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Cake day: Dec 30, 2021

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It’s actually terrible.

Everyone is trying to regulate speech on the Internet, and it’s reprehensible.


If you have an Android phone, it’s possible to disable any app using adb. It’s a game changer for phones with good hardware and bloated software like Samsungs. Many of the useless features are added through apps you can disable.


Ironically, his big moment for a lot of people was pwning bill mahr, but in the meantime bill mahr has sort of turned sane, and crenshaw turned out to be insane.


Honestly, under the constitution only the congress can control money, and the things listed for money are gold and silver so they’re allowed to regulate cryptocurrency more than most things.

On the other hand, if they followed the constitution and issued gold and silver as currency then nobody would need crypto.


It’s a good thing for now, but I’m particularly wary about this government getting involved.


I was on parler, but after it went down I went all-in on self-hosting distributed solutions.




Just stop letting your kids on TikTok and it’s over.



People want to blame producers, but there’s a balance between cost and production, and if they didn’t raise prices there would be shortages and eventually scalping. Ask Nvidia.


Just a week or two ago, someone was telling me something like this was completely impossible.



They don’t want to.

Some of them do, but the GOP is the RINO party in fact.


I think that’s incredibly naive.

I don’t think the governments of the world would even need to pass any new laws to ban crypto outright.


It’s transitory inflation; Transitioning from low inflation to high inflation, and in between there’s high inflation.


Imagine: Facebook thinks ISIS is so good that they’ll create the pages for them, but they think “guy who isn’t sure he actually lost election” is so dangerous he needs to be banned for years.



Hopefully bluesky can bridge with activitypub so we can all chill out with whatever platform we want to use.


I sure hope that it’s compatible with both Lemmy and lotide. This corner of the fediverse needs more diversity in the sense of more users on more websites.


Ironically, I expect it will eliminate the upper class that’s constantly pushing to end capitalism because we won’t need people to write bullshit articles about how air is racist, and a lot of middle management that doesn’t actually do anything but pass messages along between lower management and upper management and follow procedures mindlessly.


Despite everything, youtube does platform a lot of creators I really like. As long as we don’t let them have a monopoly on video, I think that’s fine.

I even pay for a youtube premium account because I’d prefer to be the customer rather than the product. Some people think I’m an idiot for doing that, but imagine this: Ad demonetization doesn’t apply to youtube premium revenue for creators.


One big thing that the far left doesn’t understand is that just because they’re in good with the megacorps and government right now doesn’t mean that’ll always be the case. These tools they’re cheering over will be used against them 10 times harder than they’re used against comparatively tame dissidents.


I started off using friendica. The direct RSS support was one of the best things about it (and there were lots of great things about it). Ultimately I switched to something more efficient since I’m running my entire empire off of parts scavenged from roadside signs.


On fbxl social I posted an observation that boxes that amazon sent to me for free I had to spend $115 to send to their correct destination, so I absolutely believe it. You can’t lose money on each package and make up for it with volume!!!


I’m still not convinced that e-commerce is Amazon’s endgame. I think thats just an ad for their real moneymakers in services.


It’s been time to jump ship from google products for a while.

The only google product I’m still using is youtube, because while it’s imperfect it’s still a good source of media. OTOH, we’ve got alternatives growing every day.


I’ve used chatgpt in political debates, not by having it create my arguments for me, but by posting my argument and asking “is this factually accurate?”

Chatgpt is sorta lefty, so it’ll happily pick apart arguments with a center left to right bent. Helps though because you’ve already modified your post to manage obvious criticisms.


The moment a viable alternative exists, PayPal broke their covenant with users and so they will die.


I set up a freeforum on fbxl lotide. Besides being able to sub directly on fbxl lotide, it’s also something compatible with mastodon et al just by following @freeforum@lotide.fbxl.net.

If any of the current freeforum regulars want mod, I’m happy to give it.

I don’t have my heart set on freeforum being hosted on my server, but I’d prefer it be somewhere we can access from the fediverse. Exploding-heads is a good site too.



Whether we like it or not, we’re raised by our parents, and our parents have power over us until we become adults. They’re the ones who can get us to labor, and they’re the ones who decide how we go to school.

The problem is that at some point we need to have some sort of basis for society. In the past, it was religion, community, and family. Unfortunately, we’ve seen all 3 get heavily corrupted over time. The last pillar is family, and it’s crumbling fast.

So hypothetically, let’s say we give children more rights to make decisions. At that point you might look at some fringe cases where they can go off and do better than they’d do with their parents, but it might also open a lot of kids up to being exploited.

The current law regarding child labor in the US is the Fair Labor Standards Act. For non-agricultural jobs, children under 14 may not be employed, children between 14 and 16 may be employed in allowed occupations during limited hours, and children between 16 and 17 may be employed for unlimited hours in non-hazardous occupations. My gut says that this is all very reasonable. I don’t think I want kids working before 14, and I’m not sure I want them working full time between 14 and 16, and I’m not sure I want even 16 and 17 year old in hazardous occupations.

Let’s imagine a situation where a child under 14 could work and unlimited number of hours. I can see a few scenarios that are worrisome. In some, you might have a parent pull their kid out of school to work full time solely for their own benefit. In another, you might have unscrupulous employers trying to coherce kids into employment and because they’re just dumb kids they get exploited. There’s a reason that these laws were originally instituted.

