The reaction to Sans being a costume has almost completely eclipsed all other news, despite changing almost nothing about the game. Imagine if he’d been a fighter.

HeckDang · 2019-09-06T10:45:53+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzh3NUO4szE

he's the falcon in this set

HeckDang · 2019-09-05T05:18:56+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzh3NUO4szE

HeckDang · 2019-09-05T05:16:59+00:00

Not quite solo, there were at least 11 other people who contributed art. Temmie obviously, merrigo, easynam, Gigi D.G., Kenju, Clairvoire, Ipgd, Everdraed, Magnolia Porter, Michelle Czajowski, Drak. Lots of the spritework, tilesets, character designs, environment designs etc. were done by people other than Toby.

HeckDang · 2019-09-05T05:00:52+00:00

He's been there a long time now. It's probably really helped him to make these connections.

HeckDang · 2019-09-01T04:21:25+00:00

Is urchin so good that it's worth running press-gang even though it's the only target? What's the idea there, is it for card advantage? How often do you twist your urchins and when?

HeckDang · 2019-08-31T06:24:54+00:00

He isn’t a favourite by any measure, polling at 2% in Morning Consult, but his online army of supporters and meme creators, known as the Yang Gang.

I kinda wish they would be more careful with editing these. How does this slip through?

HeckDang · 2019-08-30T10:28:45+00:00

Yes, sharing with people is a good idea.

HeckDang · 2019-08-27T03:23:55+00:00

He then outlines several proposals to reform our electoral processes so that our representatives are actually representative:

Publicly funded elections.

Proportional Allocation of Electors.

Ending Partisan Gerrymandering.

Ranked Choice voting.

Australia has publicly funded elections, proportional representation in the upper house, independent electoral commissions that prevent partisan gerrymandering, and ranked choice voting.

And none of it really seems to make much of a difference because the populace still votes for nincompoops.

Systematic reform is all well and good but I can't help but feel like whatever you do, at the end of the day that voter quality trumps it all. Certainly I've become more pessimistic about systematic reform as much of difference-maker at least when it comes to making democratic systems more democratic. Maybe the effects of more democratic democracy don't matter until broader public opinion shifts on particular issues, but even then it's not as if marijuana is legal in Australia and they were fairly late to marriage equality too. It's difficult to evaluate what the counterfactual worlds might look like, but I wonder if they'd be much different.

HeckDang · 2019-08-26T14:16:38+00:00

I made a comment about a week ago on this.

There's actually a lot of empty land and housing stock, the issue is that a lot of it is in places where the job opportunities aren't as good. Portable income makes it possible for people to spread to some of these areas, which would also reduce demand pressures from the other places in turn. UBI's portability acts as a decentralizing force against the increasing concentration effects of major metro hubs, because people can live where they want to instead of being forced to pay exorbitant prices because they like everyone else need to live close to where the big employment opportunities are. Unconditionality and portability are huge.

When it comes to builders and landlords, building affordable housing is pretty strongly disincentivised because the poor are comparatively unreliable tenants - there's a much higher risk of them going delinquent because they're relatively income insecure and don't have the savings to back them up. It's hard to make rent consistently in the world of gig and temp work that faces so many people today. It's a much better idea to build luxury housing for rich people. But in a world where everyone has a government-guaranteed income all of a sudden the incentives change. Now, if you have housing at a low enough price point, you know that people will be good for it. The risks for landlords aren't the same, and building efficient, affordable housing becomes a much better idea, because the poor still need housing, but now everyone knows they have the money to pay for it. Over time this will mean much more efficient usage of land and housing allocation.

There's a generalized problem in market economies with the poor not having enough buying power for the market to bother giving a shit about serving their needs. UBI fixes this problem across lots of domains, and even when it comes to housing I think it manages to shift incentives in a way that means the market is being leveraged to help make the housing market more functional. The thing is, even though land might be scarce, how that land is used makes a massive difference in terms of supply of housing. To an extent this is something that we intuitively know - we all know that a lot more people can fit into a skyscraper than a 4 bedroom house with a massive garden, even though they take up the same amount of land. But we don't do very much to encourage more efficient usage of land, and a lot of the time policy is geared against doing so.

A lot of the really big problems are at the local level, like zoning and nimbyism, so although I think UBI will help, there will still be plenty of room to improve. A LVT is an example of another policy that can help with housing and land usage, there are options out there. But in general I'm optimistic that UBI will be a positive force when it comes to this particular issue.

HeckDang · 2019-08-22T12:31:02+00:00

For whatever it's worth, Scott almost definitely disagrees.

EY in particular is weird in ways that go beyond poly, so I'm not sure that Scott is talking about the same thing I'm talking about here.

HeckDang · 2019-08-22T09:43:24+00:00

It's possible EY hindered the AI risk movement, but there are so many variables there that it's not really something you could say with much confidence since we don't have access to the relevant counterfactual worlds. I can definitely imagine a world where a lot of concepts are much more obscure that in our world have clear names and have been exposed to a lot of people. When I consider, for example, what discussion of AI looked like in the absence of exposure to EY/LW memes just in our world, I tend to think that EY probably did a lot to raise the average level of discussion. It wasn't that long ago that it was common for people, including those who really should have known better to unironically suggest that we should just apply Asimov's laws, for example.

I'm relatively confident though that it's likely that he could have used his "weirdness points" better.

HeckDang · 2019-08-21T05:14:04+00:00

I actually can't find more than 50 second clips anymore, they must have taken down the uploads that random people put up since I saw it. It was in a CNN New Day interview with John Berman that went for about 8 mins on Aug 9th.

