Emma_Goldman

> His intelligence and breath was clear.

That bad huh? Hehe.

I emailed Chomsky some horribly pompous 'intellectual' questions when I was eighteen. I cringed when I read them years later. But Chomsky answered within a day, giving gentle, thoughtful answers to each of my questions. It was a far kinder response than my email merited. I used to read and watch everything by Chomsky, and one thing that does cut through is his basic human decency.

As someone who has made this trip countless times, London-Edinburgh is sluggish. The UK's only true high-speed network is the Eurostar from London ('HS1'), under the channel.

Paris-Marseilles in 3.5 hours is a better comparator.

Honestly, this just strikes me as typical of the the kind of heavy-handed, bureaucratic box-ticking that now dominates academia.

One of the first things I had to do as a post-doc was complete a 4-page document on whether my chair was comfortable enough.

I have been involved in major EU grant applicants that exceed 100 pages, and consist of excruciatingly obtuse questions as to how our project aligns with their institutional goals and byzantine definition of 'success'.

I don't really find this convincing. Companies have been transitioning from paper for 20 years, and most have superseded it. WFH is hardly a step change.

It is trivially solvable in principle, not in practice. Political constraints are as real as technical constraints, and you cannot make sense of and intelligently affect the world without understanding that. Similarly, political constraints do not simply issue from the stupidity of the people who stand in your way. That is political philistinism.

Very cool. My first go was similar:

"West Virginia" to "Austria-Hungary"

Time: 50.962 Seconds

Number of links visited: 8

The path you took: ["West Virginia", "United States", "North America", "Continent", "Eurasia", "Europe", "World war", "World War I", "Austria-Hungary" ]

This is just wildly exaggerated. Italian neo-realism, British kitchen sink dramas and the emergence (in France) of vérité cinema did just as much, if not more, to contribute to the refocusing of cinema on normal, working people.

I couldn't agree more, I think the production logistics are so good in Factorio that they're really running up against powerful diminishing returns. Better to strengthen a fascinating, secondary part of the game with a lot of space left to explore: the aliens.

Hopefully this is part of the Factorio expansion.

Even though it is many orders of magnitude simpler than the real-world equivalent, I find that there is no better way of grasping the logistics of modern civilization than playing Factorio.

In fact, it's probably in the Goldilocks zone: easy enough to play, but complicated enough to convey the kind of resource, energy and transport logistics involved in scaling a multi-step production process. It is like an illustrative toy model.

The aliens even give the game a satisfying environmental and political dimension, though the mechanics in this respect are more straightforward, i.e., just kill the aliens. Though emitting less pollution with solar also helps.

>"Obviously, the burden of support isn't applied to people expressing warm thoughts about the queen, because virtually none of them are barbs. They're called "bromides" for a reason!"

Let me just cut to the chase and say that I fundamentally disagree with this. One version of what you're saying is that controversial agreement needs a lower standard of proof than controversial disagreement. I see absolutely no reason for that. Western thought is built from Plato on the idea knowledge is arrived at only through dialectical criticism - not the asymmetrical favouring of agreement.

But, maybe that's not what you meant. Perhaps you meant that disagreement is more liable to be a 'barb' - to be 'provocative', as you later say - than disagreement. From a functional view of managing HN to minimise conflict, the less provocations the better. First of all, what is and is not provocative is relative to the person. Deifying the Queen is provocative to me and, evidently, many other people in the thread. My provocation, if you want to call it that, was not the first in the chain. Yet it was singled out. The other thing is that if you take this conclusion to its logical conclusion it will simply end up enforcing and consolidating the opinion of the majority, against any dissenting minority. Again, to go back to basics, Socrates was put to death exactly because he called into question the settled views of Athenian society.

I appreciate you taking the time to write this thoughtful response. I am sympathetic with some of it, and certainly I could have been more diplomatic.

>"But also: you could have just put more effort into it. As it stands, the comment you're talking about could be persuasive only to someone who takes your word on things, because it doesn't support any of the arguments it makes."

No one reads long walls of text, not least in threads with >1000 comments. Concision is a great virtue in nearly all communication. I would say two things to the refrain that I didn't 'support' any of my assertions, and that my post 'could be persuasive only to someone who takes your word on things'.

First, they are a form of 'immanent critique'[1]. Anglo-American society recognises some basics moral and political norms. These include the idea of equality and that people shouldn't be privileged because of blood or race, the idea of liberty and that one people should not coercively rule another, and the idea of democracy and that a people ought to choose its own government. I made some simple observations to the effect that the British monarchy egregiously violates all three.