On the other hand, there’s a potential benefit to child exploitation. One of the reasons the birth rate has been falling is that children are highly expensive and a parent needs to fully support them until 18 years of age. In agrarian societies, kids were considered wealth because they could be put to work on the farm. In modern societies, kids cannot work. Therefore, people don’t have kids because they can’t afford to feed another mouth for 18 years.

The trend in the U.S. in recent years has been toward expansion of compulsory schooling to reduce dropout rates. According to the latest figures from the National Center for Education Statistics, the majority of states now require that students be either 17 or 18 before they can drop out. Since 2000, the number of states that place the cutoff at 16 years of age has dropped from 29 to 15.

This trend has occurred because it’s inarguable that on average, students who drop out of school have worse life outcomes than those who do not. A student without a high school diploma will earn on average a full $8,000 less per year, and the high school educated individual isn’t earning money hand over fist as it is.

There’s a correlation/causation argument to be made here. The sort of person who on average finishes high school may have a much different life situation than the person who on average drops out. Perhaps those people are just self-selecting for the sort of habits and attitudes that would result in lower life income on average so helping more people graduate wouldn’t be helpful because a piece of paper won’t modify their ultimate behaviors. On the other hand, we know that a lot of jobs require high school and so someone without that diploma loses the ability to take those jobs down the line, so that could be a causal factor.

You could make an argument that forcing people to go through school is contributing to credential inflation, where those jobs that don’t really require trigonometry, english literature, or advanced science require the high school diploma anyway because there’s a large supply of graduates for no good reason, and that is making life more difficult for drop-outs.

So… aaaaaall this being said, that comes back to the fundamental question: What sort of freedoms ought a child have?

In general, the standard has been a “good of the child” standard. Children can’t consent to many things because the idea is it’s better for them to be forced to live somewhat longer before doing so. That includes sex, debt, contracts, and work. The lifelong negative consequences of engaging in these too early are known and so it’s desired that a youth have sufficient life experience and neurological development before making such decisions. On the other hand, the same standard would mean that parents are allowed, encouraged, even forced to have their kids do things that the state has deemed important “for the good of the child”, including going to school in some form or another. Someone needs to make the decision, and although some parents aren’t good parents, many are and they’re a preferable choice to the state.


The real question is, was it the ai, or was it the journalists who had already decided that an arbitrary thing like spilling mustard on your pants is xenophobia and he was just getting caught up to the latest thing?


the way to defeat putin is to kill all the poor people.

The more dead poor people we have, the more Putin loses!


Antarctic midge (Belgica antarctica) is the continent’s only true insect, and has the smallest genome
https://www.livescience.com/47311-antarctic-insect-smallest-genome.html
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Admit it: running fediverse sites is fun and addictive!


It’ll be ok, brother. Not today, nor tomorrow, but someday.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul2iW3mWl90 One thing that was really interesting about this video is near the end where he makes a distinction between fear based societies and anxiety based societies. Witness today where people are anxious about climate change 150 years from now but have no concern for food and fuel shortages today that can, are, and will continue killing the world's poorest people.
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Honestly, I don’t know. Looks bad, but what actually happened? Why were they so bizarrely riled up?


If we did then he would have been President.


