AI as an existential threat i.e. some robot going on a killing spree is blown way out of proportion, but the social, political, and economic upheaval that will be caused by types of software getting more and more advanced and efficient i think is definitely downplayed and i think with enough concentration of resources and power in a small group of corporations or military organizations i think the goal of a conscious godlike ai or whatever could become essentially superfluous
yes.
this latter scenario gets less nerd attention because it’s politics and can’t be solved by programmers.
to be fair, our society at present has a deeply confused idea of what marriage is for, and this can be seen as a symptom of that
(I don’t particularly care what marriage is for. Expression of
romantic love, or child-having, or some package of legal rights,
whichever is fine. I’m just annoyed we can’t pick. Do one thing and do
it well, y'kno)
and now for the hot read as: unnecessarily disagreeable
take: in a world where the government (and a large tax base) pays the
floor healthcare costs of random persons, it’s totally reasonable for
them to be interested in banning things that will increase their costs.
If these things have sufficiently few supporters and many detractors,
guess which way we’re going to go in a democracy?
There’s definitely a legal argument for banning cousin marriage – @mitigatedchaos also touches on that in their reply here, for instance, and they’re not wrong per se. I’m skeptical that this sort of law does enough good to justify the loss of liberty, given that most people have a natural aversion to the behaviour in question and it’s the sort of thing that mainly becomes a problem when a lot of people do it over time, but certainly the state gets up to worse things for worse reasons.
But that doesn’t make a case that it’s less moral than anything with similarly deleterious effects – even from the most interventionist angle it’s, at best, an argument about picking your battles. My objection is that arguments against incest tend to be built around the idea that it’s a unique moral evil in a way that can’t really be supported by arguments from health or genetics. If people want to make pragmatic cost/benefit arguments that’s worth doing, but they need to get down off their high horse on the topic and onto a smaller horse that’s more within their means.
You spend how many hours talking with rationalists and public policy theorists about the nature of morality, evidence based interventions, and not shaming people for having politically unpopular beliefs.
Then someone brings up a taboo sexual activity, and it’s all “well if they had kids that might be bad so it seems proportionate to say anything romantic or sexual they do should be shamed. I mean just think of the medical bills for their hypothetical kids they never considered having.”
The challenge isn’t getting uninformed people to have good principles, it’s getting even thoughtful people to apply them instead of knee-jerk rationalizations.
This depends heavily on one’s opinion of the general population and their susceptibility to complex memes that depend on a careful analysis of information.
If one is optimistic, switching to the “it’s okay not to taboo this kind of incest socially, even if we will argue to them not to have kids” seems reasonable.
If one is pessimistic, then tearing away the current taboo won’t result in proportionate response, but rather no response.
An optimal political response isn’t actually available, and the odds that someone will be foreveralone if they can’t be with their cousin are pretty low, just leaving the taboo for now seems prudent, with the time limit of the next generation of genetic repair/enhancement technology.
Also we’ve had experiments with “societies that allow cousin marriage”, and it doesn’t look good.
In a sense Khan and Valls are correct. Terror is indeed something that the residents of London, Paris, Antwerp and many other cities are going to have to learn to live with. In the same way that the residents of Istanbul, Beirut and Islamabad have had to learn to live with the same.
Yet why it might be that London, Paris and Antwerp are having to accustom themselves to the security status of Istanbul, Beirut and Islamabad is a question that nobody in any position of power seems keen to ask.
The Blitz was a war between states. The IRA had tactics that involved scaring people out and then blowing up expensive empty buildings. Both of them have potential off-switches long before “our religion takes over the world”.
A license agreement John Deere required farmers to sign in October forbids nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and prevents farmers from suing for “crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software.” The agreement applies to anyone who turns the key or otherwise uses a John Deere tractor with embedded software. It means that only John Deere dealerships and “authorized" repair shops can work on newer tractors.
“If a farmer bought the tractor, he should be able to do whatever he wants with it,” Kevin Kenney, a farmer and right-to-repair advocate in Nebraska, told me. “You want to replace a transmission and you take it to an independent mechanic—he can put in the new transmission but the tractor can’t drive out of the shop. Deere charges $230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize the part.”
