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Notes -
Does anyone else feel like we're heading for a good old-fashioned, 2008-tier, financial crash? I recall people bringing up the possibility ever since Covid bucks started rolling out, but even though we were due for one, and even though the money printer was going brrrrr, the crash has so far failed to materialize.
At the time, I was of two minds about this. On one hand, all the libertarian theory I used to subscribe to said money-printing => boom, boom => bust. On the other hand, the problem for me was it never felt like a boom, and I think this is changing now. A key feature of the pre-crash boom is "malinvestment"; capital going into often downright deranged projects, that are later abandoned half-finished. Well, I feel like the datacenter craze qualifies, and with the wave of AI IPOs that are coming just as major indices are changing their rules, to allow for these companies' near-instantaneous inclusion (an investment so good, you can't pass up on it. Literally, if you're American), it seems like we're solidly in the "irrational exuberance" phase.
Add this to the list of things I hope I'm wrong about, because if we get a proper crash, the political fallout is going to be massive. The script writes itself: Trump / tech bros / capitalism bad, even more gay race communism now.
To whitepillers: is there an argument for why I'm wrong that doesn't boil down to "you don't get it, chud, it's the New Economy! The Singularity is just around the corner! All the rules are obsolete!"? This argument is verboten, because this is pretty much what people say with every bubble.
To fellow blackpillers: any ideas on how to brace for impact? Any IT guys here old enough to make it through the dotcom bubble? How did you do it? Any advice you would have given your past self?
At this point I would prefer to be ruled by the pink haired feminist communists than the AI techbros.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” -- CS Lewis
I always wondered if Lewis considered the ultimate application that quote automatically suggests, being a card-carrying believer in the most supremely omnipotent moral busybody of all. I feel like the benevolent deity who fails to understand the wants and needs of His subjects is a somewhat exhausted trope now, but was it already back then?
You are totally free to go to Hell if that's what you want. He won't turn off your brain and make you a drone that can only obey the rules. "We want what is bad for us" is also an exhausted trope, but still applicable. "Dear God, please make it okay that I want sterile sex with robots instead of marrying one wife and having children with her, that's not too much to ask now is it? And I would feel so much better if that term "sin" only applied to really bad people, like Trump voters, because it crushes my valuable self-esteem to be told I'm sinful too".
Look at all the talk on here about curing obesity, because obesity is a bad thing that costs the rest of us money. Not too much "understanding of the wants and needs" of the sinful there, just "they are a problem, we must fix that problem". Why, it's almost like society is a rule-imposing deity!
Which version of it, the "separation from God" one or the "fire and brimstone" one? If it's the latter, "hey, I'm not forcing you to do anything, I will just torture you for{ever, _aeons} if you don't obey" doesn't register as a particularly compelling vision of freedom. I know that especially Evangelical Christians would consider "God is evil" to be very nearly an oxymoronic statement, but if their God created me, why did He equip me with a moral compass that says it?
Separation from God has always struck me as a cheat too. You never give informed consent to separation from God; you are just told "doing X automatically separates you from God, but since it's your own action, you don't get to blame anyone for it".
Alternatively, "informed consent" doesn't work the way you appear to be arguing it does. Does a 3-pack-a-day smoker give informed consent to the consequences of smoking three packs a day? Obviously not, since they didn't know for certain what the consequences would be or what the subjective experience would actually be like, right?
We've got a variety of fairly reliable evidence that smoking causes cancer. The evidence that unrepentant sin sends you to hell is, let's say, more on the hearsay side of things. If the best evidence for smoking causing cancer is that somebody said it totally does, it would be a different story.
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If I only got told about lung cancer patients, but could never see one even theoretically because the only way you can look inside a cancer ward is to become a patient, I might think "smoking kills" was bullshit, too.
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