07mk
10hr ago
Or is the idea: "YOLO, just deorbit it, and launch a new one"?
Gosh, I hope so. Imagine if sending objects into orbit became so cheap that just launching a new datacenter took roughly the equivalent amount of money and effort as shutting down a terrestrial server, fixing/replacing the broken part, and then turning it back on. By that point, the Futurama joke about landing on the Moon in less time than it takes to count down from 10 could be real. But that was the year 3,000, which still leaves a large range of time between now and then when rocketry will get that good.
07mk
10hr ago
I don't know the numbers, but I suspect that even getting rid of all the space launches in the world combined wouldn't make a significant-enough dent in slowing/stopping anthropogenic global warming to be noticeable. And given how well attempting to stop AGW through reduction in carbon emissions have gone in the past 2+ decades when it was being tried very seriously, I'm skeptical that it's a useful avenue of attack. I also suspect that the technologies we will need to make human society continue to prosper given the global warming would likely be easier to reach thanks to technological innovations created for the purpose of spaceflight. E.g. if geoengineering turns out to be required, I can't imagine having better/cheaper rockets around to disperse chemicals or to monitor large swathes of the atmosphere wouldn't be helpful.
I also think that whatever governmental or other institutions would be required to coerce SpaceX engineers (and/or finance bros) to either being fruitful and multiplying or devoting engineering expertise to technologies deemed by you to be more socially useful than what they're doing now would destroy so much prosperity and trust in institutions that it would strongly reduce both the likelihoods of human survival beyond expansion of the sun and institutions that live for billions of years. If these institutions are able to be so effective at being authoritarian and tyrannical that no one can overthrow them or create meaningful alternatives for billions of years, that might work, but running an organization with that much control and competence seems likely a lot more - like, orders of orders of magnitude more - difficult than rocket science.
So no, I don't think these things are in conflict at all. For there to be a meaningful tradeoff, there needs to be an actual credible way to redirect effort in one scenario to effort in the other scenario without there being so much loss due to friction or other reasons as to negate any gains, and I don't see that either with spaceflight vs preventing/mitigating the harms of AGW or spaceflight vs eugenics (or just preventing population collapse).
07mk
12hr ago
How about we work on making those things actually sustainable over the long term before we worry about interplanetary colonization.
I think we can do both, and that the latter doesn't substantially trade off the former. Perhaps if SpaceX, Blue Origin, NASA, and all other spaceflight-related organizations liquidated their spaceflight-related departments today and devoted all the proceeds into some effort to make our generic organizations last billions of years, we would have better expected value of having the capability of escaping the Earth when we need it (because the institutions standing up for billions of years would better allow for the technological and engineering progress). But I'm skeptical of that at all, and, even if it were the case, I'm even more skeptical that the difference would be significant.
07mk
14hr ago
But why am I wasting my time here? You talk casually of time and multiverse travel. I politely conclude that you are not actually serious about this topic.
I'd contend that casually dismissing such things or billion-year timescales is proof of unseriousness. You're treating the survival of humanity as if it's some sort of fantastical concept not worth thinking about merely because it would happen very far in the future and also require immense, scifi/fantasy-level technology to prevent. When, in fact, neither of those makes the reality of that coming extinction any less real or any more fantastical. When the challenges that reality hands us is so extreme as to sound fantastical, humanity better be ready to step up with technology that's so extreme as to sound fantastical, or else humanity won't be around any more.
Yes, most likely, making a self-sufficient colony on the sea floor or Antarctica or some other Earth-based location as a prototype makes perfect sense, but the need to consistently make a profit is where the idea becomes decoupled from reality. Because the profit potential in any Earth-based colony will necessarily be missing the one BIG part of any space-based colony; the insurance against there being no economy at all due to there being no humans (or human-equivalent beings) at all to engage in economic activity.
If you want to say that now, instead of the future, is not the right time to invest lots of money into R&D into developing technology to insure humanity against the risks of relying on one planet for survival, then there's a good argument you can make there, though most likely I'd also disagree with such an argument. But that's a different argument than that physics prevents humanity from meaningfully populating space or that there's no economic sense in populating space.
