HereAndGone2
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User ID: 4074
HereAndGone2
2hr ago
That's the kind of behaviour that is frustrating and that her mother should have smacked out of her.
Plainly, she is that type of girl, she just was affronted by the guy being so explicit about it. He was hot enough that she agreed to go on a date, so she probably would have had sex anyway, he just needed to play the game. Demanding at the start that she put out (or, the presumed implication, he would call off the date) was insulting: if he would call off the date, then she wasn't hot enough for him.
Now, whether that was a bluff on his part or not, I don't know, but she didn't call him on it and so yeah. We're just arguing over the price now.
Servalan starts off genuinely intelligent (and Jacqueline Pearce's casting was wonderful because physically she's this big-eyed waif type whom you would not expect to be the ice-cold ruthless manipulator who survives everything), but of course over the course of the series she gets over-powered.
Mainly by the cast being idiots - though Avon has always been not as smart as he thinks he is - Tarrant, though, definitely was not thinking with his brain when he was stranded with her.
I love that the SFX are done on the cheap, because this is the Beeb, and the title sequence is done in cross-stitch(!) and one of the space ships is a hair dryer cut in half and glued back together.
The ending is fantastic. It's really, really a shock when you see it the first time because you're hoping that there will be the heroic ending of the plucky, scrappy underdogs winning over the villainous tyrannical regime (like every American movie and show does). It's as if Star Wars ended with the Emperor having killed off the entire Resistance, and he got Luke to do it.
I think the "killing off everyone" was maybe (I don't know this for sure) to knock on the head any calls for a renewal of the show (the BBC has tended to look down on SF shows that get popular, see Doctor Who, as being Not Serious Broadcasting or Worthy Artistic Productions), plus it's very much in the downbeat, cynical British tradition (the plucky, scrappy rebels have been reduced by attrition and by previous successful Federation campaigns to a disorganised, fragmented bunch on the run trying to rebuild and being driven from every base they find, and in the end the organisation of power and resources in the Federation, as well as internal treachery, in-fighting, and loss of direction*, is just too much for them. The Bad Guys win because this is how the world works, and this was before George R.R. Martin tried the same thing in A Song of Ice and Fire to turn all the traditional tropes on their head).
*We see this when Blake disappears. Avon is "to hell with principles, I wanna be rich" but even there, their attempts to be space pirates go hilariously wrong (the fourth season episode Gold is wonderful with double-cross over double-cross).
Okay, your first example makes better sense, tethering it to something that is a physical store of value and then all the fancy tech comes in with ledgers and so forth.
The monkey pictures stuff never made sense to me.
And I see that FTX sank money into the monkey pictures, then unsuccessfully sued were named as colluding to artificially inflate the price in a lawsuit when the value went down after the hype faded:
“FTX has several deep ties to Yuga such that it would be mutually beneficial for both Yuga and FTX (as well as Sotheby’s) if the BAYC NFT collection were to rise in price and trading volume activity. Upon information and belief, given the extensive financial interests shared by Yuga, Sotheby’s and FTX, each knew that FTX was the real buyer of the lot of BAYC NFTs at the Sotheby’s auction at the time that Sotheby’s representatives were publicly representing that a ‘traditional’ buyer had made the purchase,” the lawsuit said. FTX is not named as a defendant.
I have to ask once again, how the fudge did this guy fool all the smart EAs and Bay Area rationalists into being his cheerleaders? I think this is one of those cases where a dumb idiot like me would have said "this is too good to be true, also buying monkey pictures is stupid" but the smart people got fooled with "shh, it's all Bayesian calculation and the blockchain and crypto! Crypto is the future!" besides him throwing money at liberal causes (the Carrick Flynn election attempt will live in my heart for aye).
The Sequoia Capital interview will never fail to be a thing of beauty and a joy forever:
The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior.
HereAndGone2
1d ago
you can just print a giga yachts for anyone with the raw materials
That is where the sticking point is. How do I get the raw materials? Joe the guy with no job (AGI and robots automated it away) and no stocks (because he didn't get in to buying stock in the AI firms/never had the upbringing where you buy stocks) and no backup fortune is dependent on UBI (if all goes well) to live. Where does Joe, out of his UBI, get the gold, steel, energy and so forth to print a gigayacht?
When I read the handwaving about post-scarcity and AGI can just pull all this out of thin air, it does sound more akin to the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes than reality as we currently have it set up. Maybe AGI will change the world so that the guy living on a rubbish tip in a Third World slum can now access the same private beaches, luxury mansions, and gigayachts as Jeff Bezos - or maybe not.
