Happiness/satisfaction per se is not a factor in my ethics. Read more.

Also...

There is no right to a $500k house in California. — BitconnectCarlos

I’m not asking for a $500k house specifically, I’m asking for housing in California to be affordable to people who live and work in California. I make significantly more money than most people who live here yet housing still isn’t affordable for me. That indicates a systemic problem of some kind of another. I think the problem isn’t that the people here don’t make enough money, but that a house that isn’t actually worth $500k costs that much. And it’s not that there isn’t enough housing built either, because there’s more unoccupied housing than homeless people, and building more housing on the overpriced land doesn’t help the poor people who can’t even afford an empty piece of land to begin with: it just creates even more unaffordable housing that only helps rich people from elsewhere, not the poor people who are already here.

It. Is. Not. Your. Land — BitconnectCarlos

It is. This is the land I was born and raised on and have already spend many many tens of thousands of dollars over decades to remain on, yet WITH NOTHING TO SHOW FOR THAT legally speaking. I’m not going to bother explaining how the rich assholes’ claims to it trace back ultimately to theft of it from the public domain or how rental contracts are an exploitative overreach of government power in favor of the wealthy because it’s clear you have an unquestioning faith in capitalist dogma and would just dismiss those. As I suspected, rather than offering actual solutions, you’re just denying the problem exists.

In my mind justice and morality cannot conflict in the same way that reason and truth cannot conflict. You can see a fuller explanation at my later essay A Note On Ethics.

EDIT: If you want to tough it out I would definitely try to get a side hustle going. This could mean filling out surveys for money, dog walking, opening credit cards and getting the bonuses, and others. — BitconnectCarlos

I think you misapprehend how absolutely trivial something like this is in comparison to the scales pf money we’re talking about. Earlier you mentioned how I could “eat out whenever I want” if I lived elsewhere. I already can do that. I have absolutely no financial hardships whatsoever outside of the enormous long-term project of saving for a house, and taking on more hardships like you suggest to save or make more money would make such an absolutely trivial dent in that project that it’s ridiculous to even bring them up. It’s like those blowhards who say if millennials ate less avocado toast they could afford a house. Yeah, if I can somehow cut a few thousand dollars a month out of my nonexistent avocado toast budget, that’ll free the money right up.

Even if you had the money required for a down payment you'd basically be draining your entire savings for that down payment, right? — BitconnectCarlos

I have a year’s expenses in cash set aside besides my down payment fund IRA, so no.

So....pride. You can't let those rich assholes win. — BitconnectCarlos

It’s not about them winning or not, it’s about me not losing; and not in the sense of some social competitive kind of “losing” but in the sense of actually being deprived of something.

Attributing this to pride is really, really offensive in a way I can’t seem to get through to you. A systemic injustice makes it nearly impossible for tens of millions of people to secure the right to continue living where they’ve always lived without constantly paying someone else for that privilege, something that an ever-growing number are increasingly unable to do. And your suggestion is “live somewhere else then”. Just give up and accept the hardship that’s being forced upon you instead of fighting it.

It’s like if a black person were complaining about the systemic difficulties of black people getting hired at any decent jobs and you tell him “then work somewhere else. Why would you want to work for someone who wouldn’t hire you anyway? Just saying, that’s what I would do.”

a "sudden realization" that attempting to control is futile so you automatically let go of it. You can't "induce" enlightenment it just happens to you. What I don't get is how that leads to the "end of suffering" that Zen purports to achieve — khaled

Because they say the origin of all suffering is (inevitably unfulfilled) desires, so giving up trying to control things, giving up desires and just accepting everything, makes you immune to suffering. So they say.

Yep.

Do you mean voters or politicians?

If politicians, because their corporate donors tell them to be, because medicare for all weakens corporate power and threatens many big (medical and insurance) corporations’ profits.

If voters, because those politicians and the media tell them that medicare for all will bankrupt the country and implicitly make them pay taxes through the roof and so bankrupt them, and make them wait in literal lines outside the hospital while dying of cancer instead of... not getting any treatment at all, like they probably do now.

You know, the normal ways that people are made to support things against their or their constituents’ interests.

