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It's really damn politically inconvenient that the Iraq War worked. At least Afghanistan failed miserably, I guess, so Bush was not overall vindicated.

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This is the only answer that seems completely indefensible. He's been cited by major government officials; so has Scott Alexander. That doesn't mean he succeeded, but it definitely means he mattered.

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I don't think this flaw is all that plausible. We have things kind of like this. Date rape drugs. MDMA. People who get really horny on alcohol or weed or (I think) cocaine. But none of them seems like they could get close to forming the same feelings as long-term attachment even if you stayed high 24/7. Even if you combined all the love-promoting effects of each of them without the side effects.

It would be a really bizarre biomedical phenomenon if there was something that worked better than that, targeted to generate not just the initial effects of infatuation but enough of the complex follow-on effects for it to be recognizably the same kind of thing as genuine love. Even if it had crippling side effects, which would still invalidate most of the love potion story tropes, I just don't buy it.

Love potions aren't a real thing, but it's kind of interesting that it's only really the variance of evolution that they aren't. You could definitely have a species that discovers, early in their history, that a certain sort of plant, when consumed, causes a hormonal cascade that causes someone to fall in love. Or maybe more likely, a chemical would be discovered that could be easily synthesized to cause the same kind of reaction.

It's the kind of maladaptive thing that evolution just cannot work against, because it's a flaw that doesn't become apparent until later.

So I'm glad that's a flaw we don't have, I guess.

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When a population is truly hated, they face social, legal, and economic consequences for it.

Observe: the tax code. Any of the dozens of Hollywood blockbusters where shady CEOs and billionaires are the mastermind villain.

Those consequences are all around you.

This is a semi spinoff of this post, but really its own thought.

When a job pays less than a living wage, it generally attracts one of two types of employees:

Desperate people (usually poor and/or otherwise marginalized or with barriers to employment), who will take any job, no matter how bad, because they need the money, or

Independently wealthy people (usually well-off retirees, students being supported by their families, or women with well-off husbands*), who don't care about the pay scale because they don't need the money anyway.**

And sometimes, organizations will intentionally keep a job low-paying or non-paying with the deliberate intent of narrowing their pool to that second category.

People sometimes bring this up when discussing the salaries of elected officials -- yes, most politicians are paid more than most "regular people," but they're not paid enough to sustain the expensive lifestyle politicians have to maintain, and that's on purpose. It's not an oversight, and it's not primarily about cost-cutting. It's a deliberate barrier to ensure that only rich people can run for office.

The same is true, albeit to less severe effect, of unpaid internships -- the benefit of "hiring" an unpaid intern isn't (just) that you don't have to pay them; it's also that you can ensure that all your workers are rich, or at least middle-class.

When nonprofits brag about how little of their budget goes to "overhead" and "salaries", as if those terms were synonymous with "waste," what they're really saying is "All our employees are financially comfortable enough that they don't worry about being underpaid. Our staff has no socioeconomic diversity, and probably very little ethnic or cultural diversity." ***

This isn't a secret. I'm not blowing anything wide open here. People very openly admit that they think underpaid workers are better, because they're "not in it for the money." This is frequently cited as a reason, for example, that private school teachers are "better" than public school teachers -- they're paid less, so they're not "in it for the money," so they must be working out of the goodness of their hearts. I keep seeing these cursed ads for a pet-sitting service where the petsitters aren't paid, which is a selling point, because they're "not in it for the money."

"In it for the money" is the worst thing a worker could be, of course. Heaven forbid they be so greedy and entitled and selfish as to expect their full-time labor to enable them to pay for basic living expenses. I get this all the time as a public library worker, when I point out how underfunded and underpaid we are. "But... you're not doing it for the money, right?" And I'm supposed to laugh and say "No, no, I'd do it for free, of course!"

Except, see, I have these pesky little human needs, like food. And I can't get a cart full of groceries and explain to the cashier that I don't have any money, but I have just so much job satisfaction!

And it's gendered, of course it's gendered. The subtext of "But you're not doing it for the money, of course" is "But how much pin money do you really need, little lady? Doesn't your husband give you a proper allowance?"

Conceptually, it's just an extension of the upper-class cultural norm that "polite" (rich) people "don't talk about money" (because if you have to think about how much money you have or how much you need, you're insufficiently rich).

*Gendered language very much intentional.

**Disabled people are more likely to be in the first category (most disabled people are poor, and being disabled is expensive), but are usually talked about as if they're in the second category. We're told that disabled people sorting clothing for $1.03 an hour are "So happy to be here" and "Just want to be included," and it's not like they need the money, since, as we all know, disability benefits are ample and generous [heavy sarcasm].

***Unless, of course, they're a nonprofit whose "mission" involves "job placement," in which case what they're saying is "We exploit the poor and desperate people we're purporting to help." Either way, "We pay our employees like crap" is nothing to brag about.

