HalloweenSnarry
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User ID: 795
HalloweenSnarry
29d ago
Don't the people of these countries suffer from all their capable people seeking higher wages in the US?
Dunno about Guatemala, but Venezuelans suffer mostly from their country being a socialist shithole that, as yet, hasn't totally collapsed into anarchy. Venezuelans staying in their country and improving it to the point that immigration to the US is no longer as attractive first requires Maduro to be removed from power, along with Chavismo being purged so thoroughly to a degree that might look rather sinister.
HalloweenSnarry
29d ago
HalloweenSnarry
28d ago
Yeah, reading this post and encountering the section about the HRE, I'm surprised that Kulak did not simply predict that the US would devolve into a patchwork of "tollbooth kingdoms" just like what the HRE became.
Fundamentally, I think the challenge for the US in the future, and the solution to said challenge, ultimately comes down to culture, cf. the Noah Smith complaint about us not being a culture that builds. I think where I diverge with Kulak on this whole concept of "US dying of DEI globohomo" is that I think it eminently possible for culture to shift and for the US to get on some sort of "healthier" path of governance, of ditching unproductive ideas and ideological frameworks, before the US has to ditch them the hard way via total collapse.
HalloweenSnarry
28d ago
Per a comment on your Substack post, I think you missed a bit of a trick: the shrinking of the material power gap in the modern era bears a similarity to that of the Bronze Age, and will be why a coming decentralization era might be short-lived: say that the Western hegemony does collapse, the US Navy is longer able to project power across oceans, and all because of weapons most anyone can have, what does happen when the supply chains that made those weapons are thus destroyed by the very same?
Pickup trucks are fairly simple, but still rely on a somewhat complex supply chain of materials, parts, and even labor that might be difficult to piece back together after a collapse. Drones rely on tiny electronics that are not easy to manufacture, and microchips are horrendously rather centralized at the moment. And, of course, whither missiles and aircraft, you better hope you have some smart cookies in your area to be able to design these weapons. Manufacturing is more capable of being decentralized nowadays, but I think it's still mostly pretty concentrated in certain areas for good reasons.
ETA: I suppose, if anything, you could always go back to the trope, as seen in 40K and BattleTech, of old technology still being used that has been long out of print, but I imagine that, in reality, it's horrid to be in a state where you're relying on aging hardware with an ever-dwindling supply of spare parts.
HalloweenSnarry
28d ago
Is that all? I was taking the term "tollbooth kingdom" to mean that travel across districts and such was infeasible because of wildly-differing laws as well as literal rent-seeking behavior to fuck with outsiders.
HalloweenSnarry
28d ago
Relevant OSD post that I only dimly remembered just now: https://opensourcedefense.substack.com/p/osd-137-centralization-and-decentralization
HalloweenSnarry
25d ago
I would like to agree with you, but I absolutely must push back on something:
We can't forget our technology, too much is recorded.
We can and we most certainly fucking will unless something is done in the near-ish future. Right to Repair is somewhat of a live issue now, and that it's a live issue at all is a sign of deep trouble--same with video games. We will actively create new problems or un-solve solved problems simply because it helps enrich the pocketbooks of executives. If anything, I expect a collapse to push us back to anywhere between the 1980's to the early-to-mid 2000's in terms of what technology will be left, and that's assuming things aren't quite so total that we can still set up factories and maybe reverse-engineer the more proprietary stuff.
I'm not terribly, 100% convinced that we'll see the collapse of the USA in our lifetimes, but I can easily imagine that it will start, not directly via fire, explosions, coups, civil war, or turnkey tyrrany, but it will start with numbers on balance sheets and lines on charts going down, which will cause a cascade of various services mysteriously (heavy sarcasm tone indicators optional) becoming unavailable, as people in suits order servers to be shut down, following a cold, contextless logic driven by numbers and lines.
HalloweenSnarry
25d ago
ACX just seems to be Substack already, unless there's some other way to view the posts. I also notice awful, awful chugging on ACX. I think the problem is that the comments section always loads everything, which is a lot of text and images to render, whereas normal Substack makes you go to a separate page to see all of them.
