BraveSirZaphod @ BraveSirZaphod @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Take the old adage “treat others how you would want to be treated” - is that something you believe because you’ve just been told that for so long? Or is that something you intrinsically believe in regardless of what others have said?

For what it's worth, this is essentially the "tit-for-tat" strategy from game theory, and you can rigorously prove it to be a superior cooperative strategy in many situations. Essentially, cooperation with others enables greater community success than everyone going alone, but trusting others always exposes you to selfish people that will take advantage of you. The optimal strategy is to cooperate by default, but if someone reveals themselves to be untrustworthy, stop cooperating and ideally work with others to punish them.

You actually see this bear out in nature in other animals as well. Vampire bats will share blood with other vampire bats that didn't successfully feed, but they also keep track of individual contributions, and if they identify that a bat is freeloading, they'll stop feeding it. By default, they cooperate to help each other, but if a selfish actor is identified, they stop helping it.

In the abstract, so long as most actors aren't selfish and the cost of being betrayed isn't too high, tit-for-tat is the optimal strategy.

That's completely normal for literally any new platform. You saw the same thing with Threads, down to the hordes of people proclaiming it dead after the initial wave of interest calmed down.

That's an argument for having cops not be literal excrement, not for increasing sentencing standards.

That is literally the point. Violent extremist movements are directly incentivized to make peaceful solutions impossible so that they remain as the only possible option and thus retain power.

Hamas, which is sworn to Israel’s destruction, claimed responsibility for the Jerusalem attack, deeming it “heroic”.

So long as one side is very deliberately planning and praising the explicit targeted murder of civilians, this isn't going to end.

Israel is absolutely doing a lot of harm and it's by no means any kind of angel, but what it doesn't do is this. There is a meaningful difference between collateral damage and deliberate murder of civilians (even if that's not going to be any consolation to anybody affected by violence, of course)

Mass shooters are not right, actually.

I think there's a real argument to be made in favor of the doomspending hypothesis, particularly with younger millenials and housing. If you accept that you're simply not going to be buying a house any time remotely soon, the temptation grows to just say fuck it and go buy some nice stuff or go on a trip.

No, I didn't say that, actually.

If you care, I'd more propose deeper investments in education and jobs in rural areas so that moronic populists aren't as appealing. I'm originally from rural Missouri; I'm a lot more familiar with these kinds of areas than I'd otherwise like to be.

Because dealers have lobbied to have the law mandate them.

I know "deregulation" is a bit of a dirty word, but some regulations are genuinely bad. In this case, it's literal textbook rent seeking, in the economics sense.

There's also very large copyright implications here. A big argument for AI training being fair use is that the model doesn't actually retain a copy of the copyrighted data, but rather is simply learning from it. If it's "learning" it so well that it can spit it out verbatim, that's a huge hole in that argument, and a very strong piece of evidence in the unauthorized copying bucket.

The deeper, and much messier problem, is that people like this are willingly voted into power by their constituents. One random idiot is whatever. A population of idiots looking at another idiot and truthfully saying "This represents us!" is a much bigger problem.

Political violence is bad, actually.

Am I allowed to get upset at police officers abusing overtime with no oversight in order to make absurd amounts of money while doing essentially nothing, or is that also class betrayal?

To be clear, I'm not actually against removing the cap, means-testing the benefits, or anything else. However, the political will for that sort of thing isn't really there, especially because it would represent a non-trivial tax increase on the kind of upper middle class vaguely moderate suburbanites that tend to swing elections.

My main qualm is that Social Security simultaneously attempts to be a mandatory government retirement plan and a welfare system and doesn't do a particularly good job at either of those things. As a retirement plan, pretty much any generic investment plan outperforms it, while at the same time, its ability to be an effective elderly welfare system is hugely hampered by this political perception of it as an "earned" retirement benefit as well as its less than efficient administration.

My main point here is that it's not accurate to say that there's just "one weird trick!" that cleanly solves Social Security forever. Even raising or eliminating the cap would come with very significant political pushback from an annoyingly important and temperamental voting block.

Something tells me you wouldn't be so supportive of the Israeli government throwing Palestinian kids in Hebrew schools.

I wonder why Israel would feel the need to check all imports for possible weapons.

It's a mystery.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Iran does throw a lot of money and weapons at Hamas, but only because that has the effect of harming Israel, not because they give a shit about Palestinians. Just imagine how much good could have been done if Iran instead helped develop infrastructure and invested in the Palestinian economy instead.

Obama absolutely despised Netanyahu and didn't really try to hide it. He's very much Israel's beast to claim.

Removing the cap doesn't actually solve the problem; it only delays it. Per a Congressional Research Service report, eliminating the cap today would still have the fund be depleted in 2054. You still have to raise the rate or reduce benefits in order to make the numbers work.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL32896

That's to say nothing about how Social Security is objectively a very poor retirement plan and the average person would do much better by simply putting the money into any random total market fund instead, but that's another topic.

Eh, depends on the source and intentionality of the illiteracy. I've had good conversations with Mr. FlyingSquid before, and I was myself a lot more ignorant in the past. A lot of people genuinely don't know what they don't know and believe, for example, that it's possible to create a UK-style NHS by simply taxing the billionaires and corporations a little bit more. When you see stats about wealth inequality, it's easy to find yourself believing that they can do essentially anything, and people are bad at intuitively understanding the scale of national populations.