John Oyler

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• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  I've got to ask... it's been bugging me ever since this post went up. Am I misreading, Charlie, or are you really saying that you believe artificial general intelligence to be impossible? Sure, when I know that FTP is nothing...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  I suspect there may have been some really grotesquely stomach-churning culture from the north-east end of the Med 6000-plus years ago that predates writing, the culture and detailed traditions of which are otherwise lost to history. But bits of...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  I don't think I've ever heard the argument that there are too many people in Congress, and that more power has to be vested in fewer. I'm not sure how to respond to it. Also, you seem to somehow be...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  I don't think that's going to happen, but if it DID, I think it would fuck up the House even worse than it's already fucked up. It has no expiration clause like modern amendments. This alone suggests that it's...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  If one were truly interested in increasing the number of representatives in US Congress, there is a better way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Amendment This is an amendment that has already been put forth to the states for ratification... it has no sunset clause,...
• Commented on WTF
  Has anyone considered that Russia/Putin has been dicking around in Zaporizhzhia in a very non-strategic way? Sure, cruelty is a given, even cruelty that goes so far as to undermine their strategic goals. But it feels odd that they are...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  Charlie, I just saw the headline a few hours ago about the UK Supreme Court ruling that Scotland can't have another referendum on independence. Though I know you've spoken about this possibility before, I was hoping you might have further...
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  If we don't extend a Marshall Plan to the rural American heart of Trump country, even if they may not deserve it, we will see another Trump (maybe a smarter more dangerous Trump) in a decade or so. I...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Truly Jesus' greatest miracle is his seeming ability to convince even scholars and atheists that he was a historical person despite there being no evidence that he ever existed and the plain fact that cults rise up around fictional deities...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  That's the thing about imaginary experiments though. You can imagine the results to be whatever you want them to be... and someone else is free to imagine entirely different results. I would suspect that someone with the attitude and personality...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Btw, when has any libertarian, since you apparently now blame it all on corporations, ever tried to outlaw corporations, and only allow companies? The first time a libertarian ever gets elected to a meaningful office, I'll be sure to...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  We can't just outlaw large companies, and how do you prevent a large (billion dollar+) corporation The funny thing is large companies can't even exist without being created by laws. In the United States, most are governed by Delaware...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  No question he could do it easily, his fund managers probably trade him in and out of Amazon stock more than that on a monthly basis. Not even an interesting question for examples like him or Gates, Buffett, Musk,...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Given that Musk lives in the vicinity of south-central CA, I'm surprised he doesn't also have a helicopter for getting around. I would think that helicopters would get an extra 10-15 minutes just for clearance... don't big corporate jets...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Does it even make sense to think of these people as billionaires in the sense that they have access to that much wealth? They don't. Very few of them (Putin and the state-level actors might be the exception) have access...
• Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
  If they'd kept their mouths shut and not rebelled, there would have been no way that Lincoln would have been able to pass the 13th amendment. A politician as canny as Lincoln was wouldn't even have tried. While it's...
• Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
  They're also forced to be locked in a cell. That's called prison. No one's forced to need telephone calls. You have a strange idea of what "force" means. Even when they are "forced" to work this isn't under "constitutionally approved,...
• Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
  My understanding is that in the United States, both at the federal and state level, convicts are never forced to work. They are offered work for privileges, and are paid at some rate far below minimum wage (sometimes below a...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  As I mentioned above, my position is based on 25 years in the field, several at the policy/advocacy level and the last 15 on the front lines. And your ideas have all failed. What success have you had in...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  I don't believe you're being logical in your rebuttals. There is a complete bullshit assumption that someone who is homeless is also rootless and can/will move anywhere There are two possibilities. My argument remains the same regardless of which is...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  The whole point is to take over the "gerrymandering" so that it can be put to good use. If some small town says "we've adopted a policy which says which homeless would be our responsibility because they grew up here,...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  @Rocketpjs #728 I've become convinced that the problem of homelessness (in North America in particular) is a game theory problem. We have so many local jurisdictions, controlled by a variety of political actors... even if I posit that one faction...
• Commented on Invisible Sun: Themes and Nightmares
  Human psychology still imagines that we're all monkey-men living in a small tribe of people. This makes us like and desperately want zoning laws. True, everyone hates someone else's zoning laws, but our zoning laws are just good common sense...
• Commented on On inappropriate reactions to COVID19
  Lifestyle and cardiovascular disease correlate. Obviously, that means it's lifestyle... it couldn't possibly be that people living modern lifestyles are exposed to microbes that those living non-modern lifestyles see only rarely or never. Gotcha. And Heliobacter just happens to be...
• Commented on On inappropriate reactions to COVID19
  The only disease that I can say with any certainty as being Bernardian is diabetes. Even within my own lifetime, another disease clearly Bernardian (stomach ulcers) was confirmed to be Pasteurian. The little corkscrew bugs literally drill into the lining...
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  Children that grow up in an environment where few adults around them have children, or who only have one child tend to internalize that as the norm, and when they grow up that number becomes a ceiling for them. They...
• Commented on Because I am bored ...
  Potlatches could be a loan, of sorts. Or they could just be weaponized charity. Likely they were both from time to time. I wonder what sort of resentful behaviors you would have seen in the recipients of the latter. Imagine...
• Commented on Because I am bored ...
  How can you abolish money-as-a-commodity when all transactions for anything are simply trading one commodity for another? The only difference that money has is that it's a highly standardized commodity with a (generally) well-known value for your next transaction. It...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Hey Charlie, didn't you at one point in the comments (maybe in the past year or so) recommend an ibooks/ereader app replacement? I've been struggling to Google for it for two days and I'm not up to the task. Do...
• Commented on Central Banking on Mars!
  Re: 1116 There's also the problem of commercial incentives for healthcare providers to demand spurious tests so they can bill the insurance cos. Apparently the US healthcare industry carries out 3-5 times more diagnostic tests per patient as the NHS,...