311–320 of 970 posts
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Saying that trans-people who don't undergo surgery are just people with a sexual fetish is very disrespectful, I think.
Crossdressing and Transsexuality are not the same thing, as you sure know.
There's also nothing wrong with people who crossdress, by the way.
We were getting close to a fairly positive future. There are three basic constraints to material and non-material goods: - capital - labour - energy There are other raw materials, but they aren't limiting factors. For example, processed Lithium is in short supply right now, but it's not raw Lithium that's the constraint. We don't have enough Lithium mines and processing facilities. capital/labour/energy, in other wor…
The 'green revolution' broke a barrier in our ability to grow food (amount per acre), but it isn't clear if that increase can be sustained for the next 100 years-- the massive amounts of chemicals we put on the land are killing the soil.
That's before we get to climate-change threats to food production.
Or species diversity threats to food production.
Or the elimination of 80% of insect biomass in developed countries, with concordant impact on food production.
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>I’m skeptical that he can fundamentally change the incentives that make social media amplify extremist views over moderate views. “The other side is terrible” will always get more engagement than “we should work together”, even with validated identities. There have been a ton of Elon doubters over the last 10 years. I hope he is successful. We must get people back to the same team.
He said if he’s successful, that both the far left and far right would be equally unhappy, has he made any kind of statement to suggest his goal is to “get people back on the same team”? I.E. his goal is to get people to trust the platform, not each other.
Basically what he just said is that he won't be allowing violence or calls to violence.
When you boil down or remove the perjorativeness of 'extremism'. You can have a borderline extreme opinion on abortion. Either on right the right side that no abortion should be allowed or on the left side of 'abortion should be allowed even after birth' Neither of these are extremist positions though.
Extremism comes down to not being willing to entertain the other side and the requirement of using violence to solve the political divide. Those are far extreme positions.
I think we can all agree that violence isn't the answer and if some violent extremist from either side has been censored. Nobody will actually care.
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Sorry, I'm not entirely convinced. Egypt, even though it was still intact by the times of Socrates, has had a number of changes and shake-ups, rises, falls, attempts to change the ancient state religion, etc. Britain had the Glorious Revolution in 1688, the Magna Carta which amounts to a major revolution was enacted in 1215, and the Norman conquest happened in 1066. All these major events hardly occurred "a few gener…
The British revolution, which is the first revolution, is still fairly recent on a historical timescale (and the later revolutions would arguably reshape Britain more than the British one ever did). My point is exactly that 2-300 years is not a particularly long time. > Egypt, even though it was still intact by the times of Socrates, has had a number of changes and shake-ups, rises, falls, attempts to change the anci…
You're right that there's nothing comparable to the modern era: the modern era hasn't existed long enough to have collapses that total. I think you are not applying the same level of scrutiny to ancient societies as you are to modern ones.
I'd argue that the greater risk of things falling apart is economic rather than political. We've built our society on two near-ponzi schemes that are in danger of falling apart. The first is pension funds which are paid into by current workers to pay out for past workers. Pension funds inherently depend on population growth to avoid shortfalls. They rely on the fact that more people pay into them then take out from t…
You've outlined very clearly one of those errors - housing. We know that housing values can not both be an investment and affordable long-term - those things are inherently at opposition. Therefore the best price for land is zero. The way to do that is to increase the tax on the market value of a house until the market value of the house is equal to the cost of the parts and labor needed to build that house. When you do this, you have what we call a 100% land value tax. It fixes all sorts of incentives, turns NIMBY's into YIMBY's, incentivizes the best use for the land. A land value tax is not just increasing the equivalent of PI from 3.14 to 3.14159, it's setting the correct value for land exactly equal to PI.
