naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
It is certainly interesting to see what catches people's fancy!
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
In a hypothetical future age of abundance, how much better can things really be?
I was just this weekend reflecting on the extent to which we already live in this future. Specifically, I was purchasing over-the-counter medicine for a family member's lingering cough, and thinking about the mass produced medicinal miracles of modern chemistry. With the cost of open-market health insurance premiums set to rise next year, there is a lot of public discourse on the state of modern medicine (and how it gets funded). But for the vast, overwhelming majority of health concerns we have today, we live in an age of remarkable abundance and shocking affordability. Furthermore, we live in an age where there is very little difference in the treatments and medicines available to the rich versus the poor.
Now, don't misunderstand--I am absolutely aware of the eye-watering costs of some treatments, particularly experimental or end-of-life treatments, and the relatively better care available to people with money. But the kind of care that costs serious "rich person" cash is also the kind of care very few people would benefit from receiving. The vast majority of medical maladies you will face in your life are treatable by a nurse practitioner with medicine you can buy for less than an hour's wages, and a billionaire in your place would receive the very same prescription at the very same price.
Furthermore, though not everyone benefits in the same way or at the same level, most Americans do have some kind of health insurance that genuinely protects them from bankruptcy while providing them with treatments they could otherwise not possibly afford. Countries with socialized health care are arguably more efficient in how they structure the financing of all this, but either way the risk pooling that modern industrialized nations do with health care costs seems to work pretty well to everyone's absolute benefit, despite the persistence of individual disparities in particular cases.
Your mention of "if everyone went to college" is particularly noteworthy given that anyone who genuinely wants to learn something, today, is far better situated to make that happen than they would have been even twenty years ago. The existence of online college and satellite internet means you never even have to leave your house to get an education, often of a quality much higher than you could get at a top tier university a century ago. We have more knowledge, we disseminate it more smoothly, the costs are minimal and almost always subsidized. I have more books stored in my cell phone than I could physically fit in my house and office--combined. Someone with a loose attitude toward copyright infringement could very easily download several PhD's worth of knowledge for actual pennies (or, at their local library, possibly gratis).
Of course, credentials are a different story, but that's evidence of a society with so much abundance that it actively works to rate limit expertise. America's physician shortage (which is much less than the physician shortage in many other places) is driven in substantial measure by the profession's reluctance to increase the availability of training. This has resulted in a proliferation of paraprofessionals (who often think they are professionals)--but I digress. The point is that we have so much abundance, actually, many of our current sociocultural systems are kind of choking on it.
I sometimes wonder if this is why we are seeing a rise in political movements that, on my view, promise to function by ending abundance. On my view, trade is the lifeblood of prosperity; interfering with trade reduces abundance. On my view, free discourse generates a bounty of ideas; restricting discourse reduces abundance. Asceticism is often a kind of allergic reaction to abundance. Probably someone reading this comment is thinking of Universe 25 and wondering how it relates! Yes: possibly we are poorly evolved to thrive in an environment of abundance.
But I feel like the alternative is strictly worse. Better to wrangle with (and perhaps evolve beyond) our pyschological hangups in an environment of peace and plenty, I think, than to RETVRN to 50% infant mortality rates on grounds that this better reflects the ancestral environment. To answer the question directly, I think things could still get better in a variety of cool ways (I would like to live much, much longer then 100 years, for example!) but I do think we already live in an age of remarkable abundance, for which many, maybe most people are shamefully ungrateful, because they insist on thinking about wealth comparatively rather than in absolute terms.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9d ago
I mean...?
The Groypers, or the Groyper Army, are a far-right group loosely defined as followers, fans, or associates of the American white nationalist political commentator, activist, and live streamer Nick Fuentes. They are named after a variant of Pepe the Frog, an Internet meme.
