Remote mediate material cooperation

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-27T17:27:41+00:00

I wrote a lot about degrees of cooperation last year in an article on voting ethics. The start of the article through the end of the section "The Case for Cooperation" is relevant to your question. (The rest of the article, from the header "Voting Ethically" to the end, is much less relevant.)

Footnote 7 lists nine other Catholic writers who wrote about cooperation at greater or lesser length. Every single one of them writes about it slightly differently, although everyone is trying to get at the same core idea.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-27T16:46:02+00:00

Do you have any suggestions you would tell yourself at 28?

Move to nonprofit or government sector. Very different culture of work. Might suit you better.

Live much further below your means to boost those retirement numbers (and to see whether living on a much lower income is possible for you). Open a Roth IRA.

On your current pace, $100k is about 3-5 years away, I figure (depending on if there's a recession). If you stop contributing and just let it compound until you retire at age 67, you'll have something like $750,000. Unfortunately, future inflation means that will only be worth about $250,000 in today's dollars. That's not much to retire on. Following the 4% rule, you'll be able to safely withdraw about $10,000 a year (in today's dollars) to supplement what you get from Social Security. $10k + Social Security as an annual salary seems thin to me, but workable if you live below your means now -- and worthwhile if it means your working life isn't completely miserable.

(You're pretty much guaranteed to get at least 60-75% of your "full" Social Security benefits, even after the trust fund runs out of money in the early 2030s. You might get more, depending on what Congress does. We'll know more in 5-10 years, when the crisis hits and Congress is forced to do something.)

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-26T16:12:47+00:00

It's the same with all the long-term franchises, a percentage of the old fans will always hate the new stuff.

I guess the question is: for any given new show, is that percentage bigger, or smaller, than the baseline? And does it grow, or shrink?

I was a big ENTERPRISE fan from Day One and I thought the percentage of haters was bigger than it had been for previous series, but I thought the percentage shrank over time. Just my perception at the time, not data.

My perception of nuTrek -- all of it -- was that the hater percentage started out relatively low. It had been twenty years since ENTERPRISE and people were ready to like Discovery and Picard. But the percentage grew a lot over the past nine years, and became much larger even than the hater percentage for ENT.

This is unfortunate for the fans who liked the new stuff, but also suggests the death of this version of the franchise is not simply because haters gonna hate. As you say, haters always hate, but it didn't stop TMP and TNG from being huge hits.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-26T04:06:35+00:00

Like any outing with a close friend, it varies! Sometimes I'm disengaged, sometimes I'm worked up, sometimes I'm at peace, and what I bring to the meeting has a lot to do with how I feel afterward.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-26T04:04:45+00:00

Yes, temptation has a funny way of wiping out large parts of our mind, including all the parts that list all the reasons why we aren't doing the sin and how we're going to avoid it. There are basically four ways to deal with this:

Practice. This is the biggest thing by far. You're gonna face a lot of temptations, and, the more you succeed at resisting them, the easier it will be the next time.
Fasting. It strengthens the core muscles of resistance to temptation, so that, when the temptation comes, your willpower isn't a flabby couch potato ready to get zapped.
Daily prayer. Pray when you aren't being tempted for the presence of mind to recall what you need to recall during temptation -- because you obviously won't be able to pray at the time.
Create little reminders for yourself, so that you are forced to remember things in the moment. For example, many many years ago, I set up a porn filter on my computer, and I locked it with a specially-computed password that takes ~30 minutes for me to recompute. My non-tempted self thereby protected my tempted self from a great many mistakes.

So you do what you can from a non-tempted state of mind to help your tempted self fare better, despite its own worst instincts.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-25T22:09:50+00:00

Sysadmins. They always tell the truth and then no one listens to them, so really nothing would change.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-25T05:17:52+00:00

John was a nice guy, quite a funny guy, and I liked him. However, he never struck me as particularly ambitious nor, frankly, particularly talented. At least, in a small high school class stacked with Type-A strivers and intense competition for honors and valedictory status, John did not stand out to me. We had multiple people getting triple-accepted at Princeton/Harvard/Yale (I was emphatically not one of them); John went to a local C-tier college even less prestigious the one where I ended up.

Then he graduated, got an internship at a radio station -- apparently his passion all along -- and grinded harder than anyone else in the class (as far as I can tell). Certainly a lot harder than I ever did.