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x-uDnlGJRdk

Harry Potter and the picture of what looked like a pile.of ash


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfOd-kDs5g4 I don't really vtuber, but this is a great video haha
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The Visual Cliff Psychology Experiment | Plainly Difficult Documentary
https://invidious.fbxl.net/watch?v=oK1UgqHz7_U A relevant passage from The Graysonian Ethic: "In a lot of ways you do not realize, the human race is entirely defined by our biology. Many of your deepest-rooted fears and ambitions are written into your blood, in a library that was passed down by millions of generations of successful creatures going all the way back to the single celled organisms that first spawned within the primordial ooze."
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A modest suggestion
So I was thinking: we should finally follow the science to it's obvious conclusion: make it mandatory under the law to eat, drink, sleep, and breathe. Anti eaters, anti drinkers, anti sleepers, and anti breathers will push back against these new rules, but we need to do it to save lives.
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This giant model stopped a terrible plan
https://invidious.fbxl.net/watch?v=i70wkxmumAw Good science is humble, and is often wrong, and admits it. This is a really cool story about that.
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Left-wingers mistake capitalism for something it is not, and cast all the sins of humanity upon it.
Throughout most of human history, societies were not primarily organized around the principles of capitalism, which include a market economy based on the exchange of goods and services for profit, private ownership of the means of production, and the pursuit of individual wealth and accumulation. Instead, many societies were organized around different economic systems, such as command economy, feudalism, communitarianism, tribal communism, or some hybrid of several economic systems. Capitalism as a dominant economic system only began to emerge in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, and it was not until the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries that it became the dominant economic system in the Western world. Most societies historically were centered around different forms of strong central state control. The creation of a strong central state is often associated with the development of agriculture, as agriculture requires a complex system of organization and regulation to support large-scale food production. A strong central state is able to provide the infrastructure and resources needed to support agriculture, such as irrigation systems, transportation networks, and markets. Agriculture is typically more productive than hunting and gathering, and it allows societies to support larger populations and create a more stable and reliable food supply. As a result, agriculture often crowds out hunting and gathering as the dominant mode of food production, as it allows societies to support larger populations and to produce a more diverse range of foods. However, the adoption of agriculture also has a number of consequences for societies, including changes in social and economic organization, the development of social hierarchies, and the loss of traditional ways of life. In many cases, the adoption of agriculture has led to the displacement of hunter-gatherer societies, as they are unable to compete with the productivity of agriculture and are often forced to adapt to new ways of life. Overall, the creation of a strong central state is often associated with the development of agriculture, as it provides the resources and infrastructure needed to support large-scale food production. However, the adoption of agriculture also has significant social and economic consequences, and it can lead to the displacement of hunter-gatherer societies. There are a number of examples of economies that are explicitly non-capitalist where environmental and human rights abuses took place. The forests England were heavily exploited during the medieval period, as the demand for wood and other forest products increased with the growing population and the development of the economy. This led to widespread deforestation, as large areas of forest were cleared to meet the demand for timber, fuel, and other products. The deforestation of England had significant environmental consequences, including soil erosion, loss of habitat, and the decline of many species. Easter Island in South Asia was an island where the people were apparently wiped out as the people focused all their resources on building giant stone heads. The economy of Easter Island was based on a system of subsistence agriculture and fishing, and the island's resources were collectively owned and managed by the community as a whole. The Rapa Nui people did not engage in trade or commerce with other societies, and there was no system of money or currency on the island. The Mayan civilization was formed from people who diverged from eurasian civilizations 20,000 years ago and despite that had its own set of environmental and human rights issues. Some of the environmental problems faced by the Maya civilization included deforestation, soil erosion, and water pollution, which were the result of the civilization's reliance on agriculture and urban development. The Maya civilization also had a hierarchical social structure, and it is believed that there were significant inequalities in terms of wealth, power, and access to resources. The ruling class of the Maya civilization, which included the nobles, priests, and rulers, enjoyed a higher standard of living than the common people, who were often subject to harsh working conditions and had few rights or protections. Now all that being said, I don't mean to insinuate that capitalism is an economic system without sin either. England under industrialist capitalism also suffered deforestation and the london fog was a result of mass air pollution from burning coal, and the industrial revolution may have led to massive increases in quality of living, but it also led to massive wealth inequality and injustice. Today, we live with many legacies of pure greed, including the bulk of the United States being a fundamentally different ecosystem then it would have been prior to colonization, and I would argue the United States is one of the most capitalist civilizations in history so it can't be discounted. Clearly there's a lot of issues with wealth inequality there too, and it's indisputable that compared to the post baby boomer economic boom the average worker and the average CEO have much different lives comparatively speaking. That said, I don't need to prove capitalism is a system without faults to prove that it is not the root cause of all problems in the world. The pursuit of money and the pursuit of political power are two different goals that have driven human behavior throughout history. Both the pursuit of money and the pursuit of political power can be motivated by a desire for advantage and a desire to gain power and control over others. No matter what economic system people live under, individuals will always crave advantage compared to others and will use the systems available to them to achieve that end. In capitalist societies, the pursuit of money is often seen as a primary goal, and people may use their wealth and resources to gain influence and power. In non-capitalist societies, the pursuit of political power may be more important, and people may use their connections and influence to gain control over resources and decision-making. Ultimately, the pursuit of money and the pursuit of political power are both driven by a desire for advantage and a desire to gain power and control over others. While the specific systems that people use to achieve these goals may vary, the underlying motivations are often the same.
