Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

You wake up on the morning on the 20th of January to find that your mind is in Donald Trump, on the day of your inauguration as president. You are guaranteed that it is impossible to undo this change. As president, what do you do with the powers available to you? How do Congress, the media, and the public respond? How do you respond back?

theunitofcaring answered:

Oh wow.

I want to be clear that I think I’d be a pretty bad president. I wouldn’t be worse than Donald Trump, admittedly, but I think being president is legitimately a really hard job which you can kill billions of people by screwing up badly enough and kill millions of people just by not thinking to ask the right questions or appoint the right people. And I don’t know the right questions or the right people. I don’t even necessarily know how to find them, it’s not like ‘interviewing people and determining whether they are competent at federal policy’ is a skillset I have.

I think like @ozymandias271 I probably call Obama and explain what has happened and ask him for suggestions and take them unless they involve bombing people, which I am not going to do even though becoming president seems to mysteriously make people conclude it’s a good idea. And instead of spending our foreign aid bribing people we should probably spend it stamping out malaria and neglected tropical diseases. And maybe I could try to wiggle Trump’s position on immigration around to the stance that we should have an arrangement like Canada’s where communities can raise money to sponsor a refugee and help their integration.

And of course throwing a whole lot more resources at ending animal agriculture and developing carbon sequestration and so on and so forth (how much power does the President actually have to do this?) and bringing in people to have debates over things like the minimum wage and healthcare where the end result of the debates will not be ‘I know what to do’ but just ‘I remain horribly uncertain what to do, and I feel terrible about myself for not being smart enough to have it figured out’. Meanwhile I desperately try to replace the VP with someone who will be a good president. As soon as this person is secured I step down.

- to, uh, be a seventy year old man? The rest of my life sounds super unpleasant tbh. I will feel uncomfortable around all of my friends who have made cracks about how ugly Donald Trump is (moral: you shouldn’t body-shame people because what if a random blogger is bodyswapped with the sitting president and feels bad about themself as a result?), and most people I interact with will think I have a long history of sexual assault and this will be, like, incredibly unpleasant and terrifying and make me feel constantly disgusting. And I’ll have a ten year old who thinks I’m his dad, though maybe improving on Trump’s parenting would be as easy as improving on his presidency. 

[mitigatedchaos]

>  throwing a whole lot more resources at ending animal agriculture

Moonshot making an artificially-grown human heart.  It’s doable, it’ll go over better than vegetarianism, pave the way for better tissue engineering, and help push us to the far side of the medical care cost curve where costs start coming back down again.  So far we’ve been hurting from costs coming down from infinity.

The tissue engineering technology can then be used to develop and mass produce in-vitro meat, which will almost entirely replace animal agriculture within a few generations, to the point at which our descendants will wonder why we didn’t do it sooner.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[marcusseldon]

I feel like the Marxist left points out a lot of real problems in society relating to alienation, dehumanization, the lack of meaning, etc. But they get the cause of these things all wrong. The cause is not capitalism and private property, but living in a mass society where you coexist with thousands of people living and working together in one town or city neighborhood, and hundreds of thousands to millions in a single midsized metro area. We are built to coexist with a few dozen to a few hundred friends and relatives for life, and mass modern societies cannot provide that. This is why real world attempts to abolish private property and capitalism arguably worsened, rather than improved, the problems Marxists worry about in those societies.

Interestingly, I think certain kinds of social conservatives see the same problems, but also misread the cause.

For both Marxists and social conservatives, the cure is worse than the disease.

The only hope,  in my view, is some kind of liberal communitarianism, but I’m not sure such a thing is possible.

[wirehead-wannabe]

Endorsed

[bambamramfan]

This is why one third of my online thought is devoted to a blog trying to figure out how tribalism works and whether it can be used to good ends.
Either we can make a society with Universal Justice that does not have systematic problems that turn person against person… Or we can’t.