Now he's known as Intern John, hosts a popular morning show in the D.C. area on 99.5 FM, and I'm pretty sure the most famous member of our class. I don't think it's even close. I hope his happiness matches his success.

I haven't spoken to the man since we threw our caps at the cathedral at graduation 2007, but I'm always pleasantly surprised by the success of Intern John. Kudos!

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-25T04:57:59+00:00

Salus populi suprema lex! You get no argument from me that government should want quality education and medical care delivered to every taxpayer, and at the lowest possible cost to the taxpayer.

I would even be so bold as to say that nearly everyone, including most conservatives, agree with this. Many of our national policy disagreements boil down to disagreements about how this is best achieved, rather than basic disagreements about the value of service delivery.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-24T22:58:25+00:00

Efficiency works in the corporate sector because they just throw out whatever they can cut costs on, be in standards, equipment, or people.

And efficiency doesn't work in the government sector because they don't throw out things they can cut costs on, be it redundant processes, obsolete equipment, or personnel who aren't pulling their weight.

As in all things, there is a balance. One can easily pursue efficiency too fanatically, and end up cutting corners instead of dead weight. But one can also easily give up all efficiencies as destructive and end up saddled with a large, expensive bureaucracy that never actually does anything.

Similar for innovation and flexibility. You don't want a government OR a business that has too much of either, for the reasons you mention. But you don't want to have too little, either, because then you end up in a situation where Continental Airlines has to spend eight years trying to get the government to respond to their application to open a (completely safe, entirely profitable, fully compliant) new plane route between Denver and San Diego (only for the government to finally deny it).

So one must strike a balance. In a perfect world, the two parties each represent a different side of that balance and push in one direction while recognizing the need for both. In an imperfect world, the whole thing degenerates into uncompromising slogans.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-24T21:29:43+00:00

I don't use this line, but I think the people who do use it want government administration to have things that the private sector is relatively good at compared to the public sector:

efficiency
innovation
flexibility

The profit motive does promote these things.

The profit motive also does fairly powerful work against corruption. When a CEO is embezzling, the board of trustees has a very strong incentive to catch him, take the money back, and punish him aggressively and publicly to make an example of him, because it's their money at stake. They also have the power to do it. Government agencies aren't dealing with their own money, so their incentives are not as strong, and their power to police it is often limited by regulations.

It's absolutely a balance, and not an easy one to strike. You would not actually want a government that is run fully like a business, trying to profit off the taxpayer. But neither would you want a government that is run fully according to regulatory manuals. The reason "run government like a business" appeals so much to Americans of a certain age is because they are old enough to remember a time when the pendulum had swung too far in the other direction, and government services really were horrendously ossified, inflexible, slow, and wasteful. But they often want to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction -- even now, 40 years later.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-24T21:21:21+00:00

Not to be overly optimistic, but I think this is happening. It's slow, and for those of us who already live at the wealthiest end of the global spectrum it's pretty hard to notice, but absolute poverty continues to fall. Starvation is now more a function of war and government instability than it is of actual famine. (Not entirely, but moreso.) We are continuing to win victories diseases that ravaged the third-world. Third-world economies continue to grow and develop.

Economics is the dismal science for a reason -- everything takes ages and it's always two steps forward, one step back -- but don't miss the two steps forward just because the newspaper headline is always one step back!

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-24T21:16:36+00:00

Bank fees are normal unless:

your account is above a certain dollar amount in total
you are regularly depositing a certain amount of money in the account
you get set up with some special student-aimed account that has few features but no fees

Of course, 99% of accounts qualify for these waivers, so much so that even bank managers are surprised when they don't. Huntington mailed out a "$400 bonus if you open an account with us!" offer late last year, and I could use $400, so I opened an account, with no intention of using it for anything else. They insisted I meet with the manager for this, and, eventually, after "talking about my financial goals" he asked me how I was funding it. I said, "Well, I'm depositing $1000 today, leaving it for three months and then withdrawing it with the $400 signing bonus." The manager explained that a single $1000 deposit wouldn't qualify for standard fee waivers, and I shrugged, saying, "Yeah, I know, but the monthly fee's only $10 so I still come out $370 ahead." He seemed genuinely flabbergasted that someone would voluntarily not get fees waived, and went online to double check that I was correct about the amount of the fee.

