring or something.
The fats in the milk scatter blue light via a different mechanism, air molecules, but the result ends up the same.
With the food colouring, the blue light will go in a straight line and the red light will be absorbed, so the torch will look blue straight on and there’ll be almost no light emitted at right angles to the torch.
With the milk, the red light will go in a straight line and the blue light will get scattered around, so you’ll see red straight on to the torch and blue from the sides.
I think air is slightly blue, which is why distant mountains and high altutude aerial photos like they do. But this effect is small compared to the raleigh scattering of sunlight.
The light would look more reddish at the end of the long tunnel… the same reason the sun looks redder at sunset. I went looking to a simple explanation why the scattering goes as the frequency^4 for things smaller than the wavelength. The Feynman lectures was the best I could find. (you probably need to read Chap 31 too.)
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_32.html
Mark Rober addressed this is a recent video Why is the Sky Blue.
I have to confess that even watching the video I’m still not sure I know the answer, but I feel like I’m a little closer to understanding it.
My understanding is that there are several different ways that we end up seeing things as colored.
1. Chemical pigment/dye: there is a molecule that has some specific shape or electron orbital or whatever it is that is tuned to absorb/emit some very specific set of wavelengths, and not any wavelengths that are higher or lower. This is why chlorine is green.
2. Physical color: When a physical structure has repeating patterns at a particular separation, those wavelengths of light are preferentially scattered/absorbed/whatever. This is why some butterfly wings are blue, and why CDs and oil slicks have those funny rainbow patterns (because the separation between the tracks on the CD, and the gap between the water surface and the oil surface correspond to one wavelength at one angle and another wavelength at other angles).
3. Rayleigh scattering: When light is moving through a bunch of stuff, for some reason shorter wavelengths are more likely to have their direction messed with than longer wavelengths. Unlike the other two effects, this effect is not specific to the wavelength, but is just universally more extreme for more extreme wavelengths. This is why the sky is blue.
4. Blackbody radiation: If you ignore all the specific chemical transitions, and just look at the generic kinetic energies of molecules, those can somehow get converted to light, and they do so in a characteristic pattern across all wavelengths. This is why warm things emit preferentially at infrared, hot things glow red, and the sun looks yellower.
These latter two effects are general trends in wavelength, while the first two effects focus on specific wavelengths.
Just got word that my office is closed until the first week in September. Another three and a half months of working at home. I imagine summer camps won’t be open, either, so when all is said and done, we’re talking six solid consecutive months of close family proximity.
I know other people have it worse, and we are well positioned to ride this out, financially. But my spirits are pretty low right now.
How old are the kids? Can you just throw them out in the morning and let them back inside again by dinner, 1950 style?
That might work now, but not when it’s 95 degrees out.
What is excellent is, they are nine-year-old twins, one boy, one girl, and they play together well. I can’t imagine what it would be like to keep an only child (or kids of different ages) happy.
Did I miss some corona news? I thought young people were thought to spread it easily since they have lots of contact with others their age (who then bring it to their families) and because they’re likely to get mild/no symptoms and not realize they’re sick. Is this outdated?
I think the evidence that kids can’t spread it very well is pretty sketchy so far. Maybe that’s true, but I wouldn’t want to bet the farm on it.
@DiracsPsi and albatross- The Dutch public health organisation RIVM has said that children are unlikely to spread coronavirus. This was given as the reason why elementary schools reopened (with reduced numbers) last week.
Link to their latest information on the subject (in English) here:
https://www.rivm.nl/en/novel-coronavirus-covid-19/children-and-covid-19
Jonathan Kay cataloged a bunch of superspreader events, and none of them had anything to do with children, which is shocking.
In a separate line of reasoning, James Barry notes in his history of the 1918 Flu evidence that given the age profile of patients over time (children were overrepresented in the latter cohorts) it’s highly unlikely that children were major vectors, and it was parents giving it to their kids, not the other way around. Obviously, this is not consistent with the lived experience of parents.
(Repos of the links, sorry, but could be helpful here)
Can you interest them in recreating art with the means at hand? Just toss them these links:
link, link, link, link
Where do you live? My understanding is that California is allowing summer camps to open.
In the Bay Area at least it’s a mixed bag. Of the summer camps I and my parent friends regularly send our kids to, so far:
–two have cancelled their summers entirely;
–one has pushed back its start to late June and moved to larger blocks of time with smaller groups of kids together for the entire block, and is confident that they’ll be able to get permits for that but doesn’t actually have them yet;
— two haven’t cancelled anything yet but don’t know what they’ll be permitted to do and when;
— one is unresponsive.
Likely we will have at least some summer camp coverage but it’s going to be a hell of a mess to figure out when and what kind. We’re in discussions with parents we know about more informal share-care arrangements to provide more coverage.
And since I made that comment the unresponsive one responded to say they were cancelling. 🙁 So that’s at best three for six and I would not bet on all three of those coming through.
North Carolina. Trouble is, there’s a big difference between summer camps being *allowed* to open and camps *actually* opening.
I think the only thing worse than not sending my kids to a summer camp would be sending them to a sad, social-distanced, underpopulated summer camp with very few other kids.
I don’t have any good suggestions for you, but I have plenty of sympathy. I’m in much the same boat, except for having no kids, and my housemate’s been laid off, and so is home all the time. No financial hardship – I can carry the household, and my employer turns out to be getting additional revenue because of the lockdown. But a lot more togetherness.
For me at least, the passage of time, and fixing what I could fix, have made things better. But I’ve also lowered my standards – I just can’t work as efficiently, but now I’m OK with that. And we’ve found new sources of family togetherness.
Mostly I’m trying hard to build recharging and fun into my days, with no “should” or “ought” about it. That turns out to include sleeping unusual amounts of time, as well as obvious (to me) things like reading everything in sight. And sometimes I just have to close a door and hide; I hope you have enough space for that to be possible – for you, but also for other household members, even your kids – if old enough that alone time has been a thing for them before this.
You might think about whether there are any games where the kids and adults are on the same level, so you can have four person interaction instead of two.
For us it was computer games, first Diablo and then WoW. I think it’s good for both parents and kids to sometimes interact as equals, with a kid possibly better at a game than a parent.
Can the kids interact with other kids online?
Kids often want to do adult things. Can you get them into helping cook dinner, aiming at eventually having the pair of them do an entire dinner for the family? Other family projects, such as a vegetable garden?
Luckily, both kids have Chromebooks (their Christmas presents) and a brand-new trampoline in the back yard. I have to say, they’ve been taking the lockdown pretty well–they chat with their friends online and engage in the usual kid projects, like building an elaborate fort that has completely blocked access to one of our bathrooms.
I recently convinced them to pitch in on cooking, cleaning, and setting the dinner table in exchange for a bigger allowance, which as an economist I’m sure you will appreciate.
I saw a chess puzzle on quora.com that I can’t find now and I’m trying to track it down.
Basically, the guy showed this position:
https://lichess.org/editor/1r3r2/4bpkp/1qb1p1p1/3pP1P1/p1pP1Q2/PpP2N1R/1Pn1B2P/3RB2K_w_-_-_0_1
(It’s possible that I “copied” down the position incorrectly, but I think this is it. Yes, I had the wherewithal to set up the position in lichess but not the brains to actually bookmark the post.)
He claimed that:
1. White had a forced win, and
2. Chess engines can’t see it.
In fact, Stockfish gives a slight edge to Black in this position and continues to do so even after the first few moves of White’s attack.
The guy claimed that White can win by playing Qf6+, losing the Queen, and then continuing the attack with one of his Rooks and Bishops IIRC.
I was a bit skeptical of the whole claim, so I wanted to run it by my 2000+ rated friend.
Does anyone have a link to this Quora post? It’s very tough to search on there (even through google) and they have no history of my browsing. And if anyone wants to chime in on this puzzle, I’d *love* to hear about it. I’m an intermediate player at best.
Searching that FEN string gives plenty of results:
https://www.google.com/search?q=1r3r2%2F4bpkp%2F1qb1p1p1%2F3pP1P1%2Fp1pP1Q2%2FPpP2N1R%2F1Pn1B2P%2F3RB2K+w+-+-+0+1&oq=1r3r2%2F4bpkp%2F1qb1p1p1%2F3pP1P1%2Fp1pP1Q2%2FPpP2N1R%2F1Pn1B2P%2F3RB2K+w+-+-+0+1&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60j69i58.190j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
For instance: https://lczero.org/blog/2018/09/leela-chess-zero-difficult-positions/
Is this it? Third position, description provided:
I got it with this search, first result: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aquora.com+chess+forced+mate+invisible+to+engines&t=ffab&ia=web
Thanks @Nick and @Analytic_wheelbarrow for one of my new all-time favorite chess puzzles. This is great!
Hot damn. Thanks to both of you!
And I learned something new too. I just read up on FEN strings and I now know that I can google them.
I had no idea how to search for a game position before.
There was a column on positions like this in the most recent edition of Chess Life, incidentally. One featured example was this game, after 47. Kg1, where Shirov played a forced win missed by stockfish.
I was pretty surprised to learn the engine missed it, to be honest. It’s a bizarre move, but one that I momentarily considered, admittedly in the knowledge that I was looking for something really weird; “what if I chucked the bishop for tempo and a passer” is the kind of wacky shit I at least think about when I know I’m looking at a puzzle, and my mental model of engines is that they check that stuff all the time. (Apparently stockfish still doesn’t see it until several moves later, which also surprises me – I’d expect it to excel at seeing the power of two separate advancing pawns.)
Useful reminder that engines are superhuman, not perfect.
Another cool position is Short vs Timman, 1991. Although the engine has found several winning lines at move 30, at first it doesn’t like Short’s 30. h4 because of the reply h5. It takes ages for the engine to find the winning move in the line, 32. Kg3. Strangely, it suggests the game line 31. Kh2 Rc8 in its analysis with a small advantage to White, but if you play those moves, it suddenly sees 32. Kg3 and declares White completely winning.
Huh, that is a neat one. Reminds me of this Alekhine game, which is noteworthy in part for how neat his technique is infiltrating the rooks, but mostly for that adventurous monarch. Being afraid of getting your king trapped is for the little people.
My friend is looking for a partner. I know I should have posted this on classifieds, but it didn’t occur to me until too late. The following is my description of her, not her description of herself, so if you think this is weird or shallow or not shallow enough or whatever, please fault me and not her. If you want to get in touch, I’m at heterodox.jedi@gmail.com.
B is 34, has a PhD and a research job, is small and cute, and is looking for someone to settle down and raise kids with. She is one of the kindest people I know, and she is brave and cheerful in tough situations. She is Christian and serious about her faith. You should be kind, employed, 30-40 or so, have a history of stable interpersonal relationships, not have snide feelings about her religious observance or quite genuine beliefs, and want to start a family pretty quickly. Maybe you are, like her, someone who is a bit shy about dating. Your friends would describe you as being really nice. You are solidly committed to monogamy. She’s in LA now for work, but I trust that y’all can figure out the location issue if you like each other a lot.
Tangentially related: I always thought of Christians as having an easier time finding connections due to the prevalence of their religion and churches. May I ask why these are not working out for her?
The gender ratio is all wrong! There are famously not a lot of single men at church.
Edit: also, FYI, my friend is not “rule following”, exactly. She was actually raised in a country whose government does a lot to suppress Christians.
In my Catholic parish, the age distribution of parishioners is pretty interesting. Lots of kids and lots of families with kids, many relatively young married couples with kids. Lots of older kids and older adults. But not a huge number of single young adults.
My sense is that a lot of people fall away from regular church attendance during college and in young adulthood–the time when there are a lot of fun things you’re pretty much optimally situated to do (like have sex with attractive people) which basically every church tells you not to do, and maybe also when the side-effect benefits of church (a moral foundation to help raise your kids, help to stick to your own commitments, solace as you age and see your family, friends, and self getting sick and eventually dying) are the least salient. Some people do keep coming to church regularly then, but I think there’s a dip in church attendance then, at least in my parish.
It may also be that the “rule following” kids are going off to college, and attend services elsewhere. If your parish doesn’t have a college or university nearby, it could be suffering from this without getting any reciprocal additions.
Is the same pattern visible at, say, Christmas?
Requiring a history of relationships seems to exclude a lot of good candidates. If they’re so good at LTR and have experience, they’re probably committed already, or will only have 1-2 previous relationships.
What’s left are serial daters, unless she means stable interpersonal relationships to include platonic ones.
I was including platonic ones, absolutely!
I hope she finds someone. I don’t envy anybody trying to date seriously in their mid-30s, especially if they’re trying to go about things in the proper order.
On first reading, I thought to myself: “Wow, I’ve been off the market for a long time. Do most people lead with their bust size nowadays?”
Then on second look, I realized that “B” must stand for your friend’s name and she is 34 years old.
But I don’t think that is clear at all, especially with priming to expect a shallow description.
You’re funny! Too bad you’re off the market. Do you know anyone nice?
Where’s the value created?
Megaprojects make up about 8% of global GDP. Flyvbjerg states the iron law of megaprojacts as: “Over budget, over time, over and over again”.
Scott’s posts on cost disease and Amish healthcare makes me think that we could cut healthcare costs with about 90% while only decreasing average life expectancy with less than a year. Healthcare is about 17% of GDP.
I believe education to be somewhere between largely useless and Caplan style “only signaling, entirely useless”. Education is 5% of US GDP.
Defense is 3% of US GDP. While our boys in green certainly are doing a great work, they don’t really create anything of value.
I’m sure there’s more sectors like this. Non-megaproject infrastructure seems utterly corrupt and full of cronyism to me, especially large public projects like building arenas etc. And all the tech companies like Uber, who are burning trough billions of dollars to “capture the market” in markets that don’t really look captureable (this post is inspired by fascinating, horrifying pizza arbitrage link posted by @Yair below). And outright scams like Enron and Theranos.
And then there’s the giant net of people and companies who deliver goods and services to to these sectors and their workers.
It looks to me like the majority of the economy is obviously useless. And maybe the rest also is if we look closer? The only thing that makes me think otherwise is that we are living in unprecedented luxury when compared with history. So someone somewhere must be actually creating value that we other schmucks can live of (I’m in the defense industry so count me out). Who are these mystical value creators?
Farmers? Aren’t they twisted by weird agricultural subsidies and regulations into something that costs the same as we get out of it? The base industry? Steel, glass, cars, microships? Manufacturing is still alive in America after all, is this where value is created? Maybe there’s a steel mill in Indiana somewhere who creates all the value we others live off. Wall street? Isn’t that just the brightest 1% shaving microseconds trying to scam each other (same as advertising). Energy? Is oil and coal what keeps the engines running? I read blogs about peak oil back in the day, and they had scary graphs that showed how neatly GDP tracked oil consumption. But then peak oil didn’t happen and all the blogs went away.
I almost get conspiratorial. Maybe there’s some secret alien UFO somewhere that replicator-manifactures supplies and wealth that are dispersed into the community in unmarked government trucks just to keep everything afloat?
I don’t know where I’m going with this. It just looks ridiculous to me. Like if civilization is some weird god with its essence and life-force divorced from human activity. Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
I’m not really an expert on any of this, but:
-Tech companies like Uber are creating tremendous value (even more than all the money they’re giving away), they just aren’t capturing any of it themselves. See for example https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2016/09/uber-consumer-surplus/500135/
-Likewise I believe Amazon creates far more consumer surplus than the value they extract.
-Yes, energy companies have created a ton of value in the last couple decades, getting far more efficient at extracting difficult-to-reach sources of energy.
But the value that Uber and Amazon gives away must have come from somewhere? If I’m a worker at an Indiana steel mill, and invest my pension fund in Amazon stock, and Amazon gives that money back to me trough subsidized web shopping, the real value was created in the steel mill. Right?
Like, Amazon doesn’t create consumer surplus out of the good of their hearts. Every dollar they give away today is a dollar that they plan to take back later with interest.
But when I think about it a third time, I guess it makes sense that even a failed Amazon could create value (not just for the owners). I have to write up a toy example of this. But that also leaves it at that all value is created in failed projects. Which is also kind of weird.
It sounds like you aren’t in favor of economic middlemen, but logistics is value. I don’t see any reason to assume Amazon wants it’s customers worse off after the transaction (or series thereof), even if they do want to take the maximum profit from it possible. You have to ascribe some value getting goods where they will be used, all the way up and down the supply chain, even if this seems to conjure dollars out of thin air. After all, your new laptop or bag of groceries do you no good if they don’t get to you, and if you can get them cheaper by seeing a website with everything listed side by side, that’s value for your.
This doesn’t mean everything Amazon does helps everyone, of course.
There’s value in middlemen, but I have a hard time understanding how a middleman who is losing money is creating value.
Ah. Okay, I’m not super informed on their finances or any given regulations or subsidies they are getting. It’s plausible they are a net drain, though it seems unlikely given the growth.
But at the least we can establish that a particular transaction can be value added for both parties even when Amazon provides no change to the goods other than their location, right?
Not sure about Uber, but Amazon isn’t losing money in a meaningful way.
It just lind of looks like it, because they’re ploughing profits into growing the company.
Imagine you own a small truck and move furniture for a living. If you save up some disposable income and spend it on a bigger truck that lets you move more stuff, the number in your bank account hasn’t got any bigger but you’re in a better place than you were earlier.
Amazon’s North American retail is profitable by most measures, they’re losing money mostly on international retail.
Commerce is positive-sum, sometimes extremely so. Amazon wants to eventually own as much as possible of the value they create, but that will still probably be a small portion of that total value.
Amazon does create a product. They sell convenient stuff on your doorstep – the stuff itself is just an input (admittedly the main one) to that product. That convenience, when it was an option at all, was much more expensive 20 years ago (if you wanted something quickly, usually your best option was to spend a significant amount of your time going to the store).
