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r/EffectiveAltruism
For Really Effective Altruism, Try Revolutionary Socialism
u/RobotLuxemburg
In Scott Alexander's excellent article, Conflict vs. Mistake, he contrasts political narratives by dividing them into two competing dogmas: those who believe that political errors are due to honest mistakes, and those who believe they are due to misaligned intentions. Many political arguments can be analyzed through these lenses. They are two models which can help shed light on a multitude of intentions, beliefs, and actions in the political realm. In my own interactions with effective altruists, I find that many have taken his message to heart, and try not to see their enemy as truly evil. This is a rationalist trope. That being said, I think the trope as traditionally construed, is seriously wrong.
It is no surprise to find that Scott Alexander begins his article by strawmanning Marxists.
This would explain why their own governments so often fail. Also why, whenever existing governments are bad, Marxists immediately jump to the conclusion that they must be run by evil people who want them to be bad on purpose.
I have found this theme repeated over and over again in rationalist literature: Marxists are dumb because they believe that societal problems are caused by evil people. "That's not how the real world works" they say. Instead, we should look at politics as a bunch of doctors just trying to find the best cure for a patient.
When I hear this, I can hardly avoid laughing. A good doctor is one that is trained to mitigate the cause of a disease, not merely palliate the symptoms.
Yet effective altruists still think that the best way to help the developing world is to convince capitalists to donate money to private charity.
Yet effective altruists still think that the best way to help animals is to influence the companies who profit from their suffering.
Yet effective altruists still think that the best way to save the world is convincing a capitalist society, which optimizes for short term greed, to give their money to small private charities.
Africans aren't in poverty because there aren't enough resources to go around. There are enough resources to go around, we just don't distribute them. Why? Because the richest countries in the world have instilled a dangerous ethic: the idea of private property, that we should not feel entitled to other people's money, and that "hard work" is all you need to be successful. In practice this means that rich capitalists are able to grow their wealth at the expense of others.
"How is Warren Buffet harming you by not giving you money?" they say without a hint of irony. Peter Singer has already elaborated how not giving people money can in itself be considered a harm back in 1972. Remember that in consequentialist terms, inaction can be just as harmful as action.
Yet even a community such as this one, when presented with all the right tools for thinking about these things, gets it 100% wrong. Even though the effective altruist surveys indicate that most of us are on the left, the good ideas of leftism are drowned out by the libertarian underpinning which has been at the heart of effective altruism for so long.
Looking back, we see that effective altruism has been married with libertarianism since the beginning. Peter Theil funded MIRI, the SENS foundation. Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson are highly celebrated. We are taught by the mainline EA literature that politics is overfunded, overcrowded, non-neglected and intractable. Besides, leftism has never worked in practice.
To address the tired old argument about socialism killing more people than Hitler, here's the difference: Hitler's ideology is inherently about killing people, socialism isn't. It's like blaming the slave trade on international trade. "Shut down the WTO!" the hypothetical strawman warns. But there's a difference between values and their implementations. And modern day socialists do not want genocide. In the purest sense, the idea that they do is propaganda, and one that's been quite successful.
Tell me again who is supposed to be the one calling the other side evil? What happened to conflict theory being dumb?
Take the issue of animal suffering. Whenever I bring up that capitalism directly optimizes for efficiency which is literally the only reason why farm animals are in their distressed state, I get a flurry of "Well yeah but the Soviets weren't very good to animals either." These are cached thoughts, nothing else.
The reason why the Soviets didn't care about animals is because the tide of public opinion wasn't pro-animal at the time. Nowadays, 49% of people want a ban on slaughterhouses. The tide has clearly changed, but our capitalist society will obviously not shift so fast. Capitalism only becomes more ethical when there's overwhelming public preference for a particular moral attitude. In socialism you could have a vote, unimpeded by rich corporate interests.
You want to talk about how machine learning is improving at a too-fast-for-caution rate? Then let's at least discuss why it is happening.
In a community that talks about optimization processes and unaligned values, it sure isn't popular to bring up the fact that corporations already exist. Even a few days ago, a popular EA Youtuber came out with a video about how corporations aren't really comparable to superintelligent AI since they lack long serial power. OK sure. But that kind of misses the point: corporations have already performed irreparable harm, and they will continue to do so if left unabolished.
The world is heading toward the whirling razor blades, we are told, and funding small private charities is our only hope. But effective altruism should be about effecting the most change possible, not about making the most change per capita. There's no reason why we should not direct our attention to the larger political threads. The true levers of power aren't going to care about the research FHI has produced. They are just going to pave right over us -- and perhaps the entire world, not with paperclips, but money.
