“It takes a village” was a line adopted by Hillary Clinton and the title of one of her many books. Conservatives hated it, because they read it as Nanny State Socialism.

The rebuttal was “It takes a family”, with a heavy emphasis on stripping aid and punishing “Welfare Queen” single-mothers, extended family, and other community-based welfare groups. Instead, starting with Reagan and really hitting a high water market with Bush Jr, the conservative focus was on “Faith Based Initiatives”, through which religious institutions could tap into federal and state money to provide services as a benefit of church membership. More radical conservative states also pushed for Covenant Marriage, which sought to contractually prohibit divorce. And then there was the fixation on anti-abortion measures, which conservatives believed would discourage casual sex and force more pregnant women into marriage contracts and church membership rolls.

I’ve seen quite a few. The box office numbers are regularly better than they should be.

Givewell, for instance, publishes their findings as spreadsheets and lets you set weights on different aspects of human experience you consider to be good or bad.

This is still a fixation on an individual subjective human perspective. Which is a bit confusing, given that the EA manifesto explicitly leans on Bayesian statistical analysis. The end result is a round peg (perceptions and emotional priors) being shoved into a square hole (hard numerical figures). It also isn’t effective as a policy guide, because the layman fiddling with weights on a spreadsheet still doesn’t have any actual control over the scale of political economy that a government or a mega-millionaire commands.

This is also just objectively not true and suggests to me you’ve never even talked to an effective altruist.

We’re running into a Jordan Peterson line of argument, wherein “you just don’t understand my line of thinking” is used to dismiss critiques you’re not equipped to rebut.

Can I counter with “You’ve never even talked to a non-effective altruist?” and conclude you’ve been too cloistered to explore ideas outside the EA space? Or would you consider that a personal attack rather than a statistically informed observation?

horrible suffering, such as the kinds of suffering caused by easily-preventable illnesses, is much worse than any of the subtle and varied experiences of a good life

This isn’t either/or. You can go back to the old Bill Gates plan to mitigate overpopulation in the third world. He initially tried to push out contraception to the local populations of communities he’d hoped lower birthrates would help. Instead, what he discovered was routine vaccination and standard modernized health care drastically reduced infant mortality and resulted in parents choosing to have fewer kids as a result.

In hindsight, we discovered similar patterns of behavior across the US and Europe, Latin America, India, and China. But as a knock-on effect, we’ve seen the US/EU focus so exclusively on disease mitigation as a strategy for improving relations in countries they wish to ally with that they neglect their domestic populations (who are comparatively much wealthier, but see the foreign aid as coming at their expense). The iterative result has been a series of claw-backs of positive disease mitigation policy by a popular media that’s vilified the very act of disease mitigation and denigrated the people who received it as subhuman. And the true irony of the affair is in how many of these popular media institutions are owned and operated by self-proclaimed EAs.

The EA strategy of trying to decouple and distill policies into their individual components, then min-max solutions at a spreadsheet level, have produced a backlash their narrow focus failed to anticipate.

I think this should be taken evidence against charity being rooted in the need for a popular buy-in.

Until the AI wonderkin can fully divorce themselves from the public at-large, they’re going to need to rely on human labor and ingenuity to accomplish large, complex projects. The strongest card that EAs have to play is typically their ability to quickly roll up a highly educated, multi-talented workforce underneath them. Even then, they’re notoriously inefficient in their application of these skilled technicians.

But we’re already seeing the results of the Bullshit Jobs and Bullshit Bosses, as the bigger Tech companies stumble through the 2020s. Without people who want to work beside you on a project they are deeply invested in, the work slows down and the work product becomes flimsier and more ineffectual. In the end, you’re left with Bloomberg 2020 tier work, where you’ve got tens of thousands of people collecting a paycheck to do nothing.

I’m advocating for socialism, not charity.

Socialism requires a popular consensus to function. You can’t impose a collective project by executive fiat.

Broadly speaking? For the same reason every other state does. Continental unity opens up trade and travel, exploits economies of scale, and simplifies the legal system for interstate business and for civil rights purposes.

Specifically? Because federal coordination helps manage natural disasters (like wildfires) and centralize big programs life Medicare/SS and secures national defense (which California profits from handsomely).

Conservatives would actually call this a win for their side IMO.

Abstractly. But as soon as they see it happening in person, they begin frantically dialing the police.

That’s why Houston Food Not Bombs needed to get a court order forbidding the police for repeatedly ticketing them for no reason.

Noooo! You can’t! This is what they want!

As soon as people start throwing bricks at squad cars, the cops will use violence, a thing they certainly weren’t doing before now!

Then it’ll be your fault, the next time some power drunk, trigger happy, bloodthirsty, badged up serial killer assassinates another civilian waving a cardboard protest sign.

James Gunn generally knows what he’s doing and I’m sure the movie is fine.

But a film that cost $225M to produce and another $200M to market on a franchise that’s nearly a century old and has always been box office gold… If it doesn’t turn a cool $1B the studio will consider it a flop. That its cruising in to the box office third place behind Minecraft (predictably disappointing) and the Live Action Lilo & Stitch (Christ, Disney, just die already) is… eh. Not a great sign for The Movies generally speaking.

He really literally is Woke, though. In the way reactionaries mean it, too.

He’s a working class socialist refugee journalist who fights corrupt billionaires, sociopath AIs, and genocidal tyrants. He’s educated, open minded, egalitarian, and forgiving. The model liberal progressive.

I mean, its still a shit policy and it makes BlueSky worse.

Just not bad enough to do another platform migration, particularly to a platform nobody I know actually uses.

You’re not thinking enough like a grifter

I mean, its obviously a shit post. But I imagine spending a whole day doing fake interviews - 50 a day, five days a week, for a month - to make around $6k gross, and then tell yourself you can scale this up passively.