iocase

An Jeffrey Epstein is a mid level human trafficer and handler, analogous to a district manager for Wendy's. There are many people below him, but there are also many people above him as well. There are dozens of Epstein's worldwide that we won't be lucky enough to know about.

Yep that's why it exists. American petroleum engineers and techs working in Arab states where alcohol is banned. It's also why it's called that since screwdrivers are used by almost everyone.

I once saw a guy standing on the edge of a bridge, about to jump. I ran over and said, "Stop! Don't do it!"

He said, "Why shouldn't I? Nobody cares about me."

I said, "Well, do you run Linux?"

He said, "Yes."

I said, "Me too! Desktop or server?"

He said, "Server."

I said, "Me too! Debian-based or RPM-based?"

He said, "Debian-based."

I said, "Me too! Debian stable or Ubuntu LTS?"

He said, "Debian stable."

I said, "Me too! systemd or an alternative init?"

He said, "Alternative init."

I said, "Me too! runit, OpenRC, or s6?"

He said, "s6."

I said, "Me too! s6 with s6-rc as the service manager, or s6 with 66?"

He said, "s6-rc."

I said, "Me too! s6-rc with the full supervision tree defined declaratively, or with hand-rolled run scripts?"

He said, "Hand-rolled run scripts."

I said, "Die, Poettering apologist!" And I pushed him off.

Also it's fundamentally a heat engine. Even a fusion reactor is a heat engine bounded by Carnot efficiency, which is the maximum theoretical efficiency of a system determined by the absolute temperature of your hot and cold sides.

Which means his arc reactor should be hot enough to cook him unless he's got some crazy external cooling. Our bodies produce around 100w of heat, and some of the stuff ironman does with his suit would require a few million watts of energy to pull off.

I think you get wealth disparities as a result of specialization. Should a surgeon make the same as a ditch digger? They're both important to society but almost anyone can dig ditches. Not everyone can learn to be a surgeon, and the requirements are strict otherwise people won't trust surgeons not to kill them, which is a net negative for society if people don't trust them. As a result it's a small group of people who can do it, and it takes decades of dedication just to get to "I am a surgeon" levels.

Voila. Wealth disparity.

A healthy amount is fine and normal. We're at cartoonish levels where even bare mention of the word "wealth disparity" causes anaphylaxis in some people.

There's wealth disparity in normal well functioning societies it's just a healthy amount. It's like it's normal for there to be a range of body weights in a population, but extreme levels of obesity or starvation aren't healthy.

When the US was functioning at its best wealth disparity was present but small. There was even wealth disparity in the USSR and high wealth disparity was also correlated with the decay and collapse of the Soviets.

There are strong sex based differences in propensity for youth violence in WEIRD countries. There's less of a strong correlation outside of those countries but it still broadly applies when analyzed.

It's more complex than just being "hardwired" or "testosterone" but the differences are statistically significant and repeatable.

There is a strong correlation between intelligence and being a criminal. It's not predictive, but if you have low intelligence you're part of a vulnerable group that is far more likely to be imprisoned. This could also be that smart criminals don't get caught, but large case reviews with low intelligence offenders often find a lack of foresight of what happens after commiting a crime, and a lack of understanding about how serious it can be. Both of which strongly correlate with criminality. It's a fancy way of saying they don't think ahead and don't understand the magnitude of what they're doing.

Within the literature the greater male variability hypothesis is not controversial, but well established fact.

The rest of my opinion is derived from a statistics 101 level of understanding of bell curve comparisons between two groups and what happens to the tails and outliers (which is also backed up piecemeal by my sources in different areas indirectly.)

I'm willing to add more sources as needed but I think it's time you did some searching to refute my position if you still think it's suspect.

Yes I think we can both agree there! I think the third way in Buddhism would also want a balance between the two and not an extreme. My personal ideal would be something like ⅔ communism/socialism and ⅓ capitalism.

My own view is things that are natural monopolies (telecom, rail, power, natural gas, pipelines, water/sewer, food distribution ala sysco, grocery stores) should be crown corporations. It aligns incentives well with long term network health and growth to meet demand. Any profit generated is returned to the public and the crown corp has an incentive to maintain its assets instead of letting them rot by starving them of funds to return more money to shareholders. Anything that naturally ends up as a duolopoly really would be a monopoly if anti-trust laws didn't exist. The second company purely exists to protect the primary monopoly from anti-trust action...