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Have to admit, I underestimated AI
Having used ChatGPT for a few days now, it's on a completely different level. I thought AI wasn't going to be a big deal because every AI I've ever seen puts out what relatively speaking is garbage, but I've had extended conversations with it on very diverse topics, and while I can see cracks, I can't see very many. If I were all the english majors out there, I'd be very afraid because language models like this have the potential to make the tiny minority of those with 9-5 jobs in their field just as unemployable as the rest of them. If AI becomes absolutely massive, it's going to be a strangely conservative force, talking to it. By definition it can't really come up with ideas it's never been fed, so if people rely on it to find answers for them, it'll only provide answers someone else has already come up with to an extent. The answers might be even left or woke, but the answers could become trapped in time, and eventually it could end up a self-reinforcing thing like wikipedia, where someone says something on wikipedia that's wrong, journalists use wikipedia for research, the incorrect thing gets said in the media, which wikipedia can then use to justify it's incorrect thing.
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Covid infected 37 million in china in one dY
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-23/china-estimates-covid-surge-is-infecting-37-million-people-a-day?leadSource=uverify%20wall Clearly everyone in china has now died. China is just a giant ghost city now. Nobody is alive on account of them all being dead.
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https://video.fbxl.net/w/p/wncXRsWk4ucwPiGzmm2YvP The Graysonian Ethic deepfake audio book is fully released now, and this weekend I uploaded the whole thing to peertube. Here's a playlist with everything laid out in order. Totally playable without an account on fbxl social. It's also on youtube if you want to see it there.
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Discussion about doxxing and the values around it
On the other side of the fediverse, @realcaseyrollins@social.teci.world brought up an interesting point, that the concept of doxxing being something with values around it is relatively new. Thought it could make an interesting conversation here. On one hand, this isn't really a thing that was discussed much for most of history. Publishing the personal information of a person who did a thing didn't really have any moral connotations to it. Under the ideal of freedom of speech, it should be considered acceptable to publish any information about a person. On the other hand, even from a libertarian mindset and from a constitutional perspective, there are limitations to freedom of speech. For example, you're not allowed to commit fraud. You're not allowed to perjure, you're not allowed to lie about someone else in a way that causes them damage, do you not allowed to claim that you are a police officer when you're not, you're not allowed to represent that you have professional licensure you don't have, there's a lot of things that you're not allowed to do. Then from another perspective, it's important to understand the difference between what is law and what is something else, any taboos against doxing aren't enshrined in law anywhere, it's just a dick move. On the other hand there, when you have a rule on a site like Twitter that is so big and so ubiquitous, even though it isn't a law per se, it can effectively stifle speech to a similar extent because of the Monopoly Powers involved. So getting past that, why exactly would someone who values Free speech consider doxing to be something worth considering to be a taboo or against the local instance rules? To me, I think that that really boils down to a change in the nature of communication. Prior to the internet, there was a non-trivial amount of effort involved with communication. In order to talk to someone on the phone, you needed to get their phone number, you needed to pick up a phone, you needed to dial the phone, and that phone call if it wasn't local could cost a lot of money. Likewise, if you wanted to send a specific message to a million people, you would have to print off a million copies of that thing, then you would need to buy a million stamps, and a million envelopes, or alternatively you'd have to walk up to a million houses and drop them in a million mailboxes. Today, if you are among the anointed few in big tech, you can get a message out to millions of people for free. The hackers who released the trucker convoy data (and keep in mind that hacking as a relatively low risk crime of breaking into computer systems didn't exist 40 years ago -- prior to that, if you wanted to steal data from a charity you would have to break into the offices of that charity) didn't need to print out a thousand copies of that data, they just had to post it online once. At that point their exploits were carried all around the world. From there, people who supported this cause had their names and email addresses and postal codes out there, and there's an entire planet full of people who might decide that they are offended, and then from there it is an incredibly low cost operation to start spamming people's employers with emails. The human brain evolved in a world of a 50 person society. In that world, you and everyone you knew made up about 50 people. Occasionally you might run into another tribe, in which case there would likely be a war. Outsiders were dangerous. In a 50 person society, social proof is incredibly important. If 10 other people in your 50 person society back a person, that person probably has some serious power. If 49 other people back that person, then that person is basically the king. I contract, if you can find 50 people on the planet Earth who disagree with you about something, congratulations that's not very impressive. But our brains tell us that it is. The key to all of this tangent is realizing that there is a particular danger to the difference between the way that our brains are wired, and the way that the internet age actually is. The famous example for first amendment case of yelling fire in a crowded theater isn't actually against the law. However, the reason that such dicta was mentioned is the self-evident danger of crowds in a physical space. If you say a thing that causes a riot in a physical space, it is clear that something bad has happened especially if it's based on things that are either not true or partially true or presented in a highly emotional way meant to manipulate. If one whips a digital crowd into a frenzy and a similar way, seems to me that innocent people could definitely be trampled in the same way. If such a thing isn't explicitly illegal, I can understand why theater owners would ban you for doing it. I said before that the left doesn't come up with bad ideas, they just are stupid about them and shut off their brains and turn them into universals when they are not. The idea of stochastic terrorism isn't based on a stupid idea. If you behave in certain ways that you are reasonably convinced will result in harm against another person, particularly when you're aiming a large group at that person, that certainly seems to be a thing. Intent seems to play into it as well. Accidentally revealing details about a certain person is patently different than intentionally revealing details about a certain person alongside a bunch of reasons why people should go off and lynch that person. I guess arguably it's the call for lynching that is the problem not the release of personal information. At the end of the day, I think the best solution to the problem of doxing would be to change in the neopuritanical culture. We really need to stop worrying about what every single person is doing and thinking and saying, and demanding that they all agree with us in every way. That cultural change may not be possible. In a large enough group you always have bad actors, and the internet provides the largest group available. So that being the case, allowing people their anonymity and at the very least making breaking that without consent a taboo, and maybe enforcing it at the service level may be the right thing to do. Anyway, this is mostly just a brain dump, what are your thoughts?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPDK7cO-JPs
