On the Freedom of Speech issue ... it is commonly understood that George Orwell's 1984 is not just a satire on the soviet Union (though it is that) but also takes aim at the more authoritarian elements of the British left...
I'm honestly confused about what is going on here. Is it really as bad as the stories that Elon Musk highlights on Twitter? If so, it seems like this should be a bigger story! They people that aren't protesting about immigration should be protesting about putting the other protestors in prison for protesting! The US media should be doing non-stop stories about the tyranny in the UK! The official US position should be to knock it off or face very real consequences, like nudging us closer to pulling out of NATO! (I mean, if they are going to go that far down the path of authoritarianism, they can fight Russia on their own.)
If it's not as bad as all of that, then the US media should be saying so. But I don't see anything about it in US mainstream media addressing it one way or the other.
The UK, not having the First Amendment, has traditionally been stricter than the US on what counts as illegal incitement. And Starmer is more authoritarian than many Labour leaders.
I think the prosecutions over the riots are about typical for what gets prosecuted in the UK,and do not represent a major increase in authoritarianism.
I think it is true to say that George Orwell had a beef with the more authoritarian elements of the British Labour party as well as Soviet Communists. Totally legit position to have.
There was a 19 year old woman arrested and prosecuted in 2018 for posting the n-word on facebook. She was quoting rap lyrics as a tribute to a friend of hers who had just died in a car crash, who was a big fan of the song.
Supermarkets squeezing the suppliers to keep prices down works until the farmers decide to get out of the farming business because they're losing money (e.g. selling the farm land to a developer who wants to build housing,).
Potentially has the same catastrophic faiiure mode as price controls.
I remember reading a story about a Costco executive who went to a supplier and said he wanted to renegotiate the contract. The supplier replied that he can't go any lower, he is barely making anything as it is. The Costco guy responded that he realized that and wanted to increase what Costco paid the supplier.
More typical: We had a largest-in-history apple crop last year, and this led to a lot of panic pricing to get through the oversupply. This failed to really move the consumption needle, and the retailers got tired of losing money at the lowered price point. So they returned to regular pricing...but still bought at the reduced wholesale price. Has more to do with sales groupthink than any nefarious price-gougery.
I am a farmer, and very much worried about losing money. I grow in the fresh produce area, so the stuff in the produce department. This is heavily based on manual labor, seasonal, and typically offshore. I use the H2A visa program. Lately, this has turned into a very punitive program, run out of the ideologically tilted DOL. The protection device is the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, (AEWR), which are raised annually via a self-perpetuating formula. The stated goal is to protect the native workers (spoiler: there are almost none, and we have to prove it every year to get approved in the program) from undercutting the wages of jobs they don't want. Far from enriching the guest -workers, which it temporarily does, it heavily incentivises reducing hours (overtime laws) and mechanization. Also, just plain going out of business will result in $0 income for those workers.
Somewhere someone is saying "just pay more." I would love to have a meaningful discussion on how that does not work in a price-taking, global commodity supply chain environment.
I thought there was a lot of good food in Iceland. But I wouldn't describe it as "Icelandic cuisine" per se, it's more like "very fresh fish caught locally".
Specifically, the arctic char, everywhere else in the world I have had that fish it seems kind of medium and boring. But in Iceland it was very often delicious.
Interesting. Durling a heat wave last month in Raleigh I called my HVAC guy out and said it could not make the house below 70 as heat pumps in NC are sized to cool to 72 when it is no more than 92 outside. Maybe they need to update that standard.
There's still a ton of classical music composers that still write a ton of classical music, the two modern differences are:
A) if you're asking the question "why does nobody make more Bach" it's because you're in the majority of people who aren't paying attention to classical music broadly, and so is a question that answers itself
B) a lot of what (classical music) is written nowadays is relatively invisible eg film scores
But to reiterate, the reason is simply that it's not in popular demand. People are still making new music and performing the classics, all the local orchestras I'm familiar with seem to be doing fine; I went to the LA philharmonic orchestra a few years back after not having played since giving up string bass in high school and with my wife who knows basically nothing about classical music and we had a pretty great time. (I guess if you're asking specifically for more Bach, the reasons here are pretty obvious, yeah?)
