Maaruin

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
brave-little-avocado-toaster
maaruin

During the middle ages a king’s or emperor’s coronation would contain gifts to the common people. Like literally throwing coins into the crowd. So I say each citizen of the Commonwealth Realm should be given £1000 as a show of King Charles’ III generosity.

thathopeyetlives

Unfortunate fact:

Various negative outcomes related to this, such as inflated expectations, limited supplies, and riots provoked by those problems, have been a factor in at least one revolution.

maaruin

Which revolution are you thinking about?

I can certainly see those problems arising, but I would think in most cases a monarchy that takes care to display the king’s generosity is less susceptible to revolution than one that doesn’t.

brave-little-avocado-toaster

Sounds like they are referring to the Khodynka Field Tragedy at the coronation of Nicholas II. Not an immediately inciting cause of the Russian Revolution, but definitely lost a lot of popular goodwill for the new Tsar, so reasonable to say it was a contributing factor.

maaruin

now that I have read up on it, that was a really tragic incident. I suppose what really damaged Nicholas‘ reputation were some of his actions afterwards. But reacting appropriately to tragedy as a leader is always challenge.

history monarchy
thathopeyetlives
maaruin

During the middle ages a king’s or emperor’s coronation would contain gifts to the common people. Like literally throwing coins into the crowd. So I say each citizen of the Commonwealth Realm should be given £1000 as a show of King Charles’ III generosity.

thathopeyetlives

Unfortunate fact:

Various negative outcomes related to this, such as inflated expectations, limited supplies, and riots provoked by those problems, have been a factor in at least one revolution.

maaruin

Which revolution are you thinking about?

I can certainly see those problems arising, but I would think in most cases a monarchy that takes care to display the king’s generosity is less susceptible to revolution than one that doesn’t.

monarchy

When in the US elections more results came in over the course of the evening and the count switched from the right-wing candidate to the left-wing candidate, right-wingers said it was fake votes and the left was manipulating the election result.

When in the Brazilian elections more results came in over the course of the evening and the count switched from the right-wing candidate to the left-wing candidate, right-wingers said it was fake votes and the left was manipulating the election result.

So now I am wondering, if in the Turkish election more results came in over the course of the evening and the count switched from the right-wing candidate to the left-wing candidate, will right-wingers say the same thing again? Or would it be too unbelieveable when it is Erdoğan instead of Trump or Bolsonaro?

politics us politics brazilian politics turkish politics (of course it weren't all right-wingers who claimed such things in the previous examples and i honestly don't know how common such claimes were with bolsonaro's loss)

“And if the students that want to take courses on the ancient world are vulnerable to hateful ideologies, that’s *more* reason to offer the courses, not less. Better they get their Roman history from an expert, rather than some twisted, fashy version.“

history education politics
magnetoisright
what-even-is-thiss

No matter your gender or sexual preferences you are never 100% safe from Zeus. He’s been known to kidnap boys, disguise himself as peoples husbands, disguise himself as women, turn himself into random animals to catch people, turn himself into a golden shower to get into a jail cell, create huge storms in order to hide what he’s doing, among other things. He’s more often into women, and more often upfront about his intentions, but if you’re in mythological Greece the chances of you having had sex with Zeus and not knowing it is never completely zero no matter who you are.

jezebelgoldstone

"oh" you think "well that's easy, i just won't have any sex at all" you think

hey. hey, you remember that unprecedented wet dream you had a few nights ago?

what-even-is-thiss

Like I said. Shower of gold from the heavens. You been hit by any random golden sunbeams shining through the clouds recently? Period late after that? Live in mythological Greece? Might wanna take a pregnancy test.

what-even-is-thiss

image

You think Zeus cares about that even a little bit?

maaruin

What if there is a prophecy that my son will be greater than his father?

greek mythology that‘s a high risk thing though might get zeus of your back or it might cause him to eat you zeus thetis metis
tanadrin
official-kircheis

pricing scarce goods at a low value doesn’t make them more abundant, but it does make them cheaper,

disagree, it means you have to pay (partially or wholly) with something other than money like time or social capital. alternatively, in a lottery, you are not buying a PS5, but some percentage of a PS5 in expectation

tanadrin

at worst, then, you could consider it a wash between different unfair systems of distribution, since who has more time or social capital to spend is not any more or less arbitrary than who has more wealth. my point isn’t that markets are a terrible system of distribution (they have their uses) just that they’re not particularly fair, and people’s moral intuitions in that regard shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

