domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
jake
12m ago
In the spherical cow hypothetical of half the supply of labor vanishing with literally no other negative effects, yes, quality of life for the remaining would improve profoundly. This isn't a matter of "belief," it's history and biology. Wherever civilized and sufficiently stable nations have recovered from sudden and large declines in population, golden ages have followed. It's ecological succession as applied to humans.
Not to be taken as personally misanthropic--I'm quite pro humans, quite pro there being many, many more. The US is simply not presently equipped for its number of inhabitants, and this is not a problem that can be solved without first deporting 50 million people.
(A: it won't, of course, because, broadly, more labor => more production => more Stuff That People Want)
It doesn't matter if you make $10 an hour and strawberries cost $5 or you make $100 an hour and strawberries cost $50. The way you bring down the price of strawberries is by producing more strawberries. Repeat x1b across literally everything.
You describe the mechanism. Yes, flooding supply is how you decrease prices. I'm not denying the mechanism, I'm saying its benefit is illusory. Abundant cheap offshore labor is how you produce abundant cheap plastic garbage. We wouldn't need abundant cheap plastic garbage if bankers hadn't destroyed the value of the dollar, if the owners hadn't outsourced so much labor, and if those same owners hadn't stalled out worker compensation.
That's all the economy is, now. The ongoing attempt to outrun the consequences of those decisions.
TheLoser
13m ago
Values-coherence is a prerequisite for the formation and maintenance of a functional society; the aim is to achieve values-coherence with others, band together for mutual benefit and defense, and prevent rule by those who hate you.
I have to ask, becuase this seems like a pretty important wrinkle in your thesis here. To what degree and type of values-coherence do you require? You are a Christian, so I presume you are against pre-marital sex. In your ideal society, would anybody who thinks pre-marital sex is fine be expelled? Would anybody committing it be imprisoned?
My question really is how much values-coherence is enough; that is, where is the line? And how can you even quantitatively/rigorously determine where the line is?
TheLoser
23m ago
I am very curious to hear what you would say. Try to dilute the message so it's acceptable, as painful as that may be for you.
Concrete questions: when, if ever, will it be acceptable to express even the blander motte views in polite company? Was it ever?
I sometimes question my own sanity, and start asking if my recollection of the Before Times was all a fever dream, but to the best of my ability to answer your question: yes. It was completely normal to have a friend group with all sorts of people. We've had a dude that was an open (actual) fascist in mine, and the group was majority left-wing. Sometimes things would get heated, and people would fight, but at the end of the day people just wanted to have a good time. The blander views wouldn't even raise an eyebrow. Insert "this is what they took from you" meme.
Now, while I also think the news of Wokeness' death have been greatly exaggerated, I do feel like I can breathe a little. Still not comfortable attaching my Tinker Tuesday github to my resume, but way better than "undercover agent" mode of the COVID era.
jake
31m ago
GDP as an idea is like a belief that doesn't pay rent. It doesn't tell you whether a country is good, a benefit in raising it is not found in evidence. Given otherwise equal choices among westerners, >95% would rather spend their lives in #39 Switzerland or #105 Iceland over #1 China or #3 India.
HDI is a lagging indicator for what could be called civilization development factor C. C associates totally with homogeneity except in Singapore (75% Chinese anyway) and the US, whose C increased following predominantly European immigration and has consistently declined over the last 5 decades. Those countries with high C reached their peak before accepting significant numbers of non-European immigrants, now their C is in uniform decline.
Economics is a pseudoscience whose total positive contributions to humanity are counted on one hand. It endures because it is useful to power, laundering corrupt motive under the veneer of something scientific. "The GDP is high," they say. They mean "Don't believe your lying eyes."
The more laborers you have, the greater the economies of scale, the more innovations you can sustain, the more surplus you generate.