07mk
14hr ago
Those seem like engineering constraints, but also, the economic constraint seems obviously wrong. Economics can only exist when there are people or other equivalent beings around to engage in it. We know with pretty high confidence that the Earth won't be habitable by any non-scifi non-fantasy living being within a few billion years due to the expansion of the Sun. So, from an economics standpoint, there's a great incentive to expand our population to space. It just seems like a sufficiently long-enough timeline that very few, if any, people with power and resources want to devote much of those into making it happen. And there's a game theory-type problem where no one wants to be the one to sacrifice all the money and time into the R&D only to have everyone else free-riding off their work.
Technologically, almost surely building a self-sufficient base on the sea floor would be easier than doing so on the Moon or Mars, but the latter acts as insurance in a way that a sea floor basis can't. Obviously the Sun making the Earth inhabitable would likely have similar affects on the Moon and Mars, but it still decouples it somewhat, and also it lowers the risk for other planet-wide disasters. In the long run, for the survival of humanity, perhaps instead of capitalism, we'll need to invent a new system of economics that somehow provides a profit incentive to people for doing research and development into space engineering (and possibly time and multiverse travel, if those actually turn out to be possible in any meaningful sense - in the really long run, who knows how much universe in the future there actually is for humanity to expand to?).
07mk
1d ago
But I am a little confused why people hold up E33 as why the FF7Rs are mot good enough, especially since there is universal agreement that the FF7 combat, especially Rebirth, is great.
There's nowhere near universal agreement on that. I didn't play E33, but from the criticisms that I've seen, it's that E33 decided to keep the traditional turn-based RPG approach while adding the parry system to it, which proved that it was possible to make a turn-based RPG whose gameplay appealed to people. Which was in contrast to Square Enix's apparent approach with FF7R which was declaring that turn-based RPG systems like that of the original FF7 were dead and creating a real-time system that had aspects of the turn-based system stapled on. As someone who never enjoyed the original FF7 combat system - or any turn-based RPG - when I was playing FF7R, I often found myself wishing they'd just done that, since what they actually produced was the worst of both worlds, something that was unsatisfying in its real-time controls due to the reliance on ATB, while losing almost none of what made turn-based combat unfun with the heavy reliance on stats and gear/tactics.
07mk
2d ago
The funnest fact I know: Famously, "Si" is "yes" in Spanish and "Oui" is "yes" in French. But "Si" also means "yes" in French: "yes, in a no kind of way."
One of my favorite parts of Korean (and probably all East Asian languages) compared to the western ones is that yes means yes and no means no, and the listener is expected to do the job of figuring out the proper negative multiplying. So, if Bob didn't get the TV and decides to be honest, when Alice asks him "You didn't get the TV?" he just says, "Yes [I didn't]," not "No [I didn't]" like an American and not "Yes (special) [I didn't]" like a Frenchman. Because of course a positive word used to answer a question with a negative should imply affirming the negative, and having the rule be that just because the answer affirms a negative, the word that's used should be the negative one makes things needlessly confusing.
My pet theory is that a lot of people slot "negative" and "positive" into two wide swathes of things, such that using a negative word just places something into that "negative" swath, instead of seeing those things as modifiers, such that using a negative word causes the original thing to be negated, possibly to a positive state. And so the former types of people experience dissonance at double negatives or more, especially when using a positive word affirms an explicitly stated negative statement (all positive terms can affirm another negative statement, of course, but the fact that these words were actually spoken out loud and in recent proximity seem to be important parts of what causes the dissonance).
07mk
7d ago
One of the things I dislike about that sort of behavior here is that most discussion about things relating to status/victimhood tends to be completely suppressed in generic discussion settings by use of shaming and other status games. Being concerned about low status people who aren't part of the list that's been pre-approved by high-status people is, in itself, low status, and so the lowest status people who can't get on that list get no honest open discussion about their suffering. I'd prefer that The Motte (and also everywhere, but I place that wish in the same category of wishes I have for curing world hunger through feeding everyone unicorn farts) be one place where there could be some honest open discussion about that. But it inevitably attracts people who ostentatiously dismiss it only as concerns of those LOSERS, and YOU aren't a LOSER, ARE YOU? No, if you were a WINNER like ME, you'd just call the LOSERS LOSERS and move on, so why are you discussing it?