I had a theory since my last post on this topic. Economics is irrelevant in the absence of scarcity. Housing is most people’s biggest economic factor: their biggest expense and/or biggest asset. Wherever most people live, housing is necessarily scarce relative to demand. So in the places where lots of people live, their biggest economic factor is necessarily scarce, so people in those places more readily face the failures of out capitalist economic system and call for policies ameliorating them. People who live in places that nobody wants to live therefore face no scarcity of housing and see little of the failures of capitalism, and think it’s all fine and everybody else must just be whiney losers who should leave them the fuck alone and just move somewhere nobody wants to live to escape those problems.

We can fund Medicare as it is. If you’re talking about the dwindling trust, that was always supposed to run out as the Boomers died off, since it was only set up to handle the Boom and otherwise Medicare is meant to be funded on an ongoing basis from working-age people.

What influence does the political leaning of a state have on the cost of its housing? I expect it’s the other way around: people getting screwed by rich landowners demand more welfare from the state in compensation.

You seem overly worried about homelessness. — Xtrix

The state of California generally recognizes that there is a homelessness crisis here... finally, after I’ve been screaming about it for well over a decade, ever since I first had to pay for my own housing, nearly couldn’t (spending a month homeless soon thereafter) despite making a median income already, did the math to figure out how long it would take to get free of that danger entirely, and realized the answer is “possibly never”. I’ve also been watching my elderly mother wavering on the edge of homelessness for years. I’ve been screaming about how can nobody see this doom coming for themselves and why isn’t anybody doing anything about it for all that time, and only now that said doom is actually starting to befall large numbers of people are they finally starting to acknowledge the problem.

:up: :100:

practising medicine without a license — alcontali

Isn't licensing an overreach of government authority in your view?

Depends on if you define majority or plurality as "most votes". — Nobeernolife

Maybe the DNC can implement a Condorcet method internally at least, to definitively resolve issues like this, and ensure the nomination always goes to a candidate who is preferred in a one-vs-one choice against any other option by a majority of voters. With our broken FPTP system, it's possible to have no clear majority winner, in which case the plurality winner is the closest option, but then you get issues of vote-splitting and strategic voting and all that nonsense. Goddamnit the Condorcet criteria are older than this country, how did the founders not bake them in to our voting system from the beginning.

you don't get upset at the voice of harsh criticism. I like that in you. How do you do that? By forcing yourself to not show how upset you get, or you don't get upset in the first place? — god must be atheist

It's funny that on the same day you say this, two threads piss me off on this very forum:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/384912
and
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/384959

Well, you did, by turning it into a personal affair. It is not a personal affair — alcontali

Pointing out the implications your general principles would have on you specifically is not a personal attack, it is drawing your attention to the concrete consequences of your abstract ideas.

But if you want to talk about getting things personal...

How many times do we need to repeat to the plebs that personal attacks are never the solution to a problem? The only thing that you achieve by attacking people personally, is to reveal your lower social class and trailer-park origins. — alcontali

This kind of classist bullshit makes me reconsider my opinion on guillotines. Maybe a few stuck up asshats like you should get their heads paraded around on pikes until the rest of you get the fucking message that this kind of thing is not acceptable.

Makes me reconsider religious tolerance too. Maybe I’ll go doodle Mohammed and then wipe my ass with it just to spite you. I’d tell your God that you’re the instigator behind that too, except he doesn’t exist and I try not to talk to myself.

I previously assumed your right-libertarianism was nominally a matter of anti-authoritarian principle and you were just happy to overlook or rationalize the anti-egalitarian consequences of it, like most internet techie manchildren, but now it’s clear that you’re simply someone who thinks he’s inherently better than others and only opposes authorities that challenge your own power.

What happened in 1972?

A home in the sense of some kind of dwelling place, yes. Not necessarily a house. — Xtrix

The only kind of home that you can truly own is a house, because if you live in a part of a building with other people, even if you nominally “own” your part, you have to keep paying fees or you can still be kicked out.

So for people to be secure from homelessness, they need to own houses. And security from homelessness is like... the most elementary kind of thing to aspire to.

Sorry, I keep saying “hundreds of thousands” of people would have to move by your logic, but my quick mental estimate was off. It’s actually tens of millions.

Is there a good justification for this? — RogueAI

The apparent absence of aliens is pretty good justification.