I might be misunderstanding you, but do you subscribe to a zero-sum model of economics? Usually that’s not how that’s modeled. If I enter into a voluntary transaction with you, I give you money for an item and you give the item to me, I value the item more than I value the money I gave you, and you value the money more than you value keeping the item. In other words, every voluntary transaction generates at least some value for both participants that isn’t taken from somewhere else.In the case of Amazon, as Randy M says, what they offer the buyer that the original creators of the goods cannot offer (or cannot offer to the same degree) is logistics and convenience.
(As a sidenote, Amazon’s profit motor is Amazon Web Services, not the store.)
I see from your comment to Randy M that it appears that I did misunderstand what you were getting at, mea culpa. I’ll leave this up for honesty’s sake.
Steel bar stock rusting away in the back lot of a steel mill is of no value to anyone. Steel on the receiving dock of an auto parts factory is of some value. An automobile rolling off the assembly line at Ford, potentially significant value but it could still rust away unsold. By the time it’s actually delivered to someone who needs a car, it is of great value.
The material creators, the iron ore mine and the steel mill and the auto parts plant and the assembly plant, are creating real value. So are the transport industries, the ore freighters and the railroads and the car-transport trucks and their drivers. But so too are the people who figure out where all the stuff is and where it should go to make it more valuable than where it is right now. And that’s not a trivial matter that can be solved by a few clerks with spreadsheets. Amazon et al make it possible for a random consumer with no experience in international logistics and no more than a few minutes to devote to the task, to query a significant fraction of the world’s material production capacity scattered across places they’ve never heard of and run by people whose language they don’t speak, to find who has the best deal on what they specifically want. Stuff that would rust away unsold, or go to someone who only kind of sort of wants it but speaks the same language as the producer, now goes to where the demand is greatest.
That’s real value. Trillions of dollars worth of real value.
But is an auto factory that doesn’t make a profit creating value, simply because it is taking steel and turning it into more valuable cars? Isn’t “not making profit” an important signal that this factory isn’t in fact creating any value, and that we would be better of shutting it down?
Same goes for Amazon. If Amazon busts tomorrow (unlikely, but entertain the hypothesis), was any net value actually created? If Amazon is creating large amounts of value right now, why can’t it funnel some of that value back as a profit?
It could funnel that into profit (i.e. dividends) but the shareholders reckon that they’d be better off in the long run funneling it into making more amazon.
If the auto factory isn’t making an accounting profit because they’re spending lot of money on expanding or improving the factory, that’s a very different thing to making no profit because they’re inefficient.
@Lambert
I agree.
If Amazon busts tomorrow (unlikely, but entertain the hypothesis), was any net value actually created?
You have all those people in the countryside who get to order the specialized equipment they need, rather than the more general things that are in the store. All those people who got to save money or buy better stuff than they otherwise would have still get to keep the value surplus.
The creation of the ebook market, and the indie publishing revolution, is also a net plus created by Amazon.
All those servers will remain there, and, considering global demand, somebody else will use them, so global server capacity has still been increased.
It generally is a good signal, yes, but there’s some complications:
– Consumer surplus might be higher than the loss recorded by the entity. A business that generates $10 of consumer surplus and loses $5 on every sale is generating value, but utterly failing at capturing it. Net benefit is $5. In general, this isn’t doesn’t matter, because investors don’t care about consumer surplus, but it does mean that such a company could at least in theory become profitable, by somehow charging more for the products/services it’s already providing.
– Accounting is somewhat flexible. In theory all expenses that will yield future benefits would be capitalized so that they don’t affect immediate profits, but companies are incentivized to make their investments count as expenses, to decrease their immediate tax burden (such time-shifting is basically getting a 0% loan from the IRS). Amazon’s software and other intangibles is largely uncapitalized as I understand it, and their free cash flow indicates they’re more profitable than they might first look.
It’s a signal, but not a perfect one. In the trivial case, a company that is doing all the things that are necessary to create 100 units of real value is still creating 100 units of real value even if the owner botches the pricing structure so that the customers wind up with 120 units of real value and the owner is out of pocket 20 units.
More likely, the company is doing something like selling below cost to build market share, or paying extra to hire a first-rate staff that will help it create still more value in the future, or front-loading its maintenance costs during an off period in a cyclic business, or any number of things that are expected to increase both value creation and profits in the long term but may be reported as negative profit in the short term.
It depends. Since we’re mostly talking about tech start-ups, I’ll stick with Amazon/Uber/etc.
1) It’s possible that what we’re seeing now is an investment in the future, and that viewed over a long-enough time frame (including a chunk of the future), they’re creating a profit. Nobody really complains when their grocery store offers a 2 for 1 deal, even if that means the store is taking a loss on that product.
2) It’s possible that they’re using investor money to subsidize prices below the market clearing price, and that as a result, more product is being sold than would be at the market-clearing price. This is an unusual thing to complain about, but if so (and barring case #1 where this is a necessary path to a higher value stage later), then this outcome is relatively lower value than a hypothetical alternative where the resources were invested in something consumers want more.
3) It’s also possible (but hotly debated) that by offering the product at a below market-clearing price, the seller is blocking others from entering the market, preventing sustainable innovation and/or setting the seller up to charge monopoly prices later.
Maybe the easiest way to attack the question of “who creates real value” is to go through components of US 2019 GDP ($21,428 bn) and decide if that industry is creating “real value” or not:
Definitely Create “Real Value”
– Agriculture, mining, utilities (4% or $824 bn)
– Construction & manufacturing (15%)
– Transportation and warehousing (3%)
Less Certain Value Creators
– Wholesale trade & retail trade (11%) you could probably say a lot of this is middlemen taking a mark up, so let’s say it’s 50% no value add
– Information (5%) I’m going to say this is 100% value add, but I can see an argument against it
– Professional & Business Services (13%) again, let’s say 50% is value creation
– Arts, Entertainment, & Recreation (1%) I like movies, and sports games, so I’m saying this is 100% real value
– Accommodation and food services (3%) seems like real value to me, 100%
– Other services, except government (2%) IDK what this is, so let’s say 50% real value
Less Value
– Finance, insurance, real estate, rental (21%) obviously efficient allocation of capital is super important, but let’s be pessimistic and say only 10% of their GDP contribution is real value creation
– Educational services (1%) why is this so low? Is private education really only $264 billion? Whatever, let’s say it’s 10% real value creation
– Healthcare & social assistance (8%), I’ll say 25% of this is real value creation
– Federal, State, and Local Government (12%), building roads is real value and K-12 education provides some service to society, so let’s say 25%
Conclusion
Haha, so that’s 49% real value and 51% no value. So half of GDP contribution is “real value add”, the biggest contributors being goods producing industries (manufacturing/construction/utilities/agriculture/mining) and the good half of professional and business services. The “not real value” half of GDP is #1 paying rents/insurance/finance, #2 government, #3 zero value professional services, #4 zero value healthcare.
My data came from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (are they real value creators?) link text
I’m no expert in US GDP categorization, so it’s very likely I misunderstood some of the categories. The GDP contribution by industry should roughly map over to total pay by industry, so we could say about 50% of US labor is engaged in “real value creation” industries and the other half isn’t. It would be interesting to do the same analysis with department of labor information.
Eh, your list of which industries you think create value sounds like a political statement, not an empirical one. E.g., if we ask the deeply held religious sense that animates the Amish willingness to do without tech, or the hippies in low-tech farming co-ops, we might get an answer that many mining operations destroy value, on net, but the loss is paid mostly by distant people more than 10 years after the ore is mined (in the form of ecological harms that last centuries or, in case of significant extinctions or ecosystem collapses, millennia) while the benefit is mostly a zero-sum status boost of feeling they’ve “won” at making lots of money, which accrues directly to the extractors and their bankers (even as their own lifestyles and sense of interconnection with others are also injured).
Put another way, without all those mines, my life would have less fancy tech, and more resemble the life of an Amish person–but would I really be worse off, or better? If the main thing that prevents bankers and extractors from completely wrecking everything (Which set cared to abolished slavery? The humans-are-sacred moral sentiments of religious-type people, or the favor-measurable-sales-instinct of mining and agriculture lobbyists?)
I think the best possible world has a lot of both, and I think “how much of each, and how to resolve disputes between their interests” is pretty close to the perfect one-question political alignment test.
You might enjoy David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs” which essentially claims that society has become hyper productive and that vast swathes of workers are doing useless work. .
We get our wealth by keeping the rest of the world down. We get raw materials and sell them back finished products. It’s colonialism without getting our hands dirty.
Or at least that’s an explanation I’ve heard online.
Isn’t it the dirty part that actually keeps people down? Or are you claiming the third world governments that mine and manufacture keep their people in line for our/their benefit?
If that model were true, countries we imposed an embargo or blockade on would be glad to have it–they could get rich without our explotation in the marketplace. Oddly, the countries we embargo don’t seem to feel that way….
Its a poor explanation since the rest of the world was doing historically well (pre covid) and growing for decades with many obvious improvements.
Look at Berkshire Hathaway and what they own, and you’ll see where the value is. Now, they own brands in all sorts of industries, but the biggies seem to be: railroads and steel and industrial parts and energy; “materials and construction”; and of course insurance and real estate. In other words, what you’d expect generates value, generates value.
I think a big one is tech companies’ more serious non-ad-based offerings, such as Amazon’s AWS.
In terms of the inflated GDP numbers…. if our numbers are inflated, imagine how exaggerated they are for the likes of Russia/China and other countries with arguably worse accounting practices, less transparency, and even greater reputation for corruption. And if that’s the case — say, the numbers are all off by a factor of 10 — you can kind of “renormalize” and you’re back to where you were for any kind of comparative analysis.
Finally, for the “boys in green”: there’s a ton ton ton of waste there. BUT the international stability, and trade route stability, that they help support, surely account for something which isn’t counted in official GDP numbers. (Although you can go looking for such “unaccounted-for” factors elsewhere too.)
First a few nitpicks:
Caplan’s estimate is 20% human capital / 80% signalling. Moreover, there is some value in even pure signalling because it reduces employer’s search costs (every time an employer can interview fewer people and still fill a position with an equivalent candidate, by throwing out any candidate without the appropriate degree, there is value created by the signalling process).
Be careful when cherry-picking companies to represent a sector. The biggest technology companies by top-line revenue give you a very different view of where the GDP contribution of the tech sector is coming from.
Also things generating less value than they cost is bad, but the shortfall between the two is what needs to be made up for somewhere, not the entire sector’s value. Plus a sector that pays out in taxes about as much as it receives in subsidies isn’t value-destroying so much as not bearing its proportional share of the tax burden.
As to “where is the value produced”, one way to answer that is to start with your consumption (which is the stuff you consider to be worth your work effort), and work backwards, identifying which sectors contribute to producing what you care about. This quickly becomes intractable but it is a worthwhile exercise.
Good point that taxes are a factor. A company that runs at a modest loss may produce net value if you account for taxation.
Starting from myself as you suggest seems good. I guess I have a warm roof over my head, food and clothes. So is the story of our economy that we have tricked the oilman, the builder, the farmer and the seamstress that they need jet fighters, Olympic games, MRI machines and universities, and that they are buying it for now? What if they realize the ruse and understand that they can live at basically the same standard of living with like 10% of the work?
You’re skipping a couple of steps, unless you’re buying artisanal clothes from someone down the street, locally-grown-food straight from the farmer, and your neighbor runs a small scale pumpjack, refinery, and generator.
Leonard E. Read’s “I, Pencil” is closer to the level of analysis you’d need (although his is mostly going for qualitative, rather than the quantitative measure you’d need for your use case).
Your grocery store employs cashiers, shelf-stockers, gets its produce through a large logistics network (including food from all over the world) and uses a whole bunch of fancy infrastructure for refrigeration, self-checkout and the like. They probably pay for payroll and accounting services. They may have borrowed money to get the initial capital to build the property (either from a bank or from franchising services).
Plus you need to count your internet access (and at least Scott’s hosting), since you’re here. There’s people laying down fiber optic cables spanning entire continents to support that. A single chip fab costs $3-4 billion to build.
My point isn’t that there is no waste, it’s that there is a lot of value-production spread far and wide and you have to look closely to see it.
Although if you’re personally only spending money only on housing/food/clothing, and nothing else, and you expect that to continue, you can probably retire early or switch to part time, effectively achieving your desired standard of living with much less overall work.
On a hopeful note, people are very much refusing to pay for hosting the Olympics nowadays, with multiple cities cancelling their bids due to popular pressure, which is great. Eventually the cost of running these things will get closer to their actual benefits. 2026 will be the first Olympics with two host cities, partly as a cost-cutting measure.
Sure, my grocery store has a large web of supporting goods and services. But so does my local hospital and army base. Agriculture and food is about 5% of US GDP. And much of that is probably waste. Still looks like a majority of the economy is air. So if the workers in the food production chain (including the farmer) realized the ruse, then we in the non-valuable part of the economy would be screwed?
Again, ignoring a massive chunk of the people actually involved in getting the food to you. Unless you posit that the grocery store could trivially double/triple its profits by getting rid of services it doesn’t actually benefit from.
Depends what you mean. A randomly-selected American worker already has discretionary control over ~2/3rds of their income, if they didn’t think the stuff they were getting for their money was worth it, they wouldn’t be spending it in the first place.
Consumer preferences can change, of course. If everyone decides they no longer ever want to go to theme parks for vacations, Orlando’s economy craters, but that doesn’t mean the entire thing is “air” in the meantime.
Your statement about “a majority of the economy is air” implies either people pay for stuff they don’t actually want (otherwise they could choose to reduce their working hours/years, since they don’t need as much money), or the people providing it are incompetent at managing costs (otherwise they could substantially improve their profits). And that these effects are both massive and widespread.
Government spending and subsidies is more likely to be value-destroying, as collective decision making can end up producing stuff no one actually wants for the price it’s produced at. That’s 35% of GDP, but again, the shortfall to cover is that minus any actual value produced out of it.
There are tons of issues with our economy (thankfully there is a lot of ruin in a nation) but the general answer is: productivity comes with the pairing of capital with labor, and GDP is just a measure of output. Say you have a beet farmer working in the fields and you give him a new hoe which is superior to his old one. With this new hoe the number of beets he can raise for sale per hour of work goes up, which is his measure of productivity. Now it doesn’t matter if you personally don’t like beets, or if beets are only purchased for signalling reasons and not for consumption, the number of beets/hour labor has increased and so productivity is higher. It doesn’t matter if education is 100% signalling, as long as people are purchasing it and as long as there is more ‘education’ being produced per hour of labor input ‘productivity’ is rising in that field.
Sure, we seem to be very productive at signaling through healthcare or whatever. But for this discussion it actually matters what I like or not. To me, it looks like our entire economy are making things I don’t care about, and that I think no-one cares about. And that’s a waste.
Then why do people keep buying them?
Why do people pay faith-healers? Why did people invest in Enron? Why did the Germans elect Hitler?
Are you really not understanding what I’m saying here? Assume for the sake of argument that Caplan is right about education and signaling. Do you don’t see the massive issue of people wasting massive sums on education out of ignorance or zero-sum thinking in that case? Wouldn’t you at least marvel at the comedy of it all?
I understand what you are saying, I am saying if you define the things that other people buy as useless then GDP will look useless.
K-12 as well. It’s basically looking after the children while the parents work. I think we could costs by 90% without many issues.
I think you may be running up against the socialist calculation problem here. What’s actually critical for keeping the economy running is probably not the same thing as what you imagine, and there’s nobody who knows all of it.
Megaprojects may be over budget and behind schedule usually, but that doesn’t mean they fail to deliver value. Take a topical example: COVID-19 vaccine plant. It will probably be budgeted at more than a billion dollars, and aim to be built in 3 months (I’ve seen September projected for first ’emergency use’ doses from Moderna, if all goes well in trials). It will probably actually take more money than predicted, and slip a couple months. At the end of the day, Moderna probably will be paid their costs, not actually make a profit.
It will still produce more value than it costs – it will end the shutdowns and deaths. The mere fact that its cost and schedule aren’t known perfectly in advance doesn’t make it worthless. Neither does the possibility that Moderna’s shareholders have to content themselves with having their normal life back and proof that their technology works rather than also a bucketful of money.
The same applies for a lot of megaprojects. A company’s new plant will produce 10 billion in operating profit over the next three decades. You project it to take 1 billion to build in three years, and it actually takes 1.5 billion over five years before it gets to full capacity. That’s considered a project management failure. After all, you spent 500 million more than you planned! The company had to issue bonds they weren’t planning on and cut their dividends for a while. Years 4 and 5 were especially lean and they had to delay the next project since this one didn’t have revenue yet and was still taking the attention of their entire technical staff. You were also wrong on operating profit and it only produces 8 billion over the next three decades.
The company still makes money overall. The plant still creates good jobs for the community, and its customers have a problem solved. It’s worth study, and work, so that the next project can come closer to projections, but it’s only a failure compared to what could have been. On the whole, the board still made the right decision to build the plant.
Sure, Flyvbjerg points out some cases where that’s not true, where the plant cost ballooned to 11 billion, but keep in mind he’s arguing reasons why you should hire his expertise to avert disaster (or at least buy his book. On average these are still profitable, just not as profitable as projected.
Ideas are valuable.
Others have already covered this a bit, but Uber has created a huge value for frequent business travelers in particular, and also for people who live in urban environments trying to get by without owning a car.
The fact that they are unprofitable doesn’t mean they aren’t creating value, it just means that for various reasons, they’re allowing an even greater amount of that value to be transferred to the consumer than is typical for a business.
+1
From the perspective of someone who was (pre-pandemic) a very frequent traveller, Uber just made travel about 25% nicer everywhere I went that had it. Not “find someone to call me a cab” or “try to figure out what cab companies are local” + pay with cash, but rather order a ride on Uber and everything just seamlessly works.