This is a very strange cyberpunk future
No one ever thinks about the farmers and rural areas in the cyberpunk future.
No one ever thinks about the farmers and rural areas regardless of the cyberpunk future.
How can they get away with this? Do they have a monopoly on tractors? Are their tractors just so much better that people will buy them even with this bullshit in place?
Patents ensure that any tractor by a start-up competitor will likely be 20 years out of date, making a small run of new tractors you aren’t sure people will buy is prohibitively expensive, but also Capitalist competition isn’t as powerful as Hard Capitalists say it is or should be. Partially this is because Hard Capitalists assume that state interference is deeply unnatural and non-Capitalist, when in reality the state is necessary for Capitalism to exist, and the market incentivizes corporations to attempt to establish control of the state.
If there are few enough major tractor manufacturers, and tractors are absolutely vital to farming, then they can all start using restrictive EULAs all at the same time. As long as they limit their rent-seeking to something less than the cost of a whole extra tractor, they can all benefit from it without engaging in tight collusion. Farmers looking to violate the situation would have to do something like import tractors from Japan or Russia or something.
One other contributing factor is a feeling of groundbreaking, rule-shirking and recreating the rules from ideology and first principles. There is less consensus of what the rules are, and when they are broken.
But this company definitely falls under “activist circles“, and they framed the lack of boundaries as breaking with oppressive convention.
Yada yada social technology
Okay this article is hilarious. Tremendous sympathy for the employees who were stuck there, but you really should read it yourself. I went in expecting some exaggeration and sensationalization of some dumb behavior in an attempt to show a female CEO what sort of lines a male CEO has to watch. No, this is way more along the lines of “female liberated version of Donald Trump.” Like the climax of the story is when the Board asks for people to volunteer concerns about working with the CEO… and almost every employee comes with stories, going over the time available for the meeting.
Which makes it sound like “activists or startup culture” is a bad fall-guy for this. There is a tyrannical boss with no sense of professional boundaries. They have the power to fire you, and also to set up status-shame where you live in fear of firing, or are denied bonuses which are a large part of your salary. They opposed creating an HR department and threatened to blacklist any quitters. They have their own sense of reality.
What the hell is anyone, even a culture, supposed to do? Life under them is just hellish, and the easiest way is to go along. It does not appear that most other employees actually thought Agrawal’s behavior was acceptable. There just was no other option.
Now, this is not to fault individual idiots like Agrawal. There will always be idiots. The problem is any capitalistic culture that thinks one person having this much power over other humans is acceptable.
I did not intend to blame any one factor. I tried to do the opposite, as this company has ALL the factors at work: Startup culture, using SJ language as a shield, a creepy pushy boss, peer pressure, all came together to reinforce a climate of fear.
There is the detached culture warrior idea that it’s okay when we do it, and you better not say anything because you hurt our side if you go public, combined with blurring of boundaries in activist circles, isolated startup culture, vesting cliffs, all the other power a CEO at a BigCo has.
This situations is the synthesis of the tyranny of the structureless with the SNAFU principle in hierarchical organisations.
It is atypical in its terribleness, but you can see the patterns in their purest form.
So this isn’t to pick at the theory too much, because your thoughts about how callout culture thrives (which I reblogged earlier) capture a legit phenomenon. But it’s important that we be rigorous in our applications of patterns, or otherwise we become the same as people going “conservative racism is a problem some places, therefore it’s the problem in all places that look similar.”
The dynamic that makes social-justice-liberalism so scary is not just that activists, or some self-serving people, say bad things (like “a woman boss can’t harass” or “there’s nothing a defendant could say that would matter”) but that people cooperate with these suppositions. After all, people also say just as cruel and dumb things from the right, or from even weirder more insular culture, but the difference is those perspectives don’t have power in our circles. It’s the reasonable people who give a pass to poor logic and meanness as long as its phrased appropriately, that make callouts into a culture.
