domain:city-journal.org
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2m ago
What are you talking about? Acquiring the civilian population of weaker powers has been a key goal of conquest since ever.
No, it hasn't. Taking slaves has generally been a method of offsetting the costs and risks of war, not a primary war aim at the civilization scale. Babylon conquered Israel because Israel refused to submit to imperial power and/or violated suzerainty. The Romans were not sacking Syracuse to capture Archimedes, but to subdue the polity. The British Empire was not in India to gain Indian soldiers, they were there to secure value and resources for the homeland. Indian soldiers made that cheaper from the perspective of the homeland.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4m ago
To be fair, if you’re the minority party, you need every vote and supporter you can get. That’s how elections work— get the numbers, or take a seat while the other side does whatever they want. If MAGA wasn’t in power, they would not worry about Fuentes unless he was driving away potential red voters.
faceh
6m ago
Enjoy it while you can. Remember we were doing "Iran is about to kick off WWIII" posting just two months ago.
Last month a bunch of people got killed by flooding (including kids) and there was fighting over whether Trump was somehow responsible for it due to NOAA cuts that hadn't taken effect yet.
Comparatively lighthearted fare is welcome, I say.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
8m ago
Good god it’s a slow news cycle.
APnews has had a week of breathless reporting about Ukraine ceasefire negotiations. Pretty, pretty slow.
faceh
10m ago
For the galaxy-brained strategy, agreed upon by the best and brightest of all humanity, of giving global power to one shmuck. Truly, something that could never have been created in the Western canon.
Technically it was a handful of carefully selected schmucks.
And it was kinda justified given that they lived in a surveillance state where aliens could intercept ANY communications but couldn't read into human minds.
Sloot
10m ago
That doesn't follow. There are colossal differences between:
- Suspecting that there are many large companies with massive amounts of fake email job deadweight
- Being able to reliably identify companies with more (or less) fake email job deadweight
- Being able to reliably generate above market returns using the information gleaned from 2)
Where 2) would be quite difficult for professional investors, much less regular individual investors. And even conditional on if one somehow were able to pull off 2), modern financial theory would suggest 3) is still impossible. Since if you could pull off 2), so could others, and thus there leaves no opportunity for arbitrage.
Corvos
14m ago
More likely to be the other way round, don't you think? People who feel a compulsive need to travel are going to be drawn to occupations that let them do so. Combine that with the tendency of children to do the same job as their parents et voila.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
14m ago
How is this CW?
I guess I should be glad that the final frontier isn’t also, somehow, a referendum on Donald Trump. That impulse is at war with the one that tells me this is dumber than a sack of primitive, ferrous construction equipment.
In unrelated news, have you read The Dark Forest? Not for the apocalyptica. For the galaxy-brained strategy, agreed upon by the best and brightest of all humanity, of giving global power to one shmuck. Truly, something that could never have been created in the Western canon.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15m ago
I don't think Indian soldiers count as "human capital" exactly, and either way we are already at the point in the tech tree where meat soldiers are starting to get obsoleted by drones. As for the other two examples, the Archimedes one seems like a fairy tale, and the Bible "record" does not seem particularly compelling either given that it was written by Israelites as part of a larger book singing the praises of their own wise men, so they would have all the motivation to make up a story to make them look good. Compare the wall of modern fiction where audience/author avatars get abducted by foreign cultures and placed in in improbably influential roles (like the waste heap of isekai manga), or older ones such as Marco Polo's fanciful claim about being made a government official by Kublai Khan's court.
Impossible; your internalized speciesism is just showing. With their empathy and higher education levels, aliens would be beyond such bigotry and would understand that—if not for socioeconomic factors and institutional speciesism—humans would be just as capable as they are.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
20m ago
Considering that @hydroacetylene explicitly said, quote, "Earth still produces plenty of geniuses, and indeed plenty of not-genius tier but highly capable engineers, technicians, etc.", I assume that at least he specifically meant creative intellectual ability when talking about "human capital". Whether aliens would be interested in us as slaves for their menial labour is a different question, but that would certainly require certain additional circumstances (such as them having the technology to build us habitats in which we can be employed to do work they need, but not to just automate the same work or terraform our planet for themselves).
