lemongrab
3mo ago
This isn't complicated -- if they're asking you to use their service for free, it's cause they want you to use it (they think it's worth their money to subsidize your service, e.g. to further long term growth). If you want to oppose them, don't use it.
lemongrab
4mo ago
whether Macedonians should take back all lands given to their ancestors by Zeus.
Many Greeks would like a word with you about those Slavic poseurs of North Macedonia appropriating the legacy of invincible Ἀλέξανδρος. Then again, those Greeks have also abandoned Zeus, so maybe it's up for grabs.
lemongrab
5mo ago
As a former national merit scholar with a STEM masters who's currently stuck doing manual labor in a medium-sized metro, here's hoping I can make some of that frictionlessness work better for me. I was just thinking to myself last night (yes, on Sunday night), while hammering together some outdoor timber steps that I'd seriously underbid, what a great deal the client was getting given that he couldn't have found anybody else both smart enough to do the job this well and dumb enough to do it this cheap.
Without going full Girard, I think this efficiency also leads us to target our desires more to what the market has made measurable, and limits discoverability of greater personal upsides in the course of removing risks of aggregate downside. The scope narrows for being pleasantly surprised in ways you may not even have known you could be surprised. Tinderella may actually have been much happier with a particular Mr. 5'8" for illegible Tinderella-specific factors, and now she'll never know because she's set the same 6'1" filter as everyone else without even really knowing how much it matters to her. Even if average outcomes are better, maybe some of the best outcomes have been closed off because they only aligned with desires that were particular to us, perhaps unknown to us, certainly not known to the market at large, and which the market is actually leading us to downplay in ourselves.
These are half-formed thoughts and I could write a whole essay on this but I have to go hang a gate on some frozen posts.
lemongrab
9mo ago
I've also seen versions of the view popular in NRx circles.
I won't pretend to have read it all, but Moldbug wrote a whole book about this in 2007, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1/
This is the whole idea of a "failed state", no? How reliably have the states of Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria, or Haiti been able to do as they please with their "own" people in their "own" territories? Just because our international order assumes the abstraction that every piece of territory belongs to some state with a monopoly on violence within it doesn't make it so. Plenty of places retain pre-state or non-state structures (tribes, clans, gangs, etc) that are more relevant to the individuals living there than the nominal state is. States are an emergent phenomenon, not the ground of political reality.
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