Puzzlement From the Archives

From the depths of my link library. I suspect you can guess how it sold itself to me...


In any case, despite first having read it years ago, I'm still not sure what to make of it.

""I bought those shoes for a special purpose," he told me; "and I want them to be a lifelong lesson to you. There are just two grades of commodities in the world: the best -- and the others. My experience is that it pays to buy the best; and what applies to things applies equally to men."

I performed this exact experiment with jeans, except the cost spread was even greater, and found the opposite result. In this case, there's the best, and one slightly coarser which doesn't hold the dye as well. Indeed if I wanted to be uncharitable, the more expensive pair developed minor holes first. My conclusion is that it is with products as with salaries; there is a minimum level necessary for satisfaction, and anything after that is just perks.

But that's not the point of the article, is it? I'm being autistic. In this case, on purpose, to contrast sharply between how I can think about it and what it is trying to say.


Aside from wishing to understand it better, I'll note that it has these little wildly-useful nuggets, put in terms of personal experience, that newer writers seem incapable of producing. (Can I? Probably not. [But at least I know to copy his.] How would I even tell whether I can or not?)

"I was flattered by his interest, so I thought it over. That is, I indulged in what young men frequently mistake for thought. In imagination, I saw my name over the door and myself in a fine glass office looking out and watching clerks taking in money."

With this, I can check to make sure I don't. Further, I now realize it exists and it will occur to me to look for it in others. Finally, were I to try writing fiction, I can create a more believable and interesting character.

Democracy Has Obviously Failed

In Carlyle's time, you had to be really clever to successfully predict that democracy wouldn't work. Some were that clever, but I digress.

By 2007, you still had to be pretty smart, but there were other options. Could have read old books with these smarty-pants in them, or read them by proxy through Moldbug. I suspect direct experience managing a democratically-run organization would also have sufficed; come to think, indeed Foseti is my go-to man for detailed accounts of how it actually runs.

Now, however, democracy has completely, utterly failed in the most obvious ways possible. The sophistry is down, and the emperor's nakedness is shining free for anyone who cares to look.




Case 1: Belgium.

No successful elections or voting for more than a year, and it made no difference. If you could piss out the water fast enough, you could drink enough homeopathic medicine to accumulate a chemically relevant dose. Voting, however, basically doesn't do anything even when you add up every vote.

This is exactly the experiment I designed to test democracy. Elect nobody one cycle and see what happens, to find out how much the voting matters. It's kind of embarrassing how long it took me to recognize that Belgium had run my experiment. Thanks Belgians! You guys are swell.




Case 2: Tea Party. (Via a Kalim Kassan retweet.)

I know whence my psychology came to reject democracy. Were it in my power, I would end all state-funded education tomorrow, and damn the resulting chaos, because it would be worth it. This will almost certainly never happen, regardless of my actions, and even if it does, it will still be regardless of my actions. (E.g. Greece's formal education may end soon, but it won't be because anyone wanted it to happen, even though I'm sure some Grecians do.)

The standard demotist response is that I'm not a majority.

The Tea Party was a majority. They in fact elected people to parliament and everything. The Tea Party did everything you're supposed to do, they crossed the ts and such.

It did nothing. Their candidates vote like regular republicans.

Ha ha, oops.

If the Tea Party candidates have managed to enact anything the Tea Partiers wanted enacted, I guarantee it will be rolled back or circumvented within five years.




Of course, for exactly the same reasons that causes democracy to not-work, the only people who've noticed that democracy has shat itself are reactionaries and fellow travellers, to which it is about as surprising as sunset, and warrants as much comment. (At any rate, this is my excuse for not noticing the Belgium experiment right away.) Aside from that, nobody cares to look. The emperor can prance about naked as much as he likes. He's the fucking emperor.

Illegal Immigration vs. Mugging

I read that a Caplan piece was apparently particularly bad. To see what they were talking about, I read the piece.

One logical implication later, I suspected an almost-simple search and replace would be revealing.

Of note, I am mildly in favour of immigration in general. I tend to find anti-immigration arguments have gaping holes in them. None of this matters because both stances are anti-property. Who lets who live where is none of my business unless I happen to own the 'where,' in which case it is none of yours. Respect property rights and the problem vanishes, no solution necessary.




Under the Jim Crow laws, discrimination was not merely legal. It was mandatory. It was illegal for blacks to live, work, and shop in certain places. Virtually everyone today regards this as an enormous injustice. So do I. But I question the claim that modern American policy is vastly morally superior. The American government continues to mandate discrimination against an unpopular minority: muggers. And this mandatory discrimination is far harsher than anything under Jim Crow.

