netstack
Texas is freedom land
No bio...
User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
19d ago
Man. I feel like you're hitting a giant blindspot here.
Maybe you're right in saying that, with the appropriate definitional games, one can peel materialism like a banana. But isn't there merit to the framework which is hardest to peel?
The Christian framework comes apart at the slightest interaction with evidential standards. This has lead countless mystics and gurus to spin off their own heresies which try and rehabilitate it. Gold tablets, ESP, Arianism, whatever. None of them do any better than "consensus materialism."
Or maybe I'm misreading you entirely and tilting at windmills. Sorry.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
19d ago
Does it encourage productivity? More than an existing background of competition, that is. I'm trying to think of toy scenarios.
-
Case 1: You make widgets for $6 labor and $6 materials. You invest in a technology which doubles the productivity of that labor. Now you can make your widgets for $3 labor and $6 materials. Going from $12 to $9 is a 25% savings in your total costs.
-
Case 2: You make widgets for $1 labor and $11 materials. You invest in the same technology. Going from $12 to $11.5 only improves your costs by like 4%, since labor costs were so small already.
-
Case 3: You make widgets for $6 + $6 until the government comes in and forces you to spend $12 on labor. Now the same technology cuts your cost from $18 to $12, or 33%! Therefore, by making labor more expensive, the government has increased the benefit of investing.
Except...Your final cost with the technology is still $12. You've invested just to get back to where you would otherwise have been. Even if the government relaxes its edict, that just snaps you back to the first case. This is fine if the government has some strategic interest in adopting that technology--like with onshoring, or green new deal, or even corn subsidies--but I'm not convinced on the economic case.
if we (hypothetically) replaced all citizens with cheaper immigrants
Yes, if I was afraid of losing my job, getting the cheapest widgets would be a poor consolation prize. But that doesn't mean subsidizing me makes my labor more productive. It means that I'm asking to trade off some efficiency for other values, like security.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
19d ago
It was a comment by @lancbyw719n, a month-old account with four comments to his name.
Presumably this is the same guy who shows up, posts a few leading questions about race relations or immigration, never responds to comments, and then deletes all his posts. I don't know why he keeps coming back.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
19d ago
Oh, hey. A short post, deleted as soon as anyone pushes back at all. Where have I seen this before?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
19d ago
When you move a supply curve with demand held constant, you change price by changing quantity. Less labor for higher prices. This is appealing to the (remaining) workforce. It’s not so great to the customers.
Same as cartelization. Same as tariffs. Like every form of protectionism, it’s the customers who get the bill.
Given that I am a customer, rather than a competing worker, for jobs like construction, I don’t expect to see any benefit from slashing the construction labor supply.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
20d ago
Hey, I’ve had a similar experience.
Not the nihilism, per se. The open tab with a strawman getting punched to thunderous applause. When it was fresh, I avoided responding cause I was at work and couldn’t do it justice. Then a week or two of waiting till the next Monday thread. After that, it felt awkward to bring it up like some sort of callout, and I quietly let it slip.
You’ve inspired me to actually put it in tomorrow’s thread.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
23d ago
I’m ready for the Pacifier sequel where Vin Diesel takes on his toughest parenting challenge yet: the opioid epidemic.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
23d ago
Suggesting that disabled coal miners go into childcare might be on par with that Ben Shapiro bit about selling houses.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
24d ago
Sure. If they can do those things, then they’re less disabled. How do you get from there to “handouts for people who didn’t have the intelligence or wherewithal”?
Imagine a more extreme case where a guy loses his legs and, thus, his lifelong job at the widget-stomping factory. If he gets disability, it’s not because he couldn’t make it in college.
Now say a doctor asks him, “hey, do you have any skills that could get you a different job? One that doesn’t require jumping up and down?” Here a college degree would be a mitigating factor for his existing, factual disability. The handout was never for failing college. It was for not having legs.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
24d ago
I figured those were ruled out by the “back problem.”