I don't think that we are on a path to success. The default outcome is that the world will be destroyed, and possibly worse. I find the closest analogy to be like we are in a pre-nuclear age, with direct profit incentives for corporate entities to blow up the world. And rather than unrooting the seeds of disaster, we would rather fund a private charity that researches ways of safely managing a nuclear reaction. That will not avert disaster. At best, it will only delay catastrophe.
Take just about any EA cause: global poverty, animal suffering, existential risks in all forms, aging, criminal justice -- capitalism can be found at the root of them all. I call myself a revolutionary not because I want violence, but because I want change. No, I don't think that revolutions are always good. No, I don't think that the communist revolutions of 1917 were good. And no, I'm not an apologist for Stalin.
A good consequentialist needs to be an original thinker. The reasons for this are twofold: it will help them come up with novel solutions, but will also allow them to actively avoid the background biases of their society, and life. Effective altruism has an anti-socialism, pro-capitalism, we-shouldn't-even-talk-about-politics slant, and it quite possibly will doom us all. I haven't done an analysis on which charities and interventions are most likely to implement socialism, but also no one has. In a movement that's completed in-depth analyses of rent control, we aren't able to address the elephant in the room, the disease at the center.
I have a feeling after reading this post, many will come away convinced, yet do nothing. It's hard to influence institutional momentum, and ironically effective altruists are no stranger to this at all. The ingrained biases of effective altruists cannot be so easily changed, or else it would have been done already. After reading this no doubt many will find my conclusions far fetched. Some may even call me naive, or evil. But so be it -- this is the hill I will die on. And when the world breaths its last, I will take no pleasure in its demise, but you can bet I'll be indignant.
But there is a way out. A bright future is ahead of us, and it is possible, despite all evidence. Decision theory tells us that we should take the best of bad options, even if the best is a long-shot. Better to take a 1 in 10000 chance of 1050 utils than certainty of -100000 utils. I don't believe that implementing socialism is likely. But it's the best chance we have if we actually want our long-term goals to be achieved.
So stop the fake justifications, the cached thoughts. Socialism is the vision effective altruists should be fighting for.
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digongdidnothingwron
I've always felt the debate between the pro- and anti- Marxism people to be very intimidating. Every time I get convinced of one side's argument, the other has a convincing argument why that argument is wrong, and then this side has an argument why that argument is wrong, and so on... I've just decided to stick to leaning against Marxism since a lot of people I respect are as well (among other reasons) (basically epistemic learned helplessness). This is just a long-winded way of saying that you could probably debunk any direct argument against socialism I can think of, so I won't even try. I'll just try to look at it on a meta level to avoid directly hinging my arguments on a socialist revolution being good or bad.
Take just about any EA cause: global poverty, animal suffering, existential risks in all forms, aging, criminal justice -- capitalism can be found at the root of them all. I call myself a revolutionary not because I want violence, but because I want change.
I'm convinced that capitalism has big contributions on all these problems (except aging, I don't really see what's capitalism has to do with it). But I don't think any of these are necessary products of capitalism. That is, I don't think that the only way to solve any of these problems is to do away with capitalism. The EA movement's entire goal is to solve these problems, so these some of the solutions they support:
Global Poverty: economic progress*
Animal Suffering (Factory Farming): clean/cultured meat, plant-based meat
Existential Risks: existential risk research (e.g. AI safety research, synthetic biology safety research, etc.), creating friendly AGI before to protect ourselves with from other x-risks
Aging: nano-technology, synthetic biology
Criminal Justice: criminal justice reform
The solution you present to all these cause areas is a socialist revolution. Let's suppose that's the case, bearing in mind that it's merely a means to solve these problems, and not an end per se. The biggest advantage of this is that it's a single solution to all these problems. The biggest disadvantage is that it has a very low probability of success. You acknowledge this, and indeed what's distinctive about the EA movement is that it's willing to pursue high risk high reward options as long as the expected value is highest. Thus, we need to compare the expected value of a socialist revolution and those individual solutions to each cause area. Since the utility comes from solving the cause areas, the potential reward is constant. The solutions vary with respect to their probabilities. Clearly the solutions supported by the EA movement is more probable to occur than a socialist revolution, even if the EA movement did its best to create one. In fact, a lot of those only seem to be a matter of time.
I find the closest analogy to be like we are in a pre-nuclear age, with direct profit incentives for corporate entities to blow up the world. And rather than unrooting the seeds of disaster, we would rather fund a private charity that researches ways of safely managing a nuclear reaction. That will not avert disaster. At best, it will only delay catastrophe.
