Caracalla

Once upon a time there was a bad emperor named Caracalla. One day, a prophet started ranting that his random assistant would be emperor. The assistant, Macrinus, heard about this, and realized that if Caracalla heard, he would likely kill Macrinus just to be safe. So Macrinus had Caracalla assassinated. And after a bit of palace intrigue, managed to get himself declared emperor.

The lesson: don’t be unreasonable about stupid prophecies, and then people won’t kill you to prevent your unreasonable responses.

Greece’s preferences:

Stay in the Euro and end austerity > leave the euro and end austerity > stay in the euro and keep austerity

The troika’s preferences:

Stay in the euro and keep austerity > leave the euro and end austerity > stay in the euro and end austerity

The troika can crash Greece’s banking system if it tries to end austerity, which Greece can only counter by leaving the euro. Syriza simply can’t completely abandon its pledges on the austerity front, which is what the troika is demanding. So it seems to me that we’re moving inevitably towards Grexit. It seems like both sides in the negotiation are pretending to everyone that there’s a possibility of a mutually acceptable deal, but there’s just not, the preferences of the two sides are just utterly opposed.

And really, Greece’s problems would be hugely alleviated by having its own currency. It would depreciate, making Greek exports more competitive and imports more expensive, encouraging both Greeks and outsiders to buy more Greek products, boosting demand. This, combined with ending austerity and hugely increasing government spending, undoubtedly move Greek employment numbers up pretty quickly.

The real question is what are the other southern European countries going to think if Greece is rapidly reducing its unemployment rate outside the Eurozone in a few years, while their situation remains largely the same as now..

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Going into Iraq

The Bush administration decided they wanted to invade Iraq. They told the intelligence agencies to give them evidence that would justify an invasion. They sold that evidence very hard to the American people, and used it to justify invading Iraq. That evidence then turned out to be bogus. The point at which people in the Bush administration figured out that this evidence wasn’t true doesn’t really matter. What matters is that they didn’t care, because they weren’t gong to war because of the evidence, they were talking about the evidence because they wanted to go to war.

Talking to Deathists

I don’t know you but I love you

Hang in there buddy

There’s going to be plenty of room on the lifeboat for everybody

You just have to hang in there

You don’t have to die

I’m in love with this reaction to the 2015 British election

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/08/election-2015-stuart-heritage-nine-reasons-to-be-cheerful

It’s so great.

Key passage:

We’ve all learned a very important lesson about disappointment

Nobody in life gets everything they want, and realising this is what stops us from becoming entitled. This is why we have pets as children, so that we can learn what it feels like when something we love dies. There’s a lot we can all take from this. Especially first-time voters. Get used to this feeling of heartbreak, kids. This is literally all there is, and none of it is good, and then we die.

Also, we’ll all be dead soon!

We live on a coldly rotating speck in an ocean of total nothingness, and nothing we do can ever truly matter. All is blackness and abstract cruelty. There is no point to us, and soon we will be gone. The universe will spin on, oblivious.

Some pretty intense shit in the politics section. My condolences Britain!

What’s the deal with the political spectrum anyway?

I was just reading this Paul Krugman blog post in which he presents a very good explanation of why American politics looks the way it looks, in the context of describing why Rand Paul doesn’t have much of a constituency.

His point is that conservatism is the protection and promotion of traditional structures of authority and dominance. Men over women, white over black, native over immigrant, the security state over citizens, America over other countries, and of course the big one, rich over poor. Liberals (or leftists or progressives or whatever we’re calling that side of the political spectrum these days) are thus the opposite: those who support breaking down these traditional authority structures in the interest of building a better society. Thus, instead of a series of disconnected issues, politics is more unidimensional than you might expect. It’s surprisingly easy to predict someone’s position on the welfare state based on their position on abortion. It’s not about big government versus small government at all – conservatives are fine with using government to reinforce traditional values by banning abortion after all. It’s about how abortion gives women more ability to control their own sexuality and reproduction, rather than having it controlled by her husband, state, religion, or what have you. And of course no surprise that the welfare state is conservative’s biggest bugaboo of all these days – not only does it strengthen the position of the poor against the rich, it strengthens the position of the individual relative hir family / community by providing an alternative safety net.