She doesn’t want to leave her home either. She’s even more attached to the land than me; I’m happy living anywhere in the general area where I can still occasionally visit the people and things I love, she wants to stay in her particular town.

It’s not a matter of pride, it’s a matter of not just giving in and letting us be forced out of our home so that some rich asshole can move in here instead (or, more accurately, so some super-rich asshole can buy all the housing stock and rent it out for profit). The hundreds of thousands of people poorer than us who aren’t all fleeing to cheaper shitholes aren’t sticking around for pride either. People shouldn’t be forced out of their homes, and financial pressure is a kind of force. In telling me that I should move, you’re saying that almost everybody in the entire state of California, the most populous state in the country and one of the largest, also shouldn’t live in the state that they do: that almost everybody in a place bigger than most European countries should go to what is consequently equivalent to another country. Should the vast majority of Brits move to Russia too? It’s a comparable population, distance, climate difference, cost of living difference, etc. Or should Britain get its shit together so Brits can stay in Britain?

Mortgaging a house is in many ways the better alternative because you are at least paying down the mortgage and building equity as opposed to simply giving away money every month and owning nothing. — Xtrix

So long as the interest portion of the mortgage is less than the rent you would otherwise be paying, yes. Paying 6/12 your income in interest and 1/12 toward equity is worse than paying 3/12 in rent and saving 4/12 toward other investments, even though of course it’s definitely better than paying 7/12 in rent.

And yeah, sure you get more house right now for that 7/12 spent entirely on housing right now, but if you’re barely going to ever be safe from homelessness with just 4/12 set aside to buy your way out of that, reducing that to 1/12 or 0/12 so you can have a big enough place right now is just short sighted.

I'm sure your situation is shared by many Americans. How old are you, if you don't mind my asking? — Xtrix

That most Americans are even worse off was kinda my point.

We’re both 37, so Elder Millennials, Class of 2000.

you don't get upset at the voice of harsh criticism. I like that in you. How do you do that? By forcing yourself to not show how upset you get, or you don't get upset in the first place? — god must be atheist

A little bit of both. I’ve actually had a very bad temper for my entire life, but I’ve spent so long being so angry about much bigger problems that someone being wrong on the internet just doesn’t seem like something worth getting upset about anymore. But then I have also been practicing staying calm in the face of all those bigger problems for a long time so if I do feel a little upset, I’m able to deal with it a lot better than I used to.

I’ve realized that a major factor in how good or bad I feel in general is how good or bad I think I’m allowed to feel about myself, so if someone whose opinions I give weight to criticizes something that’s really important to me, so that I feel like I have to take their criticism seriously and there’s really something “wrong with me”, that hurts. It helps then to just give very little weight to most people’s opinions, to think of people like children, don’t expect them to be right and don’t really care if they think you’re not, but maybe take the opportunity to help them learn something, and yet still be open to their potential insights, and try not to actually talk down to them “like children” because even with actual children that always just backfires.

More generally than even that, I find it helps if I just don’t expect to convince anyone to begin with, but still give my say in case anyone finds it interesting. That ties into my motto which now serves as the basis of my entire philosophy: “It may be hopeless but I'm trying anyway.”

But it feels so natural... I feel better after defending my points vehemently and polemically. If I were to be polite, cool, calm and collected, would I feel the same satisfaction?

Does emotional satisfaction play a motivating role in your arguments? I know we can't argue against the truth to feel good, but when you argue FOR the right reasoning, do you still get the satisfaction, the taste of victory when you state your points, despite employing a polite, never personally degrading voice? — god must be atheist

Hearing things like this feels good, makes me feel good about myself, and so reinforces it my inclination to keep behaving this way.

In general, sharing my thoughts is very emotionally satisfying, one of my favorite things in life, and I don’t think I’d be here doing it if it weren’t so. Even worse than critical feedback is no feedback at all, just talking into the void, so even critical feedback gives me a bit of “rush” (that word is too strong but I can’t think of a better one), lets me know someone cared enough to even give it a read at all.