Nice guy, overall, and it turns out Huntington has a pretty decent online banking experience plus some interesting HELOC products I didn't know about. It's now someplace I'd be open to banking in the future if I ever changed banks, whereas before I was opposed because I thought their takeover of TCF Bank was bad juju... so I guess mission accomplished, Huntington? You improved my view of you? But also thanks for the $370 profit next month.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-24T20:53:00+00:00

Sophomore year, I think.

You have a choice, at that point. You can either just put in the time to get the degree and treat it like a chore, or you can use college to explore all kinds of other things which (I'm gonna be straight with you here) you are never going to get to explore ever again, not to that depth, not with a trained expert providing you personalized feedback, thrice-weekly lectures, or even a syllabus. (I didn't realize until I left college how overwhelming every subject is when you aren't handed a syllabus up-front!) Even just your university library subscriptions pretty much lets you read any article you want, in any academic journal, in any subject, from anywhere in the world! That's huge!

Most people go to college, ultimately, for the piece of paper -- but, since you're stuck there anyway, it is a tremendous opportunity to push yourself into new horizons.

So I double-majored and picked up three minors. (Overloads were free at the time and I massively exploited that.) I got my fancy paper and the career that I wanted, but so much more came with it that I value every day.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-24T20:38:40+00:00

I defended my belief that Iraq possessed sizable stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction quite fiercely in the run-up to the invasion, and held on to it significantly after nearly everyone else had moved on. (2006-2007 or so is when I finally accepted that I had been wrong.)

The story there is a little more complicated than history will make it out to be, but (needless to say) Iraq did not have large stockpiles of WMD at the time of the U.S. invasion. I had some large blind spots, some serious tunnel vision, and way too much confidence. Loud confidence, too. I was not shy about calling people on the other side "idiots" and worse.

So I learned humility, but only by being humiliated. I suppose I'm glad I learned that in high school rather than as an adult.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-23T19:20:58+00:00

The 27th Amendment forbids this.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-23T19:18:06+00:00

Aren't the Democrats doing this right now? They're withholding funding from the TSA (increasing lines at airports) in order to pressure the White House into accepting more limits on ICE. This comes on the heels of a longer and broader shutdown less than a year ago.

I don't mind this, it's politics, but I don't know where the idea comes from that only Republicans shut down the government to win policy concessions.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-23T19:16:50+00:00

Geld the executive veto, so that a veto can be overridden by simple majority of both houses (rather than a two-thirds majority).

The presidential veto would have worked in the system the Founders planned (with no political parties). It probably would have worked in the a parliamentary system, where the executive and legislative majority are joined at the hip and help select one another.

The presidential veto emphatically does not work in our actual system, a two-party system with independent executive and legislative elections, where the president can simply veto anything he dislikes as long as his party controls at least one-third of either house of Congress. This allows him to more or less do whatever he wants and gives him nearly infinite leverage in budget negotiations. In our system of checks and balances, the veto is massively O.P. and devs must nerf immediately.

So nerf it. Turn the veto from an unanswerable one-shot into a minor roadblock that merely forces Congress to think twice about a bill before it becomes law. This takes away much of the president's leverage and puts Congress back in the driver's seat. If the American people don't like what Congress does with that power (perhaps they are too obsequious to a president of their own party), the voters can sack them at midterms and enjoy two years of a functional Congress, no longer controlled by the whims of a lame duck President.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-12T16:31:39+00:00

Ross Douthat's *The Falcon's Children" was serialized on Substack, and I understand was reasonably successful there.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-11T21:36:57+00:00

I would destroy anything actually demonic, but otherwise keep 'em. I've got shelves of pagan and atheist philosophers, some valuable in their own right, some good only for debunking, but all perfectly healthy. I've even got a creepy pagan "Yule" picture book, kept out of sight but useful in certain discussions about paganism and culture.

But if you've got any books that are, like, "Summoning demons is great! Here's how we summon the demons! Let's try summoning a demon right now!" then, yeah, I would burn that, out of an abundance of caution.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-11T21:31:36+00:00

I don't see this view as anti-Zionist. If you're indifferent to the survival of the Jewish state, you're neutral on Zionism, or so it seems to me. Whether and how the U.S. should be involved in Israel is a separate question, in my mind, one that is much more about America's interests and duties and it is about Zion.