HalloweenSnarry
25d ago
Maybe not through Discord, but through text messages and physical proximity.
HalloweenSnarry
25d ago
I did watch a video (from a rather...polarizing YouTube channel) once that showed that, while Andy Dick does still kind of have a career, his life is practically ruined, being reduced to slumming it in a motorhome and being used for livestream views while his self-destruction is not being reversed.
HalloweenSnarry
25d ago
I dunno, maybe it is something with the background scripts on ACX, but I could swear the reason is "the page for any ACX post is like 43 times longer than any non-TV-Tropes webpage needs to be, because the comments section is not truncated like on any other Substack post."
HalloweenSnarry
25d ago
Just not doing it at all, but showing you a variety of sex scenes if you die
If you're talking about hentai games, some of those do have difficulty adjustments or at least aren't ball-bustingly hard--indeed, for some, you'd probably have to go out of your way to lose on purpose to see said scenes.
HalloweenSnarry
25d ago
HalloweenSnarry
20d ago
Didn't the Thames used to have a reputation of being kind of a sewer river at one point?
HalloweenSnarry
16d ago
I think someone here linked this review (or linked to something else that linked to said review) of a book by Mao's former personal doctor, which detailed how closed-minded, filthy, perverted, and short-tempered Mao could be. As per Olive's reply, the totalizing ideology of Communism in China, paired with the general ability of the Chinese to go along with a proclaimed direction, would naturally have led to Mao dragging an entire country down with him.
HalloweenSnarry
16d ago
This sounds like an excuse, it took me only a few minutes to read the whole thing and I could probably knock out a corrected version in an hour tops, maybe even less. I acknowledge that maybe the work of proofreading is harder than what I've dealt with as a student from kindergarten to college, but it can't be that hard.
HalloweenSnarry
16d ago
But Tarn still raises a good point: the current ruling coalition of India is a political party and a strongman head-of-state who is considerably right-wing compared to the previous ruling coalition. Will Modi reverse every last element of socialism stemming from India's independence? Probably not, but I'm under the impression that much has already been done in that direction. And given the uncertainty about the old Congress ever managing to wrest their seat of power back from the BJP, it's hard to thus conclude that India will accelerate leftwards.
HalloweenSnarry
16d ago
I am going to join the others in disagreement and point out that it definitely seems like the Japanese have been pretty anti-war since 1945. Now, sure, attitudes can change, the Japanese aren't ignorant of the rising tensions and potential threats of the current age, and there isn't exactly a political monoculture, but one needs only to look at the freaking cartoons they make to see that the population seems pretty inoculated against the more warlike tendencies they had in ages past.
HalloweenSnarry
14d ago
Somewhat off-topic, but: thoughts on RoboMaster?
HalloweenSnarry
13d ago
To summarize: guy makes a popular window manager for what will be the new standard for Linux desktop window display software, the community around it is composed of half "programmer socks" trans people and half toxic 4Chan shitposters, the toxic parts of his community prompt a Linux dev with more privilege to get him declared persona non grata from working within the "mainstream" of this tech.
HalloweenSnarry
13d ago
Perhaps they're referring to one of the oldest immigrations, i.e., the slave trade?
HalloweenSnarry
13d ago
Side note, why were Mac games seemingly so focused on story compared to some PC games? There's Marathon, Journeyman Project, Myst, that first-person game made by the lead designer of the original Rainbow Six (or was it the founder of Red Storm?), those HyperCard point-and-click games...was it just because Macs had more fixed specs and already had a GUI, focing devs to focus less on how to make tech-demo games and more on how the gameplay experience went?
HalloweenSnarry
13d ago
What do you make of this, then? That this is happening at all in Iran probably says something. I'm with Lizzardspawn in that I'm under the impression that the theocracy, while enjoying considerable support, only barely has a hold on the nation, and that the populace is a little too liberal and well-educated to remain under its thumb for eternity.
I think the comment you're replying to is pretty much just FNE expressing an aesthetical-moral distaste for the concept, not exactly a disagreement on the technical aspects.
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