You can accuse AI industry people of many things, but not having thought about this kind of thing really isn't one of them.
I do think there's an unconscious bias there where the thinking is predicated on "people like us, guys I know who work with me, my social bubble" and not "the guy who drives the bin lorry" because they don't understand what it's like to live in that socio-economic class.
HereAndGone2
1d ago
Am I understanding this correctly, is the NFT not really "you can sit in this particular seat" because there's one seat but a zillion tokens? or is there some item that backs up the NFT so that you could cash it in or translate it into physical assets?
HereAndGone2
1d ago
That's the bit I don't understand. You buy a Rolex, you have a Rolex. Yes, it's ridiculous that we are paying for the branding, but the whole aura of luxury goods is involved with the reputation for quality built up (and we saw the reverse with Burberry, where their reputation as stuffy upper class brand nose-dived once they started selling to chavs, though it seems their sales soared, so that's one example of where taking a brand downmarket paid off).
Buying a certificate that says "You own a picture of a Rolex" is what does not make sense to me.
HereAndGone2
2d ago
I think where the faith part comes in is "and that won't change the economy so radically that money won't work the same way".
If I'm producing houses (for example) that only cost $500 to build, I'm hoping to sell or rent them at market prices, which means I make a profit of X000%. But that relies on "then I sell that house to Joe and Mary who work jobs that mean they can get the mortgage for $200,000 to buy that house". If Joe and Mary aren't working any more because the same AI has taken their jobs, then there may still be a market for housing, but the price has to come down to $500 or $600, that is, be within the range of income they now have.
I think people are still stuck on the idea of "costs down, but sales prices stay the same" because they haven't really incorporated it into their world view that consumer demand may remain the same, but ability of consumers to pay those prices will drastically decline because much fewer people are in the jobs generating high enough income levels because AGI has replaced those jobs.
So if UBI is the way forward, then the owners of the AGI industries are going to pay for that via taxation, which means they are going to (1) have to sell their $500 house for as close to $500 as they can get, not the current house prices and (2) they're just transferring the money from one hand to the other, since the money to buy the house comes from the UBI they are being taxed to pay.
I honestly don't think we're managing to imagine the world of employment altered so drastically by the 'AGI means pennies on the dollar labour costs' dream, and the subsequent effect this will have on the economy. Nobody is selling superyachts to the dwellers of favelas, and you can't (currently) run an economy on superyacht sales to billionaires alone.
And seemingly now we're talking megayachts versus superyachts. Up to gigayachts? But even there, the superyacht global market is estimated to reach $45 billion by 2032, while current USA economy is valued at $30 trillion. So how are we going to replace all that consumption when fewer people have real disposable income from work anymore?
HereAndGone2
2d ago
I know this is an aside, but can anyone explain NFTs to me in a way that makes sense? I look at things like the linked article and I still can't figure out why anyone thought they were a good idea or even a workable idea. There must be some steelmanned case for "this is what they can be used for", I just haven't stumbled across it. 'Here's a thing that's totally digital. You can own a piece of it, except you won't own it. It's more like you have a licence for it. Yeah, just like paying Microsoft that subscription fee every month. But you can still make money off it by...' and that's the step where I break down.
If I squint, I can see that "I pay for the right to pixel number three thousand of this digital image" is kinda like owning a limited edition engraving or print. Fine. But it's still not the original. Maybe I can sell my print and get the price or even a bit more for it, but it's not the original drawing that is still in the artist's possession and that holds all the value. If the token is non-fungible, then my pixel three thousand can't be replaced by a swapped-in pixel.
Except it can? Or am I completely stupid? I can sell my token for money because nobody else can own a token like it. It's like selling a house.
But I can own a house to sell. I can't own the original digital piece of art that I'm selling my token from. Or can I?
This is what I'm struggling to understand.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Honey bun, I grew up with no running water and my mother washing clothes for a family of six by hand. Don't tell me I have no idea about the difficulties of past labour, it wasn't in the past so far as I and the neighbours around me were concerned.
There's still a lot of work to be done in households now; we expect washing to be done regularly, not just on one specific day. The house should be cleaned every day, not just once a week or longer intervals where you would take up carpets. All the modern conveniences did take the physical labour out of things, but there is still work to be done. And as Parkinson's Law states, "work expands to fill the time available". Just as mechanisation in the office did not mean "gosh, now I can get all the letters typed in the morning that used to take all day to write by hand, I can go home at twelve o'clock now with my work day over!" but rather "now there is even more work to be done because now instant replies to letters is the new expectation", so with housework.