If we can’t, we should find the second best alternatives, and investigate them even when they perpetuate some injustice (since in such a case, it’s impossible not to.) I think there’s a good chance such a “second best” resembles tribalism more than liberalism, and at least this question needs to explored seriously.

[slavojzyzzek]

nationalism. the concept you are looking for is nationalism

this is confused by the fact that people use ‘nationalism’ to refer to nationalism, the thing one meta level up from zionism, ethnopolitics in any form including merely engineering an ethnicity-specific culture, debates over immigration policy, and whatever dumbass shit jasbir puar tortured the word into

imo the important question that falls out of this is roman empire ‘civic nationalism’ vs the thing i’d call metazionism except back when moldbug’s comments section was relevant handle went and called it multizionism instead – if civic nationalism (which in the US would require a lot of engineering, both in the style of the ‘60s ‘black nationalists’ – or for that matter the finnish nationalists who went out and made the kalevala a thing – and in the form of redrawing the flows of information and people that give rise to shared context) is viable it’s obviously preferable, but what if it’s not

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[leftist-daily-reminders]

If you would go out of your way to argue how easy it is for capital to automate away jobs when labor costs become too high, then you should probably know that you’re giving all kinds of credibility to those of us who advocate fully-automated luxury communism. I mean, think about it: you’re arguing that so much of human labor ISN’T NECESSARY because said jobs can be done by machines, and yet you STILL want the bulk of humanity to pointlessly scrape by laboring for the capitalist class, receiving meager wages to buy the shit they helped generate in the first place. The above billboard is a THREAT. Let’s not mince words – that billboard is bourgeois propaganda designed to turn the working class against each other and against the broader goals of resource democratization. “If you fight for a basic livable wage, just know that you’re easily replaceable, peon!”

This is what leftists mean when they say that capitalism is an economic system filled to the brim with tensions and contradictions; it’s also what they mean when they say that capitalism inevitably produces its own gravediggers. Automation is one of those gravediggers, and it’s a major one at that. As more and more jobs become automated in the coming decades, the working class will face widespread dispossession, ramping up revolutionary class consciousness in the process. At that point, capitalism will either focus on generating more superfluous jobs for people to work or set about instituting a universal basic income – regardless, the point is to keep enough scraps flowing downward so that people don’t call for a broader system change. In this way, capitalism’s ruling class can maintain control over the wealth-producing means of production and imperialist capital accumulation can continue unrestrained.

For these reasons, “more jobs” and universal basic incomes are not enough. We need to democratize the broader social infrastructure and eliminate the profit system. If you recognize how possible it is to automate away human labor, then you should defenestrate yourself out of the Overton Window and use some political imagination – cut out the unnecessary jobs, automate all the labor you can, produce for human need rather than elite profit, and you end up with drastically reduced working hours and bountiful leisure time. This is the essence of fully-automated luxury communism – the natural conclusion of the conditions that capitalism set in motion.

Be wary of automation in the present climate, but always trace it back to the class struggle. Robots taking our jobs SHOULD be cause for celebration; why should we treat these potential liberators as harbingers of dispossession? Technological advancements are pushing us exponentially towards a de facto post-scarcity world, where everyone’s needs can be comfortably met alongside their desires for community and leisure and entertainment, and yet we’re held back by Empire’s insistence on keeping the means of production hoarded under the command of a superfluous ruling class. As long as we are divided into capitalists and workers, humanity will never know full liberation.

[thescalexwrites]

TL;DR: automating jobs will eventually get rid of working for profit, cut down the class system, and give everybody time to focus on whatever they want to do.

[mysticalmoonstone]

Exactly, with automation will actually come more jobs and better paying jobs to manage those technologist. Technology always statistically creates more jobs than it destroys.