Therefore there is no knowledge of reality. This does not negate the existence of truth; but it allows the POSSIBILITY of no truth. (Again: TRUTH I take to be the correspondence of our opinions to reality.) — god must be atheist

I think I see the mix up here now. What I’m arguing against here is those who say truth (having our opinions correspond to reality, roughly speaking) is not possible; and I am saying instead that it is possible, that someone might be right. It is in my other essay, against fideism, where I also argue, as you do here, that it is possibly not, i.e. that anyone always might be wrong.

There are more states where energy is spread out pretty evenly, the issue is that without knowing in the first place how likely each state is (which depends on the physical laws), then you don’t know that it is more likely to end up in the high-entropy ones even if there are many more of them. If you have a universe where because of its specific physical laws the low-entropy states are much more likely even if they are less numerous, then that universe doesn’t evolve towards higher entropy. — leo

Something being more likely and there being more possible states where that thing occurs are equivalent descriptions.

If the physical laws make something more likely, then there will be more possible states where that thing occurs. And if there just happen to be more possible states where something occurs, apparent laws mandating that thing occurring more will emerge naturally out of randomness.

It's two ways of saying the same thing.

For the greatest illustration of this, look at chemical processes. Chemical processes are stochastic, probablistic results of lots and lots of little physical processes, and because those physical processes are more likely to result in higher entropy states, chemical processes, being aggregates of many such processes, always happen in such a way as to move from lower entropy in the reactants to higher entropy in the products.

This is not in any way to say that the universe is doomed to suffer heat death. If the first law of thermodynamics is not adhered to, and energy can be created or destroyed, then the universe can keep being pushed out of equilibrium, even while everything continues winding down. It's a bit like an orbit: you're continuously falling, but never actually getting closer to hitting the ground.

Now that I think about it, the universe you describe above hinges on breaking the first law. In our universe, ordinary particles aren't "energy sources", they don't emit energy, they only pass it along after receiving it. If some particles did emit totally new energy, then you wouldn't even need the energy sinks to counter them, you'd just get an unlimited usable energy gradient between the energy sources and the rest of the distant universe. Likewise, even if you only had energy sinks, that'd create a usable energy gradient that would last for so long as there is energy available to suck into it, which may be forever if the universe is infinite. Your sources-and-sinks pairs do result in the net energy of the universe not changing, but they still are each individually violating the first law, which is how entropy can get reversed by them, without violating the second law.

Saving 1/3 of your income is really good. Bravo. — BitconnectCarlos

Thanks.

I don't know how much houses cost in your area — BitconnectCarlos

The median cost for the entire state of California is over half a million dollars, and I can't find anything less than that within hundreds of miles of the general area where my girlfriend and I have grown up and lived our entire lives with our families and friends and everything here. (Ventura county).

If it was just a matter of "moving out of the city" (I don't live in a city at all) or moving to the next county or something, there'd be no problem. And yes, I know that I personally could let myself be forced out of my homeland by wealthy invaders "investors" and find a place that's cheaper in a far-away place that I would probably hate living, but when it's not my personal fault that I can't afford to stay here, and the vast majority of my compatriots, the hundreds of thousands of people who can afford to live here even less than me, aren't getting out first, I'm not just going to accept defeat.

Someone's gotta fucking do something about this and if that means killing some rich motherfucker so the people who live in his second or third "investment" house can stop paying him for the privilege, so be it. Or maybe, you know, we could try a less drastic solution before it comes to that.

Thereabouts yeah. The MH was paid off in cash with my entire life savings up to that point (and even then only affordable because it was in a weird financially distressed condition similar to a foreclosure). I don't want to give out too much personal detail, but about a quarter of that take-home goes to my current super-under-market-for-an-ordinary-apartment lot rent, and about a third of it is being saved in an IRA toward an eventual down payment on a real house, or possibly to buy a larger MH in cash on the way to that (because I might be able to get a MH big enough for two for about half of what I'd need to put down on a real house in order for the mortgage interest to not crush me). Maybe a sixth or so is bills, the vast majority of that the minimal mandatory health insurance.

What statistics? What metric are you referring to here? Yearly salary or something, or are you saying that 75% of Americans don't have a partner and steady job? — Xtrix

I was talking about income there, as apparently the mean personal income (which I approximately make) falls at around the 75th percentile of personal incomes, i.e. 75% of people make less than that.