It is now every American's civic duty to roast Europe publicly on social media at any availabe opportunity.
My perennial joke about being good at empathy is how that only makes you good at noticing how thoughtlessly bad the average person is at all times.
I was working retail -pharmacy- when Obamacare went into effect but the only thing I remember about it was an uptick in people wrongly blaming Obama/Obamacare for literally anything that went wrong for a solid several months, but especially funny stuff like changes in their copays on plans that weren't even affected by Obamacare. People complaining about copays is one of those evergreen cosmic joke things where on one hand it's funny that they never get the right target but on the other hand it's annoying that the wrong target is often you.
When I was interviewing assisted living places for my mom, one of the sales women told me "We all meet every six months or so to make sure our prices are aligned." "In some industries, that's called price fixing", I said. "It's super helpful", she replied. "I'll bet it is", said I.
Quanta is truly excellent at consistently maintaining a high-quality level – to a degree that I am surprised they are able to do so. Most science magazines, including field-specific magazines that attempt to market to intellectual readers, have nowhere near the same consistency.
I wouldn’t be *too* hard on Harris for her less than ingenious ’price gouging’ remark.
Not so much to play whataboutism but to show this sort of thing is sadly pretty much the norm in political campaigns I’ll note:
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s running mate, tried to soften Trump’s recently expressed admiration of of Musk firing striking workers at a campaign stop in Michigan on Wednesday, saying that he wasn’t referring to autoworkers in the critical battleground state but instead “employees of Twitter who use their power to censor American citizens.”
Twitter workers, however, have not held a strike.
To paraphrase Elwood Blues explaining a lie to his Brother Jake politicians often “take the liberty of bullshitting” us.
"this sort of thing is sadly pretty much the norm in political campaigns"
"This sort of thing" being what, promising to implement horrible policies within their first 100 days? This isn't some gaffe, it's part of her platform, or at least it was.
> 3,300 people in the UK were arrested in the same year for social media posts.
This is pretty misleading. Most of these were for things not related to what Americans would consider protected free speech. E.g., threats of violence or sexual abuse.
Also, the linked tweet compares that to criminal cases in Russia. Note that in Russia, people can also be arrested for “administrative” offenses (think drunk driving or going to a protest up to two times), which are not included in the statistics; and most of the cases reported in the stats are related to free speech.
And, of course, people in Russia often simply don’t post things they know they’ll be prosecuted for.
Regarding Google losing the battle to SEO spam tactics, my hypothesis is that it's some combination of bad incentives (don't screw up search revenue) and organizational paralysis. The actual implementation of handling SEO spam better is not the problem, as is usually the case.
On loud music, would it be possible to do noise cancellation for a group? Could you just bring a portable speaker for you table and set it to 50% damping? I think this could be a blockbuster consumer product.
Hmm, ChatGPT tells me this would be pretty infeasible technically. Maybe we should all just start bringing our headphones to the bar and having a conference call?
All voting systems have their flaws, but I wish more people were aware that Ranked Choice Voting (often implemented with Instant Runoff (IRV)) is still vulnerable to the spoiler effect, while Approval Voting is not (and is arguably simpler).
Approval voting is simpler. It works with the voting machines we already use and the votes are counted as fast as in the common system. Ranked Choice Voting often takes substantially longer to find the result. The tabulated results in Approval Voting are more informative too.
I'm not sure if it's familiarity bias from living in Australia, but Ranked Choice seems to me both simpler and more obviously informative than Approval. With Ranked Choice, I can say which minor parties I like better than the less bad major party, which I like somewhere in between the two majors, and which I hate even more than the major I dislike more. It's usually pretty easy for me to work out my ranking
With Approval, tactical voting trivially says that I should draw my "good enough" line somewhere between the two major parties (because even if you think the long term equilibria will be different there'll be a quite a few years of the "short term" of the old parties with a new voting system), but that doesn't communicate which of the minors I actually like best vs think are kind of mediocre but not terrible.
