Yep.
There were like 50 ways they could have taken Rey's character to make the trilogy interesting and unique.
I distinctly recall talking to my friend after watching The Force Awakens and saying "I think they made Rey too perfect, but I am curious to learn about her background and I'm willing to see if they do anything fun with her." And they just drove her deeper into Mary-Suesville.
Having her turn in the second film would also suit the general "the good guys lose" trend of the second movies in the trilogy. And if they want to keep the circle of important characters small, then obviously have Finn be the one who either redeems her and/or kills her in the third.
Building up one character as an Overpowered prodigy to then have her flip to the bad side is a great way to raise stakes.
Likewise, one idea I've had floating around was... if you wanted to give Leia force powers, then why not have her whip out force lightning at some point in the film. A power that is universally associated with the bad guys, and Leia can use it, but maybe only under extreme stress or something. You can subvert expectations without just dumping on the actual work itself.
faceh
17hr ago
Not Aldi. At least, not so aggressively.
And I have dreamed of setting the magazine rack at the Publix checkout on fire for as long as I can remember.
Someone buys those things, I assume. I've literally never seen someone pick one up.
faceh
1d ago
Neither is a gas station or a grocery store or any other service.
The gas station or grocery store sells me the desired product, takes my money, and gives me a receipt.
If a grocery store also attempted to add random items to my grocery cart that I had to physically remove before I hit the checkout line, because "we algorithmically predicted you'd want to buy this one too!" I would probably go to a different grocery store.
Incidentally Aldi is my favorite Grocery Store because it doesn't play games with putting items on 'sale' or do weird pricing practices with coupons. It provides reasonable quality products at what I can generally expect is the lowest price around, and that's it. I appreciate this commitment to simply providing the goods and not trying to futz with the customer to get them to buy more.
That's the sum total of what I want from my media platforms too.
I hope I don't have to explain why grocery stores putting all the products in one physical place is certainly a greater value-add to me (from a pure logistics standpoint) than youtube attempting to shove random videos into my eyes, when I can go to any website I wish with no effort and find the precise content I want with minimal time investment.
faceh
1d ago
Robots.
America can afford massive expenditures on Capital. Americans will generally not accept the low wages for their labor that would allow cheap production of most manufactured goods. Too many well-paying jobs in non-manufacturing sectors.
The only squaring of this circle is industrial robots that can be put to almost any task needed.
faceh
1d ago
From what I can tell, Spotify is already doing this. I don't have a Spotify account.
faceh
1d ago
Used to be. Up until approximately age 30, I fit that description of yourself to a Tee.
I've mentioned before how I kept all my online profiles across various sites and forums separate to maximize opsec and avoid anyone tracing any particular statements back to me, the real life persona. And I diligently avoided exposing all but the most innocuous details about my personal preferences. Finding someone (my Ex) who I could let down my barriers with was a huge relief in that regard.
But eventually you learn that you vastly overestimate how much any person will actually care about certain details about your personality and tastes. Unless you are actively seeking attention upon yourself very, very few people will even remember learning that you like [band] or even that you find [porn type] alluring will barely budge any person's opinion of you, since its probably not a major concern of theirs anyway.
And the people who DO care are ones you can usually avoid and are best to avoid anyway.
I STILL do place a premium on personal privacy. I like to think I'm a 'hard target' when it comes to getting me to reveal personal details that could be used against me, be it passwords or embarrassing anecdotes from my past.
How to move past it? Oof. Well, try intentionally exposing some detail about yourself that you consider incriminating or embarrassing to someone whose opinion matters to you. It shouldn't be something illegal or particularly salacious, just something you worry would lower your status or lead to conflicts if it came out.
And then see how they react. Which most of the time will be completely nonchalant. Then see if they ever bring it up again.
Then internalize the idea that most normies go through life with minimal awareness or attention paid to the 'weird' behaviors of those around them, and never feel any inclination to use information about others to undermine them or attack them.
I eventually had the realization that despite my best efforts, a lot of information I tried to keep secret was leaking out anyway to friends and acquaintances and they just... didn't care. Or in fact just found it normal and acceptable and not actually embarrassing.
Here's my dark secret though. I DO notice aberrant behaviors or preferences of others. I DO judge them internally for it. And DO store that information for potential later use.
This process feels completely involuntary to me, my brain just pays attention and notes that this is potentially useful information and stores it away for later without me actively 'wanting' to doing so.
I also do this with positive information. Like noting what sort of music someone likes or their favorite brand of energy drink so I can give them a better gift later.
