Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[itsbenedict]

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.

[argumate]

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

[rangi42]

Booby traps just signal that there’s something valuable being protected.

[argumate]

reverse psychology: surround it with huge advertising signs that visibly reek of desperation

[bpd-anon]

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

[argumate]

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.

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Alright, it was me.

I hate every version of the Earth Sphere Federation that I’ve ever encountered so much that I altered the timeline and made Trump the President.

It wasn’t even that hard.  

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

mobile.nytimes.com

Make America Singapore - NYTimes.com

[slartibartfastibast]

Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[slartibartfastibast]

That’s fair.

Hopefully we can automate medical specialist jobs soon.

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[ranma-official]

Make America Confused Again

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

mobile.nytimes.com

Make America Singapore - NYTimes.com

[slartibartfastibast]

Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[slartibartfastibast]

That’s fair.

Hopefully we can automate medical specialist jobs soon.

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[slartibartfastibast]

@mitigatedchaos/Kanye 2020

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

mobile.nytimes.com

Make America Singapore - NYTimes.com

[slartibartfastibast]

Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[slartibartfastibast]

That’s fair.

Hopefully we can automate medical specialist jobs soon.

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[collapsedsquid]

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.

[mitigatedchaos]

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.  

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

mitigatedchaos asked:

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.)

xhxhxhx answered:

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

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Gendered alcoholic drinks

femmenietzsche answered:

… anyone have foreseen the tragedy that awaited them? The 20^th century (Old Calendar) reification of a rough gender binary had reached its apotheosis and like all such apogees it was soon to be riven, split by the seeds that had fallen into the hidden cracks of its apparently pristine edifice. Things had reached such a state that even cheap intoxicants were divided between mascul [Text missing] While scholars differ on whether the introduction of intoxicants aimed at gendfugees (an anachronism - the term used at the time was ‘enbies’) was originally satirical in intent, what is certain [Text missing] ‘cultural appropriation’. Thus, as the number of gender identities soared into the tens of millions, the culturally condoned ‘ownership’ of a specific, subtly different intoxicant was a badge of great honor, not to be trifled with except at great risk of sanction. Distillation was a rite both sacred and fractious, [Several pages missing] final triumph of the Individualists. Ten billion people, ten billion genders, ten billion nanobreweries. Time spent in one’s distillery pursuing a unique perfection led to loneliness which led to drinking. The civilization’s nadir was at hand. Thankfully, [Text missing] still be found, in the hidden places of the world, corroded metal reminders of a past now almost lost to cyberhuman understanding.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Lets say no one used nukes or chemical weapons, how devastating would a world war on the same scale as the previous 2 in numbers be but with modern weaponry?

argumate answered:

I don’t think that’s a feasible scenario.

[mitigatedchaos]

“Hahaha,” laughed the CPC Chairman, gesturing towards the smog-choked city outside. “Now this mess is your problem instead of mine! I’m free! I’m free!”

Mr. Liu continued to laugh as the NATO soldiers lead him away towards the armored convoy.