In this sense I don't need to argue for my evaluative premises because they're all bromides within our gestalt. But if you juxtapose them with some basic facts about the monarchy, suddenly it becomes obvious that there's a catastrophic contradiction. I am working from premises most people accept to a surprising - but I think obviously correct - conclusion.

Second, this same burden of 'support' is not being applied to those on the other side of the conversation. The person to whom I was responding said nothing to support their assertion that the Queen was a 'moral authority' other than that the Queen didn't succumb to personal scandal. A standard that lots of very bad people meet.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanent_critique

I am not being mean but that is historically illiterate. Britain had over seventy overseas territories in 1952, including swathes of dependent colonies across Africa and the Middle East. The Labour government that had just left office had a full-throated vision of a recrudescent British Empire. Britain violently repressed independence movements in Malaysia, Kenya, Cyprus and Yemen while the Queen sat on the throne. South Africa had just entered into apartheid. The Suez Crisis was still to come.

I never said anything about her lucre.

The Queen willingly became head of a Commonwealth that included dependent colonies, and a British state that was actively repressing several independence movements. That the head of the Commonwealth is coupled with it is obvious, not my 'choice'.

Practice refers to what's done. I am really trying to have a good faith conversation here.

PaulHoule posted that the Queen was a 'moral authority'. I replied setting out a few reasons why that might not be true.

What did Dang do? Tell me off and detach my subthread, while the original comment from PaulHoule still stands.

Clearly, that's telling me that positive but controversial comments are fine, but negative but controversial comments are not.

That is replicated across the entire thread. Praise of the Queen is controversial (my interpretation) but allowed (moderation in practice). Criticism of the Queen is controversial (my interpretation), but disallowed (moderation in practice).

But it is what happened in practice. The Queen is controversial: whether you laud her reign or question it, that's true. The whole point is that praising the Queen as a 'moral authority' is not anodyne.

As far as I can see, the PG principle that Dang refers back to is disanalogous. PG was speaking about the valence of comments - whether they were nice or mean - not whether they supported or opposed an ideological position.

>"It's true that there's an asymmetry in that it's much easier for the people making positive comments not to break the site guidelines. In a way that's not fair—but it applies to all threads equally, regardless of whether the topic is monarchy or something else. It's also an unfairness we can't do much about—it's intrinsic to the problem of how to operate this forum."

Why are positive but controversial comments fine, but negative but controversial comments bad? Why is what's positive and negative defined solely in relation to the thread being posted in?

What if Vladimir Putin had a heart attack and dropped dead tomorrow. Certainly, that would be far more historically consequential than the death of the Queen. It would therefore have even better claim to being posted on HN.

Would you only allow positive comments on that thread? Comments that eulogized Putin as an emblem of stability and moral authority? Would you freeze or delete any comments that questioned that response?

I say this not to be facetious. It's a more extreme example, but I don't think it's qualitatively different. Clearly, it doesn't make sense to allow only positive comments regardless of the subject. When it's highly ideological and contested - as is true of both Putin and the Queen - that just arbitrarily empowers one side of the debate and infuriates and alienates the other half.

I honestly think the only fair response - short of superhuman feats of moderation - is to delete the thread.

I appreciate the job you do and know it's hard. But I am not quite seeing this. How is a thread full of panegyrics to the Queen on the front page of HN curious and non-ideological, but me questioning whether - as one of many posters eulogized - that she was a 'moral authority' incurious and ideological?

Maybe it did fan the flames of controversy to question the deification of the Queen, but the deification of the Queen is controversial. I live in Scotland, I know. Surely the right thing is to just ban threads like this in the first place if you don't like ideology.

That was not my intended emphasis, but I think you could make a good case for it anyway. It involved the dispossession and genocide of native peoples in North America and Australasia. It was built on slave plantations in the Caribbean, and led to state-engineered famines in India. The total human toll is enormous.

Yes, the Queen took the throne at the twilight of the British Empire. But it was in the midst of the Malayan emergency, the Mau Mau uprising, the Suez crisis was on the horizon, and South Africa had just launched the apartheid regime. Those were all, in different ways, attempts to stamp out democratic independence. Britain didn't relinquish its sub-Saharan African and Caribbean territories until the 1960s. You cannot cleanly separate the Queen from the empire which she crowned.

The phrase 'free world' is ironically apt. It was developed in the Cold War to refer to the US-led anti-communist bloc, precisely because 'free' is equivocal enough to cover despots ruling over capitalist economies. Of course, a Queen by definition is not an emblem of free government.