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It... ultimately basically worked? So it's kind of hard to call a catastrophe.

They have a democracy. It's kind of dysfunctional but better than most of the Middle East. We're not propping them up and unlike Afghanistan they didn't collapse immediately.

It was under false pretenses and incredibly expensive and unethical and does not, really, seem like it was, in expectation, predictable that it would work. I would have expected, even five years in, that the best attainable state was partition into three largely mono-cultural states each of which was stable, and with a mutual defense pact including against each other and a NAFTA-like trade agreement. I think I did expect that, but I was, what, 18?, and I don't totally remember.

But in the end, there is a stable democracy where there was a nasty autocracy, and it doesn't seem unusually corrupt nor a puppet of anyone else; not even, really, us. 'Regime change'... worked.

I missed most of the Iraq war due to being a baby, but every time I read about it I start wondering why we aren’t all talking about it all of the time

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Handful of Trail Mix is your one stop solution to not passing out at 4pm. surely you cannot go wrong with Handful of Trail Mix when cooking or even using the microwave is unthinkable. handful of trail mix contains protein, carbohydrates, salt, fiber, sugar, and fat for all possible situations and challenges. handful of trail mix always tastes "okay". you are hiking your own Appalachian trail every day forgetting stuff in the other room eighty times before you can switch tasks why not try Handful of Trail Mix today and avoid breaking down your own muscle tissue for energy for another few hours

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Have you forgotten Brendan Eich already, Grey?

is anyone doing actual free speech absolutism not as legal technicality but personal disposition without being ultra reactionary / right wing ?

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We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

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and power was given unto me, as soon as possible so as to produce repeatable sequences of "random" numbers

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No medical evidence to support Lucy Letby’s conviction, expert panel says

Lucy Letby is the victim of “one of the major injustices of modern times”, it has been claimed, after an international panel of experts found no evidence she had murdered or harmed any of the babies she was accused of attacking. The panel concluded that the 17 newborns whom Letby was charged with harming had suffered a catalogue of “bad medical care” or deteriorated as a result of natural causes at the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England. Letby’s new barrister, Mark McDonald, said a report by 14 leading experts had demolished the case against her and was “overwhelming evidence that this conviction is unsafe”. [...] One barrister close to the case claimed the report was so “gamechanging” that Letby could be released from prison on bail if the court of appeal believed there was a real possibility of her convictions being quashed. [...] Dr Shoo Lee, a retired Canadian neonatologist who chaired the panel, said they had found “so many problems with the medical care” of many of the babies and nothing to support the claim they had been attacked. A 31-page summary report gave alternative causes of death for four of the seven babies Letby was convicted of murdering, alleging that poor care contributed to each death. “In summary, ladies and gentlemen, we did not find any murders,” he said. It said there were numerous problems in the care of the babies, including a failure to properly carry out “basic medical procedures, delays in their treatment and the misdiagnosis of diseases”. Lee said the Countess of Chester’s neonatal unit was overworked, had plumbing issues and was staffed by “inadequate numbers of appropriately trained” clinicians. “If this had happened at a hospital in Canada, it would be shut down,” he said.

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No, Brazen's basically correct, every point you raise here is wrong.

The state might overreport the poverty rate, if they are missing under-the-table income. They know this and account for it so I think not by very much, but, but they might. What they won't do, unless they're deliberately lying, is underreport it - if they report only on the income they know about, that will class 0 people as above the poverty line who are really below it. If they are missing income, that can only move people from 'truly well-off' to 'apparently poor', never the other way around.

On sales, it's all statistical, and a much, much easier problem. Cash sales are a small minority; barter a microscopic rounding error. (Barter more or less doesn't exist, now and historically. It's an illusion and/or an idealistic mirage.) And, again, the errors can only be in one direction - making prices look too high. If someone's undercutting things by doing cash business, that only is worth the trouble to buyers if they're undercutting, and so the true prices are lower and the cost of living is lower, and therefore poor people are actually living better than assumed. But, again, they're aware of this and adjust for it.

Just because the economic knowledge problem is impossible to solve with perfect certainty, doesn't mean you don't have knowledge about the economy. You have data points, with error bars, and you know the error bars are much bigger one direction than the other, and since those error bars will all, if true, cause you to overestimate the scope of the problem of poverty, you have a lower bound on how bad it is.

Seriously, just because states can make serious errors doesn't mean they're ignorant. The problems with Seeing Like a State are not the seeing - it's when you try to target solutions based on that knowledge. If your metrics improve, on a very large scale over the long term, you have, actually, improved things. You shouldn't be overconfident about what it is that helped, but you can be confident that something did, and things did not, on net, hurt.

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Bullshit. The causation is impossible (wrong order). And there's a perfectly good, extremely obvious cause there: Abundance.