In this case, from that article at least, no one was buying her defenses. To some degree she was groping in a way that would be harder for a man to get away with, but I think that sort of assumed non-sexualization among females was widespread before and outside any activist circles. And it did not take much more at all from Agrawal before her employees thought her behavior was inappropriate and hostile. There doesn’t seem to be any culture justifying this, just her spouting a lot of delusional defensive BS, and people going along with it because they had no job prospects and she was the hyperactive CEO. And other than a Board who could fire her, there wasn’t anything to stop her. The same sort of thing can replicate at any company that’s the private fiefdom of the president, and no one ever does stop it… till he ends up getting elected President.
Callout culture seems much more an issue where everyone is kind of involved in it, and ends up buying into fairly terrible beliefs just to keep going on. Like the disaster over at Amherst. There’s no one “crazy” person at the heart of those problems.
(Though the article claims Agrawal would be on a panel talking about the line between harmless and harassment at some conference. That would indeed be some toxic cultural effects, however I don’t see her anywhere on the website so I would imagine they cut her.)
She seems to have confused her workplace for an erotic roleplay of a workplace. While it’s true that the financial dominance of conditions allowed this, I do think it’s still partially driven by the idea that women have no agency and are harmless. I’m not sure she would have done the same if it were widely recognized that women are not, in fact, harmless.
A continent-spanning superstate controlled by a network of computers implementing the thing that comes after the thing that comes after prediction markets over a vast and inscrutable state bureaucracy physically realizing a National Utility Function, attacking enemy nations in ways they don’t even understand, its terrifying efficiency only truly understandable as a creeping horror to the very few.
I hate the needless moralism with incest on this site. I don't mean with legit concerns about consent and power dynamics but posts going "COUSIN MARRIAGE IS ICKY!!". I mean, this site is gung ho about animal abuse and killing but suddenly something where absolutely nobody is hurting nothing is considered totally wrong. Sorry, it just irritates me.
I hate the needless moralism with incest on this site. I don't mean with legit concerns about consent and power dynamics but posts going "COUSIN MARRIAGE IS ICKY!!". I mean, this site is gung ho about animal abuse and killing but suddenly something where absolutely nobody is hurting nothing is considered totally wrong. Sorry, it just irritates me.
one million notes but it’s just people going “I know right!!!” instead of dating this person
That makes me wonder who I’d get if I updated my dating profile with my blog description.
Crypto-Centrist Transhumanist Nationalist. Type-19 Paramilitary Cyborg. Wanted time criminal. Class A-3 citizen of the North American Union. Opposed to the Chinese Hyper Mind-Union, the Ultra-Caliphate, Google Defense Network, and the People’s Republic of Cascadia. National Separatist, enemy of the Earth Sphere Federation government and its unificationist allies.
Would it be the mad? Those with strange humor? Aspiring science fiction writers?
Oh who am I kidding, I don’t have the time/energy for a romantic partner right now.
real question is how you would react to an equivalent profile
Boring answer: Depends on the context in the rest of the profile.
Fun answer: Send an opening message in-character. You humans like that kind of thing, right?
Sidereal answer: I don’t date time paradox duplicates. I mean, if you think ordinary genetic risks are bad…
Old: A white man goes to Asia and learns their mystical art of kung fu. He becomes better than all the students that have lived there their whole lives, then returns to America to seek vengeance for his dead buddy cop.
New: A white man goes to Asia and learns their mystical art of sushi. He becomes better than all the students that have lived there their whole lives, then returns to America to open an Asian Fusion restaurant to seek vengeance against GMO food.
one million notes but it’s just people going “I know right!!!” instead of dating this person
That makes me wonder who I’d get if I updated my dating profile with my blog description.
Crypto-Centrist Transhumanist Nationalist. Type-19 Paramilitary Cyborg. Wanted time criminal. Class A-3 citizen of the North American Union. Opposed to the Chinese Hyper Mind-Union, the Ultra-Caliphate, Google Defense Network, and the People’s Republic of Cascadia. National Separatist, enemy of the Earth Sphere Federation government and its unificationist allies.
Would it be the mad? Those with strange humor? Aspiring science fiction writers?
Oh who am I kidding, I don’t have the time/energy for a romantic partner right now.
