faceh
8mo ago
I'm almost sad that nobody has 'called me out' on this given my consistent pounding of the need for accountability among the elites. My closing remark on that comment is:
Eventually the proles will start to conclude that the system is in fact SET UP so as to ensure elites are guaranteed to thrive regardless of the state of the country and that perhaps the only way skin gets re-inserted to the game is if the proles taken action themselves.
I think it does merit discussion as to whether this killing is the sort of action that suffices to bring more 'skin in the game' back to an increasingly unaccountable system where 'nobody' is responsible for bad outcomes.
For the record on my positions:
Do I condone the killing?: No, the opposite. There were other options on the table.
Do I understand the shooter's motives: Yes, and I find them sympathetic while I condemn the action. The fact that nobody else was harmed in the process is to his credit.
Do I think the killing is probably an 'inevitable' result of institutional failures that individuals feel powerless to affect? Yeah.
I think it is in fact bad that the guy is getting such an ovation from certain corners of the internet, and I strongly suspect many will come to regret their open support of the guy, even if they don't ever publicly recant.
I would remind people that this is just the most recent successful amateur assassination of a highly-positioned figure.
Multiple people took potshots at Trump earlier this year, as we all recall. The individual would-be assassins just didn't get the kind of outpouring of support this guy is receiving. Also can't forget that MULTIPLE people have lit themselves on fire due to the Israel-Palestine situation, so there's just 'something in the air' that is leading people to potentially suicidal action in the U.S. to try to affect large-scale outcomes.
I strongly suspect we're looking at a potential rash of future assassins, The means are more available than ever (3D printed guns are impossible to ban at this point). The motives are varied, and the signal cannot be ignored, if you choose your target well, that you'll get adulation and attention to your particular cause.
I'd also argue it ties into discussion of the 'male loneliness epidemic,' because the sort of disaffected males with minimal prospects are going to notice that women are responding positively to targeted killings. Objectively its the most high-impact action a guy in that age range can take, short of founding a billion-dollar company (or having a couple kids, but the whole point is that isn't a likely outcome these days!).
And that right there is why I don't think these killings or attempts quite qualify as legitimate 'skin in the game,' because they're not filtering out bad actors in a systemic, reliable way. Indeed, the people who live and who die will be almost random in a sense. There's no real attempt to select for targets based on qualities that we want to remove or disincentivize, the selection effect is not towards removing bad actors for harms they are responsible for.
We want the skin in the game to be a direct result of the institution/system itself functioning as intended, rather than a second or arguably third-order effect of its dysfunctioning. But, this will possibly lead to some reformation of the systems or institutions themselves.
faceh
8mo ago
Disagreed, in that you have to procure the boat and physically steer it out there yourself, which leaves a trail of evidence on its own.
They could in theory narrow the search down to that particular lake, at least.
Whole point of a Drone is minimal forensic trail.
faceh
8mo ago
I will say, having this information, that it IS actually possible to commit a daylight murder in Manhattan and manage to escape before being tracked down has made some of my more fanciful assassination schemes seem more plausible.
faceh
8mo ago
I've been tossing around the idea that you can probably use a consumer drone to drop a murder weapon in a lake without much hassle at all.
faceh
8mo ago
Color me somewhat surprised.
I was somewhat expecting a guilty verdict, and my guess was that'd trigger another wave of emigration out of NYC.
Depending on whether this results in large scale riots, it still might.
faceh
8mo ago
I've noticed a lot of the wisdom from when I got started has completely vanished.
Yep. As I recall it, the "HODL" meme came into existence as simple advice to keep people from panic selling AND from jumping from onto non-bitcoin coins (shitcoins, mostly) and thus from avoiding the biggest risks to your Sat stack, your own emotional decision-making.
faceh
8mo ago
No Man's Sky got a TON of flack at launch because its procedural generation was actually far too limited and there was no interaction between players, despite implications or promises made by the publisher.
But then it improved in fits and starts over the next couple years to actually deliver on or exceed most of those promises, and now its a shining example of reputation rehabilitation. So the procedural generation is indeed impressive by any fair standard, now.