[leftist-daily-reminders]

Okay but that’s also what we want to avoid. It’s not about resigning ourselves to HAVING to work a job just so we can access resources – it should be about determining what jobs are actually necessary for meeting people’s needs and for the maintenance of society, what jobs can be automated away, and how to properly transition towards a system that produces for need rather than for profit (and hopefully eventually reaching a point of abundant post-scarcity that money itself could be feasibly abolished from there), all accomplished by democratic control of the means of production and the infrastructure. I’m sick of this liberal discourse that keeps shifting all these radical developments in technology back towards the status quo, where the wealth-producing machines are still controlled by elites and where we have to just keep inventing new jobs for people to work so they can access resources. If feudalism couldn’t cope with the advancements in technology that eventually made feudal relations obsolete, then capitalism won’t be able to cope with the coming advancements in technology as well, try as it might – scarcity will have to be enforced (more so than it is now), more pointless jobs will be created, and politicians will opt for redistributive universal basic incomes in an attempt to stabilize the whole thing. We need to seize the opportunity to put the exponentially-increasing reach of technology to work for the benefit of humanity, not just for human benefit when it’s convenient to capitalists.

[saltymantears]

So this post reminded me of something from my childhood, and I couldn’t place what, until I remembered this joke from the Jetsons:

Now in the show this is obviously a statement about how easy Mr Jetson has it in the future’s workforce, but it more effectively highlights the absurdity of a capitalist system once technology has become able to automate entry-level labor: no one NEEDS Mr Jetson to do anything, but because his value in society is entirely based on income and thus employment, they need to FABRICATE a role for him to fill. In reality the only human necessary to keep the plant running is (maybe) Mr. Spacely, but goodness knows we can’t let EVERYONE enjoy an upper-middle class income in management, so they give him a bunch of useless peons to boss around all day.

The capitalist system the Jetsons live in finds THIS absurd future preferable to a system where everyone’s basic needs are met using the massive surplus generated by a fully automated workforce. The people who paid for the billboard in the original post above are even LESS sympathetic, as they’d apparently blame US for “making” them fire 90% of their employees in order to remain competitive. What a grand system, this capitalism.

[whitemarbleblock]

Always reblog.

[mitigatedchaos]

“Tensions within Capitalism” is mostly overly-academic hogwash, the same way one might talk about “tensions in the human body” or indeed any successful animal. On the other hand, the threat from automation is quite real, and it’s different this time. The “Luddite Fallacy” label is itself fallacious. Better to cut a check based on %GDP and ride it into space, or pursue some similar program. I also don’t trust anyone who hasn’t said the words “prediction market” entirely unironically to have a solid plan for what comes after The Revolution, violent revolution or peaceful.

[bambamramfan]

“Tensions within capitalism” refer to things like the unemployed person who is denied any job to do, but also told she is lazy and a leech for not having steady work. It’s a contradiction our entire society believes, but the weight of the contradiction lies on one person.

Eventually it snaps. Possibly by these unemployed people voting for unethical leaders spouting nonsense, just for any hope of making sense of their senseless situation.

“What to do after the revolution” is a very important question, but pondering how to answer it does not change the fact that the resolution of snapping tensions is coming towards you at a pretty fast clip. Even I thought Trump wouldn’t get elected till 2020. The people may pick someone else’s revolution while you’re waiting to perfect your own.

The human body also contains tensions. After enough years it dies.

[mitigatedchaos]

Had the world waited to perfect their revolutions a bit longer, several dozen million people who died might have lived.  Overthrowing a government is far easier than developing a fully workable alternative for real (not just hoping a half-finished untested alternative works out) and far more exciting than actually testing things before implementing them on a wide scale.  It’s more dangerous, of course, but that’s a different matter.

Given how straight-up murderous revolutions have tended to be in the past, it is right to distrust revolutionaries.