A socialist revolution would be a particularly poor option here, considering that the goal is to prevent the invention of nuclear weapons. You would have to stage a revolution on many of the countries capable of creating one that it's even more intractable. Funding an FHI-like charity would have much higher expected utility. This illustrates why a revolution would actually be a particularly poor solution to existential risks (you'd have to have a revolution everywhere to prevent anyone from pulling out a metaphorical black ball from the urn).
Decision theory tells us that we should take the best of bad options, even if the best is a long-shot. Better to take a 1 in 10000 chance of 1050 utils than certainty of -100000 utils. I don't believe that implementing socialism is likely. But it's the best chance we have if we actually want our long-term goals to be achieved.
This presupposes that a socialist revolution is the only solution to the world's problems. It should be more like "Better to take a 1 in 10,000 chance of 1050 utils than 1 in 1,000,000 chance of 1050 utils."
Also, as an aside (the arguments above don't rely on this), I don't think all the main cause areas are unique to capitalism (the exceptions being factory farming and criminal justice). For example, majority of the world's population was under poverty throughout most of history. Since AI and synthetic biology have such massive potential in solving the world's problems, it's not clear that it would only arise worlds with capitalism. Aging has been around since forever.Another aside: Trying to stage a socialist revolution might even increase existential risk if it increases the probability of war.
You might instead consider a more gradual shift to a socialist-leaning society instead of a revolution. That would be much more tractable as a project, though at the cost of speed. Most of the cause areas above would probably have been solved by the time that society becomes a fully-socialist one.
TLDR: Capitalism being deeply causally linked to the world's problems does not necessarily mean that the only way to solve those problems is to get rid of capitalism. Even if we assume that a socialist revolution would solve those problems, considering that the likelihood of a socialist revolution succeeding is so low, we should instead pursue higher probability options.
RobotLuxemburg
Original Poster2 points · 6 months ago · edited 6 months ago
I've just decided to stick to leaning against Marxism since a lot of people I respect are as well
But there are also plenty of smart people who endorse socialism, like Einstein for instance. I'm going to be frank: I think you just don't want to admit socialism is good because you're a conformist and default to defending the status quo. Although I admit that's not the most charitable interpretation of what you wrote, I don't know how else to interpret it.
except aging, I don't really see what's capitalism has to do with it
Big Pharma profits from diseases of aging, so they have an incentive to not solve aging. In a socialist system, these incentives would not be present. In fact, if the government stopped spending money on building weapons to kill brown people, we'd have more than enough money to find treatments and cures for all major diseases.
Since AI and synthetic biology have such massive potential in solving the world's problems, it's not clear that it would only arise worlds with capitalism
I think of socialism as a stable singleton state. Basically friendly AI but without AGI. Importantly, a socialist world would be better equipped to coordinate AI development because there wouldn't be profit incentives to be the first company to develop AI and bypass safety guidelines.
You might instead consider a more gradual shift to a socialist-leaning society instead of a revolution.
I support revolutionary socialism rather than reformism. The bourgeoisie will never voluntarily give up the means of production.
But regardless, as far as I'm aware, no EAs have researched strategies for gradually moving towards socialism either, so my point still stands even if you're a reformist.
noplusnoequalsno
5 points · 6 months ago · edited 6 months ago
Ok so there are some effective altruists out there who do think it's worthwhile to understand critiques of capitalism and to think about alternatives. I'm one of them! Having said that, I have a few issues with your post.
The first is that you seem to be assuming that anyone who accepts a pro-capitalist position is unreasonable. This seems both false and enormously counterproductive. Capitalism has produced both harms and benefits. If you look at the benefits produced by capitalism in the last 70 or so years and compare it to other economic systems that have have been tried, it's quite easy for me to see how a reasonable person would see capitalism as an overall benefit. If you're trying to persuade people to be anti-capitalist, but are going to assume that the people you're trying to persuade are simply being unreasonable, well, that just doesn't seem like a very productive rhetorical strategy. You might want to look into why reasonable people might support libertarianism or capitalism. Firstly, you might actually find they have stronger arguments than you initially thought. Secondly, it might help shape and sharpen your own position. Jason Brennan's Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know is one book that help me to do this.
Of course just because capitalism is better than other economic systems that have been tried, doesn't mean that it is the best possible economic system. It seems to me at least that while capitalism has produced enormous increases in the standard of living, it also produces significant harms, many of which you mention. I guess the main question for me is: what's the alternative?
