sprucevoid

> So why now?

From my reading of degrowth works the answer is: because now the global resource use induced by growth have accumulated enourmous negative externality costs, costs that will nedlessly increase further unless counteracted by degrowth policy. Food shortages, deadly heatwaves, property destruction. Direct dire costs to human health and welfare and rippling secondary effects. For example how would a scenario with hundreds of millions of climate refugees play out on top of current global political tensions?

I see the degrowth view not as "we should never ever have growth again" but rather the current modes of growth have very tangible imminent (on an astronomical timescale) negative effects that we must deal with right now. If we fail to step up to the current challenge of provisioning health and welfare for beings on this planet how likely are we to manage an all universe encompassing expansion without it ending in catastrophe on the largest scale? You could see the climate change challenge, and the degrowth plan to tackle it, as a necessary step to get our house in order, before expanding out.

Us attempting to expand into and shaping the universe is quite a task - so much could go right or wrong. I think Toby Ord's The Precipice[0] has a very useful framework for thinking about such risks.

[0] https://theprecipice.com/

> You don’t have a fundamental right to moderate my growth, against my wishes — but I do have a fundamental right to seek growth.

No, neither is a fundamental right. Because both growth and degrowth as a national policy (or global international policy) has immense consequences on the opportunities and outcomes in peoples lives. Both stifle and regiment the lives and actions of people in a myriad of ways (climate change is a massive externality for everyone!), so anti-stifling arguments have no traction. The only arguments that can do real work will have to concern policy consequences: which policy yields better life outcomes in terms of health, wellbeing, longevity and so on.

Those preferences are greatly shaped by inequality and status consumption. Change the institutional backdrop (which degrowth policy aims to do) and the preferences change. Robert Frank's work is great on much luxury consumption is contagious despite wildly inefficient because it is a relative status game. This Q & A is an intro https://behavioralscientist.org/putting-peer-pressure-to-wor...

That hotkey only opens the graphical overlay to take a screenshot. So not silent and additional steps required.

That hotkey only opens the graphical overlay to take a screenshot. So not silent and additional steps required.

I wish Firefox would natively let us silently take full page screenshots from a keyboard shortcut. It is (currently) a three click operation, but they seem to change the steps and graphics for it every year or so.

> In practice, progressive tax curves and incentive programs let politicians meddle.

Is there cross-country comparative empirical evidence for that? My hunch is that very obscure tax curves (trapezoids and what not with layers of ad hoc edge cases) are vulnerable to meddling. But I doubt there's a general meddle-ability difference between simple forms of progressivity vs flat.

Yes to per-person guaranteed income. No to flat income (or wealth) tax (progressivity is better so no good reason to switch to something worse). Revenue neutrality: only if, and to the extent, it makes it makes the policy package easier to pass.

> I do wonder if this has an effect of encouraging the segments of society that don't plan so well

From the POV of climate destruction the segments that don't plan so well, or to put it more bluntly, who plan and act so badly that they're strongly disproportionately responsible for the problem are those that the progressive consumption tax (and general wealth taxation) adresses: the wealthiest.

US style welfare provisions have three flaws at the same time. It is (1) not generous enough to escape the costly everyday scarcity tax* (2) spiked with time-wasting conditions and bureaucratic procedures and (3) politically and socially stigmatized. The US should transition to the northern european welfare state model which works better in all those three regards.

* https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sendhil/files/scientificam...

Robert Frank's progressive consumption tax proposal, https://archive.ph/AXDkQ

Another alternative is flat consumption taxes on climate damaging products combined with general wealth taxation and cash redistribution to lower the impact on low income/wealth households.

Not only, but single biggest. find won't do, but I'd be happy if either ANGRYsearch or FSearch one day reached feature parity with Everything.

Both speed and GUI matters (to me). ANGRYsearch and FSearch come closest on Linux, but they're still far off and the upcoming Everything 1.5 (in alpha) widens the gap.

Everything[0], instant NTFS file search on Windows. The thing keeping me from using Linux on my main home PC.

[0] https://www.voidtools.com/

To me that page is very confusing. Feels like I'm reading a single person's private brainstorm notes rather than a documentation.

Airtable makes most money from pro/business use cases and that's what alternatives mentioned here compete for.

But consider personal/family use: Recipe collections, inventories, todo, personal project planning and tracking, ... There competitors won't need more powerful scripting/customizability, just basic feature parity plus cutting the dismal ~6 seconds startup time of Airtable's Android and Windows apps. "Same but faster" wins me over.

Excellent. I hoped for a similar VS Code extension but found none. There's only Banner comments[0] to ease converting a string to large ASCII letters inline. [0]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=heyimfuz...

Nice. Though it makes me think it would be nice to have this as a built in code editor minimap feature without the multi line ASCII code. The editor would parse special tags in comments and overlay the minimap with the tag text in big letters.

Your "obvious magnitude difference between the two" is an interpersonal wellbeing comparison claim, the thing you earlier thought impossible. Progress.

"A more interesting question from the utilitarian perspective is ..."

