121–130 of 299 posts
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We just did a 30 year run of “religious people are dumb and holding bus back” and it didn’t start a science boom and just made people more unhappy and disaffected. And 2020 further revealed that science is not immune from politics or its own religious ideals.
When did this ever happen?
Foreigners are not entitled to my tax dollars. They can find other ways to fund their work.
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Giving up is not a strategy. Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity, but not having any at all is pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster. For example, allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane. Unless you are OK with the free market sorting all that out (after your family dies horribly).
> Giving up is not a strategy. Nor is it what I advocated. > Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity That's usually true, but it's not the main problem. The main problem is that the regulations don't actually regulate, in the sense they need to. All they do is entrench the incumbent corporations that paid good money for them, by making it harder for competitors to enter their marke…
Even if you eliminated the immunity shield for corporate leadership so they couldn't skate after their company goes bankrupt, there would still be innumerable risk-takers willing to gamble with human lives to make more money.
I expect the argument you want to make is that having people harmed and killed is an acceptable sacrifice for greater economic efficiency, but you're aware that it doesn't play well — especially when the benefits of economic efficiency tend to flow to the people doing the killing rather than the people being killed.
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It benefited them in the past, that allowed them to build up their fortunes. Bill Gates, for example, is now a big holder of farmland. Science allows others to build up fortunes that challenge theirs, and hurts the stasis in which they become gilded aristocracy. Lowering their taxes while burning everything to the ground benefits them now.
I'd argue that it doesn't actually benefit them now since they have more access to comfort than they could ever conceivably consume in their lifetime but I do absolutely agree that they think it benefits them because people who have accumulated wealth to that degree are highly fixated on making the number go up. A less just, less stable society is far more likely to demonize and destroy billionaires. If you have such…
Allowing others to build wealth just makes society less stable from their point of view. Better to keep the poor poor.
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> Giving up is not a strategy. Nor is it what I advocated. > Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity That's usually true, but it's not the main problem. The main problem is that the regulations don't actually regulate, in the sense they need to. All they do is entrench the incumbent corporations that paid good money for them, by making it harder for competitors to enter their marke…
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Every functioning society on earth regulates food drugs and infrastructure. We lived through the unregulated version for centuries, and it took mountains of dead children and poisoned workers to win the rules we have now; tearing them down just means ordinary people will pay the price all over again.
Capture is a failure mode of every institution humans have ever built, including the courts we presumably still want. The answer is to design better institutions, not to get rid of them and hope things work out.
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> Giving up is not a strategy. Nor is it what I advocated. > Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity That's usually true, but it's not the main problem. The main problem is that the regulations don't actually regulate, in the sense they need to. All they do is entrench the incumbent corporations that paid good money for them, by making it harder for competitors to enter their marke…
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The Chicago meat packing industry, for example, did much the same kind of bullying of their supply chains that Amazon and Walmart are now infamous for. And governments that were supposed to be preventing that sort of thing (since much of it was illegal even then--the tactics are basically the same ones organized crime has used for centuries, after all) did absolutely nothing to stop it. The Federal government finally stepping in and passing laws and regulations was not a case of government reining in a free market; it was a case of a bigger government stomping on a smaller government.
It did improve things, at least for a time, but what's the condition of the Chicago meat packing industry now? Or for that matter our food supply chain in general in the US, which has been regulated up one side and down the other for more than a century? We have beef full of antibiotics, vegetables full of pesticides, ethanol from corn in our gasoline while other food crops can't be grown profitably because the government doesn't subsidize them the same way, and a massive epidemic of obesity. So how is government regulation helping, exactly?
I mean, what else so you expect if you elect a majority of actual fascists? A fascist discriminates on every front imaginable. Things haven't become much worse simply because of the filibuster.
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Where do you imagine the power goes when you've taken it away from "the administrative state"? I can totally understand an argument that says a certain administrative function was not working well and needed to be fixed. But if you're just suggesting destroying these institutions, what fills that power vacuum other than the far worse situation we're seeing unfolding now?
> Where do you imagine the power goes when you've taken it away from "the administrative state"? Congress. The courts have clumsily dismantled the administrative state. But there are more options than an unchecked executive and unaccountable unelecteds.
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The US is trending towards a Russian style oligarchy and these latest moves are just one of a wider pattern of trying to suppress academia, freedom of speech, personal freedoms.
> The US is a Russian style oligarchy FTFY. From the outside, people can easily see it.
Anyway, I wonder what comes after the USAA.
The problem with scientific papers is that there is an exploitive macro economy of how many one can publish without sold evidence or research attached to the paper itself.