apollopigeon

I don’t know if this is true or it’s just the case that markets are frequently debated and so their flaws are well known and come to mind more readily. Allocating resources by time tends to systemically benefit certain groups in the same if not worse ways. This exact issue comes up in my local community board debates about parking.
There is a huge mismatch between the supply and demand for on street parking in Manhattan. Right now it’s almost entirely allocated by who has the most time to drive around looking for a spot and who can move their cars for the twice weekly alternate side of the street cleanings. (Metered parking is only on the avenues, the side streets that make up the majority of curb space are first come first serve).
There has been a push by the pro urbanist crowd to price curbside parking. Arguably that benefits people with money and is less fair than the first come first served model.
My wife and I have a six month old baby that she wants to spend as much time as possible with. She’s also a doctor and works long, irregular hours. I think most people would agree she is a more sympathetic figure than a retiree who uses their car once per week to drive to their country house. But the system of allocating parking by time effectively prices out our family to the benefit of the second home retiree (if you think I’m cherry picking an unusually unsympathetic group here, a lot of people who fit this exact description show up at every meeting to defend their free parking.)
I think people don’t have the same intuitions about the unfairness of queue based allocation mostly just because most things are allocated by the market now, not because it actually is more fair.

tanadrin

i know it’s not your point, but part of the problem with this specific situation is that there are too many cars in big cities like Manhattan! there is never going to be enough parking without better transit and congestion charges

jadagul

This isn't wrong but I think it is dodging the point, right?

Like yes, there are too many cars in Manhattan, because there isn’t enough streets and parking for the number of cars in Manhattan, because building streets and parking is hard and expensive and in some ways impossible.

There also aren’t enough PS5s, because building more PS5s is hard and expensive and in some cases impossible (because of chip shortages).  Which is why we charge for PS5s, as well as parking.  (In Fully Automatic Luxury Space Communism, everyone will get a PS17 for free, because there won’t be any shortages.)

But we have to allocate through shortages somehow.  Raising the price allocates in favor of people who have more money; allowing shortages allocates in favor of people who have more time.  (Explicit rationing mandates equality, but mandates it maybe more than anyone really wants; I don’t actually want Taylor Swift concert tickets.)  Your call which of those groups is “more sympathetic” but it probably depends on the details!  And on, like, which specific goods and which specific subgroups; as apollopigeon points out, rich retirees have a lot of time.  

(This is a common argument mooted for why, like, concert tickets want to underprice; partly that being sold out is good, but also that you want to invest in an enduring relationship with, like, teenagers, who are much richer in time than in money.)

I think the big argument in favor of price-rationing rather than queue-rationing is deadweight loss.  Sure, any allocation system will be unfair, and give more stuff to people rich in the allocand than people who are poor in it.  But in queue rationing, the people who don’t get the thing also have to pay!  A million people sit there refreshing the site to buy PS5s, and then only a hundred thousand of them get PS5s, but the other 900,000 still had to sit there refreshing and they still lose the time.  Or a hundred people stand in line for a concert, there are only fifty tickets, and the back of the line goes home empty-handed.

Whereas in price rationing, only the people who are actually buying the thing have to pay for it.  You don’t get a dollar auction where the losers in the bidding war also have to pay their bids.  So it’s less wasteful

The problem is that price-rationing is less egalitarian.  And the obvious, minimally-inefficient solution to that is to give poor people money.

tanadrin

i didn’t address the point of @apollopigeon’s reply bc i think the discussion kind of wandered away from my original point, which is just that ‘pricing mechanisms aren’t intrinsically fair, and people’s moral intuitions about scalpers and middlemen aren’t unreasonable (though they may be a bad basis for public policy’

a lot of the replies have focused on ways in which other mechanisms are also deficient, which felt orthogonal to the nuance i was trying to inject

