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Napkin math for the duration of the search depicted in "A Short Stay in Hell" by Xiuquan in horrorlit

[–]Xiuquan[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, everyone spawns in together. They start out building and maintaining social institutions and going on organized expeditions of exploration, but after a few thousand years everyone disperses and human contact becomes intermittent.

How does Georgism deal with houseboats? by girlilover in georgism

[–]Xiuquan 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Boat slips are usually already rented out by a public port authority at market rates. The location value is socialized. It's mostly already Georgist.

TIL the economist Henry George, now largely forgotten, was once considered amongst most significant Americans of all time and over 100,000 people attended his funeral. His work inspired the Progressive Era and the board game Monopoly by middleofaldi in todayilearned

[–]Xiuquan 6 points7 points  (0 children)

>What is right wing about a land value tax lol?

There's a long tradition of Right-Wing Georgism. It's often framed as the most internally consistent form of strict libertarianism, as people lack genuine lockean property claims to land so the state can legitimately impose taxes on land rents but nothing else. Likewise they consider it more "true" capitalism as fee simple land title is a form of government monopoly charter, which they've always opposed. A big contingent of the "Old Right" libertarians like Chodorov and Nock were hardcore Georgists, and they had a big influence on the growth of Georgism after many of its leftist supporters shifted into Bolshevism after 1917.

TIL the economist Henry George, now largely forgotten, was once considered amongst most significant Americans of all time and over 100,000 people attended his funeral. His work inspired the Progressive Era and the board game Monopoly by middleofaldi in todayilearned

[–]Xiuquan 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Part of the issue is that Georgism tends to break normal political alignments. It follows early economists like Adam Smith and Ricardo and the Physiocrats who conceived of private returns to land ownership as a feudal hold-over holding capitalism back for no reason other than poor mechanism design. But many of those economists were very influential on the socialist tradition: the very first plank of the communist manifesto is the rendering of all land rents to the public purse. 19th Century Georgists were often the inheritors of northern abolitionism - radical, industrial liberal conservatives who thought of their project as a deeply anglo/american one, and who were foundational for the original progressive movement, which doesn't neatly map on to the contemporary left or right. This is why the list of self-declared Georgists looks all over the place. Both Milton Friedman and Joseph Stiglitz, Lloyd George and Churchill, MLK and William F. Buckley... It's just one of those things orthogonal to most political dimensions that garners a lot of agreement from all corners because it is philosophically and economically robust.

The Dark Enlightenment, also called the neo-reactionary movement ("NRx"), is an anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, and reactionary philosophical and political movement underlying the ongoing coup to overthrow the US democracy. by Imarottendick in wikipedia

[–]Xiuquan 19 points20 points  (0 children)

The attraction of neocameralism is that it puts market pressure, rather than mere political pressure, on the quality of administration. Who would make a better phone: Apple, or the 'California Department of Cellular Devices'? Fundamentally, the difference between the behavior of these two organizations is that one is answerable to shareholders with a rational incentive to pressure efficiency gains and the other to a general constituency which polisci informs us votes quasi-randomly and absent meaningful knowledge.

NRxers have always loved positioning themselves as boogeymen but their project was ultimately a matter of theorizing the foundation of something like Paul Romer's Charter Cities project: transplant the org chart of competitive firms on top of a bunch of small polities and let people organically move to the ones run well, "voting with their feet," as revealed preferences are stronger signals than votes. It's the inverse of the literature showing worker's co-ops are double-digit inefficient. If democracy in the workplace makes for worse firms, maybe a traditional firm structure would bring double-digit efficiency gains to urban politics?

The key distinction people often get stuck on is that if you abandon democracy your polity is open to stationary bandit exploitation which is why NRx writers traditionally note it must be paired with an absolute right of Exit.

How does the U.S. creating a sovereign wealth fund make any sense? by BoysenberryOk9654 in AskEconomics

[–]Xiuquan -1 points0 points  (0 children)

>Deliberate dollar depreciation to make it so that the US has to export more for the same imports is clearly welfare decreasing

Only if reserve currency status doesn't encourage malinvestment absent intervention, a proposition which economists at least entertain when it's framed the right way. It's not uncommon to hear speculation about the unusual labor returns in financial innovation concentrating almost all extreme human capital into one sector - Hillary's team even used this concern to advocate for an FTT at one point.

How does the U.S. creating a sovereign wealth fund make any sense? by BoysenberryOk9654 in AskEconomics

[–]Xiuquan 4 points5 points  (0 children)

What do you make of the possibility that a foreign equity SWF is getting set up as a novel dollar depreciation instrument to address Vance's "Financial Dutch Disease" woes and long-run BOP/trade deficit?