What's so essential about a house and a car? You don't need either to find someone to love, or to raise a family. — Xtrix

You need a home big enough for two people to live in if they're going to be a family, even if they're not planning on having kids (which we're not). We're scraping by because she lives with family on super-discounted rent and I own a tiny one-room mobile home in a shitty trailer park that's also rent-controlled; when either of us visits the other, we can at most bring a backpack full of stuff to the other's place, and even that just sits on the floor in the way and constantly needs to be moved to get about, so there's no way we could actually live together on a long-term basis unless one of us was just living out of a backpack indefinitely.

An apartment big enough for two would leave us scraping by paycheck-to-paycheck, not saving anything for the future, and so when we're too old to have paychecks to pay toward that rent anymore, would leave us out on the street. The interest alone on a mortgage on the cheapest available house in the area would be just as bad, never mind paying down the principle.

So we're waiting for ages and ages and ages until we have enough saved up to put a big enough down payment on a house that the interest on the mortgage would not eat up even more than our rent already does and so even-further delay finally not owing money just for the right to exist somewhere, which at our current rates of savings we might just barely manage by the time we're too old to work anymore.

That is why a house is essential.

And apparently 75% of people make even less money than me, so are even more screwed.


Anyway, I wasn't meaning originally to contradict your point, but to emphasize that things were even worse than you're already making them out to be, to double down on your original point.

They are closely related topics.

The tendency for (closed systems in) our universe to evolve toward states of greater entropy isn't an effect of any of our specific physical laws, though. In a purely mathematical model of all of the possible instantaneous states of the universe, completely agnostic to the physical laws governing transitions from one state to another, states where energy is spread out more evenly are more common, and states where it is more concentrated are less common. Think of, for example, ways that air molecules could be arranged in a box: there's only relatively few arrangements that have them all clumped in the same corner, but a whole lot of arrangements that have them spread out pretty evenly across the whole volume of the box.

It's not that there are more high-entropy states than low-entropy ones because the physical laws make high-entropy ones more likely; the high-entropy ones are more likely because there's just more of them that are possible (and that is actually what defines them as high-entropy), so even if there was no law-like behavior at all, and the whole system just evolved randomly, you would just expect it to evolve into a higher-entropy state at random.

It's actually thought that the second law of thermodynamics is really the fundamental law of the universe, and that all of the other laws are really just that combined with restrictions on what kinds of states are even possible. Other laws define possible ways that the universe could be, and then the universe just randomly changes, one tiny bit at a time, everywhere, constantly, from one of those possible ways to one of the most similar other possible ways that it could be, and the overall tendency for it to change predictably in certain ways, from X to Y, is just because there are more possible ways that are like Y than there are like X, so randomly stepping through possible states just tends to leave things more Y-like than X-like over time.

I actually like to think of time in exactly that way: picture an abstract space of all the possible states of the universe (we can only really picture a two- or three-dimensional space, which could only visualize two or three variables, but just imagine that for simplicity). Each point in that space represents one way the universe could be, and points that are close to each other represent similar ways the universe could be. Some regions of that space are filled with points representing less-entropic states than others, but those are necessarily just little corners of the space, and the bulk of the volume is filled with points representing more-entropic states. The dimension of time is just any line through that abstract space, where the direction toward more-entropic states is "the future" and the direction toward less-entropic states is "the past".

There are therefore multiple possible timelines, multiple paths through all the possible configurations of the universe, but because more-entropic configurations are more common and less-entropic ones are less common, lines toward "the past" quickly converge, while lines toward "the future" diverge, which is why the past seems determined (few similar possible states are less-entropic than the present one, so the ways the past could have been to lead to this present are limited) but the future does not (many similar possible states are more-entropic than the present one, so the future could turn out in many different ways from this present).

And we perceive the arrow of time that way because the process of forming our memories, and the processes that form all other records of the past, occur in accordance with laws that are driven by the increase of entropy, so the states that are recorded in our brains or in rock strata or any other records will necessarily be of less-entropic states in the past, and our projections of trends in those recorded past states will therefore be toward the more-entropic states of the future.

