Obsidian
3mo ago
I need the same speech but spoken by a hotter guy so I can send it to my girlfriend.
(On second thought I'm going to speak these words to her myself instead of outsourcing my masculinity)
Obsidian
3mo ago
Obsidian
4mo ago
gotta tax the rich to give more to the poor so the poor don't revolt
Powerful hyperstition. If there were ever a step decrease in welfare, would that be taken as the signal to break shit?
Obsidian
7mo ago
Social policing only works to the extent the polity is culturally homogeneous. CS is fucked.
Obsidian
4mo ago
About to go on a one-month "digital declutter" in the style of Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism. 6/10 book, worth reading if you're suffering from screen addiction. Dovetails well with Matthew Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head.
Obsidian
4mo ago
Quebec would fit in nicely as yet another ethnic/language minority in the US
Historically the rent and lifestyle would have been good enough that we'd have been immediately flooded with Americans, destroying the local culture.
As it is, Rest-of-Canadians have been doing this all by themselves.
Obsidian
4mo ago
The effect is so strong that at some point pictures of single young white urban men in advertising have become gay-coded. Usually if I see such an ad on my commute it's trying to sell me PrEP.
Obsidian
3mo ago
It also makes such posts cattier, which is a disincentive in and of itself.
Obsidian
3mo ago
I’d say what distinguished the forum originally was more a commitment to free speech than to civility, though it had both of course.
In my mod days we experimented with keeping to a particular Overton window, above and beyond what was required to continue existing on reddit, in order to keep posters broadly comfortable. Drawing the line was frustrating and arbitrary and I hated doing it. Stuff like, don't insist on conspicuously misgendering trans posters, and don't lay 100% of the blame for any given issue on Mexicans/Jews/whatever. In any given specific situation we could have reasonably ruled in either direction, but if we'd radically committed to either free speech or civility the moderation would have become exploitable and the forum would have blown up.
Obsidian
4mo ago
As an independentist, what you're saying is true but irrelevant. People are fully economically illiterate, there is nothing close to a popular consciousness that we'd hurt from missing those transfers. We expect short-term economic injury from the turmoil, but that's pretty much it.
Obsidian
7mo ago
I can't parse half of the stuff in this comment but I'd love to hear you go on at length about it. Have you thought of going on The Bailey?
Obsidian
4mo ago
The devs quit way too early on that one. The learning curve is all over the place, and the horror effect lasts maybe one hour. Shame, it's such a cool game.
Obsidian
4mo ago
I, a frog, would wish to team up with you on a peaceable separation campaign.
Federalists on either side are wretched people.
Obsidian
5mo ago
Started the Bible (TOB translation). Integral Notes version.
It's a very busy text. I slightly regret not going with the Essential Notes version.
I tried starting Thomas Cook's 1728 translation of Hesiod's Theogony, picked at random. I'm having the opposite problem here; I'm failing to contextualize anything.
Funny, I very much experienced the "spiritual" aspects as cheap filler. They definitely set an intriguing mood, but they didn't populate it with a message.
It's vanishingly rare that we see spirituality or mysticism well done in sci-fi. The Starcraft II single-player campaign was another otherwise-decent story that was held back by poorly engaging with this. I just don't think most sci-fi writers have a connection with the divine. And godly men don't write sci-fi, mostly they write about the world they belong to.
I've been thinking that BSG with the "spiritual" bits expunged would be a much greater show. Though I'm sure something else would jump out as begging to be cut.
Obsidian
11mo ago
I've been circling this idea of a "government bank account", for allocating resources to government services in an equitable way.
The idea goes, just because services are government-administered doesn't mean they aren't subject to scarcity. And the disconnect between user and payer means that people use services with no regard to cost, and providers operate with no regard to quality. If only we could subject this to market dynamics!
The libertarian runs with this and says that all services should be paid for in cash (and removed from the aegis of the government, for good measure). But then people are shut out of public life, compounding inequality and misery over generational time scales.
If we're not going to entirely jettison the idea of a welfare state (which I would rather not; alle Menschen werden Brüdern and what not), then I would suggest a second currency, one which accrues regardless of work or merit, and which legally cannot be traded away.
This puts to the people some interesting questions. Would you rather go to work via the toll road, or heat your home hotter? Would you rather cash a welfare check, or receive end-of-life care?^1
The parallels to the Chinese social credit system are elucidating: whereas they've turned their whole society into a prolonged exam (they love taking exams), I'm proposing an exercise in private property x inalienable rights.
This also opens up more palatable avenues wrt congestion pricing, private/public competition, etc. Probably does interesting things to the meta of democracy but I haven't thought that part through.
^1 Yes, we Québécois receive electricity and healthcare as government services. To be frank, I don't know why you'd do it any other way.
Obsidian
4mo ago
@FCfromSSC origin story is iconic. I relate to the terror and depression of cancellation, but I could never put it down like you did. I'd say "go on The Bailey" but that'd be missing the point.
Obsidian
4mo ago
I don't think technocracy is once-in-a-generation hard, I just think our democracies are optimizing for something entirely incompatible
Obsidian
3mo ago
The main theme is about how slavery obliterates everything it comes into contact with, and specifically, the identity of the enslaved.
C. V. Gheorghiu's The 25th Hour, a whirlwind tour of European labor camps and concentration camps during World War II, also does a lot with this theme. It's fairly didactic though. His other book La Seconde Chance is a work of genius, and much better written; unfortunately it has not been translated to English.
Back when I entertained the idea of staying in the US for good, I bootstrapped myself to a passable credit score using a Chase secured credit card. Took a few months but everything else fell out of there.
Generational disadvantages in credit scores are downstream from generational disadvantages in executive function and time preference.
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