And they've released a lot of new content and upgrades to the game over the years.
Yet I think it is still running into the limits of what you can actually do with procedural generation. Only some subset of those generations will seem 'unique' and even fewer will be 'interesting' so the thrill of discovery is going to run out eventually, even if planet X-9-1-3-C-7-J is technically very different from planet X-9-1-3-C-7-Q, you won't feel like there's much difference if you can see how the lego pieces were rearranged to make each one.
I think the disappointment arises because any sort of full deterministic universe probably won't be like the Star Trek Universe, where you can run into nonstandard, unexplainable phenomena all over the place and the galaxy is just teeming with intelligent life that has abnormal powers, strange morality, and biology that defies understanding so the effort of exploring is rewarded, and there's nigh infinite novelty to be found because the rules of what is possible simply can't be pinned down.
faceh
8mo ago
Yeah, but you're using a second currency to denominate the value of the asset. Not the currency it was actually purchased in.
ETH which actually has multiple good uses
What are those? Because I played in the ETH ecosystem for a while (RIP Augur) and I came to be dissappointed because all the exciting projects died because ETH doesn't scale well, or because its REALLY hard to avoid programming bugs, or because whatever function they serve is just better done via centralized services.
So I tossed in the towel for now, while still holding SOME ETH in reserve (never uninstalled MetaMask).
Like, DAOs had a moment, and then seemingly nothing has been done with them. Same with NFTs.
This also sort of touches on the memes about "Open-World" vs. "Linear" games.
The joke is that open world games still ultimately railroad you to the same place, it just lets you wander around whatever winding path you like to end up there. The 'choice' of open world games is just when to move on to the next chapter in the story, but the story will still unfold in the same order.
And while I do think there's a distinction between a very cinematic linear game like Uncharted and, say Fallout: New Vegas or Baldur's Gate 3, there's something to the argument that a game can never do anything that wasn't programmed in, and whether it directly railroads the player to its end or it merely places boundaries on player actions and patiently waits for them to get there, the 'choices' presented by the game aren't actually producing new, surprising outcomes.
There's something that kind of bugs me about players who optimize for optimization with any game they play.
The game, as a piece of software, is basically just a program that is running from a start state to an end state, and the player's inputs are the one factor that determines how long, or even if it gets there. Yes, this is an obtuse oversimplificaiton. I apologize, computer science is not my forte.
Back in the day the end state was often a literal "YOU WIN" splash page before restarting from the beginning.
So by 'playing' the game, you're 'helping' the program reach a given end state. All well and dandy. But when you attempt to optimize your play to push towards that end-state as quickly as possible, you're suborning all of your other goals to that of simply 'completing' the program. The program at that point, I'd argue, no longer exists to 'serve' you, you are choosing to serve the program.
Yes, its all just math at the end of the day, and by creating a certain sequence of inputs you can make the number or the line go up more quickly pursuant to that math, and perhaps that is satisfying in its own right.
But damn, it strikes me as inverting the 'purpose' of playing games. Yes you 'win' when a given end-state is reached, but supposedly the process of reaching that end state should be fun, and/or challenging, and/or educational, and/or induce certain emotional states, and/or 'entertain' you and your friends. In fact, if the process of reaching the end state is enjoyable enough, it should be a tad dissappointing when you actually reach it!
The end state is not supposed to be the point? Unless you're in a very strictly defined 'competition' where the stakes are such that you absolutely MUST reach the end state that favors you as the 'winner' to continue.
Like, yeah, a Chess tournament is not really about 'the friends we made along the way.' Its about finding who is the absolute best at chess, which REQUIRES everyone play optimally for victory.
BUT MOST GAMES AREN'T ABOUT FINDING THE BEST POSSIBLE PLAYER! Its about helping your brain release the happy-juice or to learn something or to maybe even to kill some time... which implies that you want the game to LAST LONGER, not shorter!
At any rate, 'optimal' play, in my book, should be defined largely by what the player thinks their goals are, not inherently what the math/logic of the game itself demands to reach a point defined by the game. Its fair to say that if you do the latter, you're not playing the game, the game is playing YOU!
