Vraxx

I don't personally, it conflates boomers with capitalists, and there are plenty of boomers who aren't a part of the capitalist class by any stretch of the imagination. Just because some of them benefited from it, doesn't mean they had any part in its construction, execution, or intention.

This story just obfuscates the fact that this tension between capital and labor existed long before this generation and pretends like the entire generation was in on it, when it was really just the boomer capitalist class, not all boomers.

But that might also price out plenty of much better uses for helium as well if they are less funded than those with recreational demand. A market is not always a good way to allocate resources, especially in cases like this where the use cases are so wildly different in utility

doesn't seem nearly as malicious. Part of the problem with regulation is constant cuts and never expansion in budget despite the workload usually being expanded, it's very easy to believe that a poor job being done in this situation is just the only way they could get it to still work given the constraints. Actively cutting corners to try to beat competition is much more of a deliberate decision that bears more responsibility.

I feel as though that ire ought to be directed at the companies who knowingly walk in the gray areas to make profits where simpler laws might suffice for common sense. It's the same arms race that plays out in many other instances, if abuses didn't happen then we wouldn't need to codify into the law that those things are indeed abuses.

With every round of this game we play, it gets harder for smaller businesses to step around the collateral damage, but it's not as though the right answer is to give up on worker protections. The worst part of it all in my opinion is that after a gray area is ruled on after years of extracting profits, there's literally no consequences for a business forcing that gray area to get codified into law. Of course these vague in-between areas will be exploited and eventually refined into more and more meticulous law, there's a bounty on every one of these areas. The system we have will trend towards this unless we give up on worker protections (obviously not good) or reorganize this system so the winning move isn't to force more legislation

it seems you're not considering the effects that the climate crisis is expected to have on the conditions that our food production infrastructure is based upon. Water/soil/temperature are all pretty big components of this process that will (and already are to some extent) impact our ability to grow food.

not quite. OP described how the world "is" (according to their particular worldview, which is subject to their biases as everyone's worldview is) and then prescribing what one ought to do in the world. The person responding is cautioning readers to consider what fitting in really means if the thing you're fitting into is profoundly malformed.

Also, that comparison is made specifically because companies have no morality and so if we want them to behave in any sort of way approximating our morals, they must be regulated to do so. Those comments are advocating a change in the way companies are treated in order to get them to behave in a more expected manner.

part of this is because of an ongoing disinformation campaign by the companies and individuals who benefit the most from not addressing the climate crisis. People aren't willing to pay $100 more a year to stop climate change because from all the information they've been fed, it's not a big deal. There's very good reason to believe that if people understood the current and future effects better there would be a much more drastic response.

Just look at similar failures in the past where corporate interest spread disinformation to continue making money (cigarettes, lead in gasoline, health insurance companies today, sugar industry, etc.). When people learn the actual facts the prevailing opinion tends to change pretty heavily. Sure suppliers must cater to demand, but that ignores the fact that often suppliers play a large role in cultivating that demand regardless of the moral value of that demand.

The US supports plenty of undemocratic regimes and has toppled democratic ones. US global policy rewards subservience to the US economy more than anything (which I'd hardly call "free" trade).

Why does any percentage need to be withheld?

This is true and explains some of it, but it doesn't change the fact that currently wanting to live in a desirable area and wanting to live in an area because of a job are conflated with no options that could effectively separate or distinguish between the two sources of demand. It's not like everybody would get up and leave the Bay Area, but it would allow those who only want the job to leave the market for housing in the Bay Area and lowering demand overall. At worst, the drop in demand would be supplanted with people who wouldn't move to the Bay Area at the current price (and thus the price wouldn't see much of a drop), but at least you wouldn't be crowded out by people who would leave the Bay Area given the choice.

In the interest of being fair and balanced, I often account for the imbalance of power, or else we wouldn't be seeing any conflict at all. Often the threat of violence is enough to coerce, and that doesn't get coverage. So when there is violent protests, I'm going to give more lenience to the group with far less power and force.

I agree with KozmoNau7 here, so many notions of constructing some system that will somehow weed out the "bad" ideas seems misguided in my opinion. The reason is that these systems necessarily treat all ideas as equal valid inputs by requiring anything be allowed. This is done when we have bountiful evidence to the contrary, evidence that fascism and racism lead to horrendous consequences if left to spread through disingenuous tactics and deception.

