dontbeevil1992

that's awesome. I think CBT is really reductive. Quite pessimistic, as well - CBT seems to hold little hope of actually healing many issues, but only aims for symptom management. I think that's because it's not a very good therapy for many (most?) situations so it has to rationalize it by saying true healing is impossible.

IFS is amazing.

in gestalt therapy this is called being at an impasse - you are in touch with yourself enough to know that you're not happy, but not yet sure how to change your life to be happy. long term I do believe it is better to be in touch with yourself even though there may be periods of discomfort or confusion. it's better to do that than to be humming along feeding your trauma until you reach the age of 50, have a mid-life crisis and realize you've wasted so much time not in touch with yourself.

very cool! some similar themes to LotR. Did you intentionally make the crows names use mainly phonemes from the word "crow"? That's a cool technique

I'll say it again: I'm not saying that we can use past lack of nuclear war to predict future lack of nuclear war. All I'm saying is that each year's probability is not independent, meaning the model of a probability of no nuclear war which geometrically goes to 0 is not accurate.

I might not have said this clearly enough - I'm not saying that conditioning on "did we have a nuclear war" will change the probability to be less. I'm saying that the event "did we have a nuclear war in year n" is not independent from "did we have a nuclear war in year n+1" "n+2", ... because there are shared factors influencing them. Therefore the model of independent probabilities multiplying year over year and seeming to imply that nuclear war is inevitable because (1-p)^n goes to 0 as n grows doesn't make sense mathematically speaking.

Another issue with this logic is that the probabilities are not independent.

Saying that you have probability x of nuclear war every year and so probability (1-x)^n of no nuclear war in n years assumes independence. In fact, if you don't have nuclear war on year 1, I would assume that the reasons for that lead to inferences and correlations that would affect the probability of nuclear war on year 2, possibly making it lower.

surely there's some middle ground between infinity and a paltry $3500. in our legal system there are concepts like damages, emotional damages, pain and suffering. it's not just about how much wages you missed out on. or does all that just go out the window because these are members of society who aren't paid a lot for their labor?

seems like a good place to put this quote: "Justice is what love looks like in public." If this conservative economist wants to spread love, he can start by supporting economic policies that prevent the 1% from exploiting everyone else

Agreed, life is not always zero-sum, and higher taxes don't always translate to better services.

Let's look at an example of where life is zero-sum, which also happens to be an important battleground that leads to more macro effects: wage negotiations. Clearly it's zero-sum: the firm produces some wealth, and many dollars that aren't paid to wages end up paid to someone with more power in the firm, such as an owner, major shareholder, or executive.

Now, when it comes to negotiating wages, in an oversaturated labor market, workers without a union are in a terrible bargaining position, as they basically have the choice: work or die. This leads to what we see today: horrible exploitation of the people with the least power in society. Lawmakers have, over the years, stripped unions of relative power. This is one of the choices I mentioned, where one group is immiserated precisely in order to let another group hoard more and more money. Now, sure, unions have downsides, and they can be corrupt, but on the whole, US wages have stagnated while production has increased since the 70s, when the US began its forceful destruction of labor power.

The only argument you can make in response is that the system as a whole has to be this way, or else, for example, talented executives won't step up to difficult tasks and things won't get done. I'm sure that, in some cases, this is true, but it's a trade-off, like most other things in economics, and the absolutist way that many people hold this, so that a lot of exploitation is justified to retain this, is murderously excessive, and not based on empirical evidence.

People should stop complaining that they don't have healthcare because they have iPhones and vaccines and don't literally live in the mud? Maybe that would hold water if there were literally no other option, and if the distribution of wealth and misery were an unchangeable force of nature. But the reality is, people don't have healthcare BECAUSE some people don't want to pay more taxes, and want poor people to stay in a desperate bargaining position so they can be exploited. Some people have less BECAUSE other people have more, and for no good reason besides the fact that our society supports the haves in exploiting the have-nots. It is a choice that our society works this way, and there is another way for things to work, and we must make that choice to change.

this is a really cool idea, and well-executed! only thing Id say is the glyphs end up very bulky, it would be cumbersome to write and readd

I don't see this as a counterargument for two reasons.

First, how do the actions of other countries have bearing on what is true about the history of our country?

Second, I don't know the details, but seems to me that powerful people in other countries could, just like the U.S., be reaping political and financial benefits from criminalizing drugs.

Of course it's a powerful (alleged) quote, but it's far from the only evidence that the War on Drugs is not based, even in principle, on social good, but rather to serve powerful interests such as private prisons and police.

