So the web history thing is a fishing expedition, but’s a known thing for congress to exempt themselves from things like healthcare laws or insider trading rules or whatever, so it isn’t an entirely ungrounded assumption.
Did U Kno?: After 200 generations, ancestral Europeans have evolved a camouflage pattern that allows them to easily blend in with beach sand, allowing them to effectively hunt favored prey species such as beach umbrellas and six-pack brews.
the first thing I saw when I started splatoon 2
In the glittering postcyberpunk future of America 2017, a vast array of digital delights await just moments away, but human beings are still cruel to each other, and the shadow of economic inequality looms over the land.
- box excerpt, Cyber Cowboys! Hackers of the West (Sapporo Joint Animation Group, 1997)
I don’t know why but this exchange fills me with joy to be alive
Man, could you imagine if the Japanese had forcefully colonized places against the will of the PoCs already living there? Haha, they’re so polite though, that would never happen.
I was running out of time to create my Anime Expo cosplays (one week before con!) And I knew I wanted to do something challenging but manageable. I remembered that Monster Musume has a bunch of characters with unique features, so I latched on to Miia as my one week challenge!
Bringing it to life was comprised of running around in a panicked frenzy, hoping it would all turn out. I trekked to a faraway discount fabric outlet because I knew I would need a LOT of fabric. The tail from waist to tip is 17 feet long! Constructing it involved tediously repetitive sewing and hot glueing to make the whole tail look uniform and reptillian. I was relieved to finish it on time with a day to spare!
Wearing it to the convention was a whole new nightmare. Not only was it the busiest day Anime Expo had ever seen, but my mobility was extremely limited. Shuffling at a snail’s pace through packed hallways had me sweating and exhausted before I even made it to my destination (the most popular photo of this cosplay was taken just after bunny-hopping up a long staircase!)
When I finally arrived, I was completely overwhelmed with the response I got. I have cosplayed a lot over the last decade, but nothing I’ve done has been as popular as Miia! I’m so thankful for all the encouraging comments both in person and online that made this project worth it.
— @NikkiMoxxi
Snake girls are p. great
@collapsedsquid @xhxhxhx I went to reply to this thread, but when I opened up my draft it was already filled with this discourse from the future.Contra @fakecollapsedsquid2066’s post regarding the high-end prosthetics industry, @mecha-cyborg-xhxhxhx2066’s quick assessment is largely correct.
The development of the high-end monstergirl, monsterboy, and sex-variant full prosthetic bodies does ultimately result in lower costs for the standard bodies purchased by the middle class and for accessories and general implants available under the North American Cybernetics Subsidy Program. The key here is that these benefits are from the mass production models, and not the custom individual models, such as the gold-plated mecha scorpion body built for Ivanka Trump III.
For the custom models, they just use more material, but for the mass production models, the increase in power requirements and weight requires research into battery and materials technology which eventually filters down into the mainline models.
For example, the DSI6 Fault-Tolerant Power Control System in my body (even though I know neither of you guys have it because I’m way more paranoid than either of you) is actually a derivative of the DSI5X originally developed for the high margin DS-56 Rachnera Special, which was high margin, certainly, but sold 10,000 units, in order to increase its operational time from 76 hours to one week without violating the nuclear materials refined arms control act.
Likewise, the Modular Limb System now so commonly used by firefighters and other emergency personnel on more-or-less standard humanoid bodies was originally developed for the Broseidon Systems T-209, which as anyone on this website will remind you, is widely considered incredibly fetishistic and “deeply unnatural”!
Now of course, a lot of this could maybe come from military research, and there’s some argument whether the wealthy rebuilding themselves as fetishized versions of mythological creatures is really a good use of resources, but honestly I doubt that without it we get the same rate of progress.
ascalaphidae asked:
TBH, one thing I thought about from time to time is that if you’ve got an adversary figure with real magic powers, it could fake a bunch of miracles and make a fake religion with a fake Word of God, and even influence the emotions of people to make them feel like they were getting a real connection out of that. And how would you know?