In fact, we humans already form a decent system for weeding out bad ideas/opinions, we just don't listen to our own past experiences on the matter. We found out that fascism is putrid and yet now we try to come up with a new system that will weed it out instead of just chucking it into the garbage bin and moving on.

It's not paternalistic or a dismal view of humanity or that "humanity cannot be trusted with such a dangerous idea", it's because the people advocating for it constantly lie about it and intentionally trick/indoctrinate others into following. Under the right circumstances of me growing up, I fully believe someone could have deceived me into believing it, so I don't think I'm better than anybody who got sucked in. We can trust in democracy as long as we take proper precaution against things that prey on the freedom of expression and association in order to remove those rights from others.

Put another way, what real benefit is there to "freedom of speech, except for advocating fascism" as opposed to "freedom of speech, no exceptions"? The US already doesn't have pure unrestricted free speech because there are exceptions made for outlier situations where free speech is not protected in efforts to secure the safety of others. That hasn't led to total collapse or censorship.

I agree that it's important to have lawyers defend people accused of horrible things because they could be innocent of those charges. The thing I think I disagree on is that when it is a single lawyer or a group of lawyers constantly defending a group of connected (through power and money) people, it tends to become a lot less clear that they're doing the moral duty of defending all accused instead of defending the accused that will line their pockets the most. The problem here is the one observed in the justice system as a whole, which is that routinely people with less money are disadvantaged in the system due to the lack of money to "convince" these lawyers that shield their actions behind the high-minded moral of defending all accused individuals.

In theory: All accused get representation regardless of accusation In practice: Only the rich who are accused of vile things get a proper defense.

Definitely this needs to be pointed out more. My wife used to get upset if I suggested something might be a placebo because she thought I was telling her that she was fabricating the observed effects on her.

I think the placebo effect still working even if the person is told it is a placebo is a factor of whether or not you consider placebo to be "bad" or "ineffective". To me it just suggests a difference in the actual mechanism of how the placebo is effective. I'm curious to know if there are ways to increase the effectiveness of placebo by having a strong/pleasant smell or taste associated with it or some other sensory effect that is immediately noticeable.

I think that's just confirmation bias working in tandem with the amnesia effect described, but certainly it is a valid point. To me, the hardest part about this problem is that trust tends to be stored (at least in my brain) as a binary yes or no, though possibly with a fuzzy border and some room in the middle. It's tough for me to read something and internally modify my trust of the source by a proportional amount for getting things "right" that I "know" when even what I know is uncertain because I could be wrong.

The end effect is that I tend to double check just about any source, but I still have a handful of sources that I have strong reason to believe their motives are compromised on various topics where I expect their motive to conflict with the motive to tell the truth. It's still not great though because sources rarely move up in this system and frequently move down, which leads in a general inability to find information considered trustworthy. This works fine on things where there is a general consensus because I'll be able to find a varied set of sources saying the same thing, but not so great on hotly debated topics with lots of nuance. Also sometimes my brain is lazy and I don't do any of this processing because I'm an imperfect human.

I'm not sure about that. I've seen that police dogs are capable of picking up the bias of the officer(s) they accompany or are trained by due to body language signals and training bias[0]. This can be worked against as the article points out, but the fact that it is a problem has me uncertain that I support their usage without widespread training and protocol that prevents this issue (instead of limited training). Because the personnel in the airport have limited searching capability that fact reduces your probability of being searched, the dogs then increase your probability of being searched if you are a victim of bias expressed by the officer and dog.

[0]: https://www.npr.org/2017/11/20/563889510/preventing-police-b...

I think "luck" is mostly a bucket that we put all of the factors we couldn't have properly planned for into, so it seems that unconscious bias expressed by insiders in an industry/movement could easily describe a lot of what we might normally chalk up to "bad luck". My point isn't to say "that is definitely what happened", just that the notion that "luck favors men" isn't as ridiculous of a proposition as you seem to imply.

Put another way, every interaction we have with other people, no matter how brief or long lasting, contributes to that person's "luck" based on whether those interactions ended up favorable or unfavorable. If there was a present unconscious bias in a group that slanted the probability of a person's interactions with everyone else in that group (even if it just slanted it a bit) due to a personal characteristic, that would manifest itself as "bad luck" for group of people that had this characteristic who received this statistical slight.