I agree that, if they are doable, someone might well prefer them to scraping by on disability.
What I don’t get is where “IQ and wherewithal” come into it. Either the guy is able to do jobs or he’s disabled. A college degree adds some set of jobs, so it can take him out of the disabled category, but not put him in.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
24d ago
Didn’t complete college and can’t do manual labor. Unless the good doctor is rubber-stamping disability for healthy young farm boys?
What work are they able to do?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
24d ago
“That Part Of Twitter”. Not that it’ll make it any easier to search.
I don’t know what their deal is, but I think they’re related to the “vibecamp” thing. Which is also intentionally vague and a e s t h e t i c.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
24d ago
Okay, I admit it would be funny to make our 500k-character submission box contingent on filling out a 1k-character abstract. Only the abstract would start out visible, and users would have to click to expand the wall of text, preventing it from taking up attention by default…
But I am not convinced that this would help with the failure mode of, say, 100k-character AI Gish gallops. They’re still going to be slower to check than to create.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
25d ago
I saw one of his tweets shared in a random (very left-leaning) discord server. I had no idea how to explain that he was legitimately unhinged.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
25d ago
Pennyfarthing.
Great visibility, terrible crumple zones.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
26d ago
Sorry! I really underspecified. I should have asked more about emergent historicity.
Consider a spectrum between abstract and concrete strategy games. Chess is a pretty darn abstract form of dudes fighting. Miniature wargames add all sorts of extra rules to flesh it out. For the most part, they hold on to useful game abstractions, like dice, or alternating turns. Once we get to real-time games, though, even those can be stripped out or hidden in the pursuit of verisimilitude.
Slitherine-type games seem to go really far on this simulationist end, though with some pretty unusual focuses. It's bizarre seeing abstractions like "cards" in Shadow Empire, a game which also models planetary hydrology and the military procurement process. But so, so cool. I'm going to have to check out all three of your realist/authentic mentions just to salivate over things I don't plan on learning.
But these simulations, sometimes ridiculously complex, don't usually converge on historicity. The game conceits, or the epicycles which were added to disguise them, keep most games from getting too realistic (and, presumably, boring). So we get Warhammer games where one side can be effectively "tabled" in one "shooting phase," giving up their precious "victory points." Divinity, where my squad can spend all our "action points" beating the tar out of one guy while his friends wait their turn. Really, action economy has got to be one of the biggest sources of this kind of divergence, but it's not like actual economics are safer. Victoria 2 is kind of infamous for keeping its plates spinning with careful scripting and duct tape.
Sometimes you get more verisimilitude by reducing the level of detail. I'd say old X-COM is a good example. Oh, there's plenty of game-mechanics nonsense, but the fundamental "Time Units" system does an amazing job of implying simultaneity. Move, and you risk enemies reacting. Hold your fire, and you get a chance to spend it outside the confines of your "turn." You get interesting game choices which wouldn't be possible in a real-time combat simulation.
So when I asked the question, I was thinking something more like: "what are the simplest, most abstract games which punch above their weight in encouraging historical strategies?" Games which reward pike blocks not because someone programmed an explicit stat bonus, but because the rules of their game world imply the physics of ours.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
26d ago
In the OKC area, I recommend both the American Pigeon Museum and the Museum of Osteology.
I keep seeing the latter show up in Wikipedia photos.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
26d ago
That’s ridiculous. “They” don’t co-opt random Christian aesthetics more than anyone else. Oh no, global warming activists have stolen the flood myth!
I agree that bright colors enjoyed a window of novelty. Along with synthetic fabrics and the rise of computer graphics, they’re responsible for some extremely dated trends. I would add that the fashion trends oscillate way faster, though. They’re at least as fast as the generational pressure of teenage rebellion.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
26d ago
Millennials weren’t dominating the new car market in 2007. They were in their mid-twenties at the latest. While I didn’t find data for ‘07, over the last decade, the under-35 age group never exceeded 15%. The Flattening started when Boomers and Gen-Xers were buying the majority of new cars.