So thinking about this definition reminded me of another great blog post I read a while back (yes, I read too many blog posts, but that’s not the issue right now!): A Thrive/Survive Theory of the Political Spectrum by Scott Alexander. He brings up a whole different, and also very compelling theory to explain the political spectrum: that conservative policies are geared towards a scary, hostile world, while liberal policies are geared towards a friendly and abundant world. Thus conservatives are pro-military, pro-police, pro-unity, and generally focused on helping yourself and your in-group to survive, and not expending limited resources to help outsiders. Basically, if an action makes sense in the context of a zombie apocalypse, conservatives are in favor. If it would be risky or get you killed in that scenario, they’re against. Leftists then are the opposite: anti-military, pro-dissent, pro-tolerance, in favor of giving aid to the less successful, etc. Basically policies that would make sense in a society where we are safe and have plenty of resources, and the main issue is how to organize ourselves and distribute those resources to maximize happiness and fulfillment for everybody.

This theory works nicely, because it helps explain why there has been a trend towards liberalism over time: the world is becoming safer and richer, so liberal policies are making steadily more sense. This is substantiated by exceptions to the onward march of human progress, say the fall of the Roman Empire, also being marked by retreats from ‘liberal’, tolerant values and towards a more conservative, hierarchical setup. I find that it also meshes well with Krugman’s theory: the established authority structures he describes developed back when the world was not nearly so friendly of a place. Pre-contraception and pre-antibiotics, there were some pretty compelling reasons to avoid pre-marital sex. Pre-gunpowder, it was a lot more possible for a rampaging barbarian army to roll in and ransack your whole country for anything that’s not nailed down – pretty solid reason to keep up the old warrior ethos. Pre-massive 20th century economic growth, there really weren’t enough resources to provide everyone with a decent lifestyle, so why bother with redistribution? Now we have all these structures that don’t make sense anymore in terms of benefiting most people (to the extent they ever did) but are still being pushed very hard by the minority that do benefit from, who as a result of benefiting, have a disproportionate amount of power to make their preferences heard.

So if you agree with me on all this and are on the left, pretty much carry on. Contribute to the onward march of human progress, try to push policy farther left, and just live with the arc of history being (incredibly) long but hopefully bending towards justice. If you’re a conservative, you might have more thinking to do.

How to compete with robots: work for free

A lot of people are worried about robots taking our jobs these days. It’s a valid worry so far as it goes, in that robots are indeed almost definitely going to take our jobs.

The thing is, in any sane society this would be great news. Freeing people from labor is a noble endeavor. The issue is that in our not particularly sane society, having a job is the main way that people acquire the resources needed for a decent lifestyle. This system needs to end. Whether it’s the basic income, or a more radical socialist transformation, it’s vital to get to the point where the average person can not just live, but live well, without any income from wages.

Some people worry that in this scenario people would be bored or unhappy because they’re not working. However, not receiving any income from wages doesn’t mean that you don’t do anything productive. Instead, we would see a gradual merger of work, play, hobbies, and volunteering. Pay would decline in the face of robot competition, and fewer and fewer people would bother to have paying ‘jobs’ at all rather than devoting themselves to their own interests. People would continue performing productive activities that are enjoyable enough to do without getting paid, while unenjoyable activities are taken over by machines. This is because in this scenario, there is exactly one way that humans could outcompete machines: price. Even if a machine is better in every way, so long as a human adds any value, they’re worth having if they work for free.

So that’s how I see the division of labor: humans handle the things we enjoy handling, robots handle the rest. Don’t fight automation; focus on the political challenge of making sure its fruits are shared equitably.