I realise she has just died and it's unbecoming to do anything but laud the person, but this is just moral obsequiousness.

She claims fealty by right of blood, reigned as the crown of an extraordinarily cruel empire, and frequently interceded in the democratic government of Britain to protect her private interests.

Far and away the best book on the material and energy constraints that defined Germany's warpath in WW2 - including why it recklessly struck out to open the eastern front - is Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction

>"And there was a housing crash in there and decent growth in population over that time."

There was a slight slump in rentals after the financial crisis, not before. So if anything it would depress the subsequent growth. In England the population grew over that period from about 51 million to 55 million. That's a 7% increase. Privately rented households, as per the link I posted above, rose by 63%. Hardly compelling.

>"In fact, from your own source, Figure 1 - the percent of rented properties is, well, nearly constant over the entire window (31% rented in 2007, 37% rented in 2017). And somewhere in there mortgage laws got significantly tighter - no need for pesky investors to be the cause of less mortgages."

Figure 1 shows private rentals increase from 13% in 2007 to 20% in 2017. Social rentals, which you are bizarrely conflating with private rentals, refers to social housing, and is exactly what I think should take the place of landlords. So its decline reinforces my point.

>"Did they become silly rich? Or did they quit because it is a major problem to actually make it very profitable versus other uses of capital and time? I'm a decently saavy investor (in many things), and have watched multiple friends start up rental properties, only to stop once it became clear that tenants destroy things, costs to maintain properties are volatile and astronomical, the work required is significant, and so on."

I'm sorry but this flies in the face of my experience. Most landlords I have met buy properties and then outsource their administration to property management companies. I have never seen or spoken to my last three landlords, none of whom lived anywhere near the same city as the property.

Landlordism is parasitic in the literal sense of the word. Landlords get rent and capital appreciation for doing nothing but possessing an ownership title. The propertyless pay the propertied a premium to live.

In light of both those observations, I would say any enrichment in this case is "silly", and that landlords don't tend to do much - or any - work.

>"If it were so profitable, then tons of capital currently being spent on other uses (tech, medical, finance) would instead go into buying up more housing."

This is a non sequitur. If X is profitable and the market knows X is profitable then it should, in theory, be attracting exactly the amount of capital it merits already. In the UK, where I live, the rental sector has exploded, jumping from 2.8 million households in 2007 to 4.5 million in 2017. [1]

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/arti...

It's a whole subfield, 'population ethics'. A lot of effective altruists revere Derik Parfit, a rather staid Oxford philosopher who effectively founded the subject.

There are lots of conditions of the possibility of life - biological, physical, chemical - but the real point is that there is no incontestable reason to think that the conditions of the possibility of life are the pre-eminent source of moral value. Kant argued from the conditions of the possibility of understanding to moral conclusions. Sarte reasons from the conditions of the possibility of existential personality to morality. Rawls reasons from the conditions of the possibility of morality to morality. My point is, lots of people make this move, in a much more sophisticated way than you, and none is obviously better than the other - or indeed any other form of moral argument. There is no self-grounding foundation from which to reason about morality. What incontrovertible reason can you give for starting from the conditions of the possibility of life, or indeed one particular condition, rather than any other place? You can't.

Every one of them also had kidneys, but that's not an objective argument for the pre-eminent moral value of kidneys.

There is an inescapable choice in choosing the grounds from which to reason out to an ethical conclusion - there is no self-evident starting point, hence the riotous confusion of moral philosophy over the last two millennia.

>"But I'm not espousing my values, but values vital to the continuation of life."

There are no self-grounding values. You cannot objectively justify why fertility is the overriding value here, rather than, say, fairness, liberty or anything else. So yes, you are absolutely espousing your values. If you want to make an argument, make it, don't pretend it's self-evident.

A lovely idea, but it will not happen anytime soon because states consider energy independence to be of existential geopolitical importance.

Click on the methodology, it adjusts for purchasing power.

It amazes me how utterly ignorant the most privileged people in the world are about the stupendous luxury in which they live.

60,000 USD is 58,000 Euros at current exchange rates, which equates to a post-tax annual income of 37500 Euros in France.

If you were only supporting yourself, that would place you in the top 1.6% of earners in the world. It would be an effective income 17x the global median.[1]

Now, these are estimates, and some of the underlying data is outdated, but the basic point is clear. It would provide you with, relatively speaking, a historically and globally unprecedented level of affluence. After that point more money is going to do almost nothing to improve your well-being - doing creative and meaningful work, having good relationships, having a well balanced mind, etc., is going to be far more important.

[1] https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i?income=...