This is not a place of honor. We buried a ton of useless poison sludge here. It shoots invisible death rays that kill you slowly, so don’t dig it up or you’ll die.
why don’t we just surround it with something even more toxic that kills people quickly; a few dead explorers could save a village from radiation poisoning
Booby traps just signal that there’s something valuable being protected.
reverse psychology: surround it with huge advertising signs that visibly reek of desperation
I mean, we aren’t opening up Qin Shi Huang’s underground Mercury (and possibly crossbow) funhouse so maybe explorers in the future would indeed be deterred
only because he made sure that legends of his House Of Fun And Pain were passed down the generations for us to receive!
which is really the lesson here; if you don’t want people to be harmed by your nuclear waste dumps after the collapse of civilization, maybe you could try avoiding the collapse of civilization.
I brought this up with the Central Committee and said we should reprocess the spent fuel for a 300-400 year storage time instead.
They rejected my proposal on the grounds that the collapse of civilization would inherently involve the destruction of the United States of America as a political entity, and therefore anyone harmed by digging up a ten thousand-year-old radioactive waste dump under such conditions would, almost by definition, not be an American citizen.
Sometimes I think the decision to put that Kissinger-Trump bot in charge of the DoE was a mistake.
Problem: YouTube is owned by Google, who are ad scum. Paying for YouTube gives Google more resources to direct toward producing their primary product, advertisements.
This entire situation happened because people were unwilling to pay for content. Your plan for this is… to not pay for content.
This seems akin to the, “why do you make me hurt you” defense.
If Eve attempts to derive revenue from manipulating Alice into spending her money unwisely, thereby deriving less benefit from it than she could otherwise, it is bad for Eve to succeed, and it is good for Eve to fail and starve in the street.
Advertisers deserve to be given long prison sentences. I don’t want to do that, because it would violate their freedom of speech. However, they do deserve it.
“Content” that cannot survive without advertising doesn’t deserve to exist.
Remember that time when Google took over the government and forced everyone to connect to websites that had advertising at gunpoint?
Well you probably don’t because we’re not in that timeline. As for myself, I still haven’t forgiven GDN, but fortunately it doesn’t exist yet, and it may never exist.
Look I’m not gonna wring you out for using an ad blocker just because you don’t like ads, but don’t style yourself as a morally superior revolutionary over it. You aren’t. This “content that’s supported by ads doesn’t deserve to exist” thing is ridiculous posturing, and on some level you know it.
Internet advertisements are a form of microtransaction payment that exists due to coordination problems, partially because the value of one read of a webpage is both low and unknown before reading it. A proper alternative system would be a form of widely-accepted digital currency that made it cheap and easy to send very small amounts of money, perhaps backed by the State if you’re into that sort of thing.
Suggesting that paying money, which is a direct and very expensive signal about not wanting advertisements, is unacceptable, is basically the exact opposite of solving the problem.
Problem: YouTube is owned by Google, who are ad scum. Paying for YouTube gives Google more resources to direct toward producing their primary product, advertisements.
This entire situation happened because people were unwilling to pay for content. Your plan for this is… to not pay for content.
selfreplicatingquinian said: $10/month for no ads and the ability to play videos in the background or with the screen off turned out to be totally worth it for me. You can even just subscribe to Google Music and get the YouTube sub free
hmm there’s the instinctive revulsion at paying for what used to be free, but honestly this makes so much economic sense; if you want to be catered to you need to be the customer, not the product.
arguably I should pay for youtube or stop using youtube, much as I stopped using Netflix when I judged the payment wasn’t worth it.
I’d love to pay youtube
Of course, youtube would love for me not to, on account of I’m in a country not on their list yet.
So I keep using ublock origins.
Problem: YouTube is owned by Google, who are ad scum. Paying for YouTube gives Google more resources to direct toward producing their primary product, advertisements.
Incentives though! What if the monthly fee disables other Google ads and also disables their tracking service; how much do they even make per user per month? Maybe this would be more profitable for them, then they could tell the advertisers to go to hell and not need to worry about the ever imminent collapse of the online advertising market.
Danegeld.
