Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

By the by, @kissingerandpals, one of the reasons I’m not a pure Capitalist is that I think such things should be voluntary, even living in communities based on it.

If you are a purist Capitalist and not a Transhumanist, then I suggest abandoning Capitalist purism.  In the long run, Capitalism will sell you out to Transhumanism unless it is leashed by a strong hand.  Its alignments with traditionalism in some cases are less to do with its fundamental nature as technology increases, and more to do with other factors (like not needing the same structure to enforce as the economy of the USSR).

[mitigatedchaos]

I am not a capitalist, I do not know how you came to this conclusion.

“If” wasn’t a throwaway word, I really did mean “if you are…”.  

A lot of the people who are against Transhumanism are also Traditionalists and Capitalists, who have bought into the right-wing moral justification for Capitalism.

I disagree with the right-wing moral justification for Capitalism, partially because I worry about some of the dark futures it may create, so I leverage people’s hatred for/fear of cybernetics and the like in order to convince them to ditch it.

If not you (maybe you’re a Communist or a Distributist or something), then one of the other readers will be both averse to Transhumanism and a moral Capitalist.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

honestly I’d really appreciate it if people who dislike transhumanism point me in the direction of why

[mitigatedchaos]

Some of it is consequential - there are some potential dark futures in that direction.  But I think mostly, they’re at peace with their sex, their body, and with aging, so H+ seems like an alien, “arrogant,” or “immature” value system to them.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[kissingerandpals]

Transhumanists are scum of the Earth and should perpetually burn in their virtual hells that they will probably invent for themselves

[mitigatedchaos]

I’m not obligated to permanently and completely die and be erased from existence just to fulfill your ideological burden, and if we do it your way, permanent non-existence is the fate of every human being on Earth.

[kissingerandpals]

It’s an obviously over the top joke about transhumanist conceptions about the afterlife, but okay. I never said anything about killing you and erasing you from existence.

I think it’s kind of humorous though that you label the natural order of things “my way.“

[mitigatedchaos]

It could be read that way, but it could also be read as being a lot more spiteful, and a lot of people reaaally hate Transhumanism.  (I end up using the #shtpost tag a lot to disambiguate my posts.)

I was just being poetic with my language about afterlives, anyway, in order to push home the idea that if one is not religious, and one does not want to die after a roughly arbitrary period of time that is not determined by moral worth, it’s basically the only way forward.

As for the natural order being “your way”, well, if the alternative becomes technologically feasible, and you still support becoming weak, sick, and mad just for being alive “too long”, then it kinda is your way, then.  Presumably, you don’t want these technologies to even be developed, which makes it very much your way.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

By the by, @kissingerandpals, one of the reasons I’m not a pure Capitalist is that I think such things should be voluntary, even living in communities based on it.

If you are a purist Capitalist and not a Transhumanist, then I suggest abandoning Capitalist purism.  In the long run, Capitalism will sell you out to Transhumanism unless it is leashed by a strong hand.  Its alignments with traditionalism in some cases are less to do with its fundamental nature as technology increases, and more to do with other factors (like not needing the same structure to enforce as the economy of the USSR).

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[kissingerandpals]

Transhumanists are scum of the Earth and should perpetually burn in their virtual hells that they will probably invent for themselves

[mitigatedchaos]

I’m not obligated to permanently and completely die and be erased from existence just to fulfill your ideological burden, and if we do it your way, permanent non-existence is the fate of every human being on Earth.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@kissingerandpals: #what is wrong with transhumanists #hasn’t technology ruined our lives enough?

No God in Heaven, no Devil in Hell.  The only paradises can be the ones we make for ourselves, and one man’s paradise is another man’s torment.

My paradise, the body I want, doesn’t come standard, so the only thing to do is build the society capable of producing it.

Come to me with real magic and I might reconsider.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Okay heres what makes me dead on curious about this indie game about someone who only cares about the feelings of men (boohoo)... How do you make a feminist cyberpunk future? Isn't that kind of like the opposite?

cyberpunkpixeljunk answered:

Nah, just make sure the women in the setting fit the setting. Plus, what do we know about this game? It could be just fine.

[mitigatedchaos]

Ugh…

Transhumanism destroys gender/sex binaries by enabling mass alteration of bodies, sex, and gender.

Done properly it will be “Post-Feminist” because Transhumanism massively weakens the boundaries around what the term “woman” even means, and fundamentally alters the mechanics of human reproduction.  (I mean, just take the idea of artificial wombs by itself and you’ll get big changes.)