But there's a decent amount of information in my head that could in theory be used to attack someone's status or induce a mental breakdown (oh, that person has trauma from the death of their father, that's good to know), or at least to manipulate them a little better.
And I make a conscious effort not to actually do that sort of thing for ill. I don't want to be evil.
But that leaves me with the little niggling doubt that other people are also noticing all the weird stuff I do and consciously choosing not to abuse that knowledge, and one day it could all burst out...
faceh
1d ago
But platforms are the reason that creators and viewers can match each other at all. It's not a minimal value-add, it's a necessary (but not sufficient) piece of the entire transaction.
Which platform?
I find creators and content I like via Twitter, Facebook, Reddit (well, not much anymore), Youtube, Goodreads, Rottentomatoes/Metacritic, Google searches, like six different streaming services, group chats, very rarely via normal broadcast television, and the occasional word of mouth.
TheMotte occasionally, too.
Which of these should I be sending money to to 'thank' for acting as an intermediary for my awareness of some creator and their content?
Like, do I owe a local Movie Theater an ongoing allegiance past my ticket purchase for showing me a movie that I later go on to purchase on a DVD?
The Algorithms are not providing some unique functions that isn't available elsewhere, and the content they're 'curating' is, as stated, nearly infinite.
If these platforms were happy to act as just dumb "show me what I want and help me find other things I want" services, I'd be more tolerant. What they ACT as is "we'll show you what you want, smothered in Ads, then try our damnedest to funnel you to the content we want to show you and keeps your attention as long as possible... while shoving ads into your eyes the whole time."
Its practically hostile design, and I return that hostility with hostility.
faceh
2d ago
If the content is so compelling that you’re willing to give it a slice of your finite attention, why would you not want creators to be compensated for it?
A) There is effectively infinite content out there. The value of any individual slice of it asymptotically approaches zero. My life would not degrade notably if it were to disappear.
B) Ads are a GENUINE waste of time, 99% of the time I will never click on it, have no interest in the product or service in question, and in fact am driven AWAY from such product if the ad is particularly offputting. Get better at targeting your ads if you want my attention. I will not spend my money, why would I spend my time watching?
C) I'd rather give money to the creator directly, and not to the platform that is honestly a minimal value-add, but leverages its network effects to continue to act as the middleman between creator and viewer whilst pretending to be the reason this connection happened at all.
I want to punish the platform for bad behavior.
Here's a previous explanation I gave once.
The briefest version, I want maximum "localism" in the Talebian sense.
Or if you prefer:
Utopia of Utopias (Nozick).
Archipelago (Scott Alexander).
Patchwork (Moldbug).
Polystate (Zach Weinersmith).
Reading The Machinery of Freedom gets into the nitty gritty.
It's all the same idea. I'm forgetting a few others who pretty much came up with the same thing. Or maybe there was a common, preceding inspiration.
I think the smallest political 'unit' should really be the family, and the largest political unit should be something slightly smaller than a U.S. state.
This allows individuals to move to where their preferred social rules are implemented.
In theory this helps cool the culture wars to the extent there's no longer a need to fight over a single seat of maximum power (i.e. the Federal Government) that determines how trillions upon trillions of dollars are spent. Of course, I view leftism as a totalizing ideology so we'd still be fighting them to prevent the creation of the single seat of maximum power.
Gender Politics might very well pervade ANY society you set up, but I'd hope to at least de-centralize them so the average person isn't judging "men" or "women" as abstracts, but only those members they actually deal with in person.
Anyway, my preferences in the political locality that I would join:
Family as central political unit = For any democratic processes, the family casts a vote as a unit. One vote for each member of the family, which includes dependent children. The declared "head of household" actually casts the family votes.
Head of household is declared at the time a couple enters a 'marriage' contract. If a couple doesn't enter such a contract, then they don't get to vote as a unit, simple as.
There'd be no strict 'age of majority.' Instead there'd be a fairly standardized set of tests/criteria that any growing child could take that, if passed, would 'prove' they're ready for adulthood and thus can be granted independence of their parents. Similar to taking a driver's test to be allowed on the roads.
I like to just cut through the "age of consent" debate (cursed). In this situation, you'd have 15-16 year olds who are capable of consenting to marriage... and then there'd be some 20-25 year olds who still aren't allowed to vote.
For criminal justice, there'd basically only be three types of punishment:
-
Corporal Punishment, probably caning, swiftly administered. For petty crimes.
-
Exile, for repeated/chronic petty crimes, or committing harms that are greater than their ability to repay.
-
Execution, in the rare case where they're judged a dangerous, ongoing threat to human life.
Everything else is reduced to a 'civil' matter. You hurt someone, you make compensation.