And yes, I realize I've called out the entire concept of "speed-running* when I say that. These are the guys who go to obscene effort to find every bug, exploit, and corner-case possible to force the game to run from the start-state to the end-state without going through all the steps in between, and thus skipping the 'process' entirely. And they pride themselves on thus becoming so engrained with the program that they can make it run to completion in obscenely short times, by programming themselves to create the best possible set of inputs so as to achieve the endstate. Not because of their own particular goals.
Your premises are that only individuals are responsible for their own actions, and those actions can be neatly separated and contained to solely that person.
Yes.
And in order to be coherent you'd have to believe this too.
Otherwise, why do we hold the CEO responsible for his actions, rather than acknowledge that he is only acting amongst a massive network of incentives and players responding to endless numbers of variables.
Or we can tie everyone into the web of consequences and spread the blame around.
Your other premise is that a man's wife is no more related to him than a man's neighbor, a premise that is as obviously incorrect as it is misleading.
Close. You're playing a bit loose with the term 'related' in this case.
Genetically speaking the neither the wife nor the neighbor are probably very closely 'related' to him.
Romantically speaking the wife is clearly closer.
Geographically speaking the neighbor isn't much further.
Its just not clear to me why the nature of the wife's relationship to him somehow endows her with blame, or what-have-you, while the neighbor is excluded from blame?
Okay, I'll bring a contrarian take to the table:
I'm a Bitcoin Maxi in the sense that I don't think any coins can possibly displace it at this point.
But there's seemingly very little stuff you can "DO" with Crypto. And the stuff you can do is based around avoiding financial regs or international monetary restrictions.
I will accept the characterization of BTC as "digital gold," but Gold can be put to use as something other than a store of value. And unlike Gold it could in theory be forked to increase supply or otherwise devalue/debase itself if the miners so chose.
So even without believing that its an unsustainable Ponzi, I just ask what goal are Bitcoin holders coordinating towards, other than getting really rich as denominated in USD?
I'm not even asking what the 'endgame' is, its just, what does one 'do' with the BTC other than hold it, occasionally buy more, and maybe sell it if you ultimately need to transact business in USD?
Because there's not a lot to 'do' with BTC, I don't think Trump will actually do much to it. He may call off the regulatory watchdogs which will lead to an influx of money into the space, but even if this leads to a lot more projects, we've been waiting for 13 years for a project that actually leverages BTC's properties to do something, shall we say, truly useful.
faceh
8mo ago
That's really the unspoken truth about the market as it stands.
The exact type of person who would throw a bunch of money into this thing AND could manage to store it long term without losing it to scams or hacks AND would have the discipline to HODL through massive swings AND would resist YOLOing into meme coins or other moonshots/boondoggles trying to 100x their money... that's probably a rare combination.
So many folks lost funds to scams, blew it on shitcoin plays, or the exchange they traded on blew up, or they panic sold in one of the various crashes, or lost their keys or fat-fingered a transfer to a dead address. Those folks aren't going to advertise their failures. Some might have bounced back.
I can't think of many known whales who were around since the beginnings and are clearly riding high on their wise decisions over the years since then.
Even Mr. Bitcoin Jesus Roger Ver managed to fuck himself by pissing off the IRS.
faceh
8mo ago
Bitcoin isn't a currency because it's wildly deflationary.
My objection is that you just defined "deflationary" in terms of its U.S. DOLLAR VALUE.
Bitcoin is Deflationary due to the fixed supply and the halving rate of release over time, regardless of what its value vs. the dollar does.
But a mortgage taken out in 2012 Bitcoin would mean the holder now owes the same amount of BTC w/interest as they did before.
The holder of the note isn't exactly in a good position either, since their remedy for failure to pay is to foreclose on the house, and they ain't getting that 3 billion.
faceh
8mo ago
A man's wife and children directly benefit from his actions, and are an extension of him in a way that his neighbor is not.
I want you to be specific. How much 'benefit' does one have to receive for the connection to be close enough to justify a revenge killing. If the neighbor borrowers his mower, is that enough? If he lent some money to the neighbor and allowed him to afford life-saving surgery, is that enough?