Most obviously:

1. Under Jim Crow, there were many places in America where blacks were not legally allowed to live. Under current immigration laws, there is nowhere in America, outside of prisons, where muggers are legally allowed to live.

2. Under Jim Crow, there were many jobs in America that blacks were not legally allowed to perform. Under current mugging laws, there are almost no jobs in America that muggers are legally allowed to perform, as they're not allowed off the prison grounds.

Admittedly, mugging restrictions are not worse than Jim Crow in every possible way. Most notably:

1. Fugitive muggers face fewer restrictions on travel. De facto, though not de jure, muggers are free to use any form of transportation that doesn't require identification; they can ride trains but not planes. Under the Jim Crow laws, blacks were unable to use many forms of transportation either de jure or de facto.

2. The children of muggers face fewer restrictions on attending public school.

3. The Tuskegee Institute estimated that 3,446 blacks were lynched between 1882 and 1968 - about 40 per year. The FBI reported 681(?) hate crimes against muggers in 2010, but only one of these was a murder. Lest we feel too superior, note that according to conservative estimates, several hundred(?) muggers die due to self-defence every year.

The Jim Crow laws were awful. Still, if you had to suffer under Jim Crow or modern mugging laws, Jim Crow seems like the lesser evil.

You could object that our moral obligations to citizens are far higher than our moral obligations to muggers. But that's hardly satisfactory. After all, the essence of the segregationist position was the American blacks were not fully-fledged American citizens. Imagine that instead of abolishing Jim Crow laws, the American public had resolved its cognitive dissonance by simultaneously (a) stripping blacks of their citizenship, and (b) declaring that "All citizens are entitled to equal treatment." Would that have made the Jim Crow laws any less reprehensible?

Another possibility: You could say that the treatment muggers receive is an appropriate punishment for their law-breaking. This position would be plausible if mugging were easy. But for the typical low-skilled mugger, legal confiscation is virtually impossible. The U.S. makes it illegal for most muggers to live and work here no matter what they do. So how does the treatment they receive in any way fit their "crime"?

But perhaps I'm overlooking some crucial distinction. So tell me: What is the moral difference between Jim Crow and mugging restrictions?




Does this count as parody? I suspect I don't much care, actually. The facts are, replacing 'illegal immigrant' with 'illegal taker-of-stuff' requires exactly no change in Caplan's argument; every single thing he claims about infiltrators is exactly as true of muggers. If it works for the first, it works for the latter. If it works as parody too, well, that's nice.
I care a little bit, though. If it is bad parody, I'd like to learn why so if I do want parody in the future, I can create better parody. Maybe I should have highlighted 'mugger?'

Reminder that Government Kills People

If you put up barriers to becoming a doctor, you get fewer doctors. The doctors you do get become more expensive, as supply decreases.

How many barriers does the West put up in front of prospective doctors?

In Somalia, a physical costs about 50c. Assuming their abject poverty numbers aren't massaged to within an inch of their lives, that means the poorest Somalian spends half a day's wage on a physical.

In America, a physical costs about $130, corresponding to a daily wage of $260 or about $33/hour for an 8-hour day.

Of course anyone actually earning more than $30 an hour just about doesn't care. It is only the poor who can't afford it. It is the poor who die because the doctor that could have helped them couldn't be bothered to get a license. (Presumably went into finance instead.)

Canadians would claim this is why they have the government pay for it. Fantasy. Obviously the richer neighbourhoods have better doctors. If nothing else, hospitals are partly funded by property taxes. Add in public choice, and I start to wonder if Lovecraft really wrote fiction. Orwell clearly didn't. Reduce supply AND lower wages? Hey guys, I wonder why Canada has issues getting enough doctors. I guess they must hate poor people.

Licensing: kills people. Residency: kills people. College requirement for med school: kills people. Almost every health regulation: kills people.

Of course, of course it is impossible that legislators would ever be considered complicit in murder. They can pretty much strangle any amount of people with regulations; you'd hit the 'society collapses' ceiling before you hit the credibility ceiling.

Have a nice day.

Facebook Earnings, Employees Proxy for Expenses

I sometimes read Vox. I did some fact-checking, figured I might as well share it.
Also, disagreement. Solving it is important. So, let's. For example, any following disagreement probably cannot be resolved - yet. The necessary methods don't - yet - exist.



$4 sounds like not much.

Wikipedia lists earnings numbers.