Doing something like cutting a % of the GDP and handing it out is less likely to crash the economy or kill millions of people.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[haraii]

christmas eve what about christmas adam

[kowka]

happy christmas adam to all men’s rights activists

[forfuturereferenceonly]

Please stop pestering us with things like this. This has nothing to do with men fighting for their rights. Eve is short for ‘evening’. Please don’t turn activism into a joke. Thanks.

[reindeerplaydate]

Someone isn’t having a good christmas adam

[theguilteaparty]

Christmas Adam: December 23rd. Comes before Christmas Eve and is generally unsatisfying.

[mitigatedchaos]

Christmas Adam is like so many other jokes and “jokes” - it’s only funny when someone you know isn’t saying it as an attack is saying it. Otherwise it’s no better than… honestly I can’t think of a good gender-flipped example right now. Same thing with 95% of X Tears memes. If it’s a demographic being targetted and not something like “Console Peasant Tears”, then it isn’t really “ironic”, it’s just a flat-out attack against which they are permitted to defend themselves.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Reblog if you like Electro Swing

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

src losrh

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[leftist-daily-reminders]

If you would go out of your way to argue how easy it is for capital to automate away jobs when labor costs become too high, then you should probably know that you’re giving all kinds of credibility to those of us who advocate fully-automated luxury communism. I mean, think about it: you’re arguing that so much of human labor ISN’T NECESSARY because said jobs can be done by machines, and yet you STILL want the bulk of humanity to pointlessly scrape by laboring for the capitalist class, receiving meager wages to buy the shit they helped generate in the first place. The above billboard is a THREAT. Let’s not mince words – that billboard is bourgeois propaganda designed to turn the working class against each other and against the broader goals of resource democratization. “If you fight for a basic livable wage, just know that you’re easily replaceable, peon!”

This is what leftists mean when they say that capitalism is an economic system filled to the brim with tensions and contradictions; it’s also what they mean when they say that capitalism inevitably produces its own gravediggers. Automation is one of those gravediggers, and it’s a major one at that. As more and more jobs become automated in the coming decades, the working class will face widespread dispossession, ramping up revolutionary class consciousness in the process. At that point, capitalism will either focus on generating more superfluous jobs for people to work or set about instituting a universal basic income – regardless, the point is to keep enough scraps flowing downward so that people don’t call for a broader system change. In this way, capitalism’s ruling class can maintain control over the wealth-producing means of production and imperialist capital accumulation can continue unrestrained.

For these reasons, “more jobs” and universal basic incomes are not enough. We need to democratize the broader social infrastructure and eliminate the profit system. If you recognize how possible it is to automate away human labor, then you should defenestrate yourself out of the Overton Window and use some political imagination – cut out the unnecessary jobs, automate all the labor you can, produce for human need rather than elite profit, and you end up with drastically reduced working hours and bountiful leisure time. This is the essence of fully-automated luxury communism – the natural conclusion of the conditions that capitalism set in motion.

Be wary of automation in the present climate, but always trace it back to the class struggle. Robots taking our jobs SHOULD be cause for celebration; why should we treat these potential liberators as harbingers of dispossession? Technological advancements are pushing us exponentially towards a de facto post-scarcity world, where everyone’s needs can be comfortably met alongside their desires for community and leisure and entertainment, and yet we’re held back by Empire’s insistence on keeping the means of production hoarded under the command of a superfluous ruling class. As long as we are divided into capitalists and workers, humanity will never know full liberation.

[thescalexwrites]

TL;DR: automating jobs will eventually get rid of working for profit, cut down the class system, and give everybody time to focus on whatever they want to do.

[mysticalmoonstone]

Exactly, with automation will actually come more jobs and better paying jobs to manage those technologist. Technology always statistically creates more jobs than it destroys.

