tripu @tripu@qoto.org

Crema catalana!

#Calçots!

> _“Like Hannah Arendt and George Orwell, Klemperer understood that the #totalitarianism of the right and the totalitarianism of the left had fundamentally similar characteristics. In particular, they loved to impose #newspeak on those they subjugated.”_

https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-treason-intellectuals-third-reich

At a Chinese pound shop. The sign reads: “God, don't unpack it” (sic).

@gasull

@thesquirrelfish

> _“‘There is no \*profit\* if we force capitalists to account for the negative impacts we allow them subsidize at our collective expense,’ is true with either phrasing. Can you clarify the difference you see here?”_

Imagine someone who owns shares of the most sustainable and ethical company possible. They manage to live off of those dividends (after paying all taxes). They are 100% a capitalist.

What negative externalities is that person causing merely by having helped launch that company and by contributing to keeping it afloat?

Or: imagine someone who owns a plot of land. They pay their taxes and keep the property well maintained. They rent it at a very reasonable price, and the land is being used for the most edifying and innocuous activities you can dream of. The tenants are happy with the deal, and so is the wider community. The owner manages to live off of that business (because they're making a profit). They are 110% a capitalist.

What negative externalities is the owner causing (not the tenants, not their employees, not their customers: _the owner_) that they're not roughly paying for already?

> _“I think you might be confusing feudalism, monarchy, etc with capitalism. Peasants were considered part of the land(ie not allowed to move, had few/no rights), so the majority lived closer to slavery than wage labor.”_

So what? I'm not confusing those ideas. And they're not mutually exclusive. Didn't feudal lords own _stuff_ (and yes, perhaps also people) and lived off of that property? Aren't rich members of royal families (ie, the monarchy) today also “capitalists”?

> _“The ownership of land was passed through war so that's a big distinction”_

How so? Nowhere in our definition we mentioned the origin of that property as relevant. When a country nowadays conquests new land by war, and an autocrat doles out the spoils to the oligarchy or to businessmen, aren't those new owners, and their heirs, “capitalists” just because their assets happened to be “passed through war”?

> _“They're a family business - that's collectively owned”_

Again: nowhere in our definition we excluded groups of relatives from the definition of “capitalists”. Someone who owns a company is a capitalist, but three siblings who collectively own a similar company are not?

The richest person on Earth is not a single person, but [a father and his five children (and previously also a grandfather)](https://www.forbes.com/profile/bernard-arnault/?list=billionaires). Ditto about [the 8th richest ~~person~~ family](https://www.forbes.com/profile/carlos-slim-helu/?list=billionaires). They're definitely “family businesses”. Aren't they capitalists?

> _“I never said work/labor had to be manual labor. Running a business is working.”_

Most of the richest capitalists in people's minds are running their own businesses. ie, they are “working” for them. They're being “paid” for that “labour” in shares (that go up in value). Are they not capitalists?

You see? That's why I was so obsessive about honing the definition of “capitalist” and about giving you every opportunity to fine-tune it to your liking. But even after agreeing on a definition you have to carve out strange caveats about “land obtained through war”, “family businesses” and owners who also “work running the business” to argue against my arguments — which has the side-effect of excluding from the definition of “capitalist” a lot of definitely-capitalist people such as Nazi and Russian businessmen, rich family sagas, and rich founders who are still running the businesses they created.

> _“I don't think cars benefit everyone, I think many people only own cars because it's no longer safe or practical for them to get around their communities because so many other people have cars. For those people cars have just become another form of taxation - a toll to use the transportation infrastructure.”_

Too many cars and bad road planning is the result of coordination problems and bad incentives. Like so many other issues. That doesn't mean that people who decide to own a car don't benefit from owning one. Once the situation is what it is, of course owning a car is a net benefit for the vast majority of people who make that decision. Two or three billion people don't opt in _voluntarily_ to a tax or a toll — unless they deem the benefits will outweigh those costs. Thus, a net benefit for them.

> _“Your quality of life goes up now that you have a car. My quality of life goes down as traffic noise drowns out bird song, and neighborhood conversation, and never meeting my great grandmother because she was killed crossing the street. Quality of life measurements are hard to describe.”_

I think the best measure of quality (and quantity) of life we have is [QALY](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year). I propose we use that.

> _“When a kid dies it hurts a lot of people - not just immediate family but parents of kids similar aged feel it, the kids friends, other members of the community, etc.”_

Again, I think you lack the imagination to list _all_ (positive) impacts of cars.

You evoke very touching scenes (grandmothers and kids being killed) to argue against cars, but fail to imagine how many people would be dead, sick, or never born in the first place if not for cars. Ambulances are cars and they save lives. Private cars work as ambulances, too. Many people get an education, access distant jobs, date other people, spend time with friends, travel to other countries, go to meetings — using cars. Many people are simply happier because their car enables them to do X, and that _also_ is “quality of life”.

> _“Your claim of net benefit is unsupported”_

Then so is your claim of a net bad.

This is what I (and most people) see: a) most families in the world who can afford a car decide to own one; b) society values cars as a whole; c) no government ever _dreamt_ of banning cars or even suggesting to do so; d) there's a positive correlation between time (History progressing) and development and prosperity indices on the one hand, and rate of car ownership on the other (ie, more cars per capita higher average QALY). What you suggest flies against all these observations.