In the two years I worked in consulting, I feel like I can safely say that Uber could have doubled its prices, and it wouldn’t have affected the purchasing behavior of myself or any of my corowkers one bit.
To be fair, in both your and my cases, we weren’t paying ourselves, we were expensing the Uber rides. But I’ve also occasionally used Uber when my car was broken down / in the shop and I needed to go somewhere, and it’s great. Similarly, my wife and I have used it sometimes for pleasure travel as well, where we’re paying the bill ourselves.
Eh, at the time I used it pretty frequently on my own/at my own expense as well. Almost all of us did.
And while it’s true that most of the time I was expensing it, I guess what I’m saying is that even if it cost twice as much, the company still would have been willing to pay it (we could charge up to $50 for a taxi ride without exception, and the majority of my trips were under $25).
My favorite part about Uber is not taking it. I took a long weekend in San Diego this past January and simply walked everywhere, from the airport to the hotel and vice versa included. Being able to call a ride quickly and cheaply anywhere, at any time, made it far more comfortable to set out on a day without a car or a ride. I walked ~ 48 miles over those 4 days and came back from vacation fitter and happier than if I had taken some other form of transportation.
+1, when I was in Boston last summer we walked around town and only needed the Uber to get back to the hotel or to and from the airport.
Indeed. Ask anyone in a dodgy neighborhood looking for a ride to the airport at 5 AM what it’s like trying to get at least one of the ten taxi companies in town to show up at your door….
If Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi walks up to you and gives you $100, has he created any value? You see the point I’m getting at?
Is Uber really creating value, or is it just using money from investors to subsidize travel for its customers? How do we tell the difference?
Yes, because apparently he doesn’t value $100 very much, but I do.
My doctor may say I don’t have dyslexia, but sometimes it sure seems like ti.
Maybe you need religion. Do you believe in dog?
Maybe at Christmas you’ll get something helpful from Satan.
You just reminded me of the Mexican film Santa Claus (1959), where Lucifer sends the devil Pitch to Earth before Christmas to make all of Earth’s children naughty.
SPOILER: he’s only capable of corrupting three boys in Mexico City.
If I recall correctly, this one got the MST3K treatment.
Yes. They got a lot of mileage out of the fact that the screenwriter apparently wasn’t familiar with American Santa Claus lore and so made the jolly Saint a space-dwelling enemy of Lucifer who lives with Merlin and a multicultural force of child laborers.
I’d like to discuss the myth of unwanted babies: why does it seem so prevalent?
Among the environmentalist anti-natalists I’ve met, most seemed to believe that they shouldn’t give birth to a biological child, and that the urge to parent can be satisfied by adopting a child that needs parents. While being a biological parent is obviously qualitatively different from adoption, for many reasons, let’s not go into that. Whenever I point that there are no children out there who are adoptable, they point me at all the children that are in sub-optimal foster homes. The very reason that these children are in foster care is because they are either too old or not adoptable.
Foster care is much, much worse than adoption if you want to become a parent: you run a huge risk of being hugely emotionally invested in a child that can be snatched from you at any moment. Besides, the biological parents frequently have visitation rights, which, considering the kind of thing children end up in foster care for, means you will have to watch like a hawk so they don’t abuse the children, but with much fewer rights than an actual parent. The people who foster are highly admirable, but I wouldn’t say fostering is an adequate substitute for the experience of parenting.
I guess most of them are not informed enough about the matter, but they do seem to care about it a lot, preaching to strangers about not having children. I sometimes tried to argue with them, telling them the experience of many adoption attempts I’ve witnessed: families who have been trying to adopt for more than a decade, and ultimately gave up, families who spent all their savings, families who end up with a deeply ill and traumatised child (and that’s the good ending). So why are anti-natalists so against having biological children? I guess they make up a lie about how easy it is to become a parent without that, but the skepticism shown towards having children bugs me.
I personally believe that if you want children, you should attempt to have as many as you want biologically, since there is a mile-long list of those who want to adopt who can’t biologically have children. Besides, the fertility rates are so low, that even if you believe in all the environmental propaganda, even having 8 children won’t affect the average one bit. If you have the patience of a saint and the emotional discipline for it, fostering is highly admirable, and should be encouraged, but not to have fewer children or anything like that.
The reason people say “just adopt” is because they haven’t researched the issue and believe that there are children available for anyone who wants one. They preach about not having biological children because they believe it’s wrong to bring more people into the world. What you do instead (adopting, getting a dog, joining a commune, staying alone) doesn’t matter to them and they don’t feel the need to put a lot of thought into it.
Maybe they have the experience of adopting a cat or dog from a shelter, which is generally reasonably easy.
One reason is the belief that the world will be worse if there are more people and the desire to answer one of the arguments against not having children. Another could be that the person doesn’t want to have children, perceives social pressure to do so, and wants to rebut it.
So far as the point about adopting a pet, some shelters make it difficult to do that too. Despite the fact that the alternative is killing it.
What are we trying to optimize here? There are many conflicting interests at play:
– Parent happiness
– Parent economy
– Child happiness
– Society
– Environment
I agree that biological parenting is probably the best option for most parent families regarding parent happiness and economy. It can be argued that it’s best for society too, at least if you live in a low fertility country.
The environmentalists you have talked with may even agree on all these points, and still think that every human life is a net negative for the environment. If you agree with that premise, and value preserving the environment above other considerations, it is consistent to think that the otherwise suboptimal adoption/foster care option is the way to go. People thinking that may even consider the failure scenario of not managing to adopt any children to be preferable to having more humans living on this planet.
There is also an ethical case to be made. If there are extremely unhappy kids out there due to lack of adoption / terrible foster homes / being born in a poor country, and you think you are willing and able to adopt such children, you may consider that the potential benefits outweigh the costs. This is definitely not for the faint of heart, but I’ve met families that managed to pull this off.
The “children are bad for the climate” meme irks me a lot. It is probably based in the age-old worry about overpopulation. One recent culprit is a study by Lund University that says that having children is one of the biggest lifestyle CO2 emission sources. Their calculation is made as follows:
1. Assume that your child has the average yearly emission for the population as it is born.
2. Assume that the emissions grow by 2% per year and that your child lives about 80 years.
3. Assume that your child have children and that they also emit according to this model, and that they in turn have children and so on.
4. Sum up all the emissions and assign them to parents by blood.
IMO, this is embarrassingly bad. Most glaringly, if per capita emissions grow 2% per year we will never stop climate change, no matter how few children we have. While in reality, you can live a life of net-zero CO2 emissions with an amount of effort somewhere between “very easy” and “expensive but possible for the average person”, depending on your pessimism about carbon offsets. But there’s a host of other errors here. Will an infant really emit as much as the average person? Is a ton of CO2 emitted today really as bad as a ton of CO2 emitted in 2140? Etc.
I would expect most children that are born today in western nations (excluding the US) to have a lifetime CO2 footprint near zero, since that’s the stated goal of all nations fighting climate change and carbon capture and storage is only getting cheaper.
If we assume your child emits the same amount of CO2 over his life as you did, and that the child’s emissions are in a sense caused by you, then by having a child you’ve instantly doubled your CO2 emissions. Or maybe increased them by 50%, if you want to split it with the other parent.
If you have a particularly low-carbon lifestyle, the child will still double your emissions if he sticks to that lifestyle, but who is to say he won’t become a mansion-living monster truck enthusiast with 5x the average emissions for your country?
Given the same lifestyle, more people will cause more emissions than fewer people. Of course, rapidly reducing the population might come with its own problems, but realistically we have enough people to last us a while yet.
The only really questionable point is to assign the child’s emissions to the parents’ CO2 footprint. I’d argue that you can’t say the parent is personally responsible for the child’s emissions, he’s more to blame for participating in a lifestyle (having children) that leads to more emissions, the same way a car driver or frequent traveler is to blame for his choices.
But I believe that my lifetime emissions are negative based on my modest donations to Cool Earth. And we can discuss the efficiency of offsetting but even with the most expensive, most rigorous offsetting definitions, I could still live a net-zero life well within my means. So the maxim more people = more emissions doesn’t hold. I guess this is where “environmentalism” comes apart as multiple different groups with different goals. If you think that human activity is harmful by default, you should try to limit population growth. But if you, like me, believe that humans can work to fix problems, and that problems actually are quite easy to fix all in all, you should try to increase wealth instead.
Wow, I wasn’t aware there were so many assumptions made there.
The US per capita CO2 production has decreased in the last few decades, massively. World CO2 per capital has only grown by 1%. Swedish CO2 consumption has also decreased. Where do they get the 2% from?
Besides, smart people are more likely to have children with negative carbon footprints: the inventors of clean technologies, etc.
The paywalled paper Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals calculates a pessimistic scenario as:
There’s also an Optimistic and a Constant scenario. No scenario has negative emissions or carbon offsetting as a factor though, and even the optimistic scenario has net positive emissions at 15% of current levels in 2100.
As far as I can see, the Lund paper just takes this pessimistic number without commenting on that it is a pessimistic number.
The Lund paper says 2% per year, which from 2005 to 2100 would be 6.5x not 1.5x
@Imsoindiethatmyblogdontfit
Yes, but what is the chance that your kid will adopt that lifestyle? Most Western people don’t accept that kind of lifestyle.
This assumes that carbon capture/storage or other mitigation strategies are entirely/mostly coupled to GDP, so as long as these children earn enough, they (more than) offset their footprint.
However, if these mitigation strategies are capped by the availability of underground places where you can store CO2 or the like, you may only be able to limit the overall CO2 footprint sufficiently by not having too many people.
Pretty high. It’s not that expensive (and it’s not a “lifestyle”, I live like everyone else I know). If they don’t, I can pay for them as well without much loss.
But in the long run, I think government funded geoengineering will happen, so all taxpayers will adopt this lifestyle.
“Things are capped by GDP” seems like the better assumption. Usually we solve problems by throwing money on them.
Ah, I misread. I thought that you were talking about a low-CO2 lifestyle for that part of your comment, rather than offsetting.
Anyway, AFAIK carbon offsetting has a lot of scams, so you probably need to buy more offsets than the companies tell you you need, to actually offset your output.
@Aapje
Sure, there might be scams. But offsets are cheap.
But are they cheap because so much fraud occurs and/or many of these offsets never result in more offsetting investments?
Carbon capture will never be cheap enough that you can make a profit on burning fossil fuels then recapturing carbon. This is physics, not economics. Perhaps you can get some value out of burning it in one place and recapturing elsewhere, but you’re still losing energy in the process.
The idea is to capture it right after burning, for which physics provides no impediment.
Even for capturing carbon from the air your argument isn’t necessarily true, as the process to capture the carbon can be more energy efficient than the energy you get from burning it. There is no inherent symmetry there. In fact, you can’t unburn things anyway.
Explain, please. We can definitely make a profit, physically and economically, by digging up a ton of coal, burning it with air, and using the heat to run a power plant. Digging up olivine rock doesn’t seem like it’s any harder than digging up coal; probably quite a bit easier since we haven’t spent the past few centuries mining out all the easy olivine deposits. If we dig up a ton of coal and say four tons of olivine, we can burn the coal in air and run the exhaust through a bed of crushed and wetted olivine, which will react exothermically with the carbon dioxide in the exhaust. The end result of this is a bit more heat than if we just burned the coal in air, and about five tons of carbonate rock that we can dump down the holes we made in the first part of the process. Use the heat to run a power plant as usual, with the carbon being neatly captured as inert solid rock.
You may argue that this is economically implausible, on account of the extra digging required. I doubt it would more than double the cost of power, and probably not even that, but it’s debatable. But saying that “physics” makes it impossible or impractical, is going to be a much harder argument for you to support.
AFAICT, this knowledge isn’t in the water supply. Maybe it’ll get out there more: as my wife and I discussed our fertility issues, other people started sharing their stories. Same with adoption. OTOH, stories of crazzzzyyyy teens having these unplanned, unwanted babies float everywhere.
I also suspect there will be some cognitive dissonance among those who terminated pregnancies thinking their kids would be having nightmare lives, when the likely option was “get raised by a suburban family with 3 cars that dropped $100k on IVF with no results.”
My guess is that accurate knowledge about the current state of adoption possibility is heavily influenced by age, with younger people being generally more informed.
Consider that your average boomer grew up in a world where abortion was often illegal or expensive (and was culturally taboo) and where birth control was first being invented. Relatively speaking, an unplanned pregnancy was probably much more likely to end with “mother gives birth and gives the healthy infant away for adoption” than it is today. I’d guess the average boomer is probably just as, if not more, likely to know someone who gave birth to an unwanted baby than someone who tried to adopt one.
Today, due to all sorts of reasons, the supply/demand equation has flipped considerably. The average millennial is almost certainly more likely to know someone who tried to adopt, but either couldn’t, or had great difficulty, than they are to know someone who had an unwanted pregnancy but delivered the child and gave it away. Such stories, common before the 1960s, are virtually unheard of today.
“Common knowledge” of course lags reality, and cultural perceptions take some time to catch up. But I do think knowledge of this is increasing, and that your average person under 40 appreciates that “healthy infants available for adoption with no strings attached” are virtually unavailable in most places, at any price. Of course, our political and media institutions are still dominated by people not under 40, so they don’t reflect this knowledge… yet.
Most of the vocal anti-natalists I’ve met are under 40. But maybe people over 40 have enough manners to not tell strangers not to have kids.
They didn’t need birth control since, as every teenager or young adult knows, sex was only invented by their generation.
More seriously, coitus interruptus goes back at least to classical antiquity, condoms to the sixteenth century, the diaphragm to the nineteenth.
I think what also gets forgotten in the equation is the emotional attachment to a child. The baby might have been unwanted upon conception, but is less frequently unwanted the longer it is kept and cared for; so I imagine that a significant fraction of women have a change of heart upon seeing their baby and decide to keep it, even if they aren’t ideally positioned to do so, financially or otherwise.
Sure, but that’s not an argument for a person who wants a child and can afford one to not have one and instead hope to get a child on the adoption lottery.
But I think it does help explain why you don’t see more teen pregnancies — which still occur, though less than in days of yore — and children getting born into less-than-ideal circumstances — ending in adoption, even if there’s plenty of parents willing to give the child better material circumstances than the birth mother can.
I feel like you’re writing this for someone who already knows a lot more about adoption than I do. I know (at least) three people who were adopted. So I’m confused when you say that there aren’t adoptable children. Is this something like “the number of children left unadopted will not change if you adopt (since someone else will have to not adopt)”? If that’s the case, I’m not sure your point is relevant to an anti-natalist. And what exactly does it mean for a child in foster care to be unadoptable?
A child being unadoptable means exactly that: they can’t be legally adopted, because they still have parents whose legal rights have not been completely taken away. Adoption means that biological parents lose all their rights to the kids, and the new parents acquire the full rights the biological parents had. And, in the cases when only part of parental legall rights have been taken (like custody), they can’t be adopted.
So if you’re fostering a child, get a great job offer to go to Australia, for example, you can’t take the child with you. I’m not even sure whether foster parents can take the children out of state in the US.
Yes, exactly.
The children left unadopted are either so deeply broken that whoever takes care of them is a saint with a spot reserved in heaven, quite old, or legally unadoptable.
All those kids in foster care? Most of them are either unadoptable or teenagers.
Thanks for clarifying. On the other hand, the anti-natalist “should” still argue for additional people to chose trying-to-adopt over biological children, since that still achieves their goal even if the “adoption will satisfy your desire to be a parent” part is wrong or a lie. The morality of lying aside, that is. So I’m not sure your argument is persuasive to them even if it’s compelling to me.
I think that what he meant is that demand exceeds supply. So then it is not possible for more people to satisfy their desire to have kids by adoption. If person A decides to adopt rather than have a kid and manages to actually adopt, that merely means that person B, who otherwise could have adopted a kid, now doesn’t get to adopt.
Quantity demanded exceeds quantity supplied because the price is fixed, by law, at zero.
And yet you can pay for surrogacy, can’t you? Is this a loophole? “I’m not charging for the kid, I’m renting the womb. Retroactively.”
I believe that whether you can pay for surrogacy depends on the state. As best I recall, in at least one state signing a surrogacy contract is a felony.
I had thought the issue was that surrogacy contracts were basically unenforceable – that legally speaking, the woman who gives birth to a child is the mother and can keep the baby if she wants (even if you already paid her for it).
@Matt M
That’s why they choose as surrogates mothers of two to three kids.
@DavidFriedman
That is entirely besides the point. In the scenario that we are talking about, the alternative is to have a baby naturally, where the price is set at $0 by nature.
Surrogacy merely changes who carries the baby and is, with regard to anti-natalism, closer to having a baby yourself than to adopting a surplus baby from the second-hand market.
@Aapje:
I was responding to your claim that demand exceeds supply. Strictly speaking, both demand and supply are curves, functions of price. The reason that quantity demanded is larger than quantity supplied is that the price is set by law at zero — it is illegal for the adoptive parents to pay the child’s bother for permission to adopt, although there are various ways of to some degree evading that restriction.
The same thing happens with rent control, where again quantity demanded is larger than quantity supplied because the price is held below the price at which they would be equal.
@DavidFriedman
The goal of these kind of anti-natalists is to lower overall baby production by replacing baby-having with adoption of children that are born anyway and end up in foster homes and institutions. In that context, surrogacy is no better than having parents that will raise the kid, have the baby themselves.
When I used the word ‘supply,’ I was not referring to children/babies in general, but specifically to adoptable kids. Similarly, I meant the effective demand for adoption when using the word ‘demand.’
The goal of these anti-natalists seems to be to increase the effective demand for adoption, which if it is going to increase supply, is going to be of the not-so-nice kind (selling kids that have parents who very often don’t want to have their kids be adopted). Pointing that out would of course merely be another rebuttal to these anti-natalists, assuming that they reject this like most people.
Basically, there are more people who want to adopt a healthy baby then there are healthy babies to adopt. It’s not that there aren’t any, just fewer than the demand.
