My argument for UBI as one of the most important policy choices we can possibly make is that it not only achieves a huge amount of harm reduction, but it also opens up a huge amount of political power. With UBI, losing your job becomes much less scary. If that threat diminishes, people become far more willing to engage in activities like protests, unionizing, and general strikes.

My overall priorities would be;

• Voting reform
• UBI
• Wealth tax
• Free post-secondary education
• Head to toe healthcare
• End private home renting
• Crown corp telecoms
• Public transit

(In no particular order)

But of those I consider voting reform and UBI to be the ones that unlock the most political power among regular working people, which makes it easier to make everything else happen.

Science still doesn’t have the ability to calculate the quantities of drugs that were involved in making The Mighty Boosh. It’s like one of those irrational numbers or something.

End first past the post.

Every other goal becomes significantly more achievable if we do that.

Next immediate goal after that is UBI.

Americans, you gotta level with us… It’s a kink thing, right?

It has to be. It’s the only thing that makes sense. You’ve all got a massive humiliation kink and this guy is your dom daddy. He’s just out here every day inventing new ways to get you all off.

Oh god, the porous glass bridges.

So, Walter Block is a Libertarian economist with some pretty serious sounding credentials. Chair of economics at Loyola University, New Orleans, Senior fellow at the Ludwig Van Mises institute… Like, this guy isn’t a crank with a blog. He gets paid, and published.

And he wrote what is, among Libertarians, considered the seminal work on the privatization of roads and highways, a book called, no surprise, The Privatization of Roads and Highways.

Privatizing roads is a really funny gotcha to throw at any Libertarian you meet, because it’s basically an unsolvable problem. How do you have fair and free market competition for getting out of your driveway? Ask the average Libertarian about it and they’ll panic. Ask a Libertarian who’s been around other Libertarians long enough, and they’ll more likely retort by telling you to go read Walter Block’s book.

Now, I want to be clear; none of these people have actually read Block. It’s just an easy way to dismiss the question, because the average leftist isn’t going to read an entire textbook just to prove you wrong. But the reason I know they haven’t read Block is because I did, and everything he wrote is objectively insane.

The majority of the book is basically just an argument for why we should privatize roads (his argument is “Accidents will go down”, his source is “I made it up.”), but in the last third he addresses criticisms of his previous work on the subject, and in doing so is forced to address the practicalities. This is where Walter Block stumbles into an entire Battle City of trap cards. It’s… A long road (ba-dum, pssh) and someone like Dan Olsen could get an easy two hours out of the layers of insanity happening here, but basically Block ends up acknowledging that;

• It would probably be really bad if land ownership extended into the sky, because then a few land owners might be able to basically encircle a city and prevent any roads going in and out. So you need to be allowed to build over other people’s land. Not on it, but, you know… Bridges. Unsupported miles long bridges.
• It would probably be really bad if land ownership didn’t extend into the sky because then you could just build a bridge over someone’s farm and block all their sunlight and rainwater. Wait, no, that contradicts the previous point.
• OK, you’re allowed to build over other people’s land but everyone has a right to sunlight and rain so your bridge has to be transparent and porous. A glass bridge, full of holes for rainwater to sluice through. All the cars on it definitely won’t block any sunlight. They’ll, um, probably be made of glass too.
• Cities are a problem because you can’t just build a road next to someone else’s road. Because there are buildings there. No problem, just build on top of them. We’ve already established that building over other people’s property is OK. Why, you could probably have four or five companies all competing for your drive to the shops. Imagine it; four elevated highways stacked up over a street level road with the most insane corkscrew onramps feeding them.
• OK, there should probably be some rule about how close you can build to the people below you. A hundred feet sounds about right to Walter.

So now we have our inevitable outcome. The Libertarian answer to the question of competition in a market space where competition is functionally impossible; a quintuple decker porous glass highway extending 500 feet into the sky, each part of it built and maintained by a competing company, with no safety standards other than “You can sue someone if you die.”

This man is, I cannot emphasize this enough, considered to be a serious Libertarian economist, and Libertarian influencers cite his book as the treatise on this subject.

Who could possibly have seen this coming??!!!

Because they’re very stupid people.

