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Extinction-Level Capitalism

matthewbutterick.com

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Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#51

Post by b3ing »

dirtikiti wrote: post #32
deaux wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the US will win? Do you realize that the US has a "Secretary of War" who is a literal, unashamed Nazi? Not in the sense of "let's call all racists nazis", but a tattooed, true believer? How could we possibly live in a world where that is not obviously "a government willing to use the technology to fully silence and kill critics"? God, Idiocracy (2006) is nothing compared to World (2026).

A tattooed, true believer nazi has a Jerusalem Cross tattoo? Weird, thats like the exact opposite of a nazi.

Is that any different than the KKK that burn crosses and say they are Christian, yet hate others

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#52

Post by pixl97 »

krona wrote: post #30
deaux wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the US will win? Do you realize that the US has a "Secretary of War" who is a literal, unashamed Nazi? Not in the sense of "let's call all racists nazis", but a tattooed, true believer? How could we possibly live in a world where that is not obviously "a government willing to use the technology to fully silence and kill critics"? God, Idiocracy (2006) is nothing compared to World (2026).

> literal, unashamed Nazi He's a Christian Zionist which is the belief in the fulfilment of old testament biblical prophecy. This seems diametrically opposed to Nazism to me, ideologically. I don't know how you'd square the two.

Christian nationalists, Identity Christianity, and Nazi's are strange bedfellows. They all want chaos to occur so they can take power. Also don't expect any rational ideology out of the groups. The Christian ones commonly have beliefs that the jews killed Jesus so they are bad (or at least very complicated), and also war Jesus is coming to smite his enemies (who seems to be everyone except the Nat-C's). Actual Nazi's have quite a lot of overlapping beliefs, e.g. racism, ideas about racial purity, not actually like the jews, or really anyone that is different from them.

I was raised in proximity to a lot of people like this and got to hear all their spiels growing up, and saw a number of them end up in jail for terrorism plots.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#53

Post by somenameforme »

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #19
TacticalCoder wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... and now on top of all that we have war ... There have been war since way before capitalism was invented. Beside war, humans were doing evil things way before capitalism: south america natives torturing kids to extract as many tears as possible from them before killing them, to please the gods, comes to mind, for example. I'll never understand this fantasy people who hate on capitalism have that the world would…

Nostalgia for childhood where you had a community (family) and your needs were taken care of (dependence).

I think it's more than modern companies have, for whatever reason, become extremely scummy. They seem to have no values, ethics, or even regard for their own customers. The only thing that seems to matter to them is squeezing out a few more pennies from people, even if means the likely longer term implosion of their own companies. It's just bizarre to me how many companies, and in different industries, seem to be at war with their own customers.

I hold capitalism with a deep fondness, but I think that's largely because my formative years were in better times. For people who've never known any capitalism except for the mess we currently have? It's quite to see how they can think to themselves that anything must better.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#54

Post by pixl97 »

krona wrote: post #46
actionfromafar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of them wants an eschatological, world cleansing war. The other wants to usher in an eschatological, world cleansing war.

Nazism is as eschatological as Marxism (class vs racial struggle) and many other secular/religious ideologies with utopian endpoints. Depending on your point of view there's no difference (because the end justifies any means), but I think the True Believers of these ideologies would beg to differ.

Having grown up in some rather terrible places and having the displeasure of close proximity of American Nazi types I'd have to say that in the US there are very few German style true believer Nazi's. The modern ones have a mixed system of odd Christian and Nazi views mixed together, with a strong emphasis on racism/racial purity/and gods chosen people.

https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/christia...

>Christian Identity (CID) is an antisemitic, racist theology that gained a foothold during the Civil Rights Era and reached a prominent position within the racist right by the 1980s. “Christian” in name only, CID doctrine claims that white people, not Jewish individuals, are the true Israelites favored by God in the Bible. The movement has maintained a contentious relationship with evangelicals and fundamentalists, who believe that the return of Jewish people to Israel is essential for fulfilling end-time prophecy.

>>While the CID movement may be small, its rhetoric has seeped into more mainstream Christian nationalist ideologies, such as Dominionism.

Actual CID churches are few and far between themselves their ideas are very common in online forums and quickly adopt memes and theories that mirror their views. 'Replacement theory' is one of these that's common in more mainstream America.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#55

Post by somenameforme »

himata4113 wrote: post #49
somenameforme wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit of a tangent, but that was a view popularized by Kurzweil and is very poorly supported. The reason is that life expectancy increases over the past are overwhelmingly driven by decreases in childhood mortality. Look at more or less any sample of humanity in the past that was free from the direct effects of war/famine, and you find life expectancy for those who reach adulthood to be extremely comparable to modern t…

Isn't life expentancy 95th percentile where infant/sids deaths are excluded? Either way I am pretty sure the topmost of life expentancy has also been increasing faster. But you're right, even if we solve biological aging our brains will likely give out and will take even more generations on top of that to ever come close to solving it.

Typical life expectancy figures include childhood and infant mortality. In the past it's not like people just hit their 40s and keeled over, but rather many people didn't make it to 15. But if they did, then they tended to live comparable lives to you and I if insulated from famine/war/plague. For another random example, running for Consul in Ancient Rome had a minimum age of 42.

Here [1] is a source from a recent study overviewing shifts in life expectancy, if the word of some guy named somenameforme on the internet is, for some reason, insufficient by itself.

[1] - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/10/251026021749.h...

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#56

Post by dmurvihill »

swiftcoder wrote: post #45

There's a core problem this analysis overlooks: OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat. The Chinese labs are consistently able to replicate their LLM capabilities a few months after the fact, and then release open-weight models a few months later... The only way for "Big AI" to become a thing is for them to establish a moat, and right now the only path to that appears to be achieving regulatory capture in the US, whi…

That's why they're so keen to build out all these data centers; the massive capex is their only conceivable moat. Whether all those additional parameters actually make a competitive difference is still an open question.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#57

Post by toasty228 »

swiftcoder wrote: post #45

There's a core problem this analysis overlooks: OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat. The Chinese labs are consistently able to replicate their LLM capabilities a few months after the fact, and then release open-weight models a few months later... The only way for "Big AI" to become a thing is for them to establish a moat, and right now the only path to that appears to be achieving regulatory capture in the US, whi…

If your government weaponize AI against you it doesn't matter if the AI is American, Chinese or Uzbek

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#58

Post by hyperadvanced »

thatoneengineer wrote: post #38

I stopped reading after the first sentence. Calling something "inherently political" is a self-fulfilling prophecy and intentionally so. It consistently turns out to be an attempt to lay the groundwork for expropriation. No one called the Internet "inherently political" until people built stuff there that other people wanted to control.

I agree that “inherently political” is usually a thought terminating cliche. What kinds of technologies are conditionally political?

The internet is a bad counterexample as it originated from a department of defense project and a number of other government programs that focused on communications and military applications.

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