As far as the pushback from the family, I would just say that it wouldn't be the first time that someone is different at work than with his family. The worst people in history still sometimes had families and pets who they treated much better than minorities and political enemies.

Furthermore, Ehrlichman may not have been racist enough to spout it unprompted, the way Nixon is recorded as being. But he would not be the first person on Capitol Hill to be craven enough to go along with racism when it helps them attain or maintain power.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

- John Ehrlichman, Richard Nixon's Chief Domestic Advisor

I highly recommend to everyone who is curious about this to read Nickel and Dimed. I read it for a college course and it opened my eyes a lot to the reality of life for people who our society does not allocate enough resources to, and who we are encouraged to consider lazy and to blame for their own predicament even when it's not true.

> just a lot of people see those options as beneath them or as just too hard of work.

This might be true for some people, but don't forget that many of the available jobs are also very low-paying. People may not want to settle for the subpar quality of life that US minimum wage jobs afford them.

Hmmm idk... anyway, time to get back to grinding leetcode so I can go work at Facebook and make 200k instead of a paltry 150k somewhere else!!

this website is such an incredible compendium of wisdom and facts. how has this been accomplished?

> To say they are "taking advantage of the commons" implies they're leaving the commons worse off

I don't agree. All it means is that they're benefiting privately from something that belongs to everyone. This is particularly glaring in this case because Nestle has a history of unethical behavior - for example, there is a plausible argument that one of the reasons why the Flint lead problem hasn't been fixed is because of profits on bottled water. Taxation is not a perfect solution because the government doesn't always use the funds ethically, particularly when it is in bed with corporations. But it's better than nothing.

> The amount of water they're pumping really isn't that significant compared to agricultural or industrial users.

Then why not have them pay a use fee that is proportionally small compared to agricultural and industrial users? If we don't charge them at all then logically why can't they just go ahead and privatize the entire water supply for the cost of $200? Natural resources shouldn't be made arbitrarily available for private profit.

you and me are not a multinational billion dollar for-profit corporation. we have different capabilities, incentives, and externalities to our behavior. nestle is taking advantage of the commons for massive profit, they should contribute back

> much of what’s involved in doing it just feels tedious and I know I’m going to be stuck screwing around with the most trivial boilerplate crap

I started to feel this way during my first internship in my sophomore year of college, after having been programming as a teenager for 4 years and then starting a CS major in college. It was a rude awakening. It led to years of depression and confusion. Finally I see the light through a potential career change

this is always the right-wing rhetorical contradiction:

"less government!"... when it comes to limiting the power of capital, and redistributing its profits to society

"more government!!" when it comes to squashing dissent to capital and existing hierarchies

it's not really a contradiction, it's part of a consistent authoritarian ideology ruled by capital and other oppressive social structures, but it is outwardly hypocritical and often goes against the interests of the people who parrot it

when you say '"because capitalism" is always a terrible argument', you're doing more than observing that it's used nebulously sometimes, you're saying that by definition it cannot be used unnebulously, which is just false and is what I was responding to.

Your original comment was aggressive but I admit quoting Dunning Kruger, while not misplaced, was also aggressive and escalatory.

My point is not that googling it will reveal everything about it, but nice bad faith. My point is it has a dictionary definition and there are plenty of people who understand what it is. It is not a nebulous concept just because you aren't informed about it.

If you want to get started learning about it, I recommend looking up Richard Wolff

It has a specific definition that you can find by googling: "an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state."

Don't assume that others are naive, imprecise, or uninformed about what capitalism is and how it affects the world, just because your own understanding of it is limited.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

...so far. Other countries have some mechanisms - legal and cultural - in place that have resisted the creep of capitalist power concentration better than the U.S. has. But I'm pessimistic - I think globally we'll continue to see taxes cut, social safety nets dried up, and privatization of benefits, like has been happening in the UK. It just seems to be the tendency of capitalism.

edit: I invite downvoters to let me know why they disagree, besides "capitalism good"

does that mean that protein-folding is sort of in NP?

I was the one who first used the phrase market failure (wrongly, I gather). But the GP only used the idea that a market failed at something: "a failure of the marketplace", which is what my point still stands on.

If they only meant to talk about "market failures" as such, then they are guilty of pedantry

> In answer, maybe no harm is actually done. But even so, people will perceive that they have been harmed.

Maybe cows can fly. Maybe a lot of things. But it does cause harm. So your idea about people's perceptions seems condescending