discourse? me?? never

you are confusing

I am currently a lefty Effective Altruist whose most strongly held political positions are "war is bad", "immigration is good", and "vaccines are very, very, very good, like the best thing ever, please let's have more vaccines". I love the NHS, hate animal welfare and am vehemently opposed to veganism, want open borders, and think we should give poor people more money. I am bi and poly and happy that way. I am trying to become a consultant because I love business, desire practical skills, and also want money. I kind of wish my younger self had spent less time swordfighting and songwriting, and more time learning any practical skills and making more friends. I am very very glad that my younger self failed in her attempts to bindingly commit me to never dating, never hurting animals and never supporting technological civilization.

Pick a random person I follow on tumblr, and they probably share my values and beliefs far more than I share the values and beliefs of my ten year old self.

I don't see any reason to believe this trend won't continue. Thirty-year-old-me will probably consider me an alien. There's a good chance she'll hate the binding decisions I'm making for her. There's a fairly solid chance she'll consider me to be abusively exploiting her - I probably ruin her life in countless ways just because I can, it's easy for me to do by avoiding aversive tasks or being tempted by fun-but-unhealthy things, and I find it really hard to care about her nearly as much as I care about my actual friends.

But what about counting? They’ll hack counting machines! Except:

They don't even have a neutral Speaker. Their judges are theoretically neutral but they fucking elect them. Even civil servant appointments are always seen as partisan things, done by one politician or another because they hope this supposedly neutral individual will in practice do things that they like.

I don't know how you'd fix that, because if you don't already have a social norm that says it is utterly unacceptable to use a "neutral" position to achieve partisan aims, you're going to struggle. You can declare really loudly that a thing should be neutral and people will continue to hear "a thing parties can fight over that doesn't clearly belong to either of them" rather than "a thing which is about competence, not about loyalty".

So a good way to think about laws is the effective marginal tax rate. The effective marginal tax rate is “when I’m making my current amount of money, if I make an extra dollar, how much of that dollar do I get to keep?”

If I’m making $30,000 a year, and I make an extra dollar, I get to keep like 85cents of it. If I’m making $100,000 a year, and I make an extra dollar, I get to keep like 75cents of it. If I’m making $500k a year, and I make an extra dollar, I get to keep like 60cents of it. (The tax code is complicated and these numbers are not adjusted for all the complications, treat them more as illustrative). A maximum wage is a proposal to impose a point where, if I make an extra dollar, I get to keep 0 cents of it.

So the main problem with it is - 

- we don’t go higher than 40%. We could, if we wanted to, make our top marginal tax bracket 50%, or 60%, or 80%. I think all of those are good things to do before we make it 100%. I think so for a bunch of reasons. 

1) At some point, we will start collecting less tax revenue. Where this point is is hotly disputed, and some people assert that 40% is already past that point, but certainly if we had a 50% and a 60% and a 80% bracket it’d be easier to tell where that point was. We start collecting less tax revenue once we’re discouraging people from working by more than we’re getting more money from them. Past that point, I do not think it’s a good idea to continue to raise taxes. It isn’t bad for people to be rich in itself, it’s bad for people to be poor and dying. Making people less rich, in a way that also means we have less money to give to the poor ones, is just making everything worse for everyone.

(Not everyone agrees with me on that one. If you think that rich people mostly spend their wealth on paying to harm the poor, then it’s good to make them poorer even if it also makes everyone else poorer. My reasons for thinking that’s wrong are too long for this post, but I just want to note that it’s a place where many people will disagree with me.)

2) Ideologically, I don’t think “some people are richer than anyone needs to be” is actually a correct diagnosis of our problem. Some people are rich while other people are starving; that’s the problem. I want everyone to be rich. I want everyone to be outlandishly rich, rich in ways that are beyond our imagining, rich with things that haven’t been invented yet. Almost no one is so rich they don’t have to work for a living. Everyone should be. I’d rather we think about our problem as ‘people are suffering’ than as ‘people are too rich’, because I have high aspirations for our civilization.

3) We might actually want to stop increasing marginal tax rates before the point where our taxes actively decrease our total revenue. In particular, even long before that point, our taxes are causing some people not to do some work that they’d otherwise have done because it’s not worth it to them. We should be keeping a close eye on this effect, because if it’s work we want done, then we probably don’t want to discourage it all the way to the tax-revenue tipping point. One way to do this would be to evaluate the merits of various ways to get rich and tax the socially-valuable ones less, but this opens the system up to lots of new and exciting forms of lobbying/corruption/misclassification of work. 

A big problem is that we don’t know exactly how large those effects are. The US economy keeps growing at its tenacious economy-pace through ridiculous amounts of variation in the top marginal tax rates. We’d expect marginal tax rates to affect the economy. But it’s extremely hard to pin specific claims down. Lots of people have tried. Depending on their ideology, they either conclude that taxes don’t matter or that there would be twice as much wealth in the world if we stopped it with income taxes (which are kind of a particularly perverse sort of tax, since they discourage a behavior which we actually want).

I don’t have any idea who is right. I want more data. I’m very nonideological about this and feel that taxation should be set at whatever level produces the most flourishing, which is going to be about navigating the tradeoffs between ‘making sure everyone has enough’ and ‘making sure that enough stuff gets produced’ and ‘making sure that the rules are predictable and enforceable’.

Tax is when an employee is paid, but you take that money. So a 100% tax rate would be employers giving employees money, and you taking all of it. Except that doesn’t make any sense. If the maximum wage is £100k (to take a completely arbitrary amount), then employers will not pay salaries over £100k, because they and the employee both know that “paying over £100k” is exactly the same thing as “giving the government free money for no reason”. It’s not a tax, it’s just a ban on salaries over £100k.

Of course, some employers want to pay some people more than £100k, because they want to attract the best employees. If they’re not allowed to give an employee £100k in cash, they’ll find other ways to provide employees with valuable things that those employees desire.

So, for instance, an employer currently paying £110k might change their package so they pay £100k, plus they provide a company car and an office cafeteria full of free food.