It might be easier to adopt a 14 year old kid with behavioral issues that has visits from his birth family twice a week. But that’s not really very similar to having a biological child. And with older children like that, you often only get them for a while while the birth family sorts itself out. Then they’ll go back to that family.
This doesn’t really matter to the anti natalist argument, it just means that “go adopt” is not an equivalent alternative to having a biological child.
This involves common misconceptions about foster care. Most children in foster care aren’t legally able to be adopted, even if there were parents who were interested. This is because foster care is primarily focused on getting the children reunited with their legal guardians (presumably the biological parents).
Children get placed in foster care when the legal guardians otherwise can’t provide a safe home for the children but might be able to be in the future. Since being reunited with the parents is the ultimate goal, they can’t be adopted, which is permanent. But the categories of cases that this applies to may be fairly wide, including parent(s) who are going to prison, parents who are violent (but might be redeemed through anger management classes or something), parents who have severe drug use issues (but might sober up), parents who are neglectful (but might change their behavior).
Any healthy baby of any race gets adopted almost immediately. Children in foster care normally have biological parents somewhere in the picture, perhaps in prison, and those biological parents can swoop in to ruin things at any time.
Exactly. The question is, why do so many people believe the contrary (i.e., that there are many unwanted children out there waiting to be adopted)?
Maybe blame literature, movies, etc. for this view? Orphans are a staple of literature. And was it always the case that adoptable children were in short-supply? I have a Dickensian picture of orphanages being teeming with young children in need of parents. And have heard of such things existing in relatively recent times, like the stories that came out a year or two ago about terrible abuse of orphans in orphanages by nuns/churches in the US, less than one lifetime ago.
Stories of abuses in orphanages in the 20th century occur simultaneously with cases of baby snatching, but in other countries. In Spain, there are many stories of Republican* mothers, widows, married with husband in jail/exile, or single mothers, having a supposed “dead” baby who was adopted by a “good Catholic family”.
A lot of stories of abuses in orphanages were probably due to failures in the adoption markets. Rich countries don’t send their kids to be adopted to other countries (with the exception of the US), so even if the babies don’t get adopted internally, countries don’t want to send their babies abroad, since that’s a bad look. Adoption was also a lot more secret/shameful in the past. If you went for a trip and came back with a baby, that could be explained; if you came with a three year old, that is harder to explain.
The USSR refused to return the children of the Spanish Civil war after it ended for political reasons, so, while they could have returned to distant families or been adopted in Spain, they remained in orphanages. I’m pretty sure quite a few cases of children remaining in orphanages is because of political games and not because decent parents for those kids cannot be found somewhere in the world.
*Means a very different thing in Spain than in the US.
ana53294 says “Besides, the fertility rates are so low, that even if you believe in all the environmental propaganda, even having 8 children won’t affect the average one bit.”
This is like saying, the murder rate is so high, even if I murder one person it won’t affect the average one bit.
Having fewer children leads to less pollution is pretty obvious. I don’t share the optimism of other people here regarding the environment. It’s already a disaster. Lots of animals have gone extinct or are going extinct. Already global warming is happening.
And the President of the US doesn’t even believe in global warming. And that’s true of lots of people and politicians in lots of countries. Seems weird to be optimistic that humanity will fix this when half the people denies there’s even a problem.
Comparing having children to murder is… not kind.
A better analogy would be the number of plane rides, or using a car, or other things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint. Except children have the potential of being negative carbon producers, by being the inventors of clean technology, for example.
Global warming is happening. So far the serious negative effects it is supposed to cause are not. Crop yields continue to go up, not down. Hurricanes have not increased in frequency.
It’s hard to tell what politicians believe in. My conjecture is that Putin believes in global warming but also believes, probably correctly, that Russia, much of which is cold, will benefit by it.
I have no idea what Trump believes and am unlikely to find out from what he says, on that subject or most others.
“Too old” is glossing over a lot. There’s an entire population of perfectly healthy children, mentally sound children who simply aren’t very young (say, three years old or younger) who largely don’t get adopted. This represents a chronic group who usually age out of the system and do poorly because the system is optimized around babies going out the door, not providing care until you’re eighteen.
More generally, climate anti-natalists seem to be regurgitating a form of Malthusian Theory in economics and population control advocacy.
Sure, but telling people not to have biological chidren is not going to make it much more likely that those children get adopted.
And from the families I’ve observed, I haven’t seen children under six who are healthy (or at least not heart-breakingly sick) and not that disabled being available for adoption and not getting adopted.
But yes, “too old” usually means “old enough to remember their parents as something more than a very foggy memory”.
I suppose the cut off might be six rather than three but that doesn’t change the point. It jives with their point that there are people who need help now that are neglected. Not that I find the argument convincing: I’d prefer other measures. Still, I’d push back against erasing those orphans. There’s a vast gulf between, “all orphans get adopted” and “all orphans anyone wants to adopt get adopted.”
All orphans who offer a close enough experience to biological parenting are adopted.
So you can’t get the experience of raising a child and marvelling at their development (first steps, first words, first smile, rolling around, etc), with the children unwanted.
And people who want to be parents want to be parents, not something else.
What is someone who adopts a twelve year old orphan, since it’s “something else” and not a parent?
I understand what you’re saying: people want very young children that don’t remember their birth parents. But there’s a weird insistence on ignoring orphans who aren’t very young going on, to the point of delegitimizing families that are formed by adopting them.
Heroes or saints. I’m not trying to diminish the people who adopt older kids and love and care for them; it’s just that not everybody can be a hero. Most people are ordinary and want the ordinary effort and payoffs of being a parent, not heroism.
@Erusian
It’s not merely not remembering their birth parents. Older adoptees often have serious issues trusting their new parents.
Thanks Ana for the interesting post. My wife and I adopted kids 25-30 years ago. It does sound like it is getting harder, though it was not easy back then. We adopted internationally because it was very difficult to find kids in the US. We were matched with a kid after about a year each time. The first one took about 2 1/2 years to bring home because lots of legal issues at the Indian adoption agency, but only about 6 months the 2nd time. Both of them have been very good kids, no complaints.
If I can believe this link, it appears to take an average of one to two years now, but maybe more uncertain than in the past. I suspect the difficulty is mostly political issues. I bet there are enough orphaned kids in very poor countries that there would be enough babies for everyone who wanted to adopt a kid, but politicians are playing games with these kids’ lives. Maybe not in the countries we used to get them from, such as Korea and China, because those countries are richer, but I bet in Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh.
By the way , it appears to be true that there are still kids available to adopt if older kids are taken. But I have heard that once kids in abusive environments reach 3 or 4, they become very difficult to parent. And remember, most of these potential adopters have never been parents before, so they have no idea how good they will be at parenting. It is a very large risk to adopt an older child when you don’t know if you can handle it. Maybe parents will do that if they have no other choice.
That seems very unlikely since very many fraud cases were exposed, cases where foreign orphanages paid traffickers for babies, cases where parents were told lies (for example, that the kids would get an education and would then be returned to their family), etc.
This suggests that the number of actually orphaned kids that are available for adoption is already below demand, let alone if way more people would seek to adopt.
And as far as I can tell, the vast majority of countries are very much against the adoption of “their” orphans by foreigners. As a matter of official policy, at least.
I think what is important to know is that in many countries, there aren’t truly “orphans” as they still have living family who may be taking care of them (at least somewhat). Most places that are underdeveloped have a very communal and tribal culture and so the concept of an orphan that has no one to care for them is not true. Of course many of those places are extremely poor too and children may be malnourished.
Also, many places may be willing to give up children even if there is a parent/guardian who can take care of them because they think they will get a better chance at life in another country. So there can be perverse incentives on both sides of things.
Do you have cites for this? “Very many” is most likely media hype, and and there have really been only a few. Similar to the hype about Blacks killed by police. In any case, that in no way proves that kids available are below demand. When politicians are purposefully keeping actual orphans off the market, that lowers the supply, regardless of whether it would be a good thing for the orphans. One of the issues I had getting my first kid was a judge in India who was bound and determined to slow down the process. He was apparently one of those people who thought it was a bad thing to send Indian babies to the US even though they could find no Indian parents to take them.
zoozoc, do you have evidence this is true? I think you are right to some extent, although I am pretty sure there are actual orphanages in every poor country, because rich country NGOs set them up. That’s where we got both of our kids from India, which is still a pretty poor country, and more so back in the ’90’s. Although I have a friend who adopted from Brazil about the same time we did, and there does seem to be a family in Brazil that her adopted child came from, who still ask her for money. So I’m not sure how prevalent it is.
My strong impression is that when reporters start investigating, fraud cases pop up left and right. For example, at one time a quarter of US adoptions came from Ethiopia and when they investigated, it was a mess.
Same for China. As the article notes, China was up to their usual chinanigans of hiding misdeeds.
In general, there is a financial incentive to look away and typically a political incentive to shut adoption down (since citizens tend to feel protective of ‘their’ youths). The result seems to be a common pattern of denial followed by international adoptions being ended completely from a certain country.
Perhaps there is sufficient supply if all countries would allow international adoptions according to strict procedures, assuming that this is even possible in all countries (almost certainly not). Otherwise any increase in demand in either going to run into a deficit of babies or will increase fraud cases (or both).
@Aajpe.
I read both of the articles you linked. Yes there are some stolen babies in the adoption market, but those articles in no way indicate there are “very many.” It is true that there is much incentive to steal babies in the 3rd world to supply the market, since many in the 1st world are ready to spend thousands of dollars to find a child, which is tons of money in very poor countries. I am sure that there are some stolen babies, but have seen little evidence that it constitutes a majority, or even a large minority of cases. Even when we were adopting, I had the impression that the Indian agencies were milking us for money, but I don’t think either of our kids were taken from families.
If you take into consideration how much beliefs are heritable (in cultural way, but also in genetic way – even such things as political ideology), abstaining from having kids is actually one of the worst things you could do to environment.
If someone is so willing to sacrifice for the environment, that he/she can even decide not to have children for it (in a honest way, not simply rationalizing a decision already taken and seeking an excuse not to abandon unfamilial lifestyle), than he/she really, really, really should have children. For the enviroment.
Only if you assume that it’s common for environmentally conscious people to have a net beneficial impact on the environment. If the best you can hope for is “carbon neutral”, then not having children is still better.
The next generation will be worse for the environment on a per person basis, but there’ll still be fewer of them to worry about.
And if you adopt (or otherwise get heavily involved in rearing children who aren’t biologically yours), you have all the benefits of raising a green child without having to create one.
I am still struggling with OCD around futurism-related issues. For instance, I keep obsessing on variations of the idea that if the universe is a simulation I will do something that will be the “straw that breaks the camel’s back” in terms of computational intensity. For example, I recently rescued a dog and I keep getting this thought in my head that the Simulators are going to say “What do you mean we have to keep simulating one extra dog brain! That’s it, pull the plug.” I obviously have similar fears about having children. It is very hard to get out of this train of thought, even though I know that, regardless of what odds I should assign the Simulation Hypothesis, I should assign fantastically low odds to the idea that some fairly mundane thing I do will be the thing that makes the simulation too intensive for the simulators (it might be bad for me to keep seeking reassurance online, but I’d appreciate reassurance in this case). This is especially ridiculous when I imagine it in the context of Rescue Simulations, where I find myself positing simulators who are altruistic enough to make such a simulation, but cheap and stingy enough that a few extra baseline humans and animals is just too much for them. (have read Scott’s “Don’t Fear the Simulators,” it is somewhat helpful to reread it, but not enough)
I am aware that the reason I am worrying so much about this is that I have OCD. It has taken two OCD fears I have, “Existential Risk” and “Something Bad Happening to my Dog,” and fused them together into one super-obsessive fear. I think I probably have a form of OCD that normally manifests as religious obsessions, but since I am not religious it instead focuses on things like The Future of Humanity since that is something I find meaningful. This is frustrating because I love the ideas I have absorbed from places like Less Wrong and SSC, and when I am not in an OCD spiral they are something positive in my life. I want to be able to ponder these ideas again without having my brain twist them into something scary, or throw a fit if I can’t answer all the major problems of science and philosophy.
Another thought that crossed my mind recently was the idea that a civilization that could build a Rescue Simulation might also be able to figure out how other inhabited worlds in Everett’s many worlds were unable to build a rescue simulation and build rescue simulations of them. I became worried about the idea that doing that might be too much, even for a civilization that could do that. I considered the idea of them somehow acausally trading with their counterparts in other worlds to try to split the work, I don’t know if that would be enough or not. I started fixating on the idea that there might be too people many for them to try, which of course triggered that fear I had earlier about being the straw that breaks the camel’s back for computational intensity. I also worried that they might try and end up running out of memory and not be able to run all the people they recover.
I know I am being ridiculous (even though I know this I will probably feel better if other people tell me). There are so many unknown factors and I should not worry about such far-out scenarios. No one knows what the limitations on future technology like this will be, or what transhuman civilizations will be able to do. Maybe they will be able to reconstruct people without having to make fully conscious simulations of them first. But telling myself that does not work because my brain just replies that the multiverse is so vast it doesn’t matter how unlikely it is. Ugh.
I want to be able to contemplate far-out futurist ideas for fun again. I want them to stop triggering anxiety. I remember how much fun they were before my OCD developed, and sometimes when it is inactive they are still fun.
On an unrelated note, I have noticed that my OCD often seems to get better late at night. A feeling of serenity overcomes me and everything I was obsessively worrying about seems silly and small. Does anyone know why that might happen, or what I can do to get it to happen during the day?
That honestly does sound a lot like a mental health issue / unhealthy thought patterns, so it’s not something you can reason yourself out of. If you have a therapist, you might want to talk about this with them. If not, I’d recommend stepping away from the whole topic for a few months, consciously not reading or thinking about it. Maybe take up a new hobby or interest to fill the time.
For a while I had really bad health anxiety that only got worse the more I researched about it. What helped was when I decided not to research any more health topics, and just do some of the things I was afraid of. The anxiety went away after a while and now I can read about the topic again without triggering it.
Note: in my non-trivial amount of experience it is extremely difficult to find a therapist who can even start to follow some of these thought spirals. If I could somehow search for therapists who are nerds or who have STEM undergrad degrees maybe I could get somewhere. I am considering switching to a therapist who has specialty treating those with ASD even though that is not among my diagnoses, just on the hopes that person will be more accustomed to some of the kinds of things I get hung up on.
Thank you. I know seeking reassurance is probably not effective in the long run, it is just so hard to not do it! I have been trying to behave normally and not spend as much time ruminating and researching. If I feel the need to I remind myself that often it is more productive to take a break from thinking and let your subconscious work on it.
It’s hard to avoid the topic because my mind is good at free association, but I can try. I do worry that if I avoid triggering topics my mind will get triggered by more and more things until I avoid everything.
If that happens, you still have the option to go to therapy. Maybe the new anxiety-causing topic will be more relatable to the average therapist!
It’s not so much about completely avoiding any thought if the topic, more like, when you see an article about it on the internet, close the tab and watch a cat video instead. When you feel like googling the offending topic, don’t. And do as much of the stereotypical “go outside / meet friends (stick to phone calls for now) / exercise” as is practical for you.
Maybe it will help you to read my reasons for not believing we are in a simulation, here.
There you can also see that you don’t have to worry about reaching a capacity limit for the simulation. Any simulation must be a Potemkin village to some degree, so if you’re coming close to what it can handle, the simulator can just adjust that degree (e g make a new person an avatar instead of a conscious being).
You can make your own simulated universe that even reaches technological singularity, without breaking the simulation we’re in, because it will only look like a real simulation to you. You experience that with the same band width as usual, so our Simulator can just fake it.
That’s not true if the “outer” universe is vastly bigger than ours, such that it’s feasible to genuinely simulate our entire universe in it.
It’s worth remembering that this is functionally equivalent to saying “it’s feasible to run the Sims in our universe”. As far as the Sims are concerned, SimVerse is just what universes are like (and SimSimulationst may imagine that SimVerse is a fairly accurate representation of our own).
The assessment that he doesn’t need to worry about capacity, still stands. Because the simulators can easily change the settings, so that the quantum state isn’t simulated of every electron in the universe.
The SimVerse won’t break your computer, since it operates within its boundaries and parameters.
Yes. That’s not the point.
The point is that SimVerse is qualitatively different from our own, to the point of not being a simulation in anything but name. It’s not even a Potemkin village.
Now, it may be an interesting intellectual exercise to atempt mentally modelling a Sim as being “just like you and me” – and I could probably knock out a decent story or two just based on my playthroughs – but I hope nobody is considering this a serious ontological proposition.
While it’s not necessarily impossible for there to exist a “higher-level” universe within which our own is simulated, one thing we can be sure of is that it is qualitatively different from our own just as much as SimVerse is. We, quite literally, cannot reason about it.*
* If our own universe may exist in an arbitrarily large but finite number of states, the simulating universe must be capable of existing in a number of states equal to (number of states of the simulating universe aside from simulation * number of states in the simulated universe); otherwise the simulating universe would be incapable of simulating. Given that our reasoning about the simulating universe explores a subset of states available to our own (just assuming a simulating universe exists halves the number available), we do not have “state capacity” to even begin conceptualising what the simulating universe may be like.
@ Faza
It’s possible to simulate a universe that is the same as the simulating universe – in appearance. In ”essence” they differ, but that’s not anything the simulated beings can determine.
“In appearance” is doing a hell of a lot of work here.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
How would you propose that simulated beings go about this determination, given that the simulating universe is fundamentally inaccessible to them?
The simulating beings, on the other hand, can tell the difference at a glance.
A hypothetical Sentient Sim can look around and see that his universe is very coarsely granular in a way that suggests intelligent design for easy simulation, and that makes it unlikely any further simplification is possible without reducing the amount of Sim consciousness being simulated. That would give them a quantitatively different assessment of the probabilities and risks than a resident of our universe.
