aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
1yr ago
The reality behind "santurary cities" I think is bringing more heat than light. The policy is surprisingly reasonable in the actual specifics. The policy is point is to et local prolice actually be able to interact with illegal immigrants to solve and prevent crime. If they have to work with ice they will be avoided at all costs by the likes of victims and community members. If you don't want sychopath serial criminals hiding out with a population that cannot reasonable expel them then you need something like this. There are plenty of ways that the ability to prevent illegal immigration are hampered by the denizens of MV, but this is not the important one.
aqouta
1yr ago
If it weren't for scalpers reselling tickets, assuming prices were kept artificially low, I would pretty much never get to go to a concert because I can't block time in my schedule far enough ahead of time to buy tickets the millisecond they release. Reselling is a reasonable service that makes people like me who buy at the last minute pay a premium that we're willing to pay, if the original sellers are giving them an unreasonable amount of market that's the original seller's fault.
aqouta
9mo ago
as long as arguments of the opposite side are somewhat weak
Oh blow me.
So it somehow should prove that there's no situations when there is perceived unfairness?
No, it's to demonstrate that misfortune doesn't need a culprit. This is something that Marxists have a lot of trouble on because outside of monopolies, which everyone opposes, their models for why the rich are at fault for the condition of the poor are incredibly weak.
The horribly unjust universe has much more distant effect on the death of your son than the fat general who stole the money on his equipment.
Is this some reference I should be getting? The death of any random poor person is almost always most proximately caused by some other random poor person and not the elites.
Can you try to steelman your opponents position first in your mind and THEN argue against it?
You've given me very little to work with. So far you haven't even formed arguments, just made vague statements and refused to engage in points. As a rule I don't try to form entire positions for people who haven't started formulating their own position especially regarding leftists because from what you've said I don't even know if you're arguing in favor of libertarian or authoritarian formulations of leftism and both of those take radically different tacts and require radically different arguments.
aqouta
1yr ago
This way leads to the mountains of skulls. It must be resisted until it cannot be.
Surely someone can just succinctly present the matter in a few paragraphs.
You and everyone you know and love could possibly die to this thing, it's much more likely than many think and even if it doesn't kill us all it's going to almost certainly profoundly transform nearly every aspect of everyone's lives. NVIDIA thinks the hardware necessary to run AIs is going super Moore's law at 275x per 2 years. They're already better than a lot of low level white color employees. If this thing can go super human there is a real risk the improvement goes recursive which is the generally believed most likely catalyst for a singularity type event. If this isn't enough for you then just jack off in ignorant bliss for the few remaining years before reality asserts itself. If your threat response is so atrophied and your intellectual curiosity is so empty that you can't give a single evening to figuring this out then why should anyone care about evangelizing you?
aqouta
1yr ago
noble bloodline, models of discretion, and the ceremonial heart of a nation.
This is just so much PR noise to me. They were professionally born. They have done literally nothing to earn my respect.
You're giving ugly credence to American stereotypes by equating a woman/family famous for a sex tape with actual royalty.
Sneer if you want, the old gods are dead and worshiping them is as contemptable to me as the new gods. I'm not a fan of Musk worship either but at least he's doing something with his wealth. If the Royals all disappeared tomorrow what actual impact would that have on the world besides the secondary effects of their fans being upset? I don't hate them and don't wish them ill will but I cannot understand why rational people think they matter because some tiny fraction of their genetic ancestry was William the conqueror who took the throne by force combined with nearly random decisions about who counts as royal over the years.
If this is a uniquely American perspective than I don't think highly of the rest of the world.
aqouta
28d ago
We've had a decade of widespread attacks on freedom of speech, including popular public repudiation of the concept's core validity.
And before that your faction was the defectors from my perspective, do not claim this high ground, you've not paid the cost when it was dear. You being the conservatives it's not important to me whether you, @FCfromSSC were one of those principled libertarians. It's enough that you'd oppose us now on the side of those who opposed us then.