But just inserting a few sprinkles here and there in the right places of an ordinary holy book could be pretty effective.
@voximperatoris: Also, you keep saying you don’t like prediction markets, but I’ve never seen you make a decent argument why not. Clearly, on a small and illiquid market (or one with fake money), quality will generally be poor. But that is reason to expand their use.
All prediction markets will be small and lack liquidity, as the range of things people want to predict is very broad but the number of people able or willing to get involved is very limited.
Robin Hanson often suggests that corporations should use prediction markets to predict the outcome of various internal projects, which would limit the number of participants to dozens or hundreds of people at best, require the company to provide liquidity, be confounded by all kinds of internal politics, and is really just a clumsy way of providing random bonuses to lucky employees.
Large scale real money prediction markets have to compete with all the other places people might want to invest, many predictions are very long-term, and it’s very difficult to nail down exactly how to judge a prediction, even for something as structured as a US election (eg. consider electoral college shenanigans).
Hanson’s futarchy is particularly ridiculous. Say you have a poorly designed government program like cash for clunkers to get old cars off the road and reduce pollution and CO2 emissions. The limited reach and high overhead means it’s going to have no effect or even be counterproductive, and you bet accordingly. Then the global financial crisis hits, economic growth stalls, and CO2 emissions actually decline, unexpectedly. Nothing to do with the policy you thought was bad, but how is that handled? Do you have a panel of experts to carefully go through all these issues and pronounce a verdict on each one?
There are already ways to use predictions to profit. If you think that Trump will be elected and pivot towards Russia, that has implications for energy markets and Eastern Europe and the Middle East and currencies. If you think that China will enter an economic slump you can take advantage of that. If you think that a particular movie will fail at the box office you can short the studio. If strong AI will be developed earlier or later you can invest accordingly.
People who have good ideas about the future already have plenty of options!
Prediction markets may be useful in certain fairly limited situations, but it is necessary to actually demonstrate that on a case by case basis; mostly it just seems to be the equivalent of averaging a bunch of guesses, which typically outperforms a single guess but isn’t some radical new way to structure society.
These are all good criticisms; I’ve torn into UNU elsewhere for this sort of stuff. (Their pitch is swarm intelligence, but check out their pictures. It’s just an overhyped prediction market with low stakes, plus they’ve added some totally novel bugs like letting people spread vote between certain pairs of outcomes, but not others.)
Futarchy has some way bigger problems, though. I think the common rebuttal to the things you cited is “all our existing systems suck too, so this might still beat them”. I’m not convinced by that, but I certainly think we can avoid the argument by citing more severe problems.
One is that futarchy can’t effectively deal in long-odds or long-timescale events. Black swan reasoning is always a bitch, but wisdom of the crowds is a particularly awkward way to approach it. And handling things like “global warming with lead to > 2°C of temperature rise by 2100″ has all kinds of secondary problems where running a bet that long is basically a nonstarter no matter how you assess results.
Another, which I think dooms the project, is that futarchy is catastrophically unable to reason about its own existence. If I propose a betting topic of “the prediction market will be dissolved and replaced with a dictatorship which cancels all bets”, there’s no way to coherently bet true and get profits.
If people think too big to fail is a serious issue with the stock market, they ought to be screaming in terror at the thought of futarchy. Because the equivalent faulty-downside predictions there are things like “let’s do nuclear brinkmanship with Russia to improve our economic standing when they back down”. The failure case doesn’t pay out, so it must be a good idea!
I’m being glib here, but I’ve seen this issues raised before and I’ve never seen even an attempt at a rebuttal. If someone has addressed things like “how to prediction market about 100 year x-risk issues”, I’d love to read it.
like an assassination market, but for the entire planet.
Perhaps payouts along the way based on the estimated probability for long-term bets - I guess that would be Prediction Derivatives? That allows people to profit if the estimate of high global warming increases. However, I’m not sure on how it incentivizes holding the prediction in the first place.
