Links 2016-4-17

Counting past infinity is easy! It was the infinity raised to infinity and infinite number of times that I really got lost.

I’ve settled on the right way to show the date in these links posts: the international standard ISO-8601.  It’s about time since that has been the standard since 1988.

Niskanen center names social justice aware libertarianism as “neoclassical libertarianism“. I like this idea, as it’s strictly superior to progressivism, and I’ve been trying to come up with a good name for it. Scott Alexander called it left-libertarianism-ist, which just isn’t as catchy. Of course, maybe pure libertarianism is better, but neoclassical liberalism is far more politically palatable. It is also more “conservative”, meaning that it is closer to the status quo.

Merrick Garland would not be a good SCOTUS justice. Randy Barnett discusses with Reason why he opposes Garland’s nomination: he’s completely deferential to executive and legislative authority and does not protect individual rights from the state. Does it make sense for the Senate to not give him a hearing? Maybe, maybe not. Did it make sense to declare prior to his announcement that any candidate wouldn’t get a hearing? Hard to say; if that hard line approach made Obama nominate an old white guy who endorses state power in the name of national security, that’s certainly a win for neoconservatives. I don’t think anyone should take an outrage stance on the Supreme Court opening because this really is a complicated game theory situation with nested layers of strategy. Even though I’m sure he is one of the most un-libertarian nominees ever, it’s impossible to say if he would be worse than a Hillary appointee or even a Trump appointee.

How to fight the War on Drugs: hit their wallets. Legal marijuana causes Mexican drug cartel revenues to plummet. 

Heard through Slate Star Codex, anti-censorship blog Status 451 (linked in the sidebar) held a fund-raiser for LambdaConf, a functional programming conference I had no idea existed until a week ago. Apparently, after an anonymous analysis of submitted papers, the Lambdaconf organizers selected a paper to be presented at the conference by Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug, perhaps the most well known neo-reactionary.  Certainly I think neo-reactionaries are a bit nuts, but Mr. Yarvin has also invented the intriguing functional programming language Urbit. We don’t agree with him politically, we can learn and grow our knowledge by understanding what he has to say, especially in technological areas he is an expert in! Alas, as Eric S. Raymond recounts, the social justice movement did not see it that way and pressured LambdaConf to remove Yarvin from the event. Lambdaconf refused and the activists moved to forcing sponsors to drop out. Incredibly, Status 451 started an indiegogo campaign to save LambdaConf, which was funded within the day. This is a big victory for anyone who wants to live in a tolerant, knowledgeable, and free society, but if you want to know their motivations firsthand, please read what they have to say.  Status 451 are also true believers, calling out some on the right for their similarly censoring response.

Related in Not the Onion news: Emory vows to hunt down students who politically disagree with the Left.

Bryan Caplan on liberalizing expertise and the link with defending free speech from the attacks of economic licensing.

A great write up on derivatives, what they are, how they work, and why it’s misleading to suggest that the derivatives market has a quadrillion dollars in risk.

Another excellent reddit post, this one asking soldiers what things they don’t tell you about war. In short: the smell.

Apparently the music industry thinks the DMCA doesn’t do enough to stop copyright infringers (more on the RIAA at TorrentFreak). It seems they’d like to target the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA, the only parts of it that are useful. Techdirt has a great series of posts from the other side, detailing the many abuses of DMCA takedown notices. Right now, there is no legal check on whether a takedown request comes from someone who actually owns the copyright, or even if that copyrighted work is utilized fairly for criticism or commentary. This isn’t an easy problem to solve by any means, but we should remember that the point of copyright is to encourage production of new works, and if there’s anything that YouTube does right is making it easier to create new content. Moreover, it’s helpful to remember that YouTube is run at a loss of more than $150 million a year. Trying to force YouTube to pay for content policing is one of the dumber ideas they’ve ever had, which is saying something. So what should be done instead? A good start would be to make false copyright claims a criminal offense, and require you to prove you own the copyright in the claim.  It would also be good if it turned out your copyright claim was wrong, the ad-money would not go to the claiming part, but would be held in escrow until the dispute is resolved. This would allow YouTube to better focus on actual infringers and stop the torrent of false claims. Of course, another big looming problem for the RIAA is Facebook video, which doesn’t even have the semi-transparent (though flawed) takedown-notice system of YouTube.  Ultimately, given how little money YouTube makes after 10 years on the internet, if YouTube was allowed to be held liable for infringing uploads, YouTube would either go out of business, or cease becoming a free platform anyone could use. This would be a monumental failure of the copyright regime; yes, it might end up getting RIAA members more money, but that is not the purpose of copyright. Copyright exists to help make new content, not destroy content platforms.

California is raising its minimum wage, eventually to $15 an hour. FiveThirtyEight’s Ben Casselman is excited at least to get some data on large minimum wage hikes, although judging from the headlines, it seems like he thinks this is a good idea. I’m fairly confident it is not, and Matt Zwolinski makes one good point to support me: the minimum wage doesn’t fight poverty.  There’s a lot of data surrounding the minimum wage. And it’s apparent that unemployment does not automatically rise when minimum wage increases occur.  Nonetheless, longer term unemployment effects are essentially impossible to study, and it’s likely there are some effects on businesses. If businesses could absorb 20-40% increases in labor costs easily, then why aren’t businesses getting more out of their employees, or more firms entering the business due to excess profits? There is evidence of long term job growth being harmed, as well as higher prices (see last link).  Ultimately, I predict there will be negative consequences for California, but it’s hard to find something that is worth predicting. I could predict that California’s employment and workforce participation rate will be lower than the country average by more than they are now (check this in the future). It’s also likely that low cost goods will see price increases, but I don’t have an easy way to check that over the next five years.