On the topic of smart people not understanding what it’s like to be non- smart: this issue seems especially pervasive among lawyers and academics, for reasons that are probably obvious. I am always struck at their inability or refusal to consider that their manner of reasoning and speaking is impenetrable to all but a small slice of the population. I mean, look, it’s great for me: I get to massage my ego by saying “hey I’m on par with this prolix person”, but for a large part of the population it’s utterly confounding. Compare with your average sales or marketing person who is always simplifying the language they use to convey their point to as large an audience as possible.
For law, a lot of legal decisions rest on having *really specific* definitions of words that wouldn't be necessary in regular day-to-day speech. Don't get me wrong, a lot of the issue is that lawyers are pompous jerks, but the peculiar, impenetrable way legalese is written is mostly because you can't just go off vibes with this stuff. It's not written to be read like an article, it's written so that when some dick shows up and is like "well it says we have to determine this in a reasonable way and *I* think it's reasonable that fair market value be determined by my handpicked accountant, so you can either do that or spend $800k in legal fees" someone can say "actually section 42(B)(12)(c)(2) subsection (5)(b)(8) tells us exactly what reasonable means in this context."
That’s fine for when a lawyer is communicating with another lawyer. But when the lawyer is devising, say, a regulation by which all of society must abide? And then the less intelligent get fucked over because they don’t have the cognitive horsepower to parse whatever the regulation says? That’s a problem.
Right, but there's a tradeoff between being readable to laypeople and being carefully worded enough to provide an enforceable rule. Most lawyers I know (including me!) agree that we go too far towards careful wording and being unreadable. Some would even admit in private that making it harder to read is excellent job security.
But unless everyone suddenly gets super good at reading in an analytical way we're always either going to have swiss cheese laws that can be circumvented by the clever, laws that mostly just empower authority figures to exercise their authority arbitrarily, or laws that can't be easily and casually parsed. That's the central tradeoff in drafting laws and it's unavoidable.
A trial lawyer is likely to optimize for communicating with her audience, but a contract or regulatory lawyer typically optimizes for being as unambiguously precise as possible. (Or more accurately being imprecise only strategically.)
The loud music thing was annoying to read. I also seem to have relatively bad hearing, and I'm relatively quiet.
I ended up preferring house parties where the maximum size of conversations can be selected by the partcipants. A large outdoor area without music that is basically one large conversation. A basement with loud music playing for people that want to dance. A kitchen or food area inside without loud music where people can have conversations. A TV on with something that might be interesting to different people as a way for strangers to meet.
If an area is wrong for your current preference its socially normal to leave the room and go somewhere else in the party.
Table size/shape at restaurants is a restriction on conversation size, so the music seems a bit unnecessary. You can generally only talk with the people within arms reach. Anyone further and you are rudely yelling past your table neighbors. You can talk with people slightly further away with occasional banter and throwing jokes, but not conversation.
On the Freedom of Speech issue ... it is commonly understood that George Orwell's 1984 is not just a satire on the soviet Union (though it is that) but also takes aim at the more authoritarian elements of the British left...
I'm honestly confused about what is going on here. Is it really as bad as the stories that Elon Musk highlights on Twitter? If so, it seems like this should be a bigger story! They people that aren't protesting about immigration should be protesting about putting the other protestors in prison for protesting! The US media should be doing non-stop stories about the tyranny in the UK! The official US position should be to knock it off or face very real consequences, like nudging us closer to pulling out of NATO! (I mean, if they are going to go that far down the path of authoritarianism, they can fight Russia on their own.)
If it's not as bad as all of that, then the US media should be saying so. But I don't see anything about it in US mainstream media addressing it one way or the other.