If we allow selling the shares of your position in the market, then people could hold long-term positions speculatively. For instance, I estimate a good chance that high global warming will happen, and that it will become more obvious in the intervening time, then I can buy low now and sell later.
That is very weird and I can’t think of what that could be.
Fuck, do we have microwave bombs now? Is that even possible? We already have microwave pain rays. Ten years ago this would have been fake, but…
*Capitalism could never
BRUH ARE U KIDDING ME THE HIGHWAY I LIVE NEAR HAS BEEN UNDER CONSTRUCTION FOR LIKE 4 DAMN YEARS AND IT TAKES THEM 6 MONTHS JUST TO FIX A DAMN POT HOLE
The hell do you mean “capitalism could never”??????? Last I checked, the UK is still a capitalist nation. The US could never because the US doesn’t invest in public works to the same level as other comparably large economies because we spend all our money on the military.
Whaleologist is right but….fuckin what? You can seriously do that shit in 15 hours. I honestly am amazed. That’s how you know I’m a fucking American, like, my goddamned mind is blown.
This isn’t an issue of capitalism or even public works investment.
This is an issue of how American budgets work, because America is the most idiotically designed country you could ever imagine.
American budgets are not organized by need, they’re effectively PRESCRIBED. There’s no pool of government funding that is assigned according to where money needs to go at any given time. We assign budgets in advance and they’re extremely difficult to change. Guaranteed if you ask any American politician about this, they’ll tell you it’s to “reduce government waste” by making people use their resources carefully instead of taking on unnecessary projects.
This is not what actually happens.
Because if you DON’T USE 100% of your budget every year, you will be assigned a lower budget for the next year, “to prevent government waste.” So they prescribe you a budget in advance and then you HAVE to use all of it, or else it’s a NIGHTMARE to do anything new in the future – you have to go through a billion hoops to get funding for a new infrastructure project that is a one-time expense. It’s not cheap to build a new thing, but because it’s a public good that will last a long time, you don’t need to budget for it every year – but the one year you do need to budget for it, it’s an enormous pain in the ass because everyone responsible is desperate to “cut government waste.”
So with American construction projects, especially on roadways, you basically have a system where people are FORCED to take longer than necessary just to use up their budgets. It is literally a regular occurrence in America for a road to be torn up for no reason, just so they can spend money filling it back in for the next four months.
And that’s why the crumbling, outdated, and underfunded infrastructure in America is an embarrassment to western civilization.
And the fact that this fucks up transportation, stresses people out, makes us all sicker and more miserable, and forces us to sit in traffic wasting gas that we have to spend a bunch of money on because one of the things we never invest in is mass public transit (because of heavy lobbying by the automotive and oil industries) – all of that should probably not be considered a coincidence.
In the name of “efficiency” and “cutting government waste,” we’ve invented the most fucked up, purposefully wasteful mandatory maximum budgeted spending that has totally eliminated our ability to respond to short term budgetary needs. Potholes take years to fix, construction goes on for years even as nothing actually gets done, etc. All because the budgets HAVE to be wasted in order for anyone to keep their funding – and notice how much of American budgets go toward things like “administrative costs”.
Our entire country is a money laundering conspiracy.
American capitalism is the most wasteful garbage budgeting system on earth.
It is fundamentally designed to be inefficient and stupid, because doing it this way allows us to keep government spending (on public goods) as close to the absolute minimum as humanly possible in order to preserve the lowest possible tax rates on the people who ‘matter’ to the people who are making the decisions – which of course means the wealthy donor class created by the dramatic shift in economic policy under Ronald Reagan.
Because every single goddamn problem in America is Ronald Reagan’s fault.
Thus why the system of infrastructure should be shifted over to grants out of a pool.
Which requires a better overall design of governments. Most governments are still running on organizational technology a century old.
great thread. Was thinkin about comin at that “grants from a pool” comment cuz I see a lot of how we already have that in education bureaucracies and other things, and it’s a great example of “college-educated people don’t care how absurd they need to get to justify the value of college-educated people” but i’m definitely tryin to fall asleep and don’t feel like writingthe comment out properly
Actually, I’d ideally have it as part of a broader system under a new ideology of National Technocracy, where the conventional legislature would be replaced with one composed of voter-delegate think-tanks that bet on the outcomes of their legislation (across baskets of metrics, not just individual ones).