(fwiw, i think that people’s moral intuitions matter , even if you’re not using them as the basis for public policy, because if you totally ignore people’s moral intuitions, the political aspects of your economic system can lose legitimacy, and people may (accurately) notice that policymakers aren’t interested in intervening to fix failures. that can lead to political pressure to implement potentially unwise but popular economic reforms (like price controls), or in the worst cases can even lead to your whole political economy collapsing, which is good for almost nobody

so even if you think markets are the best way to allocate almost everything, you probably need some mechanism of wealth redistribution to keep your society politically stable--and the harder you go in on the free market, the more aggressive that redistribution system needs to be. this was not lost on early liberal reformers, either: the thing that triggered the edwardian constitutional crisis in britain and ultimately led to the parliament act of 1911--which passed only bc the king threatened to create new liberal peers until the house of lords approved it--was that the liberals wanted aggressive taxation to fund social welfare, which was a program that both legitimized their free-market approach in other respects, and also sapped much of the power of the landed aristocracy. this was a rather canny move that later economically liberal political actors have failed to emulate, thinking they can have free markets without any kind of substantial wealth distribution, which is, i would argue, one reason for the rise of populist movements post-2008. that particular package of policies has sapped political legitimacy and people have sought alternatives,)

stoppedlurkingiguess

To be honest, this is pretty much where I think the utopian project (of ever wanting anything like a utopia) breaks down. You can push pretty hard on the free market and get economic efficiency, but it would be odd for a system optimized on efficiency to also be the most fair, and indeed it doesn't seem to work out that way.

So you have to have exceptions to have any support for the system. But as soon as you have exceptions, you start running into public choice issues and the fights start turning into who can get the unfair distribution most headed their own way.

And so you end up with far less increase of fairness than you "should" for a given loss of efficiency. And that's why every actual existing economy is both unfair and unforgivably stupid.

tanadrin

i mean, fair enough

i guess one response would be that as long as you want free markets and capitalism, you are consigning yourself to having a permanent category of people with wealth (and therefore political power) who are interested in increasing the size of that wealth at the expense of everybody else; and for historical reasons, their self-interested (even outright rent-seeking) behavior has an extensive ideological justification that’s pretty powerful, called “conservatism”

and i think one category of response would be “forcefully dispossess the capitalists and switch to a command economy.” i think (barring interesting conceptual stuff like in Red Plenty) command economies don’t seem particularly workable. but i also think that category of response misses the possibility of market mechanisms that also aren’t especially capitalist in flavor. coops and worker owned enterprises and democratic models of corporate governance--things which are emphatically not command economies, which still participate in (even require) markets, and which are in some ways just kooky experiments in corporate governance

and those solutions converge with solutions in the neighborhood of “what if we just added a basic income and four day workweek and universal healthcare and other reforms like that to the current system” in the muddy territory between social democracy and democratic socialism that, if pursued aggressively enough, may not be Utopia in the truest sense, but which seems like it would be a damned fine improvement on the status quo! of course, if you’re an ideological purist opposed fundamentally to markets of any sort, or an anarcho-capitalist opposed to anything but unfettered free markets, this won’t be a satisfying solution. but most people are neither of those, thankfully.

long discussion posts i'd say i broadly share the attitude of the last paragraph capitalism socialism social democracy markets politics economics
echofromtheabyss
skaldish

Still bothered by the US cultural idea that men can only be non-romantically intimate with one another in war-like or competitive circumstances.

skaldish

I'm pretty quiet about the fact I'm a transman usually, but holy shit I need to tell you about the culture shock I'm going through because it's blindsiding me.

There's a huge sense of social isolation that comes with being perceived as male, because now people are subconsciously treating me as a potential predator. All strangers, no matter their gender, keep their guard up around me.

It made me realize that there is no inherent camaraderie in male socialization as there is in female socialization—unless, of course, it's in very specific environments. And the fact I don't amnbiently experience this mutual kinship in basic exchanges anymore is an insanely lonely feeling.

You know how badly this would have fucked my mind up if I had grown up with this?

skaldish

It is 4:30am and I'm mourning the loss of a privilege I didn't even know I had.

skaldish

Anyway, I'm going to figure out how to navigate this. Don't know how yet, but I'm gonna.

skaldish

image

Absolutely, because it's an extremely sticky issue.

Frankly, this is something I would've never understood without living the experience.

It's now blatantly clear to me that most cis men probably experience chronic emotional malnutrition. They're deprived of social connection just enough for it to seriously fuck with their psyches, but not enough for them to realize that it's happening and what's causing it.

It's like they're starving, but don't know this because they've always been served 3 meals...except those meals have never been big enough.

This deprivation comes from all sides of aisle, by the way.

In the case of women: When I'm out in public and interact with women, all of them come off as incredibly aloof, cold, and mirthless. I have never experienced this before even though I know exactly what this composure is—the armor that keeps away creepy-ass men.

As someone who used to wear it myself, I know this armor is 100% impersonal. Nobody likes wearing it, and I can say with absolute certainty that women would dump the armor in favor of unconditional companionship with men if doing this didn't run the risk of actual assault. (Trust me when I say women aren't just being needlessly guarded.)