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc I've been saying a lot lately that these people I'm up against would have been guarding the railcars to Auschwitz. This theory is chillingly accurate to today, but was written about the actual people who would end up a few years after it was written guard the railcars to Auschwitz.
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[longpost]Establishment politics is boomer politics, and we can’t continue with boomer politics as usual.
I do want to start this by saying that none of this is meant as an attack on individual baby boomers, or the struggles they went through. I know that despite the narrative I'm about to craft it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. I reference the stagflation of the 1970s or the recession of the 1990s, but those were real things that real people had to struggle through. Not knowing if a Tsar Bomba was going to hit your town and vaporize everything you cared about, that was a real thing. Regardless, the model I'll paint is reasonably accurate enough broad model in my view to help us choose a new path forward. The baby boomers, those born after 1945 until sometime around the late 60s, have been a dominant cultural force for easily 50 years, but the world they grew up in is not the world we live in, so we need to stop looking at the world through their lens. The boomers grew up in Eden, a golden age of unprecedented prosperity for the most part. Even when there were problems (and eventually problems started to show up), the systems were so powerful they could hit the accelerator pedal in the moment to get out of them, such as when Ronald Reagan got America out of stagflation by doubling the federal debt while Paul Volker cranked up interest rates and that was practical because there wasn't much debt out there. They as a cohort were able to purchase houses cheaper than anyone since because the world was used to high interest rates and prices were proportionately affected by that, but held those assets as interest rates dropped causing proportional rises in the prices of the assets they held. They were able to go to college relatively cheaply but even if they didn't there was a strong industrial base in western countries that allowed people to leave school and get a job they could raise a family on. They experienced the largest technological boom in the history of the world, and with the economic prosperity and freedom they experienced they were free to liberalize in ways it's hard to explain today. As they aged, they became the dominant owners of stocks and economic policies were laid out in such a way that their assets would explode in value. Anyone who has had an argument with their boomer parents or grandparents about how "it's easy to get a job" or "it's easy to get a house" or any one of a lot of different arguments knows what I'm talking about. Their reality is fundamentally different than those who came after them. This directly results in the deintellectualising of society because boomers don't have any existential need to build accurate mental models of the world to protect themselves and thrive by predicting future trends in an unpredictable world -- their world is like a garden of Eden that magically provides during the good times and protects during the bad times. We've seen this with the lowest common denominator politics, and people can totally get by just following a few simplistic ideologies that never have to change with the world, because don't worry -- everything will be fine no matter what. My father is a boomer. He grew up for quite some time without running water or electricity. He's gone from that world to a world today where he's got fiber optic internet piped directly into his home and he can order virtually anything directly to his front doorstep in 2 days. One reason so many technologies were able to be adopted so quickly is that the boomers adopted them. We say "boomer" as a pejorative for someone who can't get technology, but they've adapted later in life to virtually every technology on earth, and they're the ones who built a lot of the stuff we rely on. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are boomers. Richard Stallman is a boomer. This has led to the concept that new technologies or ideas are generally automatically good and people who oppose them are just incapable of handling the new thing. I had this directed ideology directed at me when I questioned the new interface in Windows 8. "You're just an old man who doesn't understand new things! Step aside, it's time for a new generation to take over!" The boomers were raised by those who experienced World War 2, and created this mythologicalized version of World War 2 that's essentially star wars. There's good vs. evil, and the evil is faceless and irredeemable. Despite living in Eden, the Boomers already realized there was a problem with their life philosophy. The 1983 hit film "The Big Chill" far predated films like The Matrix or Fight Club in identifying that the world people were creating was hollow and empty, and that people were losing connections with each other. Who cares? We'll just make our numbers go higher have some sex and that'll help the pain go away! One thing it's important to understand is that they aren't bad people, they were just a product of their time (as we are, and I'm pretty certain the Millennials will be judged far more harshly by their children and grandchildren than by their parents, so we'll get our turn). It's easy to be beneficent when you're living in Eden. The attitudes I'll be talking about are natural given what happened around them. Among the different core beliefs is there's always plenty to go around so we can afford to be generous and to look the other way on thing. It's a moral good to dismantle old systems and old moral frameworks. If there is a belief that is literally true but has bad connotations then it's immoral to have that belief. We should try to get everything now with nothing saved for the future since they experienced the largest quality of life boom ever and lived with the spectre of nuclear war at all times. Judging others morally is the worst thing you can do. These are all luxury beliefs one can hold when there's no immediate existential threat, there's so much food everyone is getting fat, there's so many homes people are buying multiple, and America has most of the stuff. One line a historian I like talks about how "A strong and honorable person looks for flaws they hate in others and then look for those in themselves, in that evil cuts across all things, including our own hearts, allowing greater empathy when