The UK, not having the First Amendment, has traditionally been stricter than the US on what counts as illegal incitement. And Starmer is more authoritarian than many Labour leaders.
I think the prosecutions over the riots are about typical for what gets prosecuted in the UK,and do not represent a major increase in authoritarianism.
I think it is true to say that George Orwell had a beef with the more authoritarian elements of the British Labour party as well as Soviet Communists. Totally legit position to have.
There was a 19 year old woman arrested and prosecuted in 2018 for posting the n-word on facebook. She was quoting rap lyrics as a tribute to a friend of hers who had just died in a car crash, who was a big fan of the song.
It's kind of nothing new. Count Dankula was arrested for posting a video of his pug doing a Nazi salute.
Supermarkets squeezing the suppliers to keep prices down works until the farmers decide to get out of the farming business because they're losing money (e.g. selling the farm land to a developer who wants to build housing,).
Potentially has the same catastrophic faiiure mode as price controls.
I remember reading a story about a Costco executive who went to a supplier and said he wanted to renegotiate the contract. The supplier replied that he can't go any lower, he is barely making anything as it is. The Costco guy responded that he realized that and wanted to increase what Costco paid the supplier.
This does sometimes happen.
More typical: We had a largest-in-history apple crop last year, and this led to a lot of panic pricing to get through the oversupply. This failed to really move the consumption needle, and the retailers got tired of losing money at the lowered price point. So they returned to regular pricing...but still bought at the reduced wholesale price. Has more to do with sales groupthink than any nefarious price-gougery.
I am a farmer, and very much worried about losing money. I grow in the fresh produce area, so the stuff in the produce department. This is heavily based on manual labor, seasonal, and typically offshore. I use the H2A visa program. Lately, this has turned into a very punitive program, run out of the ideologically tilted DOL. The protection device is the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, (AEWR), which are raised annually via a self-perpetuating formula. The stated goal is to protect the native workers (spoiler: there are almost none, and we have to prove it every year to get approved in the program) from undercutting the wages of jobs they don't want. Far from enriching the guest -workers, which it temporarily does, it heavily incentivises reducing hours (overtime laws) and mechanization. Also, just plain going out of business will result in $0 income for those workers.
Somewhere someone is saying "just pay more." I would love to have a meaningful discussion on how that does not work in a price-taking, global commodity supply chain environment.
I thought there was a lot of good food in Iceland. But I wouldn't describe it as "Icelandic cuisine" per se, it's more like "very fresh fish caught locally".
Specifically, the arctic char, everywhere else in the world I have had that fish it seems kind of medium and boring. But in Iceland it was very often delicious.
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/monthly-roundup-21-august-2024?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
On the topic of HVAC installers charging too much: they are very likely planning and quoting you for a too-large system:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTsQjiPlksA
Interesting. Durling a heat wave last month in Raleigh I called my HVAC guy out and said it could not make the house below 70 as heat pumps in NC are sized to cool to 72 when it is no more than 92 outside. Maybe they need to update that standard.
We had a heat pump put in on our townhouse in Raleigh about 15 years ago. It definitely kept the place cooler than 72 on a 90 degree day.
There's still a ton of classical music composers that still write a ton of classical music, the two modern differences are:
A) if you're asking the question "why does nobody make more Bach" it's because you're in the majority of people who aren't paying attention to classical music broadly, and so is a question that answers itself
B) a lot of what (classical music) is written nowadays is relatively invisible eg film scores
But to reiterate, the reason is simply that it's not in popular demand. People are still making new music and performing the classics, all the local orchestras I'm familiar with seem to be doing fine; I went to the LA philharmonic orchestra a few years back after not having played since giving up string bass in high school and with my wife who knows basically nothing about classical music and we had a pretty great time. (I guess if you're asking specifically for more Bach, the reasons here are pretty obvious, yeah?)
It is now every American's civic duty to roast Europe publicly on social media at any availabe opportunity.