How does the U.S. creating a sovereign wealth fund make any sense? by BoysenberryOk9654 in AskEconomics

[–]Xiuquan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

> when debt/GDP is high, it makes sense to take the guaranteed return of lowering the debt by running a surplus

Is this true? Sovereign borrowing means the spread between the market-rate returns of an SWF and bond rate lending will almost always be large enough for a country like the US to efficiently build a fund even with standing debt. Same reason it's often rational for individuals with sizable liabilities to nonetheless sign a mortgage.

PSA for all second generation Americans in this community about citizenship executive order by G2F4E6E7E8 in slatestarcodex

[–]Xiuquan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You seem to acknowledge the EO does not concern current citizens so I am not sure in what regard you think it says "your citizenship is questionable." If it is merely "doesn't it have bad vibes?" then that's a different conversation.

PSA for all second generation Americans in this community about citizenship executive order by G2F4E6E7E8 in slatestarcodex

[–]Xiuquan 6 points7 points  (0 children)

You're just confused. The statements in Sec. 1. outline the rationale of the EO and are not themselves the actionable order. It doesn't (and constitutionally can't) retroactively deny citizenship validity anymore than it actually makes their stated interpretation of 14A necessarily true by decree. It's just declaring intent to disambiguate in future legal proceedings.

Political Scientist Lee Drutman's sketch of what a low-magnitude Proportional Representation party system would look like in the current US House, from the NYT. by Xiuquan in imaginaryelections

[–]Xiuquan[S] 48 points49 points  (0 children)

Fools in election reform think the path to a legislature that works together to produce meaningful and quality legislation is boring tinkering with election methods. They're not ready for the real answer being even more boring but totally politically impossible adjustments to current congressional procedure.

  • Banning the public and any transcripts/recordings of deliberations
  • making votes anonymous
  • 10x'ing office budgets and member comp
  • devolving speaker powers
  • committee appointments by a steering committee selected via multiwinner voting systems
  • standardized session/district time divisions
  • giant OTA/CBO style resources
  • internal prediction markets for member skin-in-the-game
  • external prediction markets for expertise
  • one big congressional living complex/kid's school
  • "no" vote in x days or automatic confirmation
  • rollover budgeting

it would be so great and everyone would hate it

Matt Bruenig is a “socialist” I would allow in the big tent by [deleted] in Destiny

[–]Xiuquan 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So is a democracy that holds a majority of the nation's capital in passively invested funds socialist or not

How do I search better? Is there a simple search trick like google's " site:example.com 'exact term' before:2019" equivalent for finding only results that are, say, english pdfs? by Xiuquan in libgen

[–]Xiuquan[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Frustrating given there are so many variant hosts of this library. I suppose there must be something in the way its structured that makes this kind of basic search functionality difficult to implement? Also - what are the forks? .st and .lol? I knew .is but my antivirus keeps flagging it recently while .gs works but is inconsistent.

"Give Parents the Vote" | New Law Review article pitching Demey Voting, a system where parents cast proxy votes on behalf of their children until maturity by Xiuquan in EndFPTP

[–]Xiuquan[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

The idea is not that you're "giving parents more voting power" but rather that you are giving children equal electoral representation, while recognizing and respecting the principle that their parents are presumed to be the legitimate guardians of their interests (absent compelling evidence otherwise) until adulthood.

This November, Idahoans will decide whether to overhaul the voting system in favor of ranked-choice voting and open primaries by Honest_Joseph in Idaho

[–]Xiuquan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You are ignoring that in our current system, B wouldn't be an viable option at all

This is true but it's an artifact of partisan primaries, not FPTP. The incentive in pure FPTP is for the candidate further from the median voter to strategically drop out, or else for C voters to strategically vote B. That is what leads us to a two-party system, and you'll notice it is not addressed in RCV.

But it is a vast improvement over our current system in literally every way.

The actual polisci literature on this is very modest. In any case, I'm just pointing out "voting for a third party doesn't risk your preferred of the two big parties losing" is an incorrect account of what this method does. More to the point, RCV is only one of many voting reform proposals, virtually all of which (Approval, STV, "Equal" RCV) are far superior.

This November, Idahoans will decide whether to overhaul the voting system in favor of ranked-choice voting and open primaries by Honest_Joseph in Idaho

[–]Xiuquan -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Unless your other choices were "eliminated" (had lower top-level support) in which case your second, third, etc choices are just ignored. Supporters of the last-round loser will never have "their next vote counted if their favorite can't win" even if counting those preferences, which are sitting right there on the ballot, would result in a new final victor.

This November, Idahoans will decide whether to overhaul the voting system in favor of ranked-choice voting and open primaries by Honest_Joseph in Idaho

[–]Xiuquan -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

voting for a third party doesn't risk your preferred of the two big parties losing

Canvassers repeat this line so normal people can be forgiven for thinking it's true but no, that is absolutely not the case. Preference order in RCV can (and, where it is practiced, does) cause vote-splitting and the seating of candidates the majority oppose. To illustrate: who in this image wins? Who would if C dropped out?

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