The potential effects of this which I find most interesting are nothing to do with tax revenue:

It would force some high paying jobs to treat employees in ways that are possibly healthier for them. Currently there are plenty of law firms, investment banks, consultancies etc which you can sell your soul to, and they will pay you £500k pa in exchange for you regularly working 17-hour days and sleeping in the office. If they were not allowed to attract top talent by offering £500k salaries, they might have to attract top talent by introducing alien new concepts like “holiday” and “caring about employees’ mental health” and “flexibility”.

In a similar vein, employers might become more likely to compensate employees in the form of goods rather than cash.

This would possibly increase access to currency. What I mean by this is sort of complicated. Goods can be traded for other goods - you can swap your apple for someone else’s banana if that’s mutually beneficial. Cash is a good, the value of which is convenience - it’s easy to store and exchange. If you’re very rich and make a lot of transactions, you value “ease of storage and exchange” highly - you’d much rather have a bank account showing a high number than have to store your wealth in a huge warehouse full of valuable goods. If you’re poor, exchange-convenience and storage are often not things you can afford to buy - you’d much rather have a cupboard full of food than a bank account saying a number which has value equivalent to the food - hence why informal and in-kind work/trade is more common among poor people. Currently, rich people drive up the value of cash because they prefer it to large stores of goods. If rich people weren’t allowed to have high income streams of cash (and instead had to have income streams of goods), it would possibly drive down the ‘price’ of currency.

If people wanted income streams of currency (not goods) higher than the maximum wage, they wouldn’t be able to get them through working. They could get them through investment, though. I expect this to have some positive effects (encouraging investment) and some negative effects (making it harder for people to ascend to the upper class through hard work and high salaries if they didn’t already have investment income).

By carving out specific exemptions (eg. if you found your own business then you can keep your profits and that doesn’t count against maximums salary), we could make policies to encourage behaviours we like, such as entrepreneurship.

Some luxury goods, currently only marketed to people with incomes well above the maximum wage, might be harder to sell. So we might see yacht sellers getting rid of their highest end models and trying to sell more of the lower end models to people at or just below the wage cap.

It might discourage the startup/fund culture of “let’s spend all of our budget paying a ridiculously high salary to attract This One Famous Dude, whose name will open all the doors we need”, and instead encourage investing in teams. This is probably good because the value of having This One Famous Dude is often massively overblown; just because Famous Dude got super lucky with his last couple startups doesn’t actually guarantee this thing will succeed as well!

I think it’d be hard to implement in practice, because people will find ways around it, like giving employees a bunch of cash-equivalents that add up to an amount above the maximum wage, and inventing new kinds of cash equivalent as fast as we could ban them. And a lot of the stuff about the value of money is really hard to study and measure, because we’re used to pretending that money is just an index that perfectly tracks value and not treating cash like a good which different people could value more or less.

Goods can be more or less liquid. Cash is pretty much the most liquid of all goods; if you want to stop owning your cash and start owning something else instead, you simply have to go down the high street and walk into any of numerous shops and say "hello, I have cash and I would like to not have cash any more, can I exchange it for something else?"

Other goods are very illiquid. If you own shares in a private company, you might have signed a contract that bans you from selling them within a certain number of years. You're stuck with them, and can't get rid of them. Alternatively, think of underwear. You can't really sell your dirty used underwear because nobody wants it (outside of certain niche fetishes).

Most of the big things ordinary people own are somewhere in between; if you wanted to sell your car or house or dog, you might have to sink time and effort and money (transaction costs) into finding someone who wants to buy it, arranging a deal, paying someone who understands the legal technicalities to oversee that deal, etc. You can sell it, but you might decide not to if the hassle of selling it isn't worth it to you.

Many goods are so liquid that they can basically just be treated like cash, because you can transform them into cash basically instantly with no effort required. If you have shares of one of the world's biggest publicly publicly traded companies then there are plenty of algorithms happy to take them from you and provide you with cash instead. Stuff like broker's fees often mean you can't actually treat it as cash equivalent unless you have thousands of them and can eat the transaction costs, but it's perfectly possible to make a more blatant cash equivalent for which that isn't an issue: imagine being paid the maximum salary in currency, plus a quantity of Company Tokens, which the company coincidentally is willing to buy back from you at £1 each.

So, like I said, I don't think it's possible to force people to be paid in illiquid goods.

However, if it was, then yeah, you wouldn't be able to sell them. That's the point. The whole advantage of currency - the reason you might prefer to own some currency, as opposed to owning apples or motorcycles or gold bars - is that it's liquid, easy to trade away, easy to store, and generally convenient.

Rich people liking having a lot of easy-to-exchange value storage drives up the price of currency, relative to the price of things like apples or motorcycles. Rich people liking value storage that seems safe and likely to keep its value drives up the price of gold, relative both to the price of things like currency and the price of things like apples and motorcycles.

You can look at lots of cycles and dynamics in the markets as being about whether people have lots of currency and not enough of other goods (therefore you get things like inflation) or whether they have lots of other goods and would rather get rid of them and have currency instead. (We single out currency because it's a particularly important good that people care a lot about, rather than because you couldn't do this kind of analysis with, say, apples.)

A maximum (currency) salary makes the market more illiquid, because instead of having money that you can trade, you have goods that will be inconvenient or impossible for you to sell.

So a good way to think about laws is the effective marginal tax rate. The effective marginal tax rate is “when I’m making my current amount of money, if I make an extra dollar, how much of that dollar do I get to keep?”

If I’m making $30,000 a year, and I make an extra dollar, I get to keep like 85cents of it. If I’m making $100,000 a year, and I make an extra dollar, I get to keep like 75cents of it. If I’m making $500k a year, and I make an extra dollar, I get to keep like 60cents of it. (The tax code is complicated and these numbers are not adjusted for all the complications, treat them more as illustrative). A maximum wage is a proposal to impose a point where, if I make an extra dollar, I get to keep 0 cents of it.

So the main problem with it is - 

- we don’t go higher than 40%. We could, if we wanted to, make our top marginal tax bracket 50%, or 60%, or 80%. I think all of those are good things to do before we make it 100%. I think so for a bunch of reasons. 