Feminism itself is already struggling to adapt to the world it has created with only modern technology levels.  The “Feminists” of 2065 (or whatever) will likely be very different from the ones of 2017.

[argumate]

WE USED TO HAVE A GENDER BINARY

[mitigatedchaos]

The year is 2064.  Thoughts are binary.  Sex is not.

You are New York Detective Plex Luscoe, final survivor of the GamerGate Day Massacre, and you have only one mission:

Party like it’s 2099.

Blake Hardy Entertainment presents…

M I R R O R  S H A D E S

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Okay heres what makes me dead on curious about this indie game about someone who only cares about the feelings of men (boohoo)... How do you make a feminist cyberpunk future? Isn't that kind of like the opposite?

cyberpunkpixeljunk answered:

Nah, just make sure the women in the setting fit the setting. Plus, what do we know about this game? It could be just fine.

[mitigatedchaos]

Ugh…

Transhumanism destroys gender/sex binaries by enabling mass alteration of bodies, sex, and gender.

Done properly it will be “Post-Feminist” because Transhumanism massively weakens the boundaries around what the term “woman” even means, and fundamentally alters the mechanics of human reproduction.  (I mean, just take the idea of artificial wombs by itself and you’ll get big changes.)

Feminism itself is already struggling to adapt to the world it has created with only modern technology levels.  The “Feminists” of 2065 (or whatever) will likely be very different from the ones of 2017.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

So, this artist Penelope Umbrico made a collage of the incredibly large number of portraits people had posted to flickr of themselves standing in front of the sunset, and put it up as an exhibit for an art gallery. Unsurprisingly, this apparent tendency for people to take pictures of themselves standing in front of sunsets and posting them to flickr has inspired others to take pictures of themselves in front of the collage, and posting it to flickr.

argumate answered:

It’s like the tension in MMORPG design: if everyone does the same quest it destroys the logic of the game world to some degree (the bad guy is beaten millions of times!) but if quests have to be unique for each player you can’t share the experience.

[mitigatedchaos]

* twitches *

Time.  The answer is Time.

Set the MMORPG in a world where the timelines are divergent and there are thousands or millions of them, and the world itself is broken into thousands of planes/zones/worlds spread across a vast and diverse cosmos in a state of multiversal war.

The players are warrior-chrononauts, members of various factions in this cosmic war across universes and timelines.  Many of the same worlds, however, occur again and again, and thus they have a shared experience of intervening in them.  There isn’t just one Space Hitler, there are thousands or millions echoing out into the cosmic void.

Video games are almost perfect for this, since single-player games do the multiple timelines branching thing intuitively just by their structure, with saves and replays!

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

In a way it’s heartening that crooked politicians can’t raid the treasury directly and have to engage in dodgy contract kickback arrangements via foreign banks; each extra link in the chain increases the vulnerability of the scheme and guarantees its eventual exposure.

[mitigatedchaos]

I’d like to add a few more links to that chain…

[argumate]

political cartoon of Leia strangling Jabba with lots of unnecessary labels like POLITICAL ELITE, FINANCIAL REGULATION, WIKILEAKS, PUBLIC OPINION, MILLENNIALS, TAX HAVENS, COST OF LIVING PRESSURE,

[fluffshy]

On the other hand, each link adds a greater chance of costs external to the pilfering of the treasury like hiring a less efficient jet manufacturing company or passing needless regulation to enable rent seeking. Directly raiding the treasury would have less real world consequences besides enriching the crook..

[mitigatedchaos]

Ah, but you see, one of the cheaper links to add…

Is just to pay your politicians more money.

People just hate politicians, so they’re unwilling to do this, but every doubling of a politician’s income is a doubling of how much money it takes to bribe them, possibly greater as money becomes relatively less important the more of it you have.

Kickbacks have to be hidden in larger projects/funds, so going from $100,000 in kickbacks to $200,000 in kickbacks could mean an increase in costs of $1,000,000, which just makes the thing even more noticeable.

I once calculated that it would cost something like $250 million USD to highly pay the US Federal legislators and President something like $500,000-$1 million each, annually.

That sounds like a lot of money, but suppose the federal government spends 25% of an $18 trillion dollar economy.

If we got a 1% improvement in federal government spending, it would provide potentially $45 billion in value, 180x that increase in cost.  Does it seem feasible that we’d get 1% better spending out of congress if we paid them at that level?  Not from existing congress critters, maybe, but some of those seats might start to look really tempting to more talented individuals…