One of the amazing side effects of the land value tax is that now that you don't need a continually increasing housing values, the amount of debt in the world is going to start growing less quickly, as a large percentage of debt comes from mortgages. When you zoom in on how that works, and why it works, what you find out is that you want debt to only increase when real productivity increases. The flipside of that is also true - you want the currency to increase equal to productivity, this is why Bitcoin is fundamentally unstable long-term and why the gold standard collapsed. The reason the land debt is bad is because land is zero-sum. It can not be created or destroyed. Any debt that is created to buy a zero-sum good will eventually turn the economy into a Ponzi scheme. So while a LVT will fix a large portion of the problem, eventually some other zero-sum asset will arrive, and that too will need to be fixed. When all zero-sum debt no longer increases the money supply, the problems that you outline will be resolved.
Once you have a money supply that increases equal to productivity, suddenly retirees will be able to save their money and retire on it without threat of inflation. We used to have this in the middle ages, but that's only because we had a flat population with no productivity increases, so a stable currency was sufficient.
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I can’t understand what you’re trying to convey. The terms fascist and nazi seem to have lost all meaning nowadays…at least to the far left.
Good god, enough with this "fascist and nazi seem to have lost all meaning" nonsense. Let's call it the "No true fascist fallacy". I could bring the corpse of Himmler here and some people would regurgitate the same "Bu-bu-but that's not actually fascist enough!". OP was basically quoting the definition of Ur-fascism by Umberto Eco. Is that historically accurate enough for you? Or should we check beforehand if whoever…
Where do you get your happiness? Amazon or your tribe? You know that this partisanship we are experiences, sounds like people are talking another language sometimes, yes?
For completeness:
--- Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God. He was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a bold man, and of great strength of hand. He persuaded them not to ascribe it to God, as if it were through his means they were happy, but to believe that it was their own courage which procured that happiness. He also gradually changed the government into tyranny, seeing no other way of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his power. He also said he would be revenged on God, if he should have a mind to drown the world again; for that he would build a tower too high for the waters to reach. And that he would avenge himself on God for destroying their forefathers. Now the multitude were very ready to follow the determination of Nimrod, and to esteem it a piece of cowardice to submit to God; and they built a tower, neither sparing any pains, nor being in any degree negligent about the work: and, by reason of the multitude of hands employed in it, it grew very high, sooner than any one could expect; but the thickness of it was so great, and it was so strongly built, that thereby its great height seemed, upon the view, to be less than it really was. It was built of burnt brick, cemented together with mortar, made of bitumen, that it might not be liable to admit water. When God saw that they acted so madly, he did not resolve to destroy them utterly, since they were not grown wiser by the destruction of the former sinners; but he caused a tumult among them, by producing in them diverse languages, and causing that, through the multitude of those languages, they should not be able to understand one another. The place wherein they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion of that language which they readily understood before; for the Hebrews mean by the word Babel, confusion ...
Things collapsing has been a predominant sentiment in every modern generation. It's unprecedented because of our collective amnesia, that regards the familiar as a stable starting point rather than a random moment in a volatile reality. Journalism was a tawdry, un-respectable business since its conception, but experienced a brief period of valor around the mid-twentieth century when industry concentration, Cold War e…
Yes, the 60s was far, far, far more disillusioned than this.
I've had some thoughts lately that these issues are closely linked with physical borders. In the old days, people with similar ideals would gather in physical proximity. Eventually, their common values would form nations. In today's world, it is trivial to find people who share similar values - but they might be on the opposite side of the world. We are doing nation building in a virtual space, but we are unable to r…
I can't think of any nation in history which was formed by such a rational and reasonable process, but I'd love to be informed otherwise.
In my estimation, nations were formed by force, usually by individuals with a functional balance of ruthlessness and charisma. Sometimes by confederations of people with the same qualities.
This is an interesting response to the original article. My TL;DR for this is something like 'Yes, information tech has always resulted in social upheaval, so notwithstanding the scale and speed of the current iteration, this isn't new. Also, it can result in international social cohesion (aka Nazis of the world unite). The thing is, it feels like the author is telling us not to worry because all of this has happened…
I think practically the best strategy is to reduce your exposure to the churn as much as reasonably possible if it's something you're worried about.