cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
4hr ago
This is low effort culture warring. Don't do this.
- Avoid low-effort participation.
- Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
If you are going to make this sort of comparison defend it or explain it.
cjet79
6hr ago
Let's recap this whole thread
- MC posts about the fertility crisis.
- Self made writes about technology being a solution to avoid hard political problems.
- I respond more specifically about which technologies I think might help the most.
- You respond to me disagreeing with the usefulness of a particular technology, and suggest that the government should just force people to accept the danger.
- I say I don't think the government will be able to do that.
- You say if I care about democracy I should figure out how to make the government do that.
You have repeatedly and increasingly centralized the discussion around government. Every step was you moving in that direction. I joined this specific thread to talk about technology effects on fertility.
There are like a dozen other posters that will be happy to defend and discuss government effects on fertility. I'm not one of them. I don't care to play "pretend to be an authoritarian in order to save democracy". I like neither system so roleplaying as one to save the other has no appeal to me.
Go have the discussion you are looking for with someone else I am not the one you want.
cjet79
8hr ago
Your objections seem maximally hand wavey 'yeah just massively alter society to fit this new goal, democrats did it back during covid'
cjet79
9hr ago
The human body is not really meant to be cut open. We have figured out ways to do it that minimize harm and damage, but the risk doesn't go away. Roll the dice enough and eventually some bad luck arises and someone dies or gets a life altering injury.
Doctors don't want to kill people, insurance companies and hospitals don't want to get sued, patients don't want to die or be disfigured. It's generally in everyone's interest to minimize the number of major surgeries or at least only do them when the danger of not doing them is greater.
An implantable pelvic floor device sounds exactly like the kind of thing that fails a risk reward test for surgery.
A government that overrides all the other people involved in the situation and says "do it anyway" is not going to be popular for saying that. If it's a democracy, they are likely to be replaced.
cjet79
1d ago
I do think there are some technological solutions, but many of them have nothing to do with pregnancy. From my perspective as a stay at home dad and parent of 3, in a neighborhood full of kids, I think most parents are accurately estimating the number of kids they can have and then having that many kids.
Shout-out to @HereAndGone2's post below pointing out the difficulties involved in potential surgery options. Throwing out surgery options feels easy, but actually going through with it is generally scary.
I'll go through the list of blockers and how I think Tech is impacting them:
- Conception. I've known plenty of couples that have fertility problems. There does however seem to be some kind of "breaking the seal" effect. Where a woman gets pregnant once and then it is much easier to conceive after that. Its stopped very few that I know of. Mostly it slows them down on having an initial kid. Tech - is being used to alleviate this problem already. Don't think you get much delta out of increased tech.
- Pregnancy. It absolutely sucks for some women. Worst case scenario its as bad as going through Chemo. Nausea and vomiting in 1st trimester is likely, lingering effects less likely. 3rd trimester is physical discomfort and limited mobility. For working women this means burning a bunch of PTO or sick leave before the baby even arrives. Typically pregnancies seem to be the same level of struggle across multiple kids for one woman. So if you have one really shitty pregancy experience, its likely gonna happen again for other kids. Tech - limited in this area, dangerous to do medical experiments on women with children. Having babies via pods or external wombs is like far future tech that could help a lot.
- Birth. As they get older it gets more and more dangerous to have kids. Modern medicine does a hell of a job of keeping them alive, but its still scary as hell for everyone remotely involved. My wife lost one of her childhood friends when she was giving birth (some kind of infection that killed the mother and child). I have multiple friends where the mother had to be taken in for emergency C-sections for various complications. Having kids younger is maybe safer in the sense that having major surgery while younger is safer. But having major surgery is still a base level of dangerous and scary. Tech - already heavily deployed in this area. Modern medicine is really a miracle. We are probably close to maxed out on this.
- Transportation. Car seats are a hassle. The number you can fit in a car is way less than the total seats. Lots of cars claim three seats per middle/back row. Only two car seats can fit in a row, even in very large American cars. Car seats as contraception is a known issue. Tech - is decent on this but its mostly a regulatory issue. Car designs are limited by safety concerns. Car seats are required.