[leftist-daily-reminders]

Okay but that’s also what we want to avoid. It’s not about resigning ourselves to HAVING to work a job just so we can access resources – it should be about determining what jobs are actually necessary for meeting people’s needs and for the maintenance of society, what jobs can be automated away, and how to properly transition towards a system that produces for need rather than for profit (and hopefully eventually reaching a point of abundant post-scarcity that money itself could be feasibly abolished from there), all accomplished by democratic control of the means of production and the infrastructure. I’m sick of this liberal discourse that keeps shifting all these radical developments in technology back towards the status quo, where the wealth-producing machines are still controlled by elites and where we have to just keep inventing new jobs for people to work so they can access resources. If feudalism couldn’t cope with the advancements in technology that eventually made feudal relations obsolete, then capitalism won’t be able to cope with the coming advancements in technology as well, try as it might – scarcity will have to be enforced (more so than it is now), more pointless jobs will be created, and politicians will opt for redistributive universal basic incomes in an attempt to stabilize the whole thing. We need to seize the opportunity to put the exponentially-increasing reach of technology to work for the benefit of humanity, not just for human benefit when it’s convenient to capitalists.

[saltymantears]

So this post reminded me of something from my childhood, and I couldn’t place what, until I remembered this joke from the Jetsons:

Now in the show this is obviously a statement about how easy Mr Jetson has it in the future’s workforce, but it more effectively highlights the absurdity of a capitalist system once technology has become able to automate entry-level labor: no one NEEDS Mr Jetson to do anything, but because his value in society is entirely based on income and thus employment, they need to FABRICATE a role for him to fill. In reality the only human necessary to keep the plant running is (maybe) Mr. Spacely, but goodness knows we can’t let EVERYONE enjoy an upper-middle class income in management, so they give him a bunch of useless peons to boss around all day.

The capitalist system the Jetsons live in finds THIS absurd future preferable to a system where everyone’s basic needs are met using the massive surplus generated by a fully automated workforce. The people who paid for the billboard in the original post above are even LESS sympathetic, as they’d apparently blame US for “making” them fire 90% of their employees in order to remain competitive. What a grand system, this capitalism.

[whitemarbleblock]

Always reblog.

[mitigatedchaos]

“Tensions within Capitalism” is mostly overly-academic hogwash, the same way one might talk about “tensions in the human body” or indeed any successful animal. On the other hand, the threat from automation is quite real, and it’s different this time. The “Luddite Fallacy” label is itself fallacious. Better to cut a check based on %GDP and ride it into space, or pursue some similar program. I also don’t trust anyone who hasn’t said the words “prediction market” entirely unironically to have a solid plan for what comes after The Revolution, violent revolution or peaceful.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

@wirehead-wannabe: Wait, does tumblr hate sriracha now?

I think when people hate X it’s more they hate people banging on about X

[mitigatedchaos]

Might be that new Wendys ad campaign.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

in order for the media to actively marginalise white supremacist groups they need to adopt a classically liberal posture, eg. that there are universal values, that ethnoracial solidarity is bad and cosmopolitanism good, and that some cultures deserve to be squashed because they suck.

[mitigatedchaos]

Good luck with that.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[bambamramfan]

a reminder that the reason nuclear power has not grown in the US is not overzealous safety fears, but because building a plant is an extremely capital-intensive investment with a large tail risk of extremely high costs. (quotes you see about the cheapness of nuclear power are about the *marginal* cost of the power, not including the fixed costs like the plant.)

no one wants to insure that. so, the government has to subsidize nuclear power with below-rate insurance. which is akin to the government insuring major investment firms - usually they won’t have to pay out, but the one time they do, it will be ugly.

the states with a flourishing nuclear power industry (such as France) are characterized by more government involvement because that’s what it takes to subsidize such risks. nuclear power does not flourish in a free market.

[mitigatedchaos]

It isn’t the insurance. The US government would cover it if the price of the power were right. The issue is very cheap natural gas combined with uncertainty about the future price of renewables. A carbon price could make a big difference in the first. As for the second, there currently seems to be a saturation point on renewables before it starts needing too much backup power generation, and the real question is battery technology. That will remain uncertain.