You mention that you're a revolutionary and in the same breath admit that revolutions aren't always good. While I'm not well versed in the history of revolutionary struggle, my impression is that these revolutions almost always go badly. That's not to say that it is inevitable for revolutions to go badly, but simply agitating for revolution alone doesn't seem like a very productive strategy. If risking a revolution is the only alternative, well that doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
Luckily there are other potential responses we could make. Erik Olin Wright has outlined four categories of resistance to capitalsim:
Smashing capitalism
Taming capitalism
Escaping capitalism
Eroding capitalism
Wright argues that revolution is not a viable response to capitalism at this time, and that anticapitalists should instead focus on mitigating the harms of capitalism (taming capitalism), and building more democratic, egalitarian and participatory structures within capitalism (eroding capitalism). Whether or not this is the most effective way to do good is another issue, but if you think the harms caused by capitalism are one of the world's most pressing problems, then this seems like a more productive framework to begin addressing them.
The_Ebb_and_Flow
I think Chomsky's view is similar:
Interviewed on the odds of realizing an anarchist society Chomsky, using a slogan used by agricultural workers from Brazil, answers: "They say they have to enlarge their cage until they can break the bars." Chomsky asserts that, in the current US state of things, one must defend the cage against external predators; defend power – however certainly illegitimate – of the State against private tyranny. It is, he says, "an evidence for all people troubled by injustice and unfreedom, for example someone who thinks children must be nourished, but this seems difficult to make understand many who fancy themselves libertarian or anarchist." "In my view", he adds, "it is one of the irrational and self-destructive instincts of good people who consider themselves left who, in fact, distance themselves from the legitimate lives and aspirations of suffering people."
youcanteatbullets
I call myself a revolutionary not because I want violence, but because I want change. No, I don't think that revolutions are always good
Right so when you agitate for a revolution you also need to make sure that your particular revolution will be good (they usually aren't) and also prove this to others. Which takes a lot more than just repeating "capitalism bad", assuming everybody will agree with you, and not-so-subtly implying that anybody who doesn't is an idiot.
Take just about any EA cause: global poverty, animal suffering, existential risks in all forms, aging, criminal justice -- capitalism can be found at the root of them all.
Capitalism is at the root of the entire world economy, so it stands to reason it would be at the root of many things (both good and bad).
A good consequentialist needs to be an original thinker
For starters, this is totally false. Second, "revolutionary socialism" is not an original idea so you're clearly not practicing what you preach. Come back when you've come up with a way to structure society that you developed yourself and would solve the entire worlds problems.
_brybgr
I think this is important to bear in mind: around 90 percent of the world population lived in extreme poverty in 1800, as opposed to 10 percent today (see link below). This is not because already existing resources are now more evenly distributed, it's because of economic growth. I think most economists would agree that property rights and markets are important contributors to this. While I think improvements to our economic systems should be sought, throwing out property rights doesn't seem like a particularly wise move. Unless you worry about AI and want a collapse of civilisation in order to delay AI progress or something... but even then I suspect that our chances of avoiding an undesirable AI is better if civilisation is in a relatively good shape, even if we have to face the dangers earlier.
https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
curiouskiwicat
This was a long post, so I want to highlight a few key points you made that I think deserve further discussion, here or elsewhere:
This seems really relevant. One thing that EAs differ on substantially from the mean view in society is our concern about the dangers of AI and bringing it on too fast. Capitalism is a driving force in that process. If AI risk is really the most important and pressing issue of our time, then maybe capitalism's drive of AI risk is enough on its own for us to consider substantial limits on capitalism even if we think it's otherwise a good system.
This sounds somewhat compelling to me as well.
(1) The counterargument is that any democracy is capable of electing politicians who will ban factory farming and the majority would in fact support that.
(2) As an aside, I'm not so convinced a majority would really vote for a ban on factory farming if they understood the change in the price of meat, but that's an interesting empirical question.
(3) Back in favor of your argument, the fact is that even if democracies in theory would allow us to all "have a vote", most democracies do have strong corporate influence over their politics in practice. In the USA that is undeniable, but even in a small agile democracy like New Zealand where there are strict spending limits on election advertising, corporate interests such as Fonterra have an outsized say in government. The same goes for the UK. I am not so familiar with the Nordic democracies but I think the same would apply. No capitalist democracy escapes corporate influence generally.
(4) An additional piece of evidence that bears directly on (1) and (2) above: here in California, after the last election, a statewide ballot initiative has banned eggs from hens locked in cages, and will eventually push against sow crates as well. This supports my point (1) against your argument because it does seem that in California, voters in a capitalist democracy can directly ban animal cruelty that they object to. How would a socialist society improve on this? But as to (2), the vote was 55% to 45%, for a fairly small change. If the proposition was a more dramatic change to end animal cruelty, I don't know if the majority would have voted for it. So democratic socialism might not get us to where we want to go anyway.