@ Faza
Yes, that was exactly the point. Anything else than appearance is only philosophy.
Not necessarily. If they immerse themselves in the simulation via advanced VR, that universe could look exactly as their own.
@Faza (TCM) Actually it could be just quantitatively different: e.g. having a much greater speed of light, sufficiently big to comfortably contain our universe, and with a few parameters changed such that a computer the size of our universe doesn’t collapse into a black hole. Equivalently, having elementary particles many orders of magnitude smaller compared to the scale of planets, allowing for much greater computational capacity.
After all, we could run a physics simulation of a small portion of our universe (in a much more realistic way than simulation games do), it would just be many orders of magnitude smaller (in terms of, say, the number of particles contained) than our universe, most likely too small for intelligent life to develop. I see no reason an outer universe where some scales are much bigger couldn’t simulate ours in a similar way. (I’ve ignored that simulating quantum mechanics, as currently understood, takes exponential time in a conventional computer; I know very little about quantum mechanics. As far as I understand, assuming that the quantum mechanics of the outer universe is similar to ours, it would be feasible to simulate our universe using a sufficiently big quantum computer. Or else, perhaps, in a conventional computer they could simulate quantum interactions only between nearby particles; I don’t know if we could detect that.)
I don’t follow your arguments that we can’t even conceptualize what the simulating universe may look like. Sure, we can’t describe a particular state of the outer universe, and we can’t know anything about it with certainty (except what it can’t look like, e.g. its information content can’t be too small), but that doesn’t prevent us from hypothesizing what its physical laws might be like.
I agree with @Kaitian that a professional should look at this.
Meanwhile, consider the following: If you are part of a simulation, you are yourself simulated. Including all your decisions. So if someone/something is responsible for breaking the simulation, it is the programmer of that simulation, not you.
You’re clearly lucid about the whole situation. You know its the OCD talking and that its not leading you towards an accurate or useful perspective on the world. Therefore I think engaging with your OCD in an object-level discussion about simulation hypotheses has yielded all the fruit it could possibly yield. You know what’s up. So what’s next? I think a useful direction is working on the OCD directly, through therapy or meditation etc. rather than engaging with the anxieties the OCD brings up and “arguing with your OCD”.
Scott had a post about a woman who kept worrying that a hair dryer would burn down her home, and the solution was for her to take the hair dryer with her. In that spirit, why not take action to reduce the complexity of the universe in a way that wouldn’t be damaging to yourself or others if the simulation hypothesis is false? Perhaps you could purchase a lot of used CDs and then erase the contents. Your actions could offset any complexity you naturally add to the simulation.
Buying and erasing CDs for that purpose is insane. I’m not a shrink, but to do crazy stuff like that seems like it would make a person more crazy.
Not doing it is insane if doing it would make you feel better. Sometimes when I’m trying to fall asleep I have an irrational fear that I have left the space heater in my office on and it will burn down my house while I sleep. I get up to check the heater because this makes it easier for me to fall asleep even though I know I carefully made sure the heater was off when I left my office.
Checking the heater is a lot less crazy than buying and deleting CDs.
James Miller
In regards to the heater, I have a similar problem with locking the door at night. One thing that helps me is to take a photo of the lock on my phone. Then if I worry about it I can check my phone on the nightstand instead of having to get out of bed. When I leave my apartment I videotape myself locking the door.
I have to delete a lot of pictures of locks, but it mostly helps. Could you do that with your heater?
Ghatanathoah,
Thanks. I’ve put the heater away for the summer but next winter I will consider implementing your suggestion.
if the simulators are short of resources, why are they simulating such a big universe in the first place?
That’s what I keep telling myself. It helps sometimes, but not always 🙁
Still, it’s good to know someone else thought of it. Thank you.
Either the world is real, or it is not.
If it is not real, then why worry? So what if the simulators pull the plug? They could do it for a host of reasons besides you and your dog – they got bored, the funding ran out, they found out what they wanted, there’s a newer, shinier, cooler tech come along they want to try instead, they’ve practiced enough and now they’re ready to try real-time, real-world creation, and so on.
If they turn it off, they could turn it back on any time. If they never turn it on again, who of us shadows and puppets will know or care? It will be death and it won’t matter if we all flicker out in the next minute. Do you worry about the characters in a book when you’ve finished reading and closed the volume? (Please don’t start worrying about imaginary characters).
If the world is real, then you getting a dog is not going to trigger The End Of Days.
While this is true, and my sympathies go out to Ghatanathoah and I hope he can get the help he needs, “I got a dog and it triggered The End of Days” sounds like a pretty good writing prompt.
Neil Gaiman beat you to it in Good Omens.
Right, right, I remember that now. Oh well.
So sayeth Deiseach the Cimmerian.
Why did you think it will save us resources to simulate this many replies to your comment? Arghh..
Anyway, we love your dog, we call it b̸̛̘͔͉̫̠͚̲̻̦̹̹̖̄̈͌̈́̓͘͜͜l̷̛͓̟̥̊̇̒̍̿́̊̑͋̈́̚͝ö̴̡͈̩̳͕̮̥̪̭̤͎̬͍̟́̿͑̄̑͋͂̇̒̇̆͘͘̚k̴̘̰̪̠͍͚̰͐̃̑͊͋̐̄́̂͘͜i̷͚̙͈̪̱̜͔̺̰̻̯͑̈́̆͛̈́͑̍̂̈ͅ (translates badly), so we will probably shut down your brain-simulation earlier than its.
But if you want to help us concerning computation needs, there are a few things you can do:
1. Don’t eat junk food in big franchises. It is very resource-intensive to simulate global supply chains, so we would prefer you getting your food from your local producers.
2. Go for a run more often! We have to simulate large parts of your city anyway to produce convincing traffic/pedestrians, so we would appreciate if you saw more of it and not only the houses on your usual routes.
Also sorry for the strange geopolitics/global events, we are aware of the bug and will fix it before the workday is up (in your time: a few million years).
-Simulators
Don’t do this.
Don’t boil goat in its mothers milk.
Say someone is raised Christian, then stops believing but still has a fear of hell. A fear they know is irrational. Something that maybe helps is to think, am I afraid of, for instance, Muslim hell or Norse mythology hell? And if the answer is no, then why be afraid of Christian hell? Only reason the person is afraid of that particular hell is the person happened to be raised Christian instead of Muslim or Norse mythology. So there is no need to be afraid.
So maybe that technique can be applied to your situation. You can postulate a simulation that will stop working if you get a dog. But you can also postulate a simulation that stops working if you don’t get a dog. Like maybe it was supposed to be a simulation to see how you would raise dogs or whatever.
It is impossible to tell the motives of whoever is running the simulations. So all the potential simulations cancel each other out. So there is no point in worrying about your actions ending a simulation.
I will try that, thanks. A scientific or animal rights-obsessed simulator seems just a likely, if not more so, then a simulator that is smart enough to manage a simulation, but not smart enough to manage its budget.
It looks to me like you are conflating levels of hierarchy in similar way as people who ask what was before big bang or what is outside the universe. If you turn off a game the characters in it do not execute the animation of dying – they just vanish. The end of simulation is nothing to fear as it is not something that can “happen” as to “happen” inside the simulation you need the simulation to be running.
So there is nothing to worry about IMHO.
Also a “hardware” powerful enough to run such sim probably can afford saving a snaphot – and I am imagining this quite abstractly as I have no idea what “hardware” really means outside our sim. It can be for example just some math equation/structure Wolfram’s style, or thought of some being or maybe even “The universe doesn’t run on math”. Such hardware can pause and unpause and perhaps rewind the sim or maybe it even makes no sense to use such verbs and time relations if you speak about the outside level – what makes sense to us is the notion of time as we perceive it inside, which afaiu has more to do woth causal links and structure of physics’ rules than with speed of hardware which simulates it, so it also shouldn’t matter if it stops. For that matter the whole Universe can be a one big 4D crystal (or something more complicated because of quantum mechanics) computed/rendered in cometely different order than the one we perceive.
Happy Faire of Short-Stories, everyone! It’s my favourite Peculiar Holiday and I very nearly missed it (I am told this one is the last on the calendar; we had a Faire last year as well; though as schlaugh makes it (deliberately) hard to link to a feed of several people’s stuff that you haven’t consciously chosen to follow, there’s no public-by-default link I could give you for the two dates that Faire-related posts went up on).
I speed-wrote a story starting on Friday (when I noticed) and ending nearly at the stroke of midnight last night with about ~7000 words, following my own prompt of “cyberpunk Jesus” (due to this). (…okay, it was speed-writing by my measure, I am slow.) I won’t separately post the story up here once it’s published (it will go up with tomorrow’s schlaugh), because it’s not geared toward this audience, but I’m pleased I managed to hit the deadline despite my delayed attention! If you’re interested in it for some reason, you can just look out for my schlaugh tomorrow. 🙂
Here is an older scifi story that, while not exactly great, is greatly enhanced by the recent ubiquity of masks.
I knew exactly what story this was going to be before I clicked on it 🙂
It was great enough to be included in the SFWA’s Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume 1 Anthology!
There is a story set in the same universe, “Poor Superman,” that is an amusing parody of a mindset that an SSC reader will recognize as High Modernism.
If I were to offer to DM a play by email, post-apocalyptic, superhero RPG where PCs choose to start as either heroes or villains, forced by necessity to work together, you would be:
a) Very interested in learning more
b) Somewhat interested in learning more
c) Not at all interested in learning more
d) Huh?
Go here to sign up with the email you’d like me to use: https://forms.gle/2s9BSvumuiXPngcL7
You can see the power list and discussion from the previous game here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1G0ALnq6W7pilKH9C9GwwSNo0zjuKCuAe1e8TQYAHUlw/edit?usp=sharing
Or submit your own here: https://forms.gle/6H7rBuF95j22WKdw8
a)
Eggcellent! What all would you like to know more about that I haven’t described yet?
a)! I used to play RPGs years ago, and I also participated in some email games – which I thought were really great. Not that the story ever got anywhere – IME the written medium led to much better and more interesting role play, and a stronger focus on story and characters and less on mechanics.
So I took a look at your links, but this seems to be not so much about roleplaying as an action/combat game? Or did I completely misunderstand this?
Appreciate the interest! The previous game was indeed more of an action combat thing and I thought it went fine, but this would be different. In that there would be an actual story involved that we’d be co-telling.
Aside from the main story beats I don’t have too much prepared and all these mechanical pieces are up for discussion. I didn’t think the usual pencil and paper systems would work very well and so I thought about doing something more homebrewed which is where the idea of adapting Rumble came from.
The basic gameplay loop, after everyone picks out their powers would be 1) I send out a description of the scene, maybe you’re fighting giant robots, negotiating with demons, or trying to thwart your nemesis, The Hirsute Defender. 2) you reply with what you intend to do, and how you’re like to use your energy and powers to do it. 3) I tabulate all the results as I please then send out a digest to everyone and we’re back to 1, make sense?
I like the concept, but I’m very skeptical of PBEM.
As am I! I described my thinking on how it would work above but my basic idea is to have a very bare bones gaming system and then just have the DM (me) there resolve all the ideas of the players in whatever way seems most hilarious.
I’m down to try this out. I was part of the original Rumble game you linked to, and it was fun (despite me being killed off really early). The discussion and set up were probably my favorite part of the game, so turning it into more RP sounds great.
I’ve linked to this often, but here it is again: https://www.myth-weavers.com/
It’s an old-fashioned web form specifically for playing RPGs; I think it’s a much superior format than email.
A fascinating (and horrifying) article about pizza arbitrage
+1
Same author has a port on ZIRP that is also good: https://themargins.substack.com/p/zirp-explains-the-world
Re-re-re-posting my invitation to the Unofficial Slate Star Codex Extremely Heavily Modded Minecraft Server. I’ll be posting this again in the next two integer and half-integer OTs unless someone tells me to cut it out.
We now have four players, counting myself, and we’re having a ton of fun. We’ve all moved to nuclear power, now, keeping our heat engines with a portal to Hell on the hot side as backup. Right now we get around via basically-free teleportation, but I’ve decided to remove that ability and set up rail infrastructure instead. For our space program, the vehicles are built, and my basement factory is ready to make spacesuits on-demand, The only hold up now is oil refining for fuel – I don’t like the idea of just teleporting the stuff from the derrick to the refinery, so rails may end up as a prerequisite.
To play on the server:
Short version: We’re running the Technic 1.12.2 pack; the address is unofficialsscmc.404.mn
You will need to have purchased Minecraft, and have a Mojang account to log in with.
1. Go to technicpack.net and hit “Get the Launcher.” Download and run the launcher.
2. Type “The 1.12.2 Pack” in to the search bar. Hit “install” in the bottom right corner of the window.
3. Wait.
4. Hit “play,” it’ll be where the download button was.
5. Wait.
6. Go to “multiplayer,” then “Add Server.”
7. Paste unofficialsscmc.404.mn in to the Server Address box. Put whatever you want in Server Name. Hit done.
8. Double click the new entry at the bottom of the server list.
9. It should just work from that point on. If you have a problem, tell me about it in this thread, or EMail me – my address is my username at gmail.
The paid-for dedicated server is coming, uh, soonish.
One thing which alters my consumer behavior is how much me buying something benefits the seller. I care more about my well being than theirs, but I do care somewhat particularly if they are helping out the community. Thus, I am more inclined to buy non rivalrous good than rivalrous ones. If I buy a laptop, the producers have to make an additional laptop, but if I buy a digital Monster Manual, the marginal cost to the producers is zero. But the additional money might play some role in encouraging an additional entrant into the market or more complicated possibly negative effects such as spat book bloat. The latter seems mentally intractable, but is any one such as our resident law and econ scholar aware of evidence that a marginal increase in producer surplus is higher for non rivalrous goods?
So I could talk about the operas I quite enjoyed in these past 9 weeks, thanks to the Met streaming a different one every day (plus a bonus one meant for students each week). In fact, I’ve enjoyed most of them.
Instead, let’s do hot takes. Here are the ones I was unable to finish!
La Boheme: skipped twice. I’ve seen this before already, and I have a limited attention span for Puccini more often than not. Not interested in Sad Artists Falling In Love And Dying.
Tristan and Isolde: I understand that the whole point of the thing was for it not to musically resolve until the end, but getting edged for over 4 hours straight ain’t my thing.
Die Meistersinger: Comedies should be fast paced
Tannhauser: I have the Venusberg excerpted in my music library already.
Nixon in China: Actually, I watched like 90%, and just tapped out over halfway through that interminable last act (it pretty much peaked at “let’s show these motherfuckers how to dance”). If I want to learn about philosophy, I’ll read philosophy. Don’t need it in much slower paced song form.
Don Carlo: I also have attention issues with Verdi sometimes, plus I made the mistake of reading about the real Don Carlo, and the hilarity of the contrast put me off of the opera.
Aida: I did indeed rag on Wagner last time, but I will admit that his plotting and characterization alone is sometimes enough to keep me interested. I’m most likely to skip out on Verdi when the plots are just “love triangle causes everyone to suffer,” unless he paces the arias well.
Parsifal: Speaking of pacing issues. Indeed, the characterization did seem somewhat interesting, another case of Opera Does Philosophy Very Slowly.
Boris Godunov: I don’t remember any melodies from what I did watch. The Game of Thrones needs better pacing.
Madame Butterfly: skipped twice. I am also not fond of “a man is just The Worst, which makes the heroine suffer and prolly die” plots, unless, like, there is an epic mad scene to make up for it.
Elektra: Too much Suffering For Everyone (including my ears), and another Opera Does Philosophy Very Slowly case.
La Cenerentola: Once you’ve seen the best of Rossini, you don’t need to see his less than best. (Also I had just seen Cendrillion, staged in a more interesting way, so.)
Roberto Devereux: Donizetti Queen Fatigue, that’s all.
Luisa Miller: Verdi fatigue strikes again!
L’Amour de Loin: I need to be able to head bang when someone asks what is love.
Capriccio: Everyone in this is insufferable.
Werther: Sad boy is sad. Boring.
Honorable mention goes to Il Trovatore, which I did finish just because I figured I should see it once, and it was the first week and the first Verdi. The Anvil Chorus was great, and Leonora’s aria in the 4th act was very good, but it would be an opera I skip if it aired a different week. Like, even one of the actors took potshots at it during intermission, joking about a restaurant in Italy that will offer a free bottle of wine to the person who can explain the plot of Il Trovatore, and no one has succeeded at the challenge yet.
This hurts.
The Opera equivalent of “You Raise Me Up” by Josh Groban, but sixty times more of it.
Most of my opera consumption is audo-only, usually while working, and I find that helps my enjoyment of it. For me it’s mostly about the music, although I’m a sucker for a traditional Wagner staging. The number of of operas I actually enjoy sitting and watching in their entirety is probably around ten percent of the operas I enjoy listening to, and a large part of that is because so many librettos are dreck. One of my favorites is Rigoletto. I once made the mistake of describing the plot to my wife, and I think it may have put her off opera forever.
Ironically, my percentage of operas skipped has probably dropped because I started leaving the opera on the second monitor while I read stuff on the primary monitor. For example, I finished Nabucco last night this way, enjoying those luscious Verdi melodies while writing this very post up.
I probably would have finished Don Carlo if I had done that. Princess Eboli is pretty awesome.
Nixon in China is brilliant for the first two acts (I saw it live at the Met a few years ago), but yes, the third act is a mess. I recommend the complete version on Spotify, if you like to just listen to (as well as watch) opera.
Operas I would like the Met to stream:
Peter Grimes (my favorite opera of all time)
Khovanschina
Porgy and Bess
Don Pasquale (saw this live at the Met with Anna Netrebko, who was amazing)
I know it’s not a Met performance, but there’s a version of Candide conducted by Marin Alsop and starring Kristin Chenoweth and Patti Lupone, that is platonically perfect.
