cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
26d ago
I think that goes too far.
There are some cultural issues where I do believe the government exerts significant cultural force.
It tends to be on issues that question the legitimacy of the state, the tax apparatus, and democracy itself.
But there is plenty of cultural leeway on things they don't care much about. And there are things they sort of care about where they exert some minor pressure.
I think natalist stuff is something they sort of care about. They prefer you having kids that go to government schools and drink the cool aid of system indoctrination. Homeschoolers fought an uphill battle, but have mostly been slowly winning in a bunch of states.
Child tax credits didn't have any major detractors. "Pro choice" doesn't call themselves pro abortion or anti natalist.
I just don't think the model of natalist culture as a government defended cultural view is accurate.
cjet79
26d ago
It seems backwards to me that you think cultural changes are harder to implement than policy changes. Its a form of Democracy propaganda that I see often enough that its worth addressing.
Changing culture is hard and slow, it involves talking to a lot of people, convincing them, having role models to hold up who are paragons of the change you want. If you are pushing against specific incentives or people then they will try to reverse the cultural changes you are making.
How do you get a democratically elected government to change policy? You have to change base cultural desires of the people so that they change their voting habits often and consistently enough. And you need to tailor the policy to make it survive through whatever political process exists in the country.
Cultural change also has the benefit of snowballing effects. If you have some good ideas and good culture it self advertises as it spreads. Democracy requires a minimum 50%+1 starting point. So good ideas and terrible ideas have somewhat equal chances to getting implemented.
cjet79
27d ago
It honestly doesn't seem like internet companies have good moat options anymore. A platform moat exists for all the current platforms. Creating a new platform moat usually means you need to take space from some of the existing platform. Alphabet seems to attempt to make a new platform every time they get a chance. They suck at it and abandon the ones that fail pretty quickly, but it is guaranteed minimum competition. Anything social media related is likely to be bought up by facebook. Anything shopping related is likely to be bought up by amazon (or at least have them move in on your space). Chat and video platforms both had to compete with microsoft. AIs have zero moat, with people happy to switch between them and use whichever is cheapest or best. They almost have an anti-moat, because quite a few AIs degrade in quality as the context window increases. Since the business model is tokens, consumers are better off spreading their token usage as far and wide as possible.
If AI gets better at helping programming projects, then the cost to copy other successful software platforms goes down. Which further decreases the moat software related incumbents.
And don't forget real world things can have moats too! North America has at least two moats that aren't going away anytime soon, the Atlantic and Pacific. There have been lots of court battles over Trump's tariffs, but they might become part of the republican platform in the future. That might only stop foreign competitors, but there is a real difficulty in spinning up brand new manufacturing areas. A much higher difficulty then spinning up a new internet business company.
cjet79
27d ago
I agree that there is no such thing as appeasement for the each the rich types. There are enough marxists that I've met in real life that seem to want CEOs and the wealthy lined up against a wall and shot. Their idea of "compromise" is to simply confiscate all their wealth and imprison them for the rest of their lives in some Siberian equivalent work encampment. These people were joyous to hear about the United Health Care CEO being gunned down in the street. They were also joyous to hear that it had made other CEOs worried for their lives.
The only people like this that I have seen mellow out got married, had kids, and held down a good solid career for a decade. Which obviously has nothing to do with the policies they espoused, but it was never about policies in the first place. Its gripes about their life situation disguised as a policy gripe. And just like you can't reason someone out of position they didn't reason themselves into, you can't appease a life situation gripe with their claimed policy solution.
cjet79
27d ago
The spacex IPO has happened and made Elon Musk a Trillionaire.
There are probably hundreds of potential topics from this story, feel free to go off on your own tangents.
What I am interested in is that this is a company that is building real world things, and not fake internet shit. It feels like a lot of new wealth and investment in America comes from and is directed to the internet. I think one of the main reasons has been that large investors are generally play-it-safe followers. They see which companies are newly striking it rich: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Apple, etc. And they are happy to invest in copy-cats.
I'm hoping the spacex IPO has a similar effect. That investors start chasing new copy cats. But this time copy-cats of spacex rather than copy cats of facebook or google.
Is exposing yourself to a minor not a crime in the location they are holding it?
If it is a crime then they are being very dumb. It would be an easy way for a DA that doesn't like them to basically round up all the nudists and event organizers and get them all labelled as sex offenders and put on the list. And being on the list will fuck up their lives so badly. But hey maybe if they have a sex tent at their event they just like getting bent over and having things rammed up their ass all the time.
I'd personally avoid this event like the plague.
In general I think people are allowed and encouraged to have some number of weirdness points. They can have weird beliefs, pets, sex lives, religion, activities, etc. Normal people are weird in one or a few ways, weird people are weird in many ways. If you want to be weird that's fine. But if you have ideological beliefs you want other people to adopt you must be a normal person. You basically use up your weirdness points on your ideology, and any weirdness beyond that is just doing harm to the cause of selling your ideology.
EA and rat sphere seems filled with people that want to be weird. Which makes the "effective" part seem like a lie. Lots of charity involves convincing normies to give you money, and they basically suck at that. They are claiming all the weird people though, so maybe that is them just serving a market niche that no one else was serving well. They don't seem to have the awareness that this is what they are doing.
I am a huge nerd compared to most people around me, but hearing about these people's antics always makes me feel like a bully jock that wants to humiliate the socially incompetent nerds for shits and giggles. I dislike that feeling, I wish they'd stop being weird people.
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