If you are willing to accept one side censoring
I am not.
If you want to argue that we should cooperate to secure free speech for everyone, I note that I am part of "everyone", and eagerly await the lifting of the censorship against myself and my allies.
Ground has been reclaimed. We feast wantonly in the valley of twitter. How much of a mistake it would have been to give control to twitter over to the bureaucrats in order to spite the social justice crowd only for them to cement control forever through the deep state.
If you want to help the people censoring me to not be censored in turn, with no actual plan for ending their own censorship, I am going to oppose you, because this is a conflict and you appear to have picked a side.
If it must be so, but should my side lost the ratchet will turn and it will be your own doing.
aqouta
1mo ago
Except, of course, they don't need to convince you it's reasonable, they just have to have convinced EEOC bureaucrats, judges, DEI departments, and so on, and they'll force it on everybody whether you agree or not.
This is all technicality. We still live in a democracy, these people serve at our collective pleasure. All sorts of things have been the law carried out as written, been unjust and overthrown. Step one is to defeat the idea in the public arena, the rest follows.
aqouta
1yr ago
Some artists have. Other artists have demonstrated that people will willingly give them money for things they make even if they don't require it, merely out of admiration of the work and admiration of the artist. Others will pay them up-front because they're a good investment. I observe that most of the artists I admire and care about are in this later set, and a lot of the artists in the former range from terminally boring to actively toxic.
Cool, consume their art and let the rest of us plebeians pay for art.
The arrangement you describe isn't a moral fact of the universe, but rather a social construction
A social construct indeed and even more than that a contract, an agreement between people that you advocate for wantonly violating. Other neat social constructs we have are the ones where you have to pay at the store before leaving with goods, not committing random acts of violence and not cheating on medical board exams.
I would derive great advantage from everyone paying me significant sums of money in exchange for my assessment of their individual moral character. I do not have a right to such payment, do I?
you would have a right to one if I had an agreement with you that I'd pay you for such an assessment. But we don't, and as such you can either give it to me for free or keep it to yourself. Someone in the chain of piracy has violated such an agreement.
If we just ignore all the obscurantism this is a very simple system:
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someone produces something and is willing to let you have a copy of it on the condition that you don't copy it
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You want this copy
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you or somebody else breaks the compact and copies it anyways
I cannot fathom how you have convinced yourself that this is ethical.
aqouta
1yr ago
Some roots are deeper than others, you have to actually pick which ones to address and to do this you have to identify them. Surely the very first thought you had to hearing about suicides on the bridge was not "we should put up nets". You must have considered other remedies. That nets went up was because the governing body did root analysis, found a cheap and easy way to mitigate the problem and implemented it. This is good of course, but it's not analysis paralysis that keeps us from addressing school shootings, it's that no matter how much analysis we do we cannot come to consensus. So what no? What does the advice of not letting root analysis get in the way of acting actually cash out to?
aqouta
1yr ago
Point me where in the sequences it makes the claims that you will become unusually successful for having absorbed them? Or where they claim that they're useful to everyone. In the matrix the red pill cannot be used on just anyone. And finally, who elected these main stream media figures who were criticized as rationalist representatives? I don't even really call myself a rationalist, but these are weak swings.
aqouta
29d ago
This combined with an easy excuse to find the outgroup dishonorable allows you quite a convenient relationship with when you are bound by honor.
aqouta
1yr ago
Look, I'm partial to these libertarian "I'm free to do whatever I want" arguments but you've not actually solved the problem here. How precisely do we solve this commons problem without the concept of intellectual property? Just poofing the idea of intellectual property has tremendous cost you seem completely unwilling to contemplate. And because what? some juvenile trantrum that you are being told that defecting on the intellectual property system is unethical? It's not very impressive. And yes, it will end up in subscription models and DRM because that's the economic reality you seem totally unwilling to actually confront.
There's plenty of ways to extort money from me which sound like they're for the greater good, it's still extortion though.