Original Poster1 point · 6 months ago
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I may respond later.
dastram
Well thanks for typing this. Not convinced at all tough. I will think about it and might reread later. My first impression is, that your solution is overly simplistic and also suggest some kind of dictatorship?
UmamiTofu
First, I think it's good that you're pushing into this topic - you're right that not enough people have written about this topic, and economics and government deserve more attention in EA.
It's a huge topic, and I don't think it's ever possible to solve it with a post like this; lots of writing is needed to attack this topic and it is not easy for anyone to write so much. However, I think it could be better without being longer if you pared it down to focusing on the core evidence motivating your point of view, since we all largely agree on the basic principles of rhetoric and philosophy. There are some major reasons behind people's rejection of socialism which need to be addressed. In addition, you seem to spend a lot of time condemning other EAs for having the wrong views; this should be avoided, it's combative and unnecessary, just stick to your main argument.
This reasoning-by-analogy just brings needless complication and imperfection into the argument, it does not settle it. The issue is simple in the first place. We're not treating a disease, we're trying to reduce poverty. We have some time and money, we can give it to one cause or the other. (We could split it among both, but there is generally no situation in that makes sense.) Which is more effective? We need to estimate and do the math. No need for analogies, the framework is already simple and straightforward. If you are really wedded to the analogy, sometimes it's more important to treat the symptoms and sometimes it's more important to treat the cause. If it were easy to do everything, then there would be no need for EA.
First, these don't seem to be mutually exclusive. If the world had much more resources, perhaps Africans would have more resources, and if the world had no private property then perhaps Africans would have their fair share. I see no reason to assume that only one of these possibilities is true. I'm not sure how this matters for your argument, though. More importantly, I take it your point is that we could make everyone wealthy if we abolished private property? Well this isn't necessarily true. Abolishing private property just means you're taking away whatever property people do have, and giving it to the government or the collective. How the government wants to share products afterward is up to them. A corrupt, dysfunctional government - such as those we see today in central and sub-Saharan Africa - is liable to take public property and only use it to benefit certain people. Heck, to the extent that they have already nationalized certain national resources and services, I think they often do!
Moreover, you could simply redistribute wealth instead of abolishing private property, and that would more directly pick people out of poverty. Why would it be better to abolish private property when we can just redistribute it?
Peter Singer has already elaborated how not giving people money can in itself be considered a harm back in 1972. Remember that in consequentialist terms, inaction can be just as harmful as action.
Inaction can certainly be morally wrong, which is what Singer and consequentialism say, but by definition it's still not harmful because harmful simply means it is worse than doing nothing. Here's how this matters. We certainly don't say that it's morally OK for rich people to keep their money to themselves. However, it's important to remember that regular investment and employment is better than nothing. So if we try to cut off people's investment and economic activity in the developing world, without replacing it with something better, then we're going to make people worse off. This is a nuanced difference, but it can matter in many important ways. For instance, some people believe in boycotting sweatshop labor. However, if you pull that money out then things will get even worse for foreigners, who lose their jobs. It's only good to quit buying sweatshop goods if you instead put that money towards something that helps poor people even more than their current jobs. The causality can get a little complicated and confusing when people argue about it, so it can be best to focus on comparative evaluation (is X better than Y? If I put money here, will it have a better impact than putting money there?) rather than going after the issue of what is or isn't 'harm'. Now generally speaking, we all agree that the right policy is that which promotes the best aggregate quality of life, so there really isn't any need to argue about the concepts and framework at stake, we can move right along to debating the empirical effects of capitalism and socialism.
(More:)
To be sure, the # of people killed also depends on the sizes and number of countries, so the total # is not very relevant. And there is little point comparing socialism to fascism or Nazism because that's not the choice that we are making - here we are being asked to compare socialism to capitalism. And no developed state is likely to repeat the atrocities of the 20th century, just because of how much we have evolved as a civilization since then; everything is done better now. So, I agree that the "tired old argument" that you hear over and over is not particularly sound, it should be reworded in a better manner.
Basically: if we compare socialist states to capitalist states, which system will work better for the citizens on average? You believe that the past failures of socialist states aren't good predictions of the future behavior of socialist states, so you think that socialism might still be good. However, there are reasons to think that the past failures of socialist states are something more general to socialism, rather than being historical flukes.