- 0-6 months child care. Baby is not very mobile. Is very dependent on caregivers for everything. Feeding, clothing, diapers, etc. Tech - mostly still primitive here. Plenty of parents and adults enjoy this part of raising a baby so there aren't really attempts to automate it away. The main difficulty is that it is a 24hr job. A humanoid robot nanny might be really effective here at minimum just to turn it into a 16 hour job instead of 24. Price of them would have to come way down, and safety would be a massive concern.
- 0.5 - 3 years child care. Kid is mobile, still in diapers for most or all of this time. Will start communicating, but communication is not super useful. Tech - this is where things get interesting. I think the biggest innovation in recent years has been remote work. This is a good age where you can set the kid down in a play area they can have fun with toys and entertain themselves to some extent (or sibilings around the same age can entertain each other). They need periodic supervision and help with meals and diapers. Some work can get done in those periods, maybe half as much as an unencumbered adult. But we aren't well setup to have employees doing 4 hours of money work in an 8 hour time period. Or you burn out the parent and have them do 8hr of money work and 8hr of parenting work in a 16 hour period. The latter is a hurdle and leads to less kids, the former is not generally available. Cheaper gadgets and devices that can entertain the kids helps a little. Cheaper and easier meal prep helps.
- 4-6 years child care. Out of diapers, more independant, but also with growing social needs. pre-school and day care costs a lot of money Tech - mostly still primitive here. Some help from internet stuff that has made coordination and finding childcare for this age easier. AI humanoid robots that could serve as guardians would be helpful. But there is also a significant contingent of adults that like kids in this age range. Mostly women of course, but certainly enough of them that the wages for this job have been driven into the dirt.
- Older kid transportation. Kids start having a bunch of activities all over the place that they need to get to. With more kids they are also in more locations. I spend some activity days driving for 2 hours. Nothing is more than 10 miles away from my house. Traffic is not great, but even if it was gone that might only shave off thirty minutes. Tech - 19th century tech, the solution is just drive everywhere. Self driving cars might help, but usually a parent still need to accompany the kids up into the mid teens. Possibly some version of vr tech might help here (so they don't have to go anywhere and can do activities at home). But so would having larger homes.
- Bureaucracy and existing. Just having your kid exist on paper is a challenge. Adults have this challenge too. Things to sign up for, accounts to manage, healthcare signup stuff, etc. If you love filling out forms this is great, for everyone else it sucks. Tech online signup has made a lot of life way easier, but its also made it easier for everyone to expect more information, more release forms etc etc. LLM AI agents seem like they might be a solution, but I think it will be the same as the internet, they won't lower the burden on the parents, they will just make organizations more comfortable asking for more stuff up until the burden on the parents is similar.
- Everything and everyone else. This list is getting too long, but this is really important. Parents are a subset of everyone. If you make life easier for everyone you also make it easier for parents. Especially when there are time savings. tech - Delivery services are great. Grocery delivery is amazing. Online shopping is super easy. Remote work reducing commutes has been awesome.
I'll just end with the general observation that if you give parents more money but there aren't areas where they can trade money for more time then the money doesn't help them. As a single person you might think of money as the incentive in and of itself. But the calculations change a bit when you are a parent. Money is fully a means to an end. The ends being providing childcare, and enjoying your children. Technology that allows for that tradeoff is good. Technology that cheapens that tradeoff rate is great. Technology that adds a new time burden as part of the rat race or through regulation is terrible.
cjet79
2d ago
Had it do some research for me on the revolutionary war. Finding out how many people were in counties where a battle took place. One AI gave me a 40-50% of the population estimate. Another gave me 50-60%.
Then had it teaching me some physics, specifically what happens when you tweak the speed of light. I learned that the speed of light is tied in with a bunch of other things, so it probably mostly just breaks the universe as we know it. Or maybe doesn't change anything because everything scales up and down with it.
cjet79
3d ago
Video game thread.
I played through Aethus this week. Its a top down survival / mining / exploring / puzzle game. The ambiance of the environments was great. I eventually turned down the difficulty settings for everything cuz it felt a bit like a slog on standard difficulty. The Scottish accents were ok sometimes, but every time I heard "no" pronounced something like "no-er" I winced. The story itself was very anti-corporate. Which I knew going in from the reviews, but it was still a little heavy handed with it all. At this point an anti-corporate screed in a video game just feels as generic as you can get.