Offering you an informational good that you can absolutely refuse is not extortion. What an absurd idea.
aqouta
1yr ago
You are perfectly capable of living in the old way, simply only use and consume the free stuff. You want to have your cake and eat it too, an understandable desire but not an ethical one. Artists have gotten together and said they are willing to create larger works of art on the condition that you pay them for it. You are reneging on their condition and worse, you're sneering at them for having the gall to even try.
aqouta
1yr ago
I'm not trying to predict the price of corn in 70 years, I'm using the historical record and some basic understanding of systems to make cause and effect predictions. It's the exact same reasoning you must use in order to even propose a change, otherwise how could you claim it's going to make things better? The golden goose is laying eggs and I think we should have quite a high prior against fucking with it, especially in ways we know to have killed other geese. I think you have no appreciation for the stakes at play and that alone is enough for me to want you to be very far from the levers of power.
aqouta
1yr ago
This is really making crypto sound like the biggest scam ever created, all crypto. Anyone who believes crypto is the future of finance, this is not alone two black eyes for the cause, it's breaking arms and legs as well. Anybody who has fond dreams of decentralised finance, the sheer lack of accountability or accounting around billions is going to break that back too.
I'm so tired of keeping up with the stupid story and people just taking random pot shots at crypto in general. This scam has as much to do with crypto as a concept as 2008 has to do with loans as a concept. Yes, it's a high profile scam, but it's a scam that makes no use of anything crypto related besides the abundance of credulous money. Everything about crypto, besides that it is new and unregulated, makes it harder for this to happen by making wallet balances public.
aqouta
1yr ago
I find this pessimism ridiculous, what are the rich going to do with all that corn? Everything I've seen or heard about them is that they want to be admired and loved by the people, and I at least live in a democracy where it's not totally up to the rich to decide to let us all starve.
aqouta
1yr ago
Honestly, you know that private property itself is a social concept itself right? Adding an extra dimension onto that shouldn't be that unbelievable.
aqouta
1yr ago
The IP laws are infringing on private property rights as they say that i cannot do anything i want with the property i lawfully bought.
And the obvious patch on this is that you buy a diminished perpetual license, that's the world you're pushing for there are no other options. And stop pretending this is some kind of novel limit on private property laws, there are tons of things you're not allowed to do with your private property. You can't swing your totally legal axe at my head for example.
aqouta
1yr ago
Have you added me to that "we" of yours for some reason? I repeat - i don't see the problem you're talking about. Your system has some problems and i need to somehow solve it for you? I've already said that i don't feel any need to incentivize any production with or without any cost upfront, it's not a positive change in my eyes. Incentivizing creating crap isn't good, there's always money in the crowdfunding and private patrons for anyone who sees themselves worthy of it and private property rights aren't up for debate
I'm saying in your world without IP a whole lot of good stuff simply cannot be produced. To repeat this example from a different thread my grandfather was recently saved from colon cancer by a new cancer drug developed by some pharmaceutical company that raised funds on their research on the basis that their IP would be able to recoup the costs. Please explain how my grandfather survives with your preferred world without IP.
extortions for the greater good are unethical, that's all i'm saying.
We must have very different definition of 'extortion' can you please define yours?
Sure, but not because of the piracy but because it simply maximizes profits of people who sell it.
I am certain that spending money on stuff that prevents piracy is not profitable if there is no piracy.
Then feel free to exclusively consume art created by anti-capitalists who distribute their works for free. You'll have much more than in the past. What right do you have to the works of people who have specifically decided not to go with this model? Why do you think you're entitled to free ride off of those of us who support greater works?
aqouta
1yr ago
I find it hard to view a world with less and lower quality art/media but all of it is free as better than a world with higher quality art/media but only most of it is free and what isn't is easily affordable to someone with a very achievable income.
I continue to be baffled by people's interest in this family. Is it anything more than a British flavored Kardashian family? I understand the logic behind letting them keep their nice things after dissolving the monarchy but I can't fathom why I should care about them.
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