Only pharmaceuticals stand as a market sector where surplus drives innovation, and there it is intramarket surplus from the profits of optional and less-critical therapies funding research in critical therapies. Abundant plastic garbage has resulted in no innovations, improving the delivery of said plastic garbage is not innovation. Millions of foreigners originating in H-class visas either stifle innovation, in itinerant farmhands preventing automation, or cheap tech roles for workers who, as H-class visa holders, are by definition not innovators. No innovation has resulted from the proliferation of Indian hotel, gas station/C-Store owners and low-class tech workers; among the behemoths, the rise of Indians in Alphabet and Microsoft, among many other corporations, preceded not innovation but enshittification. Amazon may be credited for leading to AWS, but Prime is now the lamprey on the whale of their hosting services. The billions who owe cheap computers for their access to the internet will stand in history as evidence directly disproving the utility of cheap goods.
We reached the moon in the 60s. Beyond medicine, the idea we have become more innovative is laughable. We do have better medicine, we do have better entertainment. Day-to-day life today versus the 60s remains worse. It's no coincidence video games, television, and cinema declined, and now the previous bastion of culture in the left is on the verge of collapse. In the absence of such distractions, we would have already seen revolutionary violence.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
49m ago
It's unclear what triggered the escalation to physical violence or by what dream logic Dumana's friend transformed into his sister.
I thought the person accompanying him, be it his wife, sister, or friend, was a woman? The local media articles about the additional arrests talk about "a man and a woman". Though it would be a whole 'nother level to start calling 12 year olds "sexy" in front of your wife or sister, I suppose.
The death of woke has been claimed many times. I'm not convinced.
I'm still afraid to admit to being centrist, maybe slightly right thereof, in social settings and certainly in work ones. A bit left of the modal Mottizen (someone, link the song, I've long lost it!). My close friends know, but I'd never casually admit to even a lack of antipathy for Trump in front of new people. And that's all as someone in many ways immune to censorship - I'm relatively old and well established, take me or leave me.
Concrete questions: when, if ever, will it be acceptable to express even the blander motte views in polite company? Was it ever?
"Trump? A little grating, but the country's doing fine, I don't mind him." "Trans? I mean...you do you, but you ain't a chick, and stop pushing books into the elementary school curriculum."
TitaniumButterfly
58m ago
Crazy like a fox. 🦊
sodiummuffin
1hr ago
And as we're seeing in the latter case with the crackdowns in Steam and itch.io, these tools are available to non-wokes too.
That seems to have been a response to an open-letter and phone campaign by Australian feminist nonprofit Collective Shout to payment processors a week before it happened.
Open letter to payment processors profiting from rape, incest + child abuse games on Steam
These games endorsing men’s sexualised abuse and torture of women and girls fly in the face of efforts to address violence against women. We do not see how facilitating payment transactions and deriving financial benefit from these violent and unethical games, is consistent with your corporate values and mission statements.
We request that you demonstrate corporate social responsibility and immediately cease processing payments on Steam and Itch.io and any other platforms hosting similar games.
Now, what makes this case unusual is that instead of their fellow SJWs rallying to support them the cascade went the other direction, with many of them insisting that Collective Shout are fake feminists or whatever. (Though the Online Hate Prevention Institute, having worked with them in the past, still sided with them and said their critics were the new Gamergate.) You can go to places like /r/GirlGamers, which previously was campaigning to get No Mercy banned by urging people to sign Collective Shout's petition and copy Collective Shout's email template, and now people think it's a "heavily conservative group...under the pretense of feminism". Factors that presumably contributed to this include that a co-founder of Collective Shout is pro-life, the censorship happened to get some bad press in left-wing spaces early on, and due to this there was rumors going around that "LGBT content" was being targeted. Also the fact that it was a big enough news story for a lot of more moderate SJW-positive people to hear about it, not just the hardcore.
Now that doesn't mean it can't lead to some changed opinions about censorship. Despite how frustrating the dishonest and self-serving narratives about it are, people's opinions on the subject are presumably generally sincere. But it does seem important that this is payment processors continuing to listen to the same sort of arguments they've been listening to for years as they censored various (mostly Japanese) storefronts, not suddenly listening to "non-wokes". Also it's hard to guess what percentage of people objecting are just going the way the winds are currently blowing in their ideological environment, and will flip back without acknowledging any contradiction if circumstances are a bit different. Hopefully it'll stick at least somewhat, among the less-ideological gamers if nothing else.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
mocking
I mean that as non-confrontationally as possible, as good faith as possible: you might want examine your biases if you take my literal statement of (...) as laughing at anyone.