That’s a reductive statement, but it’s basically the whole thing when you get right down to it. The entire rationalist movement - referring specifically to the Elizer Yudkowsky bastardization of the term here - is basically bad logic that appeals to people who think they’re smart, but aren’t actually smart enough to recognize it as bad logic. Elizer sells the fiction that smart people don’t actually have to trust in experts or commonly established scientific methods because they can just deduce all the answers to the universe by applying logic. This presumes some kind of inherent superpower of intelligence and effectively teaches it’s adherents to treat every presumption they make as scientific fact. This makes you very prone to reinforcing bad ideas, and makes you extremely vulnerable to scams that prey on your belief in your own intelligence. Crypto is the perfect version of such a scam.

There’s also a massive overlap between rationalists and libertarians because a fundamental belief in the supremacy of your own mind, with its attendant presumption that the vast majority of people are incredibly stupid because they don’t agree with you, tends to align very strongly with individualist philosophies. And of course, it takes a very special kind of stupid to believe that libertarianism - a school of thought that proposes that we privatize roads by building quadruple decker porous glass bridges, among other things - is actually a good idea.

This is why the cinnamon challenge is so difficult.

OK. And?

How do they get home? Go on, tell us.

How?

Literally, how should they do that? They’re on a boat, in an ocean. How should they go about the task of going home?

OK, but what you said was “Stop fighting for a pedophile and go home.”

That’s the misapprehension I was correcting. Now you’re just saying a completely different thing.

I remember there was this whole period where tech savvy Shadowrun GMs on Dumpshock were grappling endlessly with the “unrealistic” gameplay concessions that riddled the hacking rules and trying to come up with solutions that allowed for a balance of good gameplay and believable IT design.

And then reality just YOLO’d itself off a cliff of utter insanity and it turned out the rules were right all along.

The one thing none of us had accounted for was how incredibly stupid businesses are capable of being.

I’m honestly no longer convinced that some California tech company couldn’t sell the US military on a wirelessly connected grenade.

Is it an objectively stupid idea? Yes, absolutely. But then so is using Claude to run your strategic planning and they’re doing that, so I guess everything is on the fucking table now.

Otaku has essentially become a loan-word in English. It’s somewhat derogatory and generally used to refer to people who are really into anime and manga.

You’re uh… Way off. Good try though.

Putting aside specific etymology, what it means in common parlance is basically “nerd” with a heavy implication of “really into anime and manga.”

Buddy, I’m just going by what actual soldiers tell me.

That would either be insubordination, dereliction of duty, or going AWOL, depending on the exact context. All of those can buy you a court martial and potentially some time in military prison, as well as fines and other punishments.

You’ve probably heard at some point about people volunteering for deployments, which is a thing that happens, but only on a “Volunteers get first dibs” basis. If they don’t have the numbers they start tasking people and you absolutely do not get to say no. That’s why you swear an oath. It’s not a regular job, they own your ass. During actual conflicts like this they even get to keep people on after their contracts are up, if it’s required for “operational tempo.”

Oh, actually, here’s an additional fun fact (provided by one of the serving military members I showed your previous comments to, after they were done laughing their asses off); when you’re overseas on an operation you travel on a military passport, which is kept locked up by the orderlies, and even if you got it back somehow you’d need travel orders to use it. Airports will literally refuse to board you on the plane if you don’t have paperwork saying you’re not AWOL. It’s not only illegal for these guys to go home, it’s also basically impossible.

I’m genuinely shocked at how weak and incompetent the US Military has looked throughout this entire operation. Iraq and Afghanistan were shit shows, but the US was always able to handle the essentials of logistics and so on. The machine worked, it was just clumsy and hard to steer.

Somewhere in the gap between Afghanistan and Iran, that machine has been left without even basic maintenance.

You do realize that’s not actually an option right? Like, you can’t just quit the military. You can request your release, but they’re not gonna grant it until your ship gets cycled off of the operation and returns to a friendly port, and that’s assuming they grant it at all. They absolutely do not have to, and during an active military operation they’re extremely unlikely to.

Failing to feed your troops is one of the fastest ways possible to tank morale. Mail from home comes every few weeks. You eat three times a day.