Incarceration, in my view, is good ONLY for keeping someone locked down while awaiting some other step in a process. So jails would only exist to keep people for short stints, and nobody would be expected to stay for more than a year.
For gender issues I'd expect that the male/husband would be the 'head of household' in most marriages. But hey if they want to do it differently that's fine. So I do expect that downstream of this setup, the socioeconomic structure of this locality would favor Married Men, Married Women, and children. Single Males and single females would likewise be at a political disadvantage. I'd wager a guess that prostitution and similar activities would be illegal (Petty crime for the first few offenses, exile if there's multiple). Similar with drugs, although selling certain drugs might qualify you for the "dangerous, ongoing threat to human life" category.
Personally, I wouldn't want to criminalize prostitution, drug use, or gambling. But I'd want there to be friction. Like, limit the vices to one particular area of the locality, and you have to have proper licensure to even enter that area. There'd probably be a social stigma attached to going there at all.
I don't expect racial politics to 'go away' in this scenario. But I hope the norms would be healthier. Focus in on the things we have in common, I guess. There'd be no segregation or Jim Crow or Affirmative Action laws, but people who want to self-segregate are free to do so.
Most social functions would be privatized, including charity and welfare and I'd expect churches and social clubs to be the backbone of the individual communities.
I'd like to see some version of Futarchy used to make larger-scale decisions, but for local decisions I think the Hayekian Knowledge Problem, and the need for Skin in the Game means such decisions are always best made by those who actually live in that locality.
Fundamentally, I want to live in a High Trust Society with traditions and social institutions geared towards maintaining it against all interference. Then people can build their lives, their careers, anything they want, really, on top of that.
faceh
5d ago
So speaking loudly about problems with the status quo in a certain perspective becomes a heuristic for certain assumptions.
And I won't even deny that those are valid heuristics.
But its so often used as a means of just writing off the whole discussion.
"Only a Fascist would notice this facet of the world and dare to comment on it."
Okay fine, call me that if you want, but we either discuss it or I suspect certain bad things are going to happen. (note, I'm not accusing you of accusing me of being fascist)
By making it so only the icky right wingers can talk about an issue, a REAL issue, guess whose proposed solutions will end up gaining the most traction?
Anyhow, if anyone is curious as to my preferred solutions or the shape of society I prefer, I can happily explain all that. I don't hide the ball, and I'll bite virtually any bullet when it comes to defending my stance.
Genuine belief appears to be the kind of thing that was mostly for the downtrodden classes and the kind of clergy that was secluded in monasteries and not making too much political noise.
Even then, they had to keep up some level of appearances for greater societal buy-in. This is after all why Henry VIII had to go to such massive lengths to divorce his wife, since he had to at least pretend that God's rules were binding him.
I mean honestly, I suspect that's why religiosity is so aggressively waning. The elites/upper classes have abandoned its constraints, and nothing obviously bad is happening to them, so the classes that take their cues from those with higher status are simply learning by example.
faceh
5d ago
Time and money spent on elder care isn’t spent on roads, farms, or a warm campfire. How far down should our current course take us?
I have no good answer to this particular question.
We can spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars squeaking out a few extra weeks/months of 'life' for a dying elderly person.
They will not enjoy this life, but they will be alive.
Or we can have some norms around end-of-life care that decide that its NOT appropriate to blow wealth that might benefit a younger generation on such diminishing returns.
We currently do not have any real traditions that allow the elderly to end their lives with 'dignity,' And the current instantiation of MAID is clearly not being limited to true "end of natural lifespan" cases.
But if it turns out that the world I like is unsustainable in the state of it that I like, such as for example not relying on literal slavery and/or being race-segregated and sex-segregated and everything you're darkly hinting at, then I'd rather milk it for what it's worth.
See, people seem to read that into any ambiguity I leave in my writings.
But that's quite far from what I'd actually want or even suggest for society. I do not, in fact, think that we need to make blacks into second-class citizens, or strip voting rights from women, or created mandates for childbirths.
I'm mostly in favor of radical individualism, I may be the most nonracist person on this entire board, insofar as I consciously, deliberately choose to judge every single person I meet on their own merits, by their own behavior, and accept their words as truthful in good faith until proven otherwise.
But that runs smack into the reality that a lot of people are not well-suited to run their own lives and this is very detectable in the larger aggregate outcomes.
So when I look at broader statistics, I feel very comfortable discussing them as concrete facts about the world, and proposing the hopefully least intrusive intervention that might improve on the current equilibrium.
Western women are getting less content with life.