We see what we got for aspiring to be nothing more than television watchers working steady 9-5 jobs with the hope of meeting someone, buying a house and starting a family. — Xtrix

Personally, that's still something I aspire to... like, the bare minimum I aspired to have had already well over a decade ago, and am still very slowly struggling toward, despite making better progress at it than like 75% of the country if the statistics are to believed. The apparently near-impossibility of ever achieving that bare minimum any time in my natural lifespan is a large part of what's got me so pissed off about politics.

(I got the steady job and met someone just shy of a decade ago... but even beginning to buy a house, and so being able to afford to live together, and get married, is still years if not decades away, even at my breakneck rate of saving... and actually paying off that house before I'm too old to work, so we don't just die homeless in the streets when we're old, is not something I'm sure will ever be possible).

I can't find it at the moment, but I recently saw something about a different strain of anti-aging research, that claims that all or at least most animals (including humans) have cells with basically two modes, a grow-and-reproduce mode and a repair-and-protect mode. The repair-and-protect mode is triggered by hardships like starvation and extreme cold, and is supposedly responsible for the observed correlation between restricted-calorie diets and longevity and health in old age. (It was particularly a lack of protein that was responsible for triggering the repair-and-protect mode, interestingly). The research I saw was looking into other ways of artificially triggering the repair-and-protect mode in cells, without having to starve or freeze; they had supposedly artificially triggered that mode in the eye cells of mice who had gone blind with old age, whose eyes then returned to a youthful, functional state. Right now it's a really painstaking meticulous process of forcing the individual cells into that mode, though, so there's not yet just some drug you can take that will trigger that internal fountain of youth. But the fact that there is such an internal restore-youth function already in our cells, that just needs an appropriate trigger, is very promising.

I wish I could find a link to the thing I read about this. Hopefully it sounds familiar enough to someone that they can find one?

Coral-area Gooblefish and the colourful Geddifish of the south seas change sex spontaneosly when they listen to Black Sabbath — god must be atheist

As do I.

When you think about it the “second law” doesn’t dictate how things move deep down, it isn’t an additional force that attracts or repels things, it is a statistical observation that works on average. — leo

That's actually what makes it so iron clad, in the way I meant. You're absolutely right that small local temporary reductions of entropy are possible (and happen all the time, at the really submicroscopic scale), it's just that statistically over long time scales large complex systems tend toward increased entropy. What I mean by "iron clad" though is precisely that that doesn't depend on any actual physical force, it's just a purely mathematical thing. Any universe with any physical laws would still obey the same mathematics, and so still be bound to that purely mathematical statistical tendency.

That still doesn't guarantee the heat death of the universe, though, if the universe is not a closed system but rather has a continuous influx of new energy, which current models say it does, and say is the explanation for how we have all this structure that we currently have and not an already-heat-dead universe instead.

One of the top recommended things on YouTube this morning is The Democratic Debate in About a Minute, from.... Bloomberg Politics. It's a bunch of short clips from the debate, most of them devoid of any context (if I hadn't already read about the debate elsewhere I wouldn't understand what most of them were about), with one longer one of Bloomberg himself, and another of Warren talking about Bloomberg. The overall message it seems to be saying is "all these communists and fat broads attacking me [Bloomberg] is just going to hand the election to Trump", but it's not framed as being a message from Bloomberg himself, just a neutral summary of the whole debate.

FiveThirtyEight is now showing no majority as clearly more likely than anyone getting a majority, and Bernie far more likely than anyone else to get a plurality. Combined with the last question yesterday about whether the plurality winner should get the nomination or not, I'm really fearing a brokered convention where the superdelegates coronate one of their preferred corporate candidates (like Biden, still second-most-likely behind Bernie; or probably even worse, Bloomberg), pissing off the whole left half of the country and basically handing the election to Trump.

It's not so much atheist as antitheist, maybe atheist by way of the Problem of Evil:

You're such an inspiration for the ways
That I'll never ever choose to be
Oh so many ways for me to show you
How the savior has abandoned you
Fuck your God
Your Lord and your Christ
He did this
Took all you had and
Left you this way
Still you pray, you never stray
Never taste of the fruit
You never thought to question why
It's not like you killed someone
It's not like you drove a hateful spear into his side
Praise the one who left you
Broken down and paralyzed
He did it all for you — Judith, A Perfect Circle

(Purportedly about the unwavering religiosity of a terminally ill loved one of the author).

Where exactly can one watch these debates besides live TV?