Notices by George Budd (gbudd@qoto.org)

@freemo Thanks for all your hard work on this!

@freemo The problem is that “better” has so many dimensions as to make it mean whatever someone wants.

On one hand, it’s a lot more expensive to get a house or college degree than it was 20 or 40 years ago, on the other hand we’ve got access to information and entertainment that would be unimaginable 40 years ago. Not to mention the safety improvements you mention.

@freemo Practically there’s no difference who I vote for in NJ so I could always write someone in.

On the other hand, it’s arguable that that strategy in the aggregate gave us Bush 2 and Trump. Gore and Hillary Clinton should have just earned the majority outright but while it’s impossible to know what would have happened but I’d say that those two losses produced some pretty awful consequences.

@freemo It’s possible, but since the Bull Moose party in 1912 it doesn’t look like a third party has gotten a significant share of the vote and the Whigs appear to have disappeared in 1860 or so.

I’m seeing Kennedy, Stein, and West as third party candidates (with apologies to any I’m missing), I can’t say I’m affirmatively enthused about any of them. None of them are likely to crack 5% unless something dramatically changes.

In a normal year, where there were just two candidates that I didn’t like I’d be more inclined to vote third party (and I have in the past). For me (and speaking only for me) Biden / Trump is a choice between bad and catastrophic. My personal judgment is that I’d prefer bad over catastrophic but everyone gets to make that choice for themselves.

None of that is to tell anyone else what to do or how to vote, it’s just my thought process.

@freemo I agree that it’s a shared delusion (as are many things that make a society, like money for example). It’s definitely a system that keeps the two parties in power and that’s why they fight things like ranked choice voting.

@freemo That would be fine if we did ranked choice voting but today my meaningful choices are going to be between Biden and Trump. For me that’s not a close call, I’ll vote for Biden any day over Trump (with all respect to your first hand and well earned loathing of Biden).

I would really like ranked choice voting to take off so we could meaningfully vote for third-party candidates as our first choice but we’re not there yet

@freemo That’s not unreasonable in a vacuum. It’s certainly true that I wish I had somehow done something concrete to somehow meaningfully create a different alternative but at the moment what I’m capable of doing is voting for what I believe to be the less awful alternative. (I do spend a fair bit of time trying to improve my local world but it’s more about EMS than creating political change)

@freemo I totally understand the choice you’re trying to get people to make. I wish there were a candidate I’d like to win but there’s definitely a candidate I particularly want to lose (I think Obama was the only presidential candidate that I affirmatively wanted to win rather than voting for someone because I wanted the other candidate to lose )

@freemo @peterdrake Thanks for taking this on and making it run more and more smoothly!

@freemo @BlueWaver22 It seems to vary a lot, but it is interesting how we’ve become inured to flu deaths and are well on our way to being inured to covid-19 deaths.

As a species we are really good at getting used to all manner of things

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html#:~:text=CDC%20estimates%20that%20flu%20has,annually%20between%202010%20and%202022.

@freemo Your CAPTCHA should require that they write in LaTeX

@freemo @mjambon Thanks! (I missed it upthread)

@mjambon @freemo I don’t find it’s usable for that use case (though there’s probably someone who’s written something to do it), I really like that it works well with source control and that I can write code to programmatically generate pieces of the document. But yeah for real-time collaboration I’d probably use something else.

@freemo The LaTeX requirement will definitely thin the herd! (I really like LaTeX right up until I need to collaborate with someone that doesn’t use it)

@freemo I should clarify a bit too.

When I’m out as an EMT it’s a relatively bright line. If they’re competent (alert and oriented, not a threat to themselves or others, over 18) they get to refuse medical attention. We might try to convince them but at the end of the day they get to choose.

There are calls where that feels crappy but at least we have a decision making framework to fall back on.

@freemo That’s a really interesting question! Putting my EMT hat on, if they’re competent they get to refuse an intervention but in practice those are hard calls.

More generally it kind of depends on other factors. For example, do you let someone ignore a mandatory evacuation knowing they may want to be rescued later at greater risk to all concerned?

It’s a thought provoking question. I’d lean towards answering “Yes” in the abstract and mostly in practice but I’m willing to believe there are circumstances where I’d be open to “No” and I can’t come up with a consistent limiting principle.

@freemo @mk

I mostly agree with your original point that on the macro level that wealth isn’t a zero sum game (though it can certainly be a lot closer to one within a company).

Saying that the existence of rich people isn’t a red flag is a different and interesting argument, but I don’t want to hijack your thread

@freemo @mk

It’s might not strictly be a zero sum within a company (presumably it’s value goes up and down) and sure, a company can increase its value and we would typically expect that gain (or loss) to be sent to the owners of that company.

On the employee level it feels like it’s closer to zero sum though, and maybe that’s just a perception thing. While relative CEO pay has gone up over the years I guess you can’t necessarily disentangle whether that increase comes out of the pool of wages available to all employees or whether it’s coming out of the pool of money that could be going back to investors. I guess I should go see if economists have any papers on that