You're adding epicycles. It used to be just "do unto others," but now you're adding in "Do unto others, and do unto those who benefited from those others." I'm happy to chase this to whatever extremes you like, but understand that it will probably lead me to conclude that under your moral code, it is acceptable to kill you.
This is basically a slightly more sophisticated Gangland mentality. "You send one of ours to the hospital, we send one of yours to the morgue." At least in gangland everyone is (sort of) willingly participating.
You are saying they are unrelated third parties
Bullshit. I said they are innocent third parties, having committed no action worthy of blame, and certainly not death. 'Related' parties is a completely different question, and a harder one.
And that goes double for the kids, who almost certainly has no conception of why their father would be considered bad.
your premises are nonsensical.
Please, state what you believe my 'premises' to be.
faceh
8mo ago
Yes, I'm suggesting that if "Do unto others" justifies murdering a man's wife because your wife died (Which is changing the facts, so its not even what happened here!) then it justifies murdering a man's neighbor because your neighbor died.
My whole point is when you bring in third parties who DON'T have blame for the outcome, now you're the one 'doing unto others' by bringing innocent parties into it.
And that demolishes your moral standing, whatever it was.
"Do unto others" just about covers it, I think
... but the wife and kids didn't do anything unto him, so he CAN'T be justified in doing unto them.
Like, killing innocent bystanders in the course of seeking revenge is among the most basic of taboos I can imagine. Its the one thing you're supposed to avoid if you want your cause to remain righteous.
It justifies some crazy shit if you want to take it that far:
"UHC denied my next-door neighbor coverage for cancer meds and he died, which made me sad and angry. So I stalked and murdered the CEO's neighbor to make it equal." This is psychopathic and utterly inconsistent, to boot.
faceh
8mo ago
Now now bud, if you're going to ACTUALLY mean this, you better also account for the thousands or hundreds of thousands of people whose medical care was covered and lives were saved because the company paid for the necessary treatment or cure.
If you're already saying they're responsible for the lives of customers, have to give them credit just as much as blame.
faceh
8mo ago
I'm curious why going for the family is somehow justified if the guy's company denied insurance to someone the killer cared about, but not justifiable otherwise?
Indeed it makes no sense why you'd care about the killer's motivation before deciding whether such an act was acceptable or beyond the pale. "God I wish his wife and children were killed, slowly and agonizingly, right in front of him so he could live a tortured existence going forward, but ONLY IF my preferred justification is present."
I find the moral reasoning on display there hideous, by the way.
faceh
8mo ago
Yep. It was interesting that what nuked him was giving his honest opinion on something that he had actually experienced and wasn't doing it to insult any given target or to troll.
One wonders if he responded by going SO DEEP into his act that he'll never resurface again.
faceh
8mo ago
Yeah, the 'reasonable centrist' or 'sane rightie' niche seems to eat people's personalities alive. Mentally, you probably get pulled in so many directions that eventually you'll suffer a break in some direction or other. Every person you mentioned is somebody that I enjoyed listening to at some point or another, but over time lost the qualities that actually made the stand out as notable.
ShoeOnHead seems to have avoided the worst possible outcomes.
faceh
8mo ago
I'd go out on a limb and say its 60-40, 60% good people getting compromised because they are suddenly gifted fame and fortune and happen to fall into some vice or other, and 40% grifters who were ALWAYS in it for the money and fame, and had no morals before getting them.
Milo Yiannopoulos had a seemingly meteoric rise and fall in a fairly short period, he's probably the most obvious of the grifters.
The other amazing thing is how these types will often lash out and drag others down with them when they sense they're about to lose everything. I think that's perhaps the one way you can tell who was ever a good, honorable person. If they quietly accept their fate and remove themselves from the limelight without trying to blow everything up on their way out, vs. pull a straight up face/heel turn and lean into the controversy, desperately trying to stay relevant by picking fights and destroying others reputations in the process.
I think men care a bit less about whether a woman is a whore when he marries her, but more if she will end up whoring out after the marriage, and maybe more importantly if she carries the reputation of a whore or has been able to keep things discreet.
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