When most work was outside, it was fashionable to be pale, to show you didn't have to work.

When most work became inside, it became fashionable to be tan, to show you didn't have to work. That you had the spare time to get tan.

When food was scarce, being well-fed was the most important thing. It was, I think, generally fashionable to appear plump and well-fed, but compared to staying alive and resilient against illness and bad winters not a major concern.

When food became abundant, and it was cheap to get fat because food is cheap now, it became fashionable to be thin, to show you had the spare time (or even spare energy) to eat such that you stayed thin.

(And in return many other fashions about clothes and hairstyles and such, which had gotten easier, became much less strict.)

Appearance fashions typically hit women harder and always have, but they haven't skipped men, either. Bodybuilding is even more perverse and harmful than obsessive thinness, and requires equally unnatural dieting!

(Only now, when almost all work is sedentary, does appearing strong become fashionable. Being strong, of course, is something very different.)

And in this case they predate second-wave feminism and the Pill, so the proposed causation is bogus anyway.

diet talk is so inexpressibly nonsensical the instant you know anything about "the human body" or "nutrition" or if you think about it for three seconds

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It's only a limit if you care about consequences.

I've only read the comic, but Preacher mostly runs on vibes and the occasional character study.

If he becomes the sheriff of a random very weird small town, consider skipping the next season or two until he's done. That arc was... not good. Very, very weird, and not good.

The end was good, though.

I've been making my way through Preacher, the TV version, and in the first season they make a big deal of the fact that he has the power to compel people with his Voice, and how if used carelessly this can result in serious issues.

And I thought "ah, this is an interesting tension, a nice little limit, like a monkey's paw situation".

But in the second season it really seems that they just kind of ... don't care about it? Preacher is using the Voice all over the place, in ways that are really sloppy and have obvious monkey's paw scenarios, and neither he nor the narrative cares about it.

He says "get lost!" to people and then they just go away, never to be seen nor heard from again, and this is horrifying, right? Because they're being compelled to go actually get lost, and this seems like the kind of thing that could easily lead to them just dying.

Extremely uneven show overall, but I think it's got just enough weird and interesting stuff to keep me coming back.

(It's a completely different show from The Magicians, but they're hitting similar notes in my brain, especially late-stage The Magicians where there'd often be a single gag that would make the whole thing worth it for me.)

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The natural state of humanity, as is extremely evident from history, is to hate and fear anyone who makes money from business or anything intangible. The intuitive theory of value is the labor theory - something is worth as much work as has been put into it - and anyone who makes a living off anything else is suspect. The labor theory is wrong and the subjective theory is right, but even people who have read enough economics to understand that are not immune to the universal intuition.

This is the root of antisemitism, and the Armenian genocide, and a number of less flashy but similar actions in East Asia on minority Chinese ethnicities (both in China and outside it). They were middleman minorities, groups who were on the outskirts of society, but were allowed to resell goods, move them from place to place, and/or loan money at interest. And then persecuted whenever the powers that be wanted the money they'd accumulated, with the assent and assistance of the poor, because everyone saw them as thieves, somehow making money without creating anything and therefore nefarious.

Your theory of how people react to money now must reflect that until Adam Smith this was universal. Europe and Asia, Africa and the Native Americas. Everywhere. Everywhen. Even when a powerful merchant society like Venice got a foothold, it was treated with suspicion by everyone else, who assumed that it, too, must be made of thieves.

You say

they're not paid enough to sustain the expensive lifestyle politicians have to maintain, and that's on purpose. It's not an oversight, and it's not primarily about cost-cutting. It's a deliberate barrier to ensure that only rich people can run for office.

And this is historically ignorant. No, it's not on purpose. Even the founding fathers of the United States largely hated and feared anyone who made money by trade or banking, with a few exceptions in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. They put barriers that required, generally, land, because renting out farmland intuitively doesn't count to most people.

I also can't imagine living in a world where most people hate the rich

You live in a bubble. The same attitudes are still with us. Pew Research, 2020:

70% of Americans say U.S. economic system unfairly favors the powerful The notion that the U.S. economy is “rigged” to benefit the wealthy and special interests was a major rallying cry in the 2016 presidential election and is already resurfacing in the 2020 race.

A Claude summary which is correct everywhere I've checked:

Pew Research Center: - A 2015 survey found 65% of Americans believed the economic system unfairly favored powerful interests - Their 2020 study showed 71% believed the economic system disproportionately benefited the wealthy - A 2022 survey indicated 82% believed large corporations made too much profit Edelman Trust Barometer: - 2020 report showed declining trust in wealthy individuals across multiple countries - In 2022, they found that 76% of respondents globally worried about wealthy people having too much influence on policy decisions Reuters/Ipsos: - A 2019 poll found that about 64% of Americans believed "the very rich should contribute an extra share of their total wealth each year to support public programs"

Look around at society; see that everyone is incredibly suspicious of billionaires and say facile false things like "you can't earn a million dollars, you can steal a million dollars." People still hate and fear people who make their money in business, and never mind that everything nice the United States has is because of that business.