> _“I used California indigenous peoples - Chumash and Karuk - as examples because this has been really well documented. California indigenous peoples had systems of healthy fire (among other practices) which created what was described as a paradise by arriving colonizers. The colonizers stopped those practices and the forests and other ecosystems became less healthy - megafires, clogged underbrush, pest prevalence, etc. Now we are currently working to begin those healthy practices again with guidance of the Karuk who kept that traditional knowledge alive.”_

“Healthy fires” sound great, and I agree it's probably something they did (do) better. But it's telling that that's the one thing you can cite to support your claim that those people live better than we do in developed countries. When discussing human well-being (measuring QALYs), what weigh should we give to the section “better management of wildfires”?

Much more than “healthy fires”, I'm interested in trivial and inconsequential indicators such as: do the Chumash and Karuk know what an appendicitis is and how to treat it, or do people die of that? (Remember: _“when a kid dies it hurts a lot of people - not just immediate family but…”_. Do Chumash and Karuk children die less, or more often than children in Switzerland? Shouldn't that be METRIC NUMBER ONE?) Or: can they all read and write, and are they keeping a record of their knowledge that any member can access? Are they democratic? Do both sexes have the same rights under the law? Antibiotics? Anaesthesia? Birth control?

> _“Historically they were doing way better on all those measures than the colonists who pushed them off.”_

I very much doubt that. Almost by definition, peoples who have technology, wealth, and institutions good enough _to travel to another continent, explore unknown lands and use those new resources_ are definitely “doing way better” than peoples who are stuck in the same patch of land for centuries and who don't stand a chance against those “colonisers”.

But admitting that was so, for the sake of the argument: what about _now_? Do you think that if the native Americans had never seen a European person, they would be by now sending probes out of the galaxy, screening human embryos for diseases, and organised in liberal democracies?

> _“They are making the people who still live in these sustainable communities sick and killing them directly. Saying 'oh the people who are not acting like capitalists aren't as healthy as capitalists', when they're actually being poisoned by capitalists.”_

The miserable conditions I mentioned (a child dying of a disease that is routinely cured in the West, illiteracy, etc) are mostly orthogonal to Western companies polluting their environment. Again: if Chevron hadn't ever set foot in there, do you really think those people would be by now living on average well into their eighties like we do?

> _“Like literally people are dying”_

Yes. Also literally, people are saving their lives.

> _“As far as I know there's no attempts to save lives or mission to help people or anything positive here”_

You're wrong. Chevron's stated mission is [“to develop the affordable, reliable, ever-cleaner energy that enables human progress”](https://www.chevron.com/who-we-are/culture/the-chevron-way) because [“access to energy helps improve lives by driving human progress and enabling the benefits of modern society”](https://www.chevron.com/who-we-are). We can be as cynical about that as we want, and of course I don't take that at face value. But even if their energy is not remotely as “clean” as we would wish, it's true that _not having their energy at all_ would be worse than the current situation.

> _“The world would absolutely be a better place if [companies like Chevron] vanished tonight”_

With all due respect: I think you lack the imagination to visualise how your life would become a nightmare if fossil-fuel companies vanished tonight. [Fossil fuel accounts for 84% of the energy produced in the world](https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix#how-much-of-global-energy-comes-from-low-carbon-sources). Eighty-four percent. Imagine living with _less than a fifth_ of the energy you have today, and make sure you account for all the products and services you consume, either directly or indirectly. And you and I would be among the lucky ones: [the energy mix in poor countries is even more skewed towards fossil fuels](https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix#which-countries-get-the-most-energy-from-low-carbon-sources). It would take _decades_ to get renewables up to the task of making up for that, our lives would be miserable in the meantime, and the whole process would be further delayed by immense humanitarian crises and wars that would surely happen as a consequence. As it is today, [fuel prices rising leads to famine](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/20/global-energy-crisis-famine-production); just imagine if there were _no fossil fuel at all_ (ie, if Chevron and the like didn't even exist).

@gasull

Now seriously: don't you think there's an upper bound to “muscle growth that is healthy”? Of course excluding drugs. Don't you think that the most massive bodybuilder in the world who never took drugs, whoever that may be, would be healthier and have a higher life expectancy _if they had stopped growing muscle at some point earlier in their career_?

In any case, it's very gay :)

This!

https://collabfund.com/blog/long-term-news/

#news #theNews #media #progress #wellbeing #EA #EffectiveAltruism

@gasull

Yest. But building the largerest muscles is unhealthy. And very gay.

Bodybuilding is so gay. I don't mean the pursuit of fitness, strength training or weight lifting. I mean bodybuilding.

I feel vindicated about alcohol:

_Any amount_ is bad (carcinogenic) — even small amounts or “moderate consumption”.

_Any type_ is bad — including red wine.

If “moderate consumption” of some types of #alcohol (like red #wine) is considered “good” merely because it's a source of “nutrients” (antioxidants, polyphenols), then virtually any food or beverage must be considered “good” too (potato chips have potassium and sodium, a cheeseburger with bacon has a lot of iron, a chocolate candy provides fiber, etc). Do you drink a bit of red wine because “it's good for you”? Then switch to nuts and berries: you'll get more antioxidants and polyphenols!

Let's be honest and consume #drugs (like alcohol) because wee seek their mind-altering properties. Don't be hypocrites about their “nutritional” properties.

https://www.who.int/europe/publications/m/item/alcohol-and-cancer-in-the-european-union-a-call-to-action

#Denia, Alicante, #Spain — five days last week

I often download #books (and rarely also films) simply because I can't buy what I want #DRM-free and in an open format. I always had the intuition I was justified in doing so, but now thanks to @pluralistic I know there's a perfect moral argument to support this practice:

> _“If buying isn't owning, #piracy isn't stealing”_

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

#fuckDRM

The idea of being bored in #Tokyo after a couple of days there

Note to self:

https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/animal-farm