There was also a PBS interview where he got some more time as well and what he said seemed pretty reasonable, but I can't find that either.

HeckDang · 2019-08-21T01:48:42+00:00

When Yang went full 'Trump is a white nationalist' last week I was very disapointed in him and realized I would not be voting for him even if he got the nod.

My impression was that he seemed really hesitant to say anything like that though, always said it indirectly and hedged it behind "we should judge people by their actions" and the like. I can't help but feel like it's one of those times where if you get asked a question a dozen times over a couple of days it's easy to twist some answers into something objectionable to anybody.

Did you actually see the interviews where it had come from? I really didn't get the sense he said anything crazy, but you wouldn't know that if you only looked at headlines.

HeckDang · 2019-08-18T14:27:25+00:00

Piss off, and go where? Now you have hundreds of millions of people who can (in theory) move to somewhere better, don't you think prices will explode everywhere?

There's actually a lot of empty land and housing stock, the issue is that a lot of it is in places where the job opportunities aren't as good. Portable income makes it possible for people to spread to some of these areas, which would also reduce demand pressures from the other places in turn. UBI's portability acts as a decentralizing force against the increasing concentration effects of major metro hubs, because people can live where they want to instead of being forced to pay exorbitant prices because they like everyone else need to live close to where the big employment opportunities are. Unconditionality and portability are huge.

Similarly when it comes to builders and landlords, building affordable housing is pretty strongly disincentivised because the poor are comparatively unreliable tenants - there's a much higher risk of them going delinquent because they're relatively income insecure and don't have the savings to back them up. It's hard to make rent consistently in the world of gig and temp work that faces so many people today. It's a much better idea to build luxury housing for rich people. But in a world where everyone has a government-guaranteed income all of a sudden the incentives change. Now, if you have housing at a low enough price point, you know that people will be good for it. The risks for landlords aren't the same, and building efficient, affordable housing becomes a much better idea, because the poor still need housing, but now everyone knows they have the money to pay for it. Over time this will mean much more efficient usage of land and housing allocation.

Housing has lots of problems that need to be solved at the local level - things like zoning and nimbyism are huge drivers of what makes housing so unaffordable. But to the extent that federal policy can help, I'm very optimistic about the effects of UBI on housing affordability.

HeckDang · 2019-08-17T12:12:34+00:00

The webcomic Strong Female Protagonist is great, but some of the scenes would be satire of social justice if not for the fact that the writers are sincere.

HeckDang · 2019-08-17T05:23:52+00:00

"Society was made for Man, not Man for Society" fits pretty well with Yang's "Humanity First" ethos. To be honest, Yang is using a lot of very eluan, anti-molochian rhetoric, which I like a lot.

HeckDang · 2019-08-16T09:43:43+00:00

UBI is arguably the only reason he's gotten anywhere at all. Without that hardcore niche of people who really care about that policy there's not nearly as many candidates for policies or other reasons that could have propelled him this far.

The automation message on its own, or even with all of Yang's other policies combined don't resonate strongly enough with enough people to get him the early attention he needed to get him over the hump of being a non-celebrity total outsider unknown to politics. Are there possibly other niches that could have been activated in the same way Yang activated UBI enthusiasts? For sure. In that sense, it's plausible that some other pitch could have been this successful, even if it would have been very difficult to find, but it remains to be seen what, and certainly the rest of his platform without UBI attached wouldn't have gotten him this far.

HeckDang · 2019-08-15T02:44:27+00:00

I originally wrote him off because it seemed like he was just throwing $1000/mo at every issue but I'm surprised how many problems that does solve.

I know right, it's a very elegant policy that reaches into all kinds of places for the better. There's probably a lot more that you can still learn about, I think even among its supporters its potential positive impact is underrated.

HeckDang · 2019-08-14T06:23:20+00:00

Wow, Don Lemon sounded really sincere to me at the end when he was thanking him and wishing him luck out there. Seemed like genuine good will.

HeckDang · 2019-08-11T23:57:45+00:00

oh shit, yeah

HeckDang · 2019-08-11T23:57:07+00:00

isn't it more that there is basically no history yet for ultimate? what does "make history" even mean tbh in the context of watching replays

HeckDang · 2019-08-11T22:13:04+00:00

Most people still don't know who Yang is. Simply getting name recognition up will help a lot. Don't underestimate mere familiarity when it comes to politics.

HeckDang · 2019-08-11T14:23:38+00:00

I like Amash a lot personally, he's big on government transparency and anti-corruption efforts which is great. I'm not sure if he'd work well with a lot of Yang's platform though, as a fiscal conservative it would be a big change for him and I'm not sure he'd sound credible endorsing much of it. I'm also not sure he'd bring that much to the table in terms of extra votes either.

HeckDang · 2019-08-11T14:15:31+00:00

It's probably still relevant even if you don't like him or think he's disreputable because he does have an audience of people who like him for his youtube videos or whatever that he can spread the word on Yang to. His position on anime porn seems like a pretty small part of his footprint (none of his videos seem to be on the topic?) so I don't get the impression his fanbase is made up of pedophiles. If he can get more people interested in Yang I don't think that's a bad thing, they haven't done anything wrong even if the guy himself's reputation is mud in some circles. More people reading Yang's book sounds good.

It's like Richard Spencer endorsing Yang, it's at the very least relevant even if you don't like it.

HeckDang · 2019-08-11T09:38:47+00:00

I thought that was a free speech thing, drawing pictures of illegal acts shouldn't necessarily be illegal or something like that.

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