'Real value' comes from working directly. Management, trade, and paper-pushing are inherently suspect and getting wealthy from them doubly so.

And if making money by trade and banking seems like theft to most people, how much worse is making law, which doesn't even provide anyone with tangible goods or cash?

This entirely explains why politician salaries are low.

Adding anything else is just confusing things.

Politician salaries are low because no one wants to give them money.

They do not need to take actions to do this. In fact, they regularly take actions to increase their compensation. Everyone hates this. (I'm generally in agreement it would be better for politicians to be paid better or at least have their business expenses paid, but I still, intuitively, hate it.)

Also, any theory of how the upper class and entrenched interests control politics has to contend with Donald Trump. Donald Trump is not upper class; it's not even clear if he's wealthy, in any given year. He is against entrenched interests; even his wealthy allies this time around are the new rich, with businesses which didn't exist twenty years ago, and even those stayed away until Lina Khan alienated them. He is a chaos gremlin with a short attention span, upending long-stable equilibria because they annoy him or he doesn't understand them. He endangers the power of everyone who has it, because power in a stable system is secure, and power in an unstable system is very, very insecure. It is an existential threat to their power as a class. If you have the power, as a class of people with money, class, and power, to do anything to the American political system, you stop Donald Trump. Which they failed to do, 2/3 times at least. That means they can't really be very powerful, when it comes down to it.

This is a semi spinoff of this post, but really its own thought.

When a job pays less than a living wage, it generally attracts one of two types of employees:

Desperate people (usually poor and/or otherwise marginalized or with barriers to employment), who will take any job, no matter how bad, because they need the money, or

Independently wealthy people (usually well-off retirees, students being supported by their families, or women with well-off husbands*), who don't care about the pay scale because they don't need the money anyway.**

And sometimes, organizations will intentionally keep a job low-paying or non-paying with the deliberate intent of narrowing their pool to that second category.

People sometimes bring this up when discussing the salaries of elected officials -- yes, most politicians are paid more than most "regular people," but they're not paid enough to sustain the expensive lifestyle politicians have to maintain, and that's on purpose. It's not an oversight, and it's not primarily about cost-cutting. It's a deliberate barrier to ensure that only rich people can run for office.

The same is true, albeit to less severe effect, of unpaid internships -- the benefit of "hiring" an unpaid intern isn't (just) that you don't have to pay them; it's also that you can ensure that all your workers are rich, or at least middle-class.

When nonprofits brag about how little of their budget goes to "overhead" and "salaries", as if those terms were synonymous with "waste," what they're really saying is "All our employees are financially comfortable enough that they don't worry about being underpaid. Our staff has no socioeconomic diversity, and probably very little ethnic or cultural diversity." ***

This isn't a secret. I'm not blowing anything wide open here. People very openly admit that they think underpaid workers are better, because they're "not in it for the money." This is frequently cited as a reason, for example, that private school teachers are "better" than public school teachers -- they're paid less, so they're not "in it for the money," so they must be working out of the goodness of their hearts. I keep seeing these cursed ads for a pet-sitting service where the petsitters aren't paid, which is a selling point, because they're "not in it for the money."

"In it for the money" is the worst thing a worker could be, of course. Heaven forbid they be so greedy and entitled and selfish as to expect their full-time labor to enable them to pay for basic living expenses. I get this all the time as a public library worker, when I point out how underfunded and underpaid we are. "But... you're not doing it for the money, right?" And I'm supposed to laugh and say "No, no, I'd do it for free, of course!"

Except, see, I have these pesky little human needs, like food. And I can't get a cart full of groceries and explain to the cashier that I don't have any money, but I have just so much job satisfaction!

And it's gendered, of course it's gendered. The subtext of "But you're not doing it for the money, of course" is "But how much pin money do you really need, little lady? Doesn't your husband give you a proper allowance?"

Conceptually, it's just an extension of the upper-class cultural norm that "polite" (rich) people "don't talk about money" (because if you have to think about how much money you have or how much you need, you're insufficiently rich).

*Gendered language very much intentional.

**Disabled people are more likely to be in the first category (most disabled people are poor, and being disabled is expensive), but are usually talked about as if they're in the second category. We're told that disabled people sorting clothing for $1.03 an hour are "So happy to be here" and "Just want to be included," and it's not like they need the money, since, as we all know, disability benefits are ample and generous [heavy sarcasm].

***Unless, of course, they're a nonprofit whose "mission" involves "job placement," in which case what they're saying is "We exploit the poor and desperate people we're purporting to help." Either way, "We pay our employees like crap" is nothing to brag about.