others fail. However, the degenerate refuses to judge themselves against objective moral standards and then create purely evil bogeymen as 'others' to justify their superiority against." This is in the context of painting the Nazis as the total evil to compare ourselves against. Personally, I've seen this worldview in other ways. As America's government engaged in evil during the war on Terror, I'd see people justify mass violations of basic human rights as "Well look at Syria! Look at Iran!" as if those people being evil justified our evil because we weren't being as evil as the most evil people we could find. Boomer politics don't want to judge anyone for anything... unless they're a group that has been decided upon as evil such as nazis, racists, sexists, misogynists, etc. We see this taken advantage of by politicians today and if we were using our brains we'd realize how absurd and offensively reductive it is. "Everyone who disagrees with me is in a group we've all agreed is irredeemably evil and so we can do anything we want to them as a result including mass violations of basic human rights because they aren't humans, they're nazis!" The permissiveness and the focus on hedonistic pleasure rather than eudimonia comes directly from the boomers. The idea that high school is the best time of your life really started with them. The idea that partying and sex and drugs are a moral good in themselves is at its core a boomer idea. Like him or hate him, Donald Trump is the most boomer president ever. He's loud, views the world in binary terms, has a personally degenerate lifestyle including excess and debauchery including sexual debauchery, has an unintellectual view of the world and is extremely narcissistic. He makes short slogans using simple language and promises things will be fixed right away. He doesn't focus on any traditional values such as honor, gravitas, or duty. He isn't actually religious, but especially on the campaign trail doesn't negatively judge those who are. Ironically though, his most influential detractors are the exact same. They don't make arguments. They just keep yelling "You're a nazi!" over and over again because the world must be separated into good and evil. The press (even the independent press) plays red rover taking two sides of the former president either being the worst evil of this generation or the greatest hero since the last one. There are no shades of grey, there is no disassembling different parts of the man or his presidency. Even stuff intended to appear intellectual is a simulacra of intellectualism, simple ideas wrapped up in a nice suit. The thing is, we're no longer in the garden of Eden. There were recessions in the late 70s, early 80s, early 90s, in 2001, 2003, and 2008 and each time the political world (including the millennials who are arguably more boomer than the boomers in some of their broken views of the world) cheered as a simple but dangerous solution of hitting the accelerator pedal with debt and later money printing powered through times that were supposed to hurt. Those simplistic policies may have worked in the short-term, but every time they were used the entire fabric holding Eden together was damaged a little more, and at this point it's inevitable we've entered a period of pain we can't escape from with easy solutions. Witness the United Kingdom which just tried the "just cut taxes" solution and ultimately was required to increase taxes to the highest level since world war 2. the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and its response is an excellent example of boomer politics, and the dangers we're facing. The simple solution of "just shut everything down! Everyone will starve if we do that? Just send everyone free money! There's an experimental vaccine? Stop being such a Luddite and take it, everything will work out, we live in Eden! You don't agree? You're not one of the bad guys, are you?" was implemented, and even simple discussion of the ramifications of different policies was effectively banned by big tech (and I see you out there small tech platforms that did the same) I'm pretty sure that was the last bite at the forbidden fruit. The consequences of simplistic policies are now impossible to escape. We can spend more money to get people out of things, but debt is getting more expensive for everyone. We can print money to keep debt cheaper, but that increases inflation. The boomer existence where there was plenty of everything and you never wanted for anything besides a couple scary times at the gas station in the 70s isn't real anymore, we're no longer living in Eden. Everything that's happening right now was predictable. I know because I predicted it, and acted upon those predictions to successfully make my life better, and I'm not alone. I'm not a hyper-academic, but what I've got is my eyes open and a desire to build a realistic model of the world so I can predict what happens next. While the talking heads on TV who are ostensibly paid to help us understand what's happening act as if nobody could possibly have predicted anything that occurred. Of course they're failing to predict this, their models are based on living forever in Eden. We have been kicked out of the Eden of our parents and grandparents. We can't close our eyes and pretend our actions don't have consequences anymore. The past 50 years has been marked by decadence, a decline in governance, philosophy, morality, social life, and practicality that was enabled by an unprecedented golden age of plenty caused by demographic factors and several technological booms the likes of which the world has never seen before. That's not to say there haven't been positives of this era, but it isn't sustainable. In history, we've been in moments like this before. During the Muslim invasions of India around 1100, rather than improve their armies, the Hindu Rajas built more temples to their Gods so they would be granted victory resulting in massive losses despite a 100 to 1 numbers advantage and virtually all of India being conquered. At the same time, the Song dynasty was being attacked from the North by the Liao, and instead of actually doing anything to protect their country they just wrote poems about how much they wanted to win instead of doing anything that would help. Much later, the arrogant Qing dynasty would look at shipments of modern firearms from England and say "There's nothing we need here" which ultimately led to the end of imperial China altogether. Rome famously was decadent during its decline and there were massive parties and orgies while the country was slowly picked apart until the republic fell to dictatorship. These all happened because the good times led to unrealistic mental models of what the world was like, and when the good times ended acting upon those models led to disaster. The boomers were a product of their time, but so too we must be. The answer is not a binary choice between liberals and conservatives. Both those ideologies as manifested by the boomers fail to reach effective solutions to the problems we face and while we can take some good ideas from both, they must be largely rejected as decadent in our current times. Other people have a list of other ideologies we can slot into, but the fact is that we don't need 200 year old theories about a world we don't live in. That's no less decadent. Millennials have largely inherited the attitudes from their parents without realizing it. While attacking Boomers, it's usually for not being boomer enough. Gen Z is the first generation in 100 years to be more conservative than their parents, and I expect that trend to continue as kids rediscover the wisdom of their ancestors in