But I only have a complete understanding of this context because I've experienced female socialization. If I hadn't, I would've thought this coldness was a conspiracy against me devised by roughly half of the human population. Even now, with all that I know about navigating the world as a woman, I'm failing to convince my monkey-brain that this armor isn't social rejection.

And as for male socialization? Again, it seems taboo for a man to be platonically intimate with men for reasons I have yet to fully understand, but I think it boils down to a) the fact society teaches boys that it's not okay to be soft with each other, and b) garden-variety homophobia. Our media only shows men being intimate with one another when they're teamed up against a dire situation, and I'd bet real money it's a huge reason why men gravitate toward activities that simulate being teamed up against an opposing force.

But men are not machines of war. Yes, testosterone absolutely gives you Dumb Bastard Brain, but that just makes you want to skateboard a wagon down a hill or duct-tape your friend to the wall, not kill someone.

The human species looks so much colder standing from this side.

I can see how men might convince themselves that their feelings of emotional desperation is personal weakness as opposed to a symptom they're all experiencing from Western* Imperialism. Because this human connection, this frith, is as essential for our wellbeing as water is.

So sick. How sick. I want to destroy this garbage.

* EDIT: Had this written as “White Imperialism” originally, but a few people interpreted this as me blaming a group of people as opposed to a system, so I’ve changed this for clarity.

archangelbeth

(And from this, no doubt, springs glomming onto "a smile! She likes me! It's love at first sight!" & other "my girlfriend is my only emotional support" issues that plague cis het guys.)

(…I dunno how to address this without, I guess, making sure that little boys get to hug all their friends platonically, and viciously guarding a social group where platonic hugs are something people can do without either pressure or derision. So maybe the next generation has a chance at being a little less broken.)

talestobetold

As a transfem, leaving this is pretty interesting as well. The camaraderie and emotional closeness female friends have with each other was *intoxicating* at first. I chalked it up to gender euphoria then, and that was definitely an element, but this was probably just as big of a factor.

Using the same analogy, it’s like not only being served full meals for the first time, but also like being given the option of ordering dessert for the first time. Of *course* you’re going to want to order everything on the menu every day. It’s new and it addresses that hunger you’ve always had and it tastes so good.

But then there’s the perception of creepiness. The idea that you’re only doing this to lower women’s boundaries and take advantage of them in some way. If you seem to excited too have your desserts, it’s implied that you’re only at this table so you can steal desserts that aren’t yours. And nobody wants to be that person.

So you keep starving yourself a little. You sit at the right table but don’t eat all your food. You only accept dessert when offered, never off the menu. You might not starve, but you’re so rarely full, if ever. And no matter how hungry you are, you have to keep an eye on how fast everyone else is eating to make sure you’re never eating the fastest. That’s a quick way to getting kicked out of the girl’s table.

fierceawakening

"But I only have a complete understanding of this context because I've experienced female socialization. If I hadn't, I would've thought this coldness was a conspiracy against me devised by roughly half of the human population. Even now, with all that I know about navigating the world as a woman, I'm failing to convince my monkey-brain that this armor isn't social rejection."

This explains A LOT about how some men act, not gonna lie.

maaruin

Some speculation on what the reason for this emotional coldness both between men and between men and women is: Maybe it is (in part) because the social expectation is that romantic and/or sexual interest must be communicated indirectly. But many people don’t know how to distinguish emotional intimacy/friendliness/bodily contact etc. from giving someone “hints”. So if you want to avoid giving someone the impression that you are into them, or avoid giving someone the impression that you are open to their advances, better keep your distance. And, I mean, not wanting to accidentally give off or show yourself receptive to romantic signals is perfectly legitimate.

Sports and war as situations where intimacy between men is acceptable work because in those situations it is clear that the reason for the emotions is something external and not the other person.

I don’t think we can fix the lack of platonic intimacy without fixing this communication problem in romance.

social norms
northshorewave
10-325

Saw a dude wearing a shirt that said “BEAST MODE ON/OFF” with the “ON” indicated and for a split second I thought it was pointing to “OFF” and i was like thats fucking insane

wetorturedsomefolks

this would be such an awesome shirt honestly. like count yourselves lucky motherfuckers, im not even in beast mode right now. dont push me or i'll go home and change into my other shirt

10-325

You fuck with a dude and he just wordlessly removes that shirt and pulls out the ON shirt

i don't know how to tag this