Same goes for houses. The median house-seller was born in 1960. By 2017, that had crept forward to…1962. It wasn’t the millennials who were choosing beige or grey or whatever.
You know what was wildly popular in the early 2000s? Apple products. Ones that looked like this instead of this. The 90s was blocky and garish, but we were living in the new millennium. We could put chrome and white plastic on things. Monitors and peripherals got thin and sleek. This might be the only time that software looked more skeuomorphic than the hardware on which it ran.
We’re climbing the fashion barber pole faster than ever. Modernism to postmodernism to high modernism to a colorful, psychedelic mess in only half a century. Add another fifty years of nuclear ennui, a pinch of Moore’s law, and stir. The memes of 2014 feel ancient in a way that 60s counterculture cannot, because the latter never really died so much as it was commercialized and co-opted. Well, we got used to that, and now it’s taken for granted that corporations will sell cheap merch representing your preferred minority.
So don’t blame the gays for sending your 70s-ass appliances out of fashion. Give them ten years, or maybe six months, and the barber pole will come back around.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
27d ago
I would hesitate to use targeted advertising as evidence for any particular trend.
Does Mr. Boyle have some special insight into the art world?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
27d ago
Anyone know any games, roleplaying or otherwise, which end up encouraging real/historical tactics? Or generalize those tactics to the magic or tech or whatever makes the setting unique.
I was playing D:OS2 this weekend and found myself thinking, "wow, all these spear-wielding magisters have zero incentive to form up and fight in ranks." It's a chaotic free-for-all.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
28d ago
Didn't it?
In college I had a part-time job with the facilities engineers. They'd digitized the blueprints for every building on campus, plus the full history of change orders. Before that, they had to go down into the halon-equipped archive and pull out file drawers with the originals. Surely that led to some productivity boost.
A couple years back, I was talking to an elderly woman who had worked in Saudi Arabia in (I believe) the 80s. She did payroll for an American-run hospital system, and oversaw their transition from bags full of paper money to checks. It sounded like a real quality of life improvement for the employer. Employees were a little more reluctant, but today, paychecks are ubiquituous. Except they've also been superseded by faster, self-documenting digital finance.
Then there's programmers. Even mirroring your hard drives has got to be more convenient and more scalable than a couple extra filing cabinets of punch cards. I don't even want to think about how the programmers of yore attempted version control. The productivity gains from digitization were obvious.
I suspect these generalize to most data-based industries. We're just more likely to take the improvements for granted.
Just finished Stormlight and really enjoyed it. Yes, people will point out stylistic/prose issues, and they'll be absolutely right. But Wind and Truth succeeded as the plate-spinning, world-expanding, every-new-detail-an-entire-sequel-hook kind of book I was looking for.
For something completely different, I'm alternating back to Annals of the Former World, a set of geology essays. I mentioned the first one last year, but apparently never commented on the next two, so here we go:
In Suspect Terrain was a hit piece on plate tectonics. Great premise, slightly confusing execution, because it was really more like a series of reasonable objections to people in the "new theory" hype cycle. I can't tell if that means the main character was stating the obvious, or if she really was a visionary who was vindicated in the next 40 years of textbooks. The coolest part was that, yes, plate tectonics was new in the 50s and 60s. I always kind of assumed it was settled in the 1800s like so much fossil and timeline stuff.
Rising from the Plains, though, was amazing. It's a history of one family stretching back to the westward expansion into Wyoming. At the same time, it's a narrative of how the Laramie and Medicine Bow mountains got where they are today. Outrageous cowboy anecdotes share pages with the solemn march of Deep Time. Part of the charm was having to keep a map open to cross-reference. I highly recommend this one.
Anyway, the next essay up is Assembling California. So far he seems to be coming at the region from both the western fault lines and the eastern Sierra Nevada. As always, the prose has been delightful. Here's hoping it keeps up.
More options
Context Copy link