Basically, (mostly) young (mostly) men who are engaged with (whether seriously or as a LARP or meme) ideas on the identitarian right, in particular taking their cues from Fuentes. It's sometimes hard to tell whether they're being serious or just being incendiary for the lulz. Maybe they would say it is always or often both.
naraburns
nihil supernum
19d ago
...the docs released so far have been negative for Trump's claims to be innocent of the whole matter.
Do you have some example in mind, here? Everything I've seen from this latest release appears to simply confirm what has long been known: that Trump and Epstein were substantially birds of a feather, but Trump kicked Epstein to the curb for stealing his girls. Since that time, Epstein has occasionally ranted about having some kind of dirt on Trump, which for some reason he never actually used and of which there is (still!) apparently no plausible evidence.
I would stop well short of describing Trump as "innocent" of anything and yet the plainly intended implication of all these reports--Trump had sex with underage girls on Epstein island or at least with Epstein's knowledge or assistance--appears to still remain purely in the realm of the undemonstrated, indeed, in most contexts the unstated. Nobody wants to get sued for defamation, and they all know Trump will happily sue them for defamation, so they are just continuing to parrot vague claims while winking and nodding in the direction of Prince Andrew, producing many guns but none smoking, nor even bearing fingerprints.
Trump has spent his adult life a man of wealth and fame, albeit also the butt of many jokes. I would honestly be surprised to learn he hadn't had more than a little bit of illicit sexual contact in his life; I would in that case need to revise my priors on the nature of rich, powerful men. But it seems like there are a lot of people out there who are utterly convinced of the details on this, who keep telling me that some bombshell or other is going to drop (including Pam Bondi!), only for those bombshells to never actually manifest. It was the same with the whole "Russian watersports" thing ten years ago. If Trump were guilty of 1% of the weird, crazy, illegal things he's accused of doing, I would expect at some point for someone to be able to produce hard, non-circumstantial evidence of something. Instead we get lawfare on novel legal theories and this recurrent "this time, we've got him!" nonsense from breathless (and brainless) journalists.
I'm open to evidence! I would not be at all surprised to see it! But again, it seems, no such thing is on offer.
naraburns
nihil supernum
28d ago
I just fixed some formatting and structure with AI.
Then unfortunately, your "fixes" made your post indistinguishable from AI slop.
That's very unfair.
I'm literally just telling you to write the argument in your own words, same as anyone else. Nothing could be more fair. Nobody comes here to talk to LLMs, and if you post something that has been touched by AI, chances are good others will notice and this will distract from substantial discussion. There's just no reason to use AI here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
29d ago
On one hand, this seems like a not-uninteresting proposal?
On the other hand, this was almost certainly written by AI (which is in this case quintessentially low effort), and is being posted by a fresh-rolled account so there's no user reputation weighing in your favor.
On balance, I'm not approving this post.
Banned for a week, albeit not strictly for this comment.
This is the comment that got you reported for antagonism. Certainly it is an uncharitable response, left on its own--if you have some good reason to doubt someone has engaged with the proffered material, you can explain that in an effortful way, but on its own there's nothing on offer here but heat.
When I came to check out this particular report, however, I saw that you had, in rapid succession, led with not one, nor two, but three low effort, top level posts. On the surface, all three posts concern different events, but the substance of each post is to cast the Trump administration in the least charitable light available--sometimes, by "just asking questions."
Taken together, you seem to have decided "flood the zone with low effort anti-Trump takes" is a good way to bait other users. Any possible doubts I might have entertained about that were eliminated by this response; the slightest pushback on your low-effort narrative resulted, not in an effortful attempt to expand on the conversation, but with a (completely unjustified) dismissal. This shows you to be here, not to test your ideas in a court of people who don't share your biases, but to simply wage culture war as you see fit.
You are not fooling anyone, but we do try to extend charity even to the likes of you. You have been warned twice before, by two other mods, about low effort top posts, and here I see that you have made three of them, and then antagonized other users, so warnings do not seem adequate anymore. Now we move to bans.
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