07mk
7d ago
The issue is that the "in discourse" is a load-bearing portion of what makes the heckler's veto negative. Because discourse is just consenting people talking, rather than imposing their coercive force on others. It makes sense that there are other standards when coercion is involved, and certainly perfection ought never be the standard. I think there's plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree on any value between 50.0000001% and 99.9999999% though.
07mk
7d ago
The refusal of Dems to say "okay we won but let's change things so everyone is more comfortable next time" may be the single most important thing behind the future death of America.
I feel like that might be overstating it, though I have no real strong argument for anything else being a more important thing other than maybe AI being the one most important thing behind the future death of [all nations]. But it's certainly an important point, and I'm not sure why other Dems don't get this, other than hubris, ego, and blindness by hatred. It seems obvious to me that, for my party to be the party that actually deserves to win, it needs to actually be better in some meaningful sense than the other party, and for them to be better in any meaningful sense requires having enough humility to open oneself to attacks of cheating and fraud and other bad things, taking those seriously, and correcting ourselves based on that, especially when they come from our opponents whom we've judged as being evil or whatever. This is abusable, but also, the reverse is also far more abusable.
Though the saying "the way you do anything is the way you do everything" isn't strictly true in every case, I do believe that when it comes to ideological thinking, it's almost always true. The only way we can have any confidence that our proposed policies are truly better than the other guys' proposed policies - instead of merely policies that we've convinced ourselves is better - is by coming to those policies in a humble, self-critical way (necessary, not sufficient, though), which we can only have any confidence we did if we also treat political attacks from our enemies in a humble, self-critical way. The idea of crushing my enemies in order to forward policies that I've genuinely convinced myself is better than the other guy's just because I genuinely consider the other guys evil seems just completely obviously far more evil than that to me.
07mk
7d ago
I'm not sure what this has to do with the heckler's veto, which has to do with a 3rd party preventing 1 party from communicating to another consenting party by physically impeding the communication. This seems more akin to a tyranny of the majority kind of thing, which is also heavily misused (since, in a democracy, a majority must be tyrannical sometimes, almost definitionally) and I'm not sure really describes this situation accurately either, though it's more fitting.
07mk
7d ago
One of the major points I (and others) was making is that this not a situation where you can rules lawyer your way out of it. Democracy requires consensus, you need to be persuasive and to make everyone feel like the elections are free and fair.
I feel like I see this kind if application of rules-lawyering in a lot of inappropriate contexts, such as interpersonal relationships. As if there were some 3rd party judge or jury observing the proceedings who everyone is trying to convince, rather than the reality that it's just the other person or people who you need to convince. You can't rules-lawyer your way into someone apologizing to you, forgiving you, being grateful to you, liking you, liking someone else, disliking someone else, etc. You need to actually understand what it would take to convince that specific person and do what it takes to do it, including sacrificing values you might hold sacred, if that's what it takes. Or just understand that you can't do the convincing and stop wasting everyone's time and energy.
Though maybe that's my secular atheistic upbringing speaking, and in extremely religious societies where everyone follows the same religion, this rules-lawyering is both effective and healthy. Maybe that's why this tendency to rules-lawyer is so common; our brains might have evolved to survive in extremely religious societies where everyone can appeal to some god or another to convince others.
07mk
8d ago
Despite what NAACP stands for, I think "colored person" would still be considered an offensive term to refer to someone these days (unlike the enlightened and inclusive "person of color").
07mk
8d ago
Women surrendering to their base instincts when it comes to sex leading to less overall sex seems entirely plausible, though.
07mk
8d ago
I'd guess that calling a black man a "negro" in the USA would be considered more offensive than calling a hapa a "halfsie." Though I don't have direct experience with either to draw on. I do recall it was around a decade ago when there was some Twitter kerfuffle because some Central/South American lady posted about her black cat being named Negro, which a lot of English speakers took issue with.
07mk
8d ago
That gets you the answer to what that person believes radicalized them, which is potentially a useful data point, but also often misleading as to be less than useless. Because whatever reason someone believes they did something will almost always be heavily - probably mostly, by my estimation - reflective of what feeds their ego.