Fewer hours, but not fewer expectations. Someone pointed out that women now spend more time with their children than 1950s full time housewives, and that's just one of the 'expansion of expectations' - now you have to manage all the extracurriculars your child/children should be doing, for one thing.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
There are women who are constantly ending up with the guys who beat them or are otherwise abusive, and there are reasons why they always end up with that kind of guy.
If you're always ending up with women who are crazy bitches, there are reasons for that, too, and it's not "because all women are crazy bitches, duh".
One of the problems with cycles of abuse is that victims get conditioned to look for abusers (because that's how they understand to function), and abusers identify potential victims.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
There's common social courtesy where everyone adheres to the same script, and there's "this is unreal but you have to pretend to believe it".
Coming in to work first thing in the morning and saying "hello, good morning" to my colleagues is not asking me to pretend up is down or fire is wet.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
As a friendless virgin I have no experience with such situations, but that's what I imagine.
Well, unless you hatched out of an egg or were found under a gooseberry bush, you presumably grew up in a family. Did you all just grunt at one another?
HereAndGone2
4d ago
A much more neutral greeting with no misleading implications is "hello".
Gandalf has entered the chat 🤣
“Good Morning!” said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat.
“What do you mean?” he said. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”
“All of them at once,” said Bilbo. “And a very fine morning for a pipe of tobacco out of doors, into the bargain. If you have a pipe about you, sit down and have a fill of mine! There’s no hurry, we have all the day before us!” Then Bilbo sat down on a seat by his door, crossed his legs, and blew out a beautiful grey ring of smoke that sailed up into the air without breaking and floated away over The Hill.
“Very pretty!” said Gandalf. “But I have no time to blow smoke-rings this morning. I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it’s very difficult to find anyone.”
“I should think so—in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can’t think what anybody sees in them,” said our Mr. Baggins, and stuck one thumb behind his braces, and blew out another even bigger smoke-ring. Then he took out his morning letters, and began to read, pretending to take no more notice of the old man. He had decided that he was not quite his sort, and wanted him to go away. But the old man did not move. He stood leaning on his stick and gazing at the hobbit without saying anything, till Bilbo got quite uncomfortable and even a little cross.
“Good morning!” he said at last. “We don’t want any adventures here, thank you! You might try over The Hill or across The Water.” By this he meant that the conversation was at an end.
“What a lot of things you do use Good morning for!” said Gandalf. “Now you mean that you want to get rid of me, and that it won’t be good till I move off.”
“Not at all, not at all, my dear sir! Let me see, I don’t think I know your name?”
“Yes, yes, my dear sir—and I do know your name, Mr. Bilbo Baggins. And you do know my name, though you don’t remember that I belong to it. I am Gandalf, and Gandalf means me! To think that I should have lived to be good-morninged by Belladonna Took’s son, as if I was selling buttons at the door!”
Looking it up, "good morning" as a polite greeting began in the early 15th century:
good morning
greeting salutation, c. 1400, from good (adj.) + morning. Earlier as good morwe (late 14c., from morrow), good morn. Compare good-night.To whom þou metys come by þe weye,
Curtasly 'gode morne' þou sey.
["The Little Children's Book," c. 1500]
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Such small civilities are the lubricant by which society functions. "Fuck you, I don't give a damn" leads not only to atomised individuals but societal breakdown.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Flip me sideways, I never thought I'd be quoting a Tumblr post of all things, but here we go.
So, to cut it short: person posting talked about how they asked their husband "what are you doing?" and he got all defensive and upset. Couldn't understand why, so she asked him "what did you hear me saying?" and he replied "I thought you were angry with me, why wasn't I doing something, why was I being lazy?" She only meant literally "what are you doing?" as signal of being interested in him.
Conclusion of post was that asking about "what did you hear me saying" for both of them saved a lot of arguments, trouble, and misunderstanding.
I think this applies to our friend here; if what they are hearing from "how was your day?" is the start of an attack, then it's either Mommy Issues from childhood or maybe they need to work out why they are dating/involved with crazy bitches all the time.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
there aren't any large corporate chain daycare (and many other large-scale child service providers), possibly because liability risk bounds the benefits of corporate mergers and acquisitions.
You could do it, but it would be expensive. And also probably taxed, because it would be considered benefit-in-kind. Would people be willing to work for Company A if it paid less because "and we include subsidised/free child care" than Company B which pays more (but you have to source and pay for your own child care)?