Still playing Starship Troopers: Extermination on occassion with the 1stmi (a light military sim group). They are fun to play with. I recently competed what they call a "harbinger run" which involves leading a 16 person group from the field (rather than staying with the squad at base). Its a fun balancing mix of shooting the bugs around you but also needing to maintain situational awareness of the entire battlefield.
Dropped the factorio playthrough. Didn't have enough takers, and I messed something up in map settings that would have required cheating to fix, or flushing approximately 10-15 hours of early game play down the drain to start again. Both options didn't make me feel good so I stopped.
cjet79
5d ago
It's not worth it. Marx's version is a pure motte and bailey argument. It's labor value when you need to prove workers are being exploited. It's subjective value when you are proving the labor theory of value is true
They'll run you in a very long circle where labor value is only real when it has "use value". What is "use value" ... Well it's a subjective and it depends on what people are willing to pay for it
I had an econ professor tell me basically that in college. I didn't believe him, I was libertarian at the time but it seemed to simple and reductive of their views. I went and argued with communists multiple different times on debate a communist back on Reddit. Over a year I did like two or three mega threads that would reach 300-500 comments. About a third of the comments were me arguing by myself against the rest of the subreddit there. Another third arguing back against me, and the last third arguing with and correcting each other. Lots of blood sweat and tears to realize the professor was correct.
cjet79
6d ago
I did see someone point out that workers have cut down on time worked, but it's time worked over their entire life. More school and leisure up front, and earlier retirements relative to death at the end. But the amount of time worked during your mid 20's through late 50's is pretty static.
These are all different. But earnest author and protagonist are something they all seem to share. Hard to know if they fit the "pulpy" category for me.
John Carter of Mars. True pulp fiction in the sense of it was written in the pulp fiction era.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/87695/adamant-blood
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/107917/sky-pride
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/81002/the-years-of-apocalypse-a-time-loop-progression
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/47826/millennial-mage-a-slice-of-life-progression-fantasy
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/72498/sublight-drive-star-wars
Beyond that, I'm looking for earnestness on the part of the author and the protagonist. I recently read Dungeon Crawler Carl after many recommendations, and it just felt a little too meta-ironic and quippy.
I bounced off of Dungeon Crawler Carl as well. There was something tonally messed up about killing 99% of all humans and then making jokes. I guess I've liked other books that do this, like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but Douglas Adams did it better.
Eh, not a great comparison.
Trump is a case of a specific wrong against specific people perpetrated by specific agencies. Its then a general payout from the government to the conservative movement in general.
Black slavery was also all of those levels of specificity. But with enough time removed it is instead all moved to generalities. Its black people in general that were wronged, its white people in general that carried it out, and its supposed to be paid for by all americans in general.
The areas where I say "general" are the problem.
For IRS targeting: I would have liked to see specific people in the IRS or the Obama administration sent to jail for the IRS tax targeting. I'd like to see unconstitutional orders treated the same way the military treats illegal orders. "I was ordered to break the constitution so its not my fault" should be an admission of guilt not a defense against prosecution. Bribing off the republicans seems like something that politicians on both sides are happy to take as a "compromise" rather than handing out punitive sentences and discouraging similar things in the future.
For slavery I'll give you a very specific example. I'll remove as many generalities as I can.
My ancestors owned slaves. We are close to a 100% certain that we know some of the descendants of those slaves (slaves tended to take on the last names of their former masters when they were freed). Lets say we can identify approximately 100 descendants of both the slave owner, and 100 descendants of the slaves. Its been about 5 generations. Assume no intermarriage so everyone is generally tracing only 1/32ndth of their ancestry to this generation.
None of the wealth acquired from the slave owning is still around. There is one house that was the former plantation house, but it was lost in bankruptcy and then re-bought. Nearly all other wealth of the slave owning family was also lost in that bankruptcy (took place in the 1880s).
How much do I a descendant of the slave owner owe to a descendant of the slave?
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