denverkarma

It would be fascinating to see a meta study that ignores the traditional definition of organized religion and instead looks at “religious” characteristics. What are the behaviors that make Buddhism and Islam both religions?

Beliefs that a person holds deeply, holds on faith without requiring proof, bases their life choices on, and evangelizes as the truth.

By that measure, aetheist San Francisco is the most religious place I’ve ever lived. The religions focus on the right way living or eating, and the evangelism is off the charts.

I would argue that the younger generation isn’t significantly less religious, but rather that they’re all inventing new religions or following scattered and informal tribes online. It’s like a new philosophical primordial soup from which I suspect we will see organized and “formal” religions emerge given sufficient time.

But the study specifically says that the data may indicate that people become more religious as they age.

Don’t gloss over all the atrocities committed by the Soviets and Chinese in the name of aetheism.

Evil people will harness whatever philosophy is convenient to justify their actions.

The irony is that there’s nothing more offensive to an observing Christian than when politicians try to quote the Bible. They don’t believe it, they misquote it and take things out of context all the time.

The second most offense thing is how many people who claim to be “enlightened and tolerant” liberals are openly hateful and bigoted toward Christianity.

There may be some of that but I think you’re misunderstanding the predominant conservative view, which has two crucial parts:

1. Most conservatives believe that the government forcibly taking your money via taxes and using it for purposes you do not approve of is undemocratic and immoral. This is the root of the small government argument - that the government should only do the things that are broadly supported by the population and since the population is fragmented the set of things that enjoy near universal support are very small.

2. Most conservatives believe very deeply that human dignity is found in freedom, independence, and meaningful work. Some might say “meaningful life” instead but for many conservatives they believe very literally that doing something that matters is the reason for living and if you aren’t doing anything that matters then you will be miserable and have no dignity. It isn’t even about making money - though that can help make the work meaningful. For many they would say that what matters is being able to contribute to your community and take care of your friends and family, and if you do a job that sucks but it’s what you’ve got and it gives you the money to contribute and take care of the people who rely on you, then THAT is what is meaningful.

So, suppose the proposal is “shall we give this homeless drug addict a home and food and money so their needs are met and put them in additction counseling and treatment and then hope they recover from their addiction, etc.”

Perhaps the liberal argument is “yes that should work for getting most people on their feet, and if it enables some people to just live more comfortably in a drugged stupor then that’s okay because overall everyone will be better off.”

The conservative argument would generally be, (1) it’s immoral to take money from people who work hard and take care of themselves to give it to someone who doesn’t work so they can live comfortably on drugs, and (2) by just giving them everything you are actually taking away the satisfaction and dignity that comes from taking care of yourself and knowing that you are independent and free.

Note also that the conservatives tend to worry a lot about the moral hazard: they fear that any kind of “bailout” whether it’s for homeless people or for Wall Street etc. takes away the consequences of an individuals actions and therefore incentivizes risky, dangerous, or antisocial activity.

Another way to distill it down is to say that liberals tend toward viewing individuals as inherently good and not responsible for bad things that happen to them, and conservatives tend to view people as inherently bad and mostly responsible for both the good and bad that happens to them.

Conservatives tend to see civilization and civil, productive behavior as something very hard earned and fragile, and worry about how social changes like universal social programs and such may undermine civilization - think Brave New World.

What I find most interesting is the economic libertarian argument about such things which is just to do whatever costs the least :)

Anyway, this stuff is all interesting but to boil it all down what I’ve learned over time is that there isn’t really an us or them or right or wrong politically, rather there are mostly rational people who have reasonable justifications for how they think about these problems, and significantly different life experiences that result in significantly different beliefs about what works and what doesn’t, and therefore what politics they subscribe to.

Kind of a circle jerk of poor summaries of the conservative positions on welfare.

Generally the conservative argument is that welfare money should be earned in some way, essentially by doing socially constructive things (ie staying off drugs, applying for jobs, not committing crime). The goal is to direct resources to people who can be helped and are actually putting in effort to take care of themselves, on the assumption that those people can take some assistance and really benefit from it, whereas the addict who is sleeping on the street will just use tax money to buy more drugs.

A common liberal argument (not the only one but a common one), is that it’s more important to help “those in need,” no strings attached, that you can’t expect them to get out of the gutter until their basic needs are met and even if giving them money just enables their habit you have to “do something” and giving them clean needles and cash is better than “doing nothing.”

One of the problems that manifests all over the world in varying degrees is the tension between doing “something” which can easily harm more than it helps (the conservatives tend to point to this), and doing ENOUGH to actually help someone (or robust social services to rehabilitate people). In the US it used to be common for people to be institutionalized, they’d have all their needs met and in most cases get some semblance of help, albeit at a cost to their freedom. Well, nobody really liked that system since it was very expensive and was prone to human rights problems (if someone is too mentally ill to consent and you try and experimental treatment on them, are you helping or using them as a lab rat?). So now those people are on the street.

At the end of the day it’s a very difficult set of economic and moral problems to solve, and demonizing the political party you dislike and labeling them as heartless villains accomplishes exactly nothing.