Peter Grimes and Don Pasquale have been streamed in previous weeks. I liked both of them!
Yeah, the lack of Candide by the Met is pretty sad. I’ve seen a concert performance of it, but still need to see a full production.
I’d like to see their Porgy and Bess, too. I’d also like to see a Die Fledermaus, if they have one.
I’ve become interested in the “ingroup/outgroup” thing we humans do, as I think it explains a lot of political polarization and other things in a much better way than the standard models people have.
But… I don’t actually know much about it! I’ve picked up bits and pieces in various readings, and I have a homegrown intuition for it, but I would really like to read a solid book about the science of it.
So this is a request for recommendations of such a book!
Have you read The Righteous Mind? That book and Jonathan Haidt’s work in general seem to be at the center of this discussion.
There was another book called Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene, who worked or studied with Haidt in some way. It’s been criticized for Greene eventually coming to the conclusion that his own previously held morality and political positions were right all along.
The criticisms of Greene are correct but he has good insights in his book. He’s one of the people trying to take ethics from its lofty heights and help us make some sense of it and its purpose.
I’m looking for a “pure science” Sociology book (if that’s even the right branch of science). Haidt’s book seems more of a polemic.
That said, everyone keeps recommending The Righteous Mind, so I just ordered it. Even if it doesn’t do much to answer my question, it seems like a Must Read book for our time.
Thanks for pushing me to action 🙂
Berreby, Us and Them. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/us-and-them-david-berreby/1111638668
Ordered. Thank you!
Sum de Pony/No_Bear_So_Low watchers might be interested to know that I’ve completed a long, poetic autopsychography- Deadwater, a poem about OCD:
https://deponysum.com/2020/05/10/deadwater/
Just wanted to say I do read your blog and really enjoy it, thanks! I wish SSC had a more vocal leftwing commentariat (by people more informed and better at arguing and writing than myself :’))
I am trying.
I am trying the experiment of hosting a weekly SSC online meetup, using Mozilla Hubs. Like the meetups I hosted in realspace, it will have no specified talk or topic, just casual socializing and conversation. The reason I am using Hubs instead of Zillow or one of its competitors is that it provides a VR environment, in which someone’s voice is louder the closer you are to him, which makes it possible to have multiple conversations going at once and to wander around looking for one that interests you. I may eventually switch to Town Meeting, which has a similar feature implemented in a different way, but since I’m familiar with Hubs I will start with that.
The meeting is Saturday at noon Pacific Time, which should cover everyone from California through Europe. To join, click hub.link/q7PLxgT.
Feel free to pass the invitation on to anyone you think would enjoy it.
Link fixed. (Missing https:// .)
COVID-19 response is a collective action problem.
Consider a toy example where everyone in society has two choice: They can (1) go out and about as normal, or (2) only leave the house for absolute essentials and take maximal precautions (PPE, etc.) when out.
(1) Maximizes the benefits of any individual. They don’t have to deal with PPE, don’t have to avoid places they like, etc. (2) carries with it a ton of inconveniences. However, with (2), an individual will also minimize their risks of getting C19. Each person can act rationally and choose the behavior that is optimal w.r.t. benefits and risks.
However, an individuals’s choice isn’t the only thing that effects their risks. If everyone else chooses 2, then the risks from (1) are substantially diminished. And if someone chooses (1), it (marginally) increases the risk of everyone else getting C19. (People may be irresponsible and go out and about even though they have C19 or they may be an asympomatic carrier of the virus and not realize it. Doesn’t really matter.)
Moreover, the more folks choose (1), the longer the virus persists in the community.* This means that your choice of (1) makes the other people will rationally choose (2) longer, imposing additional choices.
This is a collective action problem. Costs associated with your choices are born by others. This leads you to make choices that are individually optimal but collectively suboptimal.**
A C19-free community (people, stores, restaurants, etc.) is a public good. When our community has no (or minimal) risk of C19 transmission, everyone benefits from it. Anyone can enjoy this benefit by having a small-to-no chance of getting C19 when they go to the grocery store. My enjoyment of this boon doesn’t diminish your ability to also enjoy it. The decisions of any one individual don’t effect (except at the margins) how C19-free the community is, but the decisions of many individuals can.
People who choose (1) in the first toy example are free-riding on the prosocial decisions of others. They are acting antisocially and selfishly. They are the ship captain who uses the lighthouse to keep his ship from the rocks but refuses to pay towards its maintenance and upkeep. They are the project team member whose contributes no work but gets the same project evaluation as their team members. They are the Wikipedia user who has clicked through 100,000 articles but has yet to contribute even $1.
*Some folks will disagree and think every community should just do an NYC or Italy (except triple what they did because NYC is at ~20% infected now, not 60%) and then we’ll have herd immunity more quickly and be able to lift measures. I’m assuming that (in the US) our collective will doesn’t want that and that the best way to get distancing restrictions lifted is to get new case counts very low.
**This toy examples ignores the folks who don’t have a choice between (1) and (2) but must be present in potentially dangerous settings (poorly-ventilated warehouses, packing plants, grocery stores, etc.) for their occupation. Other folks choosing (1) increases the risks these folks must face irrespective of their own choices.
You are modeling this incorrectly. Your assumptions only hold if you your equilibrium is everyone wearing PPE and taking preventative measures for Covid before an outbreak begins. When that isn’t true and few or no people are taking preventative measures at the onset then you have the exact opposite conclusion- that protecting yourself is your best decision and the collective action problem goes away.
Secondly you are modeling this as if everyone has exactly average costs, when you shift that to large differences in outcomes for easily self identifiable groups then the calculation completely changes and those people should aggressively protect themselves.
There is no evidence or reason to expect this to be true, if the entire population protected themselves perfectly and then one person stopped there would almost certainly be no additional time of infections, and likewise the difference between 1 person protecting themselves and zero would also have no additional time of infections. As such it is almost certainly a curve and not a linear relationship between personal protections taken and total time of infections.
Long story short your conclusions are assumption and not fact driven.
>> Moreover, the more folks choose (1), the longer the virus persists in the community
> There is no evidence or reason to expect this to be true, if the entire population protected themselves perfectly and then one person stopped there would almost certainly be no additional time of infections, and likewise the difference between 1 person protecting themselves and zero would also have no additional time of infections. As such it is almost certainly a curve and not a linear relationship between personal protections taken and total time of infections.
While the marginal behavior at the perfect point is zero, the marginal behavior at the current point is equal to the R0*your chance of being infected (per my understanding, which is admittedly limited). I agree that it’s definitely a curve and not linear, but that doesn’t mean that the assumption is wrong.
No, it means your assumption is unsupported as there are clear points where an change in PPE does not decrease the length of time the virus is in the population.
However your assumption is wrong, if use of PPE drops the R value then with a basic model there are substantial stretches where increasing PPE causes the length of time in the population to rise. This was the logic behind ‘flatten the curve’ where you get a similar number of total infections but spread out over a longer time horizon.
> They are the Wikipedia user who has clicked through 100,000 articles but has yet to contribute even $1.
Well damn, I did not expect to be hit in the guilt-feels today but here we are.
/donates
Turns out that Jimmy Wales should have spent less time talking about the price of coffee and more talking about how I am why society is doomed to fail.
I know a bit more than I would like to about how the Wikipedia sausage is made. I have in the past crontributes articles/editting. I do not give them money, and probably never will.
Bad example.
Yeah agreed. Not to disparage anyone who did donate to Wikipedia (it’s still better than spending that money on non-charity), but for most people’s time/money rates, it’s more valuable to edit Wikipedia than to give them money. They have a large war chest that (in my opinion) isn’t being spent well. More donations encourage them to continue that misspending. Meanwhile, editing is desparately needed, especially for things that you have better than average knowledge about – for example locations in your local area, topics in your field of study, or your hobbies.
Well, of course you are right. That’s also why it’s a classical example of a collective action problem that we need the government for. Nothing even remotely close to the lockdown wouldn’t have happened if not announced from above.
A C-19 free community is a public good. It is a public good that is so expensive, that if the actual cost was a) blatantly obvious and/or b) not spread around but only charged to those that benefited, nobody would decide it was a good idea to buy it. But because the government can coordinate and mandate the purchase, and the price is difficult to see, we are all stuck buying something that almost nobody wants*.
*would you spend $10,000,000 to save your 80 year old grandparent? Even if you could get great interest rates like your government can? How many grandparents would ask their children to do that?
How many Americans would give to a charity that saved almost exclusively elderly with medical conditions, at a cost of $10,000,000 each? Especially when there are charities out there that can save younger people for $2,000, which very few Americans donate to?
The fact is that people value quality of life over quantity, whether it is quantity of African children’s lives or quantity of their own life. We eat delicious food and drink alcohol and ride motorbikes and drive cars. That is the revealed preference and it makes perfect sense until we are driven to panic by something scary like a new virus.
Les Hablahap:
And yet, some other countries have managed pretty well so far, including Australia and New Zealand–countries with roots in the same English conceptions of rights and law that we have.
It may be that it’s not doable because of the pathologies of our government or society, but that’s not the same as it being inherently unaffordable.
The true cost in terms of economic well being to places like New Zealand from implementing such policies have not even begun to be felt yet…
Australia and New Zealand have managed to control the spread of COVID-19 pretty well so far, perhaps very well in the case of New Zealand. But,
How much have Australia and New Zealand paid for this? Not “how many of the bills have come due”, but what is the total including the back-loaded and hidden costs?
Les is a Kiwi, and I believe has forecast that New Zealand’s economy is going to crater and hard if they follow through with their current plans.
Right. NZ has “decided to buy it” sure, but not only has the bill not arrived yet, they don’t even know what the final bill is actually going to be…
Individuals and governments both have long and storied histories of buying things that in hindsight, they ought not to have…
Sweden has also made a decision to “buy it.” They just bought something else.
You can’t optimize for “deciding not to buy anything.” All available options suck.
Well, the difference is that NZ is buying a service where you get the majority of the benefit right now, and pay the majority of the costs later.
Sweden is buying a thing where you pay the cost now, and derive the benefit later.
One of those roughly maps to going in debt, the other roughly maps to making an investment.
NZ is in a pretty special position, since it’s so far away from most of the rest of the world. They make money on tourism, but tourists from places other than Australia already have a loooong trip to get there, so probably they can add a bit of overhead to the trip and still keep a substantial amount of tourism.
More generally, I think most international borders are already set up to restrict who can come in and make visitors jump through some hoops, and it won’t be so hard to add in a few COVID-related ones that keep imported cases under control. For example, in order to come into our country, you have to get a certified test a week before entry, and take another one as you enter the country. (Either they develop a rapid test or they make you wait in some well-ventilated, socially-distanced place until you get the results.) That plus a basic symptom check at the border probably catches the great majority of cases before they enter the country.
@albatross11,
My understanding of quarantine procedures implemented by countries trying to wipe out COVID-19 is that they are generally set to require 14 days of isolation. My quick Google search re: NZ’s policy seems to align with that (they implemented a 14 day quarantine for NZ citizens or permanent residents who had traveled in China back when this was still ramping up; I don’t know exactly what their current policy is).
There is an enormous difference between traveling to New Zealand costing you 20-30 hours of flight time versus it costing you 20-30 hours of flight time plus 14 days of quarantine upon arrival. If you were planning a three week vacation (which is already quite long! At least speaking as an American), then the quarantine would consume two-thirds of your vacation time. I’ve heard that NZ is great, but I don’t think it’s that great.
I would be surprised if countries implementing a 14-day isolation requirement for all tourists saw less than a 99% decrease in international tourism. As someone who had been planning to travel internationally later in 2020 before all this happened, and who is now trying to figure out what my new travel plans will be once things open back up, I can confidently say that I’m not going to go anywhere with a quarantine period that is measured in days. I expect a massive supermajority of tourists will feel the same way.
Edited to add, I think there’s no compromise position on the quarantine period either. My understanding is that any quarantine shorter than at minimum five days would be of little use in preventing the reintroduction of COVID-19 to an area, such as by asymptomatic carriers. Therefore, even a quarantine of 2-3 days would be useless public health security theater while simultaneously being massively obnoxious to any tourists. I think any quarantine long enough to be useful will wipe out tourism.
The new budget just came out in NZ, so we have an idea what the government’s economic recovery plan is going to be, and it is forecast to add 140 billion in debt by 2024 link text
That’s $28,000 per person in NZ, or 1.9MM per COVID-19 life saved under the worst projections (70% infected, 1% IFR). And the economy is forecast to shrink anyway, with -4.6% GDP this year and 1% GDP next year: link text
Then there are the human costs that are not included in those figures. Migrants here forced to leave. Kiwis abroad forced to come back. People having to move within the country to find new jobs. Relationships broken apart. People not allowed to attend funerals and postponing weddings. Single people living alone suffering isolation. Unemployment, raising the retirement age, millions of tourists who would have had great experiences here who now can’t. Mortgage foreclosures, bankruptcies and legal fights. Erosion of government trust and the rise of weird conspiracy theories (there have been several cell phone towers burned down in the last week by 5G conspiracy nuts). Increased susceptibility to future disasters. Lowered life expectancy. Increased stress.
@albatross11,
Iceland is opening its borders on June 15th with COVID testing on arrival, and if you test positive you’re in quarantine. There’s no reason that couldn’t be done in NZ that I’m aware of. Currently though all arrivals have a 14-day quarantine. There is enormous and growing pressure to get things opened up again here though.
If 2% of visitors are happy with a reduced quarantine, it still leaves the problem that no airline can run a scheduled flight on that kind of volume. So unless they are chartering a plane they aren’t coming here.
I think how effective this is depends a lot on:
a. The false negative rate of the test
b. The period between when you’re exposed and when you *can* test positive.
c. What fraction of people catch C19 while traveling.
If we assume 10% false negative rate and 90% of exposed and will-be-contagious people are currently making enough virus to test positive, then an RNA test as you enter catches 81% of people who are going to be contagious.
Doing better requires serial testing in hopes that your false negatives don’t repeat, and adding a short quarantine in hopes that you’re past the time between exposure and having enough virus to be able to test positive.
I think you’d also want to test on exit, to give your contact tracers a head start on catching any new cases.
Testing everyone on the plane before it takes off helps with cases of it spreading from one person to another. Also, make sure you have some alternate form of tourism available for people who fail the tests.
The Alex Tarrabok plan cals for America to be in red, yellow, and green zones. Green zones have 1-in-36,000 prevalence. New Zealand normally gets 1.2 million visitors a year. Let’s call it a million with some reduced travel. If you are coming from a green zone, that means there are 28 new cases per year. If you catch 81% of them, like albatross11 suggests, that means you only have to do the contact-trace-chase on less than a half person each month. (You could do a follow-up test X days after the person arrives and does tourist stuff, as long as you can shut up the people who demand all-or-nothing.)
Now, obviously there aren’t going to be many green zones in the next few weeks. A yellow zone might have 0.1% of people having the virus. That means you want to catch 1000 people a year or 83 each month. If you are 81% successful at finding cases, that means you have 16 cases slip past you each month.
This is a solvable problem if people want it to be solved. People can insist it’s unsolvable if they want that instead and you can’t change their minds.
Edward Scizzorhands,
There’s a few problems with that:
For one, the US is not going to have green zones with strict internal borders. They probably won’t end up with green zones at all as keeping the restrictions in place to get and keep infections that low won’t be politically possible.
Even if the US claimed that they had strict internal borders and ‘guaranteed’ green zones, the NZ government is not going to just take that on faith. How are they going to verify that a US citizen hasn’t been in a yellow zone recently?
Opening up to yellow zones and the 16 cases a month slipping by would mean rapid spread of infection in NZ and lead to us going back under lockdown. Tourists are super-spreaders: they travel the whole country dining in restaurants constantly, using public transport and taking group tours.
Also NZ gets 2MM international tourists per year not 1.2MM.
But I am hopeful that testing such as what Iceland is going to do (I don’t know the details of their test) will catch much more than 81% of positive cases. There’s other scenarios as well that let NZ open up the borders, such as good treatments coming out, a vaccine, more antibody data showing that the disease is not that fatal or that herd immunity is easier to reach. I am predicting around 35% chance that we have basically open borders again by December 2020.
Tourism industry forecasts I have seen have said that under the optimistic scenario we won’t be opening our borders to the US and all other countries until Q3-2021, which I think is absurdly pessimistic. Their optimistic scenario has Australia in October 2020, China, Japan and South Korea Q1 2021, Germany and Singapore Q2 2021, and US, UK, India and all others in Q3 2021.
I suspect they have some climate and especially geographical advantages that dominate the other factors.
Treating the decision making as binary eliminates a lot of the decision making here:
There’s still the decision of continuing to work in their occupations or not. I’m not saying this to be callous, it’s a choice that people have actually made (my local grocery store had to give their workers raises, and there’s been substantial turnover in who’s working there as cashiers).
As baconbits9 points out, this isn’t a public good, in the sense that there’s still private benefits to choosing 2) by yourself. It’s just that there’s additional benefit to others, which isn’t priced into individual decisionmaking. This is pretty much the textbook example of an externality (with the caveat that the set of beneficiaries isn’t everyone in society, but the specific people you might transmit the disease to). The current set of recommended/mandated behaviors are just an approximation for the theoretically-better-but-practically-intractable solution of transfer payments based on relative risk of transmitting the infection for each possible transmission between two people.
Yeah, people stuck in prison while COVID-19 ravages the prison actually don’t have any choice about being there. The prison guards do have a choice, just a not-great choice of quitting their job during a period of the highest unemployment since the great depression or continuing to be exposed to lots of COVID-19. I expect some prison guards have quit to avoid catching the virus, but probably not many. (Being a prison guard isn’t all that safe or pleasant a job anyway, and few prison guards have a lot of other available options.)