Such an arrangement could make it far more feasible to break all these construction projects down into grant-based chunks and metaphorically sort them by (voter preference) x (return on investment).
I just suggested grants because it’s easier.
Me: feels mostly alright for one day
Me: I can’t believe all my mental illness is a fake and my entire existence is a sham, I am the mayor of fraudville welcome to my town of lies.
*Capitalism could never
BRUH ARE U KIDDING ME THE HIGHWAY I LIVE NEAR HAS BEEN UNDER CONSTRUCTION FOR LIKE 4 DAMN YEARS AND IT TAKES THEM 6 MONTHS JUST TO FIX A DAMN POT HOLE
The hell do you mean “capitalism could never”??????? Last I checked, the UK is still a capitalist nation. The US could never because the US doesn’t invest in public works to the same level as other comparably large economies because we spend all our money on the military.
Whaleologist is right but….fuckin what? You can seriously do that shit in 15 hours. I honestly am amazed. That’s how you know I’m a fucking American, like, my goddamned mind is blown.
This isn’t an issue of capitalism or even public works investment.
This is an issue of how American budgets work, because America is the most idiotically designed country you could ever imagine.
American budgets are not organized by need, they’re effectively PRESCRIBED. There’s no pool of government funding that is assigned according to where money needs to go at any given time. We assign budgets in advance and they’re extremely difficult to change. Guaranteed if you ask any American politician about this, they’ll tell you it’s to “reduce government waste” by making people use their resources carefully instead of taking on unnecessary projects.
This is not what actually happens.
Because if you DON’T USE 100% of your budget every year, you will be assigned a lower budget for the next year, “to prevent government waste.” So they prescribe you a budget in advance and then you HAVE to use all of it, or else it’s a NIGHTMARE to do anything new in the future – you have to go through a billion hoops to get funding for a new infrastructure project that is a one-time expense. It’s not cheap to build a new thing, but because it’s a public good that will last a long time, you don’t need to budget for it every year – but the one year you do need to budget for it, it’s an enormous pain in the ass because everyone responsible is desperate to “cut government waste.”
So with American construction projects, especially on roadways, you basically have a system where people are FORCED to take longer than necessary just to use up their budgets. It is literally a regular occurrence in America for a road to be torn up for no reason, just so they can spend money filling it back in for the next four months.
And that’s why the crumbling, outdated, and underfunded infrastructure in America is an embarrassment to western civilization.
And the fact that this fucks up transportation, stresses people out, makes us all sicker and more miserable, and forces us to sit in traffic wasting gas that we have to spend a bunch of money on because one of the things we never invest in is mass public transit (because of heavy lobbying by the automotive and oil industries) – all of that should probably not be considered a coincidence.
In the name of “efficiency” and “cutting government waste,” we’ve invented the most fucked up, purposefully wasteful mandatory maximum budgeted spending that has totally eliminated our ability to respond to short term budgetary needs. Potholes take years to fix, construction goes on for years even as nothing actually gets done, etc. All because the budgets HAVE to be wasted in order for anyone to keep their funding – and notice how much of American budgets go toward things like “administrative costs”.
Our entire country is a money laundering conspiracy.
American capitalism is the most wasteful garbage budgeting system on earth.
It is fundamentally designed to be inefficient and stupid, because doing it this way allows us to keep government spending (on public goods) as close to the absolute minimum as humanly possible in order to preserve the lowest possible tax rates on the people who ‘matter’ to the people who are making the decisions – which of course means the wealthy donor class created by the dramatic shift in economic policy under Ronald Reagan.
Because every single goddamn problem in America is Ronald Reagan’s fault.
Thus why the system of infrastructure should be shifted over to grants out of a pool.
Which requires a better overall design of governments. Most governments are still running on organizational technology a century old.