What arguably would help is sane housing and public health policies so people could afford a roof over their heads and get medical treatment when needed without having to have an upper class job to pay for it.

Perhaps the post itself is too clever by half. It was about “why Bitcoin is going to fail” and yet all anyone is discussing is its well-told animal analogy.

I’ve had Amazon Prime since the day it came out, but I’m seriously considering abandoning Amazon now. The ability to search and find items has deteriorated noticeably in the last two years as a hundred similar knockoffs appear for every search, and I feel I have to triple check the process to avoid fraud.

I don’t enjoy the experience of shopping in a marketplace that is full of scammers and fraud.

I wish Amazon understood that.

These are amazing, thanks for sharing!

But also wealthy single family owners being heavily subsidized by prop 13.

It’s the government dictating who can live where and do what via egregious over regulation that bans people from the city. If they’d cut the red tape and let housing be built the economy would normalize toward construction cost over time.

Prop 13 is just a phenomenal transfer of wealth from the young and working class to the old and wealthy. Don’t kid yourself that it was ever about anything else.

Because the left thinks that the fix for housing shortage caused by governmental regulation starving the market of housing is for the government to intervene further and subsidize the thing they made unobtainable.

I disagree that Amazon is not considered evil.

But really I don’t think anyone deeply believes that these companies are good or evil in the personal human sense, rather it’s a question of incentives and interests.

Google makes money by selling me to advertisers. I understand the business value but I’m personally not comfortable with it.

Amazon makes money by selling me other people’s stuff. I’m comfortable with the business, but sometimes I’m concerned that what’s good for Amazon isn’t what’s good for the people who make the stuff I like.

Apple makes money by selling me stuff that they make. This is the business model that I like best, because when they make stuff I don’t like I don’t buy it, and when they make stuff I love I’m happy to give them my money in exchange.

Buying from the maker is the best win-win virtuous cycle, in my opinion.

Google is so creepy.

If you look it up you’ll find various reports that strongly link home prices with homelessness. First hit on google, for instance: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/amp/As-rents-rise-so-does-Cal...

To reinforce this with my own life experience, I lived in Houston for five years, and it was possible for me to buy a two bedroom condo in the core urban area for 100k. There were run down neighborhoods in some of the more industrial areas where you could buy a house for less than that, in some cases as low as 30-40k for run down housing. These neighborhoods had transit access and basic public services. There was essentially zero homelessness.

Those neighborhoods aren’t glamorous, and I’m not trying to idealize them. People got out when they could. Crime was not extreme but it was higher than the rest of the city.

But it turns out that even most people with mental problems could find a way to live with a roof over their head when the cost may be in the low hundreds per month. And just having a home makes the rest of the problems you’re struggling with a lot easier to tackle.

Houston isn’t a beautiful city, I moved there not because I wanted to but when the recession hit because it was the only place I had a job offer. But it gets an unfair bad wrap. It turned out to be quite a nice place to live, with tons of diversity and arts and culture, and the best food scene you can imagine.

It’s not the unregulated Wild West that people like to pretend it is, but in general the building codes are very simple and predictable, and for whatever reason the culture there is strongly anti-nimby (relative to the rest of the US). An extremely common pattern while I lived there was for old bungalows from the 1930’s to be bought up, demolished, and replaced by two modern townhomes.

People complained that they really liked the bungalows and that the townhomes weren’t as pretty. That was probably true. But the people buying those homes were ordinary folks, teachers and firefighters and mechanics and whatnot who could afford to raise a family in the nicer more walkable parts of the city without praying for a public housing assistance lottery or anything like that.

It’s bittersweet, but Houston being willing to let the cute old neighborhoods incrementally turns over into denser more modern neighborhoods is what made it a place that anyone could afford to live, and I think not coinicidentally there was a huge culture of entrepreneurship and loads of opportunity and upward mobility in the local economy.

Sounds like you’re trying to network people who want to “do something” but don’t have anything in-flight. How do you feel about engineers who already have a side hustle going and would like to find help to ramp it up?

I suspect there are a lot of current hiring practices in tech that are going to be ruled illegal over time. I know first hand the university recruiting policy of at least one major tech company is specifically not to recruit anyone who is male or white, as they want to use recruiting to change the companies racial and gender make up.

This is very similar to redlining and other implicitly discriminatory practices in the past, and the longer it goes on the more likely I suspect it will end up in court.

One of the very best programmers I've ever worked with is female. She said almost this exact thing to me, basically: "On the one hand it's awesome that I can have my pick of any job in the business, on the other hand it sucks that I don't know if I'm just a statistic for them."

"Pushed out" is an odd narrative for an industry that is bending over backwards to try and draw more women in. Is it even possible that women (on average) are less interested in tech work and thus have chosen (on aggregate) to pursue other careers instead? It seems like even asking that question is forbidden.

Why is the same level of angst not applied to education, where <20% of primary school teachers are male? Have the public schools been pushing men out, or are men just not interested? Or maybe it's some of both? Do we even know?

Brutally worded but I get what you're saying. Our collective ability to not care about mens issues really amazes me.