It's why a tank of gas and a 45" TV cost roughly the same right now. Anything we can't do without is overpriced and maximally profited from because we literally can't be without it. Luxury goods can be default capitalism + regulations. It's why non-essentials are all racing to the bottom on cost for consumer goods.

That there isn't a good solution that's permanent. I guess I have the Buddhist view of things, that all things end. It seems like having some way of organizing ourselves that survives cyclical growth and collapse is best. We expect our society to live in a perpetual spring/summer of growth and warmth, when historically societies had long wave form seasons of growth, stasis, and death that repeats endlessly.

The closest thing I know of historically is a theocracy since there's a hard limitation on the scope of government ("it is forbidden to do X! It is written in our fancy holy texts"!) and society is self regulating and self policing. It's why they can last thousands of years despite being so rigid and stiflng (that's actually the primary feature for their long term stability not a bug)

And in case it isn't obvious I'm not advocating for a theocracy either lol... It's just the longest lived example that keeps being repeated worldwide.

I guess I'm arguing for a realistic view that incorporates the reality of humanity. Capitalism seems great and like it works well during its growth stage but eventually eats itself and fucks everyone except like a group of 300 global capitalists. Communism seemed to follow a similar lifecycle of "looks great at first... Oh shit." As things get captured and corrupt.

One thing we all fall victim to is the view that "if not A, then B as an alternative" when the answer might be "there is no long term answer" which is uncomfortable to sit with and goes against the grain of our worldview that with enough human enginuity (and especially fossil fuels burned!) we can move literal mountains and do whatever we think of.

I think the answer is literally the Buddhist third way. Constant growth and evolution. If you put everything into strict written laws now the goal is finding loopholes. If nothing is written down you don't have rules and anything goes. Both extremes lead to bullshit behaviour through different pathways. It's kind of what democracy is supposed to provide as an ideal. The constant tension between the establishment and the left who try to incorporate disenfranchised groups and to bend the establishment into new shapes is it doesn't ossify. Except even that gets captured by capital.

A gun is just a construct, and so is death when you shoot someone in the head with it.

(Btw I'm not arguing for capitalism here. Just providing a critique.)

Incentives shape behaviour and for the most part determine outcomes, and I think what a lot of MLs assume is everyone is as intelligent and measured as they are, when they're statistically a minority. MLs assume society will function exactly the way they imagine it should because they project their own intelligence and motivations onto everyone, and primarily talk about communism with other MLs who are predominantly on the smart half of the bell curve. It's a well known thing in psychology called the "curse of knowledge" and cognitive egocentrism. A person with a deep body of knowledge (an expert) projects their own expertise onto others, and smart people do the same thing with intelligence.

The majority of humans alive are barely more intelligent than apes, except they do a good job of acting like they're way way more intelligent... You need guard rails and checks against a highly motivated, charismatic idiot with no empathy from using the entire structure you've built for their own gain. What incentive do they have not to? Especially if they can say all the right words and slogans to appear like they're just like you, only to gain power and abuse it where nobody can remove them.

The unfortunate part is communist power structures and committees get captured by bad actors the same way capitalists capture regulatory bodies and law makers. It's humans capturing human made institutions and I don't think it really matters the ideology behind what they say is happening. What's important is their actions.

We're also unfortunately still hardwired to be tribal. We think in terms of family, tribe (friends), community (acquaintances), town/city, province, nation .etc where as each circle grows it gets more nebulous and detached from our identity and who we are. Everyone's a communist for their family, some for their friends and communities. However most people reach a point where they go "yeah, fuck those guys." Where the majority of people reach the cognitive limit of what they care about. So your example of a tribe leader works really well as maybe a mayor or something at most, but falls apart when that good tribe leader is competing with bad actors who want the central committee spot far far more, and are willing to do viscious shit to keep the good guy out of that spot. At the same time the good tribe leader has good intentions, but feels like they have a stronger direct impact at a lower level while being shut out of higher office.

It's like how democracies eventually end up selecting for candidates who get elected, not candidates who will do a good job. Those are vastly different skill sets.

I've reached the point where I constantly screw up with conventional calculators I'm so used to RPN.

I have a Pavlovian response to seeing shelves of spices and dried peppers in unlabeled bags in a language I can't read because of this. If I'm already hungry and I walk in to a new place and see that suddenly I'm ravenous.