Also, just thinking about most office buildings and where they're located, it probably would be tough to convert part of the building into childcare facility (e.g. you need some kind of outdoor space/playground area for the kids to run around. Believe me, you got a room full of hyped-up four year olds, you want them to run around and burn off that energy). I do imagine your insurance premiums would go up by a hefty amount. Here's an example from Irish insurance provider for child care centres:
Public Liability (€13,000,000)
Employers Liability (€13,000,000)
Personal Accident cover for children and employees
Professional Liability (€6,500,000)
Directors and Officers Liability (€2,500,000)
Business Interruption (standard package includes cover of €150,000, increased to €200,000 for ECI members. This cover can be increased further upon request)
Contents cover (standard package includes cover of €20,000, increased to €25,000 for ECI and Direct Créche scheme. This cover can be increased further upon request)
Option to include buildings cover
Fidelity Guarantee – this covers loss of money or property belonging to your business as a result of fraud, theft or dishonesty committed by employees (€100,000)
Money cover – this covers loss of money from business premises (€15,000)
Legal Expenses cover – provides access to legal advice and support including a helpline, and legal costs, in the event of a dispute
HereAndGone2
4d ago
I don't see much reason to believe that working is the general cause of people not having babies.
It's the double whammy of having to have a job outside the home, then you come home and the ordinary work still has to be done, plus you have to be available for demands of work. If you need to take time off for bringing kids to the doctor, dentist, stay home with a sick child, etc. then you find yourself falling behind or even let go because "yeah you're not here to do the job you're being paid to do". If you want to get on in your career, you need to be able to devote yourself to the job at least in the early years. If you want a life where eventually you can afford to have kids, you need that career. If you have kids early on, you can't have that career. It's catch-22.
Now, it's not impossible, I'm working in a place where lower middle-class to middle-middle class are working, and managing to have families. But it's not going to be the kind of "this is High Value Human Capital Driving The Economy Line Go Up Better World Through Progress" work and careers that is also complained about (not enough Smart Productive People having babies, why not? Because it's very damn difficult to eat the cake and still have it, is why).
HereAndGone2
4d ago
sitting around at home doing nothing productive
So... cooking, cleaning, shopping, taking care of husband and children, being involved in elder care, maintaining the house - that's all "sitting around doing nothing"?
Gosh, I had no idea my house miraculously looked after itself so all that scrubbing I did this morning was completely unneeded and was, in fact, sitting around doing nothing productive! Whereas if I worked for a contract cleaning firm doing the exact same job of cleaning but in an office building, not my home, that would be Real Productive Work!
HereAndGone2
4d ago
That's it. Mother having a part-time job or no job while the kids are small, because Father can earn enough to provide a reasonable life, was the default. But the push for economic growth meant "get more women into the workplace" and now economic factors mean "if you want to pay the bills, both of you have to be working".
I don't know the solution to that. I don't think there's an easy solution.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Right now we do have a shortage of workers in that sector. When the boom collapsed with the demise of the Celtic Tiger, a lot of the Eastern European workers went home, and the native Irish workers had no jobs so went abroad to look for work. So there's a shortage of skilled workers to take up any slack to expand the industry, hence the "we need a bigger pool to draw apprentices from" messaging.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
There's also the background philosophy/religious element, which is where you can see the influence on Buddhism, about "you are deceived by appearances, you think that these are family members who have links with you, but this body is not really you, it's like a suit of clothes you put on and take off. In your last life, who were all these people to you? In your next life, who are all these people to you? Only the body dies, the soul lives on, so you are not killing anyone and they are not killing you, the real you. The only lasting real thing is the Dharma".
HereAndGone2
4d ago
I just thought it was funny to see the picture of him sitting with other Indian members and they both look like 'yeah, native blood there' and he's clearly "ah shure me great-grand da was from Fermanagh". He probably does have the 1/32nd background from his probable heritage, but good gosh, it's taking full advantage of the system.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
You need two good jobs if you want a house, two cars, eight TVs and a steady stream of parcels delivered to your door and a lifestyle in which most of the domestic labor is done by servants or robots.
I wish, but it's not. Just to get the ordinary "get married, buy a house, have kids" life (and not two cars etc.) you need both partners in the couple working fulltime or forget it.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Yeah, it's Scott's Moloch all the way down. Nobody planned to set it up this way, but it has now come to the point that we're wrecking ourselves but can't stop because if we do the entire house of cards falls down and then it's dystopia time.
Okay, that adds another layer to it. If she's managed to score a Japanese guy, she was probably willing to put up with more crap from him because of the Japanese attitude to foreigners. Though apparently Japanese have a good impression of Indonesians (if I believe online search results) while seemingly there's a more negative attitude to Koreans.
So it depends exactly where she was from and if the guy was Japanese or not. I mean, I still think she's an idiot, but there's more going on there than simply "yeah of course I'm gonna sleep with him, he's hot".
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