Young western men are getting lonely, discouraged, and angry.
A LOT of immigrants in the U.S. are a net economic drain.
Boomers are clinging to wealth and power well into old age, to the detriment of later generations.
Religious groups have higher TFR.
Non-White groups tend to vote for Democrats, Whites are the biggest racial bloc for the GOP.
Ashkenazi Jews have a significantly higher average IQ than the global average. All signs point to this being very genetic, partially cultural.
Kenyans are better at long-distance running than virtually any other group. All signs point to this being very genetic, partially cultural.
I find none of this distressing to discuss, there are many ways to divide up society to try and model the effects of various policies.
I literally just want to have a social order that grants people maximum autonomy, but also a culture that provides basic life scripts that young people can follow to produce generally good outcomes in their life if they're not particularly intelligent and agentic. Complete High School, Get Married, have kids is a pretty decent one.
And, OF COURSE, I want elites/politicians to have skin in the game.
The one thing that genuinely peeves me off is when I see people in positions of power/authority making absolutely DUNDERHEADED policy decisions, causing untold amounts of suffering or economic loss, and then skating off unscathed because they had no direct stake in the outcome/were poised to benefit either way.
So as you can imagine, I maintain an ongoing level of simmering disdain for a lot of our current political class.
This is, perhaps, the strongest argument in favor of fixing demographics now. Even then, the actual effect a currently childless person can have on reversing that is going to manifest 20-30 years later, when the children they've had ASAP grow up and become productive. So people have to believe in the sweet spot of "close enough that I'm gonna feel it, but not so soon that my potential children aren't going to be stuck in Mad Max regardless".
Yep. There's an element of faith required, and that seems to be in shorter supply. People don't know what to believe in, what purpose to work towards, or what the 'point' of it all is.
Did they ever? And even if they did, will they stop the kind of deep states upon deep states we have going on now?
If a king genuinely believed in an all-powerful creator who could and would punish them eternally after death, that would indeed incentivize 'better' behavior during their life.
That's all, just pointing out how the removal of a deity (and the threat of hell/promised reward of heaven) leaves us with very few tools for guiding human behavior.
For a 50% increase from 80 to 120, at best. Anything further will probably have to rely on society-wide life extension methods.
Unless you're arguing that there is a hard limit on how long humans can live, ingrained at a biological level, I don't see this as discouraging.
faceh
5d ago
I'm not betting on Artificial wombs arriving in the next 10 years. Or 15. 20 seems a stretch.
Which makes the extant supply of organic ones that much more critical.
That, and the fact that a state that's strong enough to reverse course towards replacement fertility has no actual reason to stop at "just a bit of strengthening the nuclear family to keep us at 2.1", makes it look like it's all or nothing.
Well, once again. No religious guidelines in place means no real guardrails on the conduct of the kings, either.
Most projections of the future that aren't AI doom or transhumanist utopia seem to make it clear that you will be dead quite a bit before society collapses to untenable levels.
The Peter Zeihan prediction is that the effects will manifest sooner rather than later, as globalization breaks down, which will very quickly make production of advanced technology/products far more difficult. The order that allows large container ships to travel the seas unmolested is tenuous, and if countries get more desperate as their own economies slip, this order likely fractures.
This will probably lead to a reversion in living standards on its own.
We got the tiniest taste of how quickly this can happen with COVID restrictions shutting down ports.
I'm also going to make a concerted effort to not die any time soon.
And I'd rather bet on the side that's given us the advanced civilization I like.
Realize that this 'side' was a largely Christianized, largely Western European-derived stock, and what we're heading towards/currently have is VERY DIFFERENT from that along most dimensions.
We should be concerned about what conditions for building advanced civilization are also necessary and sufficient for its maintenance.
faceh
5d ago
I mean, are we saying "high" birthrates, or replacement-level, with maybe a small buffer.
Me I'm not going to say we need to politically mandate a 2.1 birth rate per woman, or require that every woman put out at least 2 kids or face expulsion.
But I think maintaining the 'nuclear family' as the primary economic unit of the country is so self-evidently good for such a country's stability and development, and for the happiness of its citizens, that any policies that might be linked to weakening that unit and reducing family formation should be viewed extremely harshly.
Problem we seem to run into repeatedly is that sans some kind of biblical mandate for family formation and buy-in from some large % of the population, there's just no compelling reason to individually prefer family formation over individualized hedonism in a world where raising kids is no longer critical to individual survival. Otherwise, you have to be high-conscientiousness enough to notice that the society you're living in needs children to continue functioning, so its ultimately in your best interest to keep birth rates above replacement.