Take it easy, you seem to be taking is as much more charged than it actually was. You probably should have also probably quoted more than the word "mocking", because I think "mocking the idea of" makes it clear it's ideas, rather than people. Feel free to substitute it with "downplaying" or "dismissing". I honestly don't see how you can claim you're not doing it, when you literally say that there are problem, but none of them include neo-feudalism, or replacement, because your life is good.
I've spent time with real-life Maoists and they speak in exactly the same language. Their in-group communication where they don't have to justify their priors to each other looks remarkably similar....
Cool, but I can't imagine a less productive conversation. Just entertaining your framing means I already lost, because you get to paint me however you want with no effort, and I'm the one that has to convince you that maybe're wrong.
kky
1hr ago
Here’s my take from a few bosses and couple upgrades in.
Overall, the game’s pretty fun and meaningfully more difficult than the first. I feel pretty confident saying this. I 100%ed (112%) the first game deathless, and it wasn’t that hard. I’ve gone back to it a couple of times and it’s been very easy to pick back up. On my first play through I even got several bosses on my first try. Silksong is not giving me trouble on the level of, say, Sekiro, but it’s not nearly so easy.
I think there are two elements driving this. First, the enemies all have truly obnoxious amounts of health. It feels like every fight takes about 1.5 to 2x what it would in the original. IMO this is a hard miss. The original had a challenge mode for forcing boss completion with perfect or near-perfect mechanics. Extending the time to complete a boss will force perfect mechanics but honestly gets quite boring. I’ve so far found it pretty straightforward to learn mechanics and perform for a few minutes, but it’s not the best experience.
The second part is that the movement in the game is way messier than the first. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The first game had exceptionally clean movement, which made it a tactile delight to play. Silksong’s movement is comparatively weird. My hands are well practiced in Hollow Knight movement, and I have a hard time adjusting to the different down attack movement. This is one change of many. So some of this challenge is just a learning curve. Back to Sekiro, I had to eat dirt at the first actual boss for something like an hour to get the main mechanics under control. That’s table stakes. I also suspect that using the non-basic attack options (“tools”) is much more important than in most games in the genre, but a serious miss here is that the degree of their importance is not obvious from menus… This means that the player is not quite encouraged to experiment. For all of these I expect that the game will shake out over time, and I do like the systems even if they do not come naturally.
Last thought. The areas of the game so far have been lackluster. Hollow Knight made it very clear how the pieces tied together into a unified whole. The starting area is literally a crossroads suggesting what was once present in that land. In Silksong you start in an iron foundry that is apparently still active. I don’t know what to make of that except that the devs wanted both a lava level and red ants, which I believe got cut from Hollow Knight. If this game is eight years in the making for cutting-room floor scraps from the original it leaves much to be desired. But I’ll wait on that judgment.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Why not? Speech is fundamental for political coordination under any system, but especially in a democracy. You can sneer and call it "not being able to say nigger", but you know it's not limited to it, and that the point is disenfranchisement.
SubstackNecron
1hr ago
Do you think not being able to say nigger or keep black people out of your dad's car dealership is equivalent to being a woman in the 1890s in terms of rights lost? I am going to be honest, I really don't think that you do.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
I agree with SSCReader. You had the Cass Review, the puberty blocker ban, and the "trans women aren't women" ruling. Sure, the British police is committed to be a dystopian nightmare no matter the subject, but the UK has outright led the way worldwide in poring a bucket of cold water on the trans thing. Plus like I said, in this case, I'm pretty sure the overreach is going to cost them.
Dirty_DemSoc
Registered Demoncrat
2hr ago
Assuming Trump’s still alive and functional enough to exert the at least the same level of pressure on GOP Congress-critters that he can currently… I’d be willing to wager $100 (probably the limit on how much I’m willing to drop on this kind of bet) that either some kind of bill along those lines gets proposed, passes committee, and goes to a floor vote in at least one chamber… Or that SCOTUS effectively overturns the 22nd Amendment first, and makes it a moot point (I’m skeptical that’d be the first line of attack, but IDK).