Facebook earns 1.16 million dollars per employee.
Coca-cola earns 0.318 million dollars per employee.

La Wik does not list operating costs, but Coke is a physical product, plus it needs things like shipping; Facebook requires hard drives and bandwidth.

Hey, let's try Wal-Mart too.

Wal-Mart makes 0.203 million dollars per employee.



What else is wrong with the post? Nobody (almost) there has apparently heard how Facebook makes its money. Though they did get the users-as-livestock part right. (Heh, 'users.')

Wish I still had the link to the person who pointed this out to me. Facebook's customers are advertisers, to whom it sells nominally private information. Facebook takes the model of selling phone number lists to telemarketers, and generalizes it to everything its 'users' care to offer. The ads per se are kind of a side-show. This is why it has consistent privacy scandals - circumventing privacy norms maximizes yield. Facebook's actual users are advertisers, not individuals.

I must also conclude that it provides something that its livestock values. They keep coming back.
As a non-'user' I cannot help but suspect it is some form of anti-value, that 'users' keep coming back to avoid a negative rather than to achieve a positive. Nevertheless, Facebook provides. More optimistically, perhaps Facebook does allow otherwise impossible opportunities, opportunities which scale with user penetration, and I simply don't notice them because they're not things I personally care to achieve.



I agree that the IPO significantly increases the odds that Facebook will stop providing feed to its cattle. But if I disagreed, would it matter?

CRU and ICR Are the Same

Learn about disagreement firsthand, by engaging directly with the issue.
I accept my ignorance about disagreement. Do I know what it is? How it works? I don't know if I know or not. Do I even know how to find out? The only thing I know for sure is that if I don't try anything I won't learn anything.



I found a good objective test. Reading the Climategate emails, how much can you learn about climate? I haven't personally perused them, but it is perfectly clear that you can learn a great deal about Michael Mann's agenda. Similarly, I can guarantee that a leak of ICR emails would not help you learn much about biology, although you can probably get a substantial amount of theology.

The agenda at the ICR is transparent. The agenda is Biblical. What has apparently escaped the epistemologists in the crowd is that the agenda at the CRU is equally transparent. The agenda is political.



I wonder what one could learn from a leak of my email?

More on Gullibility

If your skill set is lying and you want power, the obvious strategy is to puff up the status of the gullible. (Previously. Subsequently.)

When a gull is responsible for their decisions, they will be rapidly disempowered. A fool and his money, etc. Their bad stewardship is rewarded with the destruction of the managed objects.

Every time a vote is mismanaged, power is redistributed from the prudent to the gullible. The resources the gull controls still get destroyed, but since votes are inalienable and equal, the destroyed resources are refreshed by leeching off the prudent. At least, until they're all destroyed, ref. Greece.



The liar must be amputated from the gull. There's only two ways to do this, either release the gull to fall into their self-inflicted pit, or else lie better than the professional liar.

The latter is remarkably feasible, because lying in service of truth is slightly easier. Some of the less dull gulls check the sources, and they'll find they were lead to believe true things.

The former doesn't involve lying for virtue, but it does mean making gulls irrelevant, and most likely dirt poor. It violates chivalrous principles in detail, as it amounts to attacking the weak, but consider the alternatives.



The other obvious strategy is to create and multiply more gulls.



The modern world overflows with frighteningly gullible gulls, who happen to be very hard-working. (Have you ever tested how gullible they are? I did.) The modern world doles out the highest-status positions according to liar championships.
Just a coincidence, I'm sure.

Juxtaposition

I'd rather do the Twitter juxtapositions on Twitter, but I don't think I can, and all suggestions are appreciated.
More volunteers to investigate disagreement also desired.


Economists' predictions record.

Vs,

All Economists Agree On.
Commentary at the places I got it from, Aretae and Blunt Object.

My bet is you agree with both, which makes for an interesting puzzle.
I'd prefer to keep it balanced, but this is recent and possibly relevant.

""It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" ~ Upton Sinclair"




Nydracu:
"The main problem with the right these days is that it tries too hard to flip everyone else off and just ends up looking dumb."

Therefore, me:
"I suppose since I'm acknowledging the existing of Tea Partiers, I should flip off OWS too. Pathetic me-too copy of something that sucked."




Also a non-dilemma, mainly interesting due to where these articles were published.

1. "People Aren't Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say"

2. "Politico says it, out loud: voters are stupid people: http://politi.co/zFoGZa"

3. "The obvious starts to creep into the mainstream... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/opinion/the-age-of-innocence.html"