Then there's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma issue: can you convince other people to have enough kids to keep the show running, whilst you instead defect and enjoy childfree life with all the joys an advanced civilization can provide you.
Cue the research showing fertility is higher across the board among the religious.
I get to see this happening up close. I have two younger brothers. The youngest has a wife and a 1-year-old kid now. The middle one is continuing with an extended adolescence, chasing every whim and indulging in various vices without much regard for anyone else. He can get a girlfriend with relative ease (currently has one) but is allergic to true commitment.
No prize for guessing which one has a more stable, fulfilling, happy outlook on the world. Then there's me, who really does want kids, and wants to continue to live in an advanced civilization, and considers the propagation of the human species to be a good thing in and of itself. And yet everywhere I turn I see the pillars upholding it all being chipped away, and very few seem to be willing to give up their own immediate comfort to try and address that fact, even assuming they realize there's an issue.
Why so much ire over nature taking its course?
There's a decently convincing and certainly coherent argument that birth rates going too low, even if it doesn't extinct humans, renders us unable to maintain a technologically advanced civilization.
I like living in a technologically advanced civilization, and its our only hope for getting humans off this rock in the near future. Which I think is important. Any threat to this raises my ire.
Short argument: too many nonproductive elderly supported by too few young, healthy, intelligent, productive citizens means our most advanced technologies (i.e., those that utterly RELY on globalized trade and capitalist hyperspecialization) cannot be built at scale. Too much economic activity is devoted to keeping oldsters alive, there's not enough talent in the younger generation to go into the most advanced fields, or to even maintain the advanced capital we've built.
Any industrial and economic advances that depend on such techs shrinks and stagnates. Standards of living fall everywhere.
A microcosm of this is Russia, which 'cut off' from global trade and can only produce tech, including military tech, that it can design and build at home, with resources on hand. If they didn't have massive energy reserves, they'd be even more screwed than currently implied.
Germany is also experiencing this problem, from all appearances.
Maybe AI and robotics comes in clutch, or we make some other crazy saving-throw (artificial wombs, anti-aging tech, some unforeseen breakthrough in global peace and cooperation) but all else equal the predictable outcome of current trends is advanced civilization sputters and regresses, if not collapses entirely. No ignoring the numbers.
faceh
5d ago
Flame war?
I engage in no such inelegant and crass activities.
"Torch Duel" if anything.
Also, I've heard of them, from growing up in a church.
faceh
6d ago
My hypothesis is that the phones themselves are not inherently the issue.
Nor even the apps.
But the algorithmically curated content which optimized for holding attention, and ensures that they're constantly inundated with content that makes them feel inferior, and provides the feeling of having 'too many options' which leads to decision paralysis and regretting the choices we do make, and generally just increasing anxiety without giving any outlets to resolve or relieve the feeling. Hence, the doomscroll.
The creation of a decentralized panopticon that has a 'leaderboard' so everyone is acutely aware of their approximate rank and is constantly reminded of how poorly they're doing compared to others is going do particular psychic damage to the portion of the population that is hypersensitive to social status.
faceh
7d ago
But consider, does India inspire this level of Patriotism?
I think not.
faceh
7d ago
There will inevitably be gaffes in which the author is being interviewed about what their latest book is about, and it will become glaringly obvious that the author doesn't know what it's about, because they haven't read it, never mind written it.
Hah, easily solved by simply having any interviews of the author be completely AI-Generated videos as well.
Or the author will be approached by a fan at a convention who'll ask them to sign a copy of a book published under their name, and the author won't have even heard of this book.
This one's trickier, but I speculate that the studio/publisher might have an artist/actor/author whose whole body of work is AI, but they hire somebody to pretend to "be" the artist/actor/author for all in-person appearances.
faceh
8d ago
I would point out that the actual shocker here is that this democratizes the slop production. The labels need not be involved in this process at all.
As far as I can tell, "Breaking Rust" is just some person with a Suno subscription who used Distrokid to put the music on all the streaming services, and it ended up being used in some popular tiktok videos. Maybe they did some additional guerilla marketing or something, I dunno.
I've actually done it myself, to vastly less (read: zero) success, just to see how simple the process is.
As far as I know, it was exceedingly rare for an indie artist to make it to the big time while producing music in their garage alone, they needed the studio systems for, if nothing else, distribution/radio access.
It became semi-common in the streaming era for an artist to upload to e.g. bandcamp or soundcloud and get some traction there before they signed with a label.
This current case seems different from even that.
The thought has crossed my mind.
Or develop an app that is basically designed to mute/filter out all the worst, noisiest polluters of the digital commons.
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