Not a good analogy. The Danes aren’t offering an actual service. YouTube, however, is an actual service on offer and costs money to run, like various other websites.
diogenesvonneumann said: Alawites are about 10% of the Syrian population, fighting a war to maintain their dominance over the majority Sunnis is pretty close to imperialism. And Russia supporting Assad in that war to maintain access to their naval base definitely is. On the other hand the other aspiring rulers of Syria are probably even worse.
If a sufficiently nasty war broke out in the Middle East that resulted in forced ethnic relocation similar to what happened in Europe at the end of WWII and the Yugoslav Wars resulting in relatively monolithic ethnostates, would that make the situation more fucked up or less fucked up or just a different variety of fucked up.
(Because as people keep pointing out, Europe has been suspiciously peaceful since right-wing nationalists achieved their dream of neatly reshuffling all the people and borders to line up, barring some over enthusiasm where they mistakenly thought the German border might extend a thousand miles into Russia).
While I genuinely like the idea of allowing different ethnic groups to have their own laws (providing Exit is still an option, etc, etc) to a degree and nation-states are a way to do that, I suspect that the sectarian religious divisions might cause them to constantly bristle at each other.
It might not be enough. But then again, maybe that war would bring about an Islamic Reformation.
I hope the corrupt officials of the Earth Sphere Federation throw every Globalist in jail for meaningless political crimes. Because that’s where this ends. But they’ll throw me in instead. If there is one world government, there can be no place for me.
An Earth Federation will not allow cultural enclaves that might challenge its power, that exclude people it politically favors. It won’t allow that kind of gated community, much less a full-blown city-state. And there will be nowhere to go except Space.
Claiming you don’t need or want a safe space of any kind because “life isn’t safe” is the most obnoxious kind of bravery debate.
Life as an entity/overarching concept isn’t safe, sure, but we’re not talking about safety from random happenstance; we’re talking about things we can control. You could get hit by a car tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean you should take a bath with your toaster. Similarly, the fact that some people out there in the world might be callous and cruel is no reason not to avoid callousness and cruelty when you have the option. On the contrary: it’s a reason to insist on more exacting standards when you have the chance to do so.
Part of the opposition to safe spaces is driven by two things:
1. Attempts to turn entire institutions into “safe spaces” are undertaken by SJ advocates, even when making a space safe for one group means making it unsafe for another group, and this can be used as a means of political control.
2. The opposition knows darn well that they aren’t allowed to have their own spaces, therefore they want to deny every other group their ability to make an exclusive space. Part of the reason for this is that SJ tends to make excuses for why their own policies should not apply to themselves.
Combine these together, and “the world isn’t a safe space” becomes a suitable rhetorical weapon - after all, they aren’t allowed a space so they have nothing to lose by it.
The average hackathon environment makes for a hard place for coding females–let alone noncoding ones–to feel comfortable but is deeply necessary, Ali says: “Having that diversity is actually a huge asset.”
Each of the women were adamant about not letting biases become an excuse for them. And none is apologetic for not having prior coding knowledge. They do, however, ask for a level playing field–in all positions technical or not. “Noncoding women’s voices and ideas matter,” Ahmad says. “It doesn’t matter if they [women] don’t know how to code, because that’s a teachable skill, but passion isn’t. Hustle isn’t.”
“There’s not enough tech diversity because programming companies won’t hire women who can’t code.”
This is a pattern that crops up again and again. From a certain angle, it’s obvious why it happens: It alienates competent menand women. And it gives professional diversity consultants a foot in the door.
Full-time culture warriors can be the “idea guy“, but not the coder/engineer/manager. So this move gives activist a way to weasel their way in without having to invest time into skills and without being accountable when the implementation sucks.
The other part of the strategy, drawing a line between sub-groups and declaring one more female or more feminist, gives you an easy rallying flag, a motte, a bailey, and a group to blame.
I was scrolling through Tumblr and saw a vintage photo of a pretty woman saying ‘I hate men. if one of them touch me I will bite his hand off.“
I assumed this was posted by someone who thought it was funny or relatable. There are lots of images and messages on Tumblr like this - light hostility towards men, from attractive women.
I didn’t even notice my anticipation that this was done by someone approving, for an approving audience - until I imagined reversing the genders. If there was an image of a handsome man demonstrating light hostility towards women, I would anticipate that it is done by a radical or tiny group, for a largely disapproving audience. I would be much more shocked.
I don’t like the general social acceptance of hostility towards men, is my point. It’s hypocritical, because that same social acceptance vanishes if the hostility is towards women.
Men are in the process of noticing this, which is why male gender movements (distinct from the movement that is actively opposed to notice this) are popping up.
Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.
Forget the fact that Singapore is something like 75% ethnic Chinese. The government there is just flat out more competent, responsive, and self-disciplined. You and I both know, Slart, that the Central Provident Fund (and its component healthcare programs) cannot exist in the United States of America because even if it weren’t shot down as evil anti-freedom paternalism, it would be raided for either tax cuts (Republicans) or social programs (Democrats) within ten years of its creation.
That’s fair.
Hopefully we can automate medical specialist jobs soon.
Look Slart, all I’m saying is that I should be made technocratic dictator of the North American Union. Then I can enact thousands of weird ideological trades and replace congress with a legislature made up of delegated voting think tanks that bet competitively on the outcomes of their laws to determine their funding.
It’ll be great.
Make America Confused Again
Ranma m8 all I’m saying is that the RAND Corporation knew that the Iraq War wouldn’t go at all as well as planned, so an entire legislature composed of them and a bunch of other think tanks might reasonably outperform politicians.
Now I know what you’re thinking - Americans are too stupid to use a delegated voting system where the top 100 delegates by delegated vote count form the legislature, much less navigate a ballot of over 500 registered delegate candidate organizations - but I have an answer to this. The first page of the ballot will just have the top five by previous vote count in the last election times percentile standing in the legislative prediction market. They don’t need to know what that means, just click one of the five big buttons.
…Actually nevermind this will somehow get accused of racism within about five days of going into effect.
Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.
Forget the fact that Singapore is something like 75% ethnic Chinese. The government there is just flat out more competent, responsive, and self-disciplined. You and I both know, Slart, that the Central Provident Fund (and its component healthcare programs) cannot exist in the United States of America because even if it weren’t shot down as evil anti-freedom paternalism, it would be raided for either tax cuts (Republicans) or social programs (Democrats) within ten years of its creation.
That’s fair.
Hopefully we can automate medical specialist jobs soon.
Look Slart, all I’m saying is that I should be made technocratic dictator of the North American Union. Then I can enact thousands of weird ideological trades and replace congress with a legislature made up of delegated voting think tanks that bet competitively on the outcomes of their laws to determine their funding.
You say that now, but once I enact 7-part Regional Federalism in order to ease the introduction of Mexico and Canada into the NAU, your opinion on Vice Director Kanye and I may change.
Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.
Forget the fact that Singapore is something like 75% ethnic Chinese. The government there is just flat out more competent, responsive, and self-disciplined. You and I both know, Slart, that the Central Provident Fund (and its component healthcare programs) cannot exist in the United States of America because even if it weren’t shot down as evil anti-freedom paternalism, it would be raided for either tax cuts (Republicans) or social programs (Democrats) within ten years of its creation.
That’s fair.
Hopefully we can automate medical specialist jobs soon.
Look Slart, all I’m saying is that I should be made technocratic dictator of the North American Union. Then I can enact thousands of weird ideological trades and replace congress with a legislature made up of delegated voting think tanks that bet competitively on the outcomes of their laws to determine their funding.
I’m told Bush campaigned on not getting into as many wars. Obama, of course, campaigned on not getting into as many wars, though his not-wars still created more refugees. Trump campaigned on the Iraq War being a costly disaster, on not getting into a fight with Russia, on going up against ISIS militarily (which could just mean a return to Iraq, which would not really be a new war), and on not needlessly attempting to knock over strong men and replace them with democracy - thus implicitly against getting into as many wars.
So there is demand there among the American public for reducing the number of wars, but somehow the wars happen anyway. If the second part could be rectified, the number of wars could be successfully reduced.
what does America spend on defence, $600 billion a year?
I’ve seen costs for the Iraq war being bandied about in the trillions.
difficult to turn off the tap, I think.
I’ve been infuriated by the shear cost of the Iraq War simply in economic terms since around 2008. Either they’re looters or they’re freakishly incompetent, and I don’t like either. I’m really hoping this whole Trump thing works out. He’s at least smart enough to realize that you can’t just export democracy to other countries like it was done to Japan - or that you have to actually stay there and make it stick, like Japan.
Of course if you actually notice that not all cultures can support democracy and that hey, you’re going to have to do some real proper imperialism to make it stick and overwrite non-trivial chunks of the local culture, that marks you as right-wing these days…
Maybe I am right wing now. I did, after all, say that if a Communist Revolution emerged, I’d have to back the Anti-Communists. (Struggle sessions and famines aren’t really my thing.)
Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.
Forget the fact that Singapore is something like 75% ethnic Chinese. The government there is just flat out more competent, responsive, and self-disciplined. You and I both know, Slart, that the Central Provident Fund (and its component healthcare programs) cannot exist in the United States of America because even if it weren’t shot down as evil anti-freedom paternalism, it would be raided for either tax cuts (Republicans) or social programs (Democrats) within ten years of its creation.
Christopher Balding has described significant accounting weirdness around these funds, where the numbers just don’t add up:
I’m not qualified to investigate these claims (or indeed any claims) but given the level of corrupt investment money flowing from Malaysia and Singapore into Australia recently I would certainly not take any government figures for granted.
Thank you for this information. The last time I read about this, it was just noticing the discrepancy between GIC and Temasek growth (7-16%) and the CPF payout (2.5-4%), making it seem that the Dark Open Secret was that the government bureaucrats were using the population’s savings for cheap capital which they could then out-earn on and give themselves handsome salaries. But if the actual growth is not that strong, it could be a big problem.
Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.
Forget the fact that Singapore is something like 75% ethnic Chinese. The government there is just flat out more competent, responsive, and self-disciplined. You and I both know, Slart, that the Central Provident Fund (and its component healthcare programs) cannot exist in the United States of America because even if it weren’t shot down as evil anti-freedom paternalism, it would be raided for either tax cuts (Republicans) or social programs (Democrats) within ten years of its creation.
Edit: The zoning laws aren’t going to be fixed. The law enforcement is not going to be fixed. We aren’t going to pay our politicians an amount which actually reflects how dangerous/important they are to the economy, and we’re going to get a higher minimum wage and higher unemployment and a trash fractional UBI rather than wage subsidies. Cities will go bankrupt and urban sprawl will drain our energy. Money for clean energy will be invested into solar walkways that don’t even work.
I’m told Bush campaigned on not getting into as many wars. Obama, of course, campaigned on not getting into as many wars, though his not-wars still created more refugees. Trump campaigned on the Iraq War being a costly disaster, on not getting into a fight with Russia, on going up against ISIS militarily (which could just mean a return to Iraq, which would not really be a new war), and on not needlessly attempting to knock over strong men and replace them with democracy - thus implicitly against getting into as many wars.
So there is demand there among the American public for reducing the number of wars, but somehow the wars happen anyway. If the second part could be rectified, the number of wars could be successfully reduced.
I was doing semi deep dive into Orion’s Arm after @immanentizingeschatons reminded me of it, and it got me thinking about post-scarcity and politics.
Specifically, I was comparing it to some of the other post-scarcity settings I’ve seen, like Eclipse Phase, Mindjammer, and Nova Praxis. One thing that all of these have in common is that the politics presented in the game seems off.
Nova Praxis and Mindjammer to my mind don’t really have political conflict. They try to describe some of the political units, but they seem to be stereotypes masquerading as politics or and otherwise just poorly described. Eclipse Phase and Orion’s Arm do have political units, but they’re fairly obviously based on the political viewpoints favored in the demographic and seem kind of goofy and impossible because of that.
And it strikes me that to some level this is an impossible problem. If you think there won’t be real politics in the post-scarcity future, I’m going to very much doubt that. But if you think that you can predict the nature of political conflict in the post-scarcity future, I’m also going to very much doubt that. So, either way, you’re stuck with writing a political scene that’s weird.
But really, can there truly be post-scarcity? Maybe with magic violating conservation of matter-energy, but without it, someone is going to want to use the mass of your asteroid to build their habitat to replicate their ideology.
Good points but I take issue with "Because game journos are not real journalists and will praise you if you, like, give them a free Nexus 7" A 4-pack of chicken nuggets would suffice, you don't have to buy them a whole Nexus 7.
Is there any way to get Muslim immigrants to Western countries to integrate better, or are the cultures just totally incompatible?
I don’t think they can integrate and stay substantially Muslim, no, but I think they can integrate just fine if they drop Islam or water it down into meaninglessness like most Christians and Jews in the West have with their religions. And for that to happen I think people need to be way less *socially* tolerant of sincere Islam and recognize it as the enemy of any free society instead of virtue-signaling about how they’re not racist against a religion. Like, on the basis of how badly its claims have been debunked and how immoral its teachings are, I’d put Islam well below even Mormonism and Scientology on the religion tier list, it’s somewhere swimming in the deep abyss along with the Christian Identity Movement and Aum Shinrikyo. That’s how you should treat serious Muslims - their ideas are worthy of nothing but mockery, the principles they teach are vile, their religious traditions absurd. If you made it to the West, you’re free, you don’t have to pretend you believe in that self-contradictory nonsense any more, and you shouldn’t be bringing it with you. Ex-Muslims, though, should be especially praised and respected, like people who grew up in a cult but were strong enough to free themselves from it as adults. And beer-drinking bacon-eating cultural Muslims should just be shrugged at.
The alternative to integration, though, would be having distinct Muslim residential enclaves like Muslim Chinatowns, and I think that could also be somewhat practical - but Western states would have to allow voluntary self-segregation and greatly increased local autonomy for communities to make that happen, and they’ve spent the last half-century forcibly integrating and atomizing everyone and centralizing power. You’d need to let them enforce their abhorrent religious laws at the local level to keep them from forcing them on the country at the national level - I’m not sure that that’s something that should be tolerated, either, though.
If not either of those voluntary-leaning solutions you’d have to start doing serious 180s on a lot of the Western democratic consensus and start stripping voting rights from them, or expelling them from the country by force and becoming explicitly nationalist, or just banning Islam, if you didn’t want to wind up being reduced to dhimmi status by the inevitable consequences of the combination of democracy and a Muslim majority.
The Bible posits that the circumference of a circle in the Temple was three times its diameter, but π≈3.14,
tired: therefore gods don’t exist
wired: therefore circles were smaller back then
This is just a statistical error. The circumference of the median circle is
π times its diameter. The Cosmic Negacircle which rests in the Vaults Beyond Time and has a circumference of -1*(10^2470) times its diameter is an outlier and should not have been counted.
Why do communists seem to think that competitive markets and providing a standard of social welfare for people are mutually exclusive?
Well, not all of them do, see market socialism, but there are aesthetic and political yearnings for a more communitarian approach which run much deeper.
There’s an interesting dichotomy between the “in a capitalist system, you can do whatever you want“ and a “The capitalist system will optimize everything for maximum efficiency“ lines. It’s one of the things that I think of whenever I see sharing economy stuff, I’ve seen the occasional quip mentioning old complaints about how in a communist system you wouldn’t have a car, you’d have to share one, which is totally unlike our current system with uber.
That baugruppe discussion reminded me of it, it’s an attempt by libertarian-leaning people to build a commune to solve problems they have with the housing market. Feels like it really should be built at sea though.
Do you support the President's relocation of Oprahists that violate the National Freedom Policy to the California Special Autonomous Region? (I think it's a bit heavy-handed, tbh, but good luck getting the AFP to reconsider it.)
I like the old liberties, but we have to admit that the Oprahists have provided aid and comfort to the insurrections in our cities and the rural rebellion in the Deep South – so the old liberties are no protection of our first freedom – freedom from fear
that said, I prefer the old policy of tracking, monitoring, and punishing individuals, and suppressing the uprisings when they come; collective punishment seems like a return to the dark old days, led by the worst elements in America – the cruel irony of ‘American Freedom’ isn’t lost on anyone now, I hope
when peace returns, we’ll look back on this in shame