07mk
8d ago
The smartphones can't really be decoupled from the status cause, since smartphones have had, in part, the effect of lowering relative status of most men for most women due to enabling easier access to higher status men than before.
07mk
8d ago
Well, it's okay to say that someone is "black" in America, but refer to them by the Spanish term for the same word and... (ironically, the former used to be considered very offensive as recently as the 2000s, and the latter used to be a standard non-offensive term some time before that).
07mk
8d ago
So the word is actually only used as a subject of a clause, so the first one could work, as in "would you toss me that iPad," but the latter wouldn't really work. A variation like "I don't want you to feed me those veggies" would work, though.
07mk
8d ago
There's always a half-dozen of these fads bouncing around the upper and aspirational upper-middle classes. It's soothing behavior for class anxiety, nothing more.
With how poorly prepared I see some (a lot of) young adults are for adulthood, I have a suspicion that a lot of this is aspirational parents using these "one weird trick," "lifehacks," and such to substitute for the basic traditional stuff like providing a safe, secure home, teaching them basic life skills and inculcating useful values like discipline, and such, because the latter is really really hard and requires a lot of personal sacrifice in both time and energy.
And mostly unrelated, but these hacks remind me a lot of what seems to have happened with the way education standards seem to have evolved by taking "tricks" that high performing people use (e.g. "whole word reading," which is the way a lot of intelligent, fast readers read words in dense texts, by looking at the 1st and last letters and inferring the rest from context, or the techniques of adding or multiplying numbers in one's head more easily by adding on whatever's necessary to get to the nearest multiple of 10, then getting rid of it at the end, which is certainly the way I figured out how to do it when I was young) and teaching it as the baseline to everyone, under the false belief that that would just lift everyone up to high performance. Instead of what I believe is the reality, that high performers have internalized the standard, slower way enough such that they can build these tricks on top of it, and these tricks need that stable base to actually be effective. Looks like a lot of cargo culting.
07mk
8d ago
I mean, it has a net -4 rating, which is hardly mass downvoting. And the core chunk of the comment was pretty transparently a massive strawman about loser men and their supposed unreasonably high standards based on nothing really concrete. I think the lack of substantial rebuttal has mostly to do with magicalkittycat's history of showing the same style of arguing as GuessWho (darwin2500 from Reddit), which makes almost any meaningful argument with him impossible. I've long since accepted that there's little-to-none value to be gained from any conversation with him and learned to just downvote comments from him that I find problematic and just move on.
07mk
8d ago
Fortunately for us, my son never addressed me in the 2nd person around any black people (you is pronounced "nigga" in Korean).
Hm, was he taught Korean in a sort of Western, status-independent way? The only time a Korean child would use that term for his father is when he's overtly trying to disrespect him, as "nigga" is only used when referring to people at or below one's status.
07mk
8d ago
The comment is about the claim that this reflects a "new direction" for the left and pointing out that this is actually exactly just the existing, well-worn standard operating procedure, by way of e.g. making remigration seem completely out of bounds or targeting "the bigger issue" or root cause at the sacrifice of actually solving whatever issue is at hand directly.
07mk
9d ago
Perhaps, and it's certainly possible that it's just something that happened that someone slapped a label onto, but I'm not sure there's such a thing as a positive "unavoidable consequence" that isn't sensitive to "leftist project" policy decisions or any "project" policy decisions. There are about a Graham's Number times more ways things can go negative than they can go positive, and in the rare cases where the positive things happen by chance, they seem extremely easy to destroy, either completely by chance or due to people specifically attacking the parts that make things positive, as is the case here.
Perhaps it's better that the electoral system filters out unlucky people. Then again, this is probably a very lossy and inefficient way of filtering such people out; a more direct approach would be to just make every candidate play one round of Russian Roulette together.
But also, it might not be better for you if your elected representative has better luck. Him having good luck could mean that him and everyone around him avoid the bullet, or it could also mean that he avoids the bullets while everyone else around him doesn't. So perhaps wed want him to be on the lucky end of the spectrum but not too much luckier than the people he's representing.
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