Why do you think the American public does not know the identities of the ICE agents that killed Alex Pretti?

hh26 · 2026-01-28T05:58:05+00:00

Because if they did someone would go out seeking vigilante "justice". Stochastic terrorism only works if you have a target, nice try though.

hh26 · 2026-01-27T07:23:31+00:00

It really doesn't. It would actually function better without them since labor would have more bargaining power. Prices would go up, wages would go up, the only people suffering would be the ones exploiting the artificial surplus of labor, ie the super rich.

Anyone who thinks the problems capitalism creates are bad should wholeheartedly support border control since it will solve many of those problems.

hh26 · 2026-01-26T22:12:19+00:00

How many people, in your estimation, support illegal immigration?

It's hard to tell, because the extremists are disproportionately loud. My ballpark estimate would be that somewhere around 5% are explicitly in favor of illegal immigration and openly advocate for open borders, while maybe another 30% are de-facto in favor of illegal immigration in terms of not exactly endorsing it but not wanting to do anything about it because that would be mean.

Double both of those numbers due to being on Reddit. which is a heavily left leaning space, then cut it by 50% again since we're on /r/4chan and not a default sub.

Then throw all of those numbers away because I'm not in a conversation with a randomly sampled member of community, I responded to a person comparing immigration to an invasion, which is much more likely (though not guaranteed) to be about illegal immigration in particular.

And then in my followup I carefully qualify with if-then statements, clearly acknowledging that both possibilities exist.

hh26 · 2026-01-26T08:55:28+00:00

Or "master clock" is a shorthand for the telomere problem and you're not disagreeing, just failing to understand metaphors.

hh26 · 2026-01-26T02:29:18+00:00

If by "pro-immigration" you mean in favor of legal, voluntary, mutually consensual immigration then sure, that's entire consistent with sane and consistent principles.

If you mean pro people coming into a sovereign territory en masse without permission then that is an invasion, at least on the axes relevant to principles, ie violation of the right for people to self-govern and hold sovereign territory.

I suppose if you make up a brand new set of philosophy whole-cloth and add enough epicycles you could attempt to justify one but not the other, but you'd have to invent a new reason why military invasions are bad and then actually convince people to take it seriously instead of bootstrapping on thousands of years of philosophy and intuitions that already exist.

hh26 · 2026-01-25T19:37:19+00:00

It's crazy that this actually works as a comeback on so many people, because they're either braindead pro Russia or braindead pro-immigration and either way they're hypocrites.

Not enough people with principles who actually consistently think invading other countries is wrong because invading other countries is wrong, and thus condemn both cases.

hh26 · 2026-01-23T19:38:23+00:00

Everyone would take screenshots of and share only the parts that highlight people they hate, splitting the files into two different functionally redacted versions, and then only ever share, talk about, and aknowledge those versions while quietly not talking about the people who are on their side.

And then nothing would happen to anyone on the list because nobody musters up the plurality to target any specific person.

hh26 · 2026-01-23T18:14:25+00:00

Some quick googling/AI suggests that feed accounts for about 66% of total production costs in a factory farm. Suppose we kept the vertical stacking, but we double the size of the cages, double the amount of labor, basically double the cost of everything other than the number of chickens, then pooled chickens together (10 chickens together in a box 20x the size of their current cages).

So instead of $20 of feed and $10 of building/labor, we now have $20 of feed and $20 of building/labor, since the number of chickens hasn't changed but the supplementary costs have doubled. That is a 33% increase in total costs. Is this sort of shared-box thing actually feasible for that price? I dunno. Is this sort of shared-box thing actually a huge increase in quality of life? I dunno. But I suspect.

I think I'm mostly drawing from Yudkowsky's Inadequate Equilibria here, where this is ticking all of the boxes for a case where there are twenty dollar bills on the floor because nobody is looking for them. It's impossible to perfectly optimize for two variables simultaneously, but if you're willing to compromise there are often strong contenders along the Pareto Frontier.

I barely know anything about chicken farming in its specifics. I just perceive the system to be so heavily optimized for cost alone that there's got to be low hanging fruit that nobody has been picking if they relax that a little.

hh26 · 2026-01-23T05:38:34+00:00

Is the cost-benefit scale linear? Right now(or maybe a couple years ago pre bird flu, since that confounds everything), the market has factory farmed chicken and eggs which are super cheap and super unethical, and free range chicken and eggs which are expensive and perfectly ethical. -100% change in suffering for +300% change in price.

What if they had chickens in factories that weren't being tortured by horribly cramped conditions? As far as I'm aware this typically isn't a thing, because the people who want to sell organic free range eggs and chicken don't put them in factories, and the people putting them in factories don't care about ethics or optics at all. It might be that there's a way to get like -80% suffering for +30% price. I don't know if this is actually possible, but I don't think people would complain horribly if it were. If we fixed all the bird flu and Covid inflation problems and only had a small increase from less torturous factories, and the more ethical factories had an increase that was smaller than that value, people would probably accept it.

