Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
"Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts."
User ID: 83
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
27d ago
Nursing homes are containment areas.
Yes aging to death in there is horrible for everyone involved, but it involves fewer people and keeps the horror away from anyone who isn't professionally obliged to deal with it.
You degenerating in your home means neighbors, landlords and everyone nearby need to deal with your increasingly disagreeable behavior and appearance, if you still drive then you may also endanger other people in traffic, and even if not everyone around needs to be on their guard lest you burn the house down.
It's horrible either way, but making you die under controlled conditions is somewhat more pro-social. Except for you of course, but you aren't really part of society anymore by that point.
God, I hope I just die from lightning strike.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
27d ago
blackmail enough American politicians (with child rape)
Are you serious?
Sun Tzu said to be subtle to the point of formlessness. I feel like the current developments in terms of drones are simply taking that old advice seriously. Instead of having a small number of very expensive assets concentrated in one geographic position for ease of communication and handling and to leverage overlapping areas of influence (phalanx, encamped Roman legion, turtle ships, line formation, star fort, grand battery, battleship, tank brigade, transport convoy, carrier group, bomber wing), we're taking another step towards uniquitous, distributed, affordable and flexibly deployed assets (skirmishers in general, zealot sicarii, flying columns, organic artillery, guerilla tactics, a rifle behind each blade of grass, minefields, man-portable anti-tank and anti-air weapons, nuclear triad). The means of destruction are to be omnipresent, always available, always replaceable, and as unpredictable as possible. The entire theater of war is to be flooded with them to the point where you're no longer able to seek out and destroy a discrete enemy at all, or able to hold and lay claim to a specific place, because the enemy is not obliged to present any vulnerabilities in order to attack and all places are equally undesirable to occupy.
Historically the limit on such technologies has been that you need one at least one human to actually be the weapon, wield the weapon, or direct the weapon. The weapon would not be able to go places where humans cannot go (at least not without using vehicles, which makes the weapon a lot larger, more detectable, less flexible and less affordable), cannot be deployed in numbers greater than the number of available and qualified humans, and will never be cheaper than the price of one qualified human + the technology involved, and will be at least as detectable as the human wielding it.
With sufficiently advanced drones, those constraints go out of the window. All of a sudden your weapon can be arbitrarily small, arbitrarily cheap, arbitrarily numerous and arbitrarily dispersed. We're sill at the early stages of what will one day be swarms of millions of miniscule drones mapping out the contested space, being eyes and ears for hundreds of thousands of anti-personnel drones, backed up with tens of thousands of anti-armor drones. They will fly close to the ground if not crawl outright, utilize cover and concealement, infest all your nooks and crannies, be so cheap as to be freely replaceable, operate completely autonomously, and if they find you they'll shoot you with an embarassingly small zip-gun right in the dick.
At least that's the way things are headed right now. As so often, attack precedes defense. Maybe there are low-hanging fruits for countermeasures - some kind of electromagnetic weapon that prevents drones from functioning in a large area but that doesn't affect humans. And then, since we've already tasted the forbidden fruit, you can bet someone will develop organic circuitry. Maybe human soldiers will huddle in fortified bases surrounded by miles of completely denuded flat country, protected by some kind of automated RADAR and LASER system that zaps anything that moves their way. But honestly, it's wishful thinking either way.
More realistically, the countermeasure to infinite omnipresent autonomous drone swarms will be infinite omnipresent autonomous drone swarms of our own. It's practically guaranteed. I'd be willing to take bets on this if I had money to spare. I don't feel like there's any more to explain here because it seems so very obvious. With autonomous drones, we will have uncoupled warfare from the human frame and mind. The current human-controlled drone phase is just a clumsy first step towards honest-to-god man-made horrors beyond all possibility of comprehension. From that point on it will barely matter whether the drones kill us with jury-rigged mortar shells or by dropping polonium in our coffee cups or by buzzing near our ears until we go insane or by shooting a tiny laser from the horizon that neatly severs our neck arteries. It will not matter much wether they're built in a dozen factories, in a million living rooms, or self-replicating right here and now. Either way, us humans will be obsolete as combatants.
But that's future music, of course. For the more immediate future, near-term developments will depend on what the lowest-hanging technological fruits are and who's picking what. Just making drones cheaper, making them smarter, and making them more easily controllable in large numbers (i.e., giving them limited autonomy) will significantly increase the numbers deployable en masse. Short of that, we may see more drones integrated organically into existing human and vehicle formations, like the Americans are already known to be experimenting, where they will probably work much like they already do in Ukraine, mostly for reconaissance and as loitering munitions, only everywhere and used by everyone and employed even more liberally.