In general the intervention priority in actual health care is guided by utilitarian inspired health economics calculations. Because even if we would want to treat all migraines fully and prevent all premature death there are limits to time, labor and resources. Consult any health economics textbook for an overview, for example "Cost-Effectiveness Analysis in Health: A Practical Approach, 3rd Edition". Can you reply with specific critique of where such established methods run afoul and what alternative you suggest that we replace them with in day to day health care priority work? Focus on the sections about QALYs and, since your hypothetical involved a comparison with death, look especially at the value estimation method called "standard gamble" https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...

I have already given simple examples of interpersonal wellbeing comparisons of a type that are both common-sense and in fact widely put to practical use in health care and risk migitation in all countries in the world. If you want to dispute that then do present evidence, saying "no" is not enough.

Here is a simple test: imagine you can press either button A or button B. If you press A 10000 people are spared the severest migraines. If you press B one person is spared a mild scratch. Which should you morally do and why? My answer is: you should do A and the reason why should do A is because we can compare the outcomes in terms of wellbeing and outcome A is comparatively much better than outcome B. What is your answer and why? Anyone denying that interpersonal wellbeing comparisons are possible or that we can in any way aggregate wellbeing ("there is no such thing as general utility") seems forced to say that there is no way to discern a moral difference between choice A and B. Is that really what you believe? If yes how do you put that into practice with regard to choices in everyday life?

As for backfilling, it seems to me that some people express aversion to utilitarianism, and portray it as very different from what it really is, as a way to shy away from taking moral responsibility for the consequences of what they do and omit to do. In fact utilitarianism is in the world as it is making similar demands as several other ethical theories https://twitter.com/ben_j_todd/status/1463867302089302019

You conflate the question of interpersonal wellbeing comparison with both adjacent and orthogonal issues I have said nothing about (level of precision, mathematical modeling, deontic criteria, ...). What I describe is practiced daily in health care priority work and risk mitigation in e.g. macro level infrastructure planning. Meanwhile the utilitarians I know are busy working to end world poverty, eradicate malaria, minimize global pandemic risk, improve health access and end factory farming. The evidence on the severest forms of migraines do not support a huge experiential variation in the people afflicted - they max out suffering for virtually everyone. https://www.preventsuffering.org/cluster-headaches/

No, the OP claim "we do not assign any moral value to decreasing the well-being of those who are better off" is different from your claim "0 weight on those who are "better off", leaving all the weight for those with the lowest utility".

The former is a way, albeit too compressed by OP, to distinguish prioritarianism from the kind of egalitarian view where interpersonal relative differences affects the value of increasing/decreasing one individual's well-being, which makes egalitarianism the target of the so called levelling down critique. See Parfit's article that OP discusses for more on that distinction and critique.

Prioritarianism does not give 0 weight or value on increasing the well-being of those who are already better off - on the contrary a distinctive feature of prioritarianism is that increasing someone's well-being always has some value. It is only how much value that varies with the absolute level the increase starts from. In jargon the most prominent version of the prioritarian social welfare function is continuous, strictly increasing and strictly concave. In contrast a leximin SWF (sometimes called "rawlsian" because of some points of similarity with the features of one component, the difference principle, in Rawls systematic theory of justice) gives absolute lexical priority to increasing the worst-off positions well-being.

All this said, perhaps there is a way to relax or modify leximin SWF so as to make it functionally equivalent to a prioritarian SWF, but I'm not familiar with anyone doing so (happy to learn if you have a reference though!) and, regardless, to call that rawlsian would be unfair to Rawls since he definitely did not propose or argue for such a view in any of his texts on political philosophy and the view he did argue for is definitely incompatible with it.

The suffering is only subjective in the sense that a particular migraine is generated in a particular brain where only one person, me the subject, has direct experience access to it. But migrains and brains are biological processes in a physical world. My brain is't magically different from other brains so I can reason to the conclusion that a maximally severe migraine in another person's brain is equally awful and bad. Both my brain and theirs are part of the world and the states of our brains partly constitutes how good or bad the world is at a particular time. A world with two severe migraines is twice as bad as a world with only one.

A general utility claim: One person suffering from the severest form of migraine is bad. Two persons suffering from the severest form of migraine is twice as bad. Here's another: one person suffering from the severest form of migraine is worse than one person experiencing a mild itch.

> The "priority view" in this article is known as the "Kalai egalitarian bargaining solution" in economics and game theory, or the "Rawlsian" social welfare function

No, that is a common misunderstanding, especially understandable here since some of OP's formulations also conflate the two. If you're an econ person a good text that puts the prioritarian view in context is Matthew Adler's 2020 Measuring Social Welfare: An Introduction. I'd also recommend that book to anyone here who claimed e.g. "we can't compare across persons!" but who is open to reading a case against that claim.

I suspect MeteorMarc meant 'euthanasia' in the philosophy sense of a death that is (a1) rationally planned over a period of time and (b1) in the dying persons overall interest. Which can be contrasted with 'suicide' in a sense commonly used in suicide prevention care and research, where the act (a2) often results from temporary cognitive or emotional instability and (b2) is seldom in the dying persons overall interest. You on the other hand perhaps meant to distinguish between the dying person (a) getting assistance vs in dying (b) acting alone. A third termological option is 'assisted dying'. A big complication is that 'euthanasia' comes with quite different historical baggage in different countries.

Bonus: Useful as a visual dictionary for us non-native english speakers.