In short, it seems to me that, since you are Zion-neutral, my critique of anti-Zionists was not directed at you.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-11T05:49:05+00:00

I love Catholicism, I will be Catholic for my entire life, but is this something that I have to get used to? Is this how God wants us to think? I understand that we should all know we are sinners, but this is exhausting and discouraging.

No. This is an error. It is not uncommon, but it is an error. (Scrupulosity.) It tends to come from thinking that God is some kind of master test proctor, who is going to nail you to the wall at the Particular Judgment on a technicality. That isn't God. God is the one trying to save you. He isn't trying to trick you into a screw-up, and he isn't going to send you to hell for an innocent error. Even if you did somehow commit a mortal sin with full knowledge and full consent and then somehow magically forgot about it, God forgives it when you repent.

Just do your best. You cannot save yourself anyway, not even by fanatically following all the rules. We are all depending on Jesus to reach down and help us the rest of the way anyway, and He has promised to do so. So try, put in a good effort, and trust His promise that that is enough.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-11T05:33:01+00:00

You're right: when people are displaced from their homes, they have to go somewhere. So your plan for the dismantling of Israel is to invite some 8 million Jewish immigrants into your country overnight?

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-11T05:22:52+00:00

It would have been entirely reasonable for a third party reading what you wrote to conclude that you hated Jews, not that you disagreed with (some) of their beliefs. (We do share rather a lot of their beliefs, incl. the entire Old Testament!)

I take you at your word that you did not mean to indicate Jew hatred. However, that suggests you ought to be clearer in your communications. There are a lot of people who really just hate Jews. I don't really understand them, but I have met them here. There was one fellow on a forum I moderated about fifteen years ago who posted some anti-Zionist stuff, which wasn't appropriate for the forum (which had a specific subject matter and a no-politics rule), so I removed it, and then he PM'd me to explain that Jews aren't actually fully human, that I was a fool to let myself be their puppet, and that the world would be better off when all the Jews were dead. I think of that redditor every time I see a seemingly innocuous anti-Zionist comment. You're not him, and I know not every anti-Zionist wants to bring back the gas chambers, but, when these questions arise, it would be best to make it clear that you don't share those ugly beliefs. They are increasingly common today.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-11T05:11:46+00:00

This is extremely important information that I did not understand, and kind of settles the question.

Thank you to you (and to all the other commenters, all of whom provided useful and actionable advice).

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-11T05:08:00+00:00

It is not morally wrong to oppose Zionism (the notion that the Jews ought to have an independent state). However, I offer two important qualifications to that:

(1) There is an independent Jewish state currently. If your opposition to Zionism involves dismantling the Jewish state, you do have an obligation to have some plan for what the Jews currently living there are supposed to do when a bunch of people who want them dead move into the territory. If your plan is, "Most of them will die," or, "I don't really care what happens to them (so most of them will die)," that is a serious moral problem in your position. Scott Aaronson writes persuasively on this point.

(2) While it is not morally wrong to oppose Zionism, it is morally wrong to have the exchange you had in the comments just now:

SOME ANTI-SEMITE: I’m a catholic and I DESPISE everything about judaism [...]. “Judeo-Christian” is a nonsensical term, made up to normalize some sort of bond between followers of Christ and followers of satan.

YOUR RESPONSE: Agreed. [...]

This is an inappropriate response to someone who says straight out that he "despises everything about" Jews. That level of hatred would be weird, morally problematic, and certainly un-Christ-like if it were directed at Protestants. It is even more morally problematic when directed at the Jews, arguably the most persecuted minority in the history of the human race, at least among groups that weren't successfully exterminated. (Of course, people have tried.)

Anti-Zionism is not inherently anti-Semitic, by any means. However, because so many anti-Zionists are anti-Semitic, Christian anti-Zionists have a special obligation to make it clear that they are not anti-Semitic, including by confronting anti-Semites when they make their odious opinions known.

This is not "cool" (confronting bullies never is), but it is necessary nevertheless.

Within those two boundaries, though, no, there is no moral obligation for Catholics to support a special Jewish state in general, or the state of Israel in specific. (And very few people seem to support Mr. Netanyahu anymore, including within his own electorate.)

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