Socialism in the 20th century was not a monolithic block of states following the same system. The Soviet system was extended across the Soviet Union, but it changed over time from one decade to the next as things changed from Leninism to Stalinism and so on. Maoism was different from the Soviet system, there was an ideological split between the two countries starting in the 1960s. North Korea created a Juche philosophy that was again different. Romania had its own socialism, Yugoslavia had its own socialism, etc. So it's not like socialism was tried once and didn't work; rather, it was tried by a variety of people, who often opposed each other's opinions rather strongly, in different contexts with different frameworks. Today we still see market economies outperforming others, adding more evidence. So it's statistically very unlikely for so many destructive implementations to just be fluke victims of circumstance. (Of course, not all of them were as bad as Stalinism, but there was still a general trend of worse outcomes.)
When economists and historians look specifically at socialist economic failures, they frequently point the finger at the economic system. For instance, many believe that poor central planning led to Soviet famines in 1920s/30s, and their eventual crisis in the 1980s. (Or at least contributed heavily.) It seems to be a common (though not universal) view that Soviet collectivization and mechanization was very effective at achieving their economic goals and improving some standards of living, but only at great human cost.
There are theoretical arguments that socialist economies perform worse than market economies, with the 'calculation problem' being perhaps the most famous one. Most economists believe the general thrust of these arguments - though I'm not sure if it's just a majority, or something like a near-consensus. To be sure, it may depend on the type of socialism.
There is a line of thought which says that the political atrocities of socialist regimes were linked to the ideology. For instance, public ownership of the means of production means a very powerful government (assuming that we can't get a great harmonious collective, which seems like a reasonable assumption, after all Marx believed that a true communist society would not be achievable until after a more conventional authoritarian stage). When the government has this much power, it can use it to achieve any political goals, which means that oppression is a viable tactic. Another possibility is that, since Marxism paints society in terms of class conflict and power struggles, it encourages people to be more vengeful and combative against other people, which encourages them to abuse their political power. The idea of uniting classes across borders also lends a hand to repression of ethnic groups as their identity is subverted. I think Leszek Kołakowski's writing provides a well-known argument along these lines, that the paranoia and oppression of the Soviet regime came from the communist ideology. The phenomenon wasn't explicitly intended, sure, but all that matters for our purposes is whether we can predict the phenomenon to occur. To be sure, things may be different for many types of socialism compared to Marxism-Leninism.
This is just my personal view - I have a hard time believing that the great Soviet leaders like Lenin and Stalin just screwed up with Marxism. You know they were scholars in a sense, right? They were surrounded by intellectuals and luminaries. They read Marx and wrote about him. They didn't just casually plaster his face up for propaganda, they discussed him in great detail, they fought hard for his vision for decades, then they built a whole government based on his philosophy. They were enormously competent and intelligent people who were revered and rewarded by other members of the Party. They had an empire of human and economic resources at their disposal. I am rather incredulous when I am pointed towards people like this, and told "ahh, don't worry about them, they were just power-grabbers who misunderstood Marx - any true Marxist would know better!" As I said, I don't expect any type of developed state to repeat the severity of their atrocities today, but I still think they point towards a bad trend.
In socialism, the government owns the slaughterhouses and makes money off of them. Why should we expect them to be more flexible in that case?
In a democratic market state, in theory, the government will also ban meat whenever 51% of people want it. It's just in practice where the lobbying comes into play. So let's compare apples to apples; ideal socialism may give the populace a perfect vote over the means of production but practical socialism can have all kinds of authoritarianism.
Plus, I'm not sure if it's good for things to be banned as soon as a simple majority of people votes for it. In this particular issue - sure, I'd like harsher laws on animal farming. But on other issues, perhaps the public opinion should not have this much power. Sometimes the populist opinion is wrong; take GMOs for instance, something which affects the lives of hundreds of millions of people in poverty. Lobbying and special interests present better-researched views to policymakers, and often provide an indirect route for foreign people's interests to be represented in the government.
International security dilemmas driving nuclear war risks and risky AI competition are independent of capitalism. Probably the Marxist theory of IR says otherwise but I doubt that view, it is not a common belief in the field. If anything, economic globalization reduces such risks, though I concede that the evidence for this view is also weak.
Wild animal suffering is clearly independent of capitalism. I don't see how farm animal suffering is caused by capitalism, except in the sort of fortunate sense where capitalism makes people rich enough to buy a lot of meat. Would a socialist country treat animals on farms better? I'm not sure, but I think you would not see the same proliferation of free range, cage free etc reforms to farming if the government owned all the farms. Private farms compete with each other to have better welfare because many consumers do care. But if the government is in charge, consumers have no choice but to buy from it, so the government has no incentive to improve things.