1) At some point, we will start collecting less tax revenue. Where this point is is hotly disputed, and some people assert that 40% is already past that point, but certainly if we had a 50% and a 60% and a 80% bracket it’d be easier to tell where that point was. We start collecting less tax revenue once we’re discouraging people from working by more than we’re getting more money from them. Past that point, I do not think it’s a good idea to continue to raise taxes. It isn’t bad for people to be rich in itself, it’s bad for people to be poor and dying. Making people less rich, in a way that also means we have less money to give to the poor ones, is just making everything worse for everyone.

(Not everyone agrees with me on that one. If you think that rich people mostly spend their wealth on paying to harm the poor, then it’s good to make them poorer even if it also makes everyone else poorer. My reasons for thinking that’s wrong are too long for this post, but I just want to note that it’s a place where many people will disagree with me.)

2) Ideologically, I don’t think “some people are richer than anyone needs to be” is actually a correct diagnosis of our problem. Some people are rich while other people are starving; that’s the problem. I want everyone to be rich. I want everyone to be outlandishly rich, rich in ways that are beyond our imagining, rich with things that haven’t been invented yet. Almost no one is so rich they don’t have to work for a living. Everyone should be. I’d rather we think about our problem as ‘people are suffering’ than as ‘people are too rich’, because I have high aspirations for our civilization.

3) We might actually want to stop increasing marginal tax rates before the point where our taxes actively decrease our total revenue. In particular, even long before that point, our taxes are causing some people not to do some work that they’d otherwise have done because it’s not worth it to them. We should be keeping a close eye on this effect, because if it’s work we want done, then we probably don’t want to discourage it all the way to the tax-revenue tipping point. One way to do this would be to evaluate the merits of various ways to get rich and tax the socially-valuable ones less, but this opens the system up to lots of new and exciting forms of lobbying/corruption/misclassification of work. 

A big problem is that we don’t know exactly how large those effects are. The US economy keeps growing at its tenacious economy-pace through ridiculous amounts of variation in the top marginal tax rates. We’d expect marginal tax rates to affect the economy. But it’s extremely hard to pin specific claims down. Lots of people have tried. Depending on their ideology, they either conclude that taxes don’t matter or that there would be twice as much wealth in the world if we stopped it with income taxes (which are kind of a particularly perverse sort of tax, since they discourage a behavior which we actually want).

I don’t have any idea who is right. I want more data. I’m very nonideological about this and feel that taxation should be set at whatever level produces the most flourishing, which is going to be about navigating the tradeoffs between ‘making sure everyone has enough’ and ‘making sure that enough stuff gets produced’ and ‘making sure that the rules are predictable and enforceable’.

Tax is when an employee is paid, but you take that money. So a 100% tax rate would be employers giving employees money, and you taking all of it. Except that doesn't make any sense. If the maximum wage is £100k (to take a completely arbitrary amount), then employers will not pay salaries over £100k, because they and the employee both know that "paying over £100k" is exactly the same thing as "giving the government free money for no reason". It's not a tax, it's just a ban on salaries over £100k.

Of course, some employers want to pay some people more than £100k, because they want to attract the best employees. If they're not allowed to give an employee £100k in cash, they'll find other ways to provide employees with valuable things that those employees desire.

So, for instance, an employer currently paying £110k might change their package so they pay £100k, plus they provide a company car and an office cafeteria full of free food.

The potential effects of this which I find most interesting are nothing to do with tax revenue:

It would force some high paying jobs to treat employees in ways that are possibly healthier for them. Currently there are plenty of law firms, investment banks, consultancies etc which you can sell your soul to, and they will pay you £500k pa in exchange for you regularly working 17-hour days and sleeping in the office. If they were not allowed to attract top talent by offering £500k salaries, they might have to attract top talent by introducing alien new concepts like "holiday" and "caring about employees' mental health" and "flexibility".

In a similar vein, employers might become more likely to compensate employees in the form of goods rather than cash.

This would possibly increase access to currency. What I mean by this is sort of complicated. Goods can be traded for other goods - you can swap your apple for someone else's banana if that's mutually beneficial. Cash is a good, the value of which is convenience - it's easy to store and exchange. If you're very rich and make a lot of transactions, you value "ease of storage and exchange" highly - you'd much rather have a bank account showing a high number than have to store your wealth in a huge warehouse full of valuable goods. If you're poor, exchange-convenience and storage are often not things you can afford to buy - you'd much rather have a cupboard full of food than a bank account saying a number which has value equivalent to the food - hence why informal and in-kind work/trade is more common among poor people. Currently, rich people drive up the value of cash because they prefer it to large stores of goods. If rich people weren't allowed to have high income streams of cash (and instead had to have income streams of goods), it would possibly drive down the 'price' of currency.

If people wanted income streams of currency (not goods) higher than the maximum wage, they wouldn't be able to get them through working. They could get them through investment, though. I expect this to have some positive effects (encouraging investment) and some negative effects (making it harder for people to ascend to the upper class through hard work and high salaries if they didn't already have investment income).

By carving out specific exemptions (eg. if you found your own business then you can keep your profits and that doesn't count against maximums salary), we could make policies to encourage behaviours we like, such as entrepreneurship.

Some luxury goods, currently only marketed to people with incomes well above the maximum wage, might be harder to sell. So we might see yacht sellers getting rid of their highest end models and trying to sell more of the lower end models to people at or just below the wage cap.

It might discourage the startup/fund culture of "let's spend all of our budget paying a ridiculously high salary to attract This One Famous Dude, whose name will open all the doors we need", and instead encourage investing in teams. This is probably good because the value of having This One Famous Dude is often massively overblown; just because Famous Dude got super lucky with his last couple startups doesn't actually guarantee this thing will succeed as well!

I think it'd be hard to implement in practice, because people will find ways around it, like giving employees a bunch of cash-equivalents that add up to an amount above the maximum wage, and inventing new kinds of cash equivalent as fast as we could ban them. And a lot of the stuff about the value of money is really hard to study and measure, because we're used to pretending that money is just an index that perfectly tracks value and not treating cash like a good which different people could value more or less.

for years i have lived this lie telling everyone i am allergic to peanuts because i hate the smell of peanut butter and don’t really like peanut butter that much but whenever i used to tell people i don’t like peanut butter they’d get all defensive like “peanut butter is amazing how do you not like it?!” and then i’d have to go into this whole thing to defend my taste buds.

but then i got tired of it and started telling people that i’m just allergic to peanuts because that way it’s not my fault that i hate the smell of peanut butter - it’s now like i’m a sad little baby who will never get to taste peanut butter ever in her life and everyone feels sad for me.

but the problem is that i really love peanut m&ms and so now i can only eat peanut m&ms when i’m at home in secret. the only person who knows my lie is my husband. and so at work this evening we had a small celebration for someone and they had peanut m&ms and i really wanted some but obviously couldn’t eat them in public because then people would know my peanut secret. 

and so when we got home after work my husband tipped his jacket over and emptied his pockets and at least thirty or so peanut m&ms fell out of his pockets and he whispered, “i was sneakily accumulating them all night for you because i could see the pain in your eyes.”

Our culture is absolutely horrible at respecting consent, and we need to talk about that in contexts other than just sex (though consent is also incredibly important for sex). Kids say they don't want to hug people and get forced to anyway. People say they don't like alcohol and get mocked until they give in.

People say they don't want to eat something and have to deal with harassment from people determined to make them admit the thing is great, "try it just once because you'll like it when you eat my version", or worse secretly slip the thing into their food so they can watch them eat it and then claim they must secretly like the food.

That's fucking disgusting behaviour and everyone who engages in it has no respect for consent. People have the right to choose what they are willing to put in their bodies. No means no. It does not mean "please convince me how wrong I am! Show me the light!"

It's really important for everyone to notice when that's happening, tell people to stop doing it, and listen to others about whether they're doing it themselves. That's the only way we can tackle this kind of systematic societal problem.

But in the meantime, if the only way to get a man to stop badgering you for sex is to lie and say you have an STI, you can lie and say you have an STI. He lost the right to hear the truth when he disrespected your boundaries. If you have to pretend your girlfriend is just your lab partner to get homophobic harassment to stop, you are absolutely within your rights to come up with an elaborate pretend chemistry project for which the two of you definitely need to be left alone together. And you're allowed to keep doing that until our society starts respecting a simple "leave me alone".

It doesn't hurt people with allergies and intolerances for there to be more of us. The more people there are who request gluten free options, the more likely the cafeteria is to start providing them. I would far rather that everyone who doesn't want to eat gluten said that they absolutely can't have any, because faced with a whole host of people saying they really need gluten free options, maybe restaurants and events would start providing food that I can actually eat instead of just turning me away.

Yeah, it's really horrible if someone claims to have a peanut allergy and then someone else secretly feeds them peanuts and goes "haha I fed you peanuts and you didn't die, that means peanut allergies are fake, haha". But it's kinda victim blamey to declare that this is the fault of the person who was forced to tell a lie in order to get people to respect their stated boundaries about what they will put in their body, and not... y'know... the fault of the person who used deception to violate someone else's boundaries and (as far as they knew) risk killing them.

And like - it would be nice if things were incredibly clear cut. If everyone who said "I have a peanut allergy" was actually going to die if fed even a tiny amount of peanuts, and nobody who didn't have a peanut allergy would suffer at all because they ate peanuts. I can see how, when someone says they can't have a certain food and then eats a little of it and doesn't die, that would make people around them think that they're faking, and then maybe they'll assume the next person is faking too and they'll feed that person allergens and kill them. Or maybe if most people request a peanut-free version just because they don't like the taste, a restaurant might (wrongly) feel like they can relax their protocols about not getting trace amounts of contamination. And maybe it'd make those people stop, if everyone who claimed food restrictions was actually deathly allergic.

But that's not... actually how the world is.

I have food intolerances. That means that if I eat too much of the food I'm intolerant to, I'll be really sick. Before I got diagnosed, when I was eating those foods for practically every meal for years on end, I was incredibly sick. I couldn't sleep for days on end, to the point where I literally fell asleep on my feet and just - crashed down onto the floor in the middle of a school assembly. I was taking 10x to 20x overdoses of anti-acids every single day just to stave the pain and nausea off. Just drinking Gaviscon like water. Sometimes I couldn't eat anything because I just felt too sick. I'm telling you this to emphasise that I'm not faking. I may not instantly drop down dead when I eat the wrong foods, but my dietary restrictions are incredibly important for my health.

But my diet is incredibly hard to follow. "No gluten" rules out a lot of basic snacks. "No onions or garlic" rules out basically all pre-prepared food and anything I didn't cook myself. I can never buy salads because they always have at least one thing I'm not supposed to have, whether it be avocado or coleslaw or croutons. I can very very rarely eat anything provided by vegans, because I'm not supposed to have nuts or soy or tofu or cauliflower or beans or basically any of the vegan sources of protein.

So yeah. Sometimes I eat a bit of a food that I'm not supposed to eat, and I don't drop down dead. (I do feel sick and super sleepy and get a really bad stomach ache - a little bit occasionally is okay, but I am the only one who chooses when and where to accept that tradeoff.) If someone watches that, concludes that I'm faking, and decides to go harass peanut allergy sufferers? That person is an asshole. The problem is not ~fakers~, the problem is assholes.

And you can say "oh but op isn't like you, op is actually faking" - but it's a pretty smooth continuum, all the way from people who just dislike a food and will be unhappy if they eat it because they don't like the way it tastes, to people who really hate a food to the point of retching when they taste it, to autistics who have no medical restrictions on food but will throw up if they eat textures they really hate, to people who just get a bit of indigestion if they eat too many beans, to people like me who can eat a pizza if they don't mind writing off tomorrow, to people who have a mild allergic reaction but nothing that needs hospitalisation, through to people who will end up in hospital but survive, through to people with deadly allergies who can't be in the same room as a food without risking their life.

There is no principled place to draw the line and say "these people deserve to have their boundaries respected but these other people are fakers and don't". Everyone's boundaries deserve respect.

It's worth being aware of the situations in which it actually hurts others to lie about allergies. For instance, if you tell a restaurant to take a food out, they ought to just take it out. If you lie and say you have an allergy when you don't, it really disrupts their kitchen process because they have to clear a whole space to make sure there is no trace of the allergen in your food. So, you can lie to a random person, but please don't lie to restaurants.

But "this was the only way to get people not to violate my boundaries and constantly badger me" is not one of those situations. This is fine. If you want to be a good ally to people with food restrictions, then you can badger food providers (event organisers, restaurants, cafes etc) to disclose and clearly label ingredients, talk about providing alternative food options as a disability accessibility issue, call out bad behaviours like harassing/deceiving people about food, and make sure there will be food options for your diet-restricted friends before bringing them to places.

It’s literally apples and oranges. We have a different culture here. London is an entity to itself and feels foreign to the rest of the UK. We have issues with gangs and teenagers stabbing each other where they only meant to wound, but ended up killing, just to improve their street cred. 

But you know why this has been posted and there’s a whole bunch of The Yanks™ bringing up the UK for no reason: because they’re angry that other Americans are demanding gun control and, despite always being furious when those Americans compare gun crime to other countries (such as the UK), they’ve decided to make the opposite comparisons themselves. Because they don’t actually give a damn about the UK, or want to help start a conversation about how best to improve the UK, no. They want to basically go, “See?! This is why you should be against gun control!!!!1!” It’s hilariously transparent hypocrisy.

It suddenly stops mattering to them that we’re two different cultures with two different histories and two entirely different sets of issues. No, that’s only important when the gun control advocates make the comparisons. The comparisons to another country are only okay if they do it.

I am so over The Yanks™ and uneducated Brits that only consume Yank™ ideas about politics tripping over themselves.

“We’re still technically ruled by a monarchy!!!1!”

You mean, we have the Queen that fills a set of historical and traditional roles, is deliberately apolitical, has her political speeches written by the ruling government, is reported on and criticised and even hated by parts of the press and has no real power of her own aside from her land-owning and taxpayer money given to fund her and the royal family? That “rule”?

What’s the other solution, to give them guns? The message here seems to be pro-gun, but how does “there is a lot of knife violence in London” make me wish they had guns instead? That would undoubtedly make the situation worse, so gun control is a good thing regardless. If there is no violence, we’re glad criminals can’t buy guns. If there is lots of violence, we’re even more glad criminals can’t buy guns.

More importantly, the whole stat is misleading. For a start, the overall UK murder rate is 0.92 per 100,000 people, compared to 4.88 in the US. They’ve just found one city in the US with fewer murders than probably the most dangerous in the UK. This proves absolutely nothing about the different laws, just that it’s possible to cherry-pick two cities which fit the pattern you want. It’s easier to name US cities with higher crime rates than London, and then you could make a similar graphic mocking their gun problem.

Secondly, London is currently experiencing a high whilst New York’s figures have decreased. This is the first time in history that New York hasn’t had more homicides than London, despite having very similar populations. It’s only been one or two months, during an all-time high, but they’ve jumped on it as if it’s a long-term trend. Any other month before February and you could again make a similar graphic showing that New York has a violence problem.

Across the whole of last year, New York’s murder figures were actually almost double London’s. This is an exception to the rule, but people with an agenda are spreading it as if it’s the norm, suddenly paying attention to the stats because for the first time ever they fit their cause for one month. 

I don't know if taking the guns would make the US better. Maybe it's just that Americans are inherently violent and hate each other. Maybe it's because your police are so unbelievably shitty.

In theory, “if you hit someone you’ll be liable” provides an incentive not to hit people. But the incentive doesn’t really work. It’s a low probability high penalty thing, which we know human brains don’t respond to well - humans respond much better to rules that have lower penalties but are consistently enforced, like if they got a slap on the wrist every time they drove carelessly, rather than having a tiny chance of massive costs when they drive carelessly.

I get that people want to punish drivers who they think “deserve it” for hurting people, but the thing is that it’s really random. Sometimes a very careful and thoughtful driver kills a child because the child ran out suddenly into the road from behind a hedge. Sometimes incredibly careless people have car chases around cities and manage not to kill anybody. And sometimes situations are dangerous enough that someone is going to hit a pedestrian, and it’s essentially random who ends up doing it. You’re not actually punishing the “bad” people when you punish the ones that get into accidents; there’s a reason it’s called an accident.

There is another actor, who you can and should incentivize to increase road safety. And that’s the State.

The State can do far more to reduce car accidents than any individual driver can do. A driver can drive slowly and carefully and sober, but if they’re coming round a blind bend on a road with no pavement at the moment when a pedestrian decides to cross the road, they’re going to hit that pedestrian and there wasn’t anything they could do about it. The State (or the private road builder if that’s the case) could have prevented that accident - removing sight barriers so there’s no blind bends, straightening roads, building better highways to divert traffic from residential areas, putting up signs warning people about dangerous stretches of road, building pavements (sidewalks to Americans) so pedestrians aren’t on the road surface, providing crossings where needed, etc.

When someone is hit by a car, the state should be liable. It should pay for their repair costs, health care costs (as it would anyway in a civilised country), long term disability support costs if there are any, unemployment benefits if the accident leaves them unable to work, and funeral costs if it comes to that.

Removing the requirement for car insurance would also make it much cheaper to purchase a car, especially for young people. That would massively increase the mobility of youth, the opportunities they can access, and their ability to exit bad situations if needed.

Unless the government is a high-functioning Technocracy, or else just extremely effectively technocratic, this has the effect that,

1) Car use is even more significantly subsidized by non-car-owners than it is now.  We should not be subsidizing cars, especially through non-car-owners, because they are inefficient both economically and environmentally.

If you have the political power to impose this policy, you should instead alter zoning laws, increase city density, and improve public transit with that power.

2) The poor design of the incentives within the state ensures that the cost is rendered invisible by just being spread out across the entire population, with no significant improvement in road services.  But, if they do act to increase road signage?  Well…

3) The positive externalities of transport will not be accurately priced in to the system of incentives.  The benefits from owning and operating a car and being able to reach places will not be included in the calculations of how much money should be spent on road improvements, and how many restrictions should be placed on users.

Mandatory car insurance already widely distributes the risk associated with car accidents - and it puts it on the party that is incurring that risk, which is drivers.  The cost with insurance is a more accurate reflection of what the car actually costs to society.  Car insurance is the clever hack.

Remember, people who do not own or drive cars do actually exist.  

We already have a mechanism for making people stop doing things that are bad and harm others. It's the law. It's illegal to drink and drive. If you want those people to stop driving, just confiscate their licences after the third DUI.

But he said he would be “amazed” if he was prosecuted over the death.

“The law says that a person can use reasonable force when defending himself, his family or property. If the intruder is running away the threat has diminished but if that person stays where they are that’s an assault and if they are armed with a weapon then it would be regarded as aggravating circumstances,” said Mr Brennan. - x

B, even if it wasn't, stabbing people to death is actually bad, it's still bad even if those people are criminals, and "but it's understandable and the victims were bad people" cannot cannot cannot become a reason not to enforce laws against stabbing people to death. If it was proportional self defence then of course they'll let him go, but they have to check that it actually fell under the exceptions clearly defined in law. You can't just... not even bother to investigate stabbings because obviously it was fine and just self defence.

C, wow, Americans have an unbelievably fucked up sense of what "any sane person with natural survival instincts would do".

Sane people with natural survival instincts

hide

run away and call the police

retreat to a room with a door that can be locked, lock it, then call the police

if violence becomes absolutely necessary, arm yourself with something large that can keep them at a distance, and aim to knock people out; stabbing people isn't even a good self defence strategy since they can stab you back while they're bleeding out

give the burglars a chance to run away, which in almost all cases they'll take, since they usually had no plans on encountering residents

If your "sane survival instinct" is to grapple with younger, fitter attackers who outnumber you until you can take their screwdriver from them and then stab one of them, I am genuinely impressed by how your survival instincts managed to hit on the actual worst strategy out of all of your options. Your survival instincts will get you killed and you need to get better ones.

In theory, “if you hit someone you’ll be liable” provides an incentive not to hit people. But the incentive doesn’t really work. It’s a low probability high penalty thing, which we know human brains don’t respond to well - humans respond much better to rules that have lower penalties but are consistently enforced, like if they got a slap on the wrist every time they drove carelessly, rather than having a tiny chance of massive costs when they drive carelessly.

I get that people want to punish drivers who they think “deserve it” for hurting people, but the thing is that it’s really random. Sometimes a very careful and thoughtful driver kills a child because the child ran out suddenly into the road from behind a hedge. Sometimes incredibly careless people have car chases around cities and manage not to kill anybody. And sometimes situations are dangerous enough that someone is going to hit a pedestrian, and it’s essentially random who ends up doing it. You’re not actually punishing the “bad” people when you punish the ones that get into accidents; there’s a reason it’s called an accident.

There is another actor, who you can and should incentivize to increase road safety. And that’s the State.

The State can do far more to reduce car accidents than any individual driver can do. A driver can drive slowly and carefully and sober, but if they’re coming round a blind bend on a road with no pavement at the moment when a pedestrian decides to cross the road, they’re going to hit that pedestrian and there wasn’t anything they could do about it. The State (or the private road builder if that’s the case) could have prevented that accident - removing sight barriers so there’s no blind bends, straightening roads, building better highways to divert traffic from residential areas, putting up signs warning people about dangerous stretches of road, building pavements (sidewalks to Americans) so pedestrians aren’t on the road surface, providing crossings where needed, etc.

When someone is hit by a car, the state should be liable. It should pay for their repair costs, health care costs (as it would anyway in a civilised country), long term disability support costs if there are any, unemployment benefits if the accident leaves them unable to work, and funeral costs if it comes to that.

Removing the requirement for car insurance would also make it much cheaper to purchase a car, especially for young people. That would massively increase the mobility of youth, the opportunities they can access, and their ability to exit bad situations if needed.

If you’ve never lived in an rural area, you probably have no idea how incredibly important cars are. I expect giving young people cars to be a massive step for youth rights, a huge economic boost, a great way to increase access to education and extracurricular activities, an effective strategy to reduce abuse and increase people’s exit rights, a bonus for everyone’s mental health, etc etc, and to reduce unemployment and prevent people having to sleep on the streets.

I’m surprised that you think the main limiting reagent to youth car ownership is car insurance. At least in the US, in my experience the cost of the car is greater than the cost of insurance for a couple of years (though probably not over the lifetime of the car), plus the cost of the car is upfront, while insurance is more distributed. Actually, I just looked into this further, and https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/total-cost-owning-car/ seems to estimate that monthly costs of car insurance is about 1/5 of cost of car payments. It’s probably a bit higher than that for young people, but still not the main cost.

That’s definitely the thing that scares me - people being at the mercy of their parents because they do not have a car and therefore they can’t work, they can’t leave, they can’t visit friends, they can’t safely transport possessions, they can’t go to any extracurricular or educational activity that their parents aren’t willing to actively contribute time to, and if they’re kicked out there’s nowhere they can go because there’s nowhere in walking distance.

(They would mean less need for parking spaces and more efficient use of that land for things people actually need to survive, and carpooling versions – like UberPool or Lyft Line – would be better for congestion than taxis and single-occupant cars.)

The thing about personal cars is that they're persistent. If I own a car, then I can leave some possessions in the boot (I think "trunk" to Americans?), and when I come back to the car they will still be there. I can make modifications to the car to make it safer or more pleasant for me to drive, or adapt it so I can use it with a disability, or otherwise ensure it conforms to my preferences. I can pack some emergency stuff in my car, just in case I have to travel somewhere in a hurry.

Taxi services don't achieve any of what I care about in terms of exit rights. If I need to leave an abusive situation and I have a car, then I pack all my possessions into my car and I go. If I can't quickly find anywhere safe to go, I can just sleep in the car - a relatively safe, warm, locked, waterproof environment where I can spread some duvets across the back seats. I can toss my business suit into the car boot when I leave, and then use it to interview for jobs until I'm back on my feet. I can drive to a friend's house and crash on their couch, but if they can't host me for more than a few days, it's a really easy matter to shove everything into my car and move on again.

If I need to leave an abusive situation and I only have a taxi, I can't carry anything with me except what I can carry on my person. I certainly can't take business attire, or a duvet, or stocks of medicines or bulky disability equipment. If I can't find a place to stay by nightfall, I'll be sleeping on the streets - exposing me to the risk of violence, damaging my health, and by all accounts an altogether unpleasant experience. If I had anything with me like a laptop, it's decently likely it'll be stolen, making it much harder for me to apply to jobs or look for housing or get back on my feet at all.

Taxis let you transport yourself and the stuff in your pockets - unless there's any reason you can't access them, in which case you need a car that's adapted to your needs. Cars give you the ability to transport yourself and your stuff. And while some people have the skill of living out of a backpack, absolutely not everyone does, and many people stay in abusive situations because they could get out but they don't know how they'd transport their essential possessions and they don't know how to survive without them. Not to mention that for many people, possessions are the vast majority of their net worth, and it's understandably important to them to hold onto them.

Cars as emergency backup housing are also incredibly valuable - homeless people who live out of their cars are much better off than those who sleep exposed on the streets. They're safer, they're able to store more stuff (read: essential tools for fixing their situation and taking care of themselves, like clothes, Internet devices, toiletries, medicine), and they have better access to essential services because they can go to stuff that isn't in walking distance.

People also have different needs. Many people are disabled, and far more people have unusual preferences or just really strong desires for things to be a certain way, and people use cars for a bunch of different things. Personal cars let you actually meet your needs.

If your illness flares up while the travelling sometimes, you can keep some medicines on your back seat. If you always forget your house keys when you go to work, you can put a "keys!" sticker on your glove box. If you can't stand other people for whatever reason, you can travel alone. If you're vegan you can get a car without leather seats. If you're allergic to other car seat materials you can specifically get leather instead. If your dog freaks out when you drive them to the vet you can put extra padding in the dog cage you've installed in the back. If light hurts your eyes or you're concerned about privacy then you can get tinted windows. If you're allergic to dust you can keep your car squeaky clean. If your job frequently involves ferrying large amounts of stuff around you can knock out the back seats for more boot space. If you have kids you can install booster seats. If you need lots of leg room you can buy a roomy car. If seat belts hurt your neck you can put covers on them. If you often take your bike places you can fit a bike rack on the roof. ....I could go on for a while.

If you're lucky, taxis will occasionally comply with "send me a taxi which is wheelchair accessible". But "send me a taxi with a couple booster seats and a dog cage, and promise me nobody has eaten peanuts inside since the last time it was cleaned"? Yeah right.

A car is a transport option. But it's also a mobile base. Borrowing someone else's is not the same, at all, as having your own.

Plus in my experience, taxi services are often really unwilling to comply with even simple basic requests like "hang around for a few hours while I load boxes in to the back of your van" or "take me to a rural location, outside of your usual range" or "pick me up when it's late at night, from anywhere but a city centre". Maybe self driving cars would solve the problem of drivers refusing to shut up when their passengers really don't want to talk, but it's not going to significantly change the economics of providing a service that covers all areas and journey lengths.

In theory, “if you hit someone you’ll be liable” provides an incentive not to hit people. But the incentive doesn’t really work. It’s a low probability high penalty thing, which we know human brains don’t respond to well - humans respond much better to rules that have lower penalties but are consistently enforced, like if they got a slap on the wrist every time they drove carelessly, rather than having a tiny chance of massive costs when they drive carelessly.

I get that people want to punish drivers who they think “deserve it” for hurting people, but the thing is that it’s really random. Sometimes a very careful and thoughtful driver kills a child because the child ran out suddenly into the road from behind a hedge. Sometimes incredibly careless people have car chases around cities and manage not to kill anybody. And sometimes situations are dangerous enough that someone is going to hit a pedestrian, and it’s essentially random who ends up doing it. You’re not actually punishing the “bad” people when you punish the ones that get into accidents; there’s a reason it’s called an accident.

There is another actor, who you can and should incentivize to increase road safety. And that’s the State.

The State can do far more to reduce car accidents than any individual driver can do. A driver can drive slowly and carefully and sober, but if they’re coming round a blind bend on a road with no pavement at the moment when a pedestrian decides to cross the road, they’re going to hit that pedestrian and there wasn’t anything they could do about it. The State (or the private road builder if that’s the case) could have prevented that accident - removing sight barriers so there’s no blind bends, straightening roads, building better highways to divert traffic from residential areas, putting up signs warning people about dangerous stretches of road, building pavements (sidewalks to Americans) so pedestrians aren’t on the road surface, providing crossings where needed, etc.

When someone is hit by a car, the state should be liable. It should pay for their repair costs, health care costs (as it would anyway in a civilised country), long term disability support costs if there are any, unemployment benefits if the accident leaves them unable to work, and funeral costs if it comes to that.

Removing the requirement for car insurance would also make it much cheaper to purchase a car, especially for young people. That would massively increase the mobility of youth, the opportunities they can access, and their ability to exit bad situations if needed.

If you’ve never lived in an rural area, you probably have no idea how incredibly important cars are. I expect giving young people cars to be a massive step for youth rights, a huge economic boost, a great way to increase access to education and extracurricular activities, an effective strategy to reduce abuse and increase people’s exit rights, a bonus for everyone’s mental health, etc etc, and to reduce unemployment and prevent people having to sleep on the streets.

I’m surprised that you think the main limiting reagent to youth car ownership is car insurance. At least in the US, in my experience the cost of the car is greater than the cost of insurance for a couple of years (though probably not over the lifetime of the car), plus the cost of the car is upfront, while insurance is more distributed. Actually, I just looked into this further, and https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/total-cost-owning-car/ seems to estimate that monthly costs of car insurance is about 1/5 of cost of car payments. It’s probably a bit higher than that for young people, but still not the main cost.

That's definitely the thing that scares me - people being at the mercy of their parents because they do not have a car and therefore they can't work, they can't leave, they can't visit friends, they can't safely transport possessions, they can't go to any extracurricular or educational activity that their parents aren't willing to actively contribute time to, and if they're kicked out there's nowhere they can go because there's nowhere in walking distance.

In theory, “if you hit someone you’ll be liable” provides an incentive not to hit people. But the incentive doesn’t really work. It’s a low probability high penalty thing, which we know human brains don’t respond to well - humans respond much better to rules that have lower penalties but are consistently enforced, like if they got a slap on the wrist every time they drove carelessly, rather than having a tiny chance of massive costs when they drive carelessly.