My perennial joke about being good at empathy is how that only makes you good at noticing how thoughtlessly bad the average person is at all times.
I was working retail -pharmacy- when Obamacare went into effect but the only thing I remember about it was an uptick in people wrongly blaming Obama/Obamacare for literally anything that went wrong for a solid several months, but especially funny stuff like changes in their copays on plans that weren't even affected by Obamacare. People complaining about copays is one of those evergreen cosmic joke things where on one hand it's funny that they never get the right target but on the other hand it's annoying that the wrong target is often you.
When I was interviewing assisted living places for my mom, one of the sales women told me "We all meet every six months or so to make sure our prices are aligned." "In some industries, that's called price fixing", I said. "It's super helpful", she replied. "I'll bet it is", said I.
Quanta is truly excellent at consistently maintaining a high-quality level – to a degree that I am surprised they are able to do so. Most science magazines, including field-specific magazines that attempt to market to intellectual readers, have nowhere near the same consistency.
I wouldn’t be *too* hard on Harris for her less than ingenious ’price gouging’ remark.
Not so much to play whataboutism but to show this sort of thing is sadly pretty much the norm in political campaigns I’ll note:
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s running mate, tried to soften Trump’s recently expressed admiration of of Musk firing striking workers at a campaign stop in Michigan on Wednesday, saying that he wasn’t referring to autoworkers in the critical battleground state but instead “employees of Twitter who use their power to censor American citizens.”
Twitter workers, however, have not held a strike.
To paraphrase Elwood Blues explaining a lie to his Brother Jake politicians often “take the liberty of bullshitting” us.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VzykUGonAyg
Oh, not sure, is that Yeltsin being blown away by the amazing array of food?
It looks like Yeltsin but the guy seems like he’s sober so…
IMHO the main difference is that I'm sure Vance is lying, but I'm not sure Harris is.
I'd feel substantially better if I were sure Harris was lying about her plans to take the fight to Big Grocery, so hopefully she is.
Hopefully someone will remind her how price controls worked out for Nixon in 1971.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/remembering-nixons-wage-price-controls
"this sort of thing is sadly pretty much the norm in political campaigns"
"This sort of thing" being what, promising to implement horrible policies within their first 100 days? This isn't some gaffe, it's part of her platform, or at least it was.
Perhaps. I think she’ll back off the initial statement bowing to reality of its pretty obvious flaws. But we’ll know more in a he next couple weeks.
> 3,300 people in the UK were arrested in the same year for social media posts.
This is pretty misleading. Most of these were for things not related to what Americans would consider protected free speech. E.g., threats of violence or sexual abuse.
https://pa.media/blogs/fact-check/russia-has-far-more-restrictions-on-social-media-use-than-the-uk/: “jail sentences for speech that is protected under international human rights norms remain rare”.
Also, the linked tweet compares that to criminal cases in Russia. Note that in Russia, people can also be arrested for “administrative” offenses (think drunk driving or going to a protest up to two times), which are not included in the statistics; and most of the cases reported in the stats are related to free speech.
And, of course, people in Russia often simply don’t post things they know they’ll be prosecuted for.
See also this FB discussion- https://www.facebook.com/share/p/Efsngz9zM77H99AH/?
Regarding Google losing the battle to SEO spam tactics, my hypothesis is that it's some combination of bad incentives (don't screw up search revenue) and organizational paralysis. The actual implementation of handling SEO spam better is not the problem, as is usually the case.
On loud music, would it be possible to do noise cancellation for a group? Could you just bring a portable speaker for you table and set it to 50% damping? I think this could be a blockbuster consumer product.
Hmm, ChatGPT tells me this would be pretty infeasible technically. Maybe we should all just start bringing our headphones to the bar and having a conference call?