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Q: How did this SQL duplicate row happen? I had a flash game; a user had many items; each item is a row in a table in the database with columns:
id - user_id - item_type_id - quantity

Each time the user gets an item, I perform a select on the database to check if the user already has a row of that item type.  If it does not exist, then it is inserted, else increment the quantity and commit; everything always in a transaction.
Sometimes, when the game gets heavy traffic, duplicate item rows appear. Right now, I perform a select to check for duplicate rows to merge the quantities and delete the dupped row.

*

*How does this problem happen?

*How can I prevent the problem happening?

I am using MySQL.

A: You need to ensure that there is a unique constraint (index) on the column pair user_id and item_type_id.  Otherwise, the system can allow duplicate entries, exactly as you found out.

A: To avoid gettintg an error if trying to insert when updating was necessary, you can use ON DUPLICATE clause. See this link on how to use it.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Q: Does the suspension spectrum functor preserve weak equivalences? Let $\Sigma^{\infty}$ denote the suspension spectrum functor from pointed topological spaces (=CGWH spaces) to orthogonal spectra. As usual, a weak equivalence of spaces is a continuous map inducing a bijection on $\pi_0$ and an iso on all $\pi_i$, $i\ge 1$, for all choices of basepoint. For orthogonal spectra, I refer to the usual notion of stable equivalence, see e.g. Mandell-May-Shipley-Schwede.
Question: If $f\colon X\longrightarrow Y$ is a weak equivalence, is $\Sigma^\infty f\colon \Sigma^\infty X\longrightarrow \Sigma^\infty Y$ a stable equivalence?
Remarks: 1. This is true if $X$ and $Y$ are well-pointed, see this MO discussion.

*In general, if $X$ and $Y$ are not well-pointed, then the reduced suspension does not preserve weak equivalences. For example, take the set $\{0\} \cup\{\frac 1n\}$ which receives a weak equivalence from a countable discrete set. The reduced suspension is a map from a wedge of spheres to the Hawaiian earrings which is not a weak equivalence.


Flagstaff Frenzy - Who Needs a Tailwind?
A wise man once said: "When Classics guys ride, you're forced to draft off their egos."
Ouch...the wind was biting hard today up on Poorman. Not a cold wind either!! I had that stinging sweat in my eyes—you know the one that tells you "Hey, Dummy, drink more water!"
We were graced with the presence of the Chair of Classics who deigned to share the same road with us. Normally those Classics guys wouldn't give you the time of day, but today was different. Maybe it was the Zéphyros cascading down from Mt. Olympus.
Seriously, thanks to Noel, Dave, and Kevin for making the Chinook bearable!


Corbin Streets. When the officers attempted to detain him, he fled, and officers engaged in a foot pursuit. The suspect was taken into custody and identified as Cruise Kristeo Smith, B/M/31. Smith was charged with Evading Detention/Arrest, as well as Possession of a Controlled Substance. He was transported to Police Headquarters and interviewed by Detectives. Smith is currently in the Lew Sterrett Jail charged with Evading Detention/Arrest, Possession of Controlled Substance and Aggravated Robbery. His bond has been set at $25,000.
On Tuesday, February 13, 2018, at about 9:40 p.m., the victim was walking in the 1800 block of Laws Street near the West End when she was punched in the face and knocked down to the ground by two unknown suspects. The suspects took off some of victim's clothing looking for property as she lay in the street unconscious. The suspects fled with the victim's property when a vehicle approached. The suspects ran toward Griffin Street. This offense is documented on case number 032510-2018.
If anyone knows the identity of the suspects involved in this offense, please contact Detective Holmes at 214-671-3637.


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University of Michigan reaches $490M settlement with more than 1,000 who say they were assaulted by former doctor
Federal judge in San Diego overturns California's three-decade ban on assault weapons
by: Associated Press, Ellina Abovian
Posted: Jun 4, 2021 / 08:55 PM PDT / Updated: Jun 7, 2021 / 05:36 AM PDT
A federal judge Friday overturned California's three-decade-old ban on assault weapons, ruling that it violates the constitutional right to bear arms.
U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego ruled that the state's definition of illegal military-style rifles unlawfully deprives law-abiding Californians of weapons commonly allowed in most other states and by the U.S. Supreme Court.
"Under no level of heightened scrutiny can the law survive," Benitez said. He issued a permanent injunction against enforcement of the law but stayed it for 30 days to give state Attorney General Rob Bonta time to appeal.
Gov. Gavin Newsom condemned the decision, calling it "a direct threat to public safety and the lives of innocent Californians, period."