I get that people want to punish drivers who they think “deserve it” for hurting people, but the thing is that it’s really random. Sometimes a very careful and thoughtful driver kills a child because the child ran out suddenly into the road from behind a hedge. Sometimes incredibly careless people have car chases around cities and manage not to kill anybody. And sometimes situations are dangerous enough that someone is going to hit a pedestrian, and it’s essentially random who ends up doing it. You’re not actually punishing the “bad” people when you punish the ones that get into accidents; there’s a reason it’s called an accident.

There is another actor, who you can and should incentivize to increase road safety. And that’s the State.

The State can do far more to reduce car accidents than any individual driver can do. A driver can drive slowly and carefully and sober, but if they’re coming round a blind bend on a road with no pavement at the moment when a pedestrian decides to cross the road, they’re going to hit that pedestrian and there wasn’t anything they could do about it. The State (or the private road builder if that’s the case) could have prevented that accident - removing sight barriers so there’s no blind bends, straightening roads, building better highways to divert traffic from residential areas, putting up signs warning people about dangerous stretches of road, building pavements (sidewalks to Americans) so pedestrians aren’t on the road surface, providing crossings where needed, etc.

When someone is hit by a car, the state should be liable. It should pay for their repair costs, health care costs (as it would anyway in a civilised country), long term disability support costs if there are any, unemployment benefits if the accident leaves them unable to work, and funeral costs if it comes to that.

Removing the requirement for car insurance would also make it much cheaper to purchase a car, especially for young people. That would massively increase the mobility of youth, the opportunities they can access, and their ability to exit bad situations if needed.

Obviously these people should be provided with ways to do these things that are much less dangerous. Cars that can Bluetooth connect to your phone and allow hands free calling are great, and so are fidgety steering wheel covers that don't require you to take your hands off the wheel.

I don't think showing that a driver harmed someone is a great way to prove they were distracted, and if your incentive is based on "there's a very small risk that you hurt someone and if that happens there's a steep penalty" it will work much much worse than "definitely receive a slap on the wrist" type penalties.

In theory, “if you hit someone you’ll be liable” provides an incentive not to hit people. But the incentive doesn’t really work. It’s a low probability high penalty thing, which we know human brains don’t respond to well - humans respond much better to rules that have lower penalties but are consistently enforced, like if they got a slap on the wrist every time they drove carelessly, rather than having a tiny chance of massive costs when they drive carelessly.

I get that people want to punish drivers who they think “deserve it” for hurting people, but the thing is that it’s really random. Sometimes a very careful and thoughtful driver kills a child because the child ran out suddenly into the road from behind a hedge. Sometimes incredibly careless people have car chases around cities and manage not to kill anybody. And sometimes situations are dangerous enough that someone is going to hit a pedestrian, and it’s essentially random who ends up doing it. You’re not actually punishing the “bad” people when you punish the ones that get into accidents; there’s a reason it’s called an accident.

There is another actor, who you can and should incentivize to increase road safety. And that’s the State.

The State can do far more to reduce car accidents than any individual driver can do. A driver can drive slowly and carefully and sober, but if they’re coming round a blind bend on a road with no pavement at the moment when a pedestrian decides to cross the road, they’re going to hit that pedestrian and there wasn’t anything they could do about it. The State (or the private road builder if that’s the case) could have prevented that accident - removing sight barriers so there’s no blind bends, straightening roads, building better highways to divert traffic from residential areas, putting up signs warning people about dangerous stretches of road, building pavements (sidewalks to Americans) so pedestrians aren’t on the road surface, providing crossings where needed, etc.

When someone is hit by a car, the state should be liable. It should pay for their repair costs, health care costs (as it would anyway in a civilised country), long term disability support costs if there are any, unemployment benefits if the accident leaves them unable to work, and funeral costs if it comes to that.

Removing the requirement for car insurance would also make it much cheaper to purchase a car, especially for young people. That would massively increase the mobility of youth, the opportunities they can access, and their ability to exit bad situations if needed.

If you've never lived in an rural area, you probably have no idea how incredibly important cars are. I expect giving young people cars to be a massive step for youth rights, a huge economic boost, a great way to increase access to education and extracurricular activities, an effective strategy to reduce abuse and increase people's exit rights, a bonus for everyone's mental health, etc etc, and to reduce unemployment and prevent people having to sleep on the streets.

In theory, “if you hit someone you’ll be liable” provides an incentive not to hit people. But the incentive doesn’t really work. It’s a low probability high penalty thing, which we know human brains don’t respond to well - humans respond much better to rules that have lower penalties but are consistently enforced, like if they got a slap on the wrist every time they drove carelessly, rather than having a tiny chance of massive costs when they drive carelessly.

I get that people want to punish drivers who they think “deserve it” for hurting people, but the thing is that it’s really random. Sometimes a very careful and thoughtful driver kills a child because the child ran out suddenly into the road from behind a hedge. Sometimes incredibly careless people have car chases around cities and manage not to kill anybody. And sometimes situations are dangerous enough that someone is going to hit a pedestrian, and it’s essentially random who ends up doing it. You’re not actually punishing the “bad” people when you punish the ones that get into accidents; there’s a reason it’s called an accident.

There is another actor, who you can and should incentivize to increase road safety. And that’s the State.

The State can do far more to reduce car accidents than any individual driver can do. A driver can drive slowly and carefully and sober, but if they’re coming round a blind bend on a road with no pavement at the moment when a pedestrian decides to cross the road, they’re going to hit that pedestrian and there wasn’t anything they could do about it. The State (or the private road builder if that’s the case) could have prevented that accident - removing sight barriers so there’s no blind bends, straightening roads, building better highways to divert traffic from residential areas, putting up signs warning people about dangerous stretches of road, building pavements (sidewalks to Americans) so pedestrians aren’t on the road surface, providing crossings where needed, etc.

When someone is hit by a car, the state should be liable. It should pay for their repair costs, health care costs (as it would anyway in a civilised country), long term disability support costs if there are any, unemployment benefits if the accident leaves them unable to work, and funeral costs if it comes to that.

Removing the requirement for car insurance would also make it much cheaper to purchase a car, especially for young people. That would massively increase the mobility of youth, the opportunities they can access, and their ability to exit bad situations if needed.