Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

@slartibartfastibast quoting others

“That’s when a friend of mine stumbled over a footnote in an esoteric army report about simulator sickness in virtual environments. Sure enough, military researchers had noticed that women seemed to get sick at higher rates in simulators than men. While they seemed to be able to eventually adjust to the simulator, they would then get sick again when switching back into reality.”

In the future, all women are autistics on testosterone, and the global GDP per capita exceeds $120,000.  Conventional gender as we know it has dissolved and been replaced by a neurotype inventory dynamically read from the global hypergrid.

[slartibartfastibast]

That first bit would affect childbearing.

Does that stat hide a planet full of impoverished depth grovelers mining for nuggets of neoplasm, offset by a small cabal of multi-trillionaires?

Edit: shit, you ninja-edited in another sentence. I do that a lot. Is this hypergrid capable of sustainably manifesting unenumerably vast continuums of juvenile rage and fear?

[mitigatedchaos]

An astute observation!

Childbearing has been replaced with artificial wombs in order to fine-tune the characteristics of neural development and orientation the future-market (not the same as the “future market”) demands.  And yes, the cost of these systems and state-sponsored child raising is reflected in the GDP, and it is quite extensive, though hardly limited to multi-trillionaires.

Those territories with no state-sponsored child raising glitter spectacularly, but of course they are always on the brink of collapse.  You know how it is.

As for the hypergrid, it depends on just how deeply you want to entertain the emotions of others in your hardware.  I recommend not diving /r90k/.  Oneness with the Universe is a little more difficult there.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@slartibartfastibast quoting others

“That’s when a friend of mine stumbled over a footnote in an esoteric army report about simulator sickness in virtual environments. Sure enough, military researchers had noticed that women seemed to get sick at higher rates in simulators than men. While they seemed to be able to eventually adjust to the simulator, they would then get sick again when switching back into reality.”

In the future, all women are autistics on testosterone, and the global GDP per capita exceeds $120,000.  Conventional gender as we know it has dissolved and been replaced by a neurotype inventory dynamically read from the global hypergrid.  The largest political bloc is controlled by a rocky alliance between the National Globalists, the Post-Salvation Abrahamic Spiritualists, and the Small Animals subreddit.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[the-grey-tribe]

All kinds of pop culture concepts cross the Atlantic Ocean and I’m fine with that. Some stay where they are and never make it here. I don’t think buying milk in 3.78 litre jugs will ever become the norm here.

Political science and activism concepts are constantly exported from the US. People here start to think in these concepts. Academics in the US get feedback about the situation here and interpret it through the lens of the status quo in the US.

I used to get exasperated at people using identity politics from the US without adapting the terminology (calling Frenchmen of Algerian descent African-American for example). I used to get exasperated at people assuming that health insurance was the most pressing concern in every country, or that any EU country could learn anything from Obamacare.

People are starting to assimilate Trump’s Mexican Border Wall Discourse in the context of the refugee crisis in Europe. For once I wish it was the other way round. I wish people in the US would say that immigration from Mexico is primarily a humanitarian concern, because of ISIS, but many “Mexicans” are actually from Morocco and Afghanistan. This is how it feels.

I wish people would sometimes act as if the main problem in US politics right now is too many parties in parliament, haphazard privatisation of state-run heavy industry, too much cheap but empty housing, organised crime in local government, or austerity measures imposed on the US by Germany, France and Britain.

Americans are acting like WE elected Trump TOO. Some of this might be in order to act as if THEY TOO elected Macron.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

3dspacejesus asked:

An Englishman is in the process of moving to Australia. The customs officer asks, "Have you ever been convicted of a criminal offence?" He says, "Oh, sorry! I didn't realise that was still a requirement!"

argumate answered:

Later the Englishman joins the army and is sent to fight on the Western Front. After being wounded terribly in an assault, he is rescued by an Australian unit and taken to a field hospital where he drifts in and out of consciousness. Unable to stand the pain any longer he cries out “was I brought here to die??” only to hear “nah mate, you was brought here yesterday.”

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

But also, like, @collapsedsquid, if you don’t intuitively trust the other direction because it can be supported by the “Capitalism is Perfect and Good Forever” crowd, I get that.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[collapsedsquid]

Just saw this on Branko’s twitter and all I can think of is “What’s the economic growth of a million ‘steam slaves’ with no materials for them to process?“ Does someone need to explain the concept of “Necessary but not sufficient“ here?

Having those machines means you will absolutely need as much raw material as you can get, if that’s the bottleneck, it’s easy to see that more industrial capacity could increase the level of labor exploitation. 

One thing here he reaches right up to but does not realize is that colonies are useful precisely because they are so far away.  You can keep your pampered well-fed skilled artisans in Britain, and so when the labor uprising happens in Africa they’re not at risk or even bothered.  That’s in addition to the fact that having resources be distant makes the whole process very profitable and therefore gives capacity and desire for more intense investment

Also talks about the ”heydays of capitalist growth in the West in the period 1945–1973“ without commenting on the fact that it ended. I can easily argue that wasn’t actually stable and it was a weird period in multiple ways.

I feel I could be convinced that slavery/colonization/whatever wasn’t actually necessary for industrialization but people are so bad at arguing it.

[mitigatedchaos]

You see, I’m the other way around.  Ever since I read that “they found harder ways to work the slaves to get more cotton” was bullshit and actually much of the productivity growth was due to breeding better cotton, I have been even more suspicious of claims that slavery/colonization/etc was required as a class.

They seem less about a study of the matter, and more about saddling the West with an infinite moral debt that can never be repaid, and excusing the impact of culture on development.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[elliemaplefox]

H A N G E R Y

I was mad and hungry when I made this~

[mitigatedchaos]

Okay, the contrast between the realism of the shading here with the anime face is weirding me out a little.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[theunitofcaring]

I also want to, like, specifically say that employers are not cutting hours to be jerks, employers are cutting hours because it’s not profitable to have the doors open for more hours. If you think of the problem as ‘employers jerkishly don’t want to pay employees well’ you’ll be very confused by behavior like ‘keep hours at this franchise, close this one on weekends, close this one on Wednesday afternoons’, yet those are the sort of decisions actually being made.

[drethelin]

I think something a lot of people are ignorant of which would be helpful when it comes to a lot of these kind of conversations is the actual margins in the businesses they view as the enemy. Walmart has a 3-5 percent profit margin. Oil companies make around 6 percent. Health insurance profit margins are around 4 percent. Fast food franchises can range from near zero to over 10 percent. Thanks to the cutthroat nature of capitalism in many industries, businesses run along the very edge of existing at all. You can’t mandate any significant savings to the consumer or increased payment to employees without actually making those businesses fail. 

[mitigatedchaos]

Not unless you’re very clever about it, and most of these plans are not.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[collapsedsquid]

I keep thinking this shit isn’t real but it is.

[isaacsapphire]

The fucking colors and type styles too! Like… I’m not sure how to explain it, but those type styles/color palette really says “hipster” to me . I feel alienated.

[mitigatedchaos]

It isn’t self-parody, but this is how I imagine the alt right imagine the democrats imagining themselves.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[marcusseldon]

(Note: Rehashing things I’ve said before, definitely a late-night rant)

I still find the fact that 46% of the country decided to vote for Donald fucking Trump of all people for President to be completely baffling at a gut level. 

How could anyone possibly have been comfortable voting for such an obviously mean, selfish, low-IQ, inexperienced, incoherent, authoritarian, and unserious person? How could otherwise educated, moral, rational people, have voted for this man (as many otherwise well-educated, moral, and rational Republicans did)? I still feel like I live in a bad satire of America rather than the real world.

Even if I grant every critique of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and I try to inhabit the mindset of a person with conservative policy views, and I concede all the frustration with the cultural left that many on the right feel, I still don’t see how there is even a contest between which one would be preferable to run our military, our diplomacy, and our nuclear weapons. Like shouldn’t basic respectability and competence trump all else when the other candidate completely fails on those metrics?

I feel a deep shame whenever I think about the fact that such a horrible man is the face of my nation. I didn’t feel that way about Bush, I would not have felt that way about McCain or Romney.

Something is rotten about the right in this country, something so rotten that they all thought that somehow Trump was a lesser of evils choice. There were signs of this rot earlier: the rise of Fox News, talk radio, and Breitbart, the crazier elements of the Tea Party (Sharon Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Todd Aiken), the radicalization of Republicans in Congress and state legislatures, but it wasn’t clear until Trump how deep the rot went.

The left is by no means perfect, not even close, and if this were another time with a more normal President I’d be more comfortable focusing more of my time on that. But there really is no equivalence between the left’s dysfunction’s and the right’s. Right now there really is something truly different, something scary, something very big and uniquely bad going on with the right at a systemic, sociological level that I don’t really understand no matter how much I obsess about it, at least at an emotional level.

Half the country was willing to accept authoritarian rhetoric. Half the country was willing to accept incoherence and stupidity and lying. Half the country was willing to accept meanness, endorsement of sexual assault, and racist rhetoric. Most Republican voters are not authoritarians, racists, sexists, liars, or mean, but they didn’t mind voting for it at all.

That’s terrifying.

[mitigatedchaos]

I want you to imagine that there was a group within your country that had been mass kidnapping kids for sex trafficking with more or less impunity, for years.

The police refused to do anything about it.  The politicians not only claimed it wasn’t happening, but celebrated bringing more of that group.  The media gaslit you and said it wasn’t happening.

In fact, when you raised objections, you were sent for ideological retraining.

Of course, I’m not talking about the United States.

But suppose someone in the United States did know about such a thing happening.  And the same cycle of “but it isn’t real” was being used by the same ideological groups to claim that what happened in another developed country was impossible, that it would never happen, and certainly wasn’t happening there and could not possibly happen here.

Approximately how many layers of “FUCK YOU” would they want to send those ideological groups as a message?  Why on Earth would they care about those groups’ criticisms when said groups are a bunch of lying hypocrites?

Quite frankly, if you’re actually baffled that they could put Trump in the Whitehouse, you don’t understand Trump voters as well as you think you do.

And those Very Serious People that Clinton was the representative of?  Clinton wanted even more involvement in Syria than Trump has so far actually provided.  She said as much right before he missile striked that airbase, and we all know that the MSM would have been chanting “YASS, QUEEN, SLAY! #STRONGWOMEN” the whole time.

I didn’t vote for Trump, but the Serious People have worn down the value of being perceived as serious.  If we get through to 2020 with no new big wars, I’m going to chalk it up as a victory.