In his 94-page ruling, the judge spoke favorably of modern weapons, said they were overwhelmingly used for legal reasons.
"Like the Swiss Army knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment. Good for both home and battle," the judge said in his ruling's introduction.
That comparison "completely undermines the credibility of this decision and is a slap in the face to the families who've lost loved ones to this weapon," Newsom said in a statement. "We're not backing down from this fight, and we'll continue pushing for common sense gun laws that will save lives."
Bonta called the ruling flawed and said it will be appealed.
California first restricted assault weapons in 1989, with multiple updates to the law since then.
Assault weapons as defined by the law are more dangerous than other firearms and are disproportionately used in crimes, mass shootings and against law enforcement, with more resulting casualties, the state attorney general's office argued, and barring them "furthers the state's important public safety interests."
Further, a surge in sales of more than 1.16 million other types of pistols, rifles and shotguns in the last year — more than a third of them to likely first-time buyers — show that the assault weapons ban "has not prevented law-abiding citizens in the state from acquiring a range of firearms for lawful purposes, including self-defense," the state contended in a court filing in March.
Similar assault weapon restrictions have previously been upheld by six other federal district and appeals courts, the state argued. Overturning the ban would allow not only assault rifles, but things like assault shotguns and assault pistols, state officials said.
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But Benitez disagreed.
"This case is not about extraordinary weapons lying at the outer limits of Second Amendment protection. The banned 'assault weapons' are not bazookas, howitzers, or machine guns. Those arms are dangerous and solely useful for military purposes," his ruling said.
Despite California's ban, there currently are an estimated 185,569 assault weapons registered with the state, the judge said.
"This is an average case about average guns used in average ways for average purposes," the ruling said. "One is to be forgiven if one is persuaded by news media and others that the nation is awash with murderous AR-15 assault rifles. The facts, however, do not support this hyperbole, and facts matter."
"In California, murder by knife occurs seven times more often than murder by rifle," he added.
In a preliminary ruling in September, Benitez said California's complicated legal definition of assault weapons can ensnare otherwise law-abiding gun owners with criminal penalties that among other things can strip them of their Second Amendment right to own firearms.
"The burden on the core Second Amendment right, if any, is minimal," the state argued, because the weapons can still be used — just not with the modifications that turn them into assault weapons. Modifications like a shorter barrel or collapsible stock make them more concealable, state officials said, while things like a pistol grip or thumbhole grip make them more lethal by improving their accuracy as they are fired rapidly.
The lawsuit filed by the San Diego County Gun Owners Political Action Committee, California Gun Rights Foundation, Second Amendment Foundation and Firearms Policy Coalition is among several by gun advocacy groups challenging California's firearms laws, which are among the strictest in the nation.
The lawsuit filed in August 2019 followed a series of deadly mass shootings nationwide involving military-style rifles.
It was filed on behalf of gun owners who want to use high-capacity magazines in their legal rifles or pistols, but said they can't because doing so would turn them into illegal assault weapons under California law. Unlike military weapons, the semi-automatic rifles fire one bullet each time the trigger is pulled, and the plaintiffs say they are legal in 41 states.
The lawsuit said California is "one of only a small handful states to ban many of the most popular semiautomatic firearms in the nation because they possess one or more common characteristics, such as pistol grips and threaded barrels," frequently but not exclusively along with detachable ammunition magazines.
The state is appealing Benitez's 2017 ruling against the state's nearly two-decade-old ban on the sales and purchases of magazines holding more than 10 bullets. That decision triggered a weeklong buying spree before the judge halted sales during the appeal. It was upheld in August by a three-judge appellate panel, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in March that an 11-member panel will rehear the case.
The state also is appealing Benitez's decision in April 2020 blocking a 2019 California law requiring background checks for anyone buying ammunition.
Both of those measures were championed by Newsom when he was lieutenant governor, and they were backed by voters in a 2016 ballot measure.
by Los Angeles Times / Jan 19, 2022
A group of teenagers and young adults solicited nearly $600 in donations in Perris with a false story about a juvenile suffering from a medical condition, authorities said.
The adults, 18-year-olds Davide Nistor and Ana Maria Dumitru of Anaheim, were arrested on suspicion of soliciting and theft by false pretenses. A 16-year-old and a 14-year-old were taken into custody and released to child protective services.
by Henry DiCarlo, Tony Kurzweil / Jan 19, 2022
Look for morning clouds and afternoon sun Wednesday with temperatures remaining right around average.
Air quality will remain mostly in the good to moderate range.
Is it better to wear an N95 mask right now?
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl