Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
"Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts."
User ID: 83
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
I'm not sure why this would be the null hypothesis.
Not the. Just mine.
Fair points on your part. I won't argue against your historical analysis. That said, I still don't think situational barely-subsistence welfare at the discretion of local elites in pre-modern societies corresponds very exactly to universal high-standard-of-living welfare administered by nationally uniform buerocracies in terms of long-term demographic dysgenics.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
Sorry, but actually having nice things is not on the table during culture war.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
the best way to use it is to not use it at all
Yes.
A tangent.
I keep gravitating back towards my own null hypothesis - public welfare is a bad idea through and through, and no matter how many epicycles its proponents attach in attempts to sanewash it, it will never be a better system than not having public welfare. I know this means that I effectively espouse the need to pay out the ass for private insurance, and that there will be a very large parts of the population near the bottom end of the socioeconomic spectrum that will look very disagreeable even to my middle class sensibilities. A low-wage class, a serf class, a dehumanized mass of barely viable specimens, or outright unviable ones kept alive by their barely viable associates, or unviable ones in the process of honest-to-god starving on the streets. But what will the world look like with another few centuries of public welfare and, I assume, no eugenics? The same low-viable population, only grown unchecked by economic pressure thanks to welfare always bailing them out at significant cost to the productive elements of society.
I keep being told that this is baseless, that the unproductive poor will be elevated by education, or that they will naturally stop breeding, or that each subsequent generation is a blank slate and those non-viable traits will not persist over long timeframes. Or, of course, that AI will fix everything for everyone anyways. Or that there's no point in worrying because the planet is doomed and we may at least die in solidarity and upholding basic standards of living and human dignity for everyone on the way.
But I don't see it. I just don't. What I see is ever-growing burdens placed on those who create value, to the benefit of an ever-growing proportion of those who do not. I'd call it injustice if that made sense to anyone nowadays, when "justice" means that those who don't work are sustained by those who do, forever, no strings attached. Until society as a whole produces nothing but parasites and their sustenance - and then either collapses or finally puts a stop to these dynamics, much later and more grievously than had it been done earlier.
"Do you want to see people dying in the streets?", one might ask me. No I don't. Of course not. But it strikes me as quite possibly the lesser evil, in the long run.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
Random thoughts: This is a return to normal. The 20th century saw an excessive standardization of all work as office or factory work, i.e., external workplace work where employed and salaried workers work under direct supervision. Employers now realize that this needn't be universally enforced. You can in fact just hire people to do their job, let them handle the details, and judge them based on their effective output. It may take some bossware to make it function for jobs that rely more on putting-in-hours than on getting-things-done, but that's a fairly minor hurdle.
What was once the craftsman's workshop adjacent to his living quarters, the farmer living on his farm, the daytaler sleeping right next to tomorrow's task, is now the employee working from home. It's a revival of an older and universal theme that was briefly obscured by some of the excessive outgrowths of the industrial revolution.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
What happened to the option of text on a plain background as album art? Is fancy imagery that essential for marketing?
I mostly use it for three purposes:
- Voice chat with friends.
- Ask questions about software that I can't find the answers to on Stack Overflow.
- Receive updates on niche computer games.
And even for those two latter purposes, Discord is more annoying than useful most of the time. It's like 4chan on crack, with the lack of anonymity doing far more to encourage attention-whoring than to discourage shitposting. It is, as you said, loud, chaotic, nonsensical, a maelstrom of inanity, people screaming over each other, incomprehensible memes, an unceasing discharge of shitpost. It's a chatroom from hell, for zoomers. Everyone's an autistic transsexual furry and has a caricature instead of a personality. It's incoherent, anathema to attention span, outright hostile to any attempts at having a conversation. Anything that doesn't fit on-screen with the latest messages in a given channel may as well never have been written.
I hate it, but still use it because for many purposes, it's the only way to obtain specific pieces of information.
Its most-appreciated feature as far as I'm concerned is the option to mute channels.
I mean, how do you use it in a way that's actually practical, fun, and not overwhelming?
Practical and not overwhelming: Do like I do; minimize your interactions with it, try to block out the most annoying parts while getting the information you want. Give up on it in cases where this does not work; it's never worth the effort of diving deeper.
Fun: Become one with the mob. Embrace the brain damage. I can't imagine there's a sane way.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
I'm curious, Mottizens: what speed would you drive at in perfect conditions (straight, flat, sunny, minimal traffic), in a 70 mph interstate?
I don't know what an interstate is, and 70 mph only makes sense to me after conversion to 112 km/h. So let's just call it 120 km/h, which is a common Autobahn speed limit.
If this is the legal speed limit, then let's be real, I'm a civilized contrarian who obviously spends every second at the wheel trying to bend the rules without needing to pay a fine, so I drive 130 km/h (around 80 mph).
If it's only a suggestion and there's no fine for speeding, only an elevated risk of fiery death, then I'll go faster under ideal conditions. I'm comfortable driving around 150 km/h (93 mph), but might briefly go faster only to see what my (very boring) car is capable of.
For reference, the fastest I've ever driven was around 200 km/h (124 mph) downhill, once.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
Been getting a little time in, actually. Not much to show for it; I'm mostly just experimenting with procedurally instantiating objects in Unreal and marvelling at how they don't behave how I expect and at how difficult it is to do anything with the Unreal editor.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
This is just a sneer, isn't it?
Can you put some meat on it?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
Can you name any specific and forseeable advantages that space manufacturing may have? And if so, would they be significant enough to offset the disadvantage of needing to ship things from and to space?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
Sad. I hoped to see those two getting some things done (almost doesn't matter what, as long as "you can actually do things" gets signal-boosted). This kind of outcome isn't unexpected, but it certainly is disappointing.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
Carrying the kid on my shoulders over several kilometers while both my knees have already given out, for one.
Being thoroughly struck by hayfever, my head one mess of snot and aches, dead tired from the antihistamines, and still spending the whole day outdoors because I can't stand to see said little monkey cooped up indoors.
Hearing "I'm bored" from the backseat for the millionth time.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
I keep getting accidentally kicked in the balls by my child. It hurts, alright, but it's nowhere near the most painful thing I endure for the kid's sake.
Frankly, I keep getting kicked, smacked and elbowed in absolutely all my bodily parts. I think that's normal. Right? It's normal for every day to be an MMA cage fight against a little monkey.
I think a lot of political-extremists-by-night-milquetoast-law-abiding-citizen-by-day people, i.e. most people who comment on politics online, do actually sincerely believe that open war should be waged against their political extremist enemies, but at the same time it should obviously not be waged at the expense of the milquetoast law abiding citizen life they enjoy. It's easy to say that yeah, you support breaking out the long knives, but at lot less easy to go the extra mile to actually accept that you might lose everything you value and enjoy in the process.
So in my view it's not - not consciously - all just empty rhetorics and jokes to be in on.
Rather, the calls for violence come with the unspoken assumption that you and the people on your side can crush the despicable enemy without much resistance, because that's how people talk themelves up. Obviously my side will win, we're on the right side of history, our values are better, our enemies are idiots. But when someone nominally aligned with you goes through with acts of political violence, you suddenly realize that you aren't the well-regimented, organized and coordinated forces of good about to exterminate your weak and irredeemable enemy - you personally are sitting in comfort and luxury at home while your cause's champion is a deranged mass murderer who just killed a bunch of random people, picked a fight with the very establishment that guarantees your comfort and luxury, and got absolutely crushed by it. Your actual political enemies didn't even get to factor into it.
And there you are, left holding the bag full of needing to square that okay, that guy's intentions technically aligned with what you demanded, but obviously he's not supposed to
- be a lunatic who attacks random people instead of the enemy's champions
- be ineffective
- endanger your comfort and luxury (firstly by putting you in the establishment's sights for wrongthink, secondly by highlighting how suicidal your violence would be were you to commit it), which you aren't willing to risk no matter how infinitely evil your enemies are
Everyone who isn't Uncle-Tedding it by going off the grid entirely is a first-world citizen first, and a political extremist second.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
Fair. I know there are plenty of angles from which Blood Meridian is just edgy cringe.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
Fair points. I live in the countryside, so urban concerns are somewhat invisible to me.
Absolutely this. Firstly the choice to want an EV in the first place is purely virtue signalling - nobody I know ever justified it with anything other than highfalutin saving-the-planet rethoric - and secondly the choice to not pick a Tesla might have been justified by practicality, but let's be frank: it isn't. What it is is "Musk man bad". EVs are like anything related to the whole "carbon is killing the planet" narrative and its associated Ablaßhandel (Indulgence/Pardon Industry) - 100% virtue signalling.
It's so very obvious that as far as I'm concerned, any claim to the contrary will need thorough justification. I'd have to contort myself into a pretzel of charity to pretend otherwise.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
@Southkraut gave me a bit of pushback for writing on screens in my daughter's presence, which I felt a bit bad about, but also not. I do agree with Zvi and Scott that it's probably bad if Everything is Childcare, and parents aren't allowed to read an article and post about it because the children might be infected by the proximity to a screen. (The children are painting. They have used their agency to decide that they want to paint, asked for the paints and supplies they need, and the older one has made a little notebook full of concept sketches)
If it works for you, it works. I won't argue.
It's just in my immediate experience that parents trying to get screen-time in while parenting set themselves up for misery. First by conditioning themselves to seek and expect superstimuli when they should be performing their daily duties (I strongly believe that you should be able to get through a day - at least as long as the child is awake - without needing to feed your addictions), secondly by being an example to their children that will teach them to habitually stare at screens, and thirdly by getting their priorities in a jumble: Do you actually need to read that article in the middle of the day? Can it really not wait until the little ones are asleep? Or are you just going easy on yourself? Be honest with yourself on that one.
But still. If it works it works.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
It might be, but I feel like this theme of naked violence superseding all other concerns is rather universal. It pops up pretty much regardless of time and place. It's in the Iliad and it's in Roman history and it's in Mein Kampf and it's in The Wild Bunch. There may be situations in which it seems out of place, but none in which it truly is out of place. Like the good book says:
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
Well crap. It was meant as a reply to https://www.themotte.org/post/2013/smallscale-question-sunday-for-june-1/331790?context=8#context, but I fumbled. I have corrected my error, in so far as any error can ever be corrected.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.
Edit: A mis-post.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
Fair point and good suggestion.
It's all temporary anyways, isn't it? A few more years and the whole internet will just be bots talking to each other.
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.
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