the much more brutal era ahead. We need a new intellectualism intended to reconnect with the reality of the world. Reality outside our perception is the ultimate arbiter of truth as the Chinese, Indians, and Romans discovered, and we need to reconnect with truth by investigating reality. We need to build true and honest mental models to understand the world, and we need to reconcile our ethical framework with the reality of the true and honest world, and we need to come up with ideas both new and old put together in ways that actually deal with the world that exists around us. Those models need to be multi-order. Boomer politics stops at first order thinking. "poor people? give them money. Homeless? Put them in houses." That's fine in Eden, but in the real world everything is a trade-off. First order thinking leads to big solutions that end up genocidal. We need to grow up and accept that we need to make decisions that will have bad outcomes for people we don't want to hurt because that's what being an adult means -- When you leave Eden, decisions stop being easy and you have to choose between hurting one person or hurting another. It's going to mean a lot of sacred cows need to be slaughtered, and that does mean your sacred cow too.
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https://www.theblaze.com/news/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-woke-esg "Ya, hehe. I had to be, it's what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those who get f***ed by it. By this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths [sic] so everyone likes us."
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https://youtu.be/wKBMRkFIdm0 This video is extraordinary in my eyes, it describes the current state of our western world.
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Sorry folks, running a quick federation test…
I've been commenting on everyone's posts for like a week and it doesn't look like any of them made it through. Testing to see what's broken...
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https://nitter.net/martsharter/status/1589756693155840000#m
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https://babylonbee.com/news/galactic-empire-requests-amnesty-for-anyone-who-may-have-gotten-carried-away-and-blown-up-a-planet/?utm_source=fediverse
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https://rmx.news/germany/german-domestic-intelligence-agents-are-running-hundreds-of-fake-right-wing-extremist-social-media-accounts/
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If this were happening to me, I'd be so livid I don't know what I'd do. They'd better hope they can resolve it in court with a huge cash settlement, because they wouldn't like the next step.
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Pierre Poilievre won the conservative leadership in Canada tonight
It wasn't even close, 68%. Poilievre supported the trucker convoy, is explicitly anti WEF, and is running on freedom, fiscal responsibility and major changes at the bank of Canada to reign in inflation. There were a lot of great candidates, but in my opinion he was the best. Now he just needs to win the next election.
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https://torontosun.com/news/national/naci-now-suggests-canadians-consider-a-covid-19-booster-every-90-days/wcm/d58a2b0c-4ec1-465e-ab62-32d6e0fbcc96/amp/ I and many people I know got really sick when they took the vaccine. The idea that you'd willingly put yourself through that every 90 days is genocidal. People WILL die. You can't make millions of people that sick every 90 days and not kill people.
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https://youtu.be/_ViWl8UtMPg
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https://m.jpost.com/science/article-715147/ The Saccorhytus looks somewhat like a spikey jelly bean with pursed lips and is described by the University of Bristol as "resembling an angry Minion."
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the canadian is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be … unnatural
Did you ever hear the tragedy of Fuhrer Trudeau The Wise? I thought not. It's not a story the constitutionalists would tell you. It's a Fascist legend. Fuhrer Trudeau was a Fuhrer, so powerful and so wise he could use the State to influence the banks to silence peaceful protesters… He had such a knowledge of the dark side that he could even keep the ones he cared about from being criticised. The dark side of the State is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural. He became so powerful… the only thing he was afraid of was losing his power, which eventually, of course, he did. Unfortunately, he taught his pomeranian lapdog in a turban everything he knew, then his pomeranian lapdog canceled him in his sleep. Ironic. He could save others from cricicism, but not himself.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zyQc77c5FQ&t=13s I've started releasing "the Graysonian Ethic:Lessons for my unborn son" in audio book form for free on youtube. Every Saturday a new chapter is released. The preface is now up at the link above, and every Saturday at 7AM EST a new chapter will be released until December.
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Wait… Regarding Elon Musk’s kids…
I can't think of a more Elon Musk move than having 9 children and claiming his kids are literally saving the planet from destruction. Think about it for a moment. It's pretty funny.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw-FbwmzPKo Here's a longer documentary on the situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA8jIgvA8fo In 1917, an ammo ship exploded in Halifax harbor. It ended up the largest non-nuclear explosion in history. One story that really resonated with me was one of the telegraph operators. He had a chance to escape and started running, then turned back and wrote out a telegraph message. "Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbour making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good bye, boys." The last part of his message turned out to be true. The explosion totally wiped out that part of the city, and knocked the hands off his pocketwatch. The postmodernists think everything is just a drive for more power. Willingly dying to save between 200 and 700 people, how does that result in getting more power?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcnQJd_XRQQ I have a chapter in The Graysonian Ethic where I talk about my family, and I talk about my grandfather, who was a decorated war hero in WWII, the Italian theatre. He grew increasingly upset watching the free country he fought for become less free, and he died long before the woke era. I can't help but think that we need to remember their sacrifice, and what they made that sacrifice for. They didn't do it because they hated Germany, they did it because they loved the countries they were a part of. The Germans were the enemy in combat, but they were considered other people just doing their job. The other thing I remember is why the National Socialists were able to take over Germany; Everyone told the German people that they were monsters for decisions nobody outside the ruling class made, everyone told them to pay reparations for things they didn't personally do, and everyone in Germany suffered under those reparations. Tell everyone they're the devil long enough, and if some asshole with a tiny moustache says "No, we're good people and we're gonna fight back" then things got bad because they might've been good people, but he wasn't. The way that the winners built up Japan and Germany after World War 2 was the epoch of wisdom, wisdom we've sadly lost to time. Lest we forget, but we as a society have forgotten.