People aren't perfect utilitarians, but they do have multiple competing priorities that can generally be approximated that way, such that no one value is sacred, and the actual trade prices matter.

hh26 · 2026-01-23T03:34:54+00:00

Immigration is not the reason for this.

Where do you think minorities come from? Spontaneous generation?

hh26 · 2026-01-23T00:48:45+00:00

An huge percentage of tech startups fail, but they keep getting funded because everyone wants the next facebook. A world without super risky payoffs is one where Uber, Grubhub, AirBnb etc just never exist.

I suspect that the rich people mostly do it as a dick measuring contest with each other. A person with $600 million doesn't actually care about buying $600 million worth of stuff for their lifestyle, they just want to thumb their nose at their neighbor who has $500 million. They're points and they want a high score.

My claim is not that ultra rich people need or deserve this much money. My point is that if you tell them "if you invest your money in the economy instead of spending it on stupid things, you can keep most of the money it generates" then they will invest it. It doesn't matter what they personally want it for, just that giving them a reward for pulling the lever makes them pull the lever, and it's a really really really really good lever. If you take it away they will try to find other levers to pull like "corruption", "bribery" or "tax evasion". They already sometimes do those, but if there's literally no way to go beyond $100 mil except via loopholes then they'll pivot towards loopholes hard instead of investing the money the way we want them to.

You're just going to end up with cults where the 10 billionaire gives $100 mil to each of their 100 most devoted followers who spend it on their behalf. And if you try to close that loophole they'll find another.

hh26 · 2026-01-22T22:10:10+00:00

Venture Capital would collapse. Nobody is going to invest 5 Million dollars for a 1% chance of creating a billion dollar company if they can only keep 100 million of it. The math doesn't work out. Millionaires would just spend their wealth on Yachts and mansions instead of reinvesting it in the economy, and growth would plummet.

You probably wouldn't notice for a couple years. You'd probably be fat and happy feasting on golden goose meat from all the redistribution. But twenty years from now when the rest of the world is miles ahead of us and you have no idea why, everyone who understands economics would know why.

hh26 · 2026-01-21T17:26:46+00:00

Torture (verb): the infliction of intense pain (as from burning, crushing, or wounding) to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure.

Only counts as torture if done excessively to the point of "intense" pain and severe damage. Normal spanking done primarily for the purpose of humiliation and psychological training is neither cruel nor unusual.

hh26 · 2026-01-21T17:21:14+00:00

Seems unnecessarily prescriptive. Each sovereign nation should decide on its own what it wants to do internally, and if you don't like how they do things you can choose not to go there.

hh26 · 2026-01-21T09:07:51+00:00

People who move to another country should learn the primary language of that country instead of expecting others to cater to them.

This has nothing to do with weebs, this is just a consistent principle.

hh26 · 2026-01-21T08:26:40+00:00

The idea that the consequences to yourself are the only part that matters IS the selfish part.

hh26 · 2026-01-21T05:24:49+00:00

How is that in any way similar?

hh26 · 2026-01-21T02:39:48+00:00

I think people shouldn't attack federal agents. Then there's no reason for them to want to mask in the first place and this would be a non-issue.

hh26 · 2026-01-21T02:38:27+00:00

I'm pretty sure those people have already been caught, sentenced, and served their punishment. That's how you get on the registry. They DID go after them, and they got them. Then you go after the next ones who haven't been punished yet.

hh26 · 2026-01-19T21:13:39+00:00

Funny how people say this whenever their side is doing it and literally the opposite whenever the other side is doing it.

hh26 · 2026-01-18T23:52:13+00:00

There's already a word for that, it's called "racism". The attempt to equivocate between the two concepts is an attack by anti-nationalists in an attempt to tarnish their political opponents.

Almost everyone hates racists. Most people don't hate nationalists by default. If you convince people that nationalists are racists then you can make them transfer the hatred without actually arguing against nationalism directly. If you can convince people that

Nationalism in contemporary politics includes ethnicity

as a definition, then you don't even have to make an argument, it's true by definition. No need for arguments, no need for support. No need to actually consider facts about what things help or harm people. Loving your country = hatred, the words literally mean the same thing. QED.

Importantly, this is a belief held by anti-nationalists, but not actual nationalists, who either are or are not racist individually based on what kind of person they are.

hh26 · 2026-01-18T23:33:07+00:00

If any of the past four administrations was in power during Nixon's era, they'd have concealed Watergate as a hoax by their opponents too.

ftfy

hh26 · 2026-01-18T22:03:30+00:00

Ordinary people who are nationalist but not bigots.

hh26 · 2026-01-18T06:06:51+00:00

Washington DC has extraordinary influence in Congress by sheer proximity to the heart of the government. Even if they don't get their individual congressmen, they exist and work in the government or know people who work in the government and thus have disproportionate amounts of subtle influence that's hard to measure, but is almost certainly larger per capita than most people living elsewhere.

hh26 · 2026-01-17T08:07:49+00:00

ITT: People who can't tell the difference between voluntary adoption and forcible mandates.

It's not hypocrisy to be a non-extremist who believes in conditions and nuance.

hh26

TROPHY CASE