This goes hand-in-hand with the development and proliferation of weapons that defeat existing defence systems for large, concentrated and valuable assets that have the unfortunate attribute of being in one place. Famously, hypersonic missiles. These and similar traditional weapons make life very hard for humans and large vehicles, but are largely uneffective or wasteful against drones. Drones drones drones. It's all drones from here on out.
The big cracking point will be drone autonomy. One might think that this is not going to happen, that it'll be unethical and banned by some convention or treaty, but I posit that it's entirely inevitable. Unlike with NBC weapons that are either useful mostly against unprepared civilians (BC) or have incredibly high requirements of the situation before their use becomes at all practical (N), autonomous drones will be universally useful and practical due to their scalability and flexibility, from high-level strategy down to tactical nitty-gritty. No military force will be able to afford not employing autonomous drones. The killbots may not be right around the corner, but they are coming for sure. Anyone refusing to use them will be militarily irrelevant.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
28d ago
Personally, I'm not sure where these parties are or who's going to them. I haven't been to a single party outside of work events after college
When I was younger I hooked up with multiple women at the local club, which is kinda like a party that regularly happens in one place. Or used to be, about twenty to ten years ago. No idea what it's like now.
There are also music parties (usually techno) that are petty much designed for taking drugs, showing off your physical abilities through dance, and then hooking up.
University parties were also a thing, but I was too busy studying.
Actual house parties, I'll admit, I haven't seen since school.
Office parties exist, but hooking up there, as you said, can be tricky.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
28d ago
Why is this all pony literature?
Andy Weir is a good point though. I should get around to reading one of the books; I quite liked The Martian film.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
28d ago
Well, yeah - that's what my first paragraph above was about. This seems like a parsimonious explanation.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
28d ago
I somewhat doubt Unreal will let me do that, but will look into it. Thanks!
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
29d ago
A guess: Sunnism?
Possibly, but if they see a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat, then their actions are borne of a desperate need that obviates any consideration of other consequences. A fight that needs to be fought, no matter the odds or outcome, because the alternative is certain destruction.
Whether that is actually the case and the way Israeli leadership sees things, I don't know. Maybe deescalation would have been possible but was seen as too risky, or undesirable for reasons that elude me, or perhaps it is as many tinfoils claim and war is the best distraction from internal problems.
As far as Iran itself goes, I don't see the regime as particularly unstable. Compared to Israel, both have their internal tensions and and external pressures, and I'd argue Iran actually comes out slightly ahead in a direct comparison of stability. But that's from my very limited understanding. Take it with handfuls of salt.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
29d ago
People seeing sex as an end unto itself to be engaged in at the earliest convenience and with no further implications instead of an act that used to be expected of married couples and nobody else with the expectations of children to be raised by that couple.
The consequences include but are not limited to demographic decline for obvious reasons and loss of social cohesion because of extreme relationship fluidity and the battle of the sexes resulting from unclear gender roles.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
29d ago
That's absolutely fair, but also reinforces my opinion that rationalist fiction is just feel-good fantasy literature for autists.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
29d ago
I'm rather dissatisfied with the entire rational fiction genre, because it all seems to be fantasy that hinges on magic or "magic" systems that just so happen to be navigable by autists with a modicum of rules lawyering or vidya minmaxing skill.
Is there any rationalist fiction that takes place in a completely mundane setting without video game logic or outright ass-pull magic?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
29d ago
Finished my reading sample of Ninti's Gate, and ended up not buying the book. Pierce seems to have attempted a show-don't-tell approach to worldbuilding and characterization, but ended up moving the plot along too fast. The characters' motivations were completely opaque and the action made no sense.
So I'm still re-reading The Worm Ourobouros. I dunno why. Maybe the pretentious language gets me. Maybe I'm just a sucker of chivalric romance. I don't regret it.
Also picked up the Cyropaedia, but taking it slow.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
30d ago
German is very permissive with compount neologisms, but the constituent parts must be valid. "Kritikal" is not. Maybe for nuclear physicists, but I don't really think so. Try "judenkritisch".
But also, please explain yourself. Why German in the first place?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
30d ago
judenkritikal
No such Word in any German dialect I know.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
30d ago
Dug a little deeper into why procedural generation in Unreal didn't work out for me, found out about a bunch of fundamentals that I had managed to ignore, but haven't really gotten around to applying that knowledge yet.