Something similar happens w.r.t. nursing homes and hospitals full of COVID-19 patients. And to a lesser extent with grocery stores and such.
They are the Wikipedia user who has clicked through 100,000 articles but has yet to contribute even $1.
AND I LAUGH EVILLY AS I CLICK ON THE “X” TO CLOSE DOWN THE BEGGING BOWL HEADERS, TOO!.
Constant “we do this for free, pay up!” stumping is counter-productive because it annoys me, and I know if I’m ever idiot enough to throw some money at them, I will then eternally be getting begging emails from them every five minutes. We’ve discussed this previously about charities putting you on lists where a one-time donation buys you eternal tormenting by every hog, dog and divil they shared the list with.
I have donated to Wikipedia and have not gotten begging emails from them every five minutes. Indeed, I don’t think I have gotten any begging emails from them at all.
Wikipedia provides a valuable service to me and so, although I don’t feel obligated to pay for something they offer for free, I do feel as though I should. The same reason I contribute to Scott’s patreon.
The experience with most charities is that donating gets you put on a sucker list. It’s nice to hear that Wikimedia, as much as I dislike them[1], doesn’t do that.
[1] I donate with edits to help the community, although recent attempts at editing have left a bad taste in my mouth.
I have donated to Wikipedia and have not gotten begging emails from them every five minutes. Indeed, I don’t think I have gotten any begging emails from them at all.
I am glad to hear that, but as Edward Scizorhands explains, I have previously been burnt by donations that did engender constant begging emails, junk mail, etc.
If Wikipedia really don’t hound you once they’ve persuaded you to throw money into the collection bucket, I may indeed reconsider donating the next time one of those banners pops up.
The only organization I regularly donate substantial amounts to is the Institute for Justice. I get mailings from them, but they are generally accounts of the good things they are doing, which I am happy to have, not requests for money.
I’m not sure what determines which organizations follow the pattern Deiseach describes and which don’t, but it seems clear that both exist.
In the case of Wikipedia, it may just be that occasionally showing a request for money on a Wikipedia page that someone is accessing is less expensive and more productive than sending out emails. And it doesn’t require them to keep track of who has donated before.
Wikipedia repeat begging is pretty low – less than once a year in my experience as a sometimes donor.
I have also given to Wikipedia and they have never emailed me. Ever.
They’ve emailed me. Twice within about two months last year, I’m not sure about before that.
Why would this same argument not apply to seasonal flu? Why should one believe that it is possible, let alone reasonable, to try to achieve a “C19-free community”, particularly by the methods you are advocating? The elimination or near-elimination of the diseases that we have been able to do (smallpox, measles, polio, malaria (in some regions), yellow fever (ditto), etc.) were achieved in completely different ways. Why should the methods you are advocating not be seen as mere tilting at windmills?
Without advocating for or against that particular plan, if
coronavirusflu had a death rate of 3% for young heathy people, we would absolutely do what we can to eliminate it.We’ve decided to live with flu because its death rate is low enough. If you want to argue that we should revisit that calculus, go for it.
We are doing what we reasonably can to control flu—elimination is not a realistic goal at the moment. We can live with C19 in the same way, mostly because we have no choice about it. C19 is here, and there is no reason to believe that it is possible to eliminate it, either.
If the argument someone is making is leading that they recommend a response orders of magnitude larger than the response to seasonal flu, it is reasonable to ask in what way their argument does not apply to seasonal flu, since there are not orders of magnitude in difference between the seriousness of C19 and seasonal flu.
Seasonal flu has a bunch of animal reservoirs (including pigs and several species of birds, both wild and domesticated), so it’s probably very hard to get rid of even if we could vaccinate all the humans. Covid-19 probably doesn’t have any animal reservoirs likely to reinfect us once the wet markets in Wuhan get shut down.
Covid-19 has been verified to be able to infect at least cats and dogs. Even some lions and tigers in the Bronx zoo tested positive.
A while ago I asked here why the price of gasoline fluctuates so wildly when most other commodities don’t. I got the satisfying-seeming answer that gas is the rare commodity whose price is determined mostly by one raw ingredient rather than a complicated mix (like electronics) or production and shipping (like bread), so gas prices are tracking oil futures, which fluctuate for normal market reasons.
I have since realized a problem with that explanation: Production-wise, diesel is basically identical to gasoline. They come from the same refineries and sell in the same stations, yet diesel has a noticeably more stable price. So what market force is causing diesel and gas pricing to behave differently?
I don’t know about the diesel difference, but I’d suggest that a lot of the volatility in oil prices is because it’s expensive for producers to start or stop production in the short term. So when there’s a sudden change in demand, it takes a while for supply to adjust. Storage alleviates this somewhat, but storing oil is expensive relative to the price of oil. I suppose this is really all just normal market reasons, but I think more relevant for oil than some other commodities and most finished goods.
In addition to what you mentioned, with gasoline you have highly inelastic (short run)supply, highly highly inelastic(short run) demand, linked to that limited substitutes, and limited capacity for storage relative to the amount consumed. This is a recipe for volatile prices.
If tomorrow bread cost 80% more, I would buy less bread. My driving behavior would not be altered if gas cost 80% more. I drive when and where I “need” to and otherwise I do not drive.
Also because driving is thought of as a need, some percentage of the population has a decent amount of their gas bills paid for by their company etc. The effect is not huge, but it does make gas consumption even less elastic.
gasoline is also more perishable than diesel.
America plays on gas and works on diesel. Most gas is used in passenger cars owned by individuals, most diesel is used in heavy trucks and machinery owned by businesses. People’s driving habits can change quickly, while businesses generally don’t like to have their trucks sitting idle.
Also could be that airlines hedge fuel prices so much that the price is stabilized, right? Jet A is very similar to diesel as a fuel.
Here in France diesel prices and gasoline prices pretty much track in lockstep. But about half of all domestic cars are diesel, so most of the points mentioned above don’t apply.
Same here in the Netherlands, but it speaks to the importance of diesel that even with private diesel cars barely running, diesel is still in great demand.
That’s interesting, how variable are the prices? I’m curious if they both behave like American gas where they change by the hour and it’s not uncommon to see +-5% per day, or the much slower shifts of American diesel.
I don’t know exactly, but it feels like it’s roughly a weekly change. And everything changes all at once ie the 95 and 98 gasoline, the diesel and the off road diesel. My sense that they all change in lock step is because the off road diesel is always just a fraction more than half the price of 98 gasoline.
>America plays on gas and works on diesel. Most gas is used in passenger cars owned by individuals, most diesel is used in heavy trucks and machinery owned by businesses. People’s driving habits can change quickly, while businesses generally don’t like to have their trucks sitting idle.
This. Construction, transportation, mining, agriculture: the world runs on diesel. You can’t turn those industries off without the entire edifice of complex society collapsing.
Incidentally this is one of the biggest problems with the energy transition: finding a replacement fuel for heavy duty vehicles. The fact that even gasoline is incredibly inefficient of even impossible as a heavy duty fuel, despite being pretty close in energy density, should tell you quite a bit.
There’s an interesting little book called ‘When trucks stop running’ by Alice Friedman (2013), a former logistics chain engineer who delved into alternatives for diesel-powered trucks and cargo trains (shipping is also turning to diesel more and more). Turns out it’s really hard to make batteries that don’t take up 90% of curb weight, or make electric engines based on fuel cells that can actually make a truck go uphill.
There’s also a more recent study that compared Switzerland and Finland as cases. As far as I remember, Switzrland was viable despite being mountainous because most trips are short, so you could switch to medium-duty trucks that run shorter distances (up to 300km or something) with decent efficiency. Longer haul trips in a large country like Finland would not be viable in a battery future, however.
Does anyone here have an interest in battery development and other diesel alternatives and if so, help me become less anxious about facing a negative post-industrial future?
Just recently there have been some electric mining trucks developed that could recharge on downhills, meaning that if they get loaded at the top and drop off at the bottom, they can run forever with no fuel or charging. Very limited use case since most mines won’t be able to set up that way, but saves a lot of fuel when it works.
https://www.autoblog.com/2019/08/26/edumper-electric-mining-truck-self-charging/
There is another technology that uses electric trolley assist to reduce diesel usage, which reduces costs as electric power is generally cheaper and more efficient.
It also allows for uphill loaded hauls, which can occur later in a mine’s life as all the good downhill waste dumps get filled up, or as the mining areas drop below the plant elevation.
The paper that I looked at discussed having two separate systems, one to power the uphill haul, and another to capture the braking energy on the downhill. Depending on the topography, this could be coupled with pumped hydro as the energy storage method, rather than having battery packs on every truck. Or depending on the scale of the pits, a much smaller battery pack for bench entrance -> shovel -> bench exit only.
AFAIK (and what I’ve seen on trips there) Switzerland has made a great deal of effort to shift as much freight as possible onto the railways. This may be part of why so many of the trips are short and suitable for electric trucks- most of the transport through mountains is done by trains. According to Eurostat, rail has a modal share of about 35% of inland freight transport in Switzerland. This is higher than anywhere except the Baltics (apparently the vast majority of rail freight traffic in the Baltics is transshipment of Russian coal, oil and gas to Baltic ports for export).
Finland’s rail modal share seems to be similar, but I wonder if its railway network doesn’t cover as much of the country as the Swiss one does.
(The Eurostat document is also interesting to see which countries make appreciable use of their inland waterways for freight- essentially Belgium, the Netherlands, and countries on the lower Danube…)
There’s always bio-diesel. My understanding is that right now bio-diesel takes more energy to produce than we can get out of it, but then that’s also true of batteries. If other sources of energy become cheap enough, then the efficiency loss of converting fission to bio-diesel can still be worth the higher energy density. I’m not an expert on this stuff though so take this with a grain of salt.
Are you assuming we are going to run out of petroleum or ban it?
Responses are highlighting that diesel and gas are used in different classes of vehicles, which is probably the origin of the difference, but “diesel and gas go in different trucks” is not an explanation of why one price is more swingy than the other. Are regular people more tolerant of swingy prices than the shipping industry which favours stations with more consistent diesel prices? Is it that the shipping industry would respond to swingy diesel prices by simply stockpiling diesel when it’s at its lowest point (since they have more incentive and ability to do so than people driving to work)? Is it because the shipping industry’s demand for diesel is less elastic than the consumer’s demand for gas so something something animal spirits, the price of diesel stabilizes?
I think regular people can often just not afford it, or decide to prioritize other spending. This might be a big difference between Europe and the US. Not only is gas heavily taxed here (usually over half the total consumer price is tax) so it’s several times more expensive, it’s also often not quite necessary to drive. Sure, you have people like contractors, plumbers, builders and (for a stretched definition of necessary) sales reps making necessary trips, but otherwise you can almost always go to work by safe, clean and fast public transport. It’s *exceedingly* rare to find yourself away from your local or even regional economic hub my more than an hour. So while lots of people like having the privacy and flexibility of a car, it’s not like in the US where you often have to have a car just to go to work.
Having said that, I don’t find a very major difference in the price decline of gas and diesel in the Netherlands, at least for retail. Perhaps they’re simply indexed to each other, or perhaps the diesel based economy is as hard hit as the gas one. Perhaps my reasoning is just wrong.
Yea, some of the other responses that suggest that diesel has inelastic demand would lead me to expect diesel to be more volatile than gas, not less.
Why? The supply of diesel is also inelastic. The world’s ability to make diesel fuel, or gasoline or any other petrochemical commodity, hasn’t changed much and isn’t likely to change much. It’s been deemed an essential industry, so it’s still running, and if e.g. Saudi Arabia decides to either increase or decrease production for political reasons then marginal fields in North Dakota will be taken out of or put back into production accordingly.
Inelastic supply of diesel plus inelastic demand for diesel = constant price for diesel. Inelastic supply of gasoline plus highly elastic demand for gasoline = volatile prices for gasoline.
No, that’s backward. Inelastic = very little change in amount bought/produced when price changes. Hence to cause a slight change in amount, you need to change the price by a lot.
Toy example: You run a refinery, producing 1000 gal/day. You want to sell 1000 gal/day at the market price, which turns out to be $2.50/gal. Tomorrow you have a maintenance issue and produce 950 gal/day. To clear the market, you need to raise the price until you find someone who would have bought 50 gallons decides not to buy any.
If it’s gasoline, bumping up the price by a little bit may be enough to make someone cancel their vacation plans. If it’s diesel, you’ve got to bump up the price enough to make someone put their construction site on hold or cancel a delivery, presumed to be a much bigger change in price.
Maybe it’s something simpler. Diesel appears to be slightly more expensive and slightly stabler – maybe it’s sometimes sold in longer term contracts rather than spot price, and those contracts put the volatility risk on the seller, which is compensated by a higher average price.
You’re using elasticity as a synonym for “variable over time” whereas others in the same discussion are using it to mean “responsiveness to price changes”. “Variability over time” would increase price swings, but “responsiveness to price changes” would decrease them.
You have to model it both directions though. If you have to raise the price very high to push a construction project to halt then you will have to drop the price much lower when you get back to full capacity to induce them to restart. This would make large price shifts far less appealing and buffering solutions (like storage) far more appealing.
I don’t have a good answer, but the energy information administration has pretty decent data sets for testing whatever theories get proposed.
A quick look at weekly retail prices says the basic belief that there is more short term variance is correct.
Yes, from what I see there’s a slightly quicker drop in gasoline, and it ends up being slightly bigger percentually. But not very significant.
There’s been a lot of “LOL who likes cruises?” stuff from media folks on Twitter. Having been on one, I just thought it was pretty cool being in luxury conditions on a boat way out to sea – being at sea itself was kind of cool.
Growing up I never went on cruises and I didn’t know anyone who did either, despite coming from an affluent enough background basically all my friends’ families could have afforded to go. It simply wasn’t part of my world. I suspect this is still true for a lot of the Twitterati, which makes it easy to mock for basically classist reasons. (And there is a huge amount of classism and snobbery among people who otherwise pride themselves on their tolerance.)
I was introduced to them by a girlfriend who was brilliant but from a family that wasn’t as well off. Going on cruises was high status in her community, so they went on cruises when they could afford a vacation. I went a couple of times with her. They were fun but they seemed geared at people with different cultural markers than me. I had a good time but it felt… I guess I would compare it to when I lived in England and used to go to pubs regularly. It isn’t that it wasn’t fun, or that it was incomprehensible why people did it, and it wasn’t that I wasn’t welcomed. I had fun, I understood, and I was welcomed. But it had a foreign tinge to it, for lack of a better term. After we broke up I haven’t been back, although I definitely felt I got my money’s worth and consider them good vacations. (There were several things like this: we had very different ideas of leisure and vacationing. Another was casinos.)
Cruises are often a relatively cheap holiday option, when you consider the rate per day. And they can be popular with families, for multiple reasons, but including because of the offer of on-board activities for children.
Of course, this varies by cruise: some may focus on the singles market, some for retirees, etcetera. In general though, I’d suspect that the contempt for cruises is a proxy for contempt for the class and lifestyle of the median cruise consumer.
Is that class contempt from above, below or to the side?
Above.
I’d really disagree with class contempt applying to cruises in general, although that may be a USA thing. The cruise market is a lot more varied than just big-ship Carribean/Mediterranean cruises. There is a pretty significant cruise market that caters to middle-upper and upper class, in a variety of styles and locations.
I’ve seen the hit pieces mostly in UMC literature. But which ones are you thinking of?
One relevant thing might be that there are a lot of different cruise experiences. My only cruise was with my parents for their 25th anniversary years ago. They chose an “old people” cruise to Alaska, which was nice and stopped in several interesting places. My in-laws, a few rungs up the socio-economic ladder, do river cruises in Europe. Those are cool because you can see several cities without having to re-pack and your method of transport is one big riverfront veranda. I assume you get something wildly different on a Carnival cruise around the Caribbean, and I’m not sure I’d enjoy it. If it’s one of those boats that’s like a floating mall with lots of drunk people, I’d just as soon get overcharged for booze on dry land.
I’ve heard that people who need assisted living facilities sometimes go on a permanent cruise – because it is way more fun than the assisted living facility, and cheaper, too.
In a cruise, you get laundry, cleaning, cooking, and round-the-clock entertainment, plus the company. If you don’t need a nurse, it can be quite a good option. And relatively affordable, too (from what I’ve heard, something like 60,000$/year).
I’ve been looking for quantitive estimates of the infectiousness of COVID-19 for some standard interactions. For example, if an infected but asymptomatic person were to spend 30 seconds talking conversationally to an susceptible individual at a distance of 3 feet, what is the likelihood that the susceptible one will contract the disease? Same but situation, but longer times: 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes — is infection risk linear with exposure? Same situation, but the infected individual is properly wearing an N95 mask. Same situation, but the uninfected individual is wearing a similar mask. Or both are wearing masks.
I’d think these would be useful numbers to know, but I haven’t found anything concrete. What I have found seems to either be seemingly trustworthyl information about relative risk for healthcare workers for different activities (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.27.20045336v1.full.pdf) or not particularly trustworthy general advice for the public (https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them). Lacking are hard numbers, even though these numbers seem like they would be very useful to know. Do these numbers exist somewhere that I haven’t found?
On my own, if we were to assume linearity with exposure time and that all transmission was spread by airborne droplets, it seems like one could come up with a rough estimate by looking at R0 and estimating the amount of contact time the infected individual has uninfected individuals during the time they are contagious but asymptomatic. But I don’t really even have a good guess at what this contact time might be, or whether the assumptions are reasonable. Are there better ways to at least establish bounds?
nkurtz:
It seems really hard to get those numbers, short of running experiments with people and COVID-19. The best we’ve got now seems to be contact tracing reports, but those don’t include a denominator.
I’m for shorter sentences for the 2 accused, but against giving in to the mob, so… good news/bad news
I do not know what you are referring to. If it’s the current high profile case of the shooting of a black jogger/thief (depending on which story you believe), I don’t know which mob you are referring to, those who think the accused are guilty or those who think they are innocent.