Robin Hanson has a good thought experiment to show that most people don’t vote to change the outcomes of elections. This would explain why anyone votes at all, given the uselessness of voting generally.
GiveWell tries a new tactic to persuade more people to fund their top researched causes: ” First of all. Just so you understand, this guy is a total loser. He begged me to be his peer reviewer, I said ‘NO THANKS.’ Pathetic!”

Related: We can’t stop here, this is Cruz country!

Daniel J. Bernstein taking over crypto is good.

Links 2016-03-24

Scott Alexander has a new post on happiness and economic growth. There must be a name for this paradox, because it’s blindingly obvious if you think about it: Right now, compare your life to the life of 100 years ago, given your current standing in society. Your life right now is way better, you have time to spend on internet learning and debating about ideas in ways you couldn’t dream of 100 years ago. You have better food choices, longer life expectancy, better pop culture, more stimulating interests, far easier communication with distant relatives, and so on. And yet, the exact same thing will be said about our lives compared to the lives of those who live 100 years in the future. Sure, those lives will be better, but I don’t know how much that bothers us today unless we really think about it. Most people are pretty excited to live today at the frontier of human knowledge, and we don’t see it as a loss that we don’t have cheap self-driving cars and instant delivery groceries for low cost.

But yet, when you do think about it, we hate sitting in traffic or having to go to the store to pick something up, and we wish we had technologies that could get rid of those inconveniences. Yet, I bet people in the future will just have other errands they hate doing just like we hate sitting in traffic. But they will be inconveniences for future people who are tolerating them so that they can do even more awesome things that we can’t imagine, just like people 100 years didn’t sit in traffic because they didn’t own cars at all.

It’s very confusing. On a personal scale, obviously it would be ridiculous to complain about your current standing, because future technologies haven’t been invented yet. So of course everyone is pretty satisfied with what technology level they live in. Yet, our lives are obviously better for having these technologies. How do we reconcile this?

In the last month, I’ve often thought that the closest president we’ve had to Donald Trump is Andrew Jackson; Trump is a loud-mouthed, populist who falls outside of the mainstream party system, yet has significant support from non-elites and were despised by the elites themselves.  This is also the perfect description for Andrew Jackson, who was so successful in this movement, he founded the Democratic Party. David Friedman comes to the same conclusion via a different route.

That last link caused me to run into a real problem with Donald Trump and Andrew Jackson grammatically. One subject is dead and one is alive, so what is the proper verb tense to use? Stack Exchange suggested this, which is honestly kind of lame.

Scott Sumner discusses socialism and France. He makes a short argument that France sounds like a pretty good model country for modern socialism: high amount of skilled civil servants, broad support for socialist policies, a willing government to implement them, and a modern, developed economy.  Yet, Bernie Sanders supporters often reach for the Nordic countries rather than France as the big-welfare state (“socialist”) ideal.  Why is French socialist policy somewhat of a political flop, while Nordic countries are idealized? And would a Bernie-America look like Denmark or maybe better, or perhaps more like France, or even worse? Given the size and diversity of America’s population and economy, France seems closer than Denmark, although both are closer to each other than the US. The only socialistic countries of comparable size seem to be the China and the Soviet Union which have forms of socialism even Bernie Sanders would abhor. Mostly.

Do you have no friends? Never fear, it’s because really, really smart people are better off with few friends.

Bryan Caplan’s model of the Right and Left, and how it’s oddly doing well this election cycle.

Overcoming Bias discusses the cost and benefits of voting. How much would you pay to have your vote count more? His conclusion is that we don’t vote to change the outcome of the election.

Surprise! NSA data will soon be used for routine policing! Coverage from the New York Times, and the Massachusetts ACLU as well.

Bryan Caplan also has a good discussion of libertarian critiques of welfare.  Matt Zwolinski has a good counter post. I like the idea of bleeding heart libertarianism, or market liberalism or whatever, so I think Caplan’s critiques are pointed at exactly what I believe, which is excellent! You always want to have your beliefs critiqued by smart people. I think Caplan is right on many of his points, but I feel like my views are more politically practical. Voters obviously want some form of welfare for the poor, and at least that part could be done more efficiently with my ideas.

This is a good write up on the decentralized crypto-currency-ish entity Ethereum; Reason also did a recent video on it.   Very soon I’ll be able to explain to people what it actually does. Right after I’ve figured out how to install it.  If you want to learn about it without me, here is Ethereum’s website.

Fact checking Trump on trade. Why do we talk about trade deficits? I have no idea why they matter.  Is it a problem if I buy a phone from Apple and I live in New York instead of California? Is there now a trade deficit between New York and California since I sent money out of my local community? No, nobody cares. And for the US, it’s even less relevant, since those dollars that US citizens spent have to come back to the US to be redeemed for goods and services. It would be like if I paid for my iPhone in New York dollars that had to come back to New York. I’m a free trade proponent, but I’m not deaf to some concerns people might have about trade, but this is one of the worst anti-free trade arguments you could make.

Election 2016: Little To Look Forward To

In November, The Economist wrote “If the Republican campaign is to return to normality, it will do so in South Carolina” due to the state’s ability to filter out the unserious candidates.  We are now a month out from the South Carolina primary, and a lot could still happen, but if you’re one of the people who think the government should do less spying on citizens, less intervening in the market, and less mindless spending on the DoD procurement program, you’re in a for bad time: Trump is at 49% chance of winning, Cruz 18%, and Rubio 13%.

Continue reading Election 2016: Little To Look Forward To