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Legislator @travis4nh
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May 9 • 29 tweets • 5 min read
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Been thinking of TTRPG design and ruminating on the concept of "what are the units of play" ?
In music, the lowest level of abstraction is a finger movement. Literally where the finger is, how it moves, how it hammers or stretches or plucks a string.
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One level up from this you have the abstraction of "note", which sheds some of the complexity of the exact intonation of the sound, but simplifies a lot of details.
It's easier to describe a tune by listing the notes than the finger movements.
May 5 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
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both sides of this are wrong
social security isn't "running out", because there's no actual store of value that's being depleted
but no one was "stealing it", either, bc the revenue just went into the general gov budget
there are accounting concepts that make sense at the individual or household level, where the rest of the world is so huge, in comparison, that actions that you take basically have no effect ( you can sell ALL FOUR of your used cars without making the market price decline)
Apr 29 • 24 tweets • 7 min read
in fact trees do grow back
trees are a crop
you can extract 1 cord of wood per acre per year in perpetuity
Libertarianism and libertarians (as a community) are tedious beyond belief because they had a set of talking points and debates in 1975, and 50 years later they're still going in circles repeating the same mantras and bumper sticker slogans
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I tried to do two things w Aristillus:
(a) flesh out some of the details that have been discussed (e.g. by David Friedman, Vernor Vinge, etc), but never in as much detail as I went into
We EVOLVED, over the last 10-30,000 years, to get deep satisfaction off of (a) increasing skills and mastery, (b) improving our house and our land.
Videogames have hijacked this naturally evolved drive. They are a super stimulus... and they're bad.
Apr 12 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
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@octal was tweeting the other day about how boats (~80' yachts) should be cheaper, and this is something I've thought about a lot too.
The problem is that there's a feedback loop right now:
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(a) they're rare / low production numbers
(b) therefore they're all handmade
(c) since they're handmade, you might as well make them bespoke (infinite options, every one individually customized)
(d) this pushes price up
(e) high price feeds back into 'a'
Apr 7 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
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I'm more pro-free-trade than 99% of online RW twitter...but this is a deceptive description.
I am certainly open-minded to some phrases about the decentralized wisdom of markets, e.g. "markets realized that recycled copper was cheaper than newly mined", or whatever.
...but markets do not work in a vacuum, & we are 30 yrs downstream of a CONCERTED political project
Mar 28 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
"Underfunded" is a category error.
SS has always been a pay-as-you-go scheme. There's no fund that banks wealth (no could there be, as benefits are always paid in terms of labor - bookkeeping aside, the contributions are up front, and consumption is later.)
You are looking at the matte painting on a stage and noticing a thing: "Look, on the left building, the shadows are thus, but on the other building, they are otherwise"
I'd argue that there's no such thing as "the US", and to the degree that there is, there is a very specific process in the Constitution for creating obligations that bind future generations and administrations: the Senate votes by a 2/3 majority
- the DoD says "we want 3 more bushings."
- the contractor says "if you really really really want to buy them from us, we will have to spin up the factory again, which is mothballed. There's a $2M fee for that. After that, each bushing is $1. How many do you want?"
Feb 8 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
I'm on team @kitten_beloved here, and against friends @shlevy and @tracewoodgrains , because you have to WIN a war before you can rehabilitate and work with former enemies.
We gave West Germany some degree of autonomy in 1949, not in 1943.
I'd suggest that we don't have a boolean here, but a floating point.
The question is not "should we contemplate acting as brothers with our brothers?". Of course we should.
Jan 28 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
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I used to be taken in by this.
...then I realized that the same argument generalizes to "if our Ricardian comparative advantage is making gravel, then we should stop making our own jet fighters and missiles and nuclear warheads and just let China be our sole supplier..."
The argument assumes a lot of things:
(a) steady state / no chance of sudden policy changes
(b) good will from trading partners
(c) the value of optionality from having CAPABILITIES is zero
etc
Jan 20 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
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> if your hobby is woodworking, you're deciding *not* to do something technologically important.
My hobbies are woodworking and improving my land, and, yeah, I agree w this.
OTOH, I think that there's a lot to be said for investing in / revitalizing / passing down >>>
modes of human existence that are not optimized for max e/acc long-shot possibility.
I invested lots of hours per week on tech stuff in my 20s through 40s (regrettably none of it super-future-relevant, bc that was an era of building out web infrastructure etc), and now >>>
Jan 12 • 54 tweets • 12 min read
100% agreed about Sarris. One of the worst, most superficial, catty accounts.
This is actually super relevant to me as right now I'm working on the conlang created by two young dogs, one of whom is safely home in the Blue Phyle asteroid base, while the other one is forced by circumstances to move to the Orange Phyle, where he doesn't fit in and is bullied, until he's taken under the wing of a male dog schoolteacher who teaches him to fight the bullies. [ Ari 3 + 4 ]
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Sadly writing goes slowly, bc before I can write the next chapter I have to develop the conlang and before I do that I have to develop the morphemes and before I do that I have figure out the Great Consonant Shift, and before I do that I have to understand the IPA >>>
Dec 26, 2024 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
"We will REPLACE" ?!?
What the actual $%^& ?
I just totally and immediately flipped the bit on Razib ...and am pretty close to doing the same on all of his coethnics.
Why exactly should we let "we will replace" people into our country, society, or companies?
There is one thing that offends my autism beyond all other insults:
when there are two concepts, A and B, and two words for those, A' and B', and someone says A', and I say "no, that's not actually the case", and they respond
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"oh, I'm using the term rhetorically / poetically to indicate both A and B"
> On earth, the oldest rocks are deep down, but on the moon, the rocks and soil on the surface are older than what's deep down...
We have never drilled on the moon, so we have no data to suggest the above is true.
Jun 19, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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In isolation, yes. But it's a very modern thing, outside of its historical origin, and it's part of the "1619 project" which seeks to alter all of American history, and it's tied up in toppling monuments, etc.
It becomes much more ominous. It came out of nowhere, was made a federal holiday, is being incorrectly called "national independence day" (overwriting the actual independence day).