Also once again find myself chafing at C++ and the need to make every structural change twice - in .h and .cpp files. It's just so very inelegant, as far as the workflow goes. Those header files haven't really justified their existence yet, to me.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
In addition to what all the others wrote, and keeping in mind that leftists are an increasingly rare but still essential resource on the motte, why not leave?
You can enjoy living in a bubble where you're right and everyone around you is right, everyone agrees on everything and there needn't be any controversial debates in which, god forbid, there might not be one side that is clearly correct and another side that falls in line after being shown the obvious truth. Instead, if your American bubbles are anything like our German bubbles, you and the well-aligned people around you who already know what is right and what is wrong can heap fire and brimstone on the outgroup with impunity. Not, mind you, that discourse on the motte is always better than that. But it'll feel good. It'll feel good to be right, and among other right-thinking people, and to hate the wrong-thinkers together. You can bond over your shared hatred, and if that ever gets boring, have a little purity spiral and ostracize some of your former own who didn't stand sufficiently far on the right side of history. And when you're done hating, you can go back to educating those around you, teaching them the latest and greatest in sociopolitical innovation.
Leftists do this. Rightists do this. Apolitical people who stumble into political bubbles and just try to fit in do this. Why shouldn't you do it too?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
Paywalled, but I believe you. Guess my 3 minutes of flipping through headlines this morning did not give me a complete picture of the events.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
Anyone who doesn’t think this was clearly telegraphed is kidding themselves.
So clearly telegraphed that Iran failed to notice anything and kept their VIPs in high-rises instead of bunkers?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
Compared to pre-modern people who received any sort of public welfare?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
I dunno, maybe it's me who's in a bubble, but this attitude has been pretty universal as far as I observed. Tthough it's usually implied rather than stated outright; especially since the entire topic is usually avoided.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
you don't get tired doing it
Speak for yourself! I often have trouble keeping myself awake at the wheel.
That said, I'd like to add to your list of advantages: You can drive long past the point where injuries or sickness prevent you from walking notable distances.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
No.
To some extent, when dealing with the topic of whoring, we must embrace the monstrous, one way or another. Here are our options:
- Tell the kids that whores are disrespectable they will ruin their lives if they whore themselves out, be it for money or attention, because they will be considered at least damaged goods if not somewhat subhuman by most people anywhere and ever. Also tell men with low sexual market value to shut up and stop complaining, they're not getting any and that's final. The shaming is ubiquitous and relentless.
- Tell the kids that whores may fulfill an important function, that their work is valuable and necessary to keep low-status men satisfied, but god damn if you become one you'll be disinherited and booted out of the house because whoring is still disrespectable and it's the lesser humanoids who should do it, not real people! The shaming is somewhat more limited, but still strictly in effect.
- Tell the kids that everything is permitted, you can do no wrong, fuck anything that moves, there are no consequences. They subsequently ruin their lives and cannot comprehend how this cruel world does not support them in their brave life choices. You don't shame, but others will do it for you, because not everyone lives in the anti-shame bubble.
- Tell the kids to do their whoring in style and with discretion, pragmatically and as befits mid- to high-status people. Do it by disguising it as serial monogamy, or "dating", or just do it in private and make sure none of it ever becomes public knowledge. Or just do it in the classic form of medium- to long-term monogamy, they wouldn't be the first trophy wives. You don't shame for the behavior itself, but for a lack of adroitness in engaging in it.
- You somehow brainwash / reeducate / social engineer all of humanity so they buy into the sexual liberation meme and fuck without a care. Abolish all categories of infames. Restructure the world so that nobody can ever do shamefully wrong because everything is right. Shame on you if you actually believe this to be viable.
- Abolish the deeply-ingrained, natural and timeless practice of shaming people and instead skip right ahead to capital punishment and damnatio memoriae, for whore as well as client. Nuke the entire institution from orbit. There is no shame when the would-be shamed party ceases to exist.
- Do it like most western societies do it at present, by mostly just looking the other way and pretending not to see anything. There is no shame when...hey, wait, why are you plastering your whoring all over social media!?
I'm sorry. I can't take the topic entirely seriously when it leads with one of the the least deserving examples possible. Aella, an ostensibly intelligent woman who decided to build her entire name and reputation on doing things that humanity at large considers shameful is surprised when large parts of humanity would rather shame her than praise her.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
SSDI abusers are generally past prime reproductive age, so the impact on long-term demographic dysgenics is nearly zero.
True. Which is why I prefaced this entire tangent as such; an excuse to ride my hobby horse of the more general public welfare topic.
Is there an actual justification for this anywhere or is this just "women can do no wrong" crystallizing into law?
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