All of your responses are blatantly telling the person you're responding to what they were thinking instead of considering that perhaps there are multiple ways to interpret things. You told padseeker that they were insinuating something when at best you could guess that they were insinuating something. If you're actually interested in discussing things instead of telling people what they believe or what their intent was, then I suggest not using this rhetorical device because it stifles understanding and conversation, not encourages it.

yeah, you're right about that, but given how difficult these things can be to actually measure in reality, I think an indirect measure is better than no measure at all (or a gut feeling). A lot of these races with heavy suppression were extremely close races, which obviously begs the question of how effective the voter suppression was and if it turned the tide (my money is on "almost certainly).

It turned out my vote was not particularly instrumental in the election I was participating in, but if just assumed that from the start I definitely wouldn't have gone out canvassing and trying to convince other people that their votes matter. If other people like me made similar decisions and didn't vote and didn't try to mobilize, would the election I participated in still have gone favorably? Maybe, but I know I sure felt a hell of a lot better doing everything I could than sitting on the couch worrying and fretting about things instead of actively trying to influence them.

Honestly I'm not super invested in whether the argument is "correct" or not, I'm invested in the actual situation that affects actual people's lives. I personally don't make my decisions on what opinions to espouse and who to try to convince of anything based on a rigid structure of "validity" of an argument. It helps and it's a decent indicator of the right way to go sometimes, but if I know something is going to have a negative effect on people's lives based on whether or not I spread the idea or opinion, I don't care if it is "valid"/"correct" or whatever, I care about the effect. It is also important to note that even if the argument is not correct, that does not mean that the conclusion is not. A fool with no notion of "proper" argumentation can make an argument espousing any conclusion (right or wrong) that comes to him, but that has no bearing on whether any of those conclusions were right or wrong (also known as the fallacy fallacy)

I have this concept I use internally a lot where I consider what I believe to be true and what I consider to be "useful", and sometimes I will choose to believe things that I am sure are false because it is more useful to me personally to believe it is true. One example of this is the concept of karma. I am don't believe there's some mystical force in the universe that will balance everything out and ensure "what goes around comes around", but it sure is useful to believe in some mystical balancing force so that I don't feel compelled to avenge every instance of me being wronged. Instead I just let it go and assume that the universe will right itself. The previous paragraph is taking this type of analysis to an external level when I decide what I will propagate with my time and energy and what I will simply read and move on.

I don't particularly care whether or not the idea is structurally sound for some framework of debate and a system of rules for determining if it is valid or not, I'm more concerned with the real implications of believing and propagating belief in the idea. You mention that it's not the same net effect because personally deciding not to vote would change the tally by 1, but the voter suppression targets a group of more than 1. Yet here you are trying to spread the idea to other people to convince them that they also should join you in evaluating this idea as correct and thus not vote. This increases that count to more than 1, and the better you are at it, it increases further. It is exactly the same net effect because humans are social creatures and ideas spread through socialization and group acceptance. People who read your post and agree with it will feel that your reasoning justifies their belief in not voting as well. In a way, whether intentional or not, you are commenting on this topic in a way that serves to disenfranchise voters through self-disenfranchisement. If that is not your intent, I would ask that you examine what the effects of your efforts are and how they align with your goals in life and reality and perhaps focus less on systems of logic that are meant to help simplify and parse arguments, not determine your every action.

and if you are a member of that group, and they paid X dollars to target that group with an attempt at disenfranchising them then we arrive at an estimated cost of $(X/population of group) to target you (among the others in the group as well). The emphasis on individual vs group only serves to distract, groups don't target individuals with disenfranchisement because it's just easier to target entire groups. They still don't want you to vote, they just use a single piece of your identity to decide that you fall into the group of people they don't want to vote. If someone is willing to pay to make sure you (among other people) don't vote, then clearly your vote is worth both the concern and the price of the group targeting you (among other people).

Vote, and preferably against the group of people that uses voter suppression as a tactic for winning an election in a democracy.

well what better way to make sure a large number of people don't vote than to let them convince themselves that voting doesn't matter.