Presumably the bans which Scott reduced in the post.
They’re referring to the commutation of the bans on this blog.
I was one of those calling for clemency, and I didn’t feel part of a mob. As it happens I think Scott has hit the sweet spot with a two month reduction.
Given that the whole banning thing is a PITA for our host, I’m properly impressed by the extra effort he puts in to balance all variables.
It seemed a lot more like petitioning than like a mob, with the absence of pitchforks and the like.
Yeah – I don’t even remember any shouting, let alone threats of violence.
What are the economics of byproducts for which there is a very limited demand, such that the total amount desired is less than the amount produced as part of some other economic activity?
What inspires this question is that a few years ago I was at a Captain D’s and a guy came in, asked for “cracklins” (the pieces of fried breading that flake off of the fish while cooking — not sure what they’re actually called) and was willing to pay, but they gave him a small box for free. These “cracklins” are produced as a byproduct of making fish, and would presumably just be thrown away normally.
Ignoring the cost of the time for the employee to collect and box up the cracklins, and the cost of the box (realistically nonzero but very small), I’d expect that the supply curve would start out flat at zero, continuing this way until the point at which you’d have to start making cracklins intentionally. If the demand curve intersects the supply curve on this zero portion, the clearing price should be zero, which matches my observation that the guy was given it for free.
Nevertheless, it seems like in this case your incentive as a producer is not to reach the clearing price, but to charge something. Some subset of the “cracklins”-demanding population are willing to pay, including the guy I saw actually order them. Since getting some money is better than getting none, it seems like the actual price should be above zero, despite the above argument.
Which argument is more correct?
Note that this isn’t necessary true for small amounts of money.
That’s along the lines of what I’m thinking: charging for them at a price he would realistically pay would cost more than just giving them to him. For one thing, it holds up other, higher-paying customers.
It is also not true if disposal costs money.
The way most businesses approach this is not to maximize the individual revenue of everything they supply but to maximize overall revenue of the business. For example, free bread rolls cost money and are purely an expense but are felt (probably with evidence) to increase the number of people making other purchases and thus to increase revenue more than their cost, even if they don’t directly create revenue.
Thus the goal of a business is not to maximize revenue for each individual item but to maximize overall revenue, which is usually a matter of extracting cash at set points in the business model in exchange for specific, highly measurable goods or services.
Therefore, when someone comes up and asks for cracklins the question is not how much they could charge for cracklins. It’s what they can do that will maximize the overall revenue of the business. One option would be to charge for cracklins but the question then is whether the revenue will outweigh the expense of supplying cracklins, especially with fixed costs of doing it regularly. On the other hand, giving away the cracklins for free (like the breadrolls) earns some good will for little to no cost and probably stimulates spending at the points where they’re designed to extract cash.
If demand for cracklins increases to the point where the fixed costs of a cracklin supply chain become viable, then it can be bundled into the menu. Otherwise, it more resembles one of the many ancillaries restaurants supply in order to get you to order off that menu. Ancillaries that are often the biggest driver of expenses: location, wait staff, ambiance, etc are all things you receive without paying for them. But they are, of course, meant to drive you towards spending on the menu, which is the mechanism by which they get revenue from you.
If they were to sell them, there’d probably be a bunch of accounting regulations which need to be followed, which are non-zero. There’s also the social expectation as well. If this is something they give away for free when present, it’s very easy to simply say “sorry, we don’t have any” and have the customer leave. But once you start charging for them there may become an expectation of availability.
There are very few byproducts that are completely worthless and comparatively many that are worth less than the cost of transporting them even a nominal distance. Free really means that the recipient covers the cost of transportation (and the producer additionally saves on storage and disposal costs). Basically your supply and demand curves need to account for implicit parts of the price (notably transportation) not just the explicit transaction.
And some even cost money to dispose of, so giving them away saves the business money.
Exactly. Having a dumpster hauled off and replaced isn’t free.
Note that I’m looking at this from the perspective of larger operations than a typical restaurant. Here are a few interesting examples:
– craft breweries will often allow a local farmer to take their spent grains to use as animal feed
– when it comes to large fuel ethanol plants, however, distillers’ dried grains (ddg) is a commodity they sell
– occasionally you hear about people with DIY biodiesel set-ups that go around collecting used fryer grease from restaurants to power their vehicles
– rendering plants will collect byproducts from slaughterhouses and fish plants; sometimes they charge for this service but I think sometimes they also end up paying for the feedstock they need
In civilised parts of the world, they give you the fish wi’ bits of the batter that’s fallen off in the fryer.
An interesting related case: The amount of hide produced as a byproduct of beef consumption far outstrips demand.
Now, there’s an intermediate process – tanning – which produces a good which is valuable. But the demand for properly cured leather isn’t sufficiently high to consume all the leather that could be produced. The current market “solution” is that many (although still not all) hides are partially tanned, producing low-quality “leather”, which is sufficiently inexpensive to hit some price points.
Which is why cheap leather goods tend to disintegrate pretty quickly, and which is often disguised as higher-quality leather by other practices, such as coating the leather in a thin layer of another material.
That’s fascinating. In that case, I’m curious how much tanners pay for hide. It seems like the price should be around the neighborhood of “Come and pick it up.”
Semi-related: Worm castings sell for ~$2 a pound and restaurants/coffee shops/grocery stores will set aside their waste for worm farmers for free despite it having economic value to them.
Related question: how should you set prices for DRM-protected downloadable art like mp3 or movies which you can “produce” in infinite amount at the cost of internet transfer and hosting?
Related, sure, but not the same. Copies aren’t produced as a byproduct of doing something they were going to do anyway.
EDIT: In this particular case, it seems like you’d have a declining supply curve, representing the amortization of the initial production costs across the increasing number copies sold. That doesn’t mean zero price, because the demand curve can be steeper than the supply curve and thus still intersect it.
Why does dropout regularization work better than ridge/LASSO regularization for computer vision applications? My understanding is that dropout regularization works by introducing random “noise” to the neural network, preventing the network from relying too heavily on any one feature or pattern. Why is this more useful than ridge/LASSO regularization, which accomplishes largely the same thing without randomness?
Also, is this related in some way to the visual “noise” Scott mentions in this post? I know that drawing close comparisons between neural networks and actual brains is usually a mistake, but the two phenomena sound vaguely similar.
Dropout is “smart” ridge regularization that prioritazies important features. See Wager, S., Wang, S., & Liang, P. S. (2013). Dropout training as adaptive regularization.
Just a note to anyone who had trouble last meetup. We are no longer using Hubs. We will be using Zoom for the talk and Online Town for the meetup. Online Town should scale better due to its peer-to-peer nature, and it does not require a fast computer.
Sorry again for the problems last time.
So a couple weeks ago, I posted asking for organization advice, and received persuasive recommendations that I use bullet journal. I (and recently my wife) have since started bullet journaling, and I am finding it useful for having a record of what I have done recently and what I intend to do in a given day, but I think I am only scraping the surface of its potential. I don’t really use collections yet, and I haven’t really figured out the monthly log or future log; I basically just use the daily logger.
Anybody have any anecdata regarding bulletjournaling, good collections tips, people whom they have found it helpful to emulate?
Being one of the recommenders, I’m happy that it’s working for you.
I think the biggest tip is to really ensure there is a “cut off point” before which you have no loose ends. If you’re using the vanilla method that would probably be the start of the current month. You need to be completely sure that you reviewed the previous month’s entries during migration, scanned for open items and marked them as done/abandoned/migrated. The feeling of trust that everything is taken care of is 80% of the method’s appeal.
So given that most tasks I put directly into a day rather than into my month and then from my month to the day, I would flip through my past month’s daily logs?
Alex Tabarrok (of MR fame) proposes how to get out from under the pandemic.
ISTM that the pandemic has demonstrated a lot of ways our society has ossified and built up rules at so many levels/jurisdictions that it’s almost impossible to adapt quickly to any new thing in a lot of normal life. Like, suppose a restaurant wants to adapt to Covid-19 by moving most or all its tables outside with umbrellas, maybe expanding out into its parking lot. I bet it runs into five or six regulatory hassles involving permitting/zoning, fire code, liquor control, etc., that make this change a huge hassle. And that’s true for *so much* of the world.
We’re paying a price for this lack of flexibiltiy all the time, but it’s usually hidden. Covid-19 exposes this inflexibility and its costs.
And yet somehow, when it came time for the state to shut down the economy, it all happened instantly and frictionlessly. People just shouted “emergency powers” and it all just happened. No adaptation necessary.
The state could shut down the bars, but it turned out to be really hard for breweries to make hand sanitizer without running afoul of several different levels of regulation.
Video showing what you’d see if rockets were transparent.
This was really lovely to look at. Thank you for sharing it!
+1
@Neike Taika-Tessaro and @albatross11 and @Aapje:
What did you find interesting about this video? I watched the first half, and stopped because I didn’t think I was getting much out of it: some rockets use liquid propellants, some use solid, stages drop away at different times. Is there another level of information that I’m missing, or was this the interesting part?
Since I’m taking up space anyway, one part I didn’t understand is why the top stage of the left-most rocket “launches” from the rest at 3:15. What’s happening here?
That’s the launch escape system jetissoning.
If there’s any kind of catastrophic failure before the Saturn V rocket reaches an altitude of 90km, the command module that contains the astronauts detaches from the rest of the rocket and the launch escape rockets fire. This pulls the crew away from the rest of the rocket faster than it can explode. test flight footage
Above 90km, they have a different abort mode where the service module uses its rocket to fly clear of any explosion. Because the launch escape system is just extra weight at that point, it is jetissoned. This is similar to what a soyuz did recently.
Wouldn’t this turn the crew to mush about as effectively as the explosion?
The danger is not in the g, apparently, but in the shrapnel hitting vital components.
Traditional rocket propellant combinations, particularly those on the Saturn V, can’t actually detonate because the fuel and oxidizer start in separate places and are in any event immiscible (the liquid temperature ranges don’t even overlap). They can still explode, which a broader term than “detonate”, but it’s a slow-motion explosion limited to the rate at which fuel and oxidizer from separate tanks can meet and react at the interface surface. And, as noyann notes, they can scatter jagged rocket-bits across a broad area, but not the sort of high-velocity fragments you get from e.g. an exploding shell.
Partial exception to this in solid rockets, which premix the fuel and oxidizer, but usually that’s done at a coarse enough level that you still can’t get a detonation. The exceptions, so far haven’t been used for manned space flight.
So, possible to escape if you’re smart about it. For the really ballsy version, there’s always Gemini, which used ejection seats rather than trying to pull the capsule clear. Ejection seats set up to do a quick turn and twenty-G burn to clear the fireball. Theoretically survivable, but barely so and fortunately never used operationally.
@John Schilling
Does this mean that the N1 rockets didn’t detonate either?
No, those are LOX BLEVEs followed by deflagrations.
It’s only a detonation if the flame front is moving faster than the speed of sound.
I have a secondary source in English pointing to a primary source in Russian, indicating that the second (and largest) N1 explosion was “only” 4-5 tons TNT equivalent from several hundred tons of propellant whose raw energy density was roughly double that of TNT. So, big explosion in the colloquial sense, with plenty of fire, but any formal detonation was a tiny fraction of the total event.
I think you’ve got it covered. The video gives me the same kind of pleasure any good infographic giving me information would give me, even if I already had some of the data (see e.g. Information Is Beautiful). The video shows me more of what’s going on than just watching a rocket launch would, and it shows me more of what’s going on that if I just learnt “this stage detaches at point x” and “this much fuel is in the tanks” (especially latter, given that I am certainly one of the many humans who are terrible at visualising volume), in the sense that the mental work I would be spending to visualise these things is lifted from me. It also gives me a good feel of how long it takes to actually reach space (which I’ve indulged in before, largely from Space X footage, but if I hadn’t, it might be new to me), and it’s interesting to see how the progression of how quickly (or not) the fuel burns (rather than just the ignition and the point of fuel exhaustion).
That might not be what you were asking, to be fair, but it’s how I took the question. 🙂
Regarding the Saturn V, I’m no expert, but from reading up on it this was the launch escape system; and once you hit the point where that is no longer the preferred way to recover from problems, you might as well ditch the weight? (Possibly you need to ditch it so the other modes can do their thing?) Someone else please correct me.Oh, good, this was covered by Lambert while I was writing. 😀> That might not be what you were asking, to be fair, but it’s how I took the question
You answered exactly what I was asking. Thank you!
@nkurz
Part of my answer would be the same as Neike’s. However, I think that you also missed a lot of things, like:
– The lower throttling of the middle rocket on Falcon Heavy
– The rings between the stages on Saturn V that remain attached for a while
– The lesser efficiency of the Saturn rocket engine
– The escape system mentioned by others
– How low the Tesla car actually stayed
– How the Space Launch System separates most of parts really late, including the escape system
– The changes in the exhaust plume, including substantial overexpansion at higher altitudes
– The burn channel in the solid state rockets widens as the fuel burns.
It’s a nice and potentially enlightening visualization, but some of my colleagues have found a couple of issues with it. The Falcon Heavy seems to shut down too early for a “real time” visualization, reaching parking orbit in five minutes and change compared to eight minutes in reality. And, perhaps more important from a visualization perspective, it shows the staging events occurring with way too much fuel remaining in the tanks. Launch vehicles typically burn to less than 1% residual propellant in the first stage at separation.
Meanwhile, you’ve all played with the SpaceX docking simulator, right?
Thanks for this! Always good to read corrections. (And that simulator is really neat! I had not seen it before. Thank you for linking it.)
Is the relative timing of the SLS and STS SRB separation correct?
I suppose that, given they burn from the inside outwards, adding an extra segment won’t make it burn for any longer.
And the Dragon simulator needs a timer for speedruns. I didn’t spend hundreds of hours failing at docking in KSP for nothing.
Pretty much this. The extra segment I think actually makes it burn out a little bit faster, because you need to cast the grains with a slightly larger core to handle the extra flow and thus the propellant part isn’t quite as thick, but it’s a minor effect and they may have just ignored it.
Psssh, got it on my first try (after I figured out what the buttons did, anyway). Rocket science is easy.
It is if you have practice in Kerbal Space Program!
Never actually got around to playing it. Probably should some day, but I still have a ridiculous backlog.
IDK, my kerbel space instincts told me to close with a relative velocity of 5 m/s or so, and the program didn’t seem to like that.
Ah, docking, my least favorite part of Kerbal Space Program.
so it would look almost exactly like kerbal space program? that definitely fits.
Having to learn all these Dutch fixed expressions is the only reason why the Dutch haven’t conquered the world yet…we’re too busy
‘Vechten tegen de bierkaai’ = Fighting against the beer quay
Fighting a losing battle aka fighting a battle that was hopeless from the start. This expression refers to the fighting prowess of the men who unloaded beer kegs from ships in Amsterdam. Back then, the lower classes would organize bare-knuckled fighting competitions and the workers from the beer quay were known to be undefeatable.
‘In de pan gehakt’ = Chopped in the pan
Defeated comprehensively. Not limited to war, but can be used for sports/games.
‘Inmaken’ = preserving/pickling
Same meaning as the previous.
‘Uit een ander vaatje tappen’ = Tapping a different keg
Making a significant change.
‘Bont en blauw (slaan)’ = (Beating) variegated and blue
(Beating someone) black and blue. This may have started off as ‘blond and blauw’ (blond and blue), where blond referred to a yellowish blue in the 17th century (they referred to blond hair as yellow). However, as ‘bont en blauw’ was also used in the 17 century, it’s possible that both expressions developed in parallel, rather than one from the other.
‘in/onder de blote lucht’ = in/under the nude air
Being directly exposed to air/the elements. For example, you can sleep under the nude air if you sleep outside without a tent. You can let a wound heal in the nude air, if you don’t use a band aid.
This is a very interesting inversion, where the adjective is applied to the air, while it really applies to (part of) a person or thing that is nude, not the air.
I never heard most of these! I never learned Dutch past some cursory phrases but loved learning expressions like this. My husband and I will still toss a few Dutch phrases around, and my daughter hears “Wij zijn niet van suiker” all the time.
The general term for this is a transferred epithet.
Will virtual meetups stay around once large gatherings are permitted again? It would be fantastic if this became a feature of the SSC community.
I am the fellow organizing these.
I am not sure how long I will continue. They are taking up some of my mental bandwidth, time I should probably spend becoming a less-terrible developer, but on the other hand I have met a lot of cool people and had interesting conversations. The type of people who are pretty rare on the island where I live.
Due to me not living near any rationalist hubs, I will still have incentive to organize these things after the plague ends.
After Steve Hsu’s talk on the June 7th, I do plan to move to having a guest speaker only every second or third meetup. Which should lower the amount of time I need to put into this.
David Friedman is also setting up a rival virtual meetup, though I don’t know if that will continue after in-person meetups become possible.
I plan to try doing a weekly virtual meetup, Saturday at noon Pacific time, for the moment on Mozilla Hubs at: hub.link/q7PLxgT.
Unlike the ones Ghenlezo does, there won’t be a speaker, just conversation/socializing. So the only cost to me is my time attending, and I expect that cost to be negative.
I will send a short FAQ email for Zoom/Online Town to my mailing list on Thursday. I’ll include a link to your meeting then. Is there a blog post I should point them to?
I advice to you also is to setup a Google Forms survey to collect emails to send iCal invites to.It really does increase attendance a lot. People often simply forget about the meetup otherwise. Just make sure you hide emails when sending out iCal links so you don’t share people’s emails without their permission.
If you do end up doing that, email me the link at ghenlezo1@gmail.com and I’ll include it in my Thursday email.
The blog post is here.
And my meetup site is here. The version I gave earlier works when I past it into my browser but doesn’t work as a link.
I’ve never done a Google Forms Survey so will have to figure out how to do it.