Gaashk
25m ago
Sure. That's in the drunk college student, but way way faster realm. Nice to have, provides consumer surplus at free tier or $20/month, but probably not $200/month.
Shrike
26m ago
Often for the kinds of physics described for UAP phenomena the things that would have to be wrong are not, like, the nuances of quantum field theory. It is shit like "conservation of energy was wrong."
Obviously it would depend on the very specific incident in question but a lot of times the claims "requiring" extreme energy fluctuations come from data like radar returns that don't give any insight into the mass of the object being observed or even if it is a material object. A lot of claims about UAP are assumptions stacked on assumptions stacked on assumptions in a trench coat. These trench coats are often based on a core observation that, while very interesting, doesn't prove much if anything about "the laws of physics" and our understanding or lack thereof even if the observation itself is 100% accurate as reported.
(This is without getting into the fact that a lot of weird stuff like warp drives and propellantless space travel are theoretically good physics.)
Quantumfreakonomics
27m ago
Good god it’s a slow news cycle. We’re actually speculating on whether or not a nearby comet is aliens.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
30m ago
...Have you never heard of Slavery? The Triangle Trade?
Human capital != creative intellectual ability
If the sentient insectoids could do warehouse work, there would be millions of them in the inland empire in a few years. That goes double for Victorians or Saudis.
Gaashk
36m ago
Word processors already look for typos that are actual words, but don't make sense in the current context, without applying AI. More and better autocorrect is about in line with the original thesis -- they're good at spreadsheet scale tasks, which is useful but not a huge amount of a given person's job. I'm not completely sure what professional editors do, but I think it's probably a bit deeper than looking for typos.
Crowstep
41m ago
Mainstream science told you to mask up and get the covid vaccine too.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1hr ago
You know what, I could die happy if people tried to make a magic dirt argument to aliens about how we could raise their GDP if they just allowed us into their empire, and the aliens just went "Then why didn't you do that already on your own planet?" and hit delete on all of us.
ThenElection
1hr ago
Simply seizing as many resources as possible is an entirely rational decision. If grabby civilizations outcompete nongrabby ones, then those are the ones we'd expect to proliferate in the universe. Even if a civilization is internally nongrabby, if they encounter a grabby one, they're likely to resort to grabbiness as a survival mechanism. (This is why humans should be grabby preemptively; there can never be any kind of effective galactic UN.)
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1hr ago
Pros: all thinking machines destroyed
Cons: Earth terraformed into another Arrakis so sandworms can produce more spice
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
What are you talking about? Acquiring the civilian population of weaker powers has been a key goal of conquest since ever. The Bible records thé wise men of Israël relocated to act as advisors in Babylon. The Romans were furious when archimedes was slaughtered in the sack of Syracuse. And the British empire used Indian soldiers extensively.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1hr ago
That argument doesn't pass any sort of smell test. Even the wars of conquest and colonization on Earth (like the European Age of Exploration) were typically not motivated in any particular sense by acquisition of human capital, and there the conquerors and the conquered were significantly closer to each other in disposition and in particular capabilities/talent than any presumable spacefaring race would be to us. Instead, it's always acquisition of inanimate resources, or land, or preemptive weakening of a potential enemy. I figure the last one would be by far the most relevant one on a space scale.
If we (or, better: someone less sentimental, like the Victorians, the Saudis or the Chinese) went to Alpha Centauri and discovered a race of sentient insectoids somewhere around the development and intellectual level of Aboriginal Australians at the time of contact (but without aesthetics or ethics that are appealing or recognisable to us), do you actually think we would be integrating them for insectoid capital, as opposed to keeping a few specimens for study and either declaring the place a nature preserve or exterminating them and proceeding to colonise or strip-mine the place?
Drinniol
1hr ago
It doesn't take much effort for a civilization higher on the scale from us to send a kinetic kill vehicle.
Indeed, the idea of an interstellar invasion is ridiculous. Preemptive extermination of all other intelligences, however, makes a disturbing amount of sense from a game theoretic perspective.
birb_cromble
1hr ago
Based on a current understanding of physics, the only reason to launch an invasion would be to acquire the population as human capital for empire building
We're all going to be shocked and disappointed when we end up being collector's items, like a peculiar cultivar of tulip.
Oh my god, you're right. I was raised with "Hell is other people".
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