———
[Granted, I’m predicating the above scenario on the assumption that the GOP will probably have a roughly similar narrow majority in Congress, so on the {IMO unlikely} chance they get utterly shellacked in the midterms, I guess that could affect the odds… But IDK in which direction, a rump GOP Congress might decide Trump’s past his expiration date and try to turn on him… Or they could double-down on supporting him and support the bill knowing it won’t pass so they can claim “they tried”. Hard to say.]
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2hr ago
Liberia never colonized at all
Uh, Liberia was a settler colony.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
But, really, do you actually think, prosaically, that's what 1890 was like?
no, but he often gives the impression that he thinks that's what 1890 was like, and I don't trust him to actually moderate in the heat of the moment.
I think you are right about your assessment of dysphemisms. Sometimes one needs to accept a label to stop it from having leverage on one's thinking. On the other hand, the solution to being called a monster by progressives is not actually to become a monster.
ulyssessword
2hr ago
I've put dozens of hours into Noita, but I still don't know how to resolve the tension in its game design: It both requires and punishes experimentation. If you find a mystery late in a run (whatever "late" happens to be for you, personally), then you're faced with a choice: Test it, and have a 50/50 chance of dying or learning something, or leave it alone forever. I ended up installing a resurrection mod to deal with it.
ulyssessword
2hr ago
Latest Windows 11 insanity:
Windows locks the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. An application puts some UI buttons at the bottom of its window. The app automatically resizes its window to hide the buttons behind the taskbar if you try to make it full size.
I wouldn't mind using Windows 11 if they made it a feature-complete and reliable operating system. I don't think that'll happen before they kill Windows 10.
(Fun (unverified) Fact: If you pay extra, you can get delayed access to the latest Windows features, because being on the general upgrade path is a good way to crash your computer.)
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
2hr ago
All military is relative to the competency of the belligerents. You wouldn't say that Hannibal was a incompetent loser if he was bushwhacked by a time-travelling Marine Corp Expeditionary regiment. To bring up the Ukrainians and the Russians, either side would be completely annihilated by a modern western combined-arms military in a war of maneuver, but we wouldn't say that Slavs are incompetent at war.
So who counts as 'white'?
Can non-white countries adapt 'white' ways of war?
durdenhobbes
2hr ago
I thought XP was pretty much the pinnacle of personal computing, before I switched to OSX.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2hr ago
Just got it today. I don't normally buy games when they first come out because $60 is a lot and I want to wait until they go on sale, and get enough reviews to know if it'll be worth it. But $20 for a game I'm nearly guaranteed to enjoy given how good HK is? I'm in.
Preliminary opinions are similar to yours. It feels a bit more streamlined in a way that makes it more convenient, but kind of loses some of the mystique. Same with Hornet talking instead of being a silent protagonist: it makes sense lore-wise, and might allow more options for the story to deliver, but it gives a very different feel.
It's fun to play so far though. I hope it ends up even better than HK, but even if it's slightly less good it'll still be worth the time and money.
popocatepetl
2hr ago
Could you go from person to non-person?
This is a pretty annoying leftist framing of "rights". Are children not people? Are foreigners living within another country not people? Are the mentally disabled and elderly not people?
Would you be able to live a happy life having had rights and then having them taken away from you?
Of course. Here, the example of expats above is helpful. And indeed, in practice I did experience losing freedom of speech when I was a teenager, having learned things and come to opinions that are de facto illegal in my country. The Boomers lost freedom of association in the 1960s and they managed well enough. And voting? Please. Voting is a joke. The right to vote is the right to be ruled by whoever controls the media.
SubstackNecron
3hr ago
Ok I will rephrase. Would you be able to live a happy life having had rights and then having them taken away from you? Could you go from person to non-person?
Zvi Mowshowitz had been spruiking it as a potential EA cause area.
I was rather surprised at the effectiveness, too, though.
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