All voting systems have their flaws, but I wish more people were aware that Ranked Choice Voting (often implemented with Instant Runoff (IRV)) is still vulnerable to the spoiler effect, while Approval Voting is not (and is arguably simpler).
https://rangevoting.org/IRV1519.html
https://rangevoting.org/FBCsurvey.html
Approval voting is simpler. It works with the voting machines we already use and the votes are counted as fast as in the common system. Ranked Choice Voting often takes substantially longer to find the result. The tabulated results in Approval Voting are more informative too.
I'm not sure if it's familiarity bias from living in Australia, but Ranked Choice seems to me both simpler and more obviously informative than Approval. With Ranked Choice, I can say which minor parties I like better than the less bad major party, which I like somewhere in between the two majors, and which I hate even more than the major I dislike more. It's usually pretty easy for me to work out my ranking
With Approval, tactical voting trivially says that I should draw my "good enough" line somewhere between the two major parties (because even if you think the long term equilibria will be different there'll be a quite a few years of the "short term" of the old parties with a new voting system), but that doesn't communicate which of the minors I actually like best vs think are kind of mediocre but not terrible.
On the topic of smart people not understanding what it’s like to be non- smart: this issue seems especially pervasive among lawyers and academics, for reasons that are probably obvious. I am always struck at their inability or refusal to consider that their manner of reasoning and speaking is impenetrable to all but a small slice of the population. I mean, look, it’s great for me: I get to massage my ego by saying “hey I’m on par with this prolix person”, but for a large part of the population it’s utterly confounding. Compare with your average sales or marketing person who is always simplifying the language they use to convey their point to as large an audience as possible.
For law, a lot of legal decisions rest on having *really specific* definitions of words that wouldn't be necessary in regular day-to-day speech. Don't get me wrong, a lot of the issue is that lawyers are pompous jerks, but the peculiar, impenetrable way legalese is written is mostly because you can't just go off vibes with this stuff. It's not written to be read like an article, it's written so that when some dick shows up and is like "well it says we have to determine this in a reasonable way and *I* think it's reasonable that fair market value be determined by my handpicked accountant, so you can either do that or spend $800k in legal fees" someone can say "actually section 42(B)(12)(c)(2) subsection (5)(b)(8) tells us exactly what reasonable means in this context."
That’s fine for when a lawyer is communicating with another lawyer. But when the lawyer is devising, say, a regulation by which all of society must abide? And then the less intelligent get fucked over because they don’t have the cognitive horsepower to parse whatever the regulation says? That’s a problem.
Right, but there's a tradeoff between being readable to laypeople and being carefully worded enough to provide an enforceable rule. Most lawyers I know (including me!) agree that we go too far towards careful wording and being unreadable. Some would even admit in private that making it harder to read is excellent job security.
But unless everyone suddenly gets super good at reading in an analytical way we're always either going to have swiss cheese laws that can be circumvented by the clever, laws that mostly just empower authority figures to exercise their authority arbitrarily, or laws that can't be easily and casually parsed. That's the central tradeoff in drafting laws and it's unavoidable.
A trial lawyer is likely to optimize for communicating with her audience, but a contract or regulatory lawyer typically optimizes for being as unambiguously precise as possible. (Or more accurately being imprecise only strategically.)
The loud music thing was annoying to read. I also seem to have relatively bad hearing, and I'm relatively quiet.
I ended up preferring house parties where the maximum size of conversations can be selected by the partcipants. A large outdoor area without music that is basically one large conversation. A basement with loud music playing for people that want to dance. A kitchen or food area inside without loud music where people can have conversations. A TV on with something that might be interesting to different people as a way for strangers to meet.
If an area is wrong for your current preference its socially normal to leave the room and go somewhere else in the party.
Table size/shape at restaurants is a restriction on conversation size, so the music seems a bit unnecessary. You can generally only talk with the people within arms reach. Anyone further and you are rudely yelling past your table neighbors. You can talk with people slightly further away with occasional banter and throwing jokes, but not conversation.
The "in-depth doc" link for Sarah Constantin asks for a Docsend passcode.