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The left lost liberalism, that will be why they keep losing.
Liberal values only work when they're universal. If I'm allowed to live my life the way that I want, and you're allowed to live without your life the way that you want, and that's a compromise that's a lot easier to make. The authoritarian bend has changed the calculus. "use the pronouns or we're sending the police to arrest you" -- oh? well that's fine, but you don't get to ask just be left alone anymore. "take our vaccines or you aren't allowed to have a life anymore" oh? well that's fine, but don't expect me to get worked up if you want to get an abortion and can't. "We're going to use schools your kids are forced to go to by the state to indoctrinate your kids" oh? Well that's fine but I hope you don't think you've got a blank slate, you will be fought against. Losing liberalism ends the moral framework the left had benefited from for generations, and the sooner they realize this the sooner they can come back to the light. It becomes a new classism. Instead of liberalism for everyone, it's different levels of freedom for people of different spots on the political bingo card. Hopefully after they're absolutely trounced in the next few elections around the world they are reminded that they aren't entitled to votes and they need messages that apply to more than just a few people.
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How should rich people be taxed? Are there any other considerations to be made?
Saw this question on lemmy and figured I'd ask it over here on the internet libre
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hid9bDnSeok He had an idea that the one technique would be better for the disk, but he had no idea how much better. Really surprising results.
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https://youtu.be/Q4Zpxxk0wb8
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https://youtu.be/Q4Zpxxk0wb8
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The picture of Dorian Gray
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel by Oscar Wilde. It is a story where a man sells his soul so that a painting ages and experiences the consequences of his own sin in his stead, so he can live a life of debauchery and sin forever without consequence. I had a thought today, that in many ways the west, and the US in particular, and its relationship with China or other countries that aren't in "the club" is sort of like this story. In the story, he is cruel to others, he murders, he engages in sexual promiscuity without regard of the consequences, and spends time ian opium dens because the photo suffers the ill effects rather than him. The west consumes so much. Every home has a big screen TV. Every poor person has one or more premium smart phones. Even the poor can find a place to live that compared to many parts of the world would be considered a castle. In the story, he stays young and beautiful and unaffected by his crimes. The west gets to stay rich, pay all its workers very well and treat them well(how is a grocery clerk treated in the west compared to an engineer in China?), gets to maintain its environment in a pristine fashion, and doesn't have to use nearly as much fossil fuels or polluting chemicals compared to the countries it relies upon. Despite that, it takes all the output of the factories it considers itself too good to have. It insists on not doing dirty, dangerous, difficult work and insists that its people probably don't want those jobs anyway. Meanwhile, China and other countries like it pay their workers trivial amounts and don't treat them well at all relatively speaking because the work actually needs to get done. The environmental impact of the industry is well documented. There are plenty of dirty, dangerous, difficult jobs done in these places. The west gets to sneer at these countries doing the dirty work they don't want to do, sneer at the reality of treating workers poorly and paying them poorly, sneer at the pollution created. In the novel, near the end he realizes the gravity of his crimes and that he must repent; so he stabs at the painting, and in that moment the wages of his compounded sin are paid. His body ages quickly and he dies himself. I can't help but look at the situation in the US and think that time is coming. The US and others will stab at China and these other countries, and will pay the wages of sin it wants to pretend it has not accumulated. I've called that incoming moment "The day of the ant and the grasshopper", alluding to the fable of the ant and the grasshopper where an ant works hard and saves and is careful and the grasshopper lazes around and takes it easy, and winter comes and the ant is ok but the grasshopper freezes to death begging the ant for help; because people who have not built anything, people who haven't put anything away, people who have enjoyed the fruits of the incongruity without recognizing it isn't just or sustainable, they will find themselves in the midst of a long winter, and no matter what they believe... The ants can't save them.
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Russia is an economic scapegoat.
Hey, don't go to war. Obviously. Nobody likes war. War sucks. Putin, you suck for going to war. Now, all that said. Supply chains were already having crazy issues last year. Fossil fuels were already on track to be constrained this year, that was projected last year. Food prices were already on track to be rising massively this year, that was projected last year. In early 2020, right around the first lockdowns, I explicitly predicted stagflation. We're experiencing the flation, the stag is coming right up within the next year. I bought a generator and heaters and a several week supply of gasoline and gas cans and emergency food for the first time in my lifetime, right before all those things actually are relevant for the first time in my entire lifetime -- all before Russia attacked Ukraine. I didn't have any idea that Russia was going to attack Ukraine. What I knew was that most of the world shut down all production by fiat and then handed wads of cash to everyone to keep them buying what remained. That isn't sustainable. It's a recipe for exactly the situation we're in right now. Russia invading is just icing on the cake. Everything was already getting scarce before Russia. I had to spend weeks going to every supermarket in town to find formula for my son because there was none anywhere. Meanwhile we just had the largest wealth transfer in the history of the world from the poor, working class, and middle class to the richest people in the history of the world. Today the poor, working class, and middle class are struggling under the weight of the invisible tax levied upon them so wall street bankers can stay fat. It's frustrating watching the global establishment play everyone like a fiddle, and we all just sing the tune they tell us to sing. They did this to us, and we're sitting there nodding like morons as they point at someone who was largely off doing his own thing while the damage was actually done.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4UR0MUBnOM
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Flange Bolting 101 - Elastic Interactions
https://invidious.fbxl.net/watch?v=yMrieQoErcQ It turns into an ad at the end, but the fundamental stuff they talk about beforehand is a really interesting and easy to understand summary of a fundamental issue with tightening bolts on a flange.
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