My point is that the net effect is the same for both things, one you don't vote because your vote was suppressed and the other is you not voting because you don't think it will matter. Obviously if it's worth paying money to try to make sure than many people can't vote then it's even better if some people don't vote for some personal reason because they don't even have to pay for that or potentially get caught doing shady shit. Disenfranchising yourself serves the same coalition that seeks to dismantle the system in return for more personal power.

which if you want to go down that route I think it's important to note that many of the policies meant to protect against the specter of voter fraud in the US drastically increase the cost of voting on a segment of population that the propagating party (Republicans in this case) does not consider to be a part of their base. Sure, this could be accidental, but with the number of times it has happened in separate places with separate policies by the same party, I don't consider it particularly likely to be an accident.

The reason I bring this up is because in the current US system, I would posit that the harder it is for a person to vote, the more likely it that your vote is important given the political capital and effort expended to make sure it is hard for that person to vote. (again, this is predicated on the belief that I do not consider this phenomenon to be accidental in any way)

Not to mention with all of the recent events in the US related to voter suppression, my question to people who espouse the opinion of "my vote doesn't matter", my question is this. Then why are those in power actively seeking to undermine this ability that is "useless". If it truly was useless I doubt they'd be scared enough to act against it.

yeah, it does sound a bit like that, but when you factor in the reasons why a free market has never (and in my opinion should never) exist there starts to be a difference. Things like regulatory capture, monopolies, and exploitation of any possible resource are all systemic effects of capitalism. When capital (power) begets more capital (power), it should be no surprise that tactics that are underhanded but ultimately grant more capital (power) are the ones chose and that the system tends towards a consolidation of power in those that have more of it already. It's not saying anybody with money or power will automatically do those things, just that the system is set up to encourage that, so somebody probably will at some point.

To me, it's similar to looking at a voting system like first past the post and identifying that the system tends towards two parties as a fundamental nature of the system. Underlying motives and strategies of individuals within the system will produce this effect.

I'm not commention on the validity of the "no real communism" statement here, just the comparison of it to the "no real free market"

It seems like I did with my words, but I did not mean to. Thanks for pointing that out, I'm just as guilty of all of the behaviors I described which is part of what helps me recognize the pattern in the first place.

I'll start by saying that I agree with your assessment of the underlying issue here, I just have a slight nitpick with your comparison.

Other areas do exist that could allow people to move out of the city to a cheaper owned home in the suburbs. Personally I don't think that's a good solution though because suburbs are pretty inefficient and seem likely to exacerbate the climate problem we're running full speed into. I just wanted to point out that you can form some comparison because they are both still relatively attainable. (I might be mistaken on the real estate landscape in the UK since I'm from the US, if so just disregard this comment)

My other comment is mostly aimed at GP, but it seems that it has persisted down the comment chain, which is that from everything I've heard and read, "Higher income, lower wealth" is not an accurate assessment of what is happening when you factor in inflation. It's more of "The same/lower income, lower wealth" on average. Even still though, given the ideals of a capitalist system saying that owning capital is literally worth capital itself, lower long term wealth is most definitely a long term problem because this is a runaway feedback loop of capital concentrating in the top and the lower non capital owning members of society are slaves to capital. You might be technically earning a wage and thus not fit the technical definition of slavery, but if you have less and less freedom (defined as less freedom through lack of actual choice) because of it, I see very little difference.

No it does not make sense, but I think what you may be missing is that it is not supposed to make logical sense as a concept, it's supposed to appeal to other parts of a person's psyche such as pride and belonging. So this contradiction and confusion that you observe is completely accurate, but that doesn't deteriorate the effectiveness of "generational thinking" at what it does.

I think it's just a part of a bigger pattern that groups of humans tend to fall into where they pick arbitrary lines to divide them into groups so that they can justify condescending the other group.

There is also the other component that people like to tell narratives with history, which is easier when you can condense the actions of millions of people into a number of categories you can count on your hand. Largely speaking, I think the world is just really complex and the ways we try to simplify it and comprehend it break down in some illogical ways because they were never superbly accurate models in the first place.

It's good to know (I wasn't aware before) that this trend isn't present in all groups of humans, it gives me hope that it is able to be overcome collectively.

Yeah, that's a fair point. This gets at why I think that we should separate money and elections as much as possible. Ideally if the only people who want to run are people who believe in their solutions to public problems, then elected officials can actually argue about the problem. I don't see that happening when money helps politicians get elected and corporations have plenty of money to spend on campaigns in "exchange" for favorable legislation (it's not a direct exchange obviously since that's illegal, but it's pretty close).

My point in all of this is that the government is far